“Whatever it takes.”
This wasn’t a clear license to introduce Blair, but it gave me room to do what I needed to do. “Your Honor,” I said in my courtroom voice, “the defense calls Miles Dane.”
The journalists in the back of the room all stirred. This was it, the money shot, the part they’d all been waiting for.
Miles walked slowly to the stand. He looked small, tired, drawn, old. Not the romantic figure he used to cut. No black clothes, no cowboy boots, no shoulder holster. His white shirt was too big around the neck, and his blue suit hung a little low in the cuff. He looked like an accountant who was coming due for retirement. The only thing left was those haunted gray eyes.
I walked into the middle of the room, waited until every eye was on me. I could feel the Court TV camera focused on my back. I paused for a moment. My heart had been beating wildly, but now, suddenly I felt calm and strong, as though all the energy of those thousands and thousands of eyeballs had just been sucked into my chest, filling me with certainty and power.
“Mr. Dane,” I said. My voice was loud, slow, grave, strong. “You are a liar. Aren’t you?”
Miles’s eyes widened. I don’t know what he expected me to say, but it damn sure wasn’t that.
His mouth opened and closed.
“I mean seriously,” I said. I put my hand in my pocket, strolled toward him, eased my tone into a conversational gear. “Come on. ’Fess up. You’re a big fat stinking liar, am I right?”
“What?” He had finally managed to find a voice.
“Your story. The mysterious and nefarious cat burglar sneaks into your office . . .” I widened my eyes comically and wiggled my fingers in the air. “. . . and he steals this stick and then silently creams your wife for fifteen minutes and then jumps nimbly out the second-floor window without leaving so much as a dent in the ground? Give me a break. It’s the most cockamamie bunch of baloney I’ve ever heard in my life. Wouldn’t you agree?”
He stared at me. Judge Evola stared at me. The jury stared. Even Stash Olesky was surprised—and he knew I didn’t mind throwing a curveball when I was behind in the count.
I strolled over to the clerk’s seat, picked up State’s Exhibit 37, that black piece of wood carved in the shape of a samurai sword, walked down the center aisle between the pews until I reached the back of the room. The camera panned as I walked, and everybody in the room turned their heads as I walked past them.
Everybody in the room except one: Sitting on a chair next to the door was a man who appeared to be asleep. He wore a green Starter jacket, jeans, and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap pulled down low over his face. “Hey!” I said. “Are we boring you?”
The man didn’t stir.
“Wake up!” I poked him with the murder weapon.
No answer.
My face gave the impression that the sleeping man had really pissed me off. I rared back, then swung the murder weapon, smashing the man in the head with the stick. The stick made a resounding whack, and the man’s hat flew through the air. People gasped.
It was a dummy, of course, leaned up against the wall by the kid who’d given me the ride in his VW. I’d given him twenty bucks for his trouble. But still, for a second there, it had looked pretty real.
I whacked the dummy savagely again. The sound resounded through the room. Then again, then again. The poor fellow slipped over sideways, fell on the floor. I kept whacking him until Judge Evola came out of his shock and began beating his gavel on the bench.
“Congratulations, Mr. Sloan,” Judge Evola shouted, his voice barely audible above the sound of the stick. “You’ve just earned yourself a one-thousand-dollar fine for that performance.”
I kept smashing away until Evola sicced the bailiff on me. The bailiff—a big corn-fed guy with a tricked-out .45 auto on his hip and a look in his eye like he’d just love an excuse to knock a couple of my teeth out—didn’t have much trouble restraining me. And honestly, I didn’t fight all that hard. By then Evola was shouting something about jail time.
“Let’s have a recess,” Evola said, when things had finally quieted down.
He cleared the courtroom.
“I’m making a point, a permissible demonstration,” I said.
“And I’m making you pay the treasurer of Kerry County a thousand dollars for making a joke out of this courtroom. A thousand dollars and a week in the county lockup. And if you think I’m letting you get a mistrial for this stunt, you’re dreaming, Sloan.” He put his hand over the microphone, and whispered, “Now step your ass back.”
After the jury had been reseated, I stood and walked back into the middle of the courtroom.
“When I hit that dummy, Mr. Dane,” I said, “you’ll confess, won’t you, that it made a good deal of noise?”
He nodded.
“Speak up,” I snapped. “This is a court of law.”
“Yes,” Miles said. His eyes were narrow. “It was loud.”
“Now the story you told Detective Denkerberg was that fifteen minutes of that went on inside your very own house and you didn’t hear a goddamn thing.”
“That’s another thousand dollars and another week in county for the profanity, Mr. Sloan. Next thing you do, I’m filing a petition to the state bar and see if we can’t relieve you of your license to practice law.” I have no doubt Judge Evola looked terribly pleased with himself, but I ignored him entirely, my eyes riveted on Miles Dane’s face.
“Well?” I said, opening my arms wide like I was inviting a punch in the face. “Tell me, Mr. Dane. Speak the truth.”
“No . . . I . . . It was him. It was . . . I saw him.”
