Proof of Intent (3 page)

Miles shrugged. “Yeah, well, what it was, the noise made me nervous. I don't know. Like something wasn't right. Hell, it could have been a million things. I just wanted to make sure she was safe.”

“Were you concerned it might have been an intruder?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, it crossed my mind. You hear a funny noise in the middle of the night, it could be a lot of things.”

“So what happened next?”

“I went down the hall toward the living room. Then I heard it again.”

“The noise.”

“Yeah. Like a crack. Or a bump. Only this time it sounded more, I don't know, like splintering wood or something.”

I felt a tingle running under my skin. I didn't like this at all, didn't like the way this was going, not one bit.

“Where was it coming from?” Denkerberg said. “This noise.”

“Upstairs.” He stopped, and his face went blank.

The room was silent again. I didn't watch my client's face. Instead I watched Denkerberg. I noticed her gaze had drifted up to the empty weapon rack again.

Miles continued. “That's when I saw him.”

I nodded slightly, as though I'd heard this all before. I hoped Denkerberg didn't pick up on my consternation. Or my sudden urge to strangle my client. I was about three seconds away from terminating the interview. Which one was the lie—the story he'd told me earlier or the one he was telling now? I could feel a cool sweat sprouting on my forehead.

“Saw who?” the detective said.

“The man in the hallway.”

In the movies lawyers are always storming into rooms and demanding that detectives terminate interviews. Sometimes that has to be done, of course; but in real life getting pushy with detectives is pretty much an invitation to get your client charged with something.

I began coughing. Miles and Denkerberg looked at me, both seemingly annoyed at the interruption. My coughing segued into a sort of choking, hacking croak.

“Water,” I gasped.

Denkerberg looked understandably skeptical.

I kept hacking away, putting my hands over my throat.

“Here.” Miles stood. “I'll get you some water.”

I shook my head sharply, pointed at Denkerberg. “Her. Don't want . . . you disturbing . . . the scene . . .” I gasped and spluttered some more.

Denkerberg didn't move.

“Please.” I pointed at her. “Get . . .”

She scowled. “Glasses in the kitchen, Mr. Dane?”

He nodded.

As soon as she was out of the room, I hopped up, closed the door, and cranked the massive bolt, locking the door.

“What in the world do you think you're doing, Miles?” I said.

He looked at me blankly, all innocence.

“Let's put aside the fact that you've been needlessly and childishly antagonizing that woman from the word go,” I said. “More importantly, Miles, I asked you very specifically if you knew what happened.” My voice was low but hard. “You said no. I asked if you heard anything. No, you were blasting Beethoven's seventeenth piano sonata on your stereo. I asked if you saw anybody. No, you were working. Now all of a sudden, there's thumping and bumping and some mysterious figure in the hallway. Don't tell me you were confused, distraught, whatever. That won't wash.”

Miles didn't say anything, just stared straight up in the air.

“So which is it, Miles? Was there a guy or not?”

“There was a guy.”

“You saw the man who killed your wife.”

“Yes. I did.”

“Then why did you lie to me earlier?”

He looked at the floor, sighed. “When you hear the whole story, the way it really happened? It's going to sound improbable, stupid. I almost wasn't going to tell the truth at all. I hadn't decided at that point.”

I studied his face, but I couldn't get a sense of whether he was lying or not. “If I get a whiff of stink here,” I said finally, “if I get even a hint that you're lying, I
will
stand up and I
will
walk out of this room, and that will be the last time you see me. Do you understand me?”

Miles nodded.

“Everything you've done so far looks self-incriminating. Just the fact that I had to interrupt this interrogation in such an obvious and silly way looks extremely, extremely, extremely bad. But I wouldn't have done it if I weren't concerned that you were about to do something wildly stupid. Are we on the same page here?”

“Now hold on just a—” Miles stood up and jabbed his finger in my face.

