Laughing Heirs (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “Mr. Miller,” the judge said. “Do you have an opening statement?”

  Miller stood. “No, your honor. I’m ready to call my first witness.”

  His first witness was a police officer named Wardle, who, in response to a call from the dispatcher, had gone to Macy Buck’s house on Patterson Avenue. He found her body in the kitchen.

  “Was the house locked or unlocked?”

  “Unlocked. The door was closed, but not latched, and it came open when I knocked. When there was no answer to my knocking, I pushed the door open further, called ‘Police’ a few times, and went in.”

  “What did you find?”

  “A young woman lying in the kitchen.”

  “Alive or dead?”

  “She looked dead. Her shirt was soaked with blood, a big circle of it in the middle of her chest, some of it on the floor, her hands wet with it, some drops and smears of it on her forearms and her legs. I checked for a pulse in her neck and couldn’t find one, then called the station for EMS and to report the apparent homicide.” EMS would be the ambulance: Emergency Medical Services.

  “Who was next on the scene?”

  “EMS. The paramedics weren’t able to find any signs of life either, so we waited for people to show up from the medical examiner’s office and from homicide.”

  “Your witness,” Miller told me.

  I stood. “Did you step in any of the blood, Officer Wardle?”

  “I don’t think so. I tried hard not to.”

  “Did the paramedics?”

  “I don’t think so. I warned them about it.”

  “But either you or the paramedics might have left hair or fibers at the scene.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You didn’t mention a weapon. Was none in evidence?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “You said the dispatcher sent you to Patterson Avenue. What prompted that call, do you know?”

  “I understood…”

  Miller was on his feet, interrupting smoothly. “The answer to that question would be hearsay, your honor.”

  “Are you planning to call the dispatcher?” I asked him.

  “Not at the preliminary hearing. I don’t think she’s necessary to prove what I have to prove to have the defendants bound over for trial.”

  “I’ve seen the transcript of the 9-1-1 call,” I said. “The person who placed the call must have been in that house at some point, but he didn’t give a name to the dispatcher, and he wasn’t on the scene when police arrived. Do you know who he was?”

  “I do not.”

  I turned to the judge. “No further questions of this witness, your honor.”

  The next witness was Victoria O’Neal, a woman in her mid-twenties who came to the stand wearing a navy skirt and a white blouse that were vaguely reminiscent of a grade-school uniform. After she had been sworn and had identified herself, Miller asked her if she remembered the date of Friday, February 11.

  “Yes, I do. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It’s the day a woman who lived across the street from us was murdered.”

  “When did you find out about that?”

  “Well, a police car came, and then an ambulance. And an SUV with two men wearing ties. They all kept going into the house, and no one was coming out.”

  “And that suggested murder to you?” I had to like Miller for that one, but the witness flared.

  “It suggested something had happened,” she said, her voice rising. “And since I’d seen a man running out of the house that evening, my husband and I went over to see what it was. One of the men wearing a tie told us it was murder.”

  “And you told him about the man you’d seen running out?” Miller asked.

  “I did.”

  “Describe the man for us please.”

  “I don’t need to describe him. It was that man sitting right over there at the table.”

  “The defendant Brian Marshall?” Miller asked, pointing.

  “Yes. He ran out and flung himself into a low-slung sports car, a Corvette or maybe a Camaro or something, that was parked on the other side of the street. For a long time he just sat there. Then when he did go, he went pealing out of there.”

  I was thinking that a Corvette looked nothing like a Camaro, but Miller asked, “What time was this?”

  “About six-fifteen. I was conscious of the time, because I was waiting for my husband Mark. We’ve…” She paused, flushing. “We’ve only been married six weeks.”

  “This man you saw running, had you ever seen him before?”

  “I had, about forty-five minutes earlier. I saw him walking up the sidewalk toward the house just before sunset.”

  “When you say just before sunset…”

  “About five-thirty.”

  “Did you see the man go into the house, or did you just notice him on the sidewalk and pay no attention to him after that?”

  “I just noticed him on the sidewalk.”

  “Where is your house in relation to Macy Buck’s, Ms. O’Neal?”

  “Right across the street. I can see her front door very clearly, but as I say I wasn’t really watching when he went in.”

  “So you weren’t watching the Buck house continuously?”

  “I was reading by the window, glancing out from time to time, particularly when I heard anything that might be my husband coming home.”

  “So this man, the defendant, came running out of the house. What did you do at that point?”

  “Well, as I said, he got into his car and just sat there, and it started making me nervous. I put down my book and stood at the window, watching the car. I couldn’t see him.”

  “How long did he sit there?”

  “Maybe as long as fifteen minutes.”

  “And you were standing and watching him the whole time?”

  “Watching his car. Then my husband Mark pulled up to the curb on our side of the street.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I hurried outside and down the sidewalk to meet him. That’s when this man, the defendant, pulled out from the curb on the other side of the street and went racing away.”

