Gone Ballistic (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “How do you plead?” the judge asked Willow.

  She wet her lips, and I nodded at her encouragingly.

  “Not guilty,” she said, almost inaudibly.

  He told her she had the right to remain silent, then asked her if there was anything she wanted to say. She shook her head.

  “Bail in this case has been set at six hundred thousand dollars?” the judge asked.

  Biggs: “Yes, your honor.”

  “Is that adequate, do you think?”

  “We think it is, your honor.”

  “Is it too much?” Judge Cheatham asked me.

  “It’s several times her net worth. She can’t raise it, and if she uses a bail bondsman it’s going to cost her everything she has. In the meantime, she’s separated from her two-year-old son.”

  Judge Cheatham tapped his pencil. “She is charged with first-degree murder,” he said to me.

  “It’s a serious crime, but she hasn’t been convicted of it yet. The court’s concern is making sure she appears for trial. A quarter-million dollars would be enough to do that.”

  Cheatham looked at Biggs.

  “A quarter-million isn’t nearly enough. Her life is on the line.” It was a restrained response from Biggs. Really, I felt a lot more comfortable when it seemed like his head was about to explode.

  “We’ll reduce it to five-hundred thousand,” Cheatham said.

  It seemed like he’d settled on the same amount the last time I’d appeared before him. I think Judge Cheatham might just be a half-million-dollar kind of guy.

  “Are you ready to set a date for the preliminary?” he asked.

  Biggs nodded. “Yes, your honor.”

  “Counselor?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Well, then.” He pulled over his calendar. “I’ve actually got Monday open. This won’t take more than a day, will it?”

  “It might,” Biggs said.

  Cheatham raised his eyebrows.

  “There are some elements to this that make it more complicated than the run-of-the-mill case.”

  “I wondered why the district attorney himself was present at an arraignment.”

  I didn’t know, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t because he missed my pretty face.

  “A day and a half?” Cheatham asked.

  “Two days, I think. Depending of course on what kind of case the defense puts on.”

  When Cheatham looked at me, I smiled. “I’d hate to limit the defense’s options at this point.”

  Cheatham rolled his eyes. “Okay. We could start Friday afternoon of next week, pick it up again the following Monday.” He looked up from his calendar. “Unless you’d be ready to go Thursday of this week.”

  “The defense would be ready,” I said.

  Biggs nodded. “The prosecution would welcome an early date.”

  “Very well then. Thursday it is. We’ll get started at nine a.m.”

  I said goodbye to Willow, and the deputy sheriff took her away. I turned toward the swinging gate in the bar and almost ran into Aubrey. He smirked up at me. “Counselor,” he said.

  “Mr. D.A. man.”

  “You are an arrogant thing, aren’t you?”

  I doubted he would have called a man an arrogant thing. “Just a pushy female who doesn’t know her place,” I said.

  Cherchez la femme, Paul had said. Another good adage for detective work is Follow the money, though I think the phrase was originally used in connection with ferreting out corruption in politics. Since I had Rodney Burns checking into Peyton Shilling, which was all I knew to do to cherchez la femme, I spent most of the day with Chris’s financial records. They’d been occupying a bit of floor along the wall beside my desk. I’d kicked them nearly every time I’d gone around my desk, but had had no time to delve into them.

  That afternoon I had a couple of folders open and papers spread over the desk when Carter Fox came in and sat uninvited in one of my client chairs. I opened a file folder on top of the exposed papers, which related to a limited partnership called South of Main. Carter nodded in the direction of the roses that I had moved to the credenza to give myself room to work. “I haven’t seen much of you lately,” he said. “You’re still enjoying the roses, I trust?”

  “Doesn’t everybody enjoy roses?”

  “Women do,” he said. “That’s what they say.” His slick, black hair glinted in the overhead fluorescents.

  “Do men not like flowers, you think, or are they just afraid of them? Too much of a threat to their masculinity?”

  He licked his finger and drew a vertical line in the air, chalking one up for Robin Starling. “What did your boyfriend think of them?”

  “Paul didn’t seem to appreciate them all that much. Of course, he isn’t female.”

  “I see he hasn’t responded to the challenge with flowers of his own.”

  “I’m sure he will once he realizes what a turn-on they are.”

  Carter’s eyes blinked, and the tip of his tongue appeared between his lips.

  “I’m kidding, Carter. There’s no magic button to push for sexual favors. The way it works is, you develop a relationship.”

  “Going to lunch, dropping by your office now and then for a few minutes of conversation? Sending flowers as a sign of one’s esteem?”

  “I do thank you for the flowers. They’re very nice. And I appreciate your efforts at relationship-building, though right now I’m snowed.”

  “Representing that woman who killed her husband?”

  “That woman falsely accused of killing her husband.”

  “You don’t really think she’s innocent.”

  “All my clients are innocent until proven otherwise. I think there was something about that in law school, but I’ll have to check my notes.”

  Carter uncrossed his legs and stood up. “You’re busy. I understand.” He stopped in the doorway and looked back at me over his shoulder. “It’s your fault, you know. You were sitting in here looking so cute behind your desk, I just had to drop in and say hello.”

