Trial by Ambush (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  Number one stepped forward and read it in a flat monotone.

  “Thank you. Number two, step forward and read the card.”

  When my turn came, I stepped forward and read the card in the same flat monotone the others had used. Laura, coming after me, was the only one to put any expression in her voice.

  “Thank you, that’s all.”

  The lights went down a notch, and we filed out. In the waiting room, everyone was sitting down again, so I took the chair next to Laura.

  “How long does this part last?” I asked her.

  “Not long. Ten, fifteen minutes.” She crossed her legs. I crossed mine, too.

  It was twenty minutes before Jordan opened the door. “Okay,” he said. “You can go now. Thanks.”

  The female cop took one of the women by the arm as they filed out. The others seemed free to go where they would. Jordan jerked his head and fell into step beside me as we clacked down the hall.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “To you? Nothing. The witness identified my secretary.”

  “Laura?”

  “You know her?”

  “We just met.”

  We got to the elevators, and he pushed a button.

  “We don’t look anything alike, you know.”

  “That’s not true. You’re both tall, athletic…”

  “She’s a knock-out.”

  “…attractive.”

  “Pulease,” I said. “I’m not in her league.”

  He glanced at me.

  I said, “If your witness picked out Laura, then whoever he saw leaving that house doesn’t look any more like me than you do.”

  Jordan eyed me speculatively as we continued to wait for the elevator.

  “What?” I said.

  “The woman at the Baldridge house was in her underwear.”

  “That would make a heck of a lineup. You might get Victoria’s Secret to sponsor it.”

  One of the elevators opened. As we got into it, he said, “Well, I said it was a wild hare.”

  “I thought I was the one who said wild hare.”

  “Whoever.”

  “So does Laura go to jail now?”

  “What?”

  “If your witness had identified me, I’d be going to jail, wouldn’t I? What was Laura doing at the Baldridge house in her underwear? Inquiring minds want to know.”

  “You’re a piece of work,” Jordan said.

  Chapter 31

  Ricky Anderson’s office was only a couple of blocks away from the police station. A bell tinkled as I went in, and Anderson’s secretary looked up from her desk.

  “I’m here to see the Club-Footed Tornado,” I said. “Is he in?”

  He appeared in the doorway of the inner office, filling most of it. “Robin Starling,” he rumbled in his deep voice.

  “That’s me.”

  We went back, and I gave him the check and the paperwork John had filled out.

  “How long is this going to take?” I asked.

  “Couple of hours. I’ll give you a call.”

  I picked up a sandwich on my way back to the office. I’d barely finished eating it when one of the junior partners latched onto me to help him with some last minute revisions to a brief he was working on. It was a pain, but it did keep my mind occupied until Ricky Anderson’s call came a little after four.

  “Ms. Starling?” Anderson said. “We’re outside the jail, standing together on the front steps. Would you like to speak to him?”

  “Please.” I waited a moment. “John?”

  “I’m here. Can you come get me?”

  He sounded tired.

  “I’m on my way.”

  Rush hour had already started. It took fifteen minutes to get my car and get across downtown to him. John was in his own clothes, but they were rumpled and he had a couple days’ growth of beard. Ricky Anderson, the Club-Footed Tornado, had done his work and gone.

  I pulled up in front of John and leaned across the front seat to push open the passenger door.

  He grinned at me, but he looked tired. “Boy, do you look good,” he said as he dropped into the seat.

  “Don’t get too enthusiastic. I’m not what’s for dinner.”

  He pulled the door shut. We were on the Downtown Expressway when he said, “What is for dinner?”

  “Your choice — but we’ve got to pick up somebody first.”

  “Pick up somebody?”

  I told him about Brooke. “We’ve been staying at the Marriott. It isn’t safe for either of us to go home.”

  “You could have stayed at my place. You still have a key, don’t you?”

  I wobbled my head. “I’ve got your set, too, from when they arrested you, but your apartment may not be safe either.” Which took a little more explaining. “We’ll be at the Marriott again tonight. There’re two beds. Maybe you ought to join us.”

  His eyes cut toward me. “What does this Brooke look like?”

  “Like peaches and cream, if that makes any difference. I’m offering basic shelter here. You’re going to have to keep your appetites under control.”

  It was a few minutes after five when we pulled into the McCormack parking lot, going against the flow of departing employees. I pulled into an empty space and called Brooke’s cell phone, but all I got was her voicemail. When I tried the number for accounting, I got seven rings and a recorded message.

  “I don’t like this,” I said.

  John raised his eyebrows. “Is something wrong?”

  My watch said a quarter past five, and the parking lot was nearly empty. “Let’s go,” I said, pushing open the car door and swinging my legs out.

  “Go where?”

  “We’re going in after her. Come on.”

  John opened his mouth as if he were going to protest, but he shut it again without saying anything. I have to say it: I like a man who knows when to keep his mouth shut. He got out of the car on his side and swung the door shut.

  I led the way to the door I’d seen Brooke go in that morning. It was a heavy metal door, painted a dull red, with a narrow pane of reinforced glass above the knob. For a moment I was afraid it would be locked, but the knob turned and the door gave when I pushed on it.

