Stash made his usual closely reasoned, methodical wrap-up. He focused on lies, evasions, inconsistencies, fingerprints, the apparent financial motive—and of course the bloody boots and clothes. Then I made my spiel. I focused on the murder weapon. No bloody fingerprints on the bokken meant no proof that Miles Dane had committed the murder. I suggested that the clothes could have been stolen by the intruder. Perhaps, I hinted darkly, they were even planted. It was a pretty good speech, and an utter waste of breath.
Judge Evola ruled from the bench without even bothering to take a recess. He was hoping, clearly, that the armchair quarterbacks at Court TV would label him as a Bold and Decisive Jurist. I noticed that he didn’t address the room generally, but looked straight into the TV camera in the back of the room. “This court finds probable cause to bind Miles Dane over pending trial for the murder of Diana Dane. Trial in this matter is hereby set for January 2 of next year.”
Then he stood up and swept out the door.
Fifteen
Lisa and I sat down for dinner at my cramped little house. I live on a road that dead-ends into the railroad tracks, most of my neighbors being drawn from the upper echelons of the working class. It’s a fine little house, nondescript, clapboard-sided, with a small front porch that suits a man of plain tastes. I’ve been thinking for some years that I’ll get a nicer place soon, and so I haven’t hung any art on the walls, and my bedroom windows are still covered with bedsheets. There are stacks of books everywhere that I keep meaning to organize or shelve or sell, but never get around to. At the rate I’m going, I may be here forever. But it still has an air of the temporary about it.
Lisa seemed eager to put on a domestic show, so I lounged around watching the NewsHour on public TV and nursing a Diet Coke—which substituted for the triple scotch I would have been working on back in the old days—while she chattered about little things and cooked spaghetti.
I thought a change of mood might be nice, so when it looked like she was about ready to serve up the food, I rummaged around for some candles in the distant hope that I might have acquired some while sleepwalking. After coming up dry on the candles, I drew from my extensive collection of two classical CDs and put some Bach on the stereo. Lisa had set the table with linen napkins and my finest CorningWare.
After putting the spaghetti on the table, she took out a bottle of nonalcoholic sparkling grape juice, popped the cork, and poured it into my two wineglasses. I own about as much crystal as I do classical music.
Raising a glass, she said, “I appreciate your helping me out. I really just . . . I didn’t know where else to go.”
“Well, you seem to be doing well. I’m glad you’re here.”
She made an attempt at a smile and took a sip of her grape juice. It struck me that there was something a little pathetic about drunks trying to stage a celebration with fake alcoholic beverages. But maybe it was just the feeling I kept having of all those years I’d wasted that colored my thinking on smaller things.
“I don’t know why, Dad, but right now I’m feeling better than I have in years.” She reached across the table and grabbed my arm. “I feel secure with you. Safe.”
Something warm moved inside my chest.
“Back in New York, I always felt like . . .” She frowned. “You know in those cartoons how Wile E. Coyote always goes off the edge of the cliff and then stands there for a minute in mid-air? Then as soon as he looks down and realizes there’s nothing underneath him, he starts to fall? That’s how I felt in New York, as though if I ever looked down at my feet, even for a fraction of a second, I’d start to fall.”
“Well, if you can’t plant your feet on the ground in Pickeral Point, Michigan,” I said, “then you can’t do it anywhere.”
She smiled wanly.
“So you want to tell me about New York, Lisa? About what happened there?”
She looked thoughtful. “No. Not yet.” Suddenly her face changed, and her voice went enthusiastic. “Look, let’s stay away from depressing things. Let’s talk about the case.”
“That’s not depressing?”
She grinned. “You know it’s not.”
I grinned back. She was right. There was something bracing about being behind the eight ball. It was where I did my best work.
Her grin faded. “So look, you think he’s guilty?”
I went into sage mode: “When I first started practicing law, Lisa, I made a big sport out of guessing who was innocent and who was guilty. But at a certain point, I realized that it was messing with my head to do that. You can torture yourself to death trying to figure out whether the people you represent really deserve to be zealously defended or not, but the truth is, you never really know. So eventually I figured out that the best thing I could do was to put that question in a little box, lock it away in some dark corner of my brain, and just do my job as vigorously as possible.”
Lisa studied my face with her large, intelligent brown eyes. Finally, she tilted her head to the side, her lips curling up slightly at the corners, and said, “Bull. Shit.”
I laughed a little. “Well, it sounds good, doesn’t it?”
She kept looking at me with the half smile on her face. “You want to know what I think?”
“I’d love to know what you think.”
“I think he’s innocent.”
I twirled my spaghetti around my fork, put it in my mouth. It was spectacularly awful. “Mm,” I said. “Terrific!”
She watched my face as I chewed. “That bad, huh?”
“No, seriously.” I forced down another mouthful of what was by any measure the saltiest dish I’d ever eaten in my life.
Lisa took a bite, spit it out on the plate. “Oh! God!”
“For a small Michigan town,” I said, “Pickeral Point has some very nice restaurants. Might I offer to take you out to one of them?”
“Well, the good news, Dad, you can see I didn’t fritter away all the tuition money you sent me on foie gras and cooking lessons from famous French guys.”