  I gave him a nod. “Hello. And thanks again for the flowers.”

  When he was gone, Brooke came in, Carly right behind her, wide-eyed and curious. She glanced back toward the hall, then closed the door.

  “He irritates the hell out of you, doesn’t he?” Brooke said.

  “He was just being friendly.”

  “Don’t pretend. The man bought you flowers, probably set him back fifty or sixty bucks, and you were hardly civil to him. ‘I think there was something about that in law school, but I’ll have to check my notes.’ ”

  I blew out a sigh. “You’re right. He has the potential to turn into a problem, though.”

  Carly shuddered. “He’s just so oily.”

  “He’ll never get stuck in a drainpipe, that’s for sure,” I said.

  Brooke and Carly only looked perplexed.

  “He’d slide right out,” I explained.

  Their expressions cleared, though neither laughed or even cracked a smile. It seemed to me I used to be a lot funnier. “You can see Paul has nothing to worry about,” I said. “You might mention that to him sometime, if it comes up in conversation.”

  “Oh, it comes up,” Carly said.

  “Hard for it not to, when he sees those roses every time he walks over,” Brooke said.

  Paul came over to my house for dinner that night. When we ate over at his place, he usually made a production of it, a white tablecloth on the table, a meal that took time and thought to prepare. When we ate at my house, we had salad with deli meat torn up on it, either turkey or chicken. We did have wine usually, or I did, while Paul had one of those dark beers that gave him what I’d come to think of as Paul-breath.

  After dinner we took Deacon for his walk. It was dusk and hard to see. Soon it would be dark enough to make Deacon invisible. No neighbors had complained about him running loose, not yet, but I made an effort to stay aware of him—as aware as you can be of a dog who has disappeared
into the gloom and is nowhere in sight.

  R.E.M. began playing on my cell phone, and I slipped the phone out of my pocket. The screen showed a number I didn’t recognize—hence the generic ringtone—but I answered anyway.

  “Hello?”

  There was a brief silence, then a child’s voice. “Is dis Miss Wobin?”

  “Caden? Yes, this is Robin.”

  “Is Dacon dare?” He pronounced Deacon’s name so that it rhymed with bacon, but I got the idea.

  “Yes, he’s here. Would you like to speak to him?”

  “Yes. I would wike to speak wif him.”

  “Let me call him for you.” I put the cell down against my thigh. “Deeks!” I called. “Deeks, old buddy.”

  “I thought you were calling him Deacon now,” Paul said.

  “When I can remember. Deacon!”

  Paul put his fingers to his mouth and gave a piercing whistle.

  “He isn’t trained to respond to a whistle,” I said.

  “I thought it might get his attention.”

  “Just a minute,” I said into the phone. “Deacon’s coming.” And he was. It’s difficult to say how I knew. It wasn’t that I heard him pushing through brush or heard his toenails on the road. It was more like the charge in the air before a thunderstorm. Then I glimpsed movement on the other side of the road, and I held up my hand.

  “Wait,” I called, and Deacon halted in the dark grass just his side of the bar ditch. No cars were coming, but I didn’t like him darting out into the road without giving me the chance to check it out. “Come,” I said, and he jumped the ditch and crossed the road toward me. I squatted, and he gave my face a lick.

  “Remember Caden?” I asked him. “The little boy who visited us?” Deacon looked like he was taking it all in, though I’m not so deluded as to think he understood any of it. “He wants to talk to you.” Into the phone I said, “Caden? Are you still there? Here’s Deacon. I’m holding the phone up to his ear.” I did, leaning my head in to hear what Caden was saying.

  “Hey, Dacon, it’s me, Caden. Gammy and P-paw tooked me to da zoo taday. Dey was monkeys dare. Do you wike monkeys? I wike ’em—a wot! Dey so funny. Dey was a tigah dare, and he was big!” I expected Deacon to lose interest quickly, but he listened to a recounting of ewiphants and big bwack kitties and giwaffes and a hippapwatamus. Eventually, I heard a woman’s voice in the background, then she came on.

  “Robin? Are you there?”

  “I’m here. I guess you took Caden to the zoo? He was telling Deacon and me all about it. If you want to put him back on, I’ll see if I can get Deacon to say something.”

  “Here he is.”

  I turned the phone toward Deacon. “Speak,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “Speak!”

  He gave a tentative woof.

  “Good boy. Did you hear him? Deacon says hello.”

  “Dacon says hi to me,” Caden said to someone. Deacon moved away from me a step, his eyes on my face.

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said.

  He ran back across the street and disappeared behind the house. I know what you’re thinking: There’s no telling what he was getting into; dogs shouldn’t be allowed to run loose. It isn’t safe for them or for others, and it’s no good saying how much he likes it. Believe me, I hear it all the time.

  “We took him to the National Zoo. He’s been before, but he didn’t remember it at all,” Gammy said.

  “I can tell he had a good time.”

  “Yes. We all had a good time. How are things down there?”

  “We had the arraignment today, but Willow’s still in jail on bail of half-a-million dollars. The preliminary hearing starts Thursday.”

  “This Thursday?”

