Sleight of Hand (18 page)

Frank had made a leg of lamb, boned and stuffed with a savory chanterelle stuffing, and no one at the table was in a hurry to move after his dinner.

"Your turn," Wally said to Frank. He poured himself a little more wine.

"Well, this is about one that got away," Frank said. "Some years ago I had this client, charged with drunkenness, rowdiness, breaking up some furniture and starting a brawl. He and his buddies all testified that they were the innocent, sober bystanders when a bunch of outsiders came to break up the wedding party they had attended earlier that afternoon. Lunch recess came and my client took off with his pals, but when court resumed they weren't there. Half an hour later, after the bailiff went looking for them, they came staggering back, drunk as lords, each and every one of them, singing in the corridor. The judge was pretty sore about it. Lost that case," Frank said, shaking his head.

"And now you make your clients stay in sight during lunch," Wally said. "I thought there might be a reason."

One of the cats strolled in. He stood up with his paws on the table and sniffed.

Frank told him to beat it. "That's Thing One," he said.

Barbara gave him a skeptical look. She no longer could tell one from the other and she doubted very much that Frank could, either.

"We'll get a cat after... Later, we'll get a cat," Meg said. "And a dog. A big dog to guard the chickens. I imagine there are coyotes out around us. I haven't seen any, but I know they used to be all over the place."

"They still are," Frank said. "You're going to have chickens?"

"I know. We started wanting just a house in the country, and now it seems I want a kitchen garden and I want chickens. Remember, I grew up on a real farm. Mom had a job in town and I rode in with her to go to school, but I was a farm girl. I guess I'm reverting to type."

Barbara began to clear the table. She had heard a note of defiance in Meg's tone, and recalled what Frank had said, that Wally wanted her to rent the place or sell it if he was found guilty. Meg was telling him no, Barbara thought. All those years living in city apartments, hotels, hungering for a farm, a few chickens, a little garden.

After they ate blackberry cobbler and had coffee, Meg offered to help clean up and Frank said absolutely not. They didn't stay much longer. At the door Meg took Barbara's hand and held it for a moment, then closed it.

"Starting tomorrow, he's in your hands," she said. "Good luck." Barbara didn't open her hand again until she was back in the kitchen to help load the dishwasher. Frank drove her home as soon as they were done. At her door he said, "Bobby, she put him in good hands. It's going to be okay." But when he got home and sat down with his crossword puzzle, he wished fervently that he really believed that.

Jury selection did not take long. Wally objected to two prospective jurors, and Barbara added them to her single choice to exercise her peremptory challenges. She trusted his judgment in sizing up people. Dodgson challenged two, and it was done.

The jury was made up of six women, six men, the youngest was twenty-two, the oldest seventy-two, two black men, one black woman, one Hispanic woman. A good cross section of the county Barbara thought.

Dodgson's brief opening statement had no surprises. The most persuasive statement he made in Barbara's opinion was when he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the reason the defendant took the boat doesn't matter. A practical joke, greed, revenge for a long-nursed grievance, it's all immaterial. No one can point to a different thief and a different murderer. He alone had the opportunity to take the boat, and no one except the killer had the opportunity to return it. The theft of that boat provided the sole motive for the murder of Jay Wilkins."

When it was her turn, Barbara concluded by saying, "This is a circumstantial case with no direct evidence, no forensic evidence, no eyewitness, nothing of substance to point to in charging Mr. Lederer. The defense will offer an alternative view of what happened, and if that case is as plausible as the case the state will present, you must ask yourselves if there is a reasonable doubt in your minds as to the guilt of Mr.

Lederer. It is not your task to question if he did not do it, then who did, as the state implies. That is not your job."

And here we go, she thought when the prosecution called its first witness.

Mrs. Wanda Haley had been the housekeeper for Jay Wilkins for eleven years. She was sixty, pleasant-looking with a placid expression, a bit overweight, and that day she was nervous at her role on the witness stand. Most witnesses were.

