Gone Ballistic (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

“Go to lunch?” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve already made plans.”

  “The boyfriend who doesn’t send flowers?”

  “That would be the one.”

  “Tomorrow then.”

  “I’ll be in trial Thursday and Friday. Preliminary hearing.”

  “Of course. Next week sometime.”

  He was a persistent bugger. “We’ll see,” I said.

  “Fair enough.” He looked at my legs, checked out my hips and my breasts on his way back up to my face. I gave him a sour look.

  “Enjoy yourself?” I asked.

  He smiled at me and cocked his head. “Any man would.”

  When he left, Brooke swung open her office door, which had been standing only half open. “What was that about?”

  “Just Carter Fox mentally undressing me.”

  “That man gives me the creeps.”

  “Yes. Someday I’m going to have to beat the snot out of him. I can feel it coming on.”

  “Well, I want to be there when it happens.”

  “Want to go to lunch? I’m heading out to the 3 Monkeys. I’ve got to check out a business out that way.”

  “What about your plans with Paul?”

  “Purely imaginary. They’re having some kind of banquet at the Fed today, community outreach or something.”

  The 3 Monkeys is not a good lunch place for two women who want to keep their figures. Brooke had the chicken and waffles; I had the Monkey Burger, which is a bacon burger with blue cheese and avocado. To be fair, there were lighter items on the menu, but what’s the point of going to a place like the 3 Monkeys if you’re just going to have the garden salad?

  “How do you eat like that?” Brooke asked me at one point when we both had our mouths full.

  “I have a dog. Keeps me active.”

  “How do I eat like this?”

  I swallowed. “An inefficient metabolism?” I suggested.

  “Thank God for inefficiency.”

  After lunch we walked around the corner to South Davis. The address I had for South of Main was at the corner of South Davis and Cary Street. It was a row house with steps leading up to double doors inset with beveled glass. A metal plaque to one side of the doors said South of Main, L.P. but a black paper For Lease sign was taped to the inside of the glass. There was a phone number handwritten with a Marks-a-lot in the white rectangle, and I tapped the number into my phone as we walked back down to the sidewalk.

  “Hello,” I said to the woman who answered the phone. “My name is Robin Starling. I wanted to ask about the office space you have available on South Davis.”

  I turned as I spoke to look back at the house. Only the ground floor of the house appeared to be commercial, and I wondered who lived above it, if anyone. “I’m a little worried about the convenience of the location and the adequacy of parking and that sort of thing. It looks like the previous business didn’t last long. Could you tell me how many businesses have been in the location in the last three to five years? Uh huh. The last one was called South of Main, some kind of limited partnership, I think. What kind of business were they in, do you know? Huh. Property management. No, I’m a lawyer. I assume the zoning would allow for a law office? How long was South of Main here? And its predecessor?”

  By the time I was done, Brooke had settled herself on the low wall that held the small patch of rising lawn off the sidewalk. “Sorry,” I said to her.

  “It’s okay, but I ate too much for lunch. I’m beginning to feel the need for either a nap or an afternoon cup of coffee.”

  “I’ll get you back to the office, and we’ll have coffee.”

  “So what did you find out?” she asked as we walked back down the street in the direction of my car.

  “South of Main had a six-month lease, but moved out before the end of it.”

  “Any other useful information?”

  “Not really. I mean, I learned a good bit about the property and it’s suitability for a small law office—it would actually work pretty well, I think—but nothing that’s going to help me at the preliminary hearing tomorrow.”

  “You’re not thinking of moving your law office, are you?”

  “No.” I gave her a smile. “If I was, I’d be looking for space for you and Rodney Burns, too.”

  “Don’t forget Carter Fox.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Who could forget him?”

  When we got back to the Executive Suites, each of us got a mug of coffee, and we went to sit in Rodney’s office across the desk from him.

  He eyed us defensively, looking from one to the other of us. “Should I be worried?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Have you got anything to hide?”

  “Probably nothing you’d be interested in.” He made a stab at a smile, but seemed too nervous to hold onto it.

  “Try us,” Brooke said. “Tell us about your love life. Where does a swinging single man of forty go to pick up women in this town?”

  Rodney’s eyes widened, and his gaze shifted, evidence of the fight-or-flight adrenalin being dumped into his bloodstream.

  “Remember? He goes to Hooter’s, chats up the waitresses,” I said.

  “That’s right!” Brooke said. “I’d forgotten about that. Do you always sit at the same table? Is there a particular waitress you like?”

  Rodney started rearranging the clutter on his desk, his breath coming faster.

  “One thing I’ve always wondered,” I said. “Do they have real names like Megan and Liz, or do they all use names like Honey or Brandy?”

  “Or Candi with an i,” Brooke said.

  Rodney placed both palms flat on his desk in an apparent effort to hold them still. I thought he might make a break for it.

  I held up a hand to forestall any escape attempt. “Really,” I said. “We’re just killing time while we drink our coffee. If I drew up a subpoena for you, do you think you could get it served this evening?”

  His eyes shifted to meet mine. “Maybe,” he said carefully.

