Proof of Intent (34 page)

He approached the stand with a painful gait. Dan Rourke must have been a large, vigorous man once, but now his body was sagging and swollen, his motions slow and tentative. His white hair was still enviably thick, though, and his blue eyes were bright.

When he sat, his face was sweaty and slightly flushed, despite the cool weather. It made me nervous. I suspected that he'd had a drink before getting on the stand.

“Mr. Rourke, what sort of work do you do?” I said.

“I'm an editor.” I was encouraged that his voice was firm, and his eyes seemed focused and clear. “My title is executive editor emeritus with Padgett Books in New York City.”

“Tell us about Padgett.”

“We're the largest publisher in America. We publish everything from how-to to tell-all, bodice rippers to Nobel prize winners.”

“And do you know Miles Dane?”

“I do. I've been his editor since 1969, back when I worked for Elgin Press. I edited his first novel, which came out that same year. I've known both him and his wife Diana since that time, and have counted them as my friends for over thirty years.”

“Were you in a position to observe Miles and Diana's relationship?”

Daniel Rourke smiled with a fondness touched by sadness. “They were one of the world's great couples,” he said expansively.

“So you know them intimately?”

“I believe I do. Back when they were living in New York, I saw them all the time. It wasn't just a business relationship we had. Miles was—and is—a close friend of mine. These days we see each other at least two or three times a year.”

“What about Diana?”

Daniel Rourke seemed to fade for a moment. “I'm sorry. The question was . . . wait, yes. Diana. Well. Diana was a shy woman. Reserved but very warm. She had what they used to call grace. It used to be that grace was the best thing a woman aspired to.” His eyes crinkled. “Now women aspire to have tattooed asses and pierced nipples.”

That got a good laugh from the audience.

Judge Evola leaned toward him. “Keep it between the lines here, if you'd be so kind, Mr. Rourke,” he said gently. “We're in a court of law.”

Rourke smiled wickedly. “My profoundest apologies, Your Honor.”

“Mr. Rourke,” I said, “you were more than just fond of her, weren't you?”

Rourke looked at me for a moment. “Yes,” he said softly.

“In love with her? Would that be fair?”

“Long ago, yes.”

“So as the other man in this troika, if there's anybody who'd be predisposed to looking at their marriage with a critical eye, I'd think it would be you.”

“I suppose that's fair to say.” He smiled sadly. “For five years Miles and I had a relationship that was almost as close as a father to a son. We saw each other constantly, and in the twenty-odd years since, I've continued to socialize with them regularly. In their home. In mine. At my place on Martha's Vineyard. And in all that time, I never saw them raise their voices at each other. I never saw them pick at each other, or fight over little things, I never saw anything but respect and tenderness.”

I picked up the copy of
How I Killed My Wife
that had been marked as an exhibit and flipped it open. “Would you do me the favor of reading this aloud?”

Rourke patted vaguely at his jacket, suddenly looking apprehensive. For a moment he seemed almost panicked. “I seem . . . it looks . . . I think I forgot my glasses,” he said. I had specifically instructed him to bring them.

I smiled. “No problem. If there's no objection from counsel, would the court indulge me?”

“Fine,” Evola said.

“This is from page forty-nine of the book Mr. Sloan wrote in 1970 entitled
How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It
: ‘In public my wife and I are the picture of marital bliss. But it's only a pose. We hold hands, we fondle, we gaze at each other. But it is an act sustained by spite, a sort of playing out of our hatred. Everyone is fooled. But it is all a lie.' ” I closed the book. “What's to say this wasn't the case with Miles and Diana?”

Rourke laughed. “Look, this is fiction. Fiction always distorts reality in some way. Sure, it's an amusing book because it plays on this fear we all have that we never really know people. But the truth is, we
do
know people.
How I Killed My Wife
is simply not psychologically accurate. This book is about two people who despised each other. People who despise each other just reek of hatred. Anybody with fifteen minutes of experience in real life knows this. People like the characters in this book, they make your skin crawl. That was never the case with Miles and Diana.”

