Against the Law

by Jay Brandon

  There was one thing that had kept him from saying those words. Amy’s eyes. Amy relentlessly focused on him during the whole discussion. She had been pleading with him. Edward tried to remember if anyone else’s need for him had ever been so apparent.

  But maybe it was her own secret behind that liquid stare. Amy had something else to tell him, something she wouldn’t share with anyone else.

  Mike said, ‘You’ve got to get her to talk to me.’

  ‘I know, Mike.’

  They sat in the living room of the house they shared. It was very much a bachelor pad. Edward sat on the sofa that was at least third-hand. Mike had pulled over his favorite chair, which he might have been hauling around ever since his divorce; a padded monstrous recliner of some manufactured material that didn’t even make an effort at pretending to be leather. Worn carpet on the floor might, at one time, have been white but now there was no telling. The blessing of familiarity was that they didn’t notice their surroundings.

  Mike tossed a manila folder onto the coffee table. ‘That’s my investigation file. See what I’ve got after two weeks.’

  Edward opened it and found what he’d expected: police reports. Firstly, one by the initial patrol officer on the scene, then supplemental reports by detectives who’d followed up by the actual investigation, such as it had been. They noted that Amy had refused to talk to them, which was smart but didn’t look like what an innocent person would do.

  ‘I talked to the neighbors myself,’ Mike said. ‘The ones the cops talked to plus more. I looked for surveillance videos from somewhere close by, maybe a gas station, but there wasn’t any place close enough. It was just a house on a street, a few blocks off Richmond. And nobody saw anything. One neighbor saw Amy on the front porch, two heard something that might have been a gunshot, but nobody’s clear on the time. Nobody had ever seen your sister there before.’

  ‘She said they were trying to keep it discreet.’

  ‘Yeah, well, they succeeded.’

  Left unspoken was what Mike would have said about any other client. Or maybe nobody ever saw her there, because she was never there before that day. Maybe she’s lying. Edward heard it.

  ‘So now we’ve got to find another suspect,’ Mike continued. ‘I know it, you know it. No one obvious presents themselves so far, so I need to start digging deeper. The victim’s bank accounts, credit card statements—’

  ‘Paul. The victim’s name is Paul Shilling. He was my brother-in-law for four years.’

  ‘Those are two of the few things I do know. I’ve got lots of other questions. Did he go out, did he have girlfriends? Maybe one with a jealous boyfriend? Or was it financial? Did he owe the wrong person?’

  Edward tried to think. He’d known Paul well enough to play tennis with him, have a couple of just-guys lunches, but never a close talk. Paul had seemed to him often preoccupied, ready to move on to the next thing.

  ‘How about professional?’ Mike suggested.

  ‘Professional jealousy,’ Edward offered. ‘Paul was a medical researcher; he could have been involved in any number of projects with other doctors. Maybe someone thought he took too much credit or wanted to take more than they deserved themselves.’

  ‘Sounds a little TV-movie-ish to be a real motive.’ Mike shrugged.

  ‘We’re talking stuff that could lead to a Nobel Prize. And I’m not saying it was a calculated murder. Maybe an argument, tempers get out of hand …’

  ‘He was shot, Edward. It wasn’t a situation where someone punched him and he fell and hit his head.’

  ‘Yes, but it was his gun, it was already there. Maybe he had it out for some reason when this colleague dropped by unexpectedly—’

  ‘Yes, just sitting there cleaning his gun, while waiting for his estranged wife to show up to go to this gala. I can picture it.’

  ‘OK, it was planned then. They were on their way to an awards dinner, don’t forget, Paul was getting some kind of award. That could stir jealousy if someone else thought he deserved some of the credit and wasn’t getting it.’

  ‘Most of the time when someone gets killed it’s by someone with whom they’re intimately related. I like a jealous lover much better, if we can find—’

  ‘I prefer women myself,’ Edward said.

  Mike laughed. But bringing up the topic of women brought Amy to mind. They sat there thinking the same thing, that the estranged wife was always the most likely suspect.