I laughed derisively. “Oh, sure. Fifteen minutes up there, beating your wife to a pulp, and you heard, what, a funny noise? And then, great, this guy, what did he do, did he parachute out the window so he wouldn’t leave footprints? And then carefully planted your fingerprints on the murder weapon using, maybe, secret methods known only to the CIA?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Speak the truth!” I shouted. Then, I lowered my voice and laid the words out nice and slow. “Stop. Insulting. These. People.” I pointed at the jury. “Just tell them what really happened.”
They say a good lawyer never asks a question he doesn’t know the answer to. But when the cards are stacked against you, sometimes you just have to take a leap, a calculated risk, and hope for the best. I was flying through the air again, the terror and exhilaration and power of the moment filling me like a drug.
Miles Dane blinked. Then slowly his face hardened. He leaned back and crossed his arms. In a loud voice, he said, “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds it may incriminate me.”
My heart sank. So much for all that exhilaration. So much for all that energy getting sucked into my chest. Other than “I did it,” Miles Dane had just chosen, from the hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, the worst possible response available.
But there I was. Standing in the middle of a room full of strangers, on live feed to a television audience of millions, nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, right in the middle of the most conspicuous and spectacular failure of my entire career. I wanted to run down the aisle and out the door crying for Mommy. But in for a penny, in for a pound. “Are you implying you killed your wife?”
“I think I’ll invoke my Fifth Amendment protection again, Mr. Sloan.” He then turned to Mark Evola. “Also, Judge, is it kosher to fire your lawyer while you’re on the stand?”
Evola was looking pretty well shell-shocked by this point. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to take a few moments to sort this out. Bailiff, would you escort these fine people to the jury room?” He stared around the room. “And clear the courtroom, while you’re at it.” His eyes narrowed as he pointed his gavel at the camera in the back of the room. “And you, young man, turn that bug-eyed thing off right this minute.”
Say this about Charley Sloan. The guy keeps it interesting.
Fifty-seven
�
�Before we chat, Your Honor,” I said, “could I take a moment with my client? If, indeed, he is my client.”
If Judge Evola’s eyes had been laser beams, I’d have gone up in smoke on the spot. He glared for all he was worth, then finally said, “I guess you’d better.”
I had the bailiff hustle Miles into the small conference room adjoining the courtroom. As soon as the door was closed, Miles said, “You happy now?”
I laughed in a way not intended to convey mirth. “What the hell do you think you were doing in there, Miles?”
“This is bullshit, Charley,” he said, shaking his shackles at me. We faced each other like a couple of wrestlers.
“You know what you just did in there?” I said. “You just gave yourself a one-way ticket to Jackson Prison.”
“Don’t goddamn lecture me!” Miles said. “I told you not to drag this other issue into this courtroom.”
“Just ten minutes ago, you told me to do whatever it took.”
“Yeah, but I’d already made it clear to you that there was one issue you absolutely had to steer clear of.”
“Issue? Issue? What, are you afraid to give this issue a name? Your son! His name is Blair.”
“Go screw yourself.”
“Don’t put this on me,” I said. “After abandoning your son to the tender mercies of the state of New York, after letting him go through God knows what hell, it’s a fine time to be protecting him from the consequences of his own actions.”
“Don’t talk to me about that boy!”
“Boy? He’s a grown man.”
“I don’t care. He’s my son, and I don’t want you saying his name.”
“Hey, I’ve met your son. I don’t like him. He just killed your wife, and you’re protecting him? What is wrong with you?”
“He deserves a chance, goddammit! I let him down once—we let him down, me and Diana both. We let that bastard Roger destroy his life. And now I’m giving him one last chance to make something better of himself.”
“It’s too late,” I said softly. “It’s too late for blame or shame or guilt or recrimination. The truth is, your son is a dangerous, conscienceless thug.”
“No! No!”
And then Miles flung himself on me, battering helplessly at me with his shackled arms. He caught me by surprise, and I fell over backward, hit the ground with a thunk. There were stars in my head, and then we were rolling around on the floor like a couple of dumb kids.
I don’t know how long it went on. Probably less than ten seconds. Then Miles started sobbing, pushing his face into my necktie and crying like a baby.
“What am I gonna do, Charley? I got nothing, man. What am I gonna do?” He kept saying it over and over. I hugged him and stroked his hair for a while. All the while he was crying, I thought about Lisa, about holding her when she was a baby. I hadn’t thought about that for years and years. Eventually Miles quit crying, and we just lay there like exhausted lovers on the dirty tile floor.
Miles rolled over on his back and stared up at the ceiling. “Shit. What have I done?”
I sat up, dusted myself off as best I could. When I’d fallen, I’d bashed my face on the floor. I could feel my eye swelling up.
“So am I fired or not?” I said.
“Nah.”
“Are you going to testify about Blair? Are you willing to tell what really happened?”
Miles continued to stare at the ceiling. For the first time since I’d taken on the case, he looked at peace. “No,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to live for now that Diana’s gone. Maybe there’s something in Blair that’s worthwhile. Something that’s worth salvaging. I want to give him the chance to find out.”
“How did it happen?” I said.
