Evidence of Guilt (A Kali O'Brien legal mystery)

by Jonnie Jacobs

When we hung up I put the matter of Wes’s defense out of my mind. I returned a few phone calls, wrote a letter on behalf of Mrs. Gillis, whose neighbor’s dog was killing her chickens, then revised Mr. Crawford’s will for probably the fourth or fifth time in as many months. Whenever he got mad at one of his four daughters he’d write her out of his will. Then he’d reinstate her when his ire turned to a different daughter, as it invariably did. I didn’t know any of the women personally—two lived in Los Angeles, one in New York, and one abroad — but from what he’d told me I couldn’t imagine any of them fighting over a rundown cottage, two acres of dry grassland, a 1984 Chevy and a pitifully small bank account.

  I did the typing myself, although I had a secretary. Or half of one, at any rate. Myra split her time between my office and the accountant’s next door. Since neither office was overwhelmed with clients, it worked fine.

  Myra wasn’t a great typist anyway. She was okay at the keyboard, despite the long nails, but she was forever transposing words, and sometimes whole phrases, so that nothing made sense. Or if it made sense, it wasn’t the sense you intended. She did the same thing with messages. But she was terrific at watering plants and making sure the magazines by the front entrance were current and neatly arranged in alphabetical order.

  She was also a genuinely nice person.

  Myra’s divorce had been my first case after moving to Silver Creek. Although we got a decent property settlement, given the circumstances, it wasn’t much. As a single mother with three small children and an ex who seemed disinclined toward steady employment, Myra needed every cent she could earn. It was unfortunate that her skills fell short of her needs.

  With the paperwork in order, I made a quick trip downstairs to the restroom. When the building was remodeled sometime back in the late ’70s, the great minds in charge removed the upstairs bathroom to make room for a storage closet, leaving only the facilities at the rear of the beauty salon. This was sometimes hell on male clients, who would invariably opt to bounce uncomfortably from foot to foot rather than walk through a roomful of women in curlers.

  The smell of permanent wave lotion filled my nostrils the minute I stepped inside. I held my breath and started toward the back of the salon, picking up snatches of the collective conversation en route.

  “She wasn’t but a child herself,” said a blond woman with foils in her hair. “And as sweet as they come. I hope they give him the death penalty.”

  The woman next to her nodded. “Too bad they can’t make it slow and painful, like what he did to that poor woman and her daughter. Her little girl was the same age as my granddaughter. I tell you, I’d like to pull the trigger on that Wes Harding myself.”

  “’Course by the time the lawyers get finished he’ll probably get off with a slap on the wrist.”

  “If that.”

  “Loopholes and technicalities,” chimed in Cherise, who owns the place. “Seems to me the law’s pretty clear. You murder someone, you don’t deserve any special breaks.”

  “Criminals get all the advantages these days.”

  The blonde swiveled her chair to face the others. “It’s the lawyers. All they’re interested in is the money. Right and wrong don’t matter.”

  Cherise mumbled agreement, snapped the rod on a curler, then looked up. “Oh hi, Kali. Didn’t see you come in. Nothing personal in this, understand. You’re about as decent as they come.”

  I let out the breath I was holding. "There’s a chance Wes Harding didn’t do it, you know.”

  “Nah.” The older woman addressed our reflection in the mirror. “They wouldn’t have arrested him if they didn’t have proof.”

  “He ought to be taken out and hung right now,” the blonde said with the vehemence of those who know they’re right. “Save us all a lot of time and money.”

  “Hanged,” I said.

  All three looked at me.

  “The word is ‘hanged’ not ‘hung.’ ”

  “Doesn’t really matter what you call it as long as Wes Harding gets what he’s got coming. Everyone in town knows he’s nothing but trouble.”

  After using the restroom I went back upstairs and phoned Sam.

  Somewhere deep inside I’d known I would agree to take the case, although I’d expected to agonize over the decision a bit more first. It struck me, with a certain appreciation for the irony involved, that I was beset with the same lust and loathing I’d experienced as a teen. Only this time it was for the case, not Wes himself.