  It opened on a long hallway with industrial-grade carpeting and a suspended ceiling. We walked along it, John slightly behind me, passing a couple of closed, unmarked doors, then an open door that revealed a small room with a copier and a wall of white cabinets.

  As I slowed down to check it out, John asked, “Do you know where you’re going?”

  “Not a clue.”

  I led on, and the hall opened into a large room divided into cubicles. Along the edge of the room were offices, mostly closed. Again I hesitated. Brooke had never mentioned whether she had an office or a cubicle.

  I heard a raised voice, a man’s, and I moved swiftly in the direction it came from. Halfway around the cubicles, I stopped, waiting, and, when the voice spoke again, I pinpointed the office it came from. The door was closed, but the nameplate said Martin Nolen.

  A woman spoke, her words indecipherable and her voice unrecognizable, and the man spoke again. I pressed my ear to the door.

  “Just sit there until I tell you you can go,” the man said.

  “You can’t just hold me here.” The woman sounded like Brooke, but I wasn’t sure.

  “I can if you still want a job tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m not sure that I do. What are we waiting for anyway?”

  “You’ll see.” The man laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant laugh.

  A hand seized the top of my shoulder, pinching painfully, and, as I turned, another hand closed on my throat.

  It was a tall man with straight, black hair and an unnaturally pale face. I knew him: He was the man who had walked into the parking garage with me a week earlier. My eyes rolled in search of help as he lifted me onto my toes, but John seemed to have disappeared.

  I croaked something unintelligible,
even to me, and then I saw John over my assailant’s shoulder, moving in swiftly. He drove his fist into the man’s spine, twisting into the punch, and it caused the man’s arms to fly out and his body to arch, leaving him, for an instant, completely open. Finding my balance, I kicked upward between his legs with enough force to rip the seam in the side of my dress, and his knees collapsed inward so fast that he almost caught my foot between his thighs.

  He was on hands and knees between us, and John kicked him in the buttocks, the point of his shoe catching the man dead center and propelling him forward so that the top of his head banged into the door of Marty Nolen’s office. He collapsed.

  “Hey!” a voice shouted from inside the office. “What the hell…” The office door was jerked open from the inside.

  It was my first look at Nolen. He was built along the lines of a tree stump, shorter than me by several inches, with a big, wide head and heavy shoulders and short, thick arms.

  “You have a visitor,” I said, nudging my erstwhile attacker with the toe of my shoe. He grunted, but didn’t move.

  “You,” Nolen said.

  “How come you to recognize me, Marty Nolen?”

  Brooke was behind him, getting up from a short couch.

  I said, “Unless you’re into criminal assault and murder, there’s no reason you should know who I am.”

  He reached for me, but his foot bumped into the body on the floor and he came up short. As Brooke slipped past him into the hall, he grabbed at her, catching her blouse for an instant and ripping it open, exposing a black bra over pale skin.

  “You get back in there, or you’re fired,” Nolen said to her as she pulled her shirt together. To John he said, “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m afraid everybody here may be out of a job,” I said. Nolan picked that moment to drive into me, his foot coming down on the back of the man on the floor, his shoulder catching me in the chest and driving me into the wall with such force that I hit the back of my head. I saw momentary blackness, but John was on him, his arms slipping beneath Nolen’s shoulders, and Nolen staggered back, giving me momentary breathing room. When my vision cleared, John had him in a full nelson. Nolen’s short arms were sticking almost straight out, and his head was down like a bull preparing to charge. Nolen slammed backward into the wall in an effort to dislodge John. The sheetrock split, and John’s right arm lost its hold.

  I kicked him in the knee. Nolan's leg collapsed, and he fell sideways, spilling John to the floor beside and on top of him. His mouth was open, stretching wider and wider. I was gasping. John was gasping. Nolen was breathing in quick, high breaths.

  Brooke stepped up and kicked him in the side of the head, which slewed him around and changed the cadence of his breathing to long, labored gasps. I laid a hand on her arm.

  “He was holding me until that man got here,” she said. “He was going to hurt me.”

  “I know.”

  “They had me in administration most of the day doing busy work, keeping me isolated, but they’re scared. The whole house of cards is coming down.”

  The man who was not Marty Nolen groaned suddenly and rolled onto his back. I stepped on his stomach with a half-inch heel, and he curled up again like one of those little gray bugs, one of his shoes coming off in the process. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I managed to get off an email to the guy at Odyssey Funds. I attached Wendy’s files and told him that an open folder with the same files was found in the home of McCormack’s murdered general counsel.”

  “But only someone who’d been in Baldridge’s house…”

  “Don’t worry. The message came from Peter Lawrence, the CEO.”

  John said, “Is this the best place to be having this conversation? Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  We both looked at him. He had a point.

  “Just a minute,” I said. I bent over Marty Nolen and put my hands in his pockets. I found a key ring, a pocketknife, and some loose change. I handed the keys to John, then bent over the other guy.

