Dying Declaration (44 page)

77

TIGER COULDN’T BELIEVE HIS EYES.

“Are they taking her to jail?” he asked his mommy. He meant to whisper, but he was so excited that it actually came out pretty loud.

“Shh,” Theresa said. “I think so.”

“Yes!”
Tiger said, once again a little louder than he intended. He felt the eyes of the spectators throughout the courtroom staring at him. “Sorry,” he whispered, though he really wasn’t.

It had been such a strange and wonderful day. He had not understood everything that had happened, but he had sensed it was going good. Plus he had learned a brand-new strategy for staying out of trouble. It had dawned on him at the end of the Mean Lady’s testimony.

“What’s that mean?” he asked his mom, when the Mean Lady took the Fifth.

“In America,” Theresa explained, “you don’t have to answer questions that might incriminate you—get you in trouble. It’s called taking the Fifth.”

Wow!
Tiger thought to himself.
Why hadn’t anybody told him about this before? “Take a fif.” He’d have to remember that!
The budding young constitutional lawyer had a feeling he’d be making good use of that rule in the days to come.

But first, there was still one matter of unfinished business.

Even though everyone had been telling Tiger all weekend that he should just pray for a short prison sentence for his daddy,
he had secretly disobeyed. Every night and every morning, silently, Tiger had prayed that his daddy would get out of jail altogether and just come home. It was exciting to see the Mean Lady heading off for jail, but it was not the same as having his dad come home. He was still praying for his dad to get out, even as the deputies escorted the Mean Lady from the courtroom.

“Will the defendant please rise,” the judge said. His dad rose. Mr. Charles stood by his daddy’s side.

“The declaration of Dr. Armistead makes it clear to this court that your conviction was based on false testimony,” the judge said. “The death of Dr. Armistead makes it equally obvious that the commonwealth could not prove its case in a new trial. Accordingly, Mr. Hammond, I am setting aside the jury verdict on the basis of prosecutorial misconduct. You are a free man, Mr. Hammond. Free to go.

“Court adjourned,” Judge Silverman announced, banging that little hammer of his one more time.

Tiger’s daddy turned and gave Mr. Charles a bear hug. His mommy jumped out of her seat and hugged his daddy.

“What’s that mean? What’s that mean?” Tiger yelled, jumping up and down.

Just then Miss Nikki came over and swooped him up in one arm, throwing her other arm around Stinky. She swung him around in a circle. “It means your daddy’s coming home!”

Tiger squeezed Miss Nikki’s neck, hard as he could, then jumped down and ran into his daddy’s arms. His dad had tears running down his cheeks, and he hugged Tiger like he would never let him go.

Then Tiger, smiling his toothy little grin while cradled in his daddy’s arms, looked over his daddy’s shoulder and saw a mean-looking deputy who had carted his daddy away to jail so many times before.

“Let’s get outta here, Dad,” a suddenly worried Tiger said.

“Good idea,” his dad said, smiling through the tears. “Let’s go home.”

Nikki grabbed Charles by the arm, turned him around, and kissed him on the cheek. “Nice job, handsome,” she gushed.

“Thanks, Nikki. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“I know.”

Charles gave her a spontaneous hug, then felt a little self-conscious and let her go. They both stood there for a second and smiled.

“By the way—” Charles dropped his voice—“what
was
on that videotape, anyway?”

“You don’t want to know,” Nikki answered.

“I was afraid of that,” Charles said. Then he gave her another hug.

78

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER,
Nikki was sitting in Charles’s office, searching for just the right words. She had waited outside his con law class, then followed him upstairs. This couldn’t wait any longer. It was now Tuesday morning, and Nikki had hardly slept since Sunday night. She hated to involve Charles, but she didn’t know where else to turn. Her conscience was killing her. And she needed a good lawyer.

Armistead had died as a result of Nikki’s breaking-and-entering scheme. She didn’t know the details, but she was pretty sure that Virginia law would treat her as if she had killed Armistead with her own hands.
But who would
know?
Only she and Buster. And now Charles.

