Trial by Ambush (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “How about McCormack?” I said. “Any ideas about it?”

  She slurped thoughtfully at her Dr. Pepper. “No. Not any.”

  “Me either.”

  I sat back with one leg on the seat, my arm on the seatback and my soft drink held loosely in one hand.

  Brooke said, “There’s nothing we can do, not by ourselves. We’re going to have to talk to somebody.”

  “Okay. Who? Marty Nolen?”

  “Not Marty Nolen.”

  “And not Al Baldridge, your general counsel. You don’t have two sets of books without somebody in top management being in on it, and he’s a pretty good candidate.”

  “Because he tried to buy you off through your law firm,” Brooke said.

  “Sure, but anybody and everybody right up to the CEO himself could be in on it.”

  “So we have to go outside the company.”

  “Can we be certain none of the auditors are involved?”

  She thought about it. “No.”

  “What have we got? Is it obviously a second set of books?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Obvious to an outsider? I have to tell you, I opened them up, and all I saw were Excel files filled with columns of numbers. The rows had little one-word labels that didn’t mean anything, when they were labeled at all.”

  Brooke didn’t answer.

  “How about an outside member of the board of directors?” I suggested. “If we can find one in Richmond, great. If we can’t, we fly to New York or Atlanta or wherever we have to. All we need is the disk and maybe a little corroborating evidence.”

  She pushed back her plate. “Corroborating evidence?”

  I grinned. “Sounds funny, doesn’t it? You have to be able to say it three times real fast before they’ll let you out of law school.”

  “What kind of corroborating evidence?”

  “A witness, preferably. What would be really nice is to turn somebody at McCormack, somebody who’s in on the money laundering or the accounting fraud.”

  “Okay. And barring that?”

  “Don’t give up so easily. We just keep putting the pressure on somebody until he cracks.”

  “And who’s going to mount this campaign of terror?” she asked. “You and me? Aren’t we the ones who are afraid to go home?”

  It did sound like a fantasy. “Documentary evidence then,” I said. “Maybe we could turn up a memo somewhere.”

  “Note to file: instructed accounting to handle the following transactions off-book…”

  “An email,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Security at McCormack is incredible. After thirty days, all email goes through the digital equivalent of a paper shredder. Of course, a recent email might help us, if we can get to it.”

  We sat for a while looking at each other, neither speaking.

  “What do you think we should do?” Brooke said at last.

  “Me? I came up with the campaign of terror, the smoking memo, and the incriminating email.”

  “Neither the memo nor the email is likely to exist.”

  “Then we’re back to the campaign of terror,” I said.

  Chapter 27

  We looked up Al Baldridge in the phone book, along with Marty Nolen and Peter Lawrence, the CEO himself. Lawrence lived in the west end on the north bank of the James River. Baldridge lived in Windsor Farms. Martin Nolen lived in Mechanicsville, a northern suburb of Richmond. We pinpointed the addresses on Google Maps.

  “What now?” I said.

  She shrugged. “It’s midnight.”

  “I’m not sleepy.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Want to go for a ride?”

  Peter Lawrence’s house was closest, almost straight down Parham from where we were. It actually looked less like a house than a museum, set on a vast, rolling lawn that went all the way down to the river.

  “He does all right for himself,” Brook said. The house was big and square and built of stone blocks that were bigger than my dresser. There was grillwork around all hundred-and-two of the windows.

  “I guess he’s never had you over.”

  “Huh,” she said.

  There were cars on the curving drive, lights in the downstairs windows. With my car window down, I thought I could make out the faint sound of music.

  “What are the chances that Al Baldridge is at that party?” Brooke said.

  “I don’t know. Greater than zero, though it’s late and I wouldn’t count on him being there long.” I put the car in gear again and rolled forward.

  We took Cary Street to Windsor Farms, an exclusive neighborhood laid out on circular and diagonal streets rather than the usual grid. Al Baldridge lived in a three-story house with dormer windows and a slate roof. It was big, but it wasn’t a museum — just a big house with a well-manicured lawn that probably cost no more than a million five. Though the porch light was on, all the windows were dark.

  “What do you think?” Brooke said.

  “I don’t know.” I opened the car door and got out.

  Brooke opened her own door. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to check out the garage.”

  I felt exposed, but I strode down the driveway as if I owned the place. The garage, detached from the rest of the house, was part of a converted carriage house with an upstairs apartment. Both of the single-car doors were solid wood, but there was a window on the right side of the garage. It was dark inside, but I thought I could make out the outlines of a car in the space closest to me.

  “What do you see?”

  I lurched upward, nearly choking on my tongue. The voice belonged to Brooke, who evidently had padded up the driveway right behind me.

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  “You didn’t think I was going to wait in the car.”

  I took a breath. “There’s a car in there, maybe two. I can’t tell.”

  “I don’t think anybody’s home. There’re no lights at all.”