I grabbed his finger and twisted. He sat down hard. “No,
you
look here, Miles. You need to think very hard about what you're going to do next. You need to be certain that what you're going to say is absolutely truthful. Okay? If you say it was quiet but your neighbor says he couldn't sleep because Horowitz's Steinway is blasting out your window at two thousand decibels, that's a problem. If you tell Denkerberg you were writing, but your computer says that you haven't saved a new file in three days, that's a problem. If you say you didn't touch your wife's body, and they find a bloody glove stuffed in the back of your sock drawer, that's a problem. Understood?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Shut up! I'm not interested in
yeah but
. Sit down in that chair, and think. Silently. For precisely two minutes. If at the end of those two minutes you have even a shadow of a doubt about whether each and every event that you are about to describe might be controvertible by other facts in even the smallest detail, then I'm going to tell Detective Denkerberg that you are very distraught and emotional and that you need medical care and that this interview is hereby terminated.”

“Now Charley—” He started to rise out of the chair.

“
Sit!
”

We stayed there, eyes locked for a few seconds. When the fire cooled a little in his eyes, I stepped back. He blew out a long breath, then stared up at the ceiling.

Denkerberg knocked sharply on the door. I didn't open it. She knocked again.

“You ready?” I said.

“Go ahead,” he said softly.

“And for godsake do your best not to antagonize her.”

Miles nodded, looking at the ground like a chastened schoolboy.

I opened the door, called the detective back in. “Sorry about that, Detective. I'm actually feeling much better now.” I rubbed my throat. “As it happened, once the choking passed, I realized there were a couple of housekeeping issues between me and my client that I'd meant to clear out of the way before our talk, but in all the haste and confusion, I had forgotten to address them. I hope you won't hold it against me.” I tried out my biggest smile on the detective.

She ignored me, her eyes fixed on Miles's face. “There was a man in the hallway,” she said.

Miles nodded. “That's right. I don't know if you looked closely, but it's a curved stairway. So you sort of come around the corner, then you're in the upstairs hallway. Anyway, I came around and there he was. I guess I just froze.” He frowned thoughtfully. “No, that's not right. Actually, I ducked back behind the wall. My first thought was, you know, what if he has a gun? Then I heard him running down the hallway, then I heard this smash. Like glass breaking. After that I guess I just got mad and stopped worrying about my own safety, because I came back out and ran after him. But he was gone. I looked out the smashed window in the back bedroom, and I saw—I guess I'd call him a shadowy figure. And he's hauling ass off toward the road. Then I started shouting my wife's name. She didn't answer, so I ran into my bedroom. And there she—”

Suddenly Miles broke down, put his face in his hands, and began to weep. By this point I had started feeling skeptical about virtually every word he'd said—but his grief looked entirely convincing to me.

When Miles finally seemed to have collected himself, Denkerberg said, “This man. What did he look like?”

Miles's face hardened. “I wish I could say. It was dark up there.”

“But it was definitely a man.”

“Yeah. I could tell by the way he moved. He didn't move like a woman.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me? Height? Build? Race? Scars? Tattoos? Eye color?”

Miles shook his head.

“Was he carrying a weapon?”

“I don't know.”

Denkerberg took some notes, then looked up. “Were you?”

“Was I what?”

“Carrying a weapon?”

Miles seemed to hesitate. “No,” he said finally.

“You're sitting in a room full of weapons. You hear a strange noise, something that you suspect might have been an intruder, you rush toward the noise . . .” She squinted curiously at Miles for a moment. “And yet you don't take a weapon?”

Miles's face was blank for a moment, then his eyes narrowed. “Are you implying something?”

“Like I said before, whys and wherefores. My job is to tie down every single detail.”

“Well I wasn't carrying a weapon. Like I said earlier, my first thought was that my wife might have slipped and fallen.”

“Didn't even grab something small? A knife? A stick?”

Miles shook his head.

Denkerberg nodded, then pointed her Bic pen at the empty rack on the wall. “What's usually in that rack?”

Miles looked up, blinked, then looked slightly confused. “On the wall?”

