I was there in less than ten minutes. Kim Beecher lived in a cracker-box house just a stone’s throw from the intersection of two highways. There were no driveways and no car in front of the house. I caught a glimpse in my rearview mirror of a car pulling to the curb behind me and turned to look over my shoulder. Brooke Marshall got out and came forward wearing a milk-chocolate leather jacket that looked good with her red skirt.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as my window slid down.
“Following you. You pulled onto the Downtown Expressway right in front of me. When you took the Powhite, I thought I’d tag along and see what you were up to.”
“I came to look at the crime scene.” I got out of my car, reached back in to get my own jacket.
“What’s there to see?”
We scanned the pavement for bloodstains or anything else of interest, but there wasn’t anything we could make out.
“Maybe we parked on top of it,” Brooke suggested.
“Let’s back up.”
We each backed up about twenty-five feet, which put us next to a tall chain-link fence with weeds growing up through the asphalt on the other side. It looked like the parking lot of a business that faced the Midlothian Turnpike. I had to get of my car to see enough of the sign to realize it was a gentlemen’s club.
“Nice neighborhood,” Brooke said, noticing it.
“Good to know there’s always work for a couple of nice-looking girls.”
She shivered, and not just from the breeze that was blowing a Styrofoam takeout carton along the street behind us. “Let’s take a closer look at the pavement.”
A man had come out of Kim Beecher’s house and was standing on his lawn of weeds and hard-packed earth, his arms crossed over his chest against the cold. His hair was cut, and his face was clean-shaven, though he was beginning to show some five-o’clock shadow. He was wearing dark slacks and a white dress-shirt open at the collar.
“Kim Beecher?” I asked as we approached.
“Yes, who am I talking to?” He looked about my age or maybe a couple of years younger, say late-twenties.
“I’m Robin Starling, a lawyer representing Natalie Stevens. This is my sidekick, Tonto.”
“I thought you were my sidekick,” Brooke said, looking at me.
“Live and learn.”
Kim Beecher was looking perplexed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Her name’s not really Tonto. It’s Brooke Marshall. She’s a friend of mine.” I held out a hand, and he unfolded his arms to take it. “We wanted to take a look at the crime scene.”
He held out a hand in invitation. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, which I thought might help us to get along.
“There doesn’t seem to be much to see,” I said.
“No, there’s not. It happened right here.” He walked us two paces to the other side of the road. “This is where the car was…” Another step. “…and here was the body, right behind it.”
“Behind it? So the car went completely over the body?”
“Seems to have. Both sets of tires, maybe. But I didn’t see it happen.”
It went a long way toward explaining the crushed head and the lacerated face, I thought. “What did you see?”
“I saw this woman getting out of the car and walking back toward the body.”
“You actually saw her getting out?”
He caught his lip in his teeth and reflected a moment. “I guess not,” he said. “I saw her walking with the open car door behind her.”
“What was she wearing?”
“Slacks. Short fur coat.”
That was a surprise. “Heels?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Did she walk like this?” I held out my hands out as I walked a few steps away from him. I was still wearing my heels from my visit to the police station, so my gait was slightly unsteady on the tar-and-chip surface of the road. “Or like this.” I gestured to Brooke, who walked a few steps in her flats.
He was back to chewing his lip, so we turned and walked back toward him as he studied us. I felt like we were auditioning for the stage at the nearby gentlemen’s club.
“More like you,” he said, tilting his head in my direction.
“Okay. We have a woman wearing a fur and heels. How old was she?”
He shrugged. “There’s just the one streetlight.” He pointed. “It makes for some stark shadows.”
“Could she have been sixty? An older woman?”
“Oh, no. No more than forty at the outside.”
“You can’t always tell from a distance. A well-dressed woman, make-up, slender figure…Was this woman slender?”
He nodded. “Medium build.”
“So she looked like me?”
He hesitated. “Not so tall and…” He hesitated again. “…stretched out.”
I tried to absorb the blow without flinching. First skinny, now stretched out.
“More like her.” He pointed, and we both looked at Brooke.
“Could it have been her?” I said.
Brooke said, “Hey!”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I think so. She’s the right height, the right build.”
That was unfortunate, since Brooke and Natalie Stevens had pretty much the same build.
“But she could have been ten, fifteen years older,” I said.
He moved his head uncomfortably. “Could have been,” he conceded, “but she moved well—gracefully if you know what I mean.”
Gracefully like a twenty-year-old soccer-player was what I was afraid he meant.
“Let’s go at it the other way,” I said. “Brooke here is thirty years old…”
“Hey!” Brooke said again.
“Could the woman you saw have been very much younger?”
He moved his head again. “Could have been,” he said finally. “I would have said about the same age, though.”
“Put her in heels and a short fur, and you could be looking at the woman you saw?”
Brooke stamped her foot. “You cut that out.”
Beecher was nodding.
“Do you have an alibi for two a.m. this morning?” I asked Brooke. “Live-in boyfriend? One-night stand?”