  “It’s Peyton Shilling. You have her address. Actually, you’re the one who gave me her address. You know, she’s actually a very attractive female just a couple, three younger than us. She might be a possibility for you.”

  Brooke said, “Maybe you could get her to put on some short orange shorts and a cut-off T-shirt when you go over.”

  “I’ll bet she has a pierced navel,” I said.

  Rodney’s eyes had widened again, and again I held up a hand in a placating gesture. “I’m sorry. We can’t seem to resist teasing you this afternoon. We’ll go.” I stood, and Brooke looked up at me.

  “Do we have to? I’m having fun.”

  “Don’t you have work to do?”

  She looked at her watch. “Oh my gosh, I’m supposed to be on the Southside at three o’clock.”

  I smiled at Rodney. “I’ve got work to do, too. You’re safe. I’ll give you the subpoena before I leave this afternoon.”

  As I left, he cleared his throat, and I turned back to see his adam’s apple bob in his thin neck. He didn’t say anything.

  As I crossed to my office, Brooke, purse in one hand and briefcase in the other, ducked back into his doorway to waggle her fingers at him. That was a bit much, I thought. It was in moments like this it occurred to me that maybe we weren’t such nice people.

  I spent some more time that afternoon on Chris’s folder for South of Main. The glossy brochure showed three apartment buildings and a half-dozen row houses. I put it aside and picked up the prospectus that had been used to market shares in the company. The partnership’s business plan was to buy houses and apartment buildings between Main and Cary and rent them out to create an income stream while the properties appreciated in value.

  There were four property deeds in the folder. The deeds had legal descriptions rather than street addresses, so I got on the website for the city assessor’s office and looked up the properties, writing the street addresses on sticky notes and pasting them to the
deeds. Comparing the deeds to the properties featured in the glossy brochure, I saw that the deeds covered all three apartment buildings and one of the row houses.

  I sat back and propped my feet on the edge of the desk. Sixty thousand dollars had gone into that limited partnership, money that Willow considered lost—and evidently Chris had, too. From the paperwork in his file, though, I didn’t see the problem, certainly nothing that was going to help his widow in her murder trial. I reached for the folder again and dragged it over to take another look at the deeds. They all showed different grantors, which was not surprising. To put together a real estate portfolio, the limited partnership would have had to make purchases from a number of different owners. What was a more surprising was that the grantees were all different, too. There was no mention of South of Main on any of deeds. Were these copies of the deeds that South of Main had made in the process of making its purchases? How had the copies come to be in Chris’s possession?

  “Robin, I—”

  I looked up. Rodney was in the doorway, his caterpillar mustache twitching as his mouth worked.

  “Yes?”

  His eyes cut down, and I realized I still had my feet on the edge of the desk and my chair tilted back. Given the length of my dress, my posture was possibly indecorous—possibly indecorous in the extreme. I took my feet of the desk and jolted forward.

  “I’m sorry, Rodney, I was lost in thought. I didn’t mean to be making a spectacle of myself.”

  He cleared his throat, his face reddening and his mustache continuing to twitch.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I, ah, I have some errands to run. I thought if you had that subpoena ready. . .”

  “Oh, sorry. I got some blank ones from the clerk. Let me fill one in.”

  When he was gone, I took a big breath and exhaled it, still embarrassed about Rodney walking in on me. It could have been a lot worse, of course. It could have been Carter Fox who walked in on me.

  Somehow, even that thought didn’t make me feel better.

  It was getting late in the day, late enough for me to begin to think about going home early, but the South of Main folder was bothering me. Instead of heading straight for my parking garage, I walked across downtown to the courthouse. One benefit of having on office a half-mile from the courthouse, I told myself as I trudged along in my sneakers, carrying my shoe bag as well as my briefcase, was that I did burn some calories from time to time.

  The office of the circuit court clerk maintained the city’s deed records in a vast library of low bookshelves with volume after volume of fat, oversized binders. All records beginning in 1993 were available online, just as you might expect, for anyone willing to pay the subscription fee of fifty dollars a month. For us more occasional users, there was the deed room.

  I started with the grantee index and looked up South of Main, LP. There was one entry. I jotted down the recording information and walked through the shelves to the indicated volume. According to the deed, the South-of-Main property was on Allen Street. There was both a legal description and an address on this one. I got Chris’s folder out of my briefcase. This wasn’t one of the properties he had the deed to. The brochure did show a property on Allen Street, though, one side of a semi-attached house.

  I went back to the grantee index and looked up South of Main again, but I hadn’t missed anything. The only entry was for the one house on Allen Street. Where were the rest of the properties? For the sake of thoroughness, I tried “Main, South of,” but there were no entries under that at all. I got out the four deeds that had been in Chris’s folder and looked up the grantees in the grantor index: When and to whom they had conveyed the properties that had been conveyed to them?

  Three of the grantees were there, having conveyed various properties in the City of Richmond at some point, but none of the conveyances covered the properties I had deeds to. From what the deed records showed, the grantees shown on the deeds still owned the properties featured in the brochure. None of them had conveyed any properties to South of Main. If South of Main had in fact acquired all the properties featured in its brochure, why hadn’t it recorded the deeds?

