Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) (12 page)

Nate spotted me first and bumped Larkin’s arm with the back of his hand. Both of them stopped. I brought the Beetle to a stop beside them.

“Hey, guys,” I said.

Larkin said, “This is harassment. I’m going to report it.”

“Who’s your contact?” I asked. “Aubrey Biggs, the commonwealth’s attorney, or somebody else?”

“I don’t have to talk to you.”

To Nate I said, “Did you and Warren see the same thing Larkin did, Bob Shorter coming out of Bill Hill’s house on the day of the murder?”

Nate shot Larkin a glance. “I don’t have nothing to do with that, man. I’m not involved.”

“So you weren’t all together that day, you and Warren and Larkin?”

“I don’t have to talk to you.”

“True enough.” I shifted my attention to Larkin. “Must have scared the piss out of you, seeing Shorter coming toward you out of Bill Hill’s house swinging that equalizer of his.”

“Not just that. He had blood on him, too, all over his clothes.”

“Did he? Splotches of blood, or were his clothes soaked with it?”

He just curled his lip at me. I heard a door slam, and a woman’s voice loud enough to make me cringe, even at that distance. “Hey! What are you doing back here? You leave them boys alone.”

I located Valerie Shaw in my side mirror, barreling down her sidewalk, her meaty arms pumping. I waved my hand out the window. “Just a friendly hello,” I called. To Larkin and Nate: “You boys play nice.”

I took my foot off the brake and rolled forward.

That evening, sometime after Deeks and I had finished our run, the music of Mozart was streaming through my TV’s sound system. It was one of his operas, which I’m sure I would have enjoyed more if I understood German. I was dressed for bed in an oversize T-shirt and sipping my second glass of chardonnay—my second half glass, to be strictly accurate. Deeks was flaked out was on the cool tile in the foyer.

My mood was subdued. I would have appreciated company, but Paul had gone to Boston with Mike, despite his reservations. The next time Paul wanted to stay the night with me, I might just let him, I thought.

My phone began playing ABBA’s “I Have a Dream,” and I reached for it. “Hey, Brooke.”

“Hey, Robin. How’s it going?”

“All right. I was just wondering about the point of having a cuddly boyfriend if he’s not going to be around to cuddle.”

“I know what you mean. Have you ever been in Mike’s house? You know where it is, don’t you? In the Fan.”

“I’ve driven by it. Paul’s pointed it out.”

“You wanna come over?”

“Are you there now? How come?” Brooke had her own apartment, and if she’d given it up and moved in with Mike, I hadn’t heard about it.

“There’s something I’d like you to see.”

“What’s wrong? You’re not doing something weird, are you, going through his stuff?”

“Will you come?”

“Sure. Is Deeks invited?” I glanced in his direction, and he raised his head at the sound of his name.

“Of course. What’s Mike gonna care about a little dog hair?”

“We’ll be right there—well, there in twenty minutes or so.”

She exhaled. “Thank you.”

I punched off just as Deeks’s cold nose touched my bare leg. He looked at me questioningly, which is to say his forehead wrinkled, and he had that worried look dogs get.

“Go for a ride?” I asked him. His forehead relaxed, and his tail began to wag.

I was quick. I pulled on some jeans under the oversize T-shirt, stepped into a pair of Top-Siders, and grabbed my purse. In less than five minutes we were backing out of the garage, Deeks turning around and around in the shotgun seat as he considered the most comfortable position in which to ride. He gave up about the time I got to the end of the alley and hopped between the seats to the back.

I adjusted my mirror to look at him. “Getting a little big for the front seat?” I asked him.

He lay down on the backseat with his front feet on the floor and his chin on the console between the front seats.

“I may have to get a bigger car,” I said.

His tail thumped the side of the car.

“Materialist.”

His tail thumped harder, but I think he just liked the sound of my voice.

Mike lived in a row house in the Fan, a district anchored on its narrower east end by Virginia Commonwealth University. Every morning, a city bus did a straight run down Grove Street, one block over from Mike’s house, to Capitol Square, about a block away from my office and two blocks from his, convenient enough that he usually took the bus to work. In the evening it came back up his street and dropped him off about half a block from his house.