We ended up eating at the Pickeral Point Inn, Pickeral Point’s intermittently best restaurant. The Inn was Pickeral Point’s one tourist attraction, a relatively well known hotel built around a quaint old river house. It had a nice bar where some of our more affluent rummies repaired at the end of the day, and a restaurant that not only had real china and real linen, but food that was well worth the money—provided, of course, that the cook, Jimmy, was sober. Which he was, mostly.
“Okay, back to this innocence-versus-guilt thing,” Lisa said, after we took our seats by the window. Across the dark river, jets of flame spouted from one of the cracking towers at the Sunoco refinery, reflecting in muted blues and yellows on the river.
“Let me play devil’s advocate,” I said. “His story sounds ridiculous. The forensic evidence is pretty damning. He apparently has a history of violence. He’s in desperate financial shape and derives a financial benefit from her death. Tell me where you see the light of innocence shining down on this man.”
Lisa looked thoughtful. “Gut instinct.”
“That’s it?” I laughed. “Woman’s intuition, something like that?”
Lisa poked listlessly at her fish. She didn’t seem hungry. “I watched his face. He just didn’t seem to be acting. I think he’s really suffering. If it were a crime of passion . . .” She shrugged. “Look, some guy who routinely beats his wife goes one step too far, then out come the rain clouds and he’s boo-hooing like a baby because he killed the love of his life. That happens all the time, I know. But there’s no indication here that he ever beat her. From what you tell me, there are no police reports, no rumors, nothing. And the way he talks about her? No, I think he worshiped her. This would have had to come totally out of the blue.”
“There’s financial motive.”
“A fifty-grand life insurance policy? Give me a break. That’s peanuts for a guy like him. Financial trouble or no, fifty thousand will barely tide him over for another year.”
�
�Okay, look, my gut says the same thing. But sometimes my gut is wrong. And in this case, I think I have no alternative but to put my gut in that little box I was talking about. Otherwise, I’ll drive myself crazy. Same applies to you.” I looked at her for a long moment. “And I don’t have to tell you what happens when people like you and I start letting our emotions get out of control.”
Lisa shook her head. “That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m saying is this: If you really believe your client is innocent, you’re going to pursue a different strategy.”
“With the evidence in front of us, we’ve only got two real choices. We try to hire some experts to shoot enough holes in their forensic evidence so they’ll give us a manslaughter plea. Which seems unlikely right now. Or we fight this thing yard by yard by yard and hope we squeak by on reasonable doubt.”
“I think you’re missing one alternative.”
I let out a long, slow breath. “Look,” I said sympathetically, “I know where you’re heading. What if somebody else did it? Right? All we have to do is uncover the malefactor and, voilà, free man, the trumpets shall sound, blah blah blah.”
Lisa’s eyes flashed. “Why is that so dumb?”
“It’s not dumb. But speaking as an experienced lawyer I have to tell you that it’s the great fool’s gold of the novice criminal lawyer. It just never happens. Defense attorneys never, ever, ever pull that off. Why not? Because the police have already ruled out all the obvious suspects. Law enforcement has vast investigative resources. They can put street cops up and down every single street in Pickeral Point asking every single citizen of the town if they saw such-and-such on a certain night. They can serve search warrants, they can raid houses, they have criminalists and detectives and medical examiners and laboratories.”
“And?”
“Okay. For the sake of argument. Just supposing that somebody else actually did it . . . do you have any idea how expensive it will be to hire a full-time team of investigators?”
“Let’s just brainstorm,” Lisa said. Suddenly, I can’t say why, but I got the impression she’d been leading me by the nose all night. I just wasn’t sure quite where she was taking me.
“Brainstorm away.”
“If he’s innocent, then why did he cook up such a bogus explanation?”
“You tell me. I can see you’ve given this more thought than I have.”
“He’s protecting someone.”
I smiled in what I hoped wouldn’t appear to be a condescending way. “Sort of like in Perry Mason?”
Hey, Dad, we’re brainstorming.”
“Okay, okay. Keep talking.”
“I think that dimwit Leon Prouty is telling the truth. I think he did see somebody coming out of Miles’s house. And I think Miles knows that person, knows why he was there, and knows he killed his wife. But for some reason he feels he owes loyalty to that person.”
It was an appealing thought. Of course, the American landscape is littered with bankrupt defense attorneys who have bought in to similar stories. I didn’t want to disappoint Lisa. But at the same time, I couldn’t afford to let myself believe in a fairy story—no matter how appealing it seemed.
“Okay,” I said. “Just for the sake of argument. You’re me. What do I send my investigators off to look for?”
“Start with his background. There’s somebody out there that Miles owes. A friend, a business partner, a relative, somebody from his past. I’d talk to his family, his friends, his editors, whoever. Even talk to her family. It’s back there somewhere. The killer’s back there somewhere in his past.”
I didn’t want to let Lisa down. But there was reality to consider. I held up my hands, palms out. “Lisa, I don’t mean to rain on your parade. I really don’t. But here’s my reality. I have to fund this trial on the price I can get for a fancy shotgun. Every dime we spend running down fruitless leads is a dime we can’t spend on an expert witness. And if we’re going to win this case, it’s going to be with expert witnesses.”
