Dog Law (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  When I got off the phone with Rodney, I tapped Paul’s name, then dropped the phone when Deeks climbed onto the wheel to help me steer.

  “Holy crap, Deeks,” I said, pulling back into my own lane and redepositing him on his side of the car. I was going to have to get a doggy seatbelt for my own safety if not for his. Keeping my eyes on the road, I felt around between my feet for the phone and came up with it.

  Paul was there, saying, “Robin? Robin?”

  “Hi, Paul. Something funny’s happening with my new case. When are you coming over?”

  “That sounds almost like an invitation.”

  “Well?”

  “Friday.”

  “Come again?”

  “We’re at a bank in Hampton Roads. We just got here around lunchtime, so it’ll probably be Friday before we can head back.”

  “Let me get this straight. You drop a puppy on me, and the next day you leave town?”

  He sighed. “Does that mean you and Deacon aren’t getting along?”

  “No. It means he’s a very needy puppy. Never mind. I’ll deal with it.” I hung up and glanced over at Deeks, my cheeks puffing out as I exhaled. He caught the glance, and the cadence of his tail-wagging went up a notch.

  “What am I going to do with you, big guy?”

  He gave me a yap.

  I didn’t have time to take him home, which meant he was coming with me. “It’s cold enough I can leave you in the car,” I said, as if he might be worried about heat exhaustion.

  He wagged his tail. It’s hard not to like a guy who’s happy with everything you say.

  The motel was a two-story L-shaped structure of tan brick. The girl at the desk—young woman—was as tall as I was and had long, straight hair with a silky sheen, which is how I like to describe my own hair, though my hair is shoulder length, and hers went halfway down her back.

  “How may I help you?” she said with a sunny smile.

  I returned the smile. “My name is Robin Starling. I’d…”

  “You have a reservation,” she said, tapping a couple of buttons on her computer.

  “No. I’d like to talk to someone about the room Natalie Stevens rented Sunday night.”

  Her smile fell, leaving her with a pouty, slightly sour expression that seemed more natural on her long face. “I’ll call Michael.” She picked up a cell phone, slid her finger across the screen, and touched a button. “Hi,” she said, turning away from me and cupping a hand in front of her mouth.

  I kept my eyes on her and my own expression sunny. After about a half-minute of murmuring, she punched a button and put the phone down.

  “He’ll be right here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You police?”

  “No. Lawyer.”

  “District attorney’s office?”

  I shook my head again. “I’m representing Natalie Stevens.”

  Her sour expression deepened. When a young man came in—I put him in his mid-twenties—she said, “She’s that woman’s lawyer.”

  “Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. “Robin Starling.”

  “Michael Vasquez,” he said. He was one of the best-looking guys I’d ever seen, with coal black hair and skin nearly as pale as mine, which was pretty pale.

  “I’m told Natalie Stevens rented a room here Sunday night,” I said. “Are you the one who checked her in?”

  “No, I was,” the girl behind the counter said.

  “Ah,” I said, focusing on her name tag. “Devon. Was she alone?”

  “Alone when she came in here.”

  “But not later.”

  “Evidently not,” she said archly.

  “But you never saw her with anyone.”

  Her lips compressed. “No.”

  “Would you know her if you saw her again?”

  “Of course.”

  “Something about her caught your attention?”

  “Just her manner. You could tell she thought she was something special.”

  “Would you be willing to look at a picture?”

  “Sure.”

  I pulled out my cell phone and thumbed through my downloaded photographs. I paused on a picture of Natalie Stevens, then on impulse flipped through a couple more. I handed the phone to Devon, and she stared at the screen intently.

  “It’s a small picture,” I said. “There’s another one behind it, if that helps.”

  She slid her thumb across the screen and studied that picture as intently as the first. “This is her,” she said. “Natalie Stevens.”

  I took the phone from her, glancing at the screen to see that it still displayed a picture of Natalie’s stepmother Chloe. Whatever else I was accomplishing, I was playing hob with the state’s eyewitnesses.