  ‘And your sister keeps dodging me. Claims other appointments, she’s busy with her practice, blah blah. In my experience,’ Mike said carefully, sitting back, ‘an innocent person accused of a crime is eager to talk to the investigator. She wants to convince everybody. I grant you, I don’t have that much experience of working for an innocent suspect, but still. She’s hiding something, and she doesn’t want to share it with me. You need to talk to her.’

  Edward let the useless paper fall back into the file.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  Edward later realized he and Mike had forgotten the victim in all this planning. But Paul Shilling had been part of his family for four years, part of their lives much longer than that. He and Amy had started dating in medical school, had gotten married while residents. As a student, Paul had worked with Dr Hall as his research assistant. They had continued that association after Paul graduated. The research became more important, as evidenced by the award Paul was supposed to receive the night of his killing. That had been for independent work of his own, not something to do with their father. Edward didn’t know enough about it to know whether it was important, but the award seemed to answer that.

  For that matter, he knew very little about the nature of Amy’s and Paul’s marriage. That had evolved mostly during the time Edward had been estranged from the family.

  Someone had felt strongly enough about Paul to kill him. If not Amy, someone else. Edward had a lot of work to do; getting to know about his family member’s life posthumously, after it was too late to know him as a person.

  Edward knew he needed to talk to Amy very soon. There was something she didn’t want him or anyone else to know, and he had to approach that delicately. But he learned Amy’s secret a different way, from the prosecution.

  Amy’s indictment, when it came, was a shock of the horrifying variety. The D.A. didn’t indict her for plain murder. The indictment charged she had caused the death of Paul Shilling in the course of committing burglary of his home.

  ‘Burglary?’ Amy shouted over the phone. ‘Burglary? That’s ridiculous. I was invited. The door was unlocked. He was expecting me.’

  If only we could prove that, her brother thought.

  ‘Oh, my God, Edward, capital murder? This is insane. Are they—? Are they going to ask for a death sentence?’

  ‘No. I’m sure not. They couldn’t possibly go that far. Even this charge is ridiculous. I’m going to go talk to the prosecutor, find out how this craziness happened. It’s probably just something they did as a bargaining tool. I’m sure I can argue them back down.’ Back down to murder, he thought wildly. The stakes had changed radically. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added lamely.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Amy’s voice was a little girl’s again.

  ‘Just sit tight. Let me see what I can do.’

  ‘OK.’ Her voice was so tiny he could barely hear her.

  It felt so strange to walk back into the District Attorney’s offices. Edward had been here many times, starting with when he’d worked in this office for five years. Walking those halls today, he remembered that feeling of being at the center of power, learning details of investigations, holding power over the lives of hundreds of defendants – but so casually that the young assistant DA’s could joke about a defendant’s stunned expression, when a jury came back with a sentence three times higher than anyone had expected. Actual years the dumbass defendant would spend in prison, but a joke to the prosecutors.

  But the real feeling of power here didn’t come from that insider knowl
edge or the ability to make or deny plea bargain offers that would alter entire families’ lives. It was the power of confidence in one’s own abilities that permeated these offices. Nearly every prosecutor was a trial lawyer, in court every day, going to trial every week. Trial work was a very specialized skill. You could plot out the course of a trial long before the first potential juror was questioned, which required devising long-term strategies very much like battles, but a trial never followed that well-thought-out course. There were always surprises: unknown defense witnesses to cross-examine, rulings by trial judges excluding important evidence, a prosecution witness telling a story to the jury differently from what she’d ever told the prosecutor. And the trial prosecutor had to deal with those unexpected developments. The best of them became quite expert at that. Never letting a jury see you flustered, never losing sight of the goal of conviction.

  Of course they all knew who the best trial lawyers in their office were and there was constant effort to change or maintain those rankings. But part of being a great prosecutor was projecting an air of indifference, as if unaware of any competition, playing a different game at a different level from everyone else.

