Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) (14 page)

“You need to go potty?” I asked Deeks, standing in front of the picture window.

He barked and wagged his tail, so I opened the front door. Paul hadn’t given me much warning. His car pulled up just as Deeks was finishing his business.

Mike got out, wearing rumpled jeans and an even more rumpled T-shirt. Paul was wearing sweats. Deeks greeted each in turn on their way to the door, a bounce in his step and his tail wagging, clearly more excited than I was about the nighttime visitors. I do have to admit to being intrigued, but I waited until they were standing awkwardly in my living room before I said anything.

“Can I offer either of you a hot beverage?”

It didn’t even get a smile.

“Is it Brooke?” I asked Mike.

“No. She’s fine.”

Good news.
I sat on the sofa, curling my legs under me, and Paul and Mike sat, too.

“It’s Sarah,” Mike said, his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced in front of him.

“Sarah Fleckman? Something’s happened to Sarah Fleckman?” He was never going to disentangle himself from that woman, I thought.

“Not exactly. She . . . let herself into my house. She was there when I got home from Enrique’s.”

Mike’s story was that he had parked on the street and let himself in through the front door, dropping his briefcase by the sofa on his way back to the kitchen to set up the coffeemaker so his morning coffee would be ready by the time he got downstairs. He’d gone to his bedroom, had hung his suit up in the closet, had tossed his shirt on the floor underneath his hanging clothes, which evidently was where he kept clothes that needed to go to the cleaners. Wearing boxer briefs and a T-shirt, he had gone into the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face. He hadn’t known anything was amiss until he’d gotten into bed and a warm, naked female had pulled herself against him.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I’d been to his house now and knew the layout. “You went in and out of your bedroom, into your closet, into your bathroom, and you never noticed there was someone in your bed?”

“All I noticed was a jumble of covers. I don’t always make my bed.”

I rolled my eyes. Brooke, I knew, couldn’t stand an unmade bed, which told me who was going to be making theirs.

“Anyway, I broke free of her and got out of bed.”

“Got out of bed!” Paul said. “He launched himself out of bed like his sheets were on fire.” To Mike he said, “What? It’s the way you told it to me.”

“Let’s just say I got out of there as fast as I could. I was halfway down the stairs before I realized I didn’t have anything on but my underwear. I had to run back up and snatch some clothes off the floor.”

His house had been so neat when Brooke showed me through it. I wondered if she’d picked up after him, or if he did better when he was going to be away.

“And Sarah was still there, I take it?”

“She was out of bed at that point. I had to move her to get to my clothes.”

“And she was still . . .”

“Still wearing the clothes she was born in,” Paul said. He seemed to be relishing the mental image of a naked Sarah a good deal more than was strictly proper for a boyfriend of mine.

“She still hasn’t given you up,” I told Mike.

“The weird thing is, she says she has,” Mike said. “Evidently what she had in mind was something of a good-bye present.”

“A thank-you for all the good times they had,” Paul said.

“Must have been some good times,” I said drily. “So how did you leave it?”

“I just left it, the house and everything.”

“He can’t even remember if he locked the front door,” Paul said.

“Sarah will lock it when she leaves,” Mike said.

“How come she still has a key?” I asked.

He shook his head. “She gave it back to me a long time ago. Evidently, she’d made a duplicate she never told me about.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“Sleep at Paul’s tonight. She’ll be gone in the morning.”

“At some point she has to go to work,” Paul said.

“No, I meant, what are you going to do about Sarah’s unbreakable attachment to you?” I said.

“I thought maybe you could talk to her,” Mike said.

And there it was. That was why they were here. “You have to change your locks.”

“I know. Tomorrow morning.”

“And this is another thing you have to tell Brooke about.”

Mike glanced at Paul. “She’ll freak out. You know she will. She’ll be over at my house washing sheets and wiping down everything in sight.”

“You don’t plan to wash your sheets?”

“Well, sure. Eventually.”

“Good grief.”

“I know, I know. Brooke’s got to know about it. For one thing, after I’ve changed my locks, she’ll need a new key to the house. I did think I might leave out some of the details as to why.”

