Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  Her thin back stiffened under the housecoat as she put the kettle on the stove and turned on the gas.

  “The reason I ask, I used your pictures. I’m afraid there was no hiding where I got them.”

  She didn’t look at me, just got down two mugs and the box of tea.

  “He said he saw Bob Shorter the day Bill Hill died and that he was coming out of Bill Hill’s house.”

  She separated the tea bags and put them in the mugs, then turned, finally, one hand on the counter as if to brace herself. “When?” she said. “When did he see him?”

  “About four o’clock. He said Shorter had blood on him.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “No. Do you?”

  She shook her head. Steam began rise from the spout of the kettle.

  “Because you saw both Shorter and Bill Hill after that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyway, I gave Larkin a pretty hard time on the witness stand. My fear is he might take it out on you.”

  The kettle began to whistle. As Melissa took it off the stove and poured the boiling water over the tea bags in our mugs, I said, “I also came by to say thank you. Your pictures were a great help.” We sat at her small Formica table, spoons in our mugs and a saucer between us. Deeks got up from his position in front of the back door and resettled at my feet.

  “How worried are you about your neighbors, Jenn and Val and the rest of them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you’ve still got any reserves of resolve, I could use another favor.”

  She looked so vulnerable, sitting there in her housecoat and looking at me with those wide eyes. I almost couldn’t say it, but I did. “I’d like you to testify about seeing Bill Hill on his patio the evening of the day he died—and I’ve got an idea that could take you off the hook with your neighbors. If I served you with a subpoena, you’d have to go. You could show it to your neighbors, complain about me barging into your home waving papers, put the whole thing on me.”

  It was time to stop talking. I did, waiting for her response. Finally, she said, “You would do that? Force me to testify?”

  I found I couldn’t meet her gaze. “Your testimony could be so important. Shorter walking by the house while Bill was sitting in his backyard . . . those are significant facts. It was halfway through the time period the coroner has established for Bill’s time of death.”

  I expected an argument or at least some kind of response from her, but when none was forthcoming, I spooned my tea bag onto the saucer between us and took a sip from my mug.

  “You know he killed him. Mr. Shorter,” Melissa said into her tea.

  I looked up. “No,” I said. “I know he’s a bad man. I know it, you know it, everyone in the neighborhood knows it. The one thing we don’t know is that he killed Bill Hill.” I reached out to lay a hand over hers. “That’s what trials are for, to decide questions like that. It’s our job to get the facts in front of the jury to give them the best possible basis for the decision they have to make.”

  “Your job.” She said it so softly that I leaned forward, not completely sure of what she’d said.

  I sat back. “Well, yes. My job—but not just mine. It’s the responsibility of all of us as citizens.”

  “Truth, no matter who it’s for or against.” She looked up finally and met my gaze. “I have something to show you.” She took her phone from the pocket of her housecoat. When she’d found what she wanted, she handed it to me. “This was last July.”

  I was looking at a photograph of a man holding an upraised stick over a cringing dog. The man looked like Shorter.

  “The dog ran up to him wagging its tail,” Melissa said. “I was at the window, and I saw it all.”

  The dog looked like some kind of shepherd mix. “Are there more pictures?”

  “Tap the screen.”

  It was a video. I tapped the screen, and the stick came down, catching the dog soundlessly across its back. The picture shook and a woman sobbed as the stick came down five or six more times, the man stepping after the dog as it tried to get away. Finally, the dog stopped moving. The man stood looking down at it, then looked up at the camera and pointed with the ax handle.

  Melissa whispered, “He saw me. He saw me with the phone, taking pictures of him beating that dog.”

  I looked down at Deeks, thinking not only about him but about all the dogs I had treated when working with my father as his veterinary assistant. Quite a few of those had been shepherd mixes.

  “I’ve been so scared.”

  I nodded, feeling a stab of empathy that was almost painful.

  “There’s no reason Mr. Shorter wouldn’t have killed Bill, if he’d felt like it,” Melissa said.