  “She’s about five years younger than you are?” I said. “Maybe twenty or so?”

  Devon snorted. “She wishes.”

  “You never saw her?” I asked Michael.

  He shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

  I handed him the phone, and he looked at the picture of Chloe a moment before shaking his head. “No. Sorry.”

  I wanted to show him a picture of Natalie, but then Devon would want to see it, too. “What room was she in? Do you think I could see it?”

  He shrugged. “Sure. The police said they were done with it.”

  Devon said, “Michael. Do you think they would want…” She tilted her head in my direction. “She’s representing her.”

  Michael looked at me, and I gave him a half-smile. “We’re all representing truth and justice to the best of our ability,” I said.

  “I understand. Let’s go this way.”

  I followed him out, and we left Devon snarling behind us—not literally, of course, but something about her had put me in a catty mood. When we walked by my car, I could see Deeks in the driver’s seat chewing methodically on the rubberized steering wheel.

  I stopped. “I’m sorry,” I said. “My new puppy seems to be trashing my car.”

  He moved up beside me. “You brought your dog?” he said.

  “I just got him last night. We’re still figuring out how things are going to work.” I beeped the door unlocked and opened the door. Deeks looked up at me, then, too quick for me to react, darted to the edge of the seat and tumbled out.

  “Ouch,” I said, bending for him, but he scrambled to his feet and ran a few steps to where a weed was poking through a crack in the asphalt. He squatted and peed on it. He hadn’t had any water since we left the house, so I don’t know where he got it all.

  Beside me, Michael laughed. “That’s going to be a great dog,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. He’s probably saved me getting out the Round Up.”

  Deeks finished and toddled back toward me. I picked him up. “I don’t suppose he can come with us,” I said.

  “Sure, we’re pet friendly.”

  Natalie had been in room 238 at the back of the hotel. Michael slid his keycard into the lock, then replaced the card in his pocket as he pushed open the door, standing to one side to let me enter first.

  It was a motel room, completely typical except that it had a king-sized bed instead of two queens or two fulls. There was also a dark stain on the striped carpet a few feet inside the door, a pale spot in the middle of the stain.

  “Is that blood?” I asked.

  “I think so. The police technicians talked about cutting out a piece of the carpet, but in the end they put something on the stain, to liquefy it, I think, and sucked it up with some kind of handheld vacuum cleaner.”

  As I stepped over the stain, Deeks began squirming to get down. I held him so we were nose to nose, his rear legs kicking the air, and growled at him. He went still, and I turned him again so I was holding him in the crook of my arm.

  “Very impressive,” Michael said.

  “I’m the alpha dog.”

  “Isn’t that another way of saying you’re a bitch?”

  We turned to the new
voice: Devon, in the doorway. “I don’t think the police would like her being here,” she said to Michael.

  “They said they were done with the room and we could re-rent it,” he responded mildly.

  “Then you might as well show her the bullet hole, hadn’t you?”

  Michael continued to look at her a moment before turning to me. “It’s in the wall right above Devon’s head there. See it? It was just about the diameter of a pencil before the police dug the bullet out.”

  Now the hole was about the diameter of a ping pong ball. “How did the police come to be digging a hole in your wall? Did you call them?”

  “Yeah. Housekeeping called me when the maid found the blood. I could smell it when I walked in.”

  “What did it smell like?” I asked, suddenly curious.

  He shook his head. “Can’t describe it, but it was unmistakable.”

  “Why do you want to know?” Devon asked. “What difference does it make?”

  “No difference. In crime novels, the smell is always coppery.”

  “It was kind of coppery,” Michael said.

  I was looking past Devon at the hole in the wall. “Take a couple steps forward, will you?” I asked her. “I want to see something.”

  She glanced at Michael, then complied. Two steps brought her past the bloodstain.