Nikki stared at her hands and rubbed them together. Charles had been unusually subdued himself, and she noticed the dark circles under his eyes that matched the ones she had confronted in her own mirror that morning. Something was eating him too.

He slouched down in his chair a little, spreading his long legs out in front of him and crossing them at the ankles. He picked up the Nerf basketball from his desk and tossed it to her. “Here,” he said. “Makes it easier to think.”

Nikki took a shot that missed by a foot. “Not a good sign,” she said.

“Talk to me, girl.” Charles sat up a little straighter and leaned forward. “Whatever it is, I’m on your side.”

This was so hard. Would he condemn her? forgive her like the woman caught in adultery? Nikki thought about that night on the boardwalk, the street sermon, the chalk, Charles asking for forgiveness.

Now it was her turn to ask. “I know what happened to Armistead,” she said softly. She paused to take a deep breath before continuing.

“Me too,” Charles injected before she could speak again.

“Huh?”

Charles sighed and reached into a desk drawer. He tossed a document in Nikki’s direction. “This came today. In the mail.”

Nikki picked it up and started reading.

“It’s a will,” Charles explained. “The last will and testament of Dr. Sean Armistead.”

“He mailed it before he died?”

“He mailed it,” Charles replied. “Chesapeake postmark. Monday’s date. Meaning it could have been dropped in the mail Sunday night or mailed by somebody else Monday or . . .”

Charles stood and shook his head. He fetched his Nerf ball and took a shot. All net. “It’s all in the follow-through,” he said.

“Or what?”
Nikki asked, leaning forward.

“Or Armistead might have mailed it himself on Monday.”

Nikki shook her head to clear her thoughts.
Armistead died Sunday night, didn’t he?

Charles took another shot and continued talking. “The will is pretty interesting. Names me as the executor and instructs me to keep the bequests as confidential as possible.” This time Charles missed. Nikki grabbed the ball from the floor and tossed it back to him.

“So, Nikki, I’m telling you these things in strictest confidence, okay? I was debating whether I should say anything at all,
but this document’” Charles stopped for a moment, a pained expression on his face—“it’s like fingers around my neck, choking me. I’ve got to talk to someone about it.”

Nikki nodded. She would have promised him anything to find out what the will said. In fact, she would have strangled it out of him herself if he had refused to tell her.

“Armistead leaves fifty thousand each to Tiger and Stinky to be used for their college education. He leaves 25K to Thomas Hammond to compensate him for time spent in jail. He leaves five hundred thousand—half a million bucks—to fund a ministry to drug dealers in New York City that will be associated with the Baptist Ministry Center on the lower east side of Manhattan. He specifically instructs that I should be the one responsible for hiring and firing anybody who works at the center under this new program. The rest of his estate—and there will be a lot left—he gives to Parkinson’s research.” Charles interrupted his Nerf basketball shots to look at Nikki.

She scrunched up her brow, her head suddenly aching with all this stuff. “I get the Parkinson’s research, since it’s the disease that ravaged his wife. But the drug ministry? I don’t get that.”

“Maybe this will help,” Charles explained. He dug into the same drawer and handed two other documents to Nikki. “Armistead not only sent his handwritten will to me, but he also sent an accompanying letter and an irrevocable trust agreement. The letter instructs me, if I should find it impossible to prove his death, to distribute his money the same way under this living irrevocable trust agreement as he specified in his will.”

The tension in Nikki’s head and neck increased. Charles was placing this puzzle in front of her, piece by piece, but she couldn’t quite see how it fit together, didn’t quite have that big picture yet from the front of the puzzle box. She had always prided herself on being the first to figure these scams out, but this one . . .

“Buster Jackson once told me that when he got out of jail, he wanted to start a ministry for drug addicts,” Charles continued,
shooting baskets again. “‘Get them clean, get them jobs, get them saved,’ is the way Buster phrased it. And one more thing,
the name of the ministry project in New York City, according to the will, is to be the Lazarus Fund. Get it? The Lazarus Fund.”