  I sighed out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “No, there’s not,” I said. “Maybe the only question is, did he feel like it?”

  “There’s another question. If Mr. Shorter didn’t do it, who did? Bill didn’t have much in the way of friends—mostly me, and I wasn’t much—but he didn’t have any enemies, either.”

  “Except for Bob Shorter,” I said.

  She nodded. “There’s no one else. You see that, don’t you?”

  I opened my mouth to talk about Shorter’s right to a presumption of innocence, his right to be tried by people with open minds, but they were just platitudes. Applied to Shorter they seemed empty and even wrong. “Did he come to the door that day?” I asked. “Has he tried to hurt you?”

  She shook her head. “When he walks by the house, he does that, though. Still. If he sees me in the window, he stops and points his equalizer at me, just like you saw.”

  “This wasn’t Bill Hill’s dog, was it? This was another one.”

  “Yes.”

  I stood up, and Deeks scrambled to his feet, his toenails audible on the linoleum floor. “I won’t bother you anymore,” I said. “If Larkin Entwistle harasses you at all, if any of them do, give me a call. I’ll take care of it.”

  Melissa studied my face a moment. She nodded, and I left, the subpoena I’d brought with me still in the pocket of my jacket.

  Chapter 16

  Usually, I open my eyes in the morning and I’m awake, but the next morning my customary alertness and energy just weren’t there. I shrugged into a robe and took my bottle of water into the backyard so Deeks could take care of his business without a lot of effort on my part.

  I dropped into one of the patio chairs as Deeks, having paused for a quick piddle, scampered to the chain-link fence that ran along the alley, going from one corner of the backyard to the other as he checked the alley for possible activity. Not seeing anything of interest, he ran back to me, pausing on the way to snatch up a tennis ball he had long since stripped of its felt. He dropped the ball between my feet and backed up alertly. I bent for the ball and flipped it over his head. He jumped, twisting in the air, and almost caught it, then scrambled for it in the dew-soaked grass.

  He brought the ball back, and I tossed it maybe a dozen more times. “You don’t ask for much—do you, buddy?” I asked him. When I stepped toward the door, he ran back toward the far corner of the yard to poop. I waited for him.

  “Good boy,” I told him when he came back.

  His tail wagged, and he grinned at me. Probably he was just panting, his tongue lolling, but it affected me like a grin. When I went in to shower, I felt ready to face the day.

  I was meeting Sarah Fleckman for coffee before court, so I got off the Downtown Expressway at the west end of Carytown. About a block before I got to the Coffee Grounds, I saw a parking spot against the curb and snagged it, then grabbed my purse and walked the rest of the way.

  Inside was the noise of conversation and the smell of coffee. I took my place at the end of a line that reached nearly to the door. Brian Marshall and Whitney Foster were working the counter. I didn’t see Sarah, though my watch said five after eight. She was later than I was, if she was coming.

  She still hadn’t shown up when I go
t to the register.

  “Robin!” Brian said as his eyes focused on me. “How are you?” Whitney, glancing over, gave me a smile and a nod.

  “Pretty well. I’m in court this morning, just dropping by for a cuppa joe to get me started.”

  “Still drink vanilla latte?”

  “I’ll take two of them this morning. Someone may join me.”

  He charged me for the lattes, and put an apple fritter on a paper plate for me. My mouth started to water. “Fuel for the day’s battle,” he said, giving me a wink. “Gratis.”

  It wasn’t easy to manage the paper plate with its glazed ambrosia and the two coffees and still scout for a table. A couple of women started strapping on their purses and satchels, one of which looked like a diaper bag, although there was no evidence of the baby who went with it. I moved over, hovering a bit to make sure no one beat me to the table, then slid onto the bench that ran along the wall as the woman with the diaper bag was sliding out.

