Proof of Intent (10 page)

I sighed. “Leon, look, I appreciate that you don't want to go to jail. But making up stories is not going to help.”

Leon scowled. “Man, I know a lot more about Mr. Big Shot Writer than you think.”

“I'm sure you do.” I stood. “Thank you for coming down. Your court date has been set for November 11. Call the public defender's office, they'll help you out.”

Leon turned to Lisa, winked. “Hey, man, I'se just playing with you.” He took a fat roll of money out of his pocket, tossed it on the table. He stood up, then watched me as I counted it. Five hundred on the nose.

“I ain't lying, Mr. Sloan. Straight up, I seen what I seen. But you want me to testify, you gonna have to do the right thing far as the rest of my bill goes. I ain't made out of money.”

He stalked out, the door banging shut behind him. I snorted dismissively.

Lisa was staring at me. “You aren't going to follow up on what he said?”

“Let me give you the first rule of thumb in the practice of law. The client always lies. It's true in civil law, and it's true in criminal law.” I waved my hand toward the door that had just closed behind Leon Prouty. “But it's especially true of people like that.”

“Yeah, but that was very specific. The black Lincoln with the rear doors that open backward . . .”

“Of
course
it was specific. Good liars know that the key to a good lie is to fill it with tantalizing details. The only thing missing from his story was a man with a wooden arm.”

I guess there must have been something bitter in my tone, because her eyes widened, and she leaned back in her chair as though I was about to hit her.

“You think Miles is guilty, don't you?” she said.

“Put it this way, Stash Olesky is both a careful and an ethical man. He's not like his worthy predecessor, our friend Judge Mark Evola. When Mark was prosecuting attorney, he wasn't above indicting you just because you showed promise of getting the smiling face of Mark Evola on the news—no matter how remote the likelihood of your guilt. No, if Stash drew up a warrant three days after the crime was committed, then things are not looking good for Miles Dane.”

At that moment Mrs. Fenton came in and handed me a folder. “This just came in from Mr. Olesky. He said, ‘Tell Charley this is professional courtesy at its finest.' ”

I read through the file folder, then handed it to Lisa.

“So they found the murder weapon with his fingerprints on it,” she said after she'd finished reading it. “Big deal. It's his stick, of course it has his fingerprints. I don't see how they could convict on this.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That's precisely what worries me.”

The Pickeral Point town square abuts the river. Its most prominent feature is the Kerry County Courthouse, a large Depression-era box whose sandstone facade alludes in the most perfunctory way to both the Federal style and to Art Deco, without having any of the charm of either. I like the courthouse for precisely this reason: It's pure Pickeral Point. By which I mean the design makes no pretentious declaration about the aims or workings or majesty of “The Law.” It's a place where real human beings do the real work of the law—by and large with professionalism and a reasonable dose of humanity and humility.

Ordinarily you can see the river from the front steps of the courthouse. On Monday morning, however, all you could see were the antennae of the various television trucks parked along the boardwalk. Lisa and I bulled through the throng of camera crews and microcassette-recorder-thrusting print journalists, into the courthouse, and up to Courtroom 2B.

The first thing I noticed was the TV camera in the back of the courtroom. I had heard a rumor that Court TV would be broadcasting live—but I didn't believe it until I saw their logo on the side of the camera.

I should have known. When I mentioned the humility of Kerry County's legal professionals, I have to except one man in particular. Judge Mark Evola.

Mark Evola had always considered himself to be larger than Pickeral Point. He loved the limelight. In theory the probable cause hearing was supposed to be held in district court rather than the more senior circuit court where Judge Evola served. But, under the dubious theory that a high-profile case of this sort required “judicial continuity,” Evola had conspired to have himself preside over the Miles Dane matter from beginning to end. Everything from the first appearance to sentencing—if it got that far—would happen in front of him.

Which was bad news for Miles because there was nothing in life that Mark Evola would like better than to see Charley Sloan getting thrashed to a bleeding pulp on a high-profile case.

