Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) (13 page)

“There’s a reason for that,” I told him. “Cases settle all the time. They settle, and they get postponed. You do a lot of work ahead of time, too often it’s wasted.”

“Hard work may pay off some day—procrastination pays off now,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“So what happens today?” Shorter asked me as we waited for the trial to get started.

“Jury selection.”

“That’s it? Jury selection?”

“Maybe opening statements. If the prosecution gets to call a witness, though, I’ll be dumbfounded.”

“I can’t say that’s very comforting.”

“That the wheels of justice take so long to get turning?”

“That my attorney’s going to be dumbfounded.”

I shrugged.

“So what have you come up with?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing? What have you been doing with your time?”

“Spider solitaire.”

His face darkened.

“Only kidding. I’ve made myself familiar with the facts associated with the case, and I’ve spent more time thinking about them than you can imagine.”

“Oh, goody. You’ve been thinking.”

“One of your neighbors saw you leaving Bill Hill’s house on the day of the murder. Did you know that?”

“Who?”

“Does it matter?”

“It’s a lie,” he said.

“Sure. Why not?”

“What do you mean, why not?”

“You say you weren’t in Hill’s house, but you would say that, wouldn’t you? You want to get acquitted. They say you were there, because they want to see you convicted.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Maybe one of you is lying, but what difference does it make? Each of you is telling a story designed to lead to the desired result. That’s the rational thing to do, isn’t it?”

“You wouldn’t know rational if it bit you on the butt. For one thing, one of us is obviously lying. I can’t have been seen coming out of Bill’s house if I was never in there, and I must have been in there if I was seen coming out. Don’t they teach logic in law school?”

“Castles in the air,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“That’s what they teach us. How to build castles in the air.”

Jury selection took most of the first day. I didn’t try to accomplish anything subtle. My goal pure and simple was to keep women off the jury. Although Shorter wouldn’t be testifying—that would be catastrophic—several of his neighbors were on the witness list. I didn’t think it would take much of their testimony to poison the women in the jury to the point that it would be difficult for them to evaluate the case objectively. Don’t get me wrong: Bob Shorter was unpleasant, obnoxious, and quite possibly evil, and it wasn’t going to be any easier to hide that from the men. My hope was that the men might take it a little less personally.

So. I didn’t want any women, but I got three, which gave me a bad feeling about the outcome of the trial right from the beginning. When the jury had been impaneled, Ian Maxwell’s opening statement was brief, suggesting the strength of his case: William Hill was found dead in his residence on March 11. He had been stabbed with a knife bearing the defendant’s fingerprints. A search of Robert Shorter’s house had uncovered clothes with blood on them: the clothes were in Shorter’s closet, pushed back underneath his hanging clothes, where they were hidden from view. DNA tests had shown the blood to be not Bob Shorter’s blood but Bill Hill’s. “Most damning of all, the murder victim had, in the last moments of his life, used his finger to write a name on the floor in his own blood. The name he wrote was one word: Shorter.” Even though nothing Maxwell said in his opening statement was evidence on which the jury could base its verdict, the case he outlined sounded pretty open-and-shut.

“What about motive?” Maxwell asked the jury. “Here we come to what is perhaps the strongest part of the commonwealth’s case. Certainly, motive is a more prominent element of this case than of any case I have ever prosecuted.”

Okay, that was too much. I stood. “I hate to interrupt the prosecutor’s personal reminiscences,” I said, even though of course that was exactly what I wanted to do. “But we’ve got a relevance problem here. What does Mr. Maxwell’s lack of experience in prosecuting cases have to do with the guilt or innocence of this defendant?”

Circuit Judge Benjamin Cooley, an elderly old coot who’d been on the bench since the Carter administration, said in a voice that quavered only slightly, “
Is
your lack of experience relevant, Mr. Boxwell?”

Maxwell was probably younger than I was, maybe still in his twenties. He wore round-lensed glasses, and his scalp showed pink through his close-cropped blond hair. “Maxwell, Your Honor. No. I wasn’t talking about my lack of experience, but about the strength of the evidence showing motive.”

