Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) (4 page)

“Listen. I know I’m not a pleasant man, but that doesn’t make me an idiot. If I’d killed Bill Hill and gotten blood on myself, I’d have washed my damn clothes, not left them shoved in the back of my closet for the police to find. Even if I didn’t have the sense that God gave a grapefruit, I’d have tossed them in the laundry basket to wash eventually, not tucked them into my closet like they were some kind of keepsake. What’s the point of that? Why would I go out of my way to preserve evidence that could convict me of murder?”

“I may be making that very argument to the jury.”

“Great. I pay you thirty thousand dollars, and now I’m doing your work for you.”

“You’re the one who came in with a check already filled out. Do I get your keys or not?”

“You think I’ve got them in my pocket? I had them on me when the police arrested me, but of course they took them along with everything else. What kind of lawyer are you?”

“One who would like your permission to get your keys from the police and to enter your house.”

“Sure. Of course. What difference is it going to make to me? I’ve got me some new accommodations until at least sometime next week.”

The deputy sheriff took Shorter away, and I took a deep breath, feeling some of the tension wash out of me as I exhaled. I was going to earn Shorter’s $30,000 before all this was done, maybe earn it several times over. I shook my arms and went to find out what had happened to the man’s personal effects.

In addition to the expected reasoning, the magistrate’s written decision included a reference to phone calls from neighbors, six of them, urging the police to keep Bob Shorter in jail because he was a threat to everyone in his community. When Shorter stalked through the neighborhood, he carried a big stick—literally, it seemed, not figuratively like Teddy Roosevelt. He made verbal threats. He had once been charged with cruelty to animals for beating a neighbor’s dog; the report didn’t say whose.

When I finished reading, I pushed back from my desk to think about it, one foot propped on a partially open drawer. The only neighbors mentioned by name were Jennifer Entwistle, the woman who lived next door to Shorter, and one Valerie Shaw, so the denial of bail had been based in part on anonymous calls. That didn’t seem right.

I was wondering if I could do something with that at the preliminary hearing when Brooke Marshall came in and sat in one of my client chairs, using a hand to smooth back her thick, red hair. “So,” she said.

“So,” I agreed.

“So you can see your panties from the doorway.”

I took my foot off the drawer.

“Where’d you get them?”

“What, you want to get a pair?”

“They’re not your usual style. Are you afraid of getting hit by a car, or are things heating up with Paul?”

“Oh, come on. You couldn’t see them that well.”

“Better than you’d think.”

Brooke and I had roomed together a while back. She had stayed in my spare bedroom, so her familiarity with my lingerie wasn’t as strange as you might think.

“I’ll be more careful.”

“So how’s your stone-cold killer?”

I rolled my eyes. “Everyone with a nasty disposition isn’t a stone-cold killer.”

“So you think he’s innocent?”

“
Innocent
is a strong word. Let’s say he might not have committed this specific crime.”

“Why do you say that?”

My shoulder twitched in a half shrug. “He says he didn’t do it.”

“Ah. We have the word of a possible killer.”

“He’s my client. For the moment I’m suspending judgment.”

“Fair enough.”

“I’m going to go out to his house this afternoon, walk through it, get a feel for things. Want to come?”

She took a big breath and let it out. “I’d like to. I miss these little adventures of yours.”

“Appointments all afternoon?”

“Three of them, back-to-back.”

“Your consulting business is taking off.” Brooke was an IT specialist who had gone into business shortly before I got fired from my job with a midsize law firm and hung out my shingle. I couldn’t help but be envious of her success sometimes.

She nodded. “At some point I’m going to have to hire help.”

“And then you’ll need more space, and I’ll lose you. I kind of have already. I hardly see you since your engagement.”

She made a face.

“What? Is that not going well?”

“It’s going great in the sense that Mike’s a wonderful guy and he’s crazy about me.”

“That seems like an important sense.” She didn’t say anything. I asked, “Are you not so crazy about him? Is the chemistry fading?”

“No, the chemistry’s there.”

“What then?”

She sighed. “Why did he have to rush it? Engagement is just so . . . final.”