  I walked back into the room. When I turned, the hole was above Devon’s head, and the bathroom door was directly behind me. I stepped backwards so that I was almost in the doorway. When I bent my knees slightly, the hole disappeared behind her head.

  “What?” Devon said.

  “If that’s a bullet hole…”

  “Oh, it’s a bullet hole,” said Devon. “The police dug a bullet out of it for heaven’s sake.”

  “And the victim was coming into the room when the shot was fired,” I continued.

  “Then the shooter was coming out of the bathroom,” Michael said.

  “Oh, please,” Devon said. “You can’t tell anything about direction from that hole, and anyway, how do you know the victim wasn’t leaving, and this woman’s client shot him in the back of the head?”

  Michael looked at me.

  “As for direction, we can draw a line from the hole to the bloodstain to the bathroom door.”

  Devon said, “He could have been going in or coming out. Or just standing there, for that matter. How do we know it was a he, even?”

  “Do you know who the victim is?” Michael asked me.

  I shook my head. “No.” My fear was that it was Natalie’s hit-and-run victim.

  I started my car and drove around to the back of the motel to stare up at room 238. The whole case was changing on me. Before, it had looked like Natalie had accidentally run over someone who wasn’t carrying ID or any other identifying effects, maybe a street person. If he’d been shot before being run over, though…Could she have shot him up in that motel room, then dragged his body along the concrete balcony to the steps, bounced him down to the parking lot, hoisted and shoved him into the trunk of her car…If the police found any of the victim’s blood or hair or clothing fibers in Natalie’s car, it was no longer a case of felony hit-and-run, it was murder. She would be found guilty and sentenced to twenty to life, and there was nothing I or anyone else could do about it.

  Already I was assuming the blood in the motel room matched the blood of the supposed hit-and-run victim and that the autopsy report was going to show he had died from a gunshot wound rather than being hit by a car. Maybe not. But if so, Natalie had been in a motel room with him for some reason—a romantic tryst? pickup sex?—had shot him, had emptied his pockets, loaded his body into her car, dumped it out in the street somewhere, and mutilated the face to delay identification and perhaps avoid it completely. If the gun that had fired the bullet turned out to be Natalie’s, then she had taken the gun with her to the motel. That looked like premeditation.

  Deeks, after discovering that the scene outside the car wasn’t changing, climbed over the console into my lap and put his paws on my chest in an effort to reach my face. I pulled my chin back to avoid his tongue, but stroked the top of his head with a couple of fingers.

  “It’s blowing up on me, bud,” I murmured, looking down into his eyes.

  He wagged his tail uncertainly. I sighed, put him back in the passenger seat. When I exited the motel parking lot, I circled back into the neighborhood, mixed residential and commercial, and found myself on Everglades Drive two blocks from Kim Beecher’s house. I stopped in front of the house and craned my neck to look back down the street. I could see the back of the Best Western; it was the same motel I’d noticed the last time I’d been here.

  Someone tapped on the glass on the passenger side of the car. I jumped, and Deeks threw himself at the window, yapping. It was Beecher. I reached across and dragged my dog away, then lowered the window halfway.

  “You’re back,” Beecher said. “And once again you’ve brought company.”

  “I can’t seem to stay away.”

  “Did you have more questions?”

  “I don’t know. Do you have more answers?”

  He laughed. “I did the lineup this afternoon. I tried to call you.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. I saw your client, but I couldn’t say positively it was her.”

  “How did you know which one was my client?”

  “I guess I don’t. I saw the girl the police had shown me a picture of.”

  “But you didn’t identify her?”

  “No. It could have been her, but like I told you, my impression was of an older woman. Look, would you like to come inside? I can offer you some sweet tea. It’s mango flavored.”

  I turned him down—I couldn’t afford to spend my days letting men pour liquids down me—but I did do my best not to hurt his feelings.

  I felt the need of something more substantial than salad, so I put the oven on 400 before going back to change clothes. Deeks trailed me to my bedroom, then back to the kitchen, where I got a chicken pot pie out of the freezer, put it on a cookie sheet, and slid the whole thing into the oven.