“Details like Sarah being naked,” Paul said. “And in his bed, waiting for him like a bare-breasted spider.”

My lip curled as I turned my gaze toward him. “Is that a new species?”

“As of tonight,” he said. “I took the privilege of naming it.”

“Even though I’m the one who discovered it,” Mike said.

“I thought you wanted to keep that part of things quiet,” I said.

“Good point.”

I shook my head.
Men and mammaries,
I thought.
Men and mammaries.

The next morning Mike had back-to-back hearings in the federal building across the street, and Paul had to go to Norfolk for some reason. Only Brooke was there when court reconvened and Ian Maxwell called Mark Rehrer, whom I had last seen in Shorter’s kitchen, as his first witness.

“Old man Rehrer” turned out to be fifty-six, an age consistent with his white side walls and the coal-black strip of hair that ran back from his forehead. Though Shorter’s tombstone had suggested he got the electric chair for cutting his wife from ear to ear, he currently lived with his unmurdered wife across the street from the house that had belonged to Bill Hill.

“Did you see Mr. Hill from time to time?” Maxwell asked him after going through the preliminaries.

“Yes, occasionally.”

“You knew him fairly well?”

“I knew him to talk to. He had problems walking, though, and he rarely left his yard.”

“What gave him walking problems?”

“The front half of one of his feet had been amputated six or seven years previously.”

“Did you see him on the day of Friday, March 9?”

“No.”

“Did you see him on Saturday, March 10?”

“No. Saturday night, though, the light in Bill’s living room was on all night. At least, it was on when I went to bed Saturday night and still on when I went out to get the newspaper before daylight the next morning.”

“This was unusual?”

“Yes. Bill was usually up pretty early, but he went to bed early, too. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and later that day I got to thinking about it. I thought maybe his light had been on all Friday night, too.”

“How often did you see him normally?”

“At least every day or two. Bill didn’t get out much, but he did run to the grocery store every few days. And he’d shuffle out to his mailbox. Mostly, though, I’d see him in his backyard or at his front window, looking out at the neighborhood and brooding.”

“What did Bill Hill have to brood about?”

I stood. “Objection. Relevance.” Some of this could come in as part of the res gestae, the circumstances surrounding the case, but Maxwell looked to be heading into things I didn’t want him heading into.

“Sustained,” Judge Cooley said. To Maxwell he added, “I’m not sure where you’re going with this, but you need to get to the point.”

“Very well. Mr. Rehrer. Was the defendant Robert Shorter responsible for Mr. Hill losing part of his foot?”

“Objection,” I said again.

Maxwell turned to me. “You can’t argue the relevance of that one. If Bob Shorter—”

I interrupted him. “Whatever Bob Shorter may or may not have done might be relevant if you could prove it by competent evidence, but I’m betting that all Mr. Rehrer knows about the matter is what somebody told him.”

Maxwell hesitated, which was fatal.

“Are you attempting to solicit hearsay evidence, Mr. Maximus?” the judge asked him in his quavery voice.

“Maxwell. I’ll be calling the physician who treated Mr. Hill at a later time, Your Honor.”

“Let’s wait for that testimony then,” the judge said. “I’ll sustain the objection.”

Maxwell adjusted his glasses. “Mr. Rehrer,” he said, “what did you do on Sunday, March 11, in relation to Bill Hill?”

“Nothing until the afternoon, I’m afraid. A bit before two o’clock, I walked across to ring his doorbell. Bill didn’t answer, so I got down off the stoop and looked in his picture window. When I stood on tiptoe, I could see his legs. He was on the floor. I knocked on the glass and shouted to him, but he didn’t move, so I called nine-one-one.”

“You didn’t try the door?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rehrer.” To me: “Your witness.”

The more time Mr. Shorter’s neighbors spent on the stand, the worse it was going to be for Mr. Shorter, I thought. “No questions,” I said.

“Call Officer Steven Warren,” Maxwell said.

Officer Warren had been the first cop on the scene. He rang the doorbell and knocked and tried the door. “It wasn’t locked,” Warren said. “So I went in. A man was lying facedown on the floor in front of a recliner. It looked like maybe he’d been stabbed in the chair and fallen forward.”