“I
don’t
get it,” Nikki said. A will, an irrevocable
living
trust, a biblical allusion. What was going on? And now Charles was tying Buster to the death of Armistead. Maybe Charles knew more than he was letting on.

“Buster and I once had a knock-down, drag-out argument on the biblical story of Lazarus,” Charles explained. “Lazarus is the guy Christ raised from the dead. Buster didn’t believe it at first, but I think I talked him into it.”

“Okay,” Nikki said, trying hard to follow.

“So here’s the big picture,” Charles said, stopping the constant motion of shooting baskets and leaning on the desk. “Armistead leaves a document he calls a dying declaration that ends up clearing Thomas Hammond in court. The concept of a dying declaration just happens to be something I told Buster about in a Bible study at the jail one night. Then Armistead leaves a will, or an irrevocable trust that works even if he’s not dead, in which he leaves a bunch of money for a drug ministry in New York City and then gives me the power to hire the people to work in that ministry—people like Buster. And then, to top it all off,
they name the project the Lazarus Project, which seems like a clear signal to me that Armistead, who we thought was dead,
is still alive.”

Nikki’s jaw dropped open. It suddenly began making sense. The big picture coming into focus. She was stunned. Elated. Buster had kept his word. She was off the hook!

“It all makes sense!” Nikki exclaimed. “The Monday postmark . . . everything.” She watched Charles shrug and miss another shot. Her own heart, lightened by this theory, suddenly went out to this guy. “But, Charles, if the Barracuda is behind bars and Armistead is still alive, why are you moping around like you just lost your best friend?”

“For starters,” Charles said, plopping back down in his chair, “I got my client off by being an unwitting participant in a fraud on the court. Though everything in the dying declaration was technically true, even the title of it is grossly misleading.”

“But that’s not your fault,” Nikki protested. “You couldn’t have known . . .”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Charles said earnestly. “In a way, it is my fault. Buster got saved in jail and needed someone to disciple him, someone to help him grow as a Christian. I mean, a man with any kind of spiritual maturity wouldn’t feel like he had to game the system to make it work. He’d trust God instead. But I was so skeptical of Buster, and so busy trying to make new converts on the streets, that I missed the opportunity to teach the one convert God had dumped right in my lap. I basically forgot that God called me to make disciples, not just converts.” He slumped in his chair, eyes downcast. “That’s my failure, not Buster’s.”

Though she would never understand it, for some reason this confession affected Nikki in a way that no sermon, argument, or emotional appeal for Christianity ever could. She found it hard to resist this level of vulnerability. Here was authentic spirituality—a man who cared more about integrity and relationship than he did about the outcome of a high-profile case. Sure,
he wanted to win, but he wanted to win the right way.

But it also seemed that Charles was beating himself up pretty hard. Buster was a free man, not some kind of robot who did whatever Charles programmed him to do. “Charles, you may have a few faults, most of which I’ve already pointed out to you—”
this brought a quick hint of a smile to his face—“but lack of spiritual intensity is not among them. I’ve never met anyone as focused as you on turning others into followers of Christ.” She tossed him the Nerf ball and watched as he leaned back in his chair and started bouncing it off the wall.

“Thanks,” he said, but Nikki could tell he didn’t find much solace in her words. A couple of tosses later, he said, “That’s my theory, Nikki. Now what’s yours?”

“Oh, nothing quite that elaborate.” Nikki shrugged. She could feel her cheeks burning. She smiled nervously as she tried to appear casual. “I actually thought that Armistead might really be dead.” No sooner were the words out of her mouth than a troubling thought hit her. She suddenly realized why Charles was so distraught about what Buster might have done.

“If Armistead is still alive, whose body was that in his car?” Nikki asked.

Charles stopped tossing the ball—frozen in time and space. She saw a troubled look grab his face, as if he had been wrestling with this same question for a long time but couldn’t quite figure it out, as if he had just completed a complex puzzle only to discover a couple of pieces still missing.

“You tell me,” Charles said. “You tell me.”