“That rack. There's an empty rack.” Denkerberg stood, walked over to the two wooden hooks, then peered at the label on the small brass plate next to it. “It says it's a bokken.”

“It's pronounced BO-ken, not bock-in. B-O-K-K-E-N. A bokken is a wooden sword used by Japanese swordsmen—kenjutsu practitioners. That one is Gabon ebony, hand-carved by Toshio Nakamitsu, the most famous craftsman of wooden weapons in modern Japan.”

“What does it look like?”

“Basically it's a black stick. A curved piece of wood, shaped roughly like a samurai sword.”

“What happened to it?”

Miles shrugged. “Seems like it's been gone a while.”

“Did you loan it to somebody? Lose it? Break it?”

Miles kept staring at the empty space on the wall, a vague expression on his face. “I don't know where it is.”

“Stolen?”

“I don't know. Hard keeping track of all this stuff.”

Denkerberg looked skeptical. “You keep the door locked at all times to protect your valuable collection, how could you lose it?”

There was a long silence.

“Okay, now that I think about it, I believe it
was
here yesterday.”

More silence.

“Maybe he . . .” Miles frowned. “I went to the bathroom right before I heard the noise. This son of a bitch must have snuck in here and taken it off the wall while I was in the toilet.”

Denkerberg took some notes, then looked up. “My experience tells me that thieves look for four things. In descending order: cash, guns, jewelry, electronics.”

Miles's jaw clenched.

“You're the author of all these famous crime novels—I assume part of what you do requires you to be able to put yourself in the mind of a criminal?”

“So?”

Denkerberg gave him a hard look. “So imagine that you're a sneak thief, a common burglar. Probably stealing to pay for your next drug hit. You come into the house, I don't know, through a window or something. You walk into this room. What's the first thing you grab?”

Miles didn't say anything.

The detective pointed at a beautiful double-barreled shotgun hanging over Miles's desk. “I'm not a burglar, I admit. But nevertheless my eye is drawn to that, Mr. Dane. Tell me about it.”

“It's a Purdy. A twenty-gauge English best gun.”

“
Best
gun?”

“That's the terminology they use in the English gun trade to describe the highest quality custom-made shotguns.”

Denkerberg strolled over to it. “Boy, that's a pretty thing. Look at the detail in that little hunting scene engraved on the side. Pheasants flying through the air and such.” She leaned closer. “My heavens, that sure looks like gold inlay, too.”

“It's gold, yes.”

Denkerberg wrinkled her nose. “What's a gun like this worth?”

“Seventy, eighty grand,” Miles said softly.

“My heavens!” she said again. Sister Herman Marie's favorite expletive, as I recall. Denkerberg turned to Miles. “Okay, let's try this again. You're an imaginary crook, looking to make a quick score. You walk into this room. Do you grab the eighty-thousand-dollar gold-inlaid shotgun? Or the black stick?”

Miles shrugged. “Look. I got up to go to the bathroom a couple times. Let's say the perp sneaks in here at three in the morning while I'm in the john. Naturally, that time of night, he thinks everybody's in bed—until he hears the toilet flush. So he goes,
Oh, shit! There's somebody in here! What am I gonna do?
He's frantic, he's in a rush, no time to think, he just reaches out and grabs the closest weapon to his hand and runs out the door.”

“Hm.” Denkerberg squinted skeptically. I could see she didn't buy it. I wasn't sure I did either. “Alright, Mr. Dane, I know this is unpleasant, but could you tell me about discovering your wife? What happened then?”

Miles slumped backward into the soft cushions. His eyes slowly closed. “I don't know,” he said finally, his voice coming out in a hoarse whisper. “My legs just got all weak, and I couldn't stand up.”

“Did you touch your wife?”

“No.”

“You didn't check her vital signs?”

Miles's eyes opened. “Check her
vital
signs! Jesus! Have a heart, lady. She was dead as a doornail. Any fool could see that. You've seen her! My God! I couldn't touch her when she was that way!”

“Easy, easy,” I said softly.

“And how long did you sit there, Mr. Dane?”