“Back then? Back in ’69? In my heart I wanted to keep the child. But Diana said that if she did, her family would cut her off. In my head . . . well, I knew how hard my writing career was going to be, and I knew if we got married and tried to raise that child after Diana got cut off from her inheritance, that my dreams would go down the tube. So I said, sure, let her give him up. Then when I was told he had died, it felt like such a relief to me.” He put his manacled hands over his face. “Later we had a lawyer look into things and we found out that in all likelihood her family couldn’t have cut her off from her trust. But by then it was too late.”
“The murder,” I said. “I meant how did the murder happen?”
“He contacted us a few months ago. Blair did. My son.” He said the word wonderingly. “He told us who he was. Told us he was our son. I figured he was probably a scam artist, so I hired a detective from New York to check it out. But as it turns out, there was no doubt. He was definitely our son.” He lay there for a while. “Of course along with finding out who he was, we found out he was a criminal.”
“What did he want?” I said. “Money?”
Miles shook his head. “Nope.”
“What, then?”
Miles took a long time. “Blood.”
“Like, revenge?”
“No. Just . . . blood. He wanted a vial of blood from each of us.”
I frowned. “Blood? Why?”
“He told us he had some sort of genetic disorder. A shortage of some obscure blood factor that made him unusually susceptible to infection or something. He was a little vague about it, but the bottom line is he wanted blood for some kind of experimental therapy.”
“That’s it? He didn’t want, I don’t know, recognition or a relationship with you or anything like that? Just blood?”
“Just blood.”
“And did you give it to him?”
Miles nodded. “Yeah, both of us did. That was about six weeks before the murder.”
“And then what?”
“He called again later, said he wanted to talk. But not to me. Just to Diana. He said he had something very important to talk to her about. Very urgent. Had to be that night.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“I didn’t like it. But I feel so . . . responsible. For who he is, how he turned out. I didn’t think we could say no.”
“And then what?”
“He came over that night.”
“When?”
“I’m not sure. I got back from the gym at about ten o’clock, and I found them together talking in the living room. When I walked in the door, they both looked up and seemed disappointed that it was me, as though they were expecting somebody else. Then Blair looked at his watch, and said, ‘I guess he’s not coming.’ ”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Only briefly. It was obvious to me that he wanted to talk to Diana privately.”
“How did he seem?”
“Very sweet. Very polite. Sometimes doing research for my books I’ve interviewed criminals, real bad people, and a lot of times you have this creepy feeling, you know? Like they’re manipulating you? And I didn’t feel that way at all with him. He seemed very . . . genuine. It was strange, it was almost like he was being tender with me. Like he didn’t want me to feel bad about who he was, what he’d been through.”
“You said that when you walked in, he said, ‘I guess he’s not coming’? Who was he talking about?”
Miles shrugged. “Beats me. Whoever it was, apparently he never showed up. Anyway, after that, I went to my office and left them.”
“Where?”
“In the living room. After a while I heard them arguing. Yelling. I went back to the living room to make sure they were okay. And again they looked up at me like I was intruding on something private. Diana told me everything was fine.” He sat quietly for a while. “So I went back to my office. The shouting started again. So that’s when I put on the Beethoven. Just like I told you the first time. I turned it up nice and loud and just lost myself in my writing. After that I didn’t hear a thing.” Tears began leaking out of his eyes. “About one o’clock I turned down the music. The house had gone totally silent by then. I worked until three. Then I went upstairs to go to bed. That’s w
hen I found her.”
“Why’d you change the story?”
“I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t. Who’d believe me if I said I was lounging around the house while somebody beat my wife to death?”
I wanted to say that the story he’d made up had only made things worse. But there was no point in going there.
“What about the bokken?” I said. “What about the clothes?”
Miles shook his head. “I have no idea.”
“And the window?”
Miles looked sheepish. “Yeah. That was me. Like I say, the thing I was afraid of was they’d decide it was impossible that I had sat through a murder. So I engineered an exit. Not very well, apparently. I didn’t even think about the footprints.” He sighed. “Jesus, how could I have been so stupid?”
Somebody knocked loudly on the door, then the bailiff’s voice, muffled: “Judge wants you back in the courtroom.”
I hoisted Miles back to his feet. “I’m just going to ask you one more time, Miles. Please. You’ve got to tell them what really happened.”
He shook his head. “Do what you’ve got to do. But I’m not sending my son to jail.”
“Even if it means—”
“How many times do I have to tell you? Diana’s dead, my career is dead, I’ve had a good run. But now it’s over.”
“What if he shows up and testifies?”
Miles shrugged. “That’s his decision. But I won’t make it for him.” He reached out and touched my face lightly with one manacled hand. “Sorry about the eye. It’s bleeding a little there, bud.”
I wiped it on my sleeve. I had bigger things to worry about than a little cut on my face.
Back in the courtroom, Judge Evola said, “Well, it sounded like you gentlemen were having a nice time in there. Mr. Dane? Are you still resolved to fire your attorney?”
“No, Your Honor. He’s just trying to do his job.”
“I’m not going to have this trial sabotaged with some kind of trumped-up inadequate counsel claim.”
“This is not a ploy to get a mistrial, Your Honor, I promise,” Miles said.
Evola glowered at Miles.
Proof of Intent Page 29