  “What are you looking for?” Brooke asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Despite the summer heat, the man was wearing a lightweight jacket over his yellow polo shirt. Beneath it he was wearing a shoulder holster. I pulled out the gun. It was some kind of automatic, but I don’t know guns, and that’s all I could tell you. I handed it to John.

  I tried to check the pockets of the man’s black jeans, but they were so tight on him I could hardly work my hand in. I decided, to heck with it, I’d peruse them at my leisure. He wasn’t wearing a belt, and one of his shoes was off already. I unsnapped his jeans, moved to his feet to yank off his remaining shoe.

  John said, “What are you doing? Are you nuts?”

  “I’m taking his pants,” I said. “What does it look like I’m doing?” I grabbed the end of each pants leg and dragged the man about halfway down the hallway before the pants came off. His shirt was rucked up to his armpits, leaving him completely exposed but for his whitey-tighties. I stepped over him, the jeans clutched against me, and he made a clumsy grab at my ankle. I kicked free. The man struggled to sit up, but John pulled back the slide on the automatic pistol, and, as it smacked back in place, the man froze.

  “I’m ready to leave,” John said.

  “That could be the guy who killed Wendy,” I said. “This could be the guy you’re taking the rap for.”

  The man's eyes were fixed on me, his breathing audible.

  There was a thump and a grunt. Brooke was standing over Marty Nolen, who was slumped against the wall with blood running down his face.

  “He was trying to get up,” she said.

  “Let’s get out of here before we have to kill these people,” John said.

  “What about him?” I said, pointing. “Suppose he has fingerprints that match prints the police found in Wendy’s apartment?”

  “What are we going to do about it? We just beat these guys to bloody pulps right inside their place of business. Do you want to be here when the police show up? I don’t.”

  He had another point there. Recognizing it, we left in some haste.

  Chapter 32

  John wanted to get to the hotel as soon as possible to clean up, but, despite that, I pulled into the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant. I was starved.

  “I’ve been in jail,” John said. “You don’t know what that means.”

  “You’re thinking enchiladas,” I said. “Don’t.”

  “What?”

  “Think ‘pitcher of margaritas.’”

  “But you don’t drink.”

  Brooke snorted.

  “Let’s just say that for the moment I’m operating under a special dispensation.”

  We went in, sat, and ordered food. The pitcher came almost immediately, and the waitress poured into mugs with salt-encrusted rims. John eyed me as I took a sip, made a face, and took another.

  He was still watching me as he took his first, long swallow.

  “I was in a police lineup today,” I said conversationally.

  I told them about it, and their response was stone silence. I gulped from my mug and smacked my lips.

  John said, “Are you making this up?”

  Brooke said, “How do you think she came to pick out the secretary?”

  “She?” John said. “How do you know the witness was a she?”

  “Because Anita Baldridge was the one who saw me in the Baldridge house last night,” I explained.

  “You were actually in the Baldridge house?” He looked back and forth between Brooke and me. “I think I spent too much time down the rabbit hole.” He reached for his mug.

  To Brooke I said, “Here’s my theory. It’s not much, but it’s all I can come up with. When Anita saw me, I wasn’t wearing anything but my red lacy underwear…”

  John spewed tequila and lime juice, but I ignored him. “What’s the overall impression she got?” I said. “You know, long legs, underwear, her husband’s bedroom…”<
br />
  “Sex pot,” Brooke said.

  John eyed her.

  “And the next time she sees me, I’m like this. Hair pulled back, business attire, face shiny with perspiration. And the girl I’m standing next to…”

  “…is a sex pot,” Brooke finished.

  “Right. Anita picked out the sex pot.”

  “I think that’s it. You’ve got it.”

  John said, “You’re lesbians, aren’t you? You can tell me. I’m cool with it.”

  For a moment, we both stared at him incredulously. Then Brooke bounced a tortilla chip off his forehead. “Jerk,” she said.

  John looked at me.

  I threw my own chip.

  “Are you saying you’re not?”

  Brooke hit him with another tortilla chip.

  We got into another argument in the parking lot. I was beat and wanted to go straight to the Marriott. John wanted to go by his apartment.

  “It’s not that far out of the way,” John said. “I’ve got to go into work tomorrow. I need my car; I need some clothes. I’ve got a trial coming up next week.”

  “You’ve got one this week,” I said. “Your preliminary hearing is set for Wednesday.”

  “Fantastic. Because of the weekend I’ve only missed two days so far, but if this keeps up, Larsen’s going to fire my butt.”

  “I think you’ve got your priorities messed up. Virginia still has the death penalty, you know.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you trying to scare me?”

  “Do I need to?”

  “No, I’m scared. But what am I going to do about it? I’ve got a job. I’ve got clients who are depending on me.”

  We went by his apartment. From the ground, it looked fine. Neither the loveseat nor the Mexican rug on the balcony had been disturbed, and, as we turned the corner, we saw that his front door was closed and intact, as it should be. We mounted the stairs.

  I handed John his ring of keys, and he quickly found the right one and opened the door.

  The sheets and comforter from his bed were lying in the hallway, and it looked as if a box of raisin bran had been emptied on them and then abandoned. I took a step into the apartment, and my foot came down in puddled water.