Trial by Ambush (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  On the other hand, she was in her underwear. With John that made a certain amount of sense, but if someone else had come into the apartment after he had gone, she surely wouldn’t have greeted him dressed like that.

  I got up. Someone had killed Wendy. I didn’t know who, and I didn’t have the resources to find out. It was time to call somebody.

  I had seen a phone in her bedroom on the nightstand. As I headed for it, I wondered cowardly if I could slip out of the apartment and give the police an anonymous call from the nearest payphone. I had no choice, though, but to face the music. I had been seen entering the apartment, seen in what had to be memorable circumstances. I had also given Steve and Dustin my name, too busy trolling for my next date to exercise even a modicum of caution.

  I picked up the cordless telephone and dialed.

  “9-1-1.”

  I took a breath. “My name is Robin Starling,” I said. “I’m afraid I have to report a murder.”

  Chapter 10

  The police were on their way. I slipped into my pumps and sat down in the bedroom to wait. Several minutes ticked by before it occurred to me that I had no way to open the door for the police when they got there. The deadbolt on the door at the bottom of the stairs required a key.

  I checked the nightstand for a spare, opening the drawer with my knuckles to avoid leaving prints that might be awkward to explain. There was a lot of stuff in there, from antacids to body lotion, but no key. I shut the drawer. In the kitchen, I checked the walls for a key hanging from a nail or a hook, likewise without success. I went back through the living room to the main door, which opened on the stairway leading down to the street. No spare key hanging on either side of it, though there was a 4-penny nail in the wall where Wendy could have kept one.

  It was then that I remembered her purse, sitting in a chair in the living room across from the couch. I didn’t need a spare key if Wendy’s own set was there in her purse. I went to check and came up with a key chain with a silver basketball on the end of it and six keys. I blinked, suddenly fighting back tears. I had a key chain like Wendy’s somewhere. Everyone on the team had gotten one when we won the game that took us to the Final Four. I stood there looking at it, then looked again at Wendy.

  “I’m sorry about Cody,” I said, for the first time. “I’m so sorry.”

  She didn’t answer. What I wanted was forgiveness, but it was too late to get it from Wendy Walters. I looked up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry about all of them,” I said to God or to no one in particular. A collage of images swirled through my mind, images of boys and men, Cody and John Parker among them, each the subject of runaway passions and self-indulgence — or so it suddenly seemed to me.

  I sat abruptly on the end of the sofa by Wendy’s feet, tears streaming down my face, but my repentance brought no feeling of peace or forgiveness. Then a banging on the door at the foot of the stairs brought me to my senses. Whether I was having a spiritual breakthrough or an emotional breakdown, there was no time for it now. I dried my face with the heels of my hands and went down to meet the police.

  “Hi,” I said in a stopped-up voice. “I’m Robin Starling.” I turned and led four of them up the stairs, two in uniforms and two wearing ties and short-sleeve dress shirts.

  They looked at the body. I sat in a chair at the dining table and watched. After several minutes, one of the men wearing a tie came over and pulled out a chair next to me. He had curly hair shot with gray and a mustache that extended down too far on either side of his mouth.

  “My name’s Jordan,” he said as he sat down.

  “Robin Starling.”

  He nodded. “Do you think you can tell me about it?”

  “I think so.”

  “You discovered the body?”

  “A few minutes ago.” I checked my watch. “Maybe twenty.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  “Wendy Walters. She’s an accountant at McCormack Labs.”

  “Did you touch anything?”

  “Some things in the bedroom. I got in through the window.” Unexpectedly, a burst of snot and spit shot from me in a convulsive sort of sob. I caught most of it in my hand and looked around vacantly for something to wipe it on. “I touched her…on the stomach,” I said, a slight quaver in my voice that I couldn’t quite control.

  Jordan got up and got me a paper towel, which was hanging from a roller above the sink.

  “It was cold,” I added as I wiped my hand. “Her stomach.” I folded the paper towel carefully and held it in my fist.

  “How did you know to break into the apartment? Did you know she was dead?”

  “No.”

  He smiled faintly. “You in the habit of breaking into other people’s apartments?”

  I shook my head. “She came to see me yesterday. I tried to reach her at work and they told me she hadn’t come in. She didn’t answer her home phone either.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “Twelve years. A little more.”

  He nodded, then got up and left me. Some more people had shown up, and they were clustered around the body. Every few seconds, someone would shift his position, and I’d get another glimpse of bare flesh. I tried not to look.

  Jordan came back. “It’s a long way to the ground,” he said. “How did you get up onto that balcony?”

  “I borrowed a ladder from some workmen a couple of doors down.” I sounded congested, and I sniffed in an effort to clear my nose.

  “It was you that tore the curtains loose?”

  I nodded. “Uh huh.”

  “And you found her there on the sofa, just like she is now.”

  I nodded again, knowing there was no danger anyone would think I had moved the body. The settled blood was persuasive testimony that no one had moved her recently.

  I noticed a young woman with her hair in a ponytail taking pictures of everything.