  Chapter 2

  Myra was already at work when I arrived the next morning. On the desk in front of her, an open bottle of nail polish perched precariously atop a stack of case files.

  “You’re here bright and early,” I said.

  She nodded, brushing at a wispy curl hanging over her eyes. Myra wore her thick, dark hair pinned at the crown with a tortoise-shell clip, and strands were forever springing free.

  “I have to take an extra hour for lunch today. Hope you don’t mind.”

  I didn’t, although I suspected it wouldn’t have mattered if I did. “One of the kids sick again?”

  “No, it’s about Marc’s school. They’re thinking of expanding this ‘good-touch, bad-touch ’ program to the lower grades. Some psychologist is going to talk to the parents this afternoon. I wouldn’t take time off except that a friend of mine is kinda twisting my arm.”

  “ ‘Good-touch, bad-touch’? What’s that?”

  Myra was concentrating on applying color to the nails of her right hand and didn’t bother to look up. “It’s like a Sex Ed, don’t-talk-to-strangers thing. You know, good touching is a hug from your mommy. Bad touching is anything that makes you uncomfortable. I guess it’s important stuff, but sometimes I think they go overboard. Here I am trying to teach my kids to be comfortable with their bodies, and then some stern-sounding stranger at school lectures them about private parts and abuse. Somehow it doesn’t quite fit.”

  “It’s probably important though.”

  “I guess, but they’re just little kids. Do we have to fill their heads with this stuff so early?”

  “It’s a sad commentary on society, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is.” She held out a hand tipped in deep fuchsia and blew on the nails to dry them. “I guess it’s nothing new. The friend who’s dragging me to the meeting this afternoon says she was abused for years by an uncle. I think that’s why she’s pushing so hard for this program. She’s almost a fanatic.” Myra examined her handiwork, then capped the bottle of polish. “I made copies of that letter you asked me to. I set out the original for your signature and stamped the file copy.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What do you want me to do with the others?”

  “What others?”

  She nodded toward the small pile of papers next to the bottle of nail polish. “You asked for two dozen copies.”

  “I asked for two copies. Geez, Myra, why in the world would I want twenty-four copies of a simple letter?”

  “How should I know, you’re the lawyer.” She tightened the cap on the bottle. “But I coulda sworn you said two dozen.”

  Suddenly it hit me. “How many donuts did you order?”

  It hit her too. “Oh gosh, Kali. You’re right. How did I manage to do that?” Her expression was stricken. She wrung her hands, heedless of the wet polish. “I’m so sorry. Stupid, stupid me. I don’t know how I got them confused.”

  Myra’s not stupid at all, but she does have trouble with some of the finer points of daily living. “It’s not the end of the world,” I told her. “We’ll use the extra copies for scratch paper. And you just saved the gals downstairs a whole hunk of calories.” Although I figured I was going to have to come up with the rest of the donuts, and an explanation, before they took it in their minds that I wasn’t such a decent sort after all.

  <><><>

  I’d hoped to be able to meet with Sam about the Harding case right away, but he was going to be tied up most of the day. He had promised to have the file read
y for me by late afternoon. “It’s probably better if you look over the file before we talk,” he'd said. “Saves time. And that way you can form your own impressions before they get tainted by mine.”

  His logic was sound, but my workload was light and I was anxious to get started. I was fairly certain of the approach Sam would want me to take anyway. Although he would doubtless argue otherwise, I had no illusions about why he was bringing me in. It wasn’t my mind he was after, or my brilliant mastery of the law; it was my legs.

  When a case goes to trial, particularly a big case, extensive legwork is inevitable. And invaluable. There is background information to be gathered, leads to be followed and checked, witnesses to be interviewed. Given his age and poor health, Sam needed someone with a sturdy pair of legs to do most of the scouting.

  I put in a call to police headquarters and left a message for the chief, who is an old family friend. Next I asked Myra, who was through with the self-flagellation and back to repairing the damage to her nails, to get me copies of the news reports of Lisa Cornell’s death. Finally, after tidying up a few things, I left for the diner where Lisa had worked. I wanted to get there around eleven, before the lunch crowd began to build.

