Defense for the Devil (41 page)

“Eat,” Barbara said, regarding her toast with disfavor.

“If you will, I will,” he said.

Alan admitted Bailey, who said that Stael and Ulrich had been driving a stolen car, and had phony ID. Stael’s gun had been fired twice.

“How do you find out stuff like that?” Barbara demanded, watching Bailey eye her toast in a predatory way. She pushed it toward him, and he took it.

“Got connections,” he said.

He said he had sent someone to pick up Shelley, and Alan would stay in Frank’s house until relief arrived, any minute now. It was understood that he was planning to stick close to Frank and Barbara all day.

Then, outside, she ignored the press being kept behind the crime tape; two uniformed officers cleared a path through the reporters to Bailey’s car parked at the curb. It wasn’t raining, although the sky was gray and low. “Remember that old horror movie,” Barbara said glumly, getting into the car,
“The Day of the Triffids?
There was one scene where the monsters were all pressed against a fence, cornstalks gone wrong, something like that. There they are in the flesh.”

“Now, Bobby,” Frank said, waving good-naturedly at the reporters.

At the courthouse they went straight to Judge Waldman’s secretary, who said the judge would be there in a minute or two. Gramm and Roxbury were both waiting also. The district attorney looked unhappy, and Roxbury was grim-faced, chewing on his lip. Everyone nodded to everyone else; no one spoke.

Inside chambers, Judge Waldman was behind her desk, not yet in her judicial robe. She was frowning and not in a good mood. Her voice was crisp and cold when she invited them to be seated.

“Ms. Holloway, Mr. Gramm has requested a continuance in the trial, and his concerns must be addressed. Mr. Gramm, please explain your reasons.”

“Your honor, in light of the double shooting in front of Mr. Holloway’s house last night, and the fact that the two men have been identified as Stael and Ulrich, both of them named in court yesterday, the state is forced to ask for time to investigate this incident, to ascertain if it has any bearing on the case being tried. The jury must be aware of the shooting, and could not help but be influenced by such knowledge. We don’t feel it would be fair to Mr. Arno to continue with so many uncertainties.”

Judge Waldman looked at Barbara.

“Absolutely no! Hold Mr. Arno in jail for another delay? They had months to look into the Stael and Ulrich connection.”

“Mr. Palmer and Mr. Trassi have been very cooperative,” Gramm said quickly, “and will continue to cooperate, but it will take a few days to get information that could be vital. We’re not planning for a lengthy delay.”

Barbara shook her head. “I object to any delay whatever.”

“We would be willing to reconsider bail for Mr. Arno,” Gramm went on, as if she had not spoken. “I agree that to hold him in jail for the continuance probably isn’t necessary.”

Before Barbara could object again, Frank said musingly, “Bail? I don’t think so. Of course, if the state is willing to drop the charges and, further, to make a public statement of apology and exoneration for Mr. Arno, that would be a different matter.”

Gramm flushed. “Based on the information we had, the state acted with all due propriety. No apology is called for, and we can’t consider dropping any charges until we complete our investigation.”

“I’ll fight it through every appellate court,” Barbara said.

“That won’t be necessary,” Judge Waldman said firmly. “Mr. Gramm, the court denies your request for a continuance. You have had sufficient time to investigate those two men. I spoke with the jury this morning, and since the names of the men were not released, they don’t know who they are, and they will not be influenced by the scant news they might have seen or read. I shall speak to them again at the end of the day, of course. Court will convene in ten minutes.”

Walking down the corridor toward the courtroom, Barbara said, “I want to be like her when I grow up.”

“I think that’s a possibility,” Frank said. “Course, you’ll have to take up clothes shopping.”

They met Shelley, and before she could ask a question, Barbara said, “Later.” She told Ray the same thing; they would talk later.

Her first witness was Peter Stepanovitch. He was thirty-five, a salesman for an electronics company in Portland, a job that required a lot of travel, he said importantly.

“Do you recall the first week of August?” Barbara asked, and he said yes. “Tell the jury what made that week memorable for you,” she said.

