Laughing Heirs (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “How come every time we try to help you out, it turns into a big old pain in the butt?” Hernandez asked.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  The next morning at six a.m., I walked into the Shady Grove YMCA, the Y where I went for pick-up games of basketball and the occasional resistance workout. Rodney had called me on my way home the night before to tell me that of all the workout places in town, all the Gold’s Gyms, World Gyms, Power Shacks, Fitness Planets, and YMCAs, only one had a muscular old guy who had started coming in the last month and was there almost every day.

  “At least only one old guy who comes close to matching Packard’s description,” Rodney said. “He usually comes in sometime between six and seven in the morning and works out for an hour, hour and fifteen minutes.”

  “And it’s the Shady Grove Y?”

  “Yeah, the one on Nuckols Road.”

  “That’s my Y.”

  “You haven’t noticed this guy?”

  “I don’t go much now that I have a dog. I never did go much in the mornings.”

  This morning, though, I was there. I went to the free-weight room and started into a ten-exercise routine I used when I hadn’t lifted in a while. It consisted of squats, Romanian deadlifts, bench press, and so on, one set each, and I could usually blow through it in about twenty minutes. Today I took my time and was doing upright rows when Jack Packard came in wearing sweatpants and a sleeveless T. I thought he started when he saw me, but he came in anyway, selected a forty-pound dumbbell from the rack in front of me, and sat on a nearby bench to do concentration curls. His biceps bulged like a cannonball each time he brought the weight up.

  “That’s an unusual exercise to start with,” I said, watching him in the mirror. There were some people across the hall on the machines, but here in the free-weight room it was just the two of us.

  “I’m thinking.” There was a gravelly quality to his voice. He finished a set of ten or twelve with one arm and switched the dumbbell to his other hand. I put one of my dumbbells back on the rack.

  “What about?” I braced myself on the bench nearest his and started doing kickbacks with my remaining dumbbell.

  “You’re Robin Starling, I’m Jack Packard. I guess you know that.”

  “I’d hoped.”

  He dropped the dumbbell on the padded floor, where it hit with a thump and didn’t bounce. “How’s the preliminary hearing going?”

  “Not too well. Brian Marshall and Whitney Foster are going to be bound over this morning.” I put the dumbbell on the bench, shifted my position, and picked up the dumbbell with my other hand. “The D.A. thinks I dumped blood on your kitchen floor…” I had to pause for breath. “…though at the moment he finds himself unable to prove it.”

  Packard nodded. “And what do you want from me?”

  “Why’d you disappear?”

  He shrugged. “I thought if everything went well, no one would even realize I was gone. If it didn’t go well, better to be out of pocket for a while.”

  “There are some who think you’re dead.”

  “Yes, after a certain attorney broke into my house and turned the whole thing into a circus. How’d you find me anyway? I haven’t used my phone. I’ve paid cash for everything, selling a gold coin here and there when I had to.”

  “I saw you at the funeral,” I said. “You looked like you worked out.”

  Brooke and Mike had tracked Nathan Walsh to a hotel in Georgetown. I considered making as much as I could of Nathan’s flight to Washington, D.C.—call Rupert Propst to the stand, maybe force him to claim attorney-client privilege to keep from answering questions about Nathan’s whereabouts. In the end, though, that would amount to no more than a sideshow. My plan to call Jordan to the stand as my own witness, use the evidence of blood in Macy’s car to suggest she had been moved, was not much better. Biggs would claim I had planted the blood, and none of it was enough to defeat probable cause.

  Now I had something. When the sheriff’s deputy brought my clients in, I smiled and gave them a few vague words of encouragement. Aubrey Biggs sat looking at me until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then he came over to tell me he wasn’t done with me yet: “You’re an embarrassment to the profession. You know that, don’t you?”

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

  “I’m not finished with you, don’t think I am.” He turned and stalked back to his table. At last the bailiff called the court to order, and Judge Cochran came in.

  I stood along with everyone else.

  “Are you ready to proceed, Ms. Starling? Mr. Biggs?”

  We said we were.

  “Is there any chance we can get this wrapped up this morning, do you think?”

  “I think there’s every chance, your honor,” I said.

  “Then my prayers have been answered. Call your first witness.”

  “Jack Packard.”

  Biggs jerked around in his chair as Packard got out of his seat and came down the aisle. I swung the gate open for him. When he had been sworn and seated, I asked him his name.

  “Jack Packard. No middle name.”

  “Kind of like Harry S. Truman,” I said.

  “No middle initial either.”

  So much for small talk. “Did you see Macy Buck on Friday, February 11th?”

  “Yes. She came to my house.”

  “By arrangement? Did she call first?”

  “No, she just showed up. She accused me of having secreted away the assets of Robert Walsh.”

  “Why would she be involved in recovering Robert Walsh’s assets?”

  “I don’t know. She seemed to feel she had some kind of proprietary interest, having been his therapist or something. Now, I understand she’s engaged to Nathan Walsh, but I didn’t know that then.”

  “What’s your connection to Robert Walsh?”

  “We’ve been best friends since high school.”

  “Are you in possession of Mr. Walsh’s assets?”

