Dog Law (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “You really want me staying with you? I’m obviously some kind of monster.”

  “Austin Reed says you’re not a bad roommate. In fact, she was pretty adamant that it would be out of character for you to shoot someone and dump his body on a side street.”

  “You’ve talked to Austin?”

  “When I’ve got a case, I run around talking to everybody. It’s a character flaw.”

  “Who else have you talked to?”

  “The people at the motel. The man who got your license number as you drove away from the body. Garrett Holloway. He’s the one who told me about the space brownies.”

  “You talk like you think I’m guilty.”

  “Not really.”

  “You’re still taking the possibility of my innocence under advisement?” One corner of her mouth lifted, but only for a moment. “I’d almost rather you think I’m a cold-blooded killer than to think I’m such a ninny as to keep a murder weapon under my mattress and my victim’s personal belongings tucked behind the toilet paper in my bathroom.”

  “It’s possible to be both a killer and a ninny.”

  “That would be a pretty deadly combination, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would.”

  Chapter 13

  Natalie changed clothes. She packed a gym bag with underwear, a change of clothes, a hairdryer, assorted toiletries, and a phone charger. We stopped in the kitchen, where she got a handful of protein bars, a couple of Greek yogurts, and a plastic spoon. She threw those in on top of her clothes. “What I really want is a steak,” she said. “I’m starved.”

  “How does Enrique’s sound?”

  “Like fajitas here we come. I’ll save this stuff for late night.”

  Oh, to be a nineteen-year-old athlete again, I thought.

  We beat Brooke and John to the restaurant. The waitress brought us chips and queso and big glasses of ice water with lime wedges on the side of the glass. “Like a margarita,” Natalie said, squeezing the lime into her water.

  “You’ve had their margaritas?”

  “Well, not theirs. This is the kind of place that checks I.D.’s.”

  “You’ve been places that don’t?”

  “There are some. Usually it depends on who you’re with. I’m with college friends, I’m gonna get carded no matter where I am.”

  I nodded. “Speaking of which, we’re likely to be joined by some friends of mine.”

  She wasn’t happy about it, and I didn’t really blame her. She especially wasn’t happy to hear that they knew her situation. “How many did you say were coming? Two?”

  I told her their names again. “John and Brooke and I had dinner right here in this restaurant the day I got him out on bail.”

  “I thought you said he was a lawyer.”

  “He is. Surely you’ve heard of criminal lawyers.”

  Her eyes relaxed, and I got the hint of a smile.

  “And don’t even get me started on all the laws written to cover men and their specialized hardware.”

  “What…”

  “You’ve heard of the Penal Code.”

  It took her a second. Then she snickered and squirted water out her nose.

  “And here’s Mister Exhibit A himself,” I said as John worked his way across the room.

  Natalie was actually smiling as she looked up to greet him.

  “Hello. I’m John Parker.” He held out a hand. She giggled and took it. He looked at me.

  Natalie said, “I’m sorry. I’m Natalie Stevens.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you.” He winked at her, which sounds smarmy as all get out, but it’s the sort of thing that works for John Parker.

  He sat, signaled the waiter, ordered a pitcher of margaritas. Brooke showed up before the margaritas came, and I introduced her. “Brooke stayed with me awhile over the summer.”

  “Was she another client of yours?”

  I smiled, shook my head. “I did get her arrested once, if that counts.”

  The waiter brought the pitcher with three mugs, saw Brooke and went back unasked to get a fourth. By the time he got back, John had already poured and presented a mug each to Natalie, Brooke, and me. When he had his, he held up his glass and said, “To crime.”

  I looked at him.

  “I’m sorry. That was in bad taste.”

  But Natalie was holding up her mug. “The Penal Code,” she said. She giggled, this time without her nose making like a garden hose. John and Brooke looked at me quizzically, but I just smiled and we all drank to the Penal Code.

  We went through that first round surprisingly fast. I told John and Brooke about Natalie being a freshman at Longwood College and about her playing soccer. John said, “I could tell you were an athlete,” and Natalie blushed faintly and poured herself another margarita.

  “He’s thirty years old,” I told her. “A few more years, and that will come across as kind of creepy.”

  “How do you know?” John asked. “I’ll have you know I expect to retain my charm well into middle-age.”

  “And I expect to carry college-girl boobs well into my forties,” I said. “That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”

  In vino veritas. In margaritas, merriment. We laughed and talked, occasionally veering into the inappropriate; we drank margaritas and ate our food. I found out Brooke had a tattoo of a humming bird on her hip, something I had somehow never seen in three months of living with her.

  “Is this recent?” I said.

  “Not too.”

  “I find that hard to believe. I mean, I’ve seen you in your underwear.”

  She tilted her head and raised her eyebrows in a what-can-I-tell-you sort of look.

  “I’ve got a soccer ball tattooed on my butt,” Natalie said, and we looked at her.

  “It’s real small,” she said in a more subdued voice. “All the girls on the team got one.”

  “Has it got your number on it?” John asked.

  “How did you know? My cleats, too.”

  “I was just picturing it. Sounds like it can’t be that small a tattoo.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Brooke told John, “and you can forget about it. You’re not going to be looking at tattoos this evening.”

