Trial by Ambush (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “You got the list?” I asked, and Brooke held up the hotel pad with its column of numbers. I plucked from my pocket the surgical gloves we’d picked up at Walgreens and worked them onto my hands. Brooke, tucking the pad under her arm, took out her own gloves and did likewise.

  One of my T-shirts dangled from the back pocket of my jeans. I pulled it out and held it so that it hung down over the pane of glass closest to the doorknob. “You do the honors.”

  Brooke put out a gloved hand to hold the T-shirt in place.

  I gave her a look. Then I took a breath, shifted position, and swung my elbow.

  The crack of the glass sounded like a rifle shot, and fragments tinkled on the kitchen’s tile floor. Brooke lost her grip on the T-shirt, and it fell to the ground, revealing several jagged blades of glass still hanging in the frame. I pried out a couple of the larger fragments and tossed them on the ground. Then I reached in to turn the thumb latch and then the doorknob.

  That’s all it took. We were inside. No alarm sounded, and there was no alarm pad on the wall.

  “By the front door,” Brooke said, and we banged through a swinging door into a hallway and raced for the front of the house.

  There was no alarm pad inside the front door either. Evidently, Al Baldridge didn’t have a security system.

  “That’s a relief,” Brooke said.

  I nodded, my heart still hammering, my gaze wandering upward. An enormous chandelier, large enough to flatten us, hung from a ceiling two stories above us. There were stairs at both ends of the entrance hall, going up, and an upstairs hallway overlooked us.

  “The bedroom?” I said, no longer believing there was an alarm system, but wanting to be thorough.

  Brooke nodded. I went up the stairs at one end of the entrance hall; Brooke went up the stairs at the other. We arrived at opposite ends of the upstairs hallway that ran the width of the house. On one side of the hall was the stained-wood balustrade and, beyond it, the chandelier. On the other side was a wall with a half-dozen painted portraits hanging in large, ornate frames. I opened the first door I came to; at the other end of the hall Brooke opened another.

  “Bedroom,” she called.

  I was looking at one, too. I guessed by its size and its uncluttered appearance that it was a guest room. It had a bath opening off it and a sliding door that was probably a closet. For what we were looking for, it seemed like the least promising room in the house. I closed the door and continued down the hall to the set of double doors in the middle of the wall.

  Brooke got there ahead of me and pushed open the right-hand door into the master bedroom.

  “No alarm pad here, either,” I noted, scanning the walls.

  Brooke walked around the king-sized bed. “Good thing,” she said. “Though I wasted a lot of time searching through the private life of Al Baldridge.”

  “No. You never know what will come in handy,” I said. The master bedroom was a big one and had a row of windows overlooking the backyard. A Stairmaster stood in one corner. An open door on one wall revealed a large walk-in closet. Another door on the same wall was closed: possibly another closet. Through a door at the other end of the room, I could see a large bathroom with flowered wallpaper and a couple of pink, fluffy throw rugs. On the wall opposite the bed hung a big, flat-panel TV.

  “Nothing up here,” I observed. “No computer, no briefcase.”

  Brooke bounced across the bed toward the door. “You check his closet for a file box or something. I’ll go down and see if there’s a study.”

  She left the room, not quite running. I hesitated a moment, then went to the open closet.

  It was Anita’s. Two rows of clothes hung on one side, one above the other. Her dresses hung from a single rod opposite them. On the wall at the end of the closet were built-in drawers. I flipped off the light and went to the other closet.

  It was his. Dark suits and dress shirts, all of them white; a tie rack; a shelf with more men’s shoes than I’d ever seen in one place outside of a shoe store.

  From downstairs I heard what sounded like the front door whooshing open, and my heart lurched in my chest. I hoped to heck it was Brooke, but couldn’t imagine why she’d be messing around with the front door. I moved toward the bedroom door, which she’d left standing open about a foot. I stopped when the entrance hall came into view.