  “Was that when you noticed the make of his car?” Miller was letting this build slowly as if he enjoyed teasing it out. So far she had identified a man walking away from her up a sidewalk on the other side of the street, then running in the darkness, but Miller’s manner suggested more was coming.

  “Yes. It was a dark car, black I think, some kind of sports car, but I was too busy getting the license plate to tell you any more about it for sure.”

  “And later that evening, when you crossed the street to talk to the police—”

  “Right,” she said. “I gave them the number.”

  Miller gave me a smile that might have been sympathetic. “Cross examine,” he said.

  I stood and went to the podium. My tentative plan was to play nice at the preliminary hearing and get from her what I could, then, if I needed to, break her down at trial. It doesn’t make me sound like a very pleasant person, I know, but I was a trial lawyer—in the opinion of many, second cousin to a barracuda—and I had a job to do. “You say this was a Corvette or a Camaro. Could it have been another model of muscle car, a Dodge Challenger maybe?”

  “Honestly, I thought Corvette, but I don’t know cars.”

  “You said it was dark, and yet you identified Brian Marshall pretty definitively. Did he pause under a streetlight to give you a good look at him?”

  “There was a streetlight, but he didn’t pause. He was running.”

  “So he was moving fast, and for the most part his face was shadowed. Is that fair?”

  “I suppose. Of course I’d seen him earlier, when it was light.”

  “That’s right. You saw him walking up the sidewalk across the street. I guess from your angle you were looking at his back. Could you describe to us what he was wearing?”

  She hesitated for the barest instant. �
��Jeans, I think. Jeans and some kind of jacket.”

  “What kind of jacket?”

  “A bulky sort of jacket.”

  “Blue?”

  “I don’t know. A darkish color of some sort.”

  “A solid color or patterned?”

  “Not a real obvious pattern.”

  I nodded. “Of course. You were across the street, looking out through a window pane. Was he wearing a hat when he went into the house? A cap of some kind?”

  She hesitated. “No.”

  “What about when he came running out?”

  “Definitely not when he came running out.”

  “So he might have been wearing something on his head when he went in. You can’t say definitely.”

  “Well, no, but I don’t think so.”

  “Baseball cap, hoodie…”

  “You know, I almost think there was something on his head. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I want to say a coonskin cap.”

  “Like Davey Crocket wore?”

  “I’m sure it was just the shadows. It was that time of evening, you know.”

  I nodded again, thinking her identification of Brian was shaky at best. On the other hand, if a coonskin cap turned up among Brian’s possessions, he was screwed. “How about his hands? Was this man carrying anything as he walked up the sidewalk to the house?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Or were his hands in his pockets?”

  “They might have been. I didn’t notice.” She bit her lip. “I do think he had something in his hands coming out. In one hand, anyway.”

  I had a sick feeling, thinking she was about to name the murder weapon. “Really?” I said. “Could it have been a glasses case?”

  “A what?”

  “A case to carry eyeglasses in,” I said, wanting to plant my own suggestion before she decided she’d seen Brian carrying a knife dripping blood.

  “I suppose that could have been it.”

  Nodding, I picked up my yellow pad and started to leave the podium. I stopped. “Which identification are you most certain about, Ms. O’Neal—your identification of the car, the license plate number, or Brian Marshall himself?”

  “The license plate,” she said promptly.

  “How certain are you about the license plate? One hundred percent, ninety-five—”

  “One hundred percent,” she said, interrupting.

  “So you were somewhat less than one hundred percent certain about the make of the car.”

  “Oh, yes. As I told you, I really don’t know cars.”

  “Are you as much as twenty-five percent certain it was a Corvette?”

  “Maybe about twenty-five percent.”

  “And you’re less than one hundred percent certain in your identification of the man you saw. It was someone about the same size and build as Brian Marshall, maybe the same hair color, but you’re not as certain about him being Brian Marshall as you were about the license plate.”

  “I don’t know that I’d say that.”

  “But you did say that. I asked you which identification you were most certain about, and you said the license plate.” I gave her what I hoped was a friendly smile. “If you were more certain about the license plate, it follows that you were less certain about the identity of the man you saw. Isn’t that right?” I tilted my head, gave my smile a lift at the corner.

  “I suppose that’s right. I’m still pretty certain though.”

  “Not a hundred percent certain,” I said. “There were strange shadows. It was that time of day.”

  “Okay, not a hundred percent,” she conceded. “More than fifty percent, though, for sure.”

  Fifty percent was a better number than I’d expected to get from her. “How can you be so certain about the license plate?”

  “It was pretty distinctive.”

  “A vanity plate?”