She recalled the day of April 22 and gave a brief account of her morning. "I got there at nine like always and started right in on the kitchen. Put dishes in the dishwasher, cleaned the stove and polished it, and the faucets, the refrigerator door, just all the usual things. Then I took my vacuum and cleaning supplies to the study. That's always next, and I was surprised to see Mr. Wilkins was in there again. He had stayed home on Monday, too. He went to the bar room and began talking on the telephone in there. I cleaned the glass for the cabinet with the cars, and was going to do the other one when I saw that it wasn't closed all the way. And I saw that the little boat was not where it belonged. So I went to the bar room and asked Mr. Wilkins if I should close it. He was real upset and looked at the door and called his insurance man. He was cursing, really mad. And in a little while the insurance man came with a policeman, I guess. I was back in the kitchen by then, though."

Dodgson nodded. "When Mr. Wilkins was in the bar room talking on the phone could you hear what he was saying?"

"Yes, sir. Some of it. He was yelling at someone and said his wife was in danger and he wanted an investigation. He said to send someone over right now to get her picture and get it posted. It was things like that."

"All right. And when he saw that the boat was missing, what exactly did he say?"

She looked uneasily at the jury. "Well, like I said, he was cursing. He said, that goddamn son of a bitch stole it! Thumbing his nose at me in my own house. I'll see the goddamn bastard back in prison. It was things like that."

"Then what happened?"

"Well, he yelled at me to go do the bedrooms or something. And that's what I did.

And just before I was ready to leave, a detective came to the kitchen. I had just mopped the floor. I always leave that for last thing, and he said he was sorry to be tracking it up again. He was real nice. He asked me to go with him to see if Mrs.

Wilkins packed a suitcase or something, and we looked in the closet where they kept the suitcases and I saw that a little roll-on suitcase was missing. And he asked me how her health was, and I told him it was fine. She'd been real sick the year before, but in the fall and over winter she got well and she was fine."

"Did he ask you anything else?"

"He wanted to know if she'd talked about going away on a trip, and I told him no.

And I asked him if she'd gone off and he said yes. And that's all. He said I could go on home and I did."

"All right," Dodgson said. "Now let's move forward a week to Monday, April 28 Do you recall that morning?"

Mrs. Haley nodded, then said yes. She did the kitchen and took her gear to the foyer. She looked into the bar room, saw the body, and ran back to the kitchen to call 911. She told them to send someone to the back door and she waited for the police in the kitchen. Two officers came, called for others and pretty soon, she said, the house was full of detectives.

"They told me to wait in the kitchen, and then one of them asked me questions. Like could I tell if he had eaten at home on the weekend. There was a plate with a steak bone on the kitchen counter, and spare ribs and slaw and stuff still on the table in the breakfast room, like he had take-out food. A skillet had some egg sticking to it, open bread loaf, the kind of breakfast he fixed for himself sometimes."

"What else did they ask you?"

"They had me check out the silverware and things like that to see if anything was missing, but it was all there. There was one towel gone from the downstairs bathroom and a red silk Afghan from the bar room."

Dodgson produced one of the gold towels and asked her if the missing one was like it and she said yes. He finished with her very soon after that.

Barbara stood up and greeted Mrs. Haley pleasantly, then said, "Early in your testimony you said you had a routine that you always followed in your daily job at Mr. Wilkins's house. You said that you cleaned the stove and polished it, and the refrigerator door and faucets. Did you do that every day?"

"Yes, I did."

"And did you clean the glass doors of the locked cabinets every day?"

"Yes. And the bar, and all the mirrors, the television screen, everything that had a finish that would show smudges or fingerprints, water spots, or anything like that. He told me to when he hired me. And I did."

"Did all those surfaces need such meticulous cleaning on a daily basis?"

"No. You couldn't tell the difference from one day to the next, but it's what he wanted, and what I did. And the bathroom waste-baskets. They had to be cleaned and polished every day."

"I see. What did he do if he spotted a smudge?"

"He left me a note on the breakfast room table. Like, 'Clean the refrigerator,' or 'The mirror is streaked.' But it didn't happen much. I was careful."

"On Monday, April 28, you didn't follow your usual routine, did you? You didn't go straight to the study after doing the kitchen. Why was that?"

