Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) (2 page)

I turned to put a hand on the counter. “What did he say to you?”

“It was just his manner.”

“No, it wasn’t. His manner didn’t upset you like this.”

She took a breath. “He came in asking about you. He wanted to know if you were as good as the
Times-Dispatch
made you out to be. When I started telling him how good you were, he interrupted me with, ‘Why am I asking you? You’ve got a year of community college under your belt, if that.’” She sniffed. “He said I wouldn’t know a criminal case from a case of Bud Light. Here I am, mid to late thirties, no wedding ring, no engagement ring… ‘You don’t have a whole hell of a lot going on, do you?’ he said. It just came out of nowhere. I didn’t know how to respond. I sat there kind of stunned, and he told me that frizzing out my hair and putting on makeup with a trowel didn’t . . . didn’t help my looks any.” The sentence ended in a squeak, and she couldn’t go on. She just sat blinking her eyes and trying very hard not to cry.

“I’m sorry. If it makes you feel any better, he called me a stringy, skinny-assed bitch—or something to that effect. He did manage to work both the a-word and the b-word into the conversation.”

That got a smile from her. “So you didn’t take his case?”

“I’m not sure there is one. If there is, we probably won’t see much of him here. He’s likely to be in the Richmond city jail, verbally abusing the turnkeys and the other inmates.”

The idea seemed to please her. “Maybe someone will stick a . . . a shiv into him,” she said hopefully.

“Well, you’re a bloodthirsty wench,” I said.

“What’s he done anyway?”

“What he says he hasn’t done is murder a man named Bill Hill. Can I borrow your newspaper?” I tapped the counter beside it. “There might be an article about it in there.”

“Someone killed Bill Hill?” she asked, pushing it toward me.

“You know him?”

“No. It just sounds like it ought to be a Quentin Tarantino movie.”

“You watch Quentin Tarantino?”

“He’s just so twisted.
Pulp Fiction
got me hooked. From there, it’s only a short step to
Kill Bill, Volume 1
.”

“I guess it is,” I said, picking up the newspaper. Carly always seemed to have a romance novel going, one of those with a picture of a shirtless, well-muscled man on the cover. As for her taste in movies, I would have thought she was more of a rom-com sort of girl.

“Don’t you watch Tarantino?” she asked me.

“I saw
Pulp Fiction
,” I said, and I headed back to my office.

Bill Hill was on the third page of the local section.

Richmond Man Found Dead in Home

William Hill, 63, was found dead of a knife wound inside his Richmond home yesterday. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

“There was no evidence of forcible entry, but the back door was unlocked when police got to the house,” said Richmond Police Detective Ray Hernandez.

Police are withholding further details about the crime scene.

Brooke Marshall, the pretty redhead who had the office next to mine, got back from her consulting job while I was reading. She and I were about the same age—she was thirty, and I was thirty-one. “Hey,” she said.

I looked up. “Hey.”

“What you reading?”

“
Kill Bill Hill, Volume 3
,” I said.

She unslung her purse and took a seat. “Quentin Tarantino is coming out with a new movie?”

“No. I may be starring in this one.” I turned the paper around so she could see the article.

After a moment, she said, “Not much there.”

“No.”

“So how are you involved?”

“An old man came by, said he was about to be arrested for the crime.” I told her about Shorter’s visit, including his effect on Carly.

“I’m surprised you took the case.”

I slid the check across the desk to her. Her eyes widened. “Maybe not,” she said.

“I’m going to present the check at his bank, see if he has sufficient funds, then I’m going to head home.” I got my purse out of the bottom desk drawer.

“It’s barely two o’clock,” Brooke protested.

“On the way I’m going to go by Shorter’s neighborhood, see if I can talk to some of the neighbors. He says they all hate him.”

She looked at her watch.

“Want to come?”

She shook her head regretfully. “I’ve got to get some work done.”

I gave her a lopsided smile. “Story of my life, too.”

So far I didn’t have a client who was charged with anything, but there’s nothing like $30,000 in the bank to pique a girl’s interest. Shorter’s house was small and white with vinyl siding, its lawn mostly dirt, the weeds just beginning to green. I stopped against the curb and got out. The March air was brisk, but I still had on my coat from my walk to the parking garage downtown.