“You see, on the third I had to fly to Chicago, so I drove to the airport and put my car in long-term parking, like I always do. I flew back home on the eleventh, and the car was gone. Stolen.”

Barbara nodded. “I see. Did you recover your car?”

“Yes, on the fourteenth, the police called and said they had it. They found it outside Corvallis on the night of the fourteenth of August.”

“What kind of a car is it, Mr. Stepanovitch?”

“A ninety-three Honda Accord, dark blue.”

“And what condition was it in when you recovered it?”

“Well, it wasn’t wrecked or anything like that, but it was filthy, like they’d been using it for camping. The trunk had a lot of dirt, and fir needles and stuff like that, like you get out camping. And there were a lot of beer cans in the back.”

“Was there anything else unusual about the car when you recovered it?”

“Yes, there was. The license plates weren’t mine. At first there was a little confusion about whose car it was, and the police called the wrong guy, because of the plates, but we figured it out with the vehicle-identification number. The crooks switched plates to make it harder to spot, I guess.”

“Did you make a note of the wrong license plate number?” she asked.

“Yes. When they called and said they had a car, they gave me the number and I wrote it in my notebook.”

She asked him to repeat the number for the jury, and he recited it without looking in his notebook. It was the same number the motel manager had given.

Barbara turned then to Roxbury and said, “Your witness.” He said, No questions. She thanked the witness, and he left the stand.

She called Michael Murillo.

Murillo was twenty-seven, married, and lived in Corvallis, where he worked for the repair shop that had received the wrecked Lexus. He described the shop and yard with a high security fence, topped with barbed wire, where the police put impounded cars, and cars that had been involved in wrecks. He remembered the Lexus very well, he said, because it was first one he had seen up close like that, and then to see it brand-new and already smashed up, he wouldn’t forget it.

“What did they do with the Lexus?”

“They towed it to the back part of the yard and left it there. We all just looked it over.”

“Was it locked?”

“Yes.”

“Just tell the jury what happened with the Lexus after that, Mr. Murillo.”

“Okay, I mean, all right. First a policeman and a locksmith came and opened it up and found papers. They locked it again and left. Then, late in the day, the cop—the policeman—came back with a lawyer, Mr. Trassi, and said he was in charge of it. And he, the lawyer, wanted to have it moved, but there wasn’t any way to do it that late on a Saturday, so he said to just fix it enough to run, and they’d take care of the stereo and CD player back in New York. And we said that we didn’t know what it needed, and in any case, we’d have to order parts and it might be a week to get them. He said to do it as soon as possible and give him a call when it was ready. He said he’d call us back with a number where we could reach him. So we ordered the parts and got it ready to run again.”

Barbara stopped him there. She smiled at him reassuringly. “Just a few details before you continue,” she said. “When Mr. Trassi arrived, did he have a key for the car?” He said no.

“While the car was being repaired, did your mechanics do anything to the interior?”

He shook his head. “They just got it up and running.”

“Where was the car being kept during the time it was at the shop?”

“Until we got the parts, it was out in the yard; then they moved it inside to work on it.”

“Is the shop inside the security fence?”

“Yes, and there’s a night watchman. We keep cars that are going to be used in trials, so we have to keep everything pretty much locked up.”

“All right. So you got the car ready to run again, then what happened?”

“I called Mr. Trassi on the thirteenth, late—we were about to close—and he said someone would come for it the next day. On the fourteenth a guy came to get it.”

“Were you present when someone collected the Lexus?”

“Yes. I work in the office mostly; I do the calling, ordering, all that kind of stuff. So I was the one that signed it out.”

He went on to say the man had walked in, but he had seen a dark blue Accord pull away, and he thought the man had been driven there in it. He described Ulrich, then said he had picked him out of the album Bailey had shown him; he had initialed the picture, and now he identified it again.

“Did he have a key for the car?” Barbara asked. He said yes.

“Did he have any papers of authorization, or the title, anything like that?”

“He had the title transfer, and he had a letter signed by Mr. Trassi saying he could take it.”