“No, marriage is final. Engagement is a much more tentative arrangement.”

“Tentative. ‘Will you marry me?’ ‘Yes. Yes, I will.’ That’s a commitment. I’m committed.”

“And I guess he’s committed,” I said.

“What? Of course he’s committed.”

“He asked you for a commitment, and you gave it. Where’s his commitment? Did he promise to marry you?”

“He . . .” She trailed off.

“He asked you a question. You answered it. Did he go on to say, ‘And I promise to marry you’?”

“I think he just kissed me.”

I nodded sagely. “Isn’t that the way of it? You make a promise, and the man kisses you in return.”

“He did give me a ring.”

We looked at it. The diamond had a squarish sort of cut and looked to be well over a carat. “He did give you a ring,” I said. “And an expensive one.” When I was in law school, I’d read something about the custom of giving engagement rings. “If he backs out of the wedding, you keep the ring as liquidated damages, you know.”

“What kind of damages?”

“When you’re engaged to someone, you’re likely to engage in certain improprieties, which lessens your value on the marriage market.”

Her face flushed. She was a pale-skinned redhead, and it didn’t take a lot to turn her cheeks pink. “Meaning I’m damaged goods.”

“No need to take it personally. A hundred years ago, if a man broke off an engagement, the woman could sue him for breach of promise and collect damages for the costs she had incurred in preparing for the wedding, emotional distress, and, possibly, her diminished marriage prospects, especially if—”

“If certain improprieties had occurred.”

“Exactly. Anyway, the courts stopped allowing the lawsuits for breach of promise, and the custom of the engagement ring took its place. It provides financial security for the woman in case the man breaks it off.”

“So Mike gave me this ring because he was about to sully me, and he wanted to be able to walk away without further consequences.”

“It’s a beautiful ring. Don’t let me ruin it for you.”

“Too late.” She got up and left the office without looking back.

I hadn’t meant to ruin it for her. Really. I’d just thought that the origins of the engagement ring made for an interesting story.

“I didn’t mean to ruin anything for anybody,” I said aloud, but there was no one to hear or offer absolution.

Bob Shorter’s house didn’t look like the house of a man who could afford to write checks for $30,000. The living room had a worn area rug that was curling up at one corner. The rest of the house consisted of a small kitchen, three bedrooms, and a bathroom, all on one floor. In the master bedroom was a full-size bed and a particleboard dresser with a laminate top that was broken off at the corners.

His bedroom closet had sliding doors, both of them pushed to one side to reveal shirts and pants all mixed together on the clothes rod. I pushed the doors to the other side and found more of the same. Squatting in the closet doorway, I pushed at the hanging clothes to see the floor all the way to the back. There were two pairs of shoes and one slipper lying on its side, nothing I’d call evidence. Whatever there had been, the police had taken it with them.

The doorbell rang as I straightened, and it continued to ring as I went down the short hall to the living room. The three diamond-shaped windows in the door were covered with aluminum foil, so the only ways to see who was there were to peel it back or open the door.

Jenn stood on the front stoop, her lank brown hair lying on the shoulders of an orange top that was a size too small. “I knew it was you,” she said. “I recognized that Volkswagen of yours.”

“Guilty as charged,” I said. “I am indeed me.”

Her upper lip rose, showing her teeth. “You think you’re funny, don’t you?”

“Not very. Do you think you’re Jennifer Entwistle?”

“How would you know my name?” she said, narrowing her eyes.

“You gave it to me yourself the first time we met. Also, I saw it on some papers recently. Your phone calls worked, by the way. The magistrate denied bail, which is why Shorter’s still in jail.”

Her nostrils flared. “Hallelujah,” she said. “Hallelujah.”

I waited. “Would you like to come in? I haven’t inventoried the kitchen yet, but I can probably offer you a glass of water.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

I shrugged. “Social lubricant? We could sit here in the living room with our waters and talk a bit.” I gestured at the furniture—a sofa and matching love seat, both upholstered in a garish pattern, and a large, well-worn recliner. At the end of the room, a twenty-five-inch console TV stood like a museum piece, a bit of 1970s Americana.