“It looked like he had been stabbed? Did you see a weapon?”

“I saw a small knife on the floor by the decedent’s body.”

“Did it have blood on it?”

“It was at the edge of a pool of blood that was only partly covered by the dead man’s body. The blade was smeared with blood.”

“Anything unusual about the crime scene that you noticed?”

“There was a pattern in the blood that looked like writing. It was a word, but not one I understood until later.”

“What was the word?”

“Shorter.”

Maxwell turned to look at the members of the jury, emphasizing the importance of that one word. “Shorter, as in Robert Shorter?” he asked the witness.

“Objection,” I said. “Leading.” Lawyers aren’t allowed to ask their own witnesses questions in ways that suggest the answer. Of course, everyone knew that Shorter was the defendant’s name, but I saw no reason to let Maxwell wallow in it.

“Sustained,” the judge said.

Maxwell spent an inordinate amount of time turning pages on his yellow pad. Finally he looked up and asked, “Was the word Shorter written in all capitals?”

“The
S
was. Well, it was as tall as the vertical line of the
H
beside it. All the other letters were little letters.”

“Lowercase letters?”

“Yes. Lowercase.”

“What did you do next?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Warren said. “I called it in and waited for Homicide.”

“Your witness,” Maxwell told me.

I half stood. “No questions.”

Shorter flapped his hand at me, his expression suggesting he’d been sucking on a lemon. I leaned toward him.

“When are you going to question one of these witnesses?”

“When I think it will do us some good,” I said.

“Well, I didn’t pay you thirty thousand dollars to sit there on that scrawny little butt of yours.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have misunderstood.”

Maxwell was calling his next witness, a doctor named Rosen. Shorter’s hand closed on my forearm, the strength of his grip suggesting he hadn’t appreciated the levity of my response.

I tilted my head toward him, smiling as pleasantly as I could with warm breath that smelled overpoweringly of stale tobacco caressing my face. In a low voice I said, “Create a scene here in front of the jury, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison. There won’t be a thing you or I or any other lawyer can do about it.”

He let go of my arm, and the reek of his breath receded.

Dr. Rosen had come to the witness box wearing a sports jacket and tie that seemed a little dressy for his rumpled chinos and battered, brown athletic shoes. He had dark, curly hair that was just beginning to gray.

“Could you state your name for the record?” Maxwell asked him.

The doctor could. He was an ER doctor at Chippenham Hospital who had been on duty one night eight years ago when William Hill came in with frostbite in his hands and feet.

“How did you know it was frostbite?”

“Symptoms and patient history.”

“What were the symptoms?”

“Fever, intense shivering, slurring of speech. Patches of his skin were hard and waxy in appearance and grayish yellow in color. I’m referring specifically to the skin on his chin and his nose and his fingers and toes, including most of his right foot.”

“And the patient history?”

I stood up. “Your Honor? May counsel approach the bench?”

Judge Cooley’s head bobbed on his thin, wattled neck. “You may approach.”

As Maxwell and I went forward, the court reporter moved closer and pushed the button that turned on the white noise designed to keep the jury from hearing our bench conference. I had asked for one because I didn’t want the jury to know I was trying to keep them from hearing relevant evidence. Juries don’t like that.

“Your Honor,” I said. “What the witness is about to give us is hearsay, something the decedent told him or told a hospital nurse many years before his death.”

Maxwell said, “It was a statement made for medical diagnosis or treatment. That’s a clear exception to the hearsay rule.”

“What’s the prosecution trying to prove by this testimony?” I asked the judge. “Not that Bill Hill had part of his foot amputated because of frostbite.”

“What I’m trying to prove is that this isn’t the first time the defendant tried to kill him.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The defendant’s name is going to come out of this doctor’s mouth, and that name had nothing to do with the patient’s condition or his course of treatment.”

“It falls within the exception to hearsay, Your Honor.”

“It’s highly prejudicial and not especially reliable. I can’t cross-examine Mr. Hill about who he said was responsible for his condition. He could have had a grievance against Mr. Shorter or some other reason for not being truthful about the events that led to his frostbite. He came in with frostbite. That’s all this witness can tell us of his own knowledge.”