  A dark haired woman in her early thirties was down there. I caught just a glimpse of her before she moved out of my field of vision. I moved away from the bedroom door, my heart hammering. Even if Anita went into the back part of the house, I had no way to track her movements and was unlikely to escape unseen. I didn’t know where Brooke was.

  I heard footsteps on the staircase and glanced through the open door again to see Mrs. Anita Baldridge, if that’s who she was, coming up. I retreated deeper into the bedroom, my eyes darting to the closet doors, to the bathroom, to the big bed. I was trapped. The bed’s side rails were too close to the ground for me to slide under them. The footboard was a little higher, perhaps high enough to allow me to scoot under the bed from the foot, but perhaps not. There wasn’t time to try it and be wrong.

  I hesitated between the master bath and Al’s closet for only an instant before hotfooting it into the bathroom. Almost immediately I regretted my decision. In Al’s closet I might have been able to push my way in behind the suits and shirts. In the bathroom, there was nowhere to hide: Even the shower had a clear plastic door. But there was no time to go back.

  I got an idea. It was a pretty awful idea, but when you have only one you can’t be too picky about it. After only a moment’s indecision, I stepped out of my shoes and unsnapped my jeans. I pushed my pants down to my ankles and stepped out of them, then shrugged out of my T-shirt. The bedroom door opened with a faint creak, and I went still.

  My gaze shifted, and I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My bra and panties matched for once, both a deep maroon. I ran my hand back through my hair to give it a little more body, noticed the surgical gloves, decided I didn’t have time to take them off. They were nearly flesh colored anyway, and with luck Anita wouldn’t notice.

  I turned and headed for the bedroom, my pulse beating wildly in my neck.

  “Al?” I said as I pulled open the bathroom door and stepped out. “Al, did you…”

  I’d surprised Anita in the act of tossing her purse onto the bed. She froze with a sharp intake of breath. Her eyes locked on mine for an endless second, then cut downward. She herself was wearing black slacks and a blouse that, coincidentally, almost matched my underwear.

  “Where’s Al?” I said.

  “Who…” She couldn’t get it out.

  “Anita?” I opened my eyes as wide as I could get them. “Oh, my God.” I put one hand over my crotch and one arm across my breasts as I backed toward the bathroom.

  Anita shrieked before I got there, and I think for a second my heart stopped. “I’m sorry,” I said to her in the silence that followed. “I’m so sorry.”

  Downstairs, the front door slammed open, and time resumed.

  Anita snatched up her purse. I stepped back into the bathroom and closed the door before she could throw the purse at me, but the bedroom door banged as she went out into the hall. Already I was shrugging into my T-shirt.

  I picked up my jeans and left the bathroom in time to see the bedroom door still vibrating inward. From the balcony Anita screeched something at her husband below. I had one leg in my jeans, and I hopped sideways in an effort to get a glimpse of what was going on.

  Anita was still on the balcony, and she had a voice on her. I couldn’t get much sense out of what she was saying, except that she was punctuating it heavily with profanity. Beyond Anita, I could see a man with a reddish scalp and thinning blond hair. It was, I imagined, the unfortunate Al. He tried to break into Anita’s tirade, but all I could catch was the bewildered tone of his voice.

  Anita wasn’t having any. She moved along the railing, and, in the foyer below, Al moved with her, still t
rying to calm her down. I heard “Anita” and “honey,” but I don’t think she did. She clunked furiously down the stairs, and he met her at the bottom, his hands outstretched.

  “Anita, calm down. What’s in our bedroom?”

  She hit him with her purse about six times, and Al stumbled against a small glass table covered with framed photographs and nearly took it down. Anita jerked open the front door and went out. The table delayed Al enough that by the time he got to the door and got it open, Anita’s car was reversing down the driveway. At the end of it, the suspension squealed and gears clashed as Anita took off with a roar of automotive power.

  Al looked up then, and he saw me. I stepped away from the door, but the damage was done. I heard an angry exclamation and, immediately, footsteps on the stairs.