"He'd been home all week, in a bad mood, and I wanted to keep out of his way. If he'd been in the bar room I would have gone to the study. I was just checking first."

"During that week did he tell you why he was in a bad mood, what was on his mind?"

"No. He never talked to me about anything. I read it in the newspaper."

"He never talked to you? Not about his missing wife, or the missing boat?"

Even as Mrs. Haley shook her head, Dodgson objected. "Your Honor, this is all irrelevant."

"Withdraw the question," Barbara said equably. "When you called 911 why did you tell them to send someone to the back door? Why not let them ring the bell and admit them at the front?"

"I couldn't open that door," Mrs. Haley said. "He told me never to open that door or he'd know. He kept changing the password and I had to keep mine written down just to remember it. The password I use is different from the front door."

Barbara nodded. "I see. Did Mrs. Wilkins talk to you?"

"Yes, she did. She'd ask about my husband and kids, and she showed me her sweatpants and shirt and said she intended to get back her muscles. She was real friendly. She said that when her exercise class was over, she'd get a bike and start riding with her stepdaughter."

"You said that Mr. Wilkins was in a bad mood all that week. Can you tell the jury how that showed? In what actions or speech?"

"Well, like I said he didn't talk to me, but he stormed around the house, and he was on the phone a lot, sometimes yelling on the phone. It sounded like someone at the dealership might have been who he called sometimes, the way he was giving orders.

And I heard him tell someone that he couldn't sleep, he was so worried. But usually I tried to keep out of his way that week and he left me alone."

"You testified that over the weekend he had eaten in both nights. What about the rest of that week? Had he been having his meals at home, either cooking something or ordering in?"

She nodded. "Every day there were boxes, or cartons, things from take-out food. I don't think he ate out a single time that week."

When she thanked Mrs. Haley and resumed her seat Barbara was aware of the slight puzzlement on Dodgson's face, as if he were wondering why she was bolstering his case of a man worried about the safety of his wife and the theft of a valuable art object. You paint your picture of Jay Wilkins, she thought, and I'll paint mine.

At that time the judge called the luncheon recess.

"Well, we got us the beginning of a motive, and we got us a corpse," Wally said in the car heading for Frank's house for lunch. "What's next?"

"They'll probably call the medical examiner," Barbara said.

"And he'll say, Yep, he was dead all right," Wally said. He sounded altogether too cheerful, but Meg groaned.

The state's next witness was Lawrence Trelawney who identified himself as a representative of the company that had carried Jay Wilkins's home owner's insurance. A well-dressed man, even a little dapper, in his middle years, he had been easy to talk to when Barbara had met him months earlier. He was at ease on the witness stand.

"Will you tell the jury what transpired on the morning of April 22?" Dodgson asked.

"Yes. Mr. Wilkins called my office and said that the boat, Cleopatra's Barge, had been stolen, and that he knew who took it. He was infuriated and demanded that I come to his house to tell the police about the value of the item. He said he would see to it that a police officer was there to take details. Of course, I did so."

Dodgson produced the boat then and had Trelawney identify it. He did not pass it to the jury to examine, but had it entered as a state exhibit.

"What is the value of that boat?" Dodgson asked.

"On today's market it would be worth roughly twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars."

Dodgson repeated the figure in an awed tone. "Did Mr. Wilkins tell you who he suspected of stealing the boat?"

"Oh, yes. More than once. He accused Mr. Lederer and told us why. He said that the boat had been in place on Monday night, that no one but Mr. Lederer and his wife had been in the house, and the boat was gone Tuesday morning. And he said that Mr. Lederer had been arrested in the past for robbery. He showed us his security system and said he had made certain it was turned on Monday night."

"Did he say more than that?"

"Yes. He said they had examined the boat and that Mr. Lederer was still holding it when he, Mr. Wilkins, took Mrs. Lederer's arm to escort her to the bar room, and that Mr. Lederer followed a minute later."

Dodgson looked very grave when he turned to the jury and said, more to them than to the witness, "And he was certain that no one else had entered the house that night?"