  My first victory of the morning, one that put me on my fanny while a half-dozen other people were still standing about with their mugs and their pastries. I tried to savor it while refraining from savoring the apple fritter reflecting light from its thick glaze of sugar. The temptation was inhuman. I broke off a bit of the apple fritter and popped it in my mouth. Oh, wow. I broke off another bit.

  What with wrestling with temptation and indulging my taste buds in an orgy of sensation, I didn’t see Sarah Fleckman until she pulled out the chair across from me and sat down.

  “Robin Starling,” she said.

  “Sarah. Thanks for meeting me.” I wiped my fingers with one of the rather inadequate napkins and held out my hand.

  She took it with a small moue of distaste, and her handshake was limp.

  “I got you coffee,” I said, nodding at the cup. “It’s a vanilla latte.”

  She eyed it a moment before picking it up, then sipped it as if suspecting I might have laced it with battery acid.

  “When we talked on the phone, you seemed to know a lot about me,” I said. “Try a bit of the apple fritter. It’s still warm.”

  “Let’s just get to it, shall we?”

  The fritter did look like a rat had been chewing its way into it. “Okay.” I took a breath. “You need to let Mike go.”

  She eyed me. “Did he ask you to talk to me, or are you taking this on yourself? Why didn’t he call me if he had something to say?”

  “Naked women make men nervous.”

  “He told you about that.”

  “He did.”

  She shook her head.

  “I know it hurts,” I said. “I know it feels unbearable. How can you put someone you’ve loved, someone who’s been so much a part of your life, aside and go on? Believe me—I’ve been there. But you’ve got to do it. He can’t be there for you anymore. You’ve got to accept it. He’s gone.”

  She was fast. A balloon of hot coffee hit me in the face before I even had time to flinch. She was on her feet, her chair overturned on the floor behind her.

  “You don’t know me,” she said into the sudden, ringing silence. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  Actually, I couldn’t tell if the coffeehouse had gone quiet, or if I’d gone deaf. The coffee dripping from my eyelashes blurred everything around me. “The next step is a restraining order,” I said. “You choose.”

  “You’re a meddling, interfering, nosy . . .”

  I stood as the small table in front of me flipped toward me, and I managed to catch it with my free hand, holding my oversize mug high in the other. Sarah’s mug bounced on the tile near my feet, not breaking, but splattering my feet with what was left of her coffee. Sarah was gone. I heard the door jangle as I righted the table and set down my mug.

  Whitney appeared as I was wiping the coffee and vanilla syrup from my eyes with my fingers, looking about me for another of the tiny napkins. Fortunately, Sarah’s vanilla latte had cooled somewhat before her psychotic episode. The coffee was hot, but not scalding, although it was going to leave brown, sticky splotches all over my clothing. I didn’t see how I was going to get cleaned up before court.

  Whitney touched my arm. “We’ve got a sink in the back. We should be able to get most of it off.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.” I worked my way through the crowded coffee shop behind her.

  In the courtroom Ian Maxwell caught my eye and gave me a quizzical glance that reminded me the cleanup had been less than complete, but I only smiled at him. They brought Shorter in, and I pushed aside the folder of photographs I’d been perusing.

  “What happened to you?” he said.

  I still had coffee stains that covered most of one shoulder and spotted the front of my dress, and my face was pink in places, evidently from the heat of the coffee. What little makeup I’d put on that morning was gone.

  “I was interviewing a witness,” I told Shorter. “It didn’t go well.” I didn’t meet his eyes. Having seen Melissa’s video showing what he had done to the shepherd mix, I couldn’t look at his coarse, orangey skin and his yellowed teeth without feeling sick.

  “What witness? What are you looking at there?” He nodded at the folder lying open on the table in front of me. “Photographs of the crime scene?”

  “Photographs of your closet.”

  “What about my closet?”

  I shook my head. “You know your problem, Shorter? You don’t believe in anything.”

  “I believe in myself.”

  “Look where that’s got you.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Do you know why that Biggs fellow hates you so much? He knows you’ll do whatever you need to do to win—break the rules, violate people’s rights, do whatever you need to. You acknowledge no constraints whatsoever.”