  Despite the hokey name, the Lazy Q Diner is one of Silver Creek’s more upscale establishments. Its offerings are a long way from the braised endive and goat cheese cuisine you find in the San Francisco area, but it’s definitely a step up from the hamburger joints and fast-food outlets in town. The couple who run the place are in their mid-fifties, transplants from somewhere back East. I’d never spoken to the husband, who spent most of his time in the kitchen, but the wife, Velma, worked as hostess and cashier, and often helped out with the tables during the lunch-hour rush.

  She was there when I walked in and took my order herself. No place in Silver Creek makes decent coffee, at least not to the taste of someone who’s been spoiled by the riches of coffee houses in the Bay Area. I ordered a Coke instead. Although I wasn’t hungry, I had a chicken salad sandwich as well, figuring that would give me a double shot at striking up a conversation.

  “You must be shorthanded without Lisa,” I volunteered when Velma set the soda on the table in front of me.

  “Shorthanded and down in the dumps. It’s such a tragedy, such a terrible waste.”

  I murmured agreement.

  “We hired a new girl last week, but I’m not sure she’s going to work out. Of course, all of us here are still pretty shaken by the whole thing, so maybe we haven’t given her a fair shot at it.”

  “Had Lisa worked here long?”

  “Seven or eight months. She moved to town after her aunt’s death, when she inherited the house. But Lisa had a way about her. Kind of made you feel like you’d known her forever.” Velma brushed a crumb from the table. “You come here quite a bit, so you must know what I mean.”

  I did. Lisa was as sunny and open as a summer’s morning. Honey-blond hair, which she wore in a long braid down her back, fresh face, dimples and a smile that never quit. She was the kind of person you take an instant liking to, even before you’ve exchanged a word.

  “She was a good worker, too,” Velma continued. “Never short-tempered or frazzled. The only time I saw her without a smile on her face was when she was coming down with one of those headaches.”

  “Migraines?”

  “I guess it was something like that. She seemed to be getting an awful lot of them lately. I didn’t want to scare her or anything, but I thought they might be a sign of something serious. She’d been seeing a doctor, though, so I guess he was on top of it.”

  A group of four women came into the restaurant just then and Velma left to seat them. She stopped back, briefly, with my sandwich before hurrying off to attend to the next cluster of patrons.

  I sipped my Coke, devoured more of the sandwich than I’d intended to and mentally ticked off what I knew about Lisa Cornell, which wasn’t a lot. She was in her early twenties, a single parent who appeared to structure much of her life around her five-year-old daughter. From the snippets of conversation I’d picked up, I knew she’d swum competitively until reaching high school, was teaching herself to play the guitar and drove an old blue Honda.

  The list of things I didn’t know was considerably longer. I hadn’t known, for starters, that she’d moved to Silver Creek so recently. I’d sort of assumed she’d grown up here. I knew where she lived, but only because that was where the bodies had been found. I hadn’t known she’d inherited the house from her aunt.

  And what about her husband, assuming there’d ever been one? I didn’t know whether he was absent because of death or divorce. And if the latter, whether the breakup had been Lisa’s idea or his. I knew nothing about her friends, her background, her interests or hobbies. Nothing about what her life had been before coming to Silver Creek. I tried a few of these questions out on Velma when she was free again, but she didn’t know a whole lot more than I did.

  “Sorry I can’t help. Only thing I know is about the house. That’s because I knew the aunt, though not well. Anne Drummond was her name. No children of her own. She died about a year ago and left the house to Lisa. It’s a nice piece of property. There was quite a bit of interest in it, but Anne wouldn’t sell, even when she knew she was dying and could have used the money to hire a private nurse or something.”

  “How’d she die?”

  “Breast cancer. It got my mother, too.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, it’s a beastly way to go.”

  “Did Lisa have other family?”

  Velma gave a head shake that was the equivalent of a shrug. “Lisa was as sweet and pleasant as they come, but she kept her distance, at least around me. Never talked much about herself. She was pretty friendly with Caroline, though, one of the other girls who works here. She might be able to tell you more.”

  I took down Caroline’s name and number.