  At the very least, there’d been some sloppy management at South of Main. Possibly, there’d been something squirrelly going on—and that was encouraging. I could work with squirrelly.

  When I came out of the courthouse, Detective Tom McClane was sitting on the low wall just this side of the sidewalk, an ankle crossed on his knee. He was leaning back on his arms in evident enjoyment of the balmy spring day.

  “Ah, Starling,” he said. “They said you were at the courthouse.”

  “Who said?”

  He waved a hand. “Your friends at the Ironfronts, though everyone there seems very protective of you. They didn’t want to tell me where you were. Why is that, Starling?”

  “Did we have an appointment?” I asked him.

  He laughed. “That’s a good one. An appointment. No, no appointment. I was just dropping by to see you.”

  “And then you followed me to the courthouse.”

  “Well, sure. There was no point in walking around in there looking for you, though. I knew if you were in the courthouse, you’d be coming through that door eventually. I could just sit here and enjoy the sunshine until you did.”

  “So is this a friendly visit, or isn’t it?”

  “Oh it’s a very friendly visit. I wanted to invite you along for a ride.”

  “You’re going to take me for a ride? Where?”

  “You can’t guess?”

  I threw open my hands in negation.

  “Headquarters,” he said. “I need someone to participate in a line-up, some woman who’s tall and blonde, and I think you’re just the woman who would do.”

  “Is what I’m wearing fine, or should I go home first to pick up a swim suit and an evening gown?”

  His lip curled. Once again I had the impression that I wasn’t as funny as I thought I was. “What you’re wearing is fine,” he said.

  “My car’s in a garage on Main Street.”

  “Oh, I’ll give you a ride back to your car after the line-up—if you get to go back, that is.”

  I didn’t like it. “I don’t think so.”

  I started walking, but he was beside me before I reached the sidewalk. “I’m asking nice, but I can get a warrant,” he said.

  “You’ll find me in my office.”

  “Have it your way.” He stopped walking and I lengthened my stride as I headed toward Broad Street, internally debating the best course of action. I needed to be in court for the preliminary tomorrow, which might mean that I ought to make myself scarce until then. On the other hand, I’d received notice that the police were getting a warrant for my arrest, and I’d just committed to be in my office. Flight could be used as evidence of guilt. . .of what I didn’t know, but McClane obviously thought I was guilty of something, and he thought he had the evidence to make it stick.

  My pace slowed, and I looked back. He was still watching me. I turned around and went back. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go to headquarters and get it over with.”

  Chapter 9

  This was my second time to participate in a line up, which might mean I had the wrong sort of law practice. Certainly, I was the only lawyer I knew who had ever been put on display for potential witnesses. We took an elevator to the fourth floor and went around a corner, where McClane opened a door and ushered me inside. There was a female police officer present and four women seated along one wall. On the ride over, McClane had called ahead to say we were coming.

  I took one of the two remaining chairs as he closed the door on us.

  “Witness is on his way, or supposed to be,” the police officer said to me. “But we may be a while.”

  “So the witness is a man?” I said.

  “His or her way, I should have said.”

  I looked around at the other women, but the only one who made eye-contact immediately looked away. I didn’t think
any of them were as tall as I was, but they were probably all five-six or better, with blonde or strawberry blonde or light brown hair. One had twenty or thirty pounds on me, though the others were about my build. It might be as fair a line-up as the police could put together on short notice.

  The door opened, and a woman I knew came in and sat beside me. “Hi, Robin.”

  “Laura.” She was one of the administrative assistants in the homicide division. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

  She laughed. “It’s quite an honor, really. You’re the most famous lawyer in homicide.”

  It made me think of what Abraham Lincoln had said being tarred and feathered and carried out of town on a rail: If it weren’t for the honor of it, I’d rather walk. “So do you do this often, or just when I’m in the line-up?” I asked.

  “This is my third time—twice now with you, once with another freakishly tall female.” She smiled. She could talk like that without giving offense because we were pretty much the same height.

  “Well, I’m glad to see you. I don’t guess you know what this is about.”

  She shook her head.

  With a glance at the police officer, I said, “Or that you could tell me if you did.”

  She tilted her head, looking at me. “On another topic,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “I like your dress.”

  “I got it at Macy’s, out at Regency Square Mall. Where’d you get your outfit?” Clothes shopping is a challenge for women our height. Laura looked like a fashion model. She was wearing gray slacks with knees that were actually at her knees instead of a couple of inches above them, I had noticed when she came in. Her turquoise blouse had sleeves that came past her wrists. She’d gotten both online, she said, from TTYA, an acronym that I recognized, fashion-challenged though I was: Taller Than Your Average.

  We talked clothes, and time passed, and eventually a buzzer sounded. The police woman said, “Okay. They’re ready for us.”

  “Do we get cards to read?” I asked.

  “No cards this time. You sound like you’ve done this before.”

  “I think of it as my civic duty.”

  We walked into a room with a long mirror along one wall. We faced it, we turned left, we turned right, we walked out again. “You three can go,” the police officer said, indicating Laura and two others.