  “It’s late,” I said. “They’re probably asleep.”

  “Or at a party at the CEO’s house.”

  “And you think Al’s wife is with him? What about the kids?”

  “Maybe there aren’t any kids.”

  “Maybe there isn’t any wife,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  I put my head back to look up at the house. It didn’t look as if anybody were at home.

  “Okay, let’s try it,” I said.

  “Try what?” She followed me as I walked around to the front of the house, mounted the steps to the front door, and rang the doorbell.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she whispered fiercely.

  The chimes sounded inside the house, followed by silence. “Casing the joint. At least they don’t have a dog,” I said.

  “I’d bet on an alarm system, though.”

  “The birthday of his firstborn,” I said.

  “What?”

  “If we could get in, we could punch that into the keypad to deactivate the system.”

  “We don’t even know if he has a firstborn.”

  “If he’s on wife number two, it could be her birthday,” I said.

  “Or their anniversary.”

  “I think we don’t know enough about Al Baldridge.”

  “No kidding,” Brooke said.

  We retreated.

  I started the car, but didn’t turn on the headlights. After a moment, I killed the engine.

  “We’re going to wait for them to come back?” Brooke asked me.

  “When we get back to the hotel, you can get on your computer,” I said. “Find out everything there is to know about Al Baldridge.”

  “I can access payroll records to get his social security number. Once I’ve got that…”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  A car was approaching. I let my seat back to avoid being silhouetted by the headlights, and beside me Brooke did the same. The car’s clock showed 1:04.

  The ca
r began to turn and, as the headlights left my car, I lifted my head in time to see it finish the turn into Baldridge’s driveway. From the car’s profile, it looked like a Jaguar.

  It disappeared behind the house, and I started my own car and rolled backward to keep it in sight.

  The garage door on the left was rumbling upward. The Jag rolled in, and its brake lights flared and went out. A man got out on the driver’s side, and a woman got out opposite him. They weren’t very close to us, but in the available light I would have placed him at about fifty and his wife at thirty.

  “Trophy wife,” Brooke said softly.

  “We need to find out how long they’ve been married and whether there are kids.”

  “You still thinking about alarm codes?”

  “Heck, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just thinking.”

  We drove out to Nolen’s house next. It was in a new development with large homes, most of them close to three thousand square feet, with spotlights set in the ground to highlight the landscaping. An umbrella visible over top of Nolen’s privacy fence suggested he had a pool.

  “Nice,” Brooke said.

  “What do you know about his family?”

  “He’s divorced and remarried. I think number-two already had a boy who would be seven or so now. He has a couple of girls from his first marriage, but they don’t live with him.”

  On the far right of the house, a light was visible through tall windows with plantation blinds. There weren’t any cars in the driveway, but with a three-car garage there wouldn’t be. We had to assume somebody was home.

  I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. “How do you know all this about his family?” I asked.

  “The divorce happened since I’ve been there, maybe three or four years ago.”

  “The remarriage?”

  “About six months after that.”

  “So maybe he was cheating with number-two before the first one said bye-bye.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “If he cheated with number two, he’d cheat on her.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe she knows it.”

  “So?” She was beginning to sound exasperated.

  “I was thinking about our campaign of terror. Callers that hang up when the wife answers…”

  “Caller ID,” Brooke objected.

  “We block it. A pair of panties under his car seat. Help me out. I’m reaching here.”

  We went back to the hotel. It was the middle of the night, but neither of us was sleepy yet. Brooke logged her computer onto the hotel wireless and started surfing. I watched her awhile, then fished out the Gideon’s Bible from the nightstand. I thought I’d look up gluttony and maybe lust, which seemed to be the particular brand of self-indulgence I was most prone to. The Bible had no index. I glanced up.

  “Who are you on?” I asked.

  “Baldridge.”

  “So you think he’s the one to start with?”

  She grunted, her lower lip between her teeth.

  “We know he’s in on it,” I mused, “because he’s hiring the Northcutt law firm to shut me up.”

  “Suppose the CEO just told him to hire you?”

  “Okay, either Baldridge or Peter Lawrence is in on it. Martin Nolen would have to know about it, too, don’t you think?”

  “I’ll work on him next,” she said, her fingers tap-dancing on the computer keys. “Baldridge first.”

  I turned my attention back to the Bible. About two-thirds the way through there was a lot of stuff in red, which I knew from childhood Sunday School classes were the words of Jesus. The first passage I focused on read, “If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” Not a lot of room for self-indulgence there, I thought.

  I flipped pages, reading a passage here and there. Jesus was quite the storyteller. The word commandment caught my eye: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” I looked up. Though the line was vaguely reminiscent of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, I was thinking about John Parker. Had I ever loved him? I’d enjoyed him, certainly, but that didn’t seem to come close to the greater love Jesus was describing. On the other hand, this greater love was way beyond my aspirations. When it came to laying down one’s life, I preferred a walk in the park.