  “I am not.” It was true, I thought, at least technically. I was the one in possession of Mr. Walsh’s assets, which had been converted to gold and left in a wheelbarrow in my backyard.

  “Do you know why Jared Walsh, the executor of Mr. Walsh’s estate, has had such a hard time locating those assets?”

  “Because before his death, Robert went to a great deal of trouble to hide them. Jared Walsh isn’t the executor, incidentally. I am. Robert wrote another will shortly before his death, disinheriting Jared and Nathan Walsh and leaving everything to his niece Whitney Foster.”

  “Why would Robert do all that?”

  “Jared and Nathan were attempting to have him declared incompetent and have Jared appointed conservator of his property. When Robert got notice served on him, he immediately started emptying his accounts and putting his property where no one was going to be able to get hold of it.”

  “How was Macy involved in this, or was she?”

  “Macy was giving Robert supplements that made him sleepy all the time and played hob with his memory. He was in a particularly bad state when a man came by who turned out to be a physician there to put together some kind of report.”

  “What kind of supplements did she give him? Pills of some sort?”

  “Pills, powders, injections…I don’t know how Robert let himself get talked into such nonsense, but she gave him all sorts of pamphlets about human growth hormone and so-called natural medicines that have names I can’t even pronounce. I told him he was going to have to stop all that stuff cold turkey, or they’d have him in the looney bin.”

  “And did he stop?”

  Packard took a breath and exhaled it noisily. “I think so. Stopped most of it anyway.”

  “Before he died, did he manage to empty his accounts?”

  A smile passed over Packard’s face. “Pretty much.”

  “And Macy Buck thought you had a hand in it.”

  “Yes, and that I had the assets, or at least knew where they were.” />
  “Did she seem to expect that you’d turn the assets over to her?”

  “Seemed to. The assets or information that would help her locate them.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  He nodded. “She evidently thought she would drug me, inject me with something.”

  “Did she try to inject you with something?”

  “She did. We were standing in my kitchen, doing a little verbal sparring, when she asked me for a drink of water. I turned away from her to get it, and quick as a flash she came at me with a big syringe with a needle the size of a sixteen-penny nail. Stuck me in the shoulder with it, might have driven it all the way to the bone if I hadn’t jerked away from her and decked her.”

  “You decked her?”

  He grimaced. “Caught her right on the cheekbone with a right cross, spun her around like a top.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Well, she went down, and I stood over her waiting for her to move. I was planning to kick her all the way into next week if she came up with that steel spike in her hand.” He sighed. “She didn’t. I turned her over finally and saw it sticking out of the middle of her body. There was a little pool of blood on my tile floor.”

  “Was she dead?”

  There was a tear running down one of the lines in his face. “No. Wasn’t even unconscious. She just lay there staring up at me with blank eyes. I should have called the ambulance, but just as I picked up the phone to do it, she spoke to me. ‘Help me to my car,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a friend who can help me.’ ”

  “And did you? Help her to her car?”

  “God help me, I did.”

  “What happened to the needle?”

  “She pulled it out and handed it to me, meek as anything, and I tucked it in the side pocket of my jacket.”

  “Your jacket?”

  “I don’t keep my place too warm in the wintertime. I have an old windbreaker I usually wear around the house.”

  “Was Macy able to walk to her car?”

  “With help. I carried her down the stairs to my basement, planning to put her down at the bottom, but ended up just carrying her on across the TV room I have there. I didn’t set her on her feet until we got to the door. She made it from there to her car, but almost fell when we got there. I saw she wasn’t in any shape to drive, so I laid back the passenger seat and put her in it, then I got behind the wheel myself. ‘I’m not taking you to any friend’s house,’ I told her. ‘I’m taking you to the ER.’ I headed across the river toward St. Mary’s, her lying back in her seat with her eyes closed, breathing steady—at least, she started off breathing steady. I didn’t notice when she stopped.” His gruff voice was getting hoarser and deeper.

  “She died in the car?”

  He nodded. “I pulled up to the E.R., jumped out and ran around to get her…but she was dead.” I had to strain to hear him. “I thought maybe it would look better if she’d died in her own home, so I took her there. Put her on her kitchen floor, found an ice pick in one of her drawers, wiped a little blood on the blade and made sure her fingerprints were on the handle.” He looked over at the table where Whitney Foster sat with Brian. “I didn’t expect anyone else to get blamed for it. I thought everyone would assume she’d fallen.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Let myself out the back door, walked down the alley to the next street. When I was several miles away from there, I used my cell phone to call a cab.”

  Chapter 22

  “Why did Nathan frame Brian and Whitney?” Brooke asked. It was late afternoon, and she, Brian, Whitney, and I were sitting around a table at Carytown Joe, ceramic mugs in our hands or in front of us. The coffee shop was closed, but all of us were having vanilla lattes.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “My guess is he’d already been part of an effort to frame Jared for his uncle’s death…”

  “Do you think Nathan and Macy killed him then?” Whitney asked.