  He looked at her, then at me, in wide-eyed innocence.

  “That’s one of the things your uncle told me about you,” I told Natalie.

  “That I had a tattoo?”

  “No. Specifically, that you were a straight-laced girl who didn’t have any tattoos.”

  “It’s been awhile since Uncle David’s seen my butt.”

  John stopped drinking his margarita in mid-sip, his eyes on Natalie. What Uncle David had actually told me, I reflected, was that Natalie seemed like a straight-laced girl, in part because of the absence of tattoos.

  “Wasn’t there some kind of hullabaloo about you and one of your teachers back at St. Catherine’s?” I asked.

  “How do you know about that?” After a moment she said, “How did Uncle David know about that?”

  I shrugged. “Was there anything to it?”

  “No. Or not very much. Mr. Blonk had a great relationship with a lot of his students.”

  That was a phrase that could have more than one meaning. “Mr. Blonk taught…”

  “Theatre. He had us over to his apartment sometimes to listen to music or watch a movie or something. Sometimes some of the guys would sleep over at his house.”

  “But never you,” I said.

  “No. Not any girls that I know of, but it was the father of one of the girls that thought the whole thing was weird and tried to stir things up with administration.”

  “How old was Mr. Blonk?” I said.

  “Twenty-eight or so. I don’t know.”

  “And he never hugged you, or…”

  “Of course he hugged me! This was theatre. Everybody hugged everybody.”

  “But he never kissed you.”

  She shook her head in evident exasperation, took another swi
g from her mug. “He may have. I don’t know.”

  “On the mouth?” John said. We looked at him, and he shrugged defensively. “Hey, I’m just trying to get a picture.”

  “You’re thinking maybe you went into the wrong profession,” Brooke said.

  He shook his head emphatically. “I know better. If all the girls at St. Catherine’s look like Natalie, and they were all on hugging and kissing terms with me…”

  “You’d be in big trouble before you turned around,” I said.

  “You’re telling me.”

  “That’s one thing about John,” Brooke said to Natalie. “At least he knows his weaknesses.”

  When we had left the restaurant and were on the way to my house, Natalie said, “I like your friends.”

  “Thanks. Me, too.”

  “I had a good time, and I wouldn’t have expected to.”

  I grinned across the console at her. “It was the margaritas. We shouldn’t have had them, what with you being under age.”

  “But then you might not have been able to get me talking about my tattoos and Mr. Blonk.”

  “I wasn’t after anything in particular. I just wanted to get a better feel for you as a person.”

  “Because you think I might be guilty?”

  “Because I think you might be innocent, yet the circumstantial evidence keeps piling up on us, making things look blacker and blacker.”

  “It matters to you, doesn’t it? Whether I’m innocent.”

  “It shouldn’t. If I’m going to represent you effectively, what I need are the facts—good or bad.”

  “It shouldn’t matter to you, but it does?”

  I moved my head, reluctant to be pinned down. “I’d rather you be innocent than some kind of monster. It makes the world a better place.”

  “One less monster at a time,” she said.

  Deeks’s crate was standing open.

  “You have a dog,” Natalie said on seeing the cage. She sounded delighted rather than dismayed, which I took as a good sign. She went to the French doors and flipped on the light for the back patio.

  “My neighbor keeps him during the day,” I said. “Old retired guy. Let me change out of my work duds, and we’ll go get him.”

  I changed into sweats and sneakers, and we walked across the street to Dr. McDermott’s.

  “This is a nice neighborhood,” Natalie said.

  It was nothing like hers, but I thanked her. At Dr. McDermott’s we mounted the steps and rang the doorbell. When the door opened, Deeks ran past me and squatted to wee on the lawn. Then he came back to greet the new person, his tail wagging. Natalie squatted to pet him.

  “Seems like he always needs to go,” I said to Dr. McDermott.

  “This afternoon, he lifted his leg on a flowerpot out back. He didn’t squat.”

  I felt a pang at having missed another big moment in Deacon’s life. “They grow up so fast.”

  “They do. The average lifespan of a lab is twelve-and-a-half years. I found it on the internet. As old as I am, I’ve got a decent chance of outliving the little guy.”

  “Now you’re just trying to make me cry.”

  His chuckle sounded old, which really did make me sad. Over the past couple of years, Dr. McDermott had become a fixture in my life.

  Natalie stood up to shake his hand and introduce herself. Deeks came over to stand on my foot.

  “So you’re having a sleepover,” Dr. McDermott said.

  “Sort of,” I said, bending to pick up Deeks. “Natalie’s dad is out of town, and her stepmother…” I paused in search of the right word, tilting my head back to keep the dog from licking my mouth.

  “Say no more.”

  To Natalie I said, “I shock Dr. McDermott sometimes with what he calls my free way of talking. I try to watch it around him.”

  “Have to be careful of my heart,” Dr. McDermott said.

  We crossed the street back to my house. Natalie played fetch with Deeks. The two of them wrestled. Deeks came and looked at me from time to time, and I tossed him a piece of deli meat. “Good boy,” I said. My goal was to get Deeks to form pleasant associations with my “good boy.” I wouldn’t always have treats in hand, but, once there was a phrase he loved, I could always reward him verbally.