  “Both the prosecution and I are trying to rush it.”

  “Why are you rushing it?”

  “To find out what I can about the prosecution’s case. I need something to work on.”

  The next morning I went by the Richmond City Jail to see Willow. In her orange jumpsuit her skin looked even paler than it usually did, and, in contrast to her jet black hair, that was pretty pale.

  “So,” she said in her throaty voice. “Preliminary hearing tomorrow.”

  “There’s no jury,” I said. “A district judge hears evidence and decides whether there’s probable cause to hold you for trial in circuit court. It’s not a high bar for the prosecution, but they will have to show most of their case.”

  “Will I be testifying?”

  “No. The point is to take a look at the prosecution’s case, not give them a look at ours.”

  “But at the main trial?”

  “I don’t know. You don’t have any felonies or scandals in your past. . .at least not that I know of.”

  She shook her head.

  “You might make a really good impression on the jury. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “I just want to get home to Caden.”

  “I know. He is doing really well with his gammy and p-paw. He called me last night to tell me about it.” I repeated what he’d said about his trip to the zoo.

  “So why are you here?” she said finally. “Hold my hand a little, make me feel better?”

  “How am I doing so far?”

  She smiled, but sadly.

  “Actually, I wanted to ask you about a limited partnership called South of Main. There was a slim folder devoted to it among your financial records.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Chris’s folly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I shouldn’t complain. It might be what brought him back to me, but he did lose us a pile of money.”

  “Sixty thousand dollars, as near as I can tell,” I said. Late last fall, twenty thousand dollars had been wired from their brokerage account into checking and another forty from Chris’s retirement account. He’d written two checks to South of Main, LP, spaced about six weeks apart, in exchange for one-and-a-half shares of the limited partnership.

  “Peyton Shilling got him into it,” Willow said. “First, she and Chris bought a share of the partnership together, then he bought another one on his own.”

  “What does the partnership do?”

  “Buys real estate between Main Street and Cary just south of the Fan District. Apartment buildings, rent houses, maybe a commercial property or two.”

  “Seems like a promising investment. What was wrong with it?”

  “I don’t know, but Chris seemed to feel like he’d been taken.”

  “Was he doing anything about it?”

  She shrugged. “I went to community college for two semesters. It wasn’t the kind of thing he bothered to explain to me.”

  “And you didn’t ask.”

  “Things were difficult between us. I didn’t press him,” she said.

  Peyton Shilling had gotten Chris to invest in South of Main, which suggested she was connected to it somehow. That was promising, I thought. Maybe I could cherchez la femme and follow the money at the same time. When I got back to my office, I went to the website of the State Corporation Commission and looked up South of Main. I learned three things: One, the limited partnership was inactive. Two, the address of its principal office was on South Davis Avenue, or had been. Three, the partnership’s registered agent was Peyton Shilling. Cherchez la femme indeed.

  The southern border of the Fan District was Main Street, a street which was itself largely commercial—a lot of bars and restaurants among the row houses. The block between Main and Cary Street was transitional. Though the Fan District itself had gone through gentrification way back in the 1970s, the area south of it had been transitioning for longer than I’d been in Richmond.

  I leafed back through Chris Woodruff’s file on South of Main and found the prospectus for it, along with a slick brochure featuring some of the properties it owned. I also gathered the paperwork relating to Chris’s purchase of his shares, one share in his own name, the other in his and Peyton’s. What I needed was anything th
at connected any of it to his murder. Chris felt like he’d been taken, which was a promising start. . .but only a start.

  I put it all aside and pulled over a legal pad. “Motives for Murder” went at the top, underneath it, “1. Love gone bad.” In that category I could put Peyton Shilling and Willow herself. Chris had a reputation as a womanizer, so there was also the possibility of a female as yet unknown. I wrote, “Peyton, Willow, Woman Unknown.”

  Next category: Jealous rage. Maybe Peyton had a boyfriend or even a husband who didn’t take kindly to the fling that had been featured so prominently on social media. Or maybe the unknown woman had a husband or boyfriend, if there’d been one.

  Third category: Money. . .And I didn’t know where that one led me.

  I got up and went into Rodney’s office, where he sat slurping coffee and looking owlishly over the rim of the mug at his computer screen. “You’re a noisy drinker,” I observed. “I guess you’ve heard that before.”

  He shook his head. “Never. I guess I haven’t had many women in my life.”

  It seemed like a slur upon my sex, but maybe I had brought it on us. “Did you ever find out whether Peyton Shilling is married or has been married?”

  He nodded solemnly.

  “She is, or she has been?” I asked.

  “Neither.”

  That was disappointing. “Any past or current boyfriends?”

  “Sure. The whole pattern of her romantic life is laid out for us on social media.”

  “Who’s her current paramour?”

  “A young man named Tanner. I can’t remember his last name, but I think it starts with a B. . .” He shook his head. “I’ll have to look it up for you.”

  “Could you make me a list of all her men, past and present?”

  “Going back. . .”

  “Say two years.”

  He nodded, and I left his office only to run immediately into Carter Fox, who seemed to be lurking in the common area of our little cul-de-sac.