I found a parking spot against the curb across from the bus stop, and Deeks sprang between the seats into the shotgun seat. I looked at him, realizing that once again I had neglected to bring a leash.

“Stay close,” I told him.

He wagged his tail and looked agreeable.

It was dark out, and there was no traffic on Hanover Street, but I held up a palm and said, “Stay. Be right back.”

His tail stopped wagging, but he held his position as I opened my car door and got out. His obedience might have been helped by my keeping my hand up and almost in his face, but I like to think he was just well trained. I withdrew my arm and closed the door.

He stepped onto my seat and looked out at me, twisting himself as I went around the car to his door, which opened onto the curb instead of the street. “Stay close,” I said through the window. I opened the door, and he hopped out onto the sidewalk beside me.

“Good boy. Stay close.”

He went to check out the knobby sugar maple in a nearby tree well and found it interesting enough to pee on.

Brooke met us at the door wearing a man’s dress shirt, her usually full hair almost flat, as if it had been combed out wet and left to dry.

“Have you been trying out Mike’s clothes?” I asked. “Am I here to play dress up?”

“I was in the hot tub earlier, and I didn’t have a cover-up. Hey, Deacon. How are you doing, you big, beautiful fur ball?”

He leaned against her as she scratched his neck, his back leg twitching. It had been months since I would have called him a fur ball. To me, he was beginning to look like a big, rangy dog. “You didn’t tell me to bring my swimsuit,” I said. The hint of a two-piece swimsuit was visible through the fabric of the white shirt. “I didn’t even know Mike had a hot tub.”

“Sorry. The hot tub would be a good place to talk after I show you what I have to show you. You can just wear your bra and panties, if you want to.”

“Unfortunately, I’m only wearing half of that ensemble. I rushed out the door when you called.”

She glanced at my chest. “Sorry,” she said again. “Come see.”

The house was narrow, no more than twenty feet wide, with exposed brick and green-painted drywall on the left and a light-wood paneling on the right. The living area furniture was modular, and about halfway back a set of stairs with a metallic rail led up to the second floor. I needed to start practicing Social Security disability law, I thought. It was evidently profitable to receive checks issued by the US Treasury on a regular basis.

A pullout desk was built into the right wall just behind the staircase. “Here,” Brooke said. “Look.”

A fat, unabridged dictionary lay open on the desk. Deeks sniffed at the edge of the desk, but he lowered his nose when he didn’t smell food and trotted back into the living room to check it out more thoroughly.

“Keep your leg down,” I called after him. “What?” I said to Brooke.

“Isn’t he house-trained?”

“Oh yeah. It’s been weeks since he’s gone in someone’s house.”

She rolled her eyes. “Here. Look at the slip of paper.”

It looked like the corner of a sheet of copy paper tucked into the crease between the pages of the big dictionary. I picked it out. On it was written, in a looping script, “I love you.”

She handed me two more scraps of paper. They said the same. “They were all in the dictionary, marking pages where the words
love
,
sex
, and
forever
were highlighted. Come on back.”

I followed her into the galley-style kitchen at the back of the house. On the table were half a dozen books or so, all of them lying open, all with scraps of paper tucked between the pages. I picked out one of the scraps and turned it to read the writing: “I love you.” It’s what they all said.

“You didn’t write these, I take it,” I said.

“You know I didn’t. Sarah did this, that Sarah Fleckman, and she left them scattered through Mike’s books.”

“All of them?”

“No, not all of them, but enough. He’s going to be running across them for the rest of his life.”

I picked up one of the books to look at the cover:
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
.
Another book was
The Fellowship of the Ring
.
Another was the Bible, which was open to the Song of Solomon.

She flipped a slimmer volume shut and held it up so I could see the spine. “He’ll be reading
The Magician’s Nephew
to our children one day, and right in the middle of chapter six he’ll run across one of these little love notes from Sarah Fleckman.”

“You’ve already talked about having children?”

She gave me a look.

“Maybe Mike wrote them,” I suggested. “Maybe he left these notes for you.”

She made a dismissive sound. “Why would I be reading Mike’s books?”