  By the time Edward left he had been one of those elite. He had walked at ease through these halls, usually with a little smile on his way to court. A fellow prosecutor he dated for a while mentioned that smile to him one day; one night, actually, while they were in bed. She found that smile attractive, though some people might take it for arrogance. ‘You look like you’re having fun. Like you have a secret you can’t wait to surprise someone with. Or like you’re on your way to take a test you know you’re going to ace. It’s sexy.’ She’d whispered the last sentence, then demonstrated how his smile excited her. Edward remained grateful to her for this observation. He’d known about the self-confidence, felt that every day, but the smile told him something else. It was fun. He loved his work, yes, but it also gave him a sense of who he was.

  Now he was back and all those senses – competition, confidence, whirring brains trying to think three steps ahead of other smart lawyers – churned around him in this building.

  When he walked into David Galindo’s office, David was on the phone, waving a hand for Edward to enter while drawling into the handset, ‘I’m sure the client doesn’t like the offer, Cindy. If he liked it, it would be a pretty weak offer, wouldn’t it? And I don’t have a weak case … Well, if you can prove that, good on you … OK. See you in court. Hello, Edward.’

  David didn’t rise or offer his hand. David was lanky and tall, wore suits well. He was usually a languid presence, as if he weren’t putting any effort into thought. But his trial record showed otherwise. He and Edward had been rising through the ranks of the D.A.’s office at the same levels when Edward worked here. Edward had been promoted to felony first but then David, after an impressive trial win, had jumped ahead of him. A while after that they had made first chair simultaneously, a draw. Not long after that Edward had left the competition behind to enter private practice. David was a senior prosecutor now, a veteran with an impressive string of trial wins. From the ease with which he lounged, David enjoyed his position very much.

  He did give his former colleague the courtesy of looking straight at him, saying, ‘Man, I am sorry.’

  ‘Thanks, David.’

  David shook his head. ‘Prison. I couldn’t believe that shit. Prison time for a lawyer? For a little low-level screw-up like you did? I couldn’t believe they worked so hard to turn it into a burglary. Make it a little possession case, a misdemeanor; maybe even let you keep your license while you’re on probation. That’s what I told people. Anyway, man, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Edward repeated. ‘And now this,’ he added, shifting topics.

  ‘Now this,’ David agreed. He had Amy’s file on the desk in front of him. It was surprisingly thick, much more so than Edward would have thought.

  ‘What the hell, David? Capital murder? Seriously?’

  David sounded apologetic. ‘Well, you know, high profile doctor victim, investigation on the front page for days …’ He got up and closed his office door. When he returned to his desk he kept his voice low.

  ‘Edward. If you repeat any of this I’ll say you’re lying and I’ll be believed. But here’s what’s going on. It’s playing to the public. It’s the appearance of equal justice. This decision was made at the top. Julia decided’ – Julia Lipscomb, the three-term District Attorney of Harris County – ‘we have to make this a capital murder and seek a death sentence. It’s about—’

  ‘Death?’ Edward felt his voice skittering higher.

  David held out a placating hand. ‘You’ll win at punishment, of course. No jury’s going to give your sister a death sentence. But we have to ask for it. Look.’ He leaned back a little. ‘If I seek a death sentence against a twenty-year-old poor black kid, who shot a convenience store clerk without really meaning for it to come out that way, how can I not against an educated rich white woman who planned and carried out an execution methodically?’

  ‘Execution?’ Edward sat stunned.

  But David was hurrying relentlessly on. ‘That’s what I mean about equal justice. This office can’t keep the public’s trust if it looks like our decisions are based on bad reasons, like race or social class. We have to be just as hard on people like your sister.’

  ‘Everybody knows our decisions are based on race and social class.’

  ‘But we can’t give anybody proof of it,’ David answered. He sat back in silence for a moment, maybe waiting for Edward to bring him some counterargument, but Edward couldn’t find anything to say. His mind couldn’t recover from the essential fact. Knowing the District Attorney’s Office was implacably determined to ask for a death sentence left him limp in his chair.

  ‘You couldn’t possibly have any punishment evidence,’ he finally mustered. In the punishment phase of a capital murder trial the prosecution had to prove the defendant was likely to commit future acts of violence. The State tried to do that by showing other criminal acts the defendant had committed. They didn’t have any evidence like that against Amy. She’d never been arrested before.

