Proof of Intent (31 page)

“You may note the word approximate, Mr. Sloan. Regardless of where his hands were, there is a certain margin of error here. Forty-one inches is well within the margin of error.”

“Oh! Margin of error!” I slapped the report down on the defense table. “That's a fancy phrase to cover up the fact that she could have been hit with anything between a toothpick and a full-grown oak tree, am I right?”

Stash Olesky objected.

“Withdraw the question,” I said. I picked up the report and flipped through it thoughtfully. “You know, I glanced through your report a couple of times, and I kept hunting around for the place where you demonstrated that
Mr. Dane
was the person holding the murder weapon. I'm sure I didn't look hard enough, but, gosh, I just couldn't seem to find it.”

Agent Pierce sat solemnly, but didn't speak. He just kept looking at me with that turn-the-other-cheek expression.

Finally I said, “Agent Pierce?”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Sloan, I was waiting for you to ask a question. I was rather under the impression you had just made a speech.”

That got a nice little titter from the jury. I smiled genially, a nice guy who doesn't mind a few yucks at his own expense.

“Let me try phrasing it in the form of a question then, Agent. Does your report in any way, shape, or form indicate the identity of the person who wielded the murder weapon?”

“Other than that it was a right-handed person of normal stature, no.”

“Ah. A right-handed person of normal stature. That narrows it down. So in that sense, it could have been you?”

“No sir, I'm left-handed.”

“Oh, thank goodness!” I said. “You're off the hook then.”

I got my own little titter out of that one. But it was small consolation.

“Right-handed.” I intoned the words ominously.

“Yes sir.”

I went up to Agent Pierce, reclaimed the bokken, and walked back toward the defense table. Then, without warning, I tossed it to Miles Dane. Startled, he caught it one-handed.

“Agent Pierce, would you identify which hand Mr. Dane caught that stick with?”

Stash Olesky jumped out of his seat. “Objection!”

“I withdraw the question,” I said.

But the jury could see. Miles Dane was holding the bokken in his left hand.

“That was among the cheapest tricks I have ever seen in my life,” Stash said over lunch, looking fairly annoyed. We were seated across the rickety table from each other down at Rae's Diner, near the wharf. “You and I both know your client isn't left-handed. You coached him.”

“Nope,” I said.

Stash was eating the cube steak and creamed spinach. “Then how . . .”

“As you know, he's secured to his chair every day by the bailiffs. Usually they cuff him by the ankle. But today I told them his ankle was getting chafed raw.” I smiled. “So I had them cuff his hand to the chair. His
right
hand. I left my coat on the table so nobody could see the handcuff.”

Stash sighed loudly, then began laughing. “If I didn't have that son of a bitch buried already, I'd be pissed.”

“Keep whistling, pal. The graveyard's coming up on the left.”

Stash Olesky didn't even look up from his creamed spinach.

“The state calls Regina Mills.”

A tall thin woman walked slowly to the front of the courtroom. She had the appearance of somebody who was used to being looked at. She must have been seventy, but her face had been recently stretched into a wrinkle-free zone, so now her skin had the taut look of Saran Wrap. She had obviously once been quite beautiful and now looked immensely frightening.

She sat and was sworn in.

“Mrs. Mills,” Stash said, “could you tell us where you live?”

“Well, normally we winter in Sarasota,” she said. Her voice was pitched high, her diction pretentious. “But Douglas, my husband, Mr. Mills, he's been ill this year, so we stayed in Michigan for the operation. Our home here in Pickeral Point is at 223 Riverside Boulevard.”

“And where is that in relation to Miles and Diana Dane's house?”

She raised her chin slightly, as though not wanting to admit the fact that she lived in the vicinity of lesser personages than herself—though whether it was writers or accused murderers she found so distasteful was not clear. “Next door.”

“How close are your homes?”

“I should say two hundred feet at most.”

“Close enough to hear anything from their home? Television, stereo, conversation, anything like that?”