  My eyes darted about for some avenue of escape, but I’d explored the possibilities before and come up empty. The bedroom door banged open, and he was there in the doorway, breathing hard. “Who the hell are you?” he said.

  I straightened. “I’m a friend of Wendy Walters.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  “What about Wendy Walters?” His eyes were moving, making sure, perhaps, that I was alone, or looking for a weapon to use against me.

  “McCormack Labs has been keeping two sets of accounting records,” I said. “Wendy discovered them, and within twenty-four hours she was murdered.”

  He took a step toward me, and I stepped back.

  “What do you know about it?” I asked him.

  He stepped sideways, and I took another step away from him before I realized he was maneuvering me into the corner.

  “Are you the one who ordered her killed?” I asked.

  “No. Not me.” He was breathing heavily. He was not an especially big man, about my height, but he had probably thirty or forty pounds on me. I couldn’t afford for him to jam me into the corner.

  “But you knew about the two sets of records,” I said.

  “I don’t know…what you’re talking about.” He charged. I tried to duck under his outstretched arms, but his forearm caught me in the forehead and snapped my head back. Before I could recover my balance, he grabbed me and we went down, me on my back and Al on top of me, his arms closing around me, pinning my arms. I tried to head-butt him as he raised up on his elbows, but, starting with the back of my head against the floor, I couldn't get any force it. My forehead did no more than graze his chin as he shifted his weight to free an arm and hit me in the side of the head. It half-stunned me, though he wasn't at an angle to put much force in that either. I got my arm up on that side and managed to take part of his next punch on my forearm, twisting and bucking in a futile effort to scramble out from under him. I took another blow to the side of my skull, and pressed my forearm against the side of my head in a desperate effort to protect it. I tugged, but I couldn't get my other arm free. Al reared up, drawing his fist back to drive his next blow into my face, and I got a glimpse of Brooke standing above him.

  “Get off her, you pig!” Brooke kicked the forearm he had braced on the floor, and he collapsed on me, driving the breath from my lungs. He turned his body toward the new threat, waving his arm as if to catch Brooke's leg or to sweep it from under her. The side of his head brushed my face, and I felt a swirl of flesh-covered cartilage against my lips. I drew breath into my lungs and screamed, my mouth against his ear.

  Al jerked as if he'd been hit with a Taser and fell sideways, landing on the floor next to me, half on his back, half on his side. Freed, I rolled away from him in the ringing silence onto hands and knees, my arms trembling so violently that they could scarcely hold my weight. I felt a hand on my back.

  “Are you all right?” Brooke’s voice.

  Al got his feet under him, but as he tried to rise, Brooke kicked at him. He avoided the kick only by falling back onto his butt.

  “You can’t…get away with it,” I huffed, still on my hands and knees, turning my head toward him. “It always…comes out.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “The files…say otherwise.”

  He got up slowly and in a crouch moved crablike toward the door, his eyes on us. I started to get up, thinking he was going to escape and call the cops. When he got to the door, though, instead of darting through it, he closed it and leaned against it, breathing heavily, his eyes moving.

  “You do know what I’m talking about,” I said.

  “Which one of you is Robin Starling? It’s you, isn’t it?”

  I finished getting to my feet. “I’m Robin Starling.”

  “You’re a stupid, nosey female, you know that? You don’t know when to quit.”

  “Is that a threat? I’ll quit when the job’s done.”

  He smiled — rather nastily, I thought. He pulled a pocketknife from his pocket and opened it. The blade clicked into locked position.

  “What, you’re going to kill us?”

  He took a step forward. Except for his expression he didn’t look especially dangerous, and the blade of the pocketknife wasn’t particularly long. Suddenly, though, I was terrified.

  “Why kill us?” I said. “Why not press charges on the burglary? Who’s going to listen to us anyway?”

  “Jared Thompson,” Brooke said. My eyes cut toward her. Al’s did, too.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Jared Thompson. The fund manager for the Odyssey Healthcare Fund.” Odyssey Investments occupied most of an office tower in downtown Richmond. Brooke said, “I don’t know why I didn’t think of him before. He’ll know what the numbers mean.”

