The Twelve Dogs of Christmas

by David Rosenfelt

  “That’s not for me to judge,” Sam says. “But what he’s asking for is probably 45 percent of the total value of the estate.”

  That comment tends to confirm my belief that there is something hidden here. I ask Hike what he thinks; until now, he has done nothing but cringe in fear that I am actually going to ask him to go to South Dakota.

  He says, “I don’t know how you could lay pipe on that land. I looked at weather dot com; you know what the temperature is there today? Wind chill is minus eleven. Eyeballs freeze in that weather.”

  “So the people of South Dakota walk around bumping into things?”

  He shakes his head. “No, their eyeballs are used to it and have adjusted. Someone from here—like me, for instance—wouldn’t have a chance.”

  “Hike, you don’t have to go there. Now what do you think?”

  “Then the answer is in South Dakota.”

  Since Sam and Hike have placed a value on each piece of land, I construct a counteroffer. I redivide the land, giving Weisler 50 percent of the value, which is more than he asked for. But in this counterproposal, the South Dakota land stays with Pups. If he turns it down, it will be obvious to me that the South Dakota land is the key.

  I have Edna type it up with the disclaimer that it is not binding and is subject to Martha’s approval. Obviously, it is also subject to her being acquitted, since that is the only reason a civil suit would be filed.

  We send it to him electronically, and then I call Walter Tillman to ask him to assist me on the civil trial should one be necessary. He knows much more about civil law than I do; between my criminal experience and knowledge of this case and his civil training, we would make a formidable team.

  “Sure,” he says. “Glad to help in any way I can.” Then, “You think the civil suit will happen?”

  It’s his not-so-roundabout way of asking me what I think the verdict will be in the criminal trial. “I don’t know,” I say. “I never know. I got a settlement offer from Weisler.”

  “And?”

  “I sent him a counteroffer.”

  “Will Pups settle?” he asks, with obvious surprise.

  “I haven’t talked to her about it yet. It might be in her best interest, to put this all behind her. And the settlement would be sealed; no one would think she was a murderer. But it would mean less money for the rescue groups.”

  “You want me to talk to her?” he asks.

  “Maybe. Let me broach it with her and see where we stand.”

  I get off the phone feeling a little better. If I have to go through a civil trial, Walter will be a major asset.

  But first we have to hear from our jury.

  Pups achieves a first among all my clients.

  She doesn’t ask me if I think we’re going to win. I’ve come to the jail to discuss the settlement offer, and I expected that to be her first question.

  Wrong. Her first question is, “How is Puddles doing?”

  “Willie says she’s doing great. Micaela is still coming to visit her at the foundation, and she’s got the reverse pet down pat.”

  She nods. “Good. What are you doing here?”

  “Hank Boyer has made an offer to avoid a civil suit.” I don’t mention that if she’s convicted he’ll get it all anyway; she already knows that.

  “Yeah?” is her noncommittal response.

  I nod. “Yes.”

  “Is it a fair offer?”

  I shrug. “I’m not sure. On its face it is, but I think there could be some hidden value on the land that we don’t know about that is driving this.” I pause and then plunge ahead. “It could be behind the murders as well.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means if Jake or you had sold some of the land, the people behind this might have gotten what they wanted.”

  “And Hank is part of this?”

  “I don’t see how, but I also don’t see any other way the bad guys can profit.”

  She thinks about this for a while but doesn’t say anything. I have no idea what is going through her mind. Finally, she says, “No settlement. If Jake didn’t want him to get anything, then I don’t either.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say. But with your permission, or even without it, I’m going to keep the discussions going.”

  “Why?” she asks.

  “I’m trying to draw them out, to find out what’s important to them and what isn’t.”

  She nods. “OK. I trust you.”

  It feels good to hear her say that; somehow when Pups gives a compliment, it has more impact than when other people do.

  “Let me ask you a question,” I say. “How come you haven’t asked me whether I think we’re going to win or lose?”

  She shrugs. “Would it change anything if I did?”

  “No.”

  “There’s your answer.”

  I’m about to get up and leave when there is a knock on the door, and it opens. A guard is standing in the doorway with a very scary message.

  “They want you in the courtroom,” he says to Pups.

  Pups takes the news much more calmly than I do. She needs to be escorted by law enforcement, so I leave and will meet her there. I call Hike and tell him the news, and he’ll meet us there as well.

  If it’s a verdict, then I think it’s bad news. I’ve instinctively felt that our chances in this one increase the longer the jury takes. Of course, if they took a month before reaching a verdict, I would think that was bad news as well. I’m a verdict-half-empty kind of guy.

  I see Tressel when I walk in, and he comes over to me. “No verdict,” he says. “The jury has a message for the judge.”

  In all such cases, the key players, including the defendant, must be present. It could be anything from a question about evidence to declaring themselves hung. We won’t know until we know.

  And we know soon enough. Chambers brings in the jury, and the foreman quickly tells him that they collectively believe they are deadlocked and are very unlikely to resolve it and come to a verdict.