“Why would you be wearing his shirt?”

“Besides, it’s not his handwriting.”

“But you don’t know it’s Sarah’s. Maybe they’re love notes from his mom.”

“With
sex
highlighted? It’s Sarah Fleckman—you know it is. Did you know she tricked him into meeting her for lunch last week? Wouldn’t tell him what it was about, just that it was important. Then when he got there, she told him she was in a different place in her life, and now she was ready to get married.”

“Mike told you about it?”

“Yes.” After a moment, she shrugged. “And that was good. He’s not keeping secrets from me.”

“How did you happen to run across these love notes?”

“I was looking up
expatiate
.”

“Expatiate? How come?”

“I was talking to Mike on the phone, and he said something about sitting through the opening session of his conference, listening to one person after another expatiate. I didn’t want to ask him what it meant.”

“You didn’t Google it?”

“He’s got this big, fat dictionary sitting right here on his shelf.”

“How long ago do you think she wrote them? Probably it’s been months. It could have been a year or more.”

“You see what that means, don’t you? When he runs across one, he tucks it right back into his book. He’s keeping them for sentimental reasons.”

“You don’t know how many he’s run across and thrown away. She might have written hundreds.”

“Great. The house is infested with them.”

“It is a great house, though,” I said.

“I know. Isn’t it?” She looked up at the twelve-foot ceiling, her expression wistful.

“It’s not ruined for you, either, not the house and not Mike’s library. It’s just going to take you a while to make them your own.”

She nodded, her lips compressed, her expression thoughtful.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s do the hot tub.”

“You’re just going to . . .” She waved a hand.

“I’ll keep my shirt on. I’m sure Mike has another one I can borrow.”

Deeks did not like the hot tub with its noisy jets and the steam coming off the surface of the roiling water. He backed up growling when Brooke flipped the cover back, then began to whine anxiously as we climbed into it. I relaxed against the wall of the tub, resting my forearm on the side, and Deeks’s mouth closed on my wrist.

“Hey,” I said.

He tugged at my arm, but I disengaged myself and pushed at his head. “Go check out the yard,” I said. “It’s unexplored territory.”

“Dig something up,” Brooke suggested.

I looked at her. “You’re not yet thinking of this place as your own.”

“It isn’t yet my own.”

Deeks sat on the deck by the tub, watching us. He gave me a whine.

“You’re such a mother hen,” I told him. To Brooke I said, “Set a wedding date. The house’ll be yours before you know it.”

“Shouldn’t I wait until this thing with Sarah Fleckman is resolved?”

I wished Deeks would stop whining. “It is resolved,” I said. I pushed at my T-shirt, which kept floating to the surface of the water. “Look, there are two possibilities. One, Mike can’t be trusted around other women. If that’s true, the thing to do is break off the engagement and stay as far away from him as you possibly can.”

“And the other possibility?”

“Is that he can be trusted. And if that’s the case, you need to trust him.”

She nodded, but she didn’t look happy about it.

“Is there something in your past that makes trust difficult for you, something I don’t know about?”

She didn’t say anything.

“I mean, I know I have trust issues,” I said, “but my father left my mother and ran off with his veterinary assistant.”

“And you had a boyfriend who cheated on you. John Parker.”

Nice of her to remind me. “So what’s your excuse?”

She took a breath. “Just a character flaw, I guess.”

Deeks’s jaws close on my forearm again, and I turned my head to meet his wrinkled-forehead gaze. “You can’t just relax, can you?” I said to him.

“I guess that’s my problem, too,” Brooke said.

“Yes, yes, it is. The two of you just need to relax. Take a chill pill, why don’t you.”

By the time the trial date rolled around, I was ready for it—not in the sense of having developed any exculpatory evidence, but at least in the sense of not being able to think of anything else I could do that was likely to help. I still hadn’t filed my answer to Larkin’s ethical complaint. My deadline for that was five days away, which, according to Paul, meant I wouldn’t be working on it for another four and a half days at least. “I’m not making a personal criticism,” he said. “I’m just noting that you’re an attorney. Attorneys never do anything until the last minute.”