“I don’t want to criticize the way you’re beginning your case, but wouldn’t it be better to actually talk about that evidence?”

Maxwell took a breath. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“I’ll sustain the objection, then. Proceed, Mr. Maxim.”

Maxim wasn’t his name, either, but he let it go. “Members of the jury. This killing was motivated by the animosity between this defendant and his victim. And it was not the first time that the defendant had harmed Bill Hill. He and Mr. Hill used to be friends, but some years ago they ceased to be friends. They became, in fact, enemies. Just how serious that hatred was and how it came about will become apparent as the trial proceeds. I know you will evaluate the evidence impartially and fairly. You will find not only that the defendant killed Mr. Hill, but that it was a deliberate, willful, and premeditated killing. In short, you will find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant Robert Shorter is guilty of murder in the first degree.”

As Ian Maxwell took his seat, Judge Cooley looked at the clock. “I see that we’ve passed the hour for adjournment,” he began, and I stood.

“Ms. Sterling?”

“It’s Starling, Your Honor. The jury at this point has heard only one side of the story. It would be unfair to have them retire for the night without also hearing from the defense.”

Judge Cooley’s eyes drifted back to the clock on the wall, his expression wistful.

“I’ll be brief, Your Honor,” I promised.

“All right, Ms. Starling. Your opening statement.”

I went to the lectern. I smiled, making eye contact with several members of the jury, with all of them who would look at me. “I’m standing between you and your dinner, and I’m sorry,” I said. “As legal counsel for a man accused of the most serious of crimes, it puts me in an uncomfortable position. The judge will instruct you that you’re not to talk about this case among yourselves or with anyone else, that you’re not to form any conclusions as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant until you have heard all the evidence—but we’re human. Our minds dwell on the questions that confront them, weighing the available evidence either consciously or unconsciously. Before you go to your dinners, I want you to know one thing. There are two sides to the case. Some of the evidence may be incontrovertible—DNA evidence linking the blood on the clothes found in the defendant’s house to the blood of the victim, the fingerprints on the knife in the victim’s house . . . but even there I urge you to evaluate the evidence critically. The law wraps Mr. Shorter in a cocoon of innocence, and before he can be convicted of a crime—any crime—the prosecution must peel away the presumption of innocence piece by piece and layer by layer until not a shred of it remains.

“Suppose the DNA evidence and fingerprint evidence do hold up. It’s not the end of the story. We still need to consider how a knife from Mr. Shorter’s kitchen, if it came from there, came to be in the victim’s house. There might be innocent explanations—perhaps Mr. Shorter lent him the knife so that it was there in the house for the murderer to pick up—or there might be explanations that are a good deal more sinister. Many of us have left a key to our homes with a neighbor or even hidden somewhere on our property so that we don’t have to break a window if we’re ever locked out. Anyone who knew about such a key could walk into Mr. Shorter’s house and walk out again with a knife and a few items of clothing. After the murder, the killer could write the name of everyone’s least favorite neighbor in the dead man’s blood. He could leave the knife and take the bloody clothing, enter one more time into Mr. Shorter’s house, and there you have all the evidence of the prosecution’s case.”

There it was in a nutshell, the only viable theory of a case for acquittal, the theory that Bob Shorter had been framed. I had presented it as matter-of-factly and prosaically as possible. Now I paused to consider whether I should deal directly with the common tendency to dismiss allegations of manufactured evidence as the product of nut-job conspiracy theorists. I decided to let it go.

“You’re going to hear evidence that Mr. Shorter is not a very nice person. I don’t know what that has to do with the question of whether or not he committed the particular crime he is accused of, but you’re likely to get the idea that Bob Shorter is one malicious SOB.” I paused again to look at Bob Shorter. The jury looked at Bob Shorter. He bared his nicotine-stained teeth at them. He was wearing rumpled chinos and a light jacket over a polo shirt, which, combined with his yellow teeth, oily hair, and prominent hooked nose, made him look like Lucifer’s indigent second cousin. I should have foreseen this moment and gotten him some nice clothes and some dental work done, but there was nothing I could do about it now.