“Okay, what about a different theory? Suppose Miles and Diana didn't hate each other. Maybe he was controlling her. Maybe she was so beaten down by some sort of secret mental abuse that she just acquiesced to whatever he wanted. Plausible?”

“Hah!” Rourke raised his bushy eyebrows. “That's a hoot. Diana came off as soft and graceful. But once you got to know her, you realized her spine was made of steel. If anything, she was the stronger one of the pair.”

“If I could follow that up . . .”

“Wait. Let me finish. Miles has always affected a tough-guy image. But the truth is . . .” He smiled at Miles. “Truth is, Miles is a sweetheart. The poor little guy wouldn't hurt a flea.”

“But look at his books, Mr. Rourke! All this violence and gore. Manipulative people, liars, religious fanatics, killers. That stuff had to come out of his head.”

“Sure. But so what?”

“Well isn't this kind of fascination with violence and evil a little . . . strange?”

Rourke looked at me with amusement. “Strange? Let's be adults. Look at this spectacle.” He swept the room with his finger. “Why are all these people here? Hm? It's the smell of blood. Why are two million people out there glued to their TV sets right now? It's the smell of blood. You and I, Mr. Sloan, are standing in the very center of the modern equivalent of the Circus Maximus. The human animal loves the scent of blood, of mayhem, of anger and violence. Every man, woman, and child on this planet has a manipulator and a liar and a destroyer inside. But that doesn't mean we act on them. Miles simply made a profession out of giving voice to the demons that live in all of us.

“But at the core, he remained a sweet romantic. Yes, his books are about liars and cheats and killers. But if you read them to the end, the wicked always get their just deserts. That's where the real Miles shows through. What really motivates him is a deep and profound hatred of wickedness. And since there was no wickedness in Diana Dane, I must tell you that the idea that he could kill her is so ludicrous as to beggar the imagination.”

“Wait, wait. You say everybody gets punished in his books. Not in
How I Killed My Wife and Got Away with It
.”

“Not so. In his original draft, the narrator tells the story from jail as he awaits his trip to the electric chair. His title for the book was
Just Deserts
. I told him it would be more fun if the character got away with it. He resisted that suggestion. So I told him if he didn't rewrite it, I wouldn't pay him for the book.” Rourke smiled mischievously. “It may shock you to find out that at that point he came around to my way of thinking fairly quickly.” Rourke laughed. “The title was mine, too, by the way.”

Rustles and coughs from the back of the courtroom.

“What did you think when you heard Miles had been charged with killing Diana?”

Rourke shook his head sadly. “The truth? I laughed. I couldn't believe it. His love for Diana was at the very core and center of his being. She was the pillar that held up his entire life. It's an impossibility that Miles Dane killed Diana.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rourke,” I said.

“Impossible!” he said again.

Stash Olesky stood quickly. “That's a lovely sentiment, and would that it were so. Are you saying that Mr. Dane is incapable of violence?”

“Serious
violence, yes.”

“Is it not true that on December 9, 1991, the
New York Times
reported that Mr. Dane fired a gun at you?”

“True.”

“Is it not true that on January 1, 1979, it was reported in the
Los Angeles Times
that Mr. Dane physically assaulted Charles Bronson at a bash thrown at the Playboy Mansion?”

“True.”

“Is it not true that on the fourth of June 1983, Mr. Rourke, the UPI wire picked up a story that Mr. Dane had struck an unnamed actress with a rattan stick in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hilton?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then, how, precisely, Mr. Rourke, would you define
unserious
violence?” Stash Olesky whirled and stalked back to his chair. “Strike that. I have no further questions.”

I stood, smiling. I had bushwhacked him beautifully, if I don't mind saying so. “Redirect, Your Honor. Mr. Rourke, I'd like you simply to answer the prosecuting attorney's last question.”