  “He might hate me because I got him in bad with the judge. I made it look like he was suborning perjury.”

  “Sure. Whatever you need to do,” Shorter said.

  “It’s not about winning.”

  “No?”

  “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for or against.”

  His lip curled. “What’s that, your motto?”

  “It seems to be. I’ve found myself saying it a lot lately.”

  The bailiff opened the door, and the jury began filing in. “I need to concentrate,” I said. I pulled the folder of police photographs toward me again. As I flipped through them, I had an uneasy feeling of something out of place, but I couldn’t bring it into focus. The door behind the judge’s bench opened, finally, and we stood as the bailiff proclaimed, “Oyez, Oyez.”

  We sat, and Maxwell called his first witness of the day.

  Police Detective Ray Hernandez came to the stand wearing a houndstooth sports jacket and a shirt with an open collar. In response to Maxwell’s preliminary questions, he told us his degree was in criminal justice. He had been a police officer for sixteen years and had been a detective in the homicide division for eleven. He had been involved in between 100 and 150 homicide investigations.

  After establishing Hernandez’s bona fides as a police detective, Maxwell went over the crime scene with him, going into more detail than he had with Officer Warren. Hernandez had been present when photographs of Bill Hill’s living room were taken. The photographs showed Hill’s body lying facedown on the floor, only partially on an area rug. They showed the position of the body in relation to the chair he had evidently been sitting in when he was stabbed. They showed the position of the murder weapon in relation to the body. Most damningly from my client’s point of view, they showed the single word scrawled in blood on the worn wood floor: Shorter. Each eight-by-ten photograph was identified individually as fairly and accurately representing the crime scene when Hernandez first saw it. Each was marked as a prosecution exhibit, was introduced into evidence, and was passed to the jury. It took a long time.

  Maxwell next used Hernandez to introduce the murder we
apon and the incriminating fingerprints found on its handle, something he’d also done in the preliminary.

  “This is some kind of paring knife?” Maxwell said, holding it up.

  “Yes.”

  “Part of a set?”

  “We think so. We seized a number of similar kitchen knives when we searched the defendant’s house.”

  “Are these the knives?”

  They all had the same handles as the murder weapon. Maxwell had them marked and introduced into evidence.

  “I don’t notice a paring knife among these you took from the defendant’s house,” Maxwell said.

  “We couldn’t find one.”

  “Going back to the paring knife you found by the victim’s body. You said there was blood on it?”

  “There was. We assumed it was the victim’s blood, but of course we turned the knife over to the office of the chief medical examiner for DNA profiling.”

  Eventually, the testimony moved to the search of Shorter’s house, centering on the shirt and the pair of pants bunched up against the wall where Shorter’s hanging clothes mostly obscured them. Maxwell moved to have the shirt and pants admitted into evidence.

  “Any objection?” Judge Cooley asked me.

  “I’d like to ask a few questions on voir dire.” A voir dire examination was to determine the admissibility of evidence. I wasn’t going to be able to get the clothes excluded, I knew, but I was getting antsy sitting beside Shorter doing nothing while the evidence poured down on us like a dump truck’s load of dirt.

  Judge Cooley looked at Maxwell, shrugged. “Very well.”

  As I replaced Maxwell at the lectern, the judge gave me a second, sharp look over the rims of his glasses.

  “Are you all right?” he asked me.

  “Quite all right, Your Honor.”

  His mouth worked, either in amusement or in an attempt to get his dentures back into place. “You look like you decided to wear your coffee this morning.”

  I smiled sourly. “Fortunately, the woman I was interviewing didn’t have a gun.”

  In the jury box, Andrew Hartman let out a bray of laughter. I was beginning to find his sense of humor a lot less amusing. I turned to Hernandez. “What did you do to determine whether the clothes you found on the floor were actually the defendant’s?” I asked.