In Self Defense (32 page)

“The decision is finally yours to make, and I’m perfectly content with that,” Sundstrom concluded.  “Because our justice system is one of the best systems we have in this country -- where one is judged by a jury of one’s peers, who patiently sit and listen and watch, and finally discuss among themselves until they determine what really happened and who is to blame.  Just as you have been studying the evidence presented in this case, I have been studying all of you, and I have total confidence in your ability to reach the right verdict.”

With a smile far more confident than he actually felt, the prosecutor took his seat.

***

It was almost one o’clock when Erin knocked on the fifth door in section D of the Lacey Trailer Park.  Moira Purdue, a used-up woman in her late sixties, answered the knock and stepped out of the ancient mobile home, squinting into the sunlight.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Mrs. Purdue?”

“Yeah.”

“Mrs. Purdue, I’m Detective Erin Hall with the Seattle Police Department, and I’m looking for your son Ryan.”

“Ain’t seen him,” the woman responded.

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“Far away from here,” Moira Purdue told her.  “As far away as he can get, I’ll bet.  I ain’t seen him in must be at least a year.  And I only saw him then because he was out of jail and out of money and had no other place to go.” She let out a hoarse smoker’s cackle.  “If you find him, tell him not to come back next time, okay?”

“Would anyone else in your family know where he was?” Erin pressed.  “It’s really important that we talk to him.  It’s about the Richard Durant case.”

“You talkin’ about Ricky?” Moira said.  “Him and Ryan was thick as thieves back in high school.  Now
that
was a son to be proud of.  Made good, he did.  And didn’t forget where he came from, neither.  Moved his folks to a fine house in Centralia, he did.  Gave them a good life.  Too bad what happened to him.”

“That’s just it,” Erin told her.  “You see, if I can find Ryan, and he can help me out, there may be some money in it for him.”

“Money?”  The woman perked up.  “Well, if there’s money to be had, you should give it over to me, you know.  That boy’s robbed me blind so many times, it’s a wonder I still have a roof over my head.  He promised he was going to give me part of that big windfall he got the last time, but he never did.”

“Windfall?”

“Yeah,” the woman said.  “He did a job for someone -- he didn’t say what or for who -- and got a lot of money for it, too.”

“How do you know this?”

“I saw it -- that’s how I know.  He was flashing it around one day.  And then he just up and left.”

“Well, if you can help me locate him,” Erin assured her, her heart pounding at Moira Purdue’s words, “it’s possible something may come your way.”

“Yeah?  Well then, you might try talking to that buddy of his  -- what’s his name now -- oh yeah, Pogo.”

“Pogo?”

“Yeah, Pogo.  He lives over to Grapevine.  I think Ryan sometimes crashes with him.”

“You have a last name for this Pogo?”

The woman shrugged.  “Ain’t never needed to know it,” she said.  “But you remember now, if you find him, some of that money should rightly come to me.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll remember,” Erin said.

***

David stood before the jury for almost a full minute before he began to speak.

“It’s hard, sometimes, to know what to say at this point in a trial,” he said finally.  “I could tell you that I know my client, that I’ve known her almost her entire life, and that I know she could never have done what the prosecutor thinks she’s done.  But I know that wouldn’t sway you.  And it shouldn’t.  After all, you don’t know her, and you don’t really know me.  So why would you think that I would be saying anything other than what I thought I ought to say -- had to say -- in order to get her acquitted and put another victory notch in my belt?

“But the truth is -- the truth isn’t going to be very hard to find here.  The prosecutor wants you to believe that Clare Durant deliberately killed her husband to get back at him for wanting to divorce her.  But how does that stand up to the facts?”

David paused thoughtfully for a moment.  “Let’s see,” he continued.  “Fact one: she had a much better weapon at hand than a gun -- and she had already threatened him with it -- losing his job.  Fact two: by all accounts, the threat alone had been enough to change his mind about seeking a divorce.  Fact three: Richard Durant himself told his attorney that he and his wife were working things out, and as evidence of that, people who saw them together, and came here to testify, referred to them as seeming to be devoted.  So why wasn’t that the end of it?  It should have been, shouldn’t it?”

David took a few steps and then stopped and turned and looked directly at each of the jurors.

“Unless it’s because Richard Durant didn’t want it to end that way, and he had come up with a scenario that would allow him to keep his job and still marry his mistress,” the attorney resumed.  “And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is exactly what we believe happened.  What proof do we have?  First and foremost, there’s the mistress who testified that, right up to the night he died, he was still telling her they were going to be married.  Even after he told others he had given up his pursuit of a divorce and that he and his wife were working things out.  And then, within weeks of dropping the divorce idea, Clare Durant had the first in a series of very close calls with death.

“Coincidence, you say?”  David suggested, and then nodded, answering his own question.  “Sure, I suppose it could be.  But how convenient a series of coincidences it was!  Poison in the water she, and she alone in that house, drank?  Falling off a treacherous mountain trail the family should never even have been on?  Deliberately run off the road by a stranger in a black truck within weeks of fifty thousand dollars being taken out of a trust account?”

David shook his head.  “I don’t know about you, Ladies and Gentlemen, but for me, maybe one of those incidents might have been a coincidence -- but all three?  I don’t think so.

“I’ll tell you what I do think, though.  I think the police put the fear of God into Clare Durant about their stalker coming to get her.  I think Clare was lying in her bed in the dark that night, wide awake, her heart pounding so hard, I’m surprised that she was even able to hear the footsteps on the stairs.  And when that bedroom door opened, she didn’t stop to ask who it was, she didn’t wait to find out whether whoever it was had a weapon or not, she just emptied her gun into the shadow she saw.  And it’s just as she got up on the stand and told you herself -- she did it because she wanted to live.”