  Al lurched forward, and I flinched before I realized he was going after Brooke rather than me. He dropped his shoulder as he hit, catching her just under the chin and throwing her back into the wall. The back of her head hit with a crack, and Al’s knife arm went up. Before he could stab her I jumped forward and grabbed his wrist. I bit down on his forearm, and he jerked so violently that I reeled away from him as the knife flew into the air. I recovered even as Brooke was sliding down the wall.

  “Come on, you skinny bitch.” Al was standing with his left foot in front of his right, his head down and both fists up in front of his chin. He was blowing hard, but it was a boxer’s stance, and he looked comfortable with it. I glanced at Brooke, but she was sitting against the wall, staring vacantly and listing sideways.

  I put up my own hands and circled, but boxing isn’t one of my talents. When I got close enough to Al, just out of arm’s reach, I faked a punch and kicked, but my sneakers were still in the bathroom, and the ball of my socked foot missed his kneecap and glanced off his thigh. Before I could recover, Al stepped in and jabbed, catching me on the chin. As I staggered backwards, pain shooting through my head and my hands in front of my face, his next punch caught me in the short ribs, and he followed with a cross that caught me on the temple.

  It was as if a black fog had filled the room. I was still on my feet, weaving, but I couldn’t see Al or anything else. I felt a hand at my back, propelling me forward, and I heard a door open, but it wasn’t until my feet slipped on the hardwood floor of the hall that I realized where we were going. The railing high above the tiled floor of the foyer pressed into my waist, and I folded over it, only half-conscious, my hands closing on two of the balusters, pushing at them in an effort to keep from going over the rail.

  Brooke screamed, and Al’s body rammed into me, pushing my feet off the floor. Al was on top of me, pinning me to the railing as I slid headfirst over the rail, losing my grip on one of the balusters as Al’s bulk rushed downward, raking my body, leaving me hanging by one hand, my feet swinging in space. Above me, Brooke leaned over the rail, her hands outstretched. I swung my free arm, making a grab for another baluster, catching only the edge of the balcony floor and unable to hold it. My body swung sideways, and my grip on the single baluster began to slip. Brooke grabbed at my wrist, but it wasn’t enough.

  I lost my grip and fell.

  Chapter 29

 
; The floor of the second-floor hallway was maybe twelve feet above the tiled floor of the foyer, but I’d been hanging, the length of my body making up nearly half the distance. I fell about seven feet, flexing my knees to absorb as much of the impact as possible and spilling forward onto Al, who lay where he had fallen.

  For perhaps half-a-minute I thought I had broken both of my socked feet on the hard tile, and I lay with my face mashed into Al’s buttocks, my moans muffled.

  Gradually the pain faded. Brooke was there, her hand on me, asking if I was all right.

  I closed my mouth and sat up.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I pushed at Al, and his body shifted, then rolled onto its back.

  “Al?” I said. I pushed my fingers into his neck.

  His eyes, I noticed, were crossed, and, if he had a pulse, I couldn’t find it.

  “Is he…”

  I looked up at her, but didn’t say anything.

  “Should we…”

  “Call the police?” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “It was self-defense.”

  “The kitchen window’s broken, and we’re wearing surgical gloves.”

  Her hands went to her face. She lowered them. “Suicide?”

  I shook my head. Anita had seen me in the bedroom no more than fifteen minutes ago.

  “Right. Who kills himself by jumping off a second-floor balcony?” Her eyes lit up. “I know. It was the people who killed Wendy.”

  “How are we going to sell that?”

  “Hold on.” Brooke disappeared into the back of the house.

  I picked myself up gingerly. If it was murder, then the two burglars in the house were the prime suspects, which suggested that the two burglars’ first order of business should be to get out. After retrieving my shoes, I found Brooke in the study, sitting at a bleached-wood desk. A sheet of paper was sliding out of the printer. She picked it up and handed it to me.

  It said, “Peter Lawrence is next.”