Evola is a boyish forty-one years old and goes about six-six. He is handsome as a movie star, his blond hair tinged at the temples with just enough gray to keep him from looking like a child. Back when he had been the prosecuting attorney of the county, I had beaten him badly on a major case, derailing his vast political ambitions.

Judging from the camera in the back of the room, I guessed he was figuring if he played his cards right, maybe this trial would raise his profile enough to get him back in the political game. Our current congressman was rumored to be suffering from end-stage colon cancer, and the job seemed likely to be opening up soon. A good performance here in front of the TV camera . . . who knows, maybe Washington might yet beckon. So the hearing began with a gratuitous civics lesson by the judge designed to impress the many journalists present—and presumably the voters of our district—with Evola's presidential qualities.

“A probable cause hearing,” Evola said grandly, addressing himself toward the television camera in the back of the room, “is a sort of proving ground, in which the state presents the evidence against a person charged with a crime and attempts to prove that there is indeed probable cause to try the accused on those charges.”

He went on at some length about the impartiality of this court, then pointed to the bronze statue he kept on his bench—the blindfolded goddess with her scales of justice held high—discoursing at length about what it represented and what a marvelous system we Americans had that forced the state to bring out its evidence in the cold, clear, unflinching light of public view. It sounded very pretty and it was all total hooey, every single syllable of it aimed at that live TV feed. Everybody in the room knew that any prosecuting attorney worth ten cents can make probable cause on a ham sandwich. I tried to keep my groans below the level of audibility.

Finally, Evola shut up and let Stash Olesky, our prosecuting attorney, get to work. Stash, like Evola, is blond. But there the resemblance ends. Where Evola exudes a bland, vapid charm, Stash, with his broad cheekbones and almost Asiatic eyes, looks like a Polish aristocrat, preparing to make a doomed charge against some invading army. There's a note of both courage and sadness in him, as though it pains him slightly as he lops you to pieces with his saber.

Stash's first move was to put Chantall Denkerberg on the stand. She walked to the stand calmly, wearing the same blue wool suit—half a step away from a nun's habit—that she had worn when she arrived at the crime scene. Or maybe all her suits looked exactly the same. Her shoulders were squared, jaw firm; she looked ready to do spiritual battle for the cause of right, truth, and justice. I suspected she would be an effective witness, and I was right.

Stash led her through a general explanation of her findings, eventually arriving at the meat of the case.

“Detective, at what point did you begin to form an opinion about the case?”

“Well, you're always making a mental list of suspects. But what I do is try to evaluate the totality of the evidence and just start matching things up. Basically when I walked into the room to interview Mr. Dane in his home on the morning of the murder, there were a couple of things that seemed peculiar about the crime scene. And what I hoped my interview would do was clarify or explain those peculiarities.

“Specifically, at that time, I had two concerns. My first concern had to do with the broken window I had observed on the second floor of Mr. Dane's house. I had been advised by Mr. Sloan, Mr. Dane's attorney, that he understood an assailant had jumped out that window. There was glass scattered in the yard beneath the window indicating it had been struck from the inside and broken outward. That was consistent with someone escaping the house there. Naturally I examined the ground underneath the window with a great deal of care. It was moist soil from the rain the previous day, with only patchy grass thanks to the fact, I guess, that there's not a lot of sunlight there. At any rate, given the condition of the soil, I would have expected to find footprints under the window. I didn't find any. I mean not so much as a dent in the soil. So that raised a serious concern in my mind.

“Second, I examined the body of the deceased. Normally when a person is attacked, they will defend themselves. The result of this is that the person sustains injuries on their hands and arms as they attempt to ward off the initial blows. Diana Dane's body showed no evidence of that sort of injury, which indicated either that she was asleep when she was attacked or that she knew her attacker and was therefore unprepared for the assault.

“So, these two things concerned me a great deal as I went into my interview with Mr. Dane. I was hoping his story would explain these two facts to my satisfaction.”

Stash Olesky nodded. “And did it?”

Chantall Denkerberg glanced briefly at Miles Dane. “No, it did not.”