  ‘But we do,’ David said. He wasn’t gloating. He sounded sad, continuing to give an old friend one piece of bad news after another. He waved a hand at his file, indicating its thickness. ‘When it came to committing burglaries, this wasn’t your sister’s first rodeo. Far from it.’

  He offered the file to Edward, who opened it and leafed slowly through the pages. There was a tab labelled: Other Offenses. Edward turned straight to that and found a series of police reports about burglaries, from as much as ten years earlier, all with an unknown suspect.

  ‘Here’s the bottom line, Edward; Amy’s a serial burglar. She’s been breaking into her friends’ houses for years. These cases were all unsolved until she was arrested and her fingerprints got put into the system. Then the computer started pinging like crazy. Now, some of these we couldn’t prove as burglaries. I mean, they were her friends, like I said; her fingerprints naturally would have been there. But not in some of the spots where the prints were found, like on the floor under a bed or on the jewelry case. Or in a house where the owner said Amy hadn’t been inside in months before the burglary.

  ‘She probably did it for kicks at first. But the point is, when she needed to slip into her estranged husband’s house and kill him, she had the skills to do it. So we do have punishment evidence.

  ‘But like I say, you’ll win at punishment,’ David continued, waving a hand generously. ‘She’s not a danger to anyone, as long as you’re not her cheating husband. We know about the other cases, but I’m not even sure you could call them burglaries. It doesn’t look like she ever stole anything. So they’re just trespassing cases. No one’s going to give her a death sentence for that. Maybe she wasn’t a great person to have as a friend, but not dangerous.’

  Mad, bad and dangerous to know, Edward thought irrelevantly. Someone’s description of Lord Byron
. No, Amy wasn’t that. But she wasn’t the sister he’d thought he knew well, either.

  ‘You know you’ll lose at punishment, but you’re still going to ask for a death sentence,’ Edward said, still hearing that hollow tone in his voice.

  ‘I have to, Edward. You know that. It’s not personal.’

  Edward looked at him and David shrugged, an acknowledgment of the inanity of his last remark.

  There was one more exchange on Edward’s way out.

  As David walked him through the halls he said, ‘Are you really going to try this thing yourself? Didn’t you have some problem with the bar?’

  ‘Yeah. I paid my tab.’

  David laughed. ‘Served out a probation of your license suspension already, or something like that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Edward said again, whilst thinking, something like that. But actually nothing like that at all.

  SIX

  Later, when Edward began thinking clearly, he was struck in retrospect by David’s offhand remark about Amy’s ‘cheating husband.’ Did he have some evidence of that? Had infidelity by Paul caused the breakup of Amy’s marriage? If so, that was a motive for the murder, one of the best.

  So forget capital murder, forget these other crimes. This case still came down to Edward having to prove that Amy hadn’t murdered her husband. Even though they were in the process of divorce and she was found next to his body, with his blood all over her and the murder weapon a few feet away.

  That was probably why he and David hadn’t talked about the case itself. It still looked like a lay-down for the prosecution. And maybe there was a good reason for that. Maybe no alternative theory worked because police had arrested the right suspect. Edward sat and thought hard about that. If this was any other client, if he was still a lawyer, he’d have acknowledged her likely guilt by now.

  So he needed to look at those other cases. Once Edward started looking through the police reports and witness statements David had given him, Edward found himself fascinated. The burglaries seemed unmotivated and without pattern. One couple – Edward vaguely recognized their names as being friends of Amy’s – had called police to report that they’d returned from a weekend trip to find someone had entered their home and apparently stayed there for some time. How did they know? Because the wife was a secret smoker and the burglar had found her hidden cache of cigarettes and smoked several, leaving the butts and ashes in a cereal bowl on a coffee table. The couple also felt someone had been in their bed, because of the rumpled state of the sheets, which was not how they had left them. From that one, Edward even picked up a hint that the homeowners suspected sexual activity in their absence. As if a degenerate Goldilocks had broken in to spread her vices around their home.