  “You with the police?” Velma asked. “I called them right after I heard the news, you know, to see if there was anything I could do to help. They never sent anyone out.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” I explained.

  She tilted her head. “Which side?”

  “Defense.”

  She let out a whistle. “Funny, I never took you for one of them.”

  “Them?”

  Ignoring my question, she volleyed one of her own. “You really believe there’s a chance Wes Harding didn’t do it?”

  “There’s always that chance."

  She took a moment to consider it. “You know, the one thing that’s never made sense to me is why. Why would anyone do a thing like that?”

  I nodded, acknowledging the senselessness of it. What I didn’t bother to tell her was that it didn’t have to make sense. Motive wasn’t an element of murder. In some instances confessed killers themselves couldn’t tell you why they’d done what they'd done.

  <><><>

  When I got back to the office Myra was just leaving.

  “I put your messages on your desk,” she said.

  “Anything urgent?”

  “Not really. Sheri Pearl wants to talk to you about the conservatorship on her mother. She has a few questions about, and I quote, ‘the legal ramifications.’ ”

  I suspected that meant Sheri wanted to get rid of at least a portion of her mother’s possessions. Her rush to tidy things up irritated me. It didn’t help that the conservatorship had been the right thing to do, and that ninety percent of the time the senior Mrs. Pearl couldn’t have told you what year it was or what she’d last had for dinner. Bottom line was, I didn’t especially like Sheri Pearl, and I did like her mother, Irma. Particularly on those rare occasions when Irma was fully lucid.

  “And you missed Tom’s call,” Myra continued. “He said to tell you ‘hi.’ ”

  “Tom?” The mere sound of his name caused my heart to quicken. “He’s supposed to be on a Boy Scout camping trip.”

  “He is, but under the pretext of needing more toilet pap
er or something, he managed to sneak off to some outpost of civilization where there’s a telephone.”

  “Did he say anything besides ‘hi’?”

  “Just that the food’s lousy, the ground’s hard, the fish aren’t biting and the mosquitoes are.”

  “That’s it? Nothing about missing me?”

  Myra laughed. “Oh, yeah, that, too.” She headed for the door. “Don’t forget to call Ms. Pearl.”

  I slumped into my chair, disappointed at missing Tom’s call. Tom is part of the reason I’m still in Silver Creek. A big part.

  We’re neighbors. We’re also dating. Or, more accurately, sort of dating, sort of screwing around, which is how I’d explained it to Sabrina. “Well, I hope you’re being careful,” was all she’d said. I hadn’t been sure if she meant that literally or more generally, but I assured her I was. On both counts. I was a veteran of too many soured relationships to let myself be otherwise.

  Still, after Myra had gone I pulled out the picture of Tom I keep in the zipper pocket of my purse. It was taken late last summer, the one and only time we’d gone camping together. We’d hiked into Desolation Wilderness, which isn’t desolate at all, camped in a meadow by a mountain lake and spent the night under a diamond-studded sky of black velvet. All in all, I prefer the comforts of home, but when I pictured Tom out there now, with a bunch of rowdy ten-year-olds, I felt a pang of jealousy. It seemed an awful waste of a fine body to have him sacked out under the stars alone.

  Chapter 3

  Later that afternoon I dropped by Sam’s office and picked up the Harding file. Then I headed out to have a look at the barn where Lisa and Amy had been killed. Not that I expected to uncover any new evidence; the police are usually fairly thorough about a crime scene investigation. What I wanted was to have a look at the site for myself. There are lawyers who can work solely from paper, but I find that reports and photos are poor substitutes for the real thing.

  Lisa Cornell’s house was a couple of miles outside town on a narrow road that wound and dipped, then unexpectedly opened onto an expanse of gently rolling grassland. It was a two-story white clapboard house with a wide porch in front and a good deal of land to either side. I guessed that it had been built sometime around the turn of the century, certainly long before the other houses that dotted the roadside. Once it had probably been the main residence on a ranch of considerable acreage. Over the years parcels had been subdivided and sold off at odd intervals, making for the kind of uneven architectural mix you so often find in rural neighborhoods.