Proof of Intent (41 page)

It was a horribly tantalizing moment. I'd reached the point where I finally believed that I understood the case. But now I couldn't go the last yard.

“Mr. van Blaricum,” I said, “you came to Detroit back in October, didn't you?”

Van Blaricum's eyes burned into me. “No,” he said.

“You came to Miles Dane's house on the night of October 20, didn't you?”

“That's absurd.” A little smile of ugly triumph licked at the corner of his mouth.

“You're lying.”

Stash hopped up. “Objection. Badgering.”

“Did you or did you not come to Miles Dane's house on the night of October 20?”

“Asked and answered,” Stash yelled.

“Sustained,” the judge said. “Move on, Mr. Sloan.”

And there I was. Stuck. No evidence, no corroborating witnesses, no way of impeaching what I knew in my heart to be lies. Behind me somebody cleared their throat loudly. I turned. It was Lisa.

And she was alone.

“Your Honor, could I have about thirty seconds with my paralegal?” I said.

Evola looked up at the clock. It was twelve on the nose. “I think this might be a good time to take lunch,” he said. I could see in his eyes that he thought that an hour of lunch would cool everybody down, kill my momentum, and derail my entire examination. Fortunately for me, he couldn't have been more wrong. “Any objection, Mr. Sloan?”

I put a look of annoyance on my face and stood there for a while like I was debating whether or not to make a stink. “I suppose,” I said grudgingly.

“Lunch it is.”

“Where's Blair, Lisa?” I said.

“He's outside. He's sitting in the car. Trying to decide what to do.”

I rubbed my face in my hands. What to do? All along I'd thought that Blair was the guy. But now, suddenly, I was convinced I'd been wrong.

“Tell you what,” I said. “Forget Blair for the moment. There's something else I need you to do . . .”

Then I went in and sat down with Miles. “Remember what you said? You said that when you walked into the room with Blair and Diana at ten o'clock, Blair said, ‘I guess he's not coming,' or something to that effect. What if he was talking about Roger?”

“Roger?” Miles shook his head in disbelief. “Jesus H. Christ. I never even thought of Roger! I thought for sure that . . . Oh, my God.”

“There's something else I need to know . . .” I said.

After lunch I put van Blaricum back on the stand.

“Mr. van Blaricum, I'm giving you State's Exhibit 59. Can you identify this for me?”

Van Blaricum looked sullenly at the book I'd handed him. “It appears to be one of Miles's books. The title is
How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It
.”

“Interesting reading, wouldn't you say?”

Van Blaricum seemed very much in control of himself now. “I wouldn't know.”

I feigned surprise. “You've never read it?”

“I wouldn't read his trash if you paid me.”

“There's a paper clip on one of the pages in the book there. Could you turn to that page and read me what it says? The highlighted portion?”

Van Blaricum flipped the book open, looked at it for a long moment.

“Cat got your tongue, Mr. van Blaricum?”

His voice was low and cold. “It says, ‘My special thanks to Roger van Blaricum, who gave me both the original idea for this book and the implement that inspired the murder weapon itself.' ”

“So you gave him the idea for this book,” I said acidly. “But you didn't actually read it?”

“The book is about a man who hated his relatives. I presume that's what he meant.”

“So you have read it.”

Van Blaricum saw his mistake and tried to correct it. But it was a little late. “I
haven't
read it.” His voice went defensive. “I
haven't
. I just heard on the news what the, ah, what the plot was about.”

“No doubt.” I laughed derisively. “Earlier you testified you had studied martial arts in Japan. What was the name of the martial arts style called again?”

“Muto Ryu.”

“I'm not a martial arts expert,” I said. “Is that like karate or kung fu or what?”

There was a long pause. “Swordsmanship. It's a style of Japanese swordsmanship.”

“You practice that with a real sword?”

“Generally, no.”

“What
do
you use?”

One side of his face twitched a couple of times. “A bokken.”

I lifted the presumed murder weapon. “Like this one?”

He spread his hands slightly. “Similar, I suppose. But . . .”

I waited.