  “Where do you work?” Jordan asked me.

  “Northcutt, Hambrick and Larsen. It’s a law firm.”

  “And you’re…?”

  “A lawyer.” I glanced at him. To judge by my experience with traffic cops, this was equivalent to saying I was the spawn of the devil, but if Jordan’s expression tightened at all, I couldn’t tell it. He continued to sit sprawled in the chair beside me, just a friendly guy making conversation. He was probably fifty, but until you looked at him closely enough to see the network of fine wrinkles around his eyes you wouldn’t know it.

  I took a breath. “Like I said, Wendy’s an accountant at McCormack Labs. Yesterday she told me she’d discovered some accounting irregularities, and she didn’t know what to do about it. She said she’d found a second set of books.”

  Jordan thought about it. “Did she have any documentation to support that?”

  He talked pretty well for a cop. “I think so,” I said. “I don’t know.” I took a breath, hesitating to embark on a story that had to sound melodramatic and overwrought. This was the second time in two days I had dialed 9-1-1, though, and I thought I’d better give some account of it.

  I told the story, starting at the end of my run with the man who knew my name. As I talked, Jordan’s eyebrows climbed his forehead.

  “Eventually, I spilled out of the trash container and walked a couple of miles to a friend’s house.” No need to mention brandishing the gun at an elderly couple. “I called the police from there, and they sent an Officer Riley to take me home and walk through the house with me.”

  “How long did it take you to discover the missing disk?”

  “A while. The first thing I missed was my briefcase. I still haven’t found that. And my purse fell open when I picked it up.”

  “So these people, whoever they were, broke into your home?”

  “It looks that way. I don’t know.”

  “And you have no idea who they are?”

  “Not unless they have some connection with Wendy.”

  It bothered me that his eyebrows still hadn’t dropped back to wh
ere they were supposed to be.

  “You don’t believe me,” I said.

  He moved his head. “If it’s the truth, you’re stuck with it.”

  “I guess I am.”

  He fished out a notebook and a pen. “Let me make sure I’ve got your name right. You said Robin…Sterling?”

  “Starling.”

  “Starling.” He wrote it at the top of a blank page in all caps. “Your address?”

  My eyes went back to the living room as he began jotting notes. A couple of guys in their early twenties were dusting for prints. For the moment nobody was near Wendy, pale in her bra and panties, ignored.

  “What’s your last name?” I asked Jordan.

  “Jordan.” After a moment, he added, “My first name is James. I have two first names.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He looked at me quizzically, but I didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t pursue it. After several more minutes of scribbling, he got up and went to talk to his partner, a Hispanic man with a flat face. Too lethargic to move, I sat and watched the technicians at work.

  Somehow, I had gotten through my entire statement with no mention of my libidinous boyfriend, and I’d done it without ever making a conscious decision to cover for him. John Parker just didn’t have anything to do with McCormack’s accounting problems or with the two men who had accosted me outside my home. What had happened to Wendy was all wrapped up with that, at least in my mind. John Parker fell under the heading of Boyfriend Problems, which was something else entirely.

  It was maybe forty minutes later when James Jordan got back to me. “You all right?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I will be.”

  “We’re going to need your fingerprints for purposes of elimination. Do you think you can stop by the station later this afternoon?” He fished a card out of his shirt pocket and gave it to me. “Ask for me.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can go now.” He smiled. “I know how to find you.”

  I had to be back in court at three o’clock for a hearing on a motion for summary judgment, and, because I had to go by my office first to pick up the file, I barely made it to the courthouse on time. I walked into the courtroom about ten seconds before my case was called.

  I stood up almost as soon as I’d sat down and pushed through the bar along with a man with reddish blond hair who looked about forty.

  I represented the plaintiff, so I went first. “It’s a suit on a note, your honor,” I said. “A copy of the note is attached to the petition. It’s authenticated by the required affidavit from the creditor. No question has been raised in the pleadings as to the legitimacy of the debt.”

  My opponent disagreed. “There’s an ambiguity on the face of the instrument, your honor. If you’ll look at the note, you’ll see that there’s a question of fact about the interest rate. It’s impossible to tell whether the defendant agreed to pay six and three-eighths or six and five-eighths.”

  The judge was flipping through his file. I opened mine. On the copy of the promissory note attached to the petition, I saw what he meant. Where it was written out in words, the interest rate was clearly six and five-eighths. Where it was written numerically, the rate was smudged. It could say six and five-eighths, but it was also possible to read it as six and three.

  “I see what you mean,” the judge said.

  I checked the original, hoping the smudge was only on the photocopy, but, no, it was there, too. I stood up. “Your honor, even if it did say six and three eighths numerically, when the numerals contradict the numbers as written out, the words control.”

  The judge looked thoughtful, but I’d run into him before and had my doubts. “That’s true for a check,” he said. “But is it true for a promissory note?”

  I didn’t know, but thought it had to be. “They’re both negotiable instruments.”

  “It raises a question of fact for the jury,” my opponent said.

  I said, “It raises a question of law. I can have it briefed for you by tomorrow.”

