by Dan Decker
“Yeah, okay, you want me to look into this?”
“As fast as you can. I need as much information about this is possible. If you have any buddies on the inside, please ask them for a favor if you need to. Frank Ward is going to try to use this to leverage a plea bargain with Timothy, but I believe it’s all baloney. I want to blow it out of the water before it gets too far.”
“This was why you were going to start talking plea bargain, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “This and the murder weapon. Unless we can come up with a tangible connection to Ron Cooper or Barbara, there isn’t much we can do. We’ve got to find more.”
“I’m on it.”
“And Winston, great job.”
27
Jun 10 – 9:58 AM
Winston had brought a pile of other information for me to review and had talked about it from a high level before heading out. I had been more interested in having him dig into this incident from summer camp than having them explain to me what he had found, so I had cut him short. I told him I’d review it and get back to him with any questions.
I was not surprised that Ron Cooper was stepping out on his wife Cynthia.
I bet she knows, I thought, when I remembered how cold she had been the day of the arraignment. She did not seem like she would be unaware of her husband’s philandering.
She did seem the type who would be willing to put up with it for a time, provided that there were other circumstances warranting such action. Judging by her carefully groomed appearance and the way she had measured every word when we had spoken, she would be careful about every step she took when she learned about her husband’s infidelity, making sure that it was well thought out.
Winston had done a thorough job after he had made the connection between Ron and Barbara. He had snapshots of them walking into a motel room, arm in arm. He had similar photographs of them leaving several hours later. Ron had even walked her to her car and opened the door, this did not look like ships just passing in the night.
I was glad that I had paid attention to my instincts to have Ron Cooper investigated, but what was I going to do with it?
Timothy had been adamant that I not investigate his father.
Was it because he knew?
Maybe he didn’t know about this one, but he knew about others? I did not expect this was just a one-time thing for Ron. My gut told me that this was a pattern of behavior for him.
And if Winston can dig it up over just a single weekend, what’s a perceptive son going to notice over a lifetime?
I shook my head as I glanced at the rest of the photos—nothing salacious, not at all like how it would be depicted on television—and focused on the paper trail Winston had been able to dig up.
If this was all Winston could find after just a few days, imagine what he can do with several weeks.
I didn’t know how he got the information, but he’d even managed to obtain copies of receipts from the same motel Ron and Barbara had stayed, the dates went back seven weeks. Apparently, it was a favorite place of theirs, despite being in a seedy and run-down part of the city.
Winston had done a thorough job researching Barbara Howard Smith, but I was curious what I would find on her, so I typed her name into the search engine and started to catalog her social media profiles. Unlike the carefully crafted image of Ron and Cynthia, she was a lot more real.
Barbara was politically active and frequently spoke out on hot button issues, almost screaming on social media. The level of ferocity was alarming and just the thing I wanted to see when looking for potential murder suspects. I couldn’t help but make a comparison between her and Cynthia. The two could not have been more different.
Perhaps this is what had drawn Ron to her.
I spent a considerable part of the next hour scrolling through her social media, hoping to find pictures of either Ron, Gordon, or Timothy, but came up with nothing. Her friend lists were all open to the public and she was not connected to Timothy, but she was connected to Gordon, something that was expected as she was his aunt.
Winston had turned up some game-changing information, and even if I did not find anything more than the affair, it was enough to create reasonable doubt in the mind of any juror at trial. I could get up and paint a great picture with all this.
It was the first bit of leverage, and with a little more luck, we’d turn up a bunch more.
I was still engrossed in my search on Barbara Howard Smith when Timothy arrived. Ellie must have been gone from her desk because she did not warn me.
Timothy just knocked on the door and walked in without waiting for me to invite him. This was why my computer screen was always turned away from the door. I locked my screen and greeted Timothy.
“Could you shut the door?”
“Oh, right.” Timothy jumped out of his chair and shut it. It almost sounded a little bit like he slammed it and I imagined others in the office might have thought we were about to have a row, but judging by the look on Timothy’s face, he seemed to be in a pretty good place.
That’s just because he hasn’t caught word of the amended charges.
“So tell me about summer camp.” I said without preamble, looking intently at his face to see if anything showed there.
“Excuse me?” He looked bewildered.
“Your bunkmate who committed suicide?” I prompted.
“How did you learn about that?”
“I think the real question is why didn’t you tell me about it? You’re in law school, you know patterns are highly relevant, especially to hyper-analytical minds that look for things that aren’t really there. Why didn’t you tell me that this was your second roommate who had turned up dead?
“I didn’t think of it. What does this mean?”
“It means that they’re trying to turn this into a capital case, amended charges are being filed today or tomorrow. I expect Frank Ward is about to make us an offer.” I initially thought about giving him the information in a gentler fashion, but decided that I wanted to push him, to set him on edge. After my interview with Winston, I had decided to confront Timothy with some questions about his father and wanted him to make similarly unguarded statements like he had the last time we met.