  When he had calmed down a bit, and we had settled on the couch and recliner, Natalie said, “Do you have them here? The things Uncle David found in my bathroom?”

  “Yeah.” I pulled over my briefcase and got out the grocery sack. “Until I decide what to do with them, we probably ought to handle them with gloves. Just a minute.” I went to my coat, hanging over a hook by the door going out into the garage, and got my gloves.

  Natalie pulled them on, looking solemn. She got out the wallet first. One at a time she took out the cards and looked at each.

  “Ring any bells?”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t seem like a real wallet to me. No driver’s license, nothing personal like a receipt or a Costco card.”

  “There’s the Starbucks gift card.”

  “Okay, he drinks coffee.” She put her index finger through the key ring and spun the keys about her finger. She shook her head again.

  “What?” I said.

  “I can’t believe this was behind the toilet paper in my bathroom.”

  “Kind of points the finger at you or Chloe, doesn’t it?”

  Chapter 14

  The arraignment the next morning was at the John Marshall Courthouse. Natalie was pretty silent on the way in. I knew how she felt, because the same sense of dread was weighing on my own spirits. I, of course, was likely to leave the courtroom on my own recognizance.

  At the courthouse we waited in line for the metal detector and took the elevator to the second floor. We reached the courtroom at a quarter till, but Ralph Waldo from the D.A.’s office was there ahead of us, seated at one of the tables with a red folder in front of him.

  “Hey, Ralph,” I said as we pushed through the bar, and he gave me a nod.

  “Starling.”

  The court reporter got up from his desk beside the judge’s bench and disappeared through a doorway.

  “What you got for me?”

  Ralph opened the folder and took out a document stapled at the corner. It was a grand jury indictment, charging that Natalie Stevens did feloniously kill and murder one John Doe against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth. They still hadn’t been able to identify the body.

  “Murder one?” I said.

  He nodded soberly. “In light of the developing evidence, we’ve dismissed the charge of manslaughter.”

  “It has been developing,” I said. “Did you get copies of my discovery motions?”

  He got another document out of his folder and handed it to me. “This is what I’ve got so far.”

  It was the autopsy report. On the front page I saw that John Doe was a white male between the ages of 35 and 50, which really didn’t do much to narrow it down. Several pages further in, the cause of death was listed as a gunshot wound to the head. The time of death was between eleven p.m. Sunday night and two a.m. Monday morning. It left Natalie without an alibi, but it answered all the questions I had at the moment. Monday’s felony hit-and-run had evaporated completely, leaving a much more sinister pattern in its place.

  The court reporter came back in, and a sheriff’s deputy took up his position beside the bench. The judge entered, and the deputy sheriff announced, “Oyez, oyez, the 151st District Court is now in session, the Honorable Eric Cheatham presiding.” Oyez has been announced in English courtrooms since the Norman invasion and means something like “Hear ye.”

  It had been four or five years since I had appeared before Judge Cheatham, which was back when I’d been doing collection work for Northcutt, Hambrick and Larsen. The judge had a name made for lawyer jokes, like the one about the law firm of Dewey, Cheatham & Howe. He also had a full head of silvered hair and was a lot better looking than the average judge, though I realize that’s pretty f
aint praise. The judge sat. Waldo, Natalie, and I remained standing.

  “We’re here for the arraignment of Natalie Elizabeth Stevens on the charge of murder in the first degree, is that right?” Judge Cheatham asked.

  Waldo said, “Yes, your honor.”

  “Ms. Stevens is present in the courtroom?” He looked at Natalie, and she nodded. I nudged her.

  “Yes, your honor,” she said.

  “You are represented by counsel, Robin Starling of the firm of…” He looked down at the paper in front of him. It was just Robin Starling, no firm. “By Robin Starling?”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  “You have been charged with murder in the first degree which is punishable by imprisonment for life or for any term not less than twenty years.” To me he said, “Do you waive the reading of the indictment?”

  “No, your honor.”

  He stopped with his mouth open. He blinked. “You don’t waive the reading of the indictment?”

  “No, your honor. We’d like to hear it read.”

  “Very well.” He put on his glasses and began, “Commonwealth of Virginia, City of Richmond, to-wit…” I watched Natalie’s face tighten as he read, not sure why I was putting her through this. The indictment wasn’t long, but by the time the judge was done, she was noticeably paler.

  The judge asked Natalie, “Do you understand the charge against you?”

  She swallowed and nodded. After a short pause she said, “Yes, your honor.”

  “You understand that you have the right to remain silent and that anything you say can be used against you in a court of law?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “Understanding that right, is there anything you would like to say at this time?”

  Natalie looked at me, and I shook my head.

  “No, your honor.”

  “Very well. How do you plead?”

  “Not guilty.”

  “So recorded. Now, I understand you have been released on bail in the amount of seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  Waldo said, “Your honor, that bail has been discharged. It was based on a manslaughter charge.”

  The judge looked for a moment as if he might react to the interruption, but he only said, “You wish to have bail set on the new charge?”