The door of the house next door opened, and a woman came out to stand on her front stoop, her arms folded across her chest. She didn’t say anything until I started across the lawn to Shorter’s door.

“He ain’t there.”

I stopped.

“The police was waiting for him when he drove in about half an hour ago.”

“They arrested him?”

She was too far away for me to be sure, but she appeared to be grinning like a maniac. I started toward her, and she watched me come.

I stopped when I got to her lawn. She was indeed grinning like a maniac.

“I’m Robin Starling,” I said.

“A friend of Mr. Shorter’s?”

“No.”

“No,” she repeated. “Bob Shorter don’t got no friends.”

“He does seem singularly unlikable. I just met him this afternoon.”

“So what you want with him?” She was staying on her porch, arms crossed. I took a step closer.

“To talk to him. He thought the police might arrest him. I wanted to talk about why.”

“Huh. Why the police might arrest him is he killed poor Mr. Hill.”

“You think he did kill him?”

She sniffed. “You’re a lawyer, ain’t cha?”

“Well,” I said vaguely. In some places, lawyers were less well regarded than politicians and sex offenders.

“You don’t want to go taking Bob Shorter’s case. He’s guilty, just as guilty as sin. He killed poor old Bill, sure as I’m standing here.”

“You are standing there,” I acknowledged.

“And he killed Bill Hill.”

“Why would he do that? Do you know?”

“Because he’s evil. That Bob Shorter would kill a man just for the pleasure of watching him die.”

“Has he ever killed a man before?”

She pressed her lips together, which I took as a no.

“What makes him evil?” I asked.

“What makes any man evil? The blackness of his soul, damn it to hell.”

“What’s he done, though? How has the evil manifested itself?” I was trying to sound less like a lawyer, more blue-collar. You could see how that was working out.

“What hasn’t he done?” the woman retorted.

I waited. When she didn’t say anything, I said, “You can’t actually see the color of his soul.”

“Oh, can’t I?” She smirked with the satisfaction of having delivered the perfect refutation.

“Well, his soul doesn’t have to be black, does it? It could be puke green and covered with pimples and sores. The point you’re making is he’s a bad man.”

“Yes, he is. That’s my point exactly.”

“He’s a bad man who’s done bad things,” I prompted.

“Oh, yes. Bad things.”

“What’s your name, anyway?” I’d been moving closer as we talked. Now I put a foot on the step leading up to her porch and held out a hand. She didn’t take it—her arms remained folded across her chest—but she did tell me her name.

“Jenn. Jenn Entwistle.”

“Glad to meet you, Jenn. You know about some of these bad things he’s done. I don’t, but I’d like to.”

She raised her eyebrows. “And how long you say you known him?”

“A couple of hours. He did make my receptionist cry, but that’s all I know about so far.”

“You know he killed Bill Hill.”

“Well, no. What I know is that the police have charged him with killing Bill Hill.”

“And why would they charge him if he ain’t done it?” Her tone was richly patronizing. “You tell me that, Ms. Lawyer.”

“Because there’s evidence that points to him,” I suggested.

“Exactly.”

“But maybe there’s another explanation for the evidence that seems to point to him.”

“What kind of explanation?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the evidence yet.”

“Yet? You gonna to take his case, then?”

“I guess I already have.”

“You gonna to help that monster get away with murder.”

“No, I hope not. If he committed murder, I wouldn’t want him to get away with it.” My expression was as mild as I could make it as I met her glare.

“So what you gonna do?”

“Examine the evidence to see if there might be an innocent explanation. Make the prosecution prove its case.”

She blew me a raspberry. “Ain’t nothing innocent about Bob Shorter.”

“Probably not.”

“So why’re you helping him?”

“I don’t like him. He may be a monster just like you say he is, but there are a lot of monsters out there. All of them can’t have killed Bill Hill.”

“I can’t believe it. You’re unbelievable.”

“He’s entitled to his day in court like any of us would be.”

“You’re a monster yourself, ain’t ya? All you lawyers.”