  “Now, we wait,” I said to Deeks. One advantage of having a puppy, I reflected, is that I didn’t need to talk to myself anymore. I tore up a couple of slices of deli turkey and put the pieces in the pocket of my warm-ups.

  There was an old can of tennis balls on the floor of the foyer closet, which was also where I kept my tennis racquet, a racquetball racquet, a well-worn softball glove, and a couple of basketballs. There were only two tennis balls in the can, but I got out one of them and rolled it across the living room. Deeks scrambled after it.

  He was such a little guy that he couldn’t quite get his mouth around it, but he did manage to pick it up by the fuzz. I squatted down, my forearms on my thighs, and called to him.

  “Deeks,” I crooned. “Dee-eeks.”

  He waddled toward me with the ball, and I continued to say his name. When he reached me, I said, “Good boy,” and held out a piece of the turkey as I put the other hand on the ball. He made the exchange willingly.

  “Good boy,” I said again. “Fetch.” I rolled the tennis ball back across the living room, and Deeks went after it. We played fetch until the timer on my oven beeped, then we went into the kitchen where I had chicken pot pie and Deeks had kibble while I thought about my case.

  When I was done with dinner, I found the number of Garrett Jennings in my phone and punched it. When he answered, I said, “You aren’t really dating Natalie, I take it.”

  He was silent for several long seconds. Perhaps it would have been quicker to engage in a few preliminaries: How’s it going? Have you remembered anything else about Sunday night I might be interested in? Here’s a thought…

  Finally he said, “No. I’m interested, that much of what I said was true, but we’re not.”

  “Do you know who her boyfriend is?”

  “She’s got a lot of guy friends, but I don’t know that she’s going out with any of
them.”

  “Have you seen her with any guys you don’t know?”

  Another pause. “I don’t think so. If this is important…” His tone suggested he didn’t see how it could be. “…you might want to talk to her roommate about it. If anyone knows anything about guys she was seeing, it would be her.”

  “Her roommate at Longwood? What’s her name?”

  He gave me a name.

  “Do you have any contact information for her? A phone number?”

  “Sure.” After a moment he gave it to me. “I think she lives in Fredericksburg.”

  “Thanks. One last question. You don’t know whether any of Natalie’s guy friends have disappeared, do you? Just in the last day or two.”

  The silence this time really stretched out before he said, “Just what are you getting at?” His voice sounded unnatural.

  “Is that a no?”

  “I thought you were on her side,” he said. “Are you suggesting some kind of sick…”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. If there’s anything to find out, though, I want to get to it ahead of the police.”

  Natalie’s roommate, one Austin Reed, had a voicemail box that had not been set up. I sent her a text telling her that Natalie was in jail, that I was Natalie’s lawyer, and asking her to call me. I waited, but after ten minutes I still hadn’t heard from her, so I pulled on a hoodie and hooked Deacon’s leash to his collar. “Go for a walk?” I asked. He seemed agreeable, so I led him outside. We walked down the sidewalk to the street. It was already dark enough that the streetlights had come on.

  “Ready?” I asked. “Okay.” We started running. Almost immediately Deeks fell behind to the length of the leash. I glanced back and saw that he was missing a step every couple of paces, leaving the ground and coming back to earth like a plane cruising the runway at just under take-off speed.

  I slowed to a walk, and he tumbled forward into the back of one of my legs. I stopped, and he looked up, panting, his tongue lolling.

  “Some running buddy,” I said.

  He wagged his tail, as content to listen to my even-toned criticism as he had been flying along in my wake.

  “On the other hand, you’re the most agreeable male I know, of any species.” I walked him back to the house, where we rooted around in three different closets until I found a backpack I hadn’t carried since law school. I put Deeks in it. Before he could scramble out, I swung the backpack onto my shoulder, hooked my other arm into it, and settled it onto my back. After a bit of scrambling, his head poked out just above the level of my shoulder.