  “No way of knowing. Maybe it was like Jared said. Macy found Robert drowned in his bathtub and thought Jared’s hot tub would be a more profitable place for discovery of the body. That wasn’t enough to get Jared arrested, so Macy started telling stories about hearing splashing and voices. If Jared were convicted of killing his uncle, he couldn’t inherit. Nathan and she—and you—would inherit fifty percent more than you would otherwise.”

  “I got the sense there was no love lost between Nathan and Jared,” Brooke said.

  Whitney shivered. “In a way it’s my fault she died. I think I told her that if anyone knew where Uncle Robert had hidden his money, it would be Jack Packard.”

  “But she was the one who went out to Packard’s place with a horse syringe,” I said. “You can’t blame yourself.”

  There was a tap at the door of the café. It was Jack Packard, standing close to the door for shelter from the cold drizzle that had begun falling about midday. Whitney got up to let him in.

  “They let you go,” I said.

  He unwound the scarf from around his neck and draped it on the back of a chair. “Is there one of those coffees for me?” he said as he unbuttoned his overcoat.

  “I’ll get it.” Whitney went behind the counter.

  “None of that sweet stuff in it,” he said. “I will take the milk.”

  “They didn’t charge you?” I asked.

  “Oh, they charged me. For right now, it’s obstruction of justice and involuntary manslaughter. I understand it might get worse, or better.”

  “So why aren’t you locked up?”

  “I called a bail bondsman and signed a bunch of papers.”

  “Did you get a lawyer?” I asked.

  “Not yet. I’m planning to hire you, if you’re willing.”

  “Sure.” I felt a certain sympathy for Jack despite everything, and, of course, I needed the work.

  “I’m going to pay for your work representing Whitney, too,” he said. “You pad your bill as much as you think you can get away with, and whatever it comes to, I’ll double it.” He looked at Whitney. “I know I’ve behaved badly in all this, and I want to make amends. I wouldn’t have let you go to prison. When they arrested you, I started to come forward, then I read up on your lawyer here, and I thought I’d wait out the preliminary hearing and see what she could do.”

  “Brian and Whitney waited it out in jail,” Brooke said.

  He made a face. “I am sorry about that. I know money can’t make it up to them, but it’s all I’ve got.” He accepted a mug from Whitney and sat back, sipping it. “Of course, Whitney’s going to be a rich woman.”

  “If Robert’s will stands up,” I said. “There’s evidently a physician’s report out there that says he’s incompetent.”

  “We made a video recording of Robert talking to his lawyer about his will and signing it. I don’t think anyone can watch him talking and joking with his lawyer and conclude he didn’t know what he was doing. Plus, as his executor, I plan to hire top-notch legal talent.” He gestured at me with his coffee mug.

  I said, “The first thing I’d advise you to do is find a safer place for the ten million dollars’ worth of gold you’ve got sitting in that wheelbarrow in my backyard.” The comment called for the story about Deeks and me, and how we had found the gold-laden wheelbarrow one night after the Strumpf brothers walked into my living room through a locked door. “It’s been giving me the willies every time I think about it,” I said.

  “I can understand that,” Brian said.

  Jack nodded. “It’s not ten million dollars, though. Just a little less than eight.”

  “Still,” I said.

  Brooke walked out with me to my car. We belted up and were still rubbing our legs to warm them when she said, “Mike asked me to marry him.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yes. We spent last night at a hotel in Alexandria, and…”

  “Double whoa.”

  “We’d followed Nathan to Georgetown and were coming back. It was late, and we were t
ired. You know.”

  “Did you, uh…”

  She colored. “No, and Mike was very decent about it. After we kissed a little, he said he ought to sleep on the other bed, and I let him, though I don’t know that either of us slept much. Getting showered and ready the next morning—of course, neither of us had a change of clothes—was very... I don’t know, domestic.” A certain dreaminess had come into her voice. “For a thirty-two-year-old lawyer, he looks pretty good with his shirt off.”

  “You saw him with his shirt off? Did he, uh, see you…”

  “He did not. Well, not completely off.”

  “Brooke Marshall, you little vixen.”

  “On the way back, we got to talking, and he asked me if I’d marry him.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “I haven’t told him yes.”

  “What have you told him?”

  “I mean, we’ve only been dating two weeks.”

  “You’ve known him the better part of a year.”

  “I wanted a boyfriend! And here I may have a husband, and it’s going to turn my whole life upside down, and who knows what it’s going to do to my friendships and everything.”

  “Sounds like you shouldn’t have used those feminine wiles at full strength.” After a moment I added, “You can probably string him along a good while, you know, kind of like I do Paul.”

  “You treat Paul just awful.”

  “Ah. Well, you could string him along, but try to be nicer about it.” After a pause, I added, “I could try to be nicer, too.”

  She looked at me sideways. “You could, you know. Paul’s a great guy, and he loves you.”

  I sighed, nodded, then put the car in gear. “Let’s go home. I’ve got a little guy there I’ve been neglecting, and Paul’s supposed to be back in town. You want to come over?”

  She shook her head. “Mike’s coming to my place.”

  “Be careful,” I said.

  “How can you be careful when, when…”

  “When you’re in love?”

  She nodded, but her smile was bleak.

  “I know just how you feel,” I said, nodding my head for emphasis. “Just…how…you…feel.”