Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) (25 page)

“Your Honor, I move to have the doorknob and dead bolt admitted into evidence.”

Maxwell stood as Judge Cooley frowned, the judge’s mouth puckering and his bushy white eyebrows coming together. “Objection,” Maxwell said. “Relevance. This is another line of testimony that seems to have nothing to do with the issues at hand.”

Judge Cooley nodded. “Perhaps you’d better make it clear to us how these items relate to the case.”

I said, “As I indicated in my opening statement, it’s the contention of the defense that Mr. Shorter has been framed, that some person or persons unknown entered into his house to take a paring knife from his kitchen and clothes from his closet and later reentered his house to plant the bloodstained clothes.”

“Go on.”

“That person or persons had to enter through the door of Mr. Shorter’s house, a door locked by this door knob and this dead bolt.”

“And the locks show signs of having been forced or picked? Mr. Burns is going to testify to that effect?”

“No, Your Honor. It is not my contention that the locks were picked. Recall that a house key was kept on a nail in the toolshed in the defendant’s backyard.”

“As I remember it, a witness testified only to looking for a key.”

“And finding an empty nail,” I said nodding.

“Ms. Steering. I’m afraid you’re going to have to give us something more before we can admit those items into evidence.”

I took a breath. “Very well.” I turned back to the witness. “Mr. Burns, is the dead bolt currently locked or unlocked?”

He held it up. The thumb-turn was screwed into the housing, and the deadbolt itself stuck out through the strike plate. “I can’t tell. I think it’s unlocked.”

It looked locked to me, but I retrieved Bill Hill’s key ring from the court clerk and took it to Rodney. “Can you tell us what this is?”

“A key ring with four keys on it.”

“This key ring has been admitted into evidence as the key ring that was found in the pants pocket of Bill Hill, the decedent in this case. Could you try the keys on the dead bolt to see if one of them will lock the dead bolt?”

He selected one of the keys and tried to insert it in the lock, but it didn’t fit. My mouth had gone dry, and my heart had begun to hammer. I had staked my whole case and possibly my career on this moment, not to mention Bob Shorter’s life.

Rodney tried another key. It went in.

And turned. The bolt clicked out another inch or so.

“Does that same key work the doorknob?”

Rodney wriggled the doorknob to show us that it wouldn’t turn. He fitted the key to the lock and turned it. Unlocked, the doorknob turned freely.

“Your Honor,” I said, looking up at the judge. “I renew my motion that the doorknob and dead bolt be admitted into evidence.”

Maxwell stood. “These two items came off the back door of the defendant’s house?” he asked Rodney.

“Yes, sir.”

“Just today?”

“On the lunch break.”

“And they are in the same condition as they were when you found them? They haven’t been altered in any way?”

“Well, there’s not a door connected to them anymore,” Rodney said.

Maxwell ignored the titter that swept the courtroom. “You haven’t rekeyed the locks,” he said. “You have not altered the locking mechanism in any way.”

“I have not.”

Maxwell made a face. “No objection,” he told the judge.

“Motion granted,” the judge said. “The doorknob and dead bolt are admitted into evidence.”

I said, “Those are all my questions of this witness.”

“Mr. Maxim?”

“No further questions.”

“Ms. Standing?” the judge said.

“The defense rests.”

His eyebrows went up. “Very well. We’ll go to closing arguments. Mr. Maximus?”

Mr. Maximus, although he seemed a bit bewildered by the testimony of Dr. Gore and Rodney Burns, made a very coherent closing argument that reiterated his original theory of the case and referred neither to Bill Hill’s medications nor to Bob Shorter’s doorknob, at least not directly. He did warn the jury that an attempt had been made to introduce facts that had little or no bearing on the question of the defendant’s guilt or innocence. “Focus your mind on the relevant facts,” he told them. “The defendant had nothing but ill will for Bill Hill. On previous occasions he injured Mr. Hill’s dog, and he left Mr. Hill himself by the side of the road in a snowstorm. The murder weapon in this case was the defendant’s own knife, which bore his fingerprints and no one else’s. None of these facts have been disputed. Despite the assertions of the defendant’s lawyer to the contrary, the most likely explanation for the defendant’s own blood-spattered clothes in the defendant’s own closet is that the defendant himself left them there when he took them off after killing Bill Hill. That is the most reasonable, it is the only reasonable, interpretation of the facts of the case.” Maxwell took a seat less than thirty minutes after he had begun his argument.