“But what, Mr. van Blaricum?” I said finally. “But . . . no, I didn't frame my brother-in-law? But . . . no, I didn't sneak his bokken out of his office while he was in the bathroom? But . . . no, I didn't kill my sister? No, I didn't use Miles Dane's book—the book I myself served as an inspiration for—as a road map for helping me frame an innocent man? Is that what you were going to say?”

“Objection to form,” Stash said.

“Sustained.”

But van Blaricum answered anyway. “This is perfectly ridiculous. I was in New York when he killed her. I can prove that.”

I was about to break into a nervous sweat when the back door of the courtroom banged open and Lisa literally ran into the room, a triumphant smile on her face. She thrust a piece of paper into my hand.

“You were right,” she whispered loudly.

I smiled at her, scanned the piece of paper she had given me, then turned back to the witness stand.

“Your Honor, I've got another piece of evidence which hasn't been disclosed to Mr. Olesky. Again, this is for the purposes of impeachment.”

“Show me.”

I showed it to him. He winced. “This has no foundation. I'm extremely reluctant to admit this.” He scratched his head furiously. I could see the wheels turning. If Miles was really innocent; if this was what it looked like; if Miles got convicted when he should have gone free; and if the whole question resolved itself on appeal rather than in trial—then his face would be on TV about a million times, with every legal correspondent in America saying that his flawed decisions had put an innocent man in prison for life. “Very well,” Evola said, sighing. He handed the paper to his clerk. “Mark it, please, Mrs. Wilson.”

I took the piece of paper back from the clerk, set it gently on the edge of the witness stand.

“Could you read the lines I've marked with my pen?” I said.

Roger van Blaricum looked at it.

“It says, ‘Record of Travel. Northwest Airlines. Flight 921. Date: October 21. Departs 11:05 AM. Arrives 1:25 PM. Ticket type: One-way. Origination. Detroit. Destination. New York-La Guardia. Payment, cash. Passenger name, colon . . .” He looked up at me, eyes wide. “This is . . . this is . . . this is someone else.”

“Keep reading.”

“Passenger name, colon, van Blaricum, comma, Roger.”

Suddenly there was a lot of noise in the courtroom. It took a few seconds for the hubbub to subside.

“Earlier, Leon Prouty testified he saw what he called an ‘old guy' leaving the house at around midnight. That was you, wasn't it?”

Roger van Blaricum blinked, then stared around the room in shock. He didn't answer.

I heard the door in the back of the courtroom open a second time. I turned and looked. A tall young man with prematurely gray hair and scary blue eyes was standing in the back of the room. “There he is, Mr. van Blaricum. I've been instructed to avoid the issue of paternity. But that man back there has run the blood tests. He knows the truth, and will testify to it when I put him on the stand. I'm sure he has copies of the tests, even if I don't. Are you prepared to continue perjuring yourself? Or do we have to hear it from him?”

Van Blaricum said nothing.

“All we want is the truth.”

Van Blaricum stared angrily at the man in the back of the courtroom. “Alright,” he said finally. “Alright. I made a terrible mistake one time in my youth.”

“Say it plain. The truth. Everything.”

Van Blaricum continued to glare at the gray-haired young man in the back of the courtroom. “I suppose, yes, I suppose he is my . . . offspring. But—”

“Your son.”

Long hesitation. Van Blaricum couldn't seem to bear looking at the tall man in the back of the room. “My son,” he finally whispered, one side of his face twisted in disgust.

“Look, here's your choice, Mr. van Blaricum. Right now, before Mr. Olesky gets mad and embarrassed, and charges you with first-degree murder, you can feel free to make a confession. If your confession shows that you killed her in the heat of passion, then Mr. Olesky will be obliged to charge you with manslaughter. Which, I might add, carries a
substantially
lower penalty than first-degree murder. So I'll ask you again. Did you kill your sister?”

The courtroom was dead silent. Stash could easily have objected. Judge Evola could easily have called a halt to the proceeding, too. But I guess they wanted to know the truth as badly as I did.