“Gladly. As it happens, Mr. Olesky, I would define those incidents as unserious violence precisely because they were not violence at all. They were entirely staged for the purposes of gaining publicity. Charles Bronson is—or at least was—a friend of Miles's. Their ‘fight' was a publicity stunt to get attention for
Fisticuff
, which was Mr. Bronson's latest movie at that time. Not so incidentally,
Fisticuff
happened to have been adapted from Miles's book of the same title.”

“A fictional fight?”

“One hundred percent pure fiction. All of them.”

During the break I ran into Stash in the hallway. “I know, I know,” he said. “Never ask a question you don't know the answer to.”

I smirked. “I wasn't even going to say it.”

“Too bad he couldn't erase the blood from those clothes, Charley. Or his fingerprints from the bokken.”

“Oh, don't worry,” I said. “I've got somebody else for that.”

Ideally you want to start strong, then trot out your middling witnesses, then finish with your strongest witness. Unfortunately, I was short on truly strong testimony, so it was time to move on to the middling witnesses. Middling, actually, was probably a charitable way of describing Leon Prouty. But I figured he couldn't hurt us. So we might as well get him on the stand, chum the waters for the somebody-else-did-it theory, and then get rid of him as quickly as possible.

Leon strutted up to the podium wearing a cheap blue suit I'd bought him the day before, white socks, cheap black shoes, and a clip-on tie. I'd bought him a real tie, but he refused to wear it, claiming it choked him.

After swearing him in, I said, “Leon, brass tacks here. You're no choirboy.”

“Nope.”

“You've served time for a variety of offenses.”

“Yup.” He grinned, showing off his rotten teeth.

“You were arrested a while back for stealing all of the sod and bushes off of a recently landscaped property, true?”

Another dumb-ass grin. “They call it midnight landscaping.”

“And I'm defending you in that case, correct?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You came to me and said you knew something about this case and that if I would defend you for free, you'd testify about what you knew, correct?”

He squinted at me. “Man, you making me out like some kind of liar! What kind of lawyer are you anyway?”

“Well, that goes right to the issue here, doesn't it? Why should these people believe you?”

He looked insulted. “Man, I'm a
thief
, not a liar!”

I gave the jury a look like,
Folks, your guess is as good as mine
. Then I forged on. “Leon, where were you on the night of October 20 and the early hours of October 21 of last year?”

“Uh . . .” He wrinkled his nose. “Let's say I was in the vicinity of Miles's house.”

“Doing what?”

Leon cleared his throat, ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, put a comical look of calculation on his face. “See, I believe the Constitution gives me the Fifth Amendment situation on that.”

I scowled. “Leon, you have to do better than that.”

Leon showed his awful teeth. “Put it like this. There was some midnight landscaping going on across the street from Miles's house. I'm not saying I was involved in it. But I was, let's say I was present in the neighborhood.”

“Okay. So you were there. Did you see anything interesting going on at Mr. Dane's house?”

“Interesting? No. But I seen
something
.”

“What did you see?”

“Seen somebody drive up.”

“Tell us about this person you saw.”

“He was driving a old Lincoln, mid sixties, a real classic. Black. Suicide doors, whitewalls, I mean, this ride was flat-ass
cherry
.”

“Mr. Prouty,” the judge said. “Next word of profanity, you go across the street to county, no bail, no parole. You with me?”

Leon looked at the judge sullenly. “Sorry, man. Your Honor, I mean.”

“So what did this man you saw look like?”

Leon shrugged, grunted.

“Speak English, Leon,” I said.

“It was dark.”

“You saw the car well enough to identify the year and model, but you didn't see what this man looked like?”

“I was a ways away. He had his back to me. What I seen, he wore a black leather jacket.”

“And when did he arrive?”

“I don't know. Maybe ten, eleven.”

“And when did he leave?”

A big shrug. “Before midnight.”

“Why do you remember that?”

“ 'Cause he wasn't there when the old guy showed up.”

Suddenly I felt a little ill. There is no feeling worse than putting a dubious witness on the stand, and then watching him start to lie. This was the first time he had ever mentioned a second person arriving at the house. But I was stuck. I couldn't ignore the statement. “Old guy?” I said.