I went to the lectern. “Members of the jury. I have conceded that I have an unsympathetic client, but we are not here to determine whether or not Bob Shorter is a good man or a bad man. We are here to determine, if we can, whether it is beyond a reasonable doubt that Bob Shorter killed Bill Hill on March 9. The theory of the case I’m about to lay before you accounts for all of the evidence and accounts for it better than the theory you have just heard from the prosecution.” I turned to give a nod to Ian Maxwell that he did not return.

“Bill Hill hated his neighbor Bob Shorter,” I said, turning back to the jury, “and he had good reason to. Bob Shorter beat Mr. Hill’s dog so badly that it eventually had to be put to sleep. His idea of a practical joke, driving off and leaving Mr. Hill in a snowstorm, cost him the front part of his foot. Day after day, Bob Shorter took his daily walks past Mr. Hill’s residence, and Mr. Hill, who could walk only with increasing difficulty, could do no more than watch.

“Of course, Mr. Hill suffered from more than a partially missing foot. He had a progressive, disabling illness for which there is no cure. It was coming to the point that he was going to have to give up his home and move into an institution of some sort. Looking forward, he saw only increasing disability, increasing pain, and an unpleasant death. All this quite naturally had a depressing effect on his emotional well-being, and his treating physician has told you that he prescribed an antidepressant to combat it. Still, Bob Shorter persisted in walking past his house every day, walking with an easy gait and swinging the ax handle he called his equalizer, the picture of health.

“March 9 was the day Bill Hill could stand it no longer. When Bob Shorter left on one of his long walks, Mr. Hill made his way, with difficulty, to Shorter’s house. Having once been close friends with the defendant, Mr. Hill knew where he kept his spare key. He got it from the toolshed and let himself into Shorter’s house. It was a cold day, and Mr. Hill was wearing a jacket and gloves, all of which he was still wearing when his body was found. He would have left no fingerprints in Shorter’s house.

“He took a paring knife from the counter in Shorter’s kitchen—it was sheer luck that it had three of Shorter’s fingerprints on it—and took it back into the closet in Shorter’s bedroom. After finding a shirt and a pair of pants that Shorter had recently worn—maybe in a laundry hamper, on the end of the bed, draped over a clothes tree—he let down his own pants, cut his thigh with the paring knife, and bloodied Shorter’s clothes. He closed the cut on his thigh with a butterfly bandage and tossed the bloody clothes back against the wall under Shorter’s hanging clothes. When he pulled up his pants, he failed to notice that a small pillbox had fallen from his pocket. That pillbox contained Rilutek, a prescription medication for ALS, a condition that he had and the defendant Bob Shorter did not. Mr. Hill took the paring knife back to his own house with him. Probably, he would have liked to return the key to the shed in Shorter’s backyard. Perhaps he simply didn’t have the strength for it. Perhaps he didn’t even notice the key until he had returned home, when there was nothing he could do but slide the key onto his own ring and hope it would not be noticed. He had one more task.

“If he wanted one final victory over the man who had done him so much harm, he not only had to kill himself, but had to do it with the paring knife he had taken from Bob Shorter’s house. I can only imagine the despair and hatred that would have given him the strength to do it. He took the beechwood handle in his gloved hands, and he drove the blade into his chest. It may be hard for us to imagine a man doing such a thing, but remember, there were no defensive wounds on Mr. Hill’s hands or forearms to indicate he had tried to ward off an attacker. There were no defensive wounds because Bill Hill was his own killer. He fell forward from his chair onto the floor and found, possibly to his surprise, that he was not yet dead. He touched his hand to his bleeding chest and used his blood-tipped finger to scrawl Shorter’s name on the wood flooring. It was done. The frame was complete. About thirty minutes later, Bill Hill died from blood loss.”