“It's not my custom to listen in on the affairs of neighbors. But ordinarily we are far enough that one can't hear much of anything from the Danes'.”

“On the night of October 21, did you have occasion to hear anything unusual?”

“As I say, it's not my custom to pay attention to other people's private matters. Unfortunately, my husband was in some discomfort due to his, ah, condition. And he couldn't sleep. It was our nurse's day off, so I was forced to help him with his . . .” She flushed slightly. “Well, there are some medical matters, personal hygiene matters I suppose you could say, that required my assistance. He wanted water, this and that. Suffice it to say, I got not a whit of rest that night.”

Stash tried to look pleasant. “Right. But did you, while you were up tending to your husband, hear anything out of the ordinary?”

The chin tipped upward a little, but she didn't answer.

“I think we've established that your neighborhood is a quiet one and that you're not the eavesdropping type. Nevertheless.”

“Yes. Well. I did hear something.”

Stash, I'm sure, was ready to strangle the woman. He smiled genially. “And that was . . .”

“Yelling. I had exerted myself somewhat in the course of moving Douglas from one place to the next and had gotten rather warm. So I stepped outside very briefly, just to feel the air on my face. That was when I heard it.”

“Heard what?”

“The yelling.”

Stash nodded. “The yelling. Tell us more.”

“There was someone yelling. I heard a man and a woman yelling. Some sort of altercation or disagreement. The sound was coming from the direction of the Danes' house.”

“An altercation or disagreement. How far away were you?”

“As I said. At most, two hundred feet. It must have been quite loud, too, because there are any number of bushes and trees between our homes that would have deadened the sound.”

“And what time was this?”

“Just after midnight.”

“You sure it wasn't later? Couldn't have been around, say, three o'clock?”

“No. I had just started watching a movie on the television.
Spartacus
.”

“The old Charlton Heston picture?”

“Kirk
Douglas,”
Mrs. Mills said disdainfully.

“Oh, right, right. I always get them confused.” Stash grinned at the jury. “I'm going to proffer—thank you, Mrs. Wilson—I'm going to show you what has just been marked as Exhibit 64. Could you identify this?”

“It's the
TV Guide
for the week dated October 18 through 23 of last year.”

“And if you could tell us when
Spartacus
was playing that night?”

“Here it is. It's on Turner Classic Movies eleven until two in the morning.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Mills.”

Stash sat down, and I stood up.

“Just a few brief questions, Mrs. Mills. How long have you and the Danes lived next to each other?”

“Since 1975 or thereabouts. Whenever they moved in.”

“And in that time have you ever heard yelling coming from their house?”

She looked up at the ceiling, took a long time to think. Finally she spoke in her high, firm voice: “Never.”

“Let me be clear. Arguments, disagreements, screaming,
anything
of that nature?”

“Never.”

“Anything to indicate the Danes were at each other's throats on a regular basis?”

“Never.”

“Never ever?”

“I said
never
. Never ever, I believe, is what they call redundant, Mr. Sloan.”

“You're absolutely right. Never is quite clear enough. You never heard an argument out of the Danes in the whole twenty-five years you lived next to them. Thank you so much for your valuable testimony.”

“We've got to find this guy,” I said. Lisa and I were sitting around the office that night eating pizza. The mood was glum. “We've got to find Blair Dane, and we've got to put him on the stand.”

“How?” Lisa said.

“Well, we know where he is, right?”

“We know where he
was
.”

“We've got no choice. We subpoena him, we send a couple of burly deputies out there, and we bring him back under court order.”

“And if he's at the store buying milk or hiding in a storm drain?”

I sighed. “Then we're out of luck.”

“So there must be a better way.”

“Name it.”

We sat in silence for ten minutes.

“Here's what I want you to do,” I said. “Draw up a material witness subpoena. That will give the sheriff the authority to hold a witness in custody. It's usually used by law enforcement, but there's nothing in the statute that says we can't use it ourselves. I'll call Evola and see if he'll sign it tonight. Then we'll see what happens.”