“Why not?”

“There are two areas that you evaluate when you're an investigator. One area is the factual circumstances of the case. That's the old Jack Webb just-the-facts-ma'am side of the case. The other thing you evaluate is the demeanor and actions of the witnesses and parties involved in a crime. And as a trained and experienced investigator it's my job to take both of those things into consideration. In my view, Mr. Dane came up short on both counts.”

Stash Olesky interrupted. “Let's stick with the Jack Webb issues first.”

Detective Denkerberg nodded. “Given the facts I had gleaned up to that point, his story just flat-out didn't make sense. In a nutshell, this is what he said: He told me that he was working in his office; he said he heard a noise that concerned him; he was a little vague and evasive in describing the noise, but he said it made him nervous. That's a direct quote. ‘It made me nervous.' So he went upstairs to see what it was. I have to mention at this point, by the way, that his office contains a huge weapons collection. Guns, knives, coshes, swords, you name it, all of them hanging on the wall.

“Now I don't know about you, but if I'm sitting in a room full of weapons and I hear a spooky noise inside my house, I'm going to grab something. A stick, a gun, a butter knife,
something
. But Mr. Dane said he didn't do that. He just went up the stairs unarmed. Okay, fair enough. So, according to his story, when Mr. Dane reached the top of the stairs, he saw a man in the hallway. The man fled into a bedroom at the end of the hall. Mr. Dane heard breaking glass, he gave chase, he arrived in the bedroom, the window was broken, he looked out, he saw the man fleeing across the lawn toward Riverside Boulevard.

“I should note here that my investigation of the top floor of Mr. Dane's home demonstrated clearly that if somebody had exited from the second floor without going down the stairs, then he would have had to jump out a window. There were no dumbwaiters, no back stairs, no doors, no fire escape.” Chantall Denkerberg shrugged. “Had to be the window. But if somebody jumped, where were the footprints? It didn't add up.

“That was probably the most important thing. But also the crime itself. Why would a burglar beat somebody to death? There was a missing weapon on the wall of Mr. Dane's office. A martial arts type object called a bokken. A wooden training sword used by Japanese swordsmen. Mr. Dane suggested a scenario in which a burglar might have snuck it off the wall while Mr. Dane was using the bathroom that was attached to his office, crept upstairs, then at some point surprised Mrs. Dane . . . or she surprised him. Whichever case it was, the intruder got scared—this is still Mr. Dane's hypothesis—and in order to silence Diana Dane, he beat her to death.

“Again, this just seemed implausible on several levels. Why? Let me run through the reasons.

“First, there are all these expensive weapons on the wall. Fancy shotguns, nice old cowboy pistols, samurai swords, bowie knives. If, indeed, a burglar were going to steal something—well, the bokken seemed to me to be an unlikely weapon to grab. This is a weapon which Mr. Dane himself described as ‘basically a black stick'—again, I'm quoting him. It was neither the most valuable nor the most dangerous weapon on the wall. It wasn't even especially eye-catching.

“Second, the victim, Diana Dane, was beaten horribly. Both experience and common sense tell me that a felon who's committing violence in order to escape detection isn't going to stay around and beat somebody beyond the point of death. What's the point? You want to escape? Give them a good smack and then scoot.

“Third, the lack of defensive wounds made the ‘surprised burglar' scenario seem unlikely. He could only be surprised by somebody who was conscious. A conscious person, attacked by a stranger with a stick, will invariably hold their hands up to ward off the blows. That's an extremely predictable feature of human nature.” Detective Denkerberg shook her head. “Nope. Mr. Dane's whole story seemed nonsensical to me. It didn't match the facts.”

“Okay,” the prosecuting attorney said, “you mentioned the Jack Webb side of the case. What about the human side? Did something bother you there?”

“It sure did. Look, this is a probable cause hearing, not a trial, so this is probably something I can say here that I might not be able to say in front of a jury. When an innocent person finds their spouse beaten to death, they call 911.” She looked at Miles with naked disgust. “That man right there? He called his
lawyer
.”