“Capital case?” He shook his head as he turned pale. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Do you really think I would joke about this?”
“I can’t believe it. My life is over.”
“Did you do this? Either one of them?”
“How can you ask me? You’re supposed to be my attorney? You’re supposed to help me. This does not feel like help.”
“Is there anything else from your past that you have not told me about? Anytime you were arrested or got into trouble with the law as a juvenile or with a school or anything else like that?”
“I promise, there isn’t anything.”
“I hope not,” I said, my voice rising. “I have fired clients for less than this!”
“You’re cutting me loose? After I chose you over Keith Williams?”
I let out a deep and exasperated breath. “No, but I need to know if there’s anything else remotely bad in your past. Is there anything that can be positioned in a negative light, with you or your family?”
I had slipped that last bit in about his family, hoping it might elicit some additional information without me having to dig. Timothy was clearly worked up, the thought of me cutting him loose had disturbed him.
His face paled. “I told you to keep my family out of this.”
“My job is to zealously represent you. If there is anything there, you must tell me. I was surprised when you brought up your father. There was a reason you did, I don’t buy that it was just because you had an argument with him about your attorney. Spit it out.”
Timothy shook his head. “I’m gonna fire you and go to Keith Williams.”
“That’s just fine. I don’t mind if you do. No skin off my back.” I held his glare and did not back down. If he was hoping to blu
ff me into doing what he wanted, he had another thing coming. I would not hesitate to fire him. I had put it in his mind, because I wanted him to know that he was at risk. He wasn’t gonna go back to Keith Williams, not after kicking him to the curb, that just was not gonna happen. It was an idle threat.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment during which he took several deep breaths while running his hands through his hair. “I got a little worked up. A capital case? This just cannot be happening. I never thought that when I got accepted into law school the better part of my education would be coming from real-life experience like this. I was hoping for an internship. This is just ridiculous. This is insane.”
“We are going to do our best to help you out here and the best way for us to do that, is for you to put all your cards down on the table. I am your attorney. Everything you tell me stays privileged with very few exceptions that aren’t going to apply here. You must start being candid. You must tell me the truth.”
I had softened my tone and was now talking to him in a quiet voice. I had unsettled him, hopefully enough to rattle him into finally giving me some answers.
“My father is something of a womanizer.”
It was evident on his face that this was something that had pained him for a long time. Although he spoke without emotion, I could tell this was a wound that had never healed.
“And why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“How is it relevant?”
“I told you before. I decide what is relevant. You tell me everything. If there is dirt on anybody else in your family,” I thought about mentioning his mother but thought better of it, “you need to make sure I know. Desperate people do desperate things. It’s a universal truth. If you have desperate people around you, it’s not only possible but it’s likely that this is why you are in this mess, either tangentially or directly.”
“I get it, I’m sorry. I’ve never done this before.”
“I have. And that’s why you need to start being completely honest about every single last thing.”
“Okay. I get it.”
“Who is your father’s most recent lady?”
Timothy hesitated and I could tell that he was about to tell me the information Winston had brought in. “You could make more of this than it is, she’s related to Gordon. I actually met him through her.”
“So it wasn’t Craigslist after all, right? Why didn’t you tell me about any of this?”
“Because my father is no murderer. I could not see him doing this in a hundred years. Yeah, he will chase anything with a dress, but that does not mean he kills people.”
“I never said he did. It does provide him with questionable motives, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, it does and I’m sorry, I should have told you. The last thing I wanted was for my father to be dragged into this.”
“It is quite possible that somebody close to this woman might have been unhappy about their little liaison. You have known about this for some time.” I wanted to ask if his mother knew, but wasn’t quite ready to tackle that.
“Yeah, I’ve known since I was little kid, he almost doesn’t care if he gets caught. At times I think my mom looks the other way.”
Even though he had given me an opening to his mom, I didn’t take it.
“Does this woman’s husband know about the affair? Does he know about you? Maybe he wanted to get back at your dad by setting you up. Maybe he thought that would make her end things with your father and he would get her back.”
“That’s a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?”
“Not at all. In fact, it might be the most readily available explanation for what’s happened. In any case, we now have alternative suspects.”
“You mean my father.”
“And his mistress. And her husband. And anybody related to them.” I said this last part while looking at my notepad, so he did not see my suspicious eyes.
“But not my mother. Never my mother.”
“Look kid, we have to take this wherever it goes. If she knew about this, that gives her motive—”
Timothy jumped to his feet. “Do not even go there, if I so much as suspect you are investigating her, you will be fired so fast!”