Van Blaricum's gaze shifted from the man in the back of the court over to the defense table. He pointed a shaking finger at Miles. “This is all his fault. Miles was nothing before he met her. A cheap, poor, chiseling, worthless little Midwestern nobody. If it weren't for
her
contacts,
her
strength of character,
her
assistance,
her
money—why, he would still be hitchhiking around America telling people in third-rate saloons that he was working on a novel and, gosh, he sure hoped he'd get it published someday.”

“Tell us the truth,” I said again. “You killed her.”

Slowly van Blaricum's eyes went down until he was looking at the floor. “Yes, I suppose I did.”

With that, Blair Dane walked slowly down the aisle toward his father.

“I suppose I'm capable of anything. After all, I spawned
that
.” Van Blaricum looked at his son with disgust. “A criminal, a drug addict, a convict with tattoos on his knuckles. He is nothing. He is less than nothing. And
I
did that.”

“Hi, Dad,” Blair said brightly. “Great to see you, too. Thanks for all your love and support over the years.”

Then Blair raised a small silver .32 Smith & Wesson—the one he'd taken from the top drawer of my desk—fired once, and hit Roger van Blaricum just above his right eye. Roger slipped out of the chair, stone dead, and hit the ground before the deafening crash had ceased to echo.

Blair Dane just stood there, staring with his empty eyes at the blood splashed on the wall next to Judge Evola's chair.

“Drop it!” It was the bailiff—the same big aggressive guy who'd restrained me when I attacked the dummy in the back of the courtroom. The bailiff's muscular arms were extended, chin on his shoulder, his automatic pistol leveled at Blair Dane's chest. Perfect form, just like they taught in police training school. “
Now!
”

“Some people are born to go out easy,” Blair said to the bailiff. His voice sounded casual, almost sleepy. “Me, from the day I arrived, I was born to go out hard.”

“
Drop it!
” The bailiff said, still pointing the gun. In his eyes you could see it: He was the kind of guy who'd been looking for this moment ever since he pinned on his badge. Itching for an excuse to pull that trigger.

And Blair gave it to him—raising his gun slowly toward the bailiff, a bitter smile on his face. I could see the crude green tattoo on his hand.
GO DOWN SHOOTING
. “There's no fighting fate, man,” Blair said.

I dived under a table, pulling Lisa with me. There were two small cracks from the .32, and an uncountable number of the loud, terrifying
wham-wham-wham-whams
from the bailiff's big automatic. When the sound stopped, I poked my head up. The bailiff was still standing, eyes wide with adrenaline. Blair Dane lay on the floor groaning.

The room was utterly silent for what seemed a long time, though it was probably only a second or two.

Finally, someone broke the silence. Me, actually.

I stood, tugged at the lapels of my jacket, and said, “Your Honor, the defense rests.”

“Okay, okay,” Lisa said after we had walked out of the courthouse, waded through the forest of microphones. “You've convinced me. I'm going back to law school.” Her face was glowing with the cold, the excitement, and the horrible triumph of the moment.

“I didn't say a word, Lisa.” I held up my hands in mock surrender.

Behind us Miles Dane stood in the middle of a circle of cameras, boom mikes, and journalists waving their pocket recorders. He was thanking the judge for the wise and fair handling of the case, thanking the prosecuting attorney for having the guts to dismiss the charges in such a complex and high-profile case, thanking his friends, thanking the marvelous and courageous Charley Sloan, lawyer
extraordinaire
.

“Yeah, but you planned it, didn't you, Dad? This whole trial was just a ploy, wasn't it? Just to make me go back to law school.”

I laughed for a minute, then looked out at the river. The wind off the water was frigid, and yet I felt hot as a radiator, like I could warm the whole county.

“So you ever going to tell me what happened back there in New York?” I said. “Why you dropped out? Why you fell off the wagon?”

Lisa's face fell. She looked at me thoughtfully, then finally stood on her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek. “If there's anything I've learned this week,” she said, “it's that some things are best left in the past.”

Then she walked away, whistling the theme to some old TV show.
Perry Mason
, I think it was.