Evola grudgingly signed the document that night, standing out in the foyer of his house in slippers and a bathrobe covered with Michigan State logos. He didn't speak to me, just signed the document and walked back down the hall, his slippers slapping against the floor, leaving his exceptionally pretty wife to close the door behind me.

At just before six in the morning, accompanied by two sheriff's deputies, we arrived at the Brothers of Christ compound and knocked on the door.

The man named Jack answered the door, his hair wet from the shower, looking a great deal more chipper than I felt. “Well, hello, Mr. Sloan. Back again?”

The senior deputy said, “Is there a Blair Dane here?”

“You have a warrant, I assume?”

“A subpoena.”

“Ah. May I?” He held out his hand. The sheriff's deputy handed it to him. Jack read it with great care.

“You know, guys, this is a subpoena, not a search warrant. Without a warrant, I don't believe you have the right to actually enter this building.” He paused a beat. “But because we're friendly and cooperative citizens with nothing to hide, I'd be happy to invite you in. Conveniently all of the brothers here are seated at the breakfast table as we speak. Then have a look through the house. Take your time. Feel free to ask for identification from anybody. They'll be perfectly happy to oblige. Unfortunately you'll find that there's nobody by the name of Blair Dane living here.”

He then opened the door, and we went in.

Our search uncovered nothing. Blair Dane was gone.

Jack stood at the door and waved pleasantly as we drove off toward the rising sun.

It had been a thin, thin thread, and a distant hope. But at this point, distant hopes were about all we had.

First thing next morning, Stash put a local lawyer, Tony Merritt, on the stand.

“Mr. Merritt,” he said after the usual preliminaries, “have you ever performed any work for Diana Dane?”

“Yes, I have.”

“And what did that work consist of?”

“I prepared a will for her.”

Stash handed him a small stack of paper, recently marked by the clerk. “I'd call your attention to Exhibit 38. Can you identify this?”

“This is the will I prepared for Ms. Dane.”

“Could you read that line, yes, right there, that my lovely assistant Miss Genovese has marked with the yellow Hi-Liter?”

“It says, ‘I hereby leave my entire estate to my husband, Miles Dane.' ”

“My entire estate. That would include the proceeds of her trust if it were liquidated?”

“I wasn't involved in the trust. So I can't really speak to that except to say that from her verbal representations to me, she said there was a trust and that it would be liquidated when she died, and that if she predeceased her husband, then the proceeds were to go to Mr. Dane.”

“Did she indicate the size of that trust?”

“No, she did not.”

“But as long as she died before him . . .”

“Right. He got the whole shooting match.”

The next witness was a tall attractive woman of about forty, who wore the sort of clothes that managed to look both casual and terribly expensive at the same time. I know all about that kind of wardrobe: My second wife, whose tastes ran toward the same sort of garb, left me with a credit card bill of seventy-one thousand dollars and change when we split up, virtually all of it spent on clothes.

“Would you state your name and occupation for the record?” Stash Olesky said after she was sworn in.

“My name is Sharon Molina, and I'm an attorney at the law firm of Shearman & Pound in New York City.” She looked almost frighteningly at ease in the witness box, a hint of smile on her face, black hair glossy, tasteful bits of gold at the ear and throat.

“What is your legal specialty?”

“I'm in the firm's trust department. Trust work involves managing the legal and business affairs of trusts.”

“And if you could explain what a trust is, Ms. Molina?”

“Technical mumbo jumbo aside—” A flash of bright, white, straight teeth to the jury. “—a trust is a legal arrangement, a contract basically, by which one person's assets are controlled by another person to accomplish a specific end laid out by whoever established the trust. My practice primarily involves trusts established by high-wealth individuals who wish to preserve their wealth for future generations, to minimize taxes, or to accomplish various charitable purposes. There are quite a few complexities involved—legal, financial, and tax-related—and so a good deal of thought and experience are required to construct and maintain trusts so that, in fact, they do what they are intended to do.”