“It is my job to represent you in every way I can. If there’s any chance she had anything to do with this, we have to take a hard look at it. I’m sorry, I know that’s not something you want to hear, but any other attorney worth his salt is going to tell you this.” I took a deep breath and went on before he had a chance to continue yelling. “I don’t think it’s her, obviously, I can’t imagine her doing this to you, but if you end up going to jail, at some point another attorney is going to come along after me and look at all the work I did, asking any hard questions that I might have neglected. I want to make sure I’ve done everything possible to represent you. That is my job. Got it? I’m going to do my job well. If you don’t like it, fire me. That would be great if you did, I’d love to be out of this rat’s nest anyway, but if not, I got work to do.”
I was standing by the end of my little monologue, this was by design. He had escalated the situation and I rose to the occasion to match what he had done. Sometimes, you just have to yell back. This was one of those times. He needed to hear what I had to say and if the only way to get that message through was to raise my voice, I was happy to oblige.
We stared at each other.
I imagined that Ellie was getting an earful on the other side of the wall. A lot of times, even though I had white noise machines outside my door, she still heard much of what went on inside my office. She, along with every other employee, had signed confidentiality agreements, but every now and again there were times I wished we could move to a new office with three-foot-thick walls.
Even that might not be enough.
Timothy was breathing hard and he looked like he was about to lay into me again, but my phone beeped.
I picked it up. “Yes.”
“Your voice is calmer than I expected,” Ellie said. “Did you get him riled up on purpose?” I had never outright told her that I sometimes did this, but she had figured it out quickly enough within a few months of coming to work for me. “I just wanted to provide you with a break, just in case…” She didn’t finish what she was going to say, but I knew without her telling me. She had witnessed some of my anger management issues firsthand, but I had gotten a lot better in the last few years.
“Thanks for the update.” I appreciated her intervening, and the timing of it could not have been more perfect. It was sometimes scary how well she knew me. The break had given Timothy a chance to catch up with the conversation and come to terms with what I had just said.
I motioned for him to take his seat while covering the phone receiver and whispering sorry.
“All right,” I said into the phone, “I won’t be much longer.”
“Go get ‘em,” Ellie said with what I was sure was a smile.
After I hung up I sat down and leaned back in my chair.
“Timothy, I get it, your mother is important to you, but we are talking about your life here. We have to do everything we can.”
“And that means investigating my mother.”
I nodded. “It does, but I will tell you this, if it turns out I find any information on her that I can use in your defense I will come to you first. You will get the final call on it.”
“I would rather go to jail than have my mother dragged into this.”
“Even if she killed somebody?”
Timothy didn’t hesitate.
“Absolutely.”
28
Jun 10 – 12:30 PM
Unless I had a meeting with my partners, I preferred to take lunch at my desk, so it was outside my regular routine when I mentioned to Ellie that I was heading out for a sandwich and would be back in a couple hours. I needed some time to decompress after my stressful morning.
“Hold my calls,” I said as I walked out the door.
“See you in a few,” she sai
d without looking up from a project she was working on. I hadn’t given her anything to do, so it had come from one of the other attorneys.
It was not even five minutes later that my phone rang.
“Frank Ward is on the phone,” Ellie said. “I assumed you would want to talk to him but I’m happy to give him an excuse.”
I thought about it for a moment and nodded, even though she could not see me. “Sure, send him through.” He was the one exception. I should have told her that I would take his call.
“Mitch, how was your weekend?”
I wanted to ground my teeth at his fake friendliness, but resolved to not let my irritation show. He had done his best to give me a bad weekend. I wanted to make sure he knew he had not succeeded so he would not try something like this again in the future. In truth, stepping away from the case had been the best thing I could have done, he had done me a favor, if anything.
“Not bad, yours?”
“Good enough.” I had apparently managed to come off as cheerful, because his voice had soured. “Look, I’ve been thinking about it, it was on my mind all weekend. I feel bad for your kid and I want to make him on offer.”
I just waited. I would pass it along, but I didn’t think Timothy was likely to take it.
“Twenty-five to life.”
“Frank, I’ll tell him, but that’s not appealing. I’ve seen you do better.”
Frank snorted. “I can’t, not on this one. I’m just doing this as a favor to you.”
“Okay, I’ll pass it on.” There was little point in arguing about it because it was not going to happen, so why waste time?
“I was just about to file the amended papers when I thought I’d give you a call. He takes this agreement and nobody ever suspects he had something to do with the death of that summer camp kid, we’ll keep it under wraps.”
I repressed a chuckle, in truth it was hard to not break out in a fit of laughter. Did these tactics ever work for Frank? Maybe if he did a better job delivering them, but this was weak. I could not help but wonder if a senior prosecutor at the office had taken him under his wing and was mentoring him, because it almost seemed like he was following a script.