I said, “Please keep in mind that even if we come to dislike Mr. Shorter, even if we come to despise him, there are a lot of malicious SOBs out there who have never killed anybody. Our job, your job, is to evaluate the evidence that ties this particular murder to this particular SOB. And the tie has to be a strong one. There can be no other reasonable explanation for the facts the prosecution is able to establish. If there is, it is your obligation to acquit.”

It was probably not my strongest opening statement. I had dinner with Brooke and Mike and Paul that evening, and they confirmed my doubts. We were at Enrique’s, a Mexican restaurant we like, eating chips and salsa. Brooke and I were sipping margaritas, and Paul was drinking a mug of a draft beer I had never heard of, when Brooke said, “Something seems different about this case. Are you sure you have your heart in it?”

She and Mike had gotten to court just as Maxwell started his opening argument, and Paul had gotten there just as I started mine. “He’s an SOB,” Paul said, lifting his mug, “but he may not be a murdering SOB.”

“Damning him with faint praise,” Brooke said.

“Having an unsympathetic client is the big weakness in my case,” I said. “I’m afraid Shorter’s going to look uglier and uglier as the trial progresses. I thought I’d better strengthen my credibility with the jury by acknowledging that up front.”

Paul asked, “You think the unsympathetic client is a bigger liability than the bloodstained clothes and the fingerprints on the murder weapon?”

“Not to mention the defendant’s name written in the victim’s blood,” Brooke said.

“Well, none of that helps,” I acknowledged.

“What did Shorter think of your tactic?” Brooke asked.

“Not much.”

“He didn’t comment?” Mike said. “I saw you talking to him.”

“It would be more accurate to say you saw him talking to me. Specifically, he said he should have known better than to put his life in the hands of a ditzy blonde female with poop for brains.”

They looked at me.

“He said that?” Paul asked. “Poop for brains?”

“No, he was a bit earthier in his description, but I think we all get the point.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to lose this one,” Paul said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Nobody bats a thousand. I lost a few cases when I was on the civil side of the docket, too.”

“Out of how many?” Mike asked. “How many jury trials did you have before you got into criminal defense work?”

I shrugged. “Here comes the food. Believe it or not, after a day in court I don’t find my professional shortcomings a relaxing topic of conversation.”

“Point taken,” Paul said. When the waitress had distributed our food, Paul pointed to me. “This lady would like another margarita,” he said.

“So would this one,” Brooke chimed in.

For the rest of the evening we talked of other things, but I never felt completely in the moment. My mind kept drifting back to Bob Shorter, who I was pretty sure would have killed Bill Hill if he had felt like it. My doubts about him didn’t provide much basis for a wholehearted defense.

I was in bed by ten, but my cell phone rang shortly before midnight, David Gates singing, “Baby, I’m-a Want You.” I groped for the phone, tapped the glowing screen.

“Hey, Paul.”

Beside me on the bed, Deeks came to his feet.

“Robin. Are you awake?”

“More or less. Someone just called me in the middle of the night and woke me up.”

“Sorry. It couldn’t be helped. Mike and I are on our way over.”

“What?” I pushed up in bed. “Is everything all right? What happened?”

I heard Mike’s voice next: “We’ll tell you when we get there. See you soon.”

The call ended, and I rested the phone against my chest. Deeks touched his cold nose to my cheek, and I worked a hand into his fur. “Hey, buddy. We got company coming.” I pushed my legs out of the covers and sat for a moment on the side of the bed as Deeks leaped lightly to the floor.

“Show-off,” I muttered, then sighed and got up. In the dark, I rummaged in a drawer for some gym shorts to pull on over my panties. I thought for a moment, then opened the top drawer to find a bra. If it was just Paul, I probably wouldn’t have bothered—let him get hot and bothered if he wanted to—but I didn’t want to spend an evening with two men glancing surreptitiously at my chest.

“I don’t know what it is with men and mammaries,” I told Deeks, shrugging into the bra beneath my oversize T-shirt.

His tail thumped against the side of the bureau, and I reached down to scratch his head. Then I got the water bottle off my nightstand and opened it on my way to the living room.