  “Not a vanity plate or anything, but the first three letters were KKX. At first I thought it said KKK, you know, like the Ku Klux Klan, before I realized the third letter was an X. And the four numbers following were sixty-three hundred.”

  “Six-three-zero-zero?”

  “That’s right. The plate was KKX 6300.”

  “Thank you.”

  I sat down, glancing at Brian. By the luck of the draw, the commonwealth of Virginia had issued him a distinctive, easy-to-remember license plate. Ordinarily, that would be a good thing.

  Chapter 18

  When the court recessed for lunch, Brian leaned toward me to murmur, “It was after dark when I got to the house. Whoever she saw going in, it wasn’t me.” He turned to Whitney and said something into her ear that earned him a glance and the flash of a smile. If I could keep them out of prison for the next twenty years, the two of them would be all right, I thought. There was something special between them.

  Miller came to my table as the sheriff’s deputies led Brian and Whitney off to their respective holding cells. “You didn’t ask her whether your client was wearing glasses going in or coming out.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Does he even wear glasses?”

  My smile was one that showed no teeth.

  “What they say about you is true. You are a piece of work.” He didn’t sound upset about it.

  “Based on what we’ve heard so far, I don’t know why you’ve charged Whitney Foster,” I said. “Your own witness tells us she wasn’t there.”

  “She doesn’t have to have been the one to do the stabbing.” In a criminal conspiracy, each coconspirator is punishable in the same manner and to the same extent as for the crime itself. “Besides, she was there at some point. We’ve got her prints.” He gave me his own smile and pushed through the bar.

  Brooke was still in her seat just behind the rail, but the Strumpf brothers were gone.

  “Lunch?” I said to Brooke.

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t eat.”

  “Keep me company. I need to take on fuel, something high in protein and fat to keep me going through the afternoon.”

  “So you want a hamburger?”

  “Hamburgers are good.”

  She sighed and got to her feet. “Hamburgers it is,” she said.

  Brooke did bestir herself to eat some of my fries, but that was okay: I’d added them to my order primarily for her benefit. Mike McMillan came in when I was about halfway through my burger, spotted us, and hurried over. “Paul said you might be here. Neither of you answers your cell.”

  Brooke pulled her phone out and looked at it. “Sorry. I had the sound off.”

  “So how did it go?” He pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “All right. We learned that another man was in and out of the murder house only minutes before Brian got there.”

  “Hey, that’s great.”

  Brooke said, “We did?”

  “Brian said it was after dark when he got to the house. Victoria O’Neal said she saw a man going in while it was daylight.”

  “Can we prove it was another man she saw?” Brooke asked.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “So what good does it do us?”

  “Gives us someone to look for.”

  When the elevator opened on the second floor of the courthouse, Charles and Darrell Strumpf were there.

  “Well looky, looky,” Darrell said, folding a stick of gum into his mouth. “If it isn’t little miss hit-the-panic-button herself.”

  I stopped in front of them. “You can’t blame a girl,” I said. “It’s a little unnerving to have a couple of tough old geezers walk through her locked front door.”

  Darrell cackled.

  “It is a neat little trick, I’ll admit,” Charles said. “We’re rather proud of it.”

  “Do many people know you can do it?” I asked. “Or is it a talent you try to keep under wraps?”

  “We don’t broadcast it. We may have shown a couple of people.”

  “Jared Walsh? Does he know about your bump keys?”

&nbs
p; “Yeah, I think so. Him and Nathan.”

  “Did you ever give anyone a set of bump keys? Are they hard to come by?”

  “We never did, but you can get ’em online, easy greasy.”

  “You two are amazing,” I said. I left them there and went into the courtroom.

  “Call Detective James Jordan.” David Miller led Jordan through his academic credentials and his experience as a police officer, then through the preliminaries of arriving on the scene after the paramedics but ahead of the medical examiner. Jordan described the scene in Macy’s kitchen pretty much the same way the patrolman had, though not so similarly to suggest they had coordinated their testimony. The gist of it was that there was a woman on the floor and that the front of her shirt was soaked with blood.

  “Was she dead?”

  “She appeared to be. My partner and I took the paramedics’ word for it rather than check personally. The M.E. and the forensic unit hadn’t gotten there, and we didn’t want to contaminate the scene any more than it was already.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Talked to the paramedics. Looked around the house. After ten minutes or so, a Sean and Victoria O’Neal showed up talking about a man she’d seen running from the house. When she gave us a license number, I went out to my car to run it.”

  “What car did the license number belong to?”

  “A black Corvette registered to the defendant Brian Marshall.”

  “What did you do with that information?”

  What he did was use his iPad to tap out an application for a warrant to search Brian’s apartment. “About fifteen minutes after I’d transmitted the application, Magistrate John Shields told me he’d signed the warrant. I called for a patrol car to meet me at the address on the defendant’s car registration. It turned out to be an apartment in Malvern Manor.”