Lisa’s eyes glittered as she stared straight at me.
“Expert witnesses, Lisa. For a price, they testify that DNA testing is unreliable, that blood spatter analysis is voodoo, that photographs can be faked, that white is black and black is white. And then, maybe the jury buys reasonable doubt.”
Lisa’s brown eyes just kept digging into me.
“What?” I said.
“You’ve got me,” she said. “I’ll be your investigator.”
“I have a lot of other things that I could more fruitfully employ your talents on. If we can put together some compelling motions to exclude evidence, we might be able to get some real traction here.”
“Come on, Dad. Just give me two weeks. What’s the harm? Then I’ll write as many briefs as you want. Look, two weeks ago you didn’t even have me working for you at all!”
I chewed my fish for a while.
“Dad!” She took on that pained, adolescent, wheedling tone that turns fathers into spineless, acquiescent wretches.
I sighed. “A week,” I said. “But that’s it.”
Lisa leaned across the table and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re the best father in the world!”
For the pleasure—however unearned—that rushed through me during that brief moment, I would gladly have let Miles Dane rot forever in the lowest, hottest dungeon of hell.
“First thing tomorrow,” I said, “let’s talk to Miles. That will help give you some focus.”
Sixteen
Because Kerry County is not exactly a hotbed of crime, the entire prison population of the county is housed in a wing of the sheriff’s department. The jail itself amounts to a small block of cells, a cafeteria, a tiny exercise yard surrounded by a high, barbed-wire-topped fence, and a dank, windowless room lawyers use to interview their clients. At ten o’clock the next morning we were sitting across the table from Miles in the interview room at the jail.
“Miles,” I began, “as we start to put this case together, we’re going to need to develop a sort of profile of you. A sort of history or time line of your life. Can you fill us in?”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Birth.”
Miles shrugged. “I was born here in Pickeral Point. My parents were, I guess you say, poor working stiffs. Daddy worked the docks, swept floors at the salt factory, that kind of thing. Mama was a cleaning lady. I spent my whole childhood with my nose in a book. Couldn’t wait to get out of this crummy little town.
“Dropped out of school at sixteen. Traveled around the country. Washed cars, bussed tables, plucked chickens, drove trucks. Just general low-wage labor. And all the time I was writing. I’d roll up in some little burg, get work, pile up a little cash, quit, write a couple short stories or half a novel or whatever, send it off to a publisher, run out of dough, move on to another town about the time the rejection notices started showing up. That lasted three, four years. Ended up in New York in ’68, finally sold my first book. Met Diana. Got married.”
“Okay, let’s hold it right there,” I said. “Exactly when did these last things occur?”
“My first book? I sold that about a year after I got to New York. Sixty-nine, I guess.”
“And you married Diana when?”
“Same year. Sixty-nine.”
“How did her family react to your marriage?”
He shrugged. “Let’s just say they weren’t overjoyed.”
“Practically speaking, how did that play out?”
He nodded, face expressionless. “Shunning, that’s the old-fashioned word for it. They just cut her off. Just like that . . .” He snapped his fingers. “. . . she’s a nonperson.”
“All these years she’s been cut off? No tearful reconciliation, nothing like that?”
Miles looked annoyed. “Why all these questions about her family? They’re a bunch of rich, self-involved jerks. End of story. Anyway, they’re all dead now. Except Roger.”
“Roger?”
“Her brother.
Real first-class creep. Groton, Harvard, Cambridge, Mr. Culture, Mr. World Traveler. Never worked a lick in his life, never did anything of note, but he still thinks he’s God’s gift to planet earth.” He stared thoughtfully into the distance.
“What?” I said.
“I don’t know. Families are strange, aren’t they? He treated her like crap, but she always had a soft spot for him. Always.” A crease formed between his eyebrows. “No, that’s not quite right. It was more of a love-hate thing. There was some kind of real close connection, but also some anger.”
“How about after he, what, shunned her?”
He nodded. “She didn’t talk about him that much afterward. But any time she did, she got this funny look in her eye.” He shrugged. “Blood’s thicker than water, huh?”
“Was there any financial impact when they cut her off? Did they disown her?”
“She had a modest trust fund that they couldn’t touch, but otherwise, yeah, she walked away from their money. Can we move on to something else? The subject of her family puts me in a bad mood.”
“Okay. So you’re married, living in New York. What then?”
He smiled fondly. “Happiest time of my life. I was working, getting published. This was my big dream, you know? The books weren’t exactly selling like hotcakes. But that was okay with me. I never expected to be . . .” He smiled ironically, waved a manacled hand around the jail room. “Never expected to end up some lucky, successful bastard like I am now, showered with blessings.”
“Why’d you guys move back here?”
“Just got fed up with New York. This was back in the early seventies, when the city had declared bankruptcy and all that. Stop on the street for thirty seconds, some punk would steal your wallet and spray paint his gang tag on your nuts. When I finally sold The Bust for big money, I sort of figured, let’s get while the getting’s good.”
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