I tried a smile on her. “I like to think not.”

She lifted her chin. “I don’t have nothing more to say to you.” She turned and jerked open her door. After she went in, she slammed it behind her. So much for the power of a smile.

Bill Hill had lived around the corner in a split-level house that probably dated from the 1950s. It was part brick, but the eaves and the second-floor siding were badly in need of a good paint job. I let myself into the backyard through the gate in a wobbly chain-link fence. Bill had a small patio outside his back door, a square of cement with a single lawn chair sitting on it, one of the chair’s crisscrossing straps broken and hanging down. The yard in back was like the front, with more clover and henbit than fescue. Against the house to one side of the patio was a big, rust-spotted tank for heating oil.

The back door, though it may not have been locked when the police came, was locked now. Peering through the glass, I could see a bit of the kitchen with a small table against one wall and two chairs. I hoped he had occasionally had a visitor to occupy one of them. I checked under the fraying rope doormat for a house key, then on the sill of the nearest window. No luck. If I wanted to take a look through Hill’s house, I was going to have to be more creative.

The fabric of the lawn chair stretched and popped as I took a seat to consider my options. Neither Bill nor his neighbors had a privacy fence, and the backyards were separated only by waist-high chain-link fences. The house next door to Bill’s was on the corner, and I could see directly across its backyard to the front of Shorter’s house. Bill’s chair faced Shorter’s house, in fact, as if to allow him to watch Shorter come and go on his twice-daily walks. It was not a prosperous neighborhood, but I liked its openness. People could know their neighbors here. They could have a sense of community.

A curtain moved in a window of the house next door. I watched it out of the corner of my eye, but it didn’t move again. Judging by the size and placement of the window, I thought it might be the window over the kitchen sink.

I got up and went back around Hill’s house, letting myself through the gate again. There were a few scraggly bushes along the house’s foundation, looking as forlorn and neglected as the house itself. Just to be thorough, I tried the front door, but it was locked tight.

Next door to Bill’s, where I’d seen the curtain move, I stepped up onto the front stoop and rang the bell. Chimes sounded, but no one came to the door.

“Hello?” I said.

Silence.

“My name is Robin Starling. Your neighbor Jenn suggested I might talk to you.” Okay, so Jenn had done nothing of the sort. Desperate times call for lying like a son of a gun. “I was hoping to get some information about your neighborhood.”

I had started to turn away when the dead bolt clicked back. The door opened, and the pale face of a woman with pale hair appeared in the narrow opening. She looked up at me with the anxious expression of someone who feared unpleasantness.

“Hi,” I said. “Thanks for opening the door.”

“Jenn didn’t send you,” she said in a voice so soft I had to lean in to hear her.

I dropped my gaze, doing what I could to look abashed. “Well, no. She did spend some time talking to me. I was hoping you would, too.” I refrained from putting my hands behind my back and digging my toe into her welcome mat. I do have some shame.

“What do you want to talk about?” she said, again almost in a whisper.

Lowering my own voice, I said, “For starters, I understand your next-door neighbor died recently.”

She shook her head in a quick, birdlike gesture. “He didn’t die. He was killed.”

“By a man named Bob Shorter?”

“That’s what they say.”

“Why would he do it? Do you have any idea?”

“Maybe for the fun of it?”

“That makes Shorter out to be pure evil. Is he really as bad as that?”

She seemed to study me.

“I’ve met the man, so I can readily believe he is.” I smiled. “I would be interested in supporting evidence.”

“Jenn said you’re going to try to get him off.”

Jenn had been busy. “It’s more complicated than that,” I said. “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for or against.”

“Is that a quote from someone?”

“It sounds like it, doesn’t it? I’m pretty sure it’s not Shakespeare, but that’s about all I can tell you.”

She took a breath, steeling herself. She stepped back and pulled the door wider. “Come in.”

We sat in her living room in facing chairs. Her hands were clasped in her lap.

“My name is Robin Starling,” I said.

“So you said.”

I waited.

“Melissa,” she said finally.

“Melissa . . .”

“Stimmler.” Her eyes were the color of the sky.