When Barbara finished with him, she turned to smile at Roxbury. He glowered at her.

Barbara’s last witness before the lunch recess was Gloria Reynolds, who lived in the Blue River district. She said she and her husband had advertised a cabin for sale the first week of August, and two men had come by to look at it early on Sunday, August fourth, before ten in the morning.

“They took one look and said that wasn’t what they were after,” she said. “Didn’t even bother to get out of the car or anything, just one look.”

“Can you describe the men or the car they were driving?”

“A dark blue foreign car, that’s all I can say about it. But they were from back East, real abrupt-speaking. One had a map and the classifieds, the other one was driving. They had on suits, I remember, dark suits. Not like fishermen, like we thought might be interested.” She sniffed, then said, “They were rude, too. Said, ‘Where’s the Marshall place?’ Just like that. So I told them how to find it, and they left without a thank you or anything.”

“Where was the cabin you had for sale?” Barbara asked.

“Just across the road from our place, a real nice little A-frame, walking distance to the river, easy to get to. A real nice little cabin. It’s sold now.”

Barbara produced the classified ads with the A-frame listed, and Gloria Reynolds said that was their ad. “The one immediately following it is for the Marshall cabin,” Barbara pointed out. “Is that what they indicated they would look at next?”

“Yes. I told them to go back to the highway, down a mile or two, and turn right. The Marshall place is at the end of the gravel road down there.”

In his cross-examination, Roxbury asked how many others had inquired about her cabin without bothering to go inside, and she said several. He demanded to know how many of the others she could recall with such detail, and she said a few, but none of the others had been so rude, so she remembered those two best. Her lips tightened when she said that, as if she now would not forget him, either.

Did she know anything about those men, he demanded, whether they had been agents for someone else, for example? If they were real-estate agents? If they were bankers? She said no, all she knew was what she had said. He gave it up with that.

Lunch was a seafood salad and crostini, ordered by Patsy. Between bites Frank and Barbara told Shelley and Patsy about the shooting at the house. Afterward, Barbara thought how strange that they all had to keep reminding one another to eat. Shelley was horrified and frightened, indignant and furious, in a combination that kept changing, as she flushed, then turned pale, then flushed again.

“But that’s so…so…” She swallowed hard. “He’s the devil,” she whispered.

No one disputed her. Then Barbara said briskly, “Okay, next comes Trassi.”

She watched as Trassi was sworn in. In her mind he had become the little gray man, and today he was grayer than ever, and he looked shrunken, as if fear had drained something vital from him. At one time she had thought to keep him on the stand for a whole day, or even more than one, wringing denials from him; then, considering how restive the jury had become, she had decided not to go that route, but to drive directly to the points she wanted to make.

After Trassi had stated his background, she asked him to recount his association with Mitchell Arno, and he gave the same statement he had made at the IRS office, in almost exactly the same words as he had used then. She admired his memory.

“All right,” she said. “Because the various dates tend to become confusing, I have prepared a timetable to help the jury keep them straight.” She turned to see Shelley setting up the easel with a very large calendar printed on heavy cardboard. The dates began with the middle of July and went through August into the first week of September. There were strips of peel-off tape on many of the dates. She went to the calendar and said, “On the nineteenth of July you stated that Mitchell Arno approached you in the anteroom of the Palmer Company in New York and asked you to represent him. Is that correct?” He said yes, and she peeled off two strips on the nineteenth, revealing the name Trassi in green lettering and under it Mitch’s name in red letters.

“Were there others in the anteroom that day?” He said yes, and she asked if Stael and Ulrich had been there.

He hesitated momentarily, then said, “I didn’t know them by name at that time, but they were there.”

She peeled off two more strips over their names, both in dark blue. She asked, “Was mention made of the delivery of the Lexus in their presence?” When he said yes, she took off another strip and there was a cutout of a sleek black automobile, very small and elongated to fit. When he admitted that the money had also been mentioned, she uncovered the final icon, a yellow suitcase with a dollar sign on it. And that filled the space.