“I don’t have nothing to talk to you about,” she said.

“And yet here you are.”

“To tell you Bob Shorter is just where he needs to be, and you need to leave him there.”

“It’s not up to me. If the prosecution proves its case, he’ll go to prison, maybe even be executed, but all that’s up to a jury.”

“Suppose the prosecution can’t prove its case?”

“Then we don’t know that prison’s where Shorter needs to be.”

She exhaled with a sharp sound of disgust. “That’s just a bunch of lawyer double-talk.”

I shrugged. Lawyer-talk was what I had. “It’s been nice seeing you.”

She stuck out her chin, her lips compressed, then turned without speaking and stalked back across the weeds and dirt toward her own home. When I closed the door, I noticed an ax handle leaning in the corner behind it. I picked the ax handle up, and a chill began to work its way up my arm. I dropped it back into the corner and stood rubbing my arm as I looked at it. Either the ax handle emanated evil, or I was letting my imagination run away with me. Neither would be a good thing.

Shorter’s other two bedrooms were small. One had a metal desk and a battered wood filing cabinet. The other bedroom was piled so full of boxes, chairs, box springs, and other discards that I couldn’t get the door all the way open. Rather than wedge myself through the narrow opening, I went back to the home office and pulled out the top drawer of the filing cabinet.

It held books: a fat tome by Thomas Hobbes, smaller books by Michel Foucault and Machiavelli. All of them were philosophers of some sort, I thought, though I’d read only
The Prince
. On the bottom of the stack was a slim paperback by Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil
.
That book, in contrast to the pristine condition of the others, was well thumbed through, with a lot of underlining in red pencil and several dog-eared pages. One of the underlined sentences read:

The lofty, independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, and even the cogent reason, are felt to be dangers, everything that elevates the individual above the herd, and is a source of fear to the neighbour, is henceforth called
evil
, the tolerant, unassuming, self-adapting, self-equalizing disposition, the
mediocrity
of desires, attains to moral distinction and honour.

It was a heck of a run-on sentence. I put the book back in the drawer, wondering about the kind of person who would write it, about the kind of person who would find it worth underlining. Of course, I’d studied literature in school and not philosophy. Maybe it was genius. Had Shorter done the underlining, I wondered, or had he bought the book used, already tattered and underlined?

I pushed in the drawer and pulled out the next one, hoping to find it full of paperbacks by Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler, books about tough guys driven by their own relentless moral codes. No such luck. This drawer contained no books at all, just two uneven stacks of papers of differing sizes—more what you’d expect to find in a filing cabinet, except that these papers weren’t standing neatly on edge inside manila folders. I pulled out a stack and sat in the canting secretarial chair to paw through it. Medical receipts, receipts for auto repairs, owner’s manuals for a TV, a microwave, three washing machines, a dryer, a refrigerator . . . pretty much everything he had in the house and everything he had ever had, although I hadn’t yet seen the dryer or any of the washing machines. The other stack was more of the same, but there was actually a folder in this one that contained copies of the paperwork from Shorter’s purchase of the house almost thirty-five years ago—the deed, the deed of trust, the promissory note, the HUD-1 Settlement Statement, and the loan application. I wasn’t a real estate lawyer, and I didn’t see anything of interest. I pulled out the bottom drawer.

The only thing there was a yellow box with a black phoenix on the cover, an intertwined
S-R
on its breast. At one end of the box was a black bar with the word
Ruger
in yellow letters on it. I pulled out the drawer all the way and pried open the top. A booklet of special instructions for the SP101 double-action revolver, .22-caliber Long Rifle rimfire cartridge, was inside. Underneath the booklet was the revolver itself, anodized silver with a black handle. If Bill Hill had been shot rather than stabbed, it might be an important piece of evidence. As it was, the police had left it, and I might as well, too. I closed the box and pushed in the drawer.

A banging came from the front of the house, and the doorbell started ringing again:
ding
,
ding
,
ding
,
ding
,
ding 
. . . Shorter’s neighbors were really beginning to tick me off. At the door I picked up the ax handle and jerked the door open.