  “Even if the wording does control,” my opponent said, “my client may have relied on the numerical representation of the interest rate, which raises the question of mistake and possibly even of fraud in the inducement.”

  “He hasn’t pleaded fraud,” I said. “Besides, how could he have relied on a number that was too smudged to read?”

  “She’s admitting the interest rate is indeterminate.”

  “The interest rate is spelled out in words plain as day,” I said.

  “It raises a fact question for the jury.”

  “A jury trial for a suit on a note?” I said. “Your honor, that would be a complete waste of the court’s resources.”

  The judge said, “I’m inclined to agree with you, counselor.” But he was looking, not at me, but at my opponent over the rims of his glasses.

  It was almost more than I could take. “Your honor, let’s say for the moment that the interest rate could be taken as six and three eighths. Let’s call it that. Resolve the question in the light most favorable to the defendant. The plaintiff is still entitled to judgment for the principal plus six-and-three-eighths.”

  The judge smiled at me as if I were a precocious child who had misrecited a lesson. “Young lady, if there’s a question of fact, there’s a question of fact. I can’t just pick one set of facts and grant a motion for summary judgment on that basis.”

  “That’s correct, your honor,” my opponent chimed in.

  “That is not correct,” I said. “If there is a genuine question of fact, then the jury will either issue a judgment for six-and-three-eighths or six-and-five-eighths. It’s not possible that the defendant is going to be any better off than six-and-three-eighths.”

  “He’s entitled to his day in court,” my opponent insisted.

  “I think that’s right.” The judge slapped at the bench with his gavel.

  “But,” I said.

  The judge raised his eyebrows. “Young lady, I’ve already ruled,” he said.

  I rode down in the elevator with my opponent. He gave me a smile. “You got screwed,” he said by way of commiseration.

  “You played your part.”

  “Just doing what I could for a client. He isn’t able to pay anything on the note right now, so I had to delay things if I could.” He shook his head. “I had no idea it would work.”

  He obviously hadn’t appeared before this judge before. “Probably arguments of counsel sound more persuasive than a young lady’s,” I said. “That’s what gets me. Why are you ‘counselor,’ and I’m just ‘young lady’?”

  He made a face and shrugged his shoulders, as if there were no answer to that one.

  “I’ll add it to my list of things to ask about when we all get to heaven,” I said.

  “We’re not all going.”

  I looked at him sharply, but he only smiled benignly.

  “You’re going, I take it,” I said as the elevator opened on the ground floor.

  “I hope so. ‘For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.’”

  “That must be a comfort to you.”

  He shrugged, stopping to let me go first through the revolving door. I pushed through and blinked in the strong sunlight.

  “You’re obviously fit physically and well-trained mentally,” he said as he came out behind me.

  I decided I didn’t like him. “Yeah. So?” I said.

  “So what are you doing to train your soul to live in heaven?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  His mouth twisted, and his eyebrows rose, and he raised a hand with the palm turned up as if in invitation.

  “See you,” I said. As I walked to my car, I remembered a fortune cookie I’d gotten once. The others at my table got fortunes like “Your enthusiasm is contagious” and “You lead and others follow.” My own fortune read, “It is a good time to place your affairs in order.” They got feel-good messages; I got a death
threat.

  Now I was being presented with the specter of invalidism in the afterlife.

  Chapter 11

  I didn’t even try to get any more work done that day. I went to the police station to be fingerprinted, though I wondered about the wisdom of being so cooperative. If I didn’t give my prints voluntarily, however, the police could just come by the office to get them, and I didn’t want that.

  Jordan wasn’t at the station, but it didn’t seem to matter. A fat man with breath that smelled of peppermint rolled my inky fingers on a white card and gave me some goo to clean them with. By five o’clock, about an hour earlier than usual, I had joined the crawl of cars westbound on I-64.

  When I got to my neighborhood, I drove along Darby Drive until I spotted the house where I’d jumped the fence and laid out two men before jumping off the tool shed into a trash bin. It was a modest ranch with a brick front. I should probably bake the homeowner some cookies as a token of remorse, I thought.

  “Robin, Robin,” I said to myself, because I knew I wouldn’t do it. I just wasn’t the cookie type.

  I drove by my own house, reconnoitering before committing myself. There was an old Chevrolet Caprice I didn’t recognize parked on the street about half-a-block away, but no one was in it. I drove around to the alley and pulled into my driveway, triggering my garage door. I pulled in, then got the shivers as the door rumbled down behind my VW Beetle, closing me in.

  This sucks, I thought. I got out of the car and swung the car door closed. Schwoomp. My pumps made a gritty sound on the garage’s cement floor. My hand on the doorknob, I took a breath and opened the door.

  It’s not often that heart-thumping anticipation precedes anything really bad. The really bad stuff just comes out of nowhere, like my encounter with Misters Mean and Nasty the night before. This time I let myself get worked up, and there was nothing to get worked up about. My house was free of intruders. As nearly as I could tell, it was exactly as I had left it the night before.