“You know I don’t.” She sounded almost tearful, and I felt a pang of guilt over framing her for felony manslaughter.
“It couldn’t have been her because of the hair,” Beecher said. “I’d have noticed the red hair, I think, even in the streetlight.”
“Ah. What color hair did this woman have?”
“Darker. Beyond that, I couldn’t say.”
“So it couldn’t have been me either.”
“No, but it’s not just because the hair…”
“I know, don’t say it. I’m too tall and stretched out.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”
“You don’t know how long those words are going to haunt me,” I said.
“Look. Would you like to come inside? I can show you where I was standing.”
I looked at Brooke, who gave me an almost imperceptible shrug. “Sure,” I said.
We went inside, and Beecher offered us something to eat, drink, smoke, or chew.
“That’s not very specific,” I said. “I don’t know whether to ask for a highball or a piece of gum.”
“It can’t be a highball,” Beecher said. “I don’t drink.”
“So we’re down to eat, smoke, or chew, unless you don’t smoke either.”
He smiled a little weakly, turned to his picture window. “I was standing here when I saw the woman,” he said. “At first I didn’t realize it was a body on the road. I thought it was a bundle of some kind, clothes or something.”
“How did you come to be looking out the window just then? Did you hear an impact? A scream maybe?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I was just standing at the plate-glass window, having a cookie and a glass of milk, and I noticed the woman.”
A cookie and a glass of milk.
“Were you a boy scout?”
“Are you still a boy scout?” Brooke asked.
“I was for a couple of years. I made it to First Class, I think.”
Not an Eagle Scout. “How about the car?” I asked. “What can you tell us about it?”
“I got the license plate. It was lit up with a little bulb above the bracket.”
“Do you remember the number?”
“GBX something. One-one-something. The car itself was a light colored sedan, white maybe, small to medium-sized.”
“You could see the license plate from here?” I was doubtful.
“Well, no. I saw the woman. She walked back and squatted down next to this…” He hesitated. “…this thing in the road. Then she stood up and started back to her car, so I started out through the front door to see if I could help.”
“Did she see you?”
“I don’t think so. She didn’t change her pace or anything. Never looked in my direction. It was when I got onto the porch that the bundle of clothes took on more of a human shape, so I yanked the cell phone out of the pocket of my robe as I ran toward the street and dialed 9-1-1. The car was moving by that time, already two or three houses away. I read off the license number to the dispatcher.”
“You could see the plate clearly?”
“All but the last digit. It was a six or an eight, I think.”
“It couldn’t have been a four?” I asked, not because I thought it might have been, but just to test his recollection.
“I suppose it could have been a four.”
“It must have been pretty ghastly,” Brooke said.
Beecher turned to her. “It was. You should have seen the guy’s face—well, his lack of a face, I should say. And the shape of his head. His skull looked like it had been crushed. The car must have hit him with incredible force, then dragged him, then the tires must have gone right over his head.”
“Maybe that’s what woke you up,” Brooke said, not quite managing to suppress a shudder.
He shook his head. “I’d been awake awhile.”
I said, “But you didn’t hear the impact—no squeal of brakes, no thump or anything.”
He looked thoughtful. “No. I didn’t.”
“Have they had you in for a lineup?”
“Tomorrow.”
Tom McClane was working his case. “Shown you any photographs of anyone?”
He nodded. “Yes, but I don’t know if it was her.”
“Just the one photograph?”
“Well, several photographs. Just one woman, though. Girl, actually. She couldn’t have been over eighteen.”
Nineteen, I thought. If the police had shown him Natalie’s picture, she was going to look familiar to him when he saw her in the line-up. They’d increased their chances of an identification and probably on purpose.
“I wonder if you’d take a look at one of my pictures,” I said.
He shrugged. “Sure.”
I got out my phone and opened my photos app. When I’d found the picture of Chloe Stevens in her motorcycle leather, I handed the phone to Beecher. Beside him, Brooke peered at it, too.
“She’s hot,” Beecher said.
“You can drool if you need to, but try not to get any on my phone.”
His laugh sounded a bit defensive.
“Is this the woman the police showed you a picture of?” I knew it wasn’t, of course.
“No. This woman has a more polished look, and I think she’s older. She could be thirty, or close to it.”
She was more likely forty, I thought, though I had seen her up close and in decent lighting.
“Forget the pictures the police showed you,” I said. “Think about the woman you saw last night. Could this have been her?”
“I don’t know. It’s just the one streetlight, like I said. Her features were in shadow, and I never got a look at her head on.”
At least he was honest. “It couldn’t have been Brooke because of her hair,” I said. “It couldn’t have been me because of my height. Is there anything about this woman’s appearance that rules her out, that lets you say, no, it couldn’t have been her?”
“Nooo,” he said slowly. “No, I don’t think there is.”
“So she’s a possibility.”
He nodded.
“And the girl the police showed you is a possibility.”
“Is she your client?”
I nodded. “I wonder if you’d be willing to give me a call after the lineup. Let me know how it went.”