  Chambers will have none of it; he tells the foreman that they need to go back and try again and work hard to make it happen. There is no hint of where the jury stands, whether the majority is in favor of an acquittal or a conviction.

  In a normal case, the defense is usually happy with a situation like this, but, once again, this case is not normal. Pups just doesn’t have that much time left, so the time needed to schedule and hold a retrial essentially means life in prison for her.

  The guards escort her back to the prison, and I check my cell phone once I get out of court. There’s a message from Weisler, asking me to call him, so I do.

  “We’re getting close,” he says. “I just need one more thing to sell it to my client, a slight reshuffling of the land distribution.”

  “What’s that?” I ask, though I have no doubt what it will be.

  “The South Dakota land is important to him. That’s his home state; it’s where he wants to spend the rest of his life. That land would be perfect. We’d be willing to trade more than fair value.”

  “I’ll bet you would,” is what I’m thinking. What I say is, “I’ve got another idea; let’s make it all or nothing and try the case.”

  The civil suit is filed twenty-four hours after my conversation with Weisler.

  In lawsuit land, that qualifies as warp speed, but it doesn’t surprise me. They clearly have no great reason to wait, since we’re not going to settle. Civil cases also involve discovery depositions, and they want to be able to question Pups under oath before her disease claims her.

  If Pups is convicted, they can and will just withdraw the suit and set about getting her estate. At that point, she will no longer own it anyway, since she cannot inherit Jake’s estate if she has been found criminally to have murdered him.

  In any event, I want to get a jump on the opposition by filing a deposition notice to interview Hank Boyer before they can interview Pups. I instruct Hike to file the notice
with Weisler. I doubt they’ll try to delay; they seem to be in something of a hurry.

  I’m still nervously awaiting the jury’s decision in the criminal case, but I’m pessimistic. In football, they say that when a quarterback throws a pass, three things can happen, and two of them are bad. There can be an incompletion, an interception, or a completion—the single good outcome.

  We are facing a similar situation in this deliberation. Three things can happen, and two of them are bad. While an acquittal would obviously be positive, the other two possible outcomes, a conviction or a hung jury, are both bad. If the jury is hung, then all Tressel has to do is announce that he will retry the case, and Pups will essentially be confined to prison for the rest of her brief life.

  There is no way to know what the jury’s breakdown was when they told Judge Chambers that they couldn’t reach a verdict. Based on my history of instinctively reading juries, I can confidently say that in the jury’s vote so far, we are either ahead, behind, or tied.

  In other words, I don’t have a clue.

  Another twenty-four hours pass, and I’m about to go off the deep end. I’m spending the days sitting on my couch, trying to divert myself by watching every sporting event on television. And with all the sports channels, there is no sporting event that isn’t on television.

  Every time the phone rings, I jump off the couch to get it. I finally come up with a new plan; I bring the phone onto the couch with me. I’m watching a nationally televised spelling bee when Sam calls.

  “That South Dakota bill finally came out of committee,” he says. “The news just broke.”

  “They chose the route through Pups’s land,” I say, more as a statement than a question. If they chose otherwise, them I’m at square 1.

  “Yup,” he says. “Locals are very surprised; there was another route that everybody expected.”

  “So what reason did they give for choosing this one?” I ask.

  “No one is saying on the record, at least not so far. Just a lot of environmental stuff, best for the people of South Dakota, blah, blah, blah. Apparently, a state senator named Ridgeway is the head of the committee, and he pushed it through.”

  “So it’s a done deal?” I ask.

  “Seems like it.”

  I hang up and call Nolan Weisler. He had called me about timing for the depositions, and we’ve traded calls since. “Looks like Jake’s dream home won’t work out,” I say. “They’re going to be laying pipeline there.”

  He knows exactly what I’m saying and doesn’t seem at all embarrassed by it. “You can’t blame me for doing my homework.”

  The truth is that I can’t. “How did you know that would be the route they would choose?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “But there was always that chance, and the rest of the land in the estate is pretty much a waste of time.”

  We change the subject to the timing of the civil depositions, which of course are subject to the criminal jury’s verdict. “You think the jury will be hung?” he asks.

  “Or not.”

  If they are hung, the civil suit will move forward, so we set up the first deposition, that of Hank Boyer, for next week. If Pups gets convicted in the meantime, we’ll just cancel it.

  I head back to my couch, just in time to see a snotty little brat misspell “potpourri.” He uses one r; it would be embarrassing for him to lose like this in front of a national television audience, except for the fact that I have to be the only dope who is tuned in.

  Now another snotty little brat steps to the podium, needing to spell one more word to be declared the winner. Unfortunately, the phone rings again. Even more unfortunately, the caller ID says that the call is coming from the courthouse.

  It’s Rita Gordon. “It’s showtime, Andy. The judge wants you down at the courthouse.”

  “Has the jury come back?” I ask.

  “This does involve the jury,” she says, obviously guarded.

  “Is there a verdict?”

  “Andy, you know I can’t tell you that. The judge would kill me. We have rules.”

  “Rules, shmules,” I say.

  “Rules, shmules? Is that the best you’ve got?”