Here, David paused again, to look thoughtfully at the jurors.  “I can tell you that, had I been in her position, I most likely would have done the very same thing that she did,” he said softly.  “And I wonder how many of you would have, too.

“I believe Clare when she says she doesn’t know why she picked up her husband’s suitcase and put it in the closet.  I’ve seen people in shock.  They do all sorts of things they can’t later explain.  Often, they don’t even remember doing them.  Between you and me, I don’t think she remembers.  I don’t think she remembers much of anything about that night.

“Now it’s clear that the prosecutor wants you to believe that Clare made a plan and set the whole thing in motion as soon as she found out her husband was coming home a day early from his trip, dovetailing it ever so neatly into the stalker scare.  But Clare has told you she didn’t know her husband was coming home a day early.  And that would make for quite an interesting he-said-she-said situation except for one thing -- Richard Durant’s own assistant testified that he didn’t know his boss was coming home a day early, either.  And surely he should have.  After all, it was his job to know these things.

“So what do we make of all this? Are we to believe that these two people are somehow in cahoots with one another and therefore both of them are lying to you because she very much wanted to be a widow and he desperately wanted to be unemployed?  Or did Richard Durant, for whatever reason, either lie in the message he left for Stephanie Burdick, or simply change his mind after leaving it?  Can any of you say you really know the answers to these questions?

“Are there inconsistencies here?  Of course there are.  Because life is full of inconsistencies, and if there weren’t any in this case, I personally would be very suspicious.  But inconsistencies can cut both ways.  So it’s going to be up to you good people, to sort through all you’ve seen and heard, to study things from every angle, examine every scenario until you can assure yourselves, absent all reasonable doubt, that you know what happened on that fateful October night.”

David gazed thoughtfully at each of the jurors one last time.  “Like the prosecutor, I, too, have been watching you throughout this trial,” he said.  “Like him, I, too, feel confident you will come to the right conclusion in this case.  Because once you put yourselves in Clare Durant’s place, once you let yourselves walk around in her shoes for a while -- live for a while in her life, I believe you’ll have no other choice but to send her home to her children.”

***

Peter “Pogo” McCloskey lived in a shack at the end of a long dirt road and raised pit bulls.  Dog fighting was against the law in Washington State, but the police did little, if anything, to stop it.  Still, he opened his door to the police detective, if warily.

“No,” he said to Erin’s question.  “I ain’t seen Ryan in, hell, it must be more’n a year now.  Don’t expect to see him, neither, unless he runs out of that wad he got.”

“What wad was that?” Erin asked.

“Oh, a year or so ago, he got fifty big ones for doing a job for some guy he knew.”

“Did he say what sort of job?”

Pogo shook his head.  “Not really.  He just said he was cleaning up a little something for some big shot he grew up with.”

“Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money for doing a little cleanup work,” Erin observed.

Pogo chuckled.  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” he told the detective.  “Didn’t believe him, either.  But then he showed me his stash.  It sure looked real to me.”

“How’d you meet Ryan?” the detective inquired.

“Just like I guess you already figured,” he said.  “We were cellmates for a stretch.  But I paid my dues, I see my parole officer every month, and I got no beef with anyone.”

“Did you see Ryan often after the two of you got out?”

“On and off.  Up until when he took off, he’d crash here whenever he wanted.”

“Know when you’re likely to hear from him again?”

Pogo chuckled again.  “Like I said,” he said, “when he runs out of money.”

“Any idea where he went?”

“I think he said something about having to get lost and maybe heading down to Mexico,” Pogo said, shrugging his shoulders.  “If he did, that fifty grand could last him a long time.”

“Was he still driving the Ford pickup when you last saw him?” Erin asked.

“Funny you should ask about that,” Pogo said.  “He only had that truck a couple of weeks.  Fussed over it like it was a brand new baby.  Then last time I saw him, he had a Seville.  I asked him what happened to the truck.  He said he didn’t need it anymore.”

***

“How long do you think it will take?” Clare asked her attorney.  The two of them were seated in the living room in Laurelhurst, pretending to drink tea.

“Hard to tell,” David replied.  By four o’clock, Mark Sundstrom had concluded the rebuttal argument for the prosecution, the judge had given the jury its instructions, the jurors had retired to the jury room to begin their deliberations, and the waiting game had begun.  “It could be hours.  It could be days.”

“Which would be better for us?”

“The general rule is -- hours are better than days,” he told her.   “A quick verdict is more often than not a defense verdict.”

“But you don’t think it will be hours, do you?”

David shrugged and shook his head.  “No, I don’t think this is going to be a quick verdict,” he said honestly.  “There really isn’t a preponderance of evidence on either side here.  There’s a good deal to be looked at on both sides. I think the jurors will have a lot to mull over, and I think they’ll take their time.”

“And I guess what the verdict should be maybe isn’t so clear,” she said softly.

“Well, maybe not as clear to some as it is to others,” David said with a gentle smile.

***

The grandfather clock in the foyer ticked off the seconds, the chime marked the quarter-hours, and Clare was positive she had never realized before how slowly -- or how loudly -- it took for time to pass.

“When you’re so busy you wish time would slow down a little so you can get everything done in a day, it flies,” she observed.  “And when you wish as hard as you can that time would fly and it would be tomorrow, you have to live through every agonizing minute of today.”

“You need something to do,” Doreen said.

“You mean something that won’t be photographed and televised and analyzed by everyone under the sun?” Clare asked.

“I recommend lunch,” the housekeeper declared.  “I’ve got a great salmon bisque simmering on the stove.”