I stepped away from the lectern, wanting nothing between me and the jury as I made my final pitch. “Do we know with one hundred percent certainty that this was what happened? Probably not. Certainty is something usually denied to juries. Juries have to deal in probabilities. If you think there is a reasonable possibility that the sequence of events was something like the one I have just described, then it is your duty to find the defendant not guilty. And it is a reasonable possibility, one that explains facts that the prosecution’s theory cannot explain: the key to Shorter’s house in Bill Hill’s pocket, the pillbox containing Bill Hill’s medications on the floor of Shorter’s closet, the wound on Bill Hill’s thigh.”

I swept my gaze over the faces of the jurors, meeting the eyes of all of them who would look at me. “The prosecution has itself presented evidence that Bill Hill had reason to hate Bob Shorter. That hatred provides a powerful motive for Mr. Hill’s attempt to frame him for the crime of murder. I am sure you do not like Bob Shorter yourselves. He is not a likable man. But as much as you may shrink from doing it, your duty is to acquit if you have any reasonable doubt that he drove that knife into Bill Hill. Bob Shorter may have a lot to answer for, but punishment for those crimes must rest in the hands of a higher tribunal.”

When I sat down, the energy seemed to drain from my body and puddle on the floor. I hardly heard Maxwell’s rebuttal argument. When the judge gave his charge to the jury, I was vaguely glad to hear him emphasizing some of the points I had made regarding the prosecution’s burden of proof and the presumption of innocence. He finished the charge, and the jury stood and exited the courtroom to begin their deliberations.

Shorter and I waited in one of the courthouse’s smaller conference rooms.

“How long are we going to have to wait?” he asked.

“Don’t know. Probably, the judge will give them until five thirty or six o’clock, then send them home for the night.”

“They haven’t been sequestered?”

I shook my head.

“So how do you think it’s going to go?”

“I don’t know. We’re about to find out whether a group of trustworthy citizens is willing to let an open sociopath go free.”

“I’m not a sociopath.”

“No? Don’t you reject any moral or legal claims on your behavior?”

“Not at all. I obey the law. I have to as a matter of self-preservation.”

“But you don’t have a conscience.”

“Let’s just say I don’t let it bother me.”

“And you have no regard for the rights of others.”

“What rights? If you mean extralegal rights, then no. It’s nonsense to talk about people having rights other than those the law gives them.”

“And you show a proclivity for violence, at least toward dogs. I think we’re getting pretty close to the definition of a sociopath.”

“Morality is all about power, you know. Of course, the law is, too—it’s just that the law is more obviously about power. The majority of our fellow citizens are a bunch of sheep, and they pass laws in an effort to control the wolves in their midst. They push their moral conventions the same way: they ostracize people and apply social pressure where they can’t enact legal penalties.”

“So you think morality is all a matter of self-interest,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“For you, morality isn’t even the majority opinion about right and wrong,” I said.

“There is no such thing as right and wrong.”

I didn’t know how to refute that statement with logical argument. I did have an impulse to leap on Shorter and choke the life out of him, but I resisted it.

Shorter said, “What are you thinking?”

“I’m wondering what the difference is between a sociopath and a psychopath.”

His eyes cut to the ceiling. “More labels. I’m a realist, that’s all.”

I presented my last argument, reluctantly because I wasn’t sure that it would stand up to Shorter’s assault. “What about God?” I said.

“What about heaven and Jesus and the saints and the prophets?” He blew a raspberry.

“You think it’s all superstition?”

“Oh, come on. Is that the basis of your morality? ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do that, because God wouldn’t like it’?”

“I prefer to think of it as living my life in conformity to the character of God, doing what pleases him.”

“And who told you there was a God? Your mommy and your daddy? Can’t you see it was an effort to control your behavior from the cradle? I don’t blame them, you understand. By that time, your parents themselves had experienced a lifetime of conditioning.”

“I don’t accept that.”

“Do you go to church?”

I moved my head equivocally.

“So you don’t believe, not really—and you can’t. You’re too smart for that.”

“I believe in God or whatever or whoever gives us a moral sense, a sense that some things are inherently right and some things are inherently wrong. I believe in a moral awareness that makes us human.” It felt a little like the recitation of a creed.

Shorter studied me, and I met his gaze, not blinking even as my eyes began to water.