  “I become less eloquent the more nervous I get. Come on, Rita. We’ll all know in an hour; I can keep your secret that long.”

  “OK,” she says. “But if you tell anyone, I’ll hunt you down and kill you like the lawyer dog you are.”

  “I can live with that.”

  “Andy, there’s a verdict.”

  By the time I get to the courthouse, most of the players are in place.

  Tressel and his team are there, as is Hike. The gallery is half full, and the rest of the seats are filling rapidly. Laurie has come with me, and she takes her seat behind the defense table. We have a little preverdict ritual in which she doesn’t wish me luck but squeezes my hand, and she reaches over and does that.

  Pups is brought in; she’s coughing and not looking well. But she gathers herself and smiles when she sits down next to me. “What is it this time?”

  I think I can safely tell her without getting Rita in trouble; I doubt that Pups is going to scream out the fact that there’s a verdict. “This is it,” I say, and she knows what I mean.

  Judge Chambers comes in and announces that the jury has communicated to him that they have, in fact, reached a verdict. He then mouths the obligatory drivel about how everyone must maintain decorum after the verdict is announced, though the next time someone is punished for violating the decorum edict will be the first.

  The jury is brought into the room. I don’t subscribe to the theory that it’s bad if the jury doesn’t look at me or good if they do. In this case, they don’t look at either the defense or the prosecution, but they all look down in a seemingly common fascination with their own shoes.

  Judge Chambers, to his credit, doesn’t drag this out. As soon as the jury is seated, he asks the foreman if they have reached a verdict, and the foreman confirms that they have. Chambers directs the bailiff to retrieve the verdict form and bring it to him, and the bailiff does so.

  Chambers glances at it in what seems to be a weirdly disinterested manner, as if he’s saying that all he cares about is conducting a fair trial; it doesn’t matter who wins or loses. It’s possible that I’m reading too much into this; it’s also possible that my head is going to explode.

  Chambers hands it to the court clerk and asks Pups to stand. She does so, and Hike and I stand as well. She seems a little shaky; the stress of what she has gone through has to have taken its toll. I put my arm around her shoulder as Chambers asks the clerk to read the verdict out loud.

  “In the matter of New Jersey vs. Martha Boyer, as relating to count one, the homicide of Mr. Jake Boyer, we the jury find the defendant, Martha Boyer, not guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  The gallery erupts enough to stop the clerk from reading, and Chambers has to admonish them and gavel the place back to silence. In most cases, I would be totally relieved, but this case is not the typical one. The Hennessey murder is where the prosecution had the most evidence; the jury could easily have compromised by finding Pups guilty of that one and not guilty of the others.

  The clerk continues to read. “In the matter of New Jersey vs. Martha Boyer, as relating to count two, the homicide of Mr. Raymond Parker, we the jury find the defendant, Martha Boyer, not guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  That is no surprise; it would be impossible to find her not guilty of killing Jake but guilty of killing Little Tiny. Obviously, the shooter was the same in both cases.

  I gird myself for the next one.

  “In the matter of New Jersey vs. Martha Boyer, as relating to count three, the homicide of Mr. Randall Hennessey, we the jury find the defendant, Martha Boyer, not guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  Relief washes over me; if there is a better feeling in the world, I don’t know what it is. I take my hand off of Pups’s shoulder and cast a quick glance at a very happy Lauri
e. I then turn back to Pups and am surprised to see that she is not there, and instead I am looking at Hike.

  That’s because Pups is lying on the floor.

  According to the doctor, Pups hadn’t been taking her heart medication.

  The result was the same supraventricular thing that sent her to the hospital last time, once again brought on by high stress. They took her to the hospital, and, as before, medication got her feeling better in thirty-six hours.

  I’ve come to see her, and I start by admonishing her for not taking the meds. “Mind your own business,” she says. Pups is not great at being admonished.

  “You’re my client, so you’re my business,” I say. “Take the damn meds.”

  “They make me dizzy,” she says.

  “Not taking them makes you unconscious,” I point out. “And you need to be strong; we have another trial coming up.”

  “Do I have to be there?”

  “Not the whole time. But you have to give a deposition and then testify. It will take a lot of energy and focus. Unless you want to settle.”

  She shakes her head. “No chance.”

  “There’s been a development in South Dakota regarding your property. It could be worth a fortune.”

  She nods. “Good. More money for the rescue groups.”

  “OK. Whenever I win a case, we have a victory party at Charlie’s. You up to it when you get out of here? Would you rather wait until after the civil case wraps up?”

  “Hey, we won, so we party,” she says. “We can party again when we win the next round.”

  “Next round is tougher.”

  “Why? If I’m innocent once, I’ll be innocent again.”

  “I told you already. Different standard of guilt, a much lower bar for them to get over. It also doesn’t have to be unanimous. The criminal jury had a tough time with this one, which may not bode well for the civil case.”

  She doesn’t want to hear about it, so I ask whom she wants me to invite to the party.

  “Whoever you want,” she says. “I’ll invite my friends, and give me Willie Miller’s phone number.”