  I said, “Are we still thinking about breaking into Baldridge’s house?”

  She looked up briefly. “It was your idea,” she said. “Campaign of terror.”

  “I guess we could smear things on the wall.” I closed the Bible and put it back in its drawer. The Book of Mormon was in there, too, but I knew less about it than I did about the Bible, so I left it alone. After several minutes, I said, “It would be nice if Mr. Baldridge had a stack of incriminating documents on the desk in his study.”

  “Sure.”

  “If he has incriminating documents, though, it seems more likely they’d be at McCormack.”

  She looked up again. “Trust me. We don’t want to break into McCormack.” She looked back at her screen, thought for a few seconds, then moved her finger on the touch pad and clicked the mouse.

  “How about this?” I said. “We enter the house, we find his computer, we take it with us. We’ll be in the house ten minutes, tops, and you’ll have a ton of information to dissect at your leisure.”

  “It’s a plan,” she said. Her mind was obviously on what she was doing, though, and I wasn’t sure she meant it.

  Late the next morning, Sunday, we had breakfast at a Denny’s near the hotel. I read somewhere that the Grand Slam breakfast has about a thousand calories — seriously — but I managed to eat all of mine — eggs, pancakes, bacon, and sausage.

  “I’m developing some really bad habits,” I told Brooke as the waitress topped off my mug of coffee. I could hardly claim to be denying myself daily.

  “Tell me about it,” Brooke said around a mouthful of food.

  “If we don’t wrap this up soon, I’m going to waddle when I run.”

  Brooke nodded, swallowing. “Tell me about it.”

  “I think you’re a bad influence.” I slurped my coffee.

  “I was going to say the same thing about you.”

  The previous evening, I’d fallen asleep before she finished with the computer, which evidently didn’t happen until sometime after three a.m. She’d discovered a lot. Al Baldridge had been married to his current wife, the former Anita Hoeffer, for four years. He’d acquired the house in Windsor Farms at roughly the same time as his new wife. He had two children by a prior marriage: Justin, age nineteen, currently a student at Mr. Jefferson’s university in Charlottesville, and Mandy, still in high school somewhere. Brooke had been unable to find out where.

  “I’d guess she lives with her mother, but I couldn’t find her,” Brooke said.

  “I’m surprised you found out as much as you did.”

  “I had help, but I had to spend fifty dollars of your boyfriend’s money to get it.”

  I waved a hand. “Cheap at the price.”

  “I put the credit card back in your purse.”

  “Good, then John can pay for breakfast, too.” I felt a pang when I said it, though. Maybe Bible-reading was bad for your peace of mind.

  Brooke had full names, birthdays, and anniversaries. From those, we could develop a list of numbers that might — or might not — include the alarm code we needed, assuming we needed one at all. Justin’s birthday was at the top of the list. Anita’s birthday was next, followed by the anniversary of the second marriage — incredibly, the same as the anniversary of the first.

  “Al Baldridge is a man of habit,” I commented.

  “We’re going to do it then? When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Suppose he’s at home? How likely is
it he has social commitments two nights in a row?”

  “Then we’ll go plant some panties on Marty Nolen,” I said.

  Chapter 28

  That afternoon, just after four, we stopped the car two doors down from Al Baldridge’s house and on the other side of the street. From our vantage point, we could see the detached garage with its two single-car garage doors, both closed, and we could see the front door of the house.

  “All right?” I asked as I killed the motor.

  “Except we don’t know if they’re in there.”

  I pulled out my cell phone. “We will in a minute.”

  An answering machine picked up.

  “No one home,” I said.

  “You mean no one’s answering.”

  “Well, yes. ‘No one home’ is my conclusion.”

  “Suppose they’re just not answering?”

  “Why wouldn’t they answer?”

  “They could be having sex?”

  “They’ve been married four years. They’re not going to be having sex.”

  “Even if they’re not home, it’s only four o’clock,” Brooke said. “They can’t be out for the evening. They could be back anytime.”

  “Okay, you win. We wait.” I settled back in my seat.

  The day was hot and humid — in Virginia, most summer days are hot and humid — and, without the air conditioner going, I could already feel sweat beginning to form on my face. The open windows kept us from dying of heat stroke, but they didn’t do much for comfort.

  After five minutes or so, Brooke said, “I’ll go ring the doorbell.”

  A bead of sweat ran down my back between my shoulder blades. “I’ll go with you.”

  We both got out of the car.

  “What are we going to say if they answer the door?” Brooke asked as we started up the sidewalk.

  “We’ll deal with that when we have to.”

  I mounted the steps to the porch and pressed the doorbell. We waited, then Brooke pressed the doorbell. Nothing happened. Brooke looked at me, and I nodded. We headed for the back of the house.

  The upper part of the kitchen door consisted of twelve panes of glass. The kitchen was at the back corner of the house, and the chimney largely shielded the door from the street.