“Sure,” he said. “What’s your number?”
I smiled and gave him one of my newly printed business cards. I’d had them a week. “Her name’s Natalie Stevens,” I said, wanting to personalize her a little. “She’s a college student at Longwood, plays varsity soccer.”
“Really. I used to date a girl who went to Longwood.”
“Oh? You didn’t go there yourself, I take it.”
“No. University of Richmond.”
“What do you do now?”
“I’m an accountant with a firm downtown.” He held up a hand. “I know what you’re thinking. What am I doing in a little two-bedroom house in this neighborhood?”
“You have some very nice pieces of furniture,” Brooke said, looking around.
“Thanks. I got them when one of our clients was liquidating. We all picked up a few nice pieces.”
“So why this house and this neighborhood?” I asked.
He smiled, showing even teeth. “Tax-deductible rent. I’m saving my money. When I get married, I’ll be able to afford a place that’s really nice.”
“So you’re engaged,” Brooke said.
“Not yet. Not even dating anyone in particular. Just planning for the future. You know, like everyone.”
When we were on the street again, and by ourselves, I said to Brooke, “How about you? Are you planning for the future?”
She gave me a look as she opened the door of her car.
“Maybe a future with a handsome young accountant who’s been saving his money?” I suggested.
“You’re the one who gave him your number,” she said primly. She swung into her car and closed the door.
She had a point. I went to my own car and stood looking around for a moment. I could see five homes, two of which needed painting and a third that was boarded up. In addition to the gentlemen’s club with its chain-link fence and part of a neon sign showing through the bare-limbed trees, I could see a Jiffy Lube and, far down the street, something that looked like it might be the back-end of a motel.
It was possible to take thriftiness a good deal too far, I thought, and got into my own car, a VW Beetle, and drove away.
Chapter 4
Brooke had roomed with me through the summer and early fall, but she had her own place now. I got home to an empty house, set my purse and briefcase on the floor just inside the door from the garage, and dropped my keys on the kitchen counter. Undoing the belt on my coat, I shrugged out of it and tossed it over the back of a chair. Then I dug in the refrigerator for the opened bottle of zinfandel, filled a coffee mug halfway and carried it into the living room, kicking off my shoes en route to the recliner.
A little wine at the end of the day was a new habit for me, one I had acquired while Brooke was living with me. When she was here, we used stemware, but alone I found a coffee mug more stable and less inclined to spill. The TV screen in front of me was blank, but I made no move to turn it on. I didn’t have anything good recorded—I’d watched the new Duck Dynasty and the new Big Bang Theory over the weekend—and the news almost invariably informed me about aggravating events and government policies I couldn’t do anything about.
Idle ruminations about Natalie Stevens, my first case as a solo practitioner, led me to the conclusion that I needed more facts upon which to ruminate. Most importantly, I’d like to know the identity of the hit-and-run victim. I couldn’t imagine, in this digital age, that his identity would remain unknown for very long, but I should probab
ly do more than wait for it to surface. I had a client, evidently a client who could pay, and I should make the most of my resources.
When my wine was half gone, I gathered my shoes and went back to the bedroom to change into sweatpants and a T-shirt. I washed my face to remove what little makeup I wore, then padded barefoot into the kitchen.
Making supper was not a big production. I dumped some mixed greens from a bag into a soup bowl, hand-shredded some deli-sliced turkey onto it, then sprinkled on some balsamic vinegar and a little pumpkin seed oil, dark and fragrant. I carried my salad into the living room and sat with one leg curled under me to eat it. I did turn on the TV then and found a romantic comedy starring Matthew McConaughey in progress on one of the movie channels.
When I finished my salad, I paused the movie and carried my bowl back into the kitchen to wash it. I had the rest of my evening before me, and the house seemed empty. A couple of days a week, I stopped off at the Y on my way home to shoot some hoops. Now that I was living alone again, maybe I ought to up it to three days a week.
I went back to my movie, though, and watched for about thirty minutes before I paused it to go put on running shoes and a hoodie. Though I generally waited longer after I ate to run, I was feeling restless.
The doorbell rang as I was pulling open the door, and a man jumped so violently he nearly fell backwards off the stoop. “You scared the hell out of me,” he said, recovering his balance. It was Paul Soldano, a man I’d been seeing sporadically for the past couple of months.
“Sorry. I was going for a run. What’s that?” A head had popped out of his jacket like a birthing alien, but I recognized it even as I flinched. “Is that a puppy?”
As if in confirmation, the puppy gave me a yap of greeting. Paul lifted it out, and its tail was going. I put a hand on the puppy’s head, and it twisted its neck to lick my forearm.
“He’s beautiful.”
“He’s a chocolate lab, has AKC papers and everything.”
“Where did you get a full-blooded lab?”
Paul beamed at me. “Parking lot of Walmart. I had to pass an interview to get him, too.”
I stepped back to let them in, closing the door behind them. “Who interviewed you?”
Dog Law (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Page 3
