Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)
Read Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Online
Authors: Michael Monhollon
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2016
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The Robin Starling Legal Thriller Series
“Robin, will you come out here?” Carly sounded close to tears.
“Sure.” I got up from behind the desk in my office and went out into the reception area of the executive suites, where a man stood with his hands in the pockets of a navy windbreaker.
“Uh . . . a gentleman is here to see you,” Carly said from behind her counter.
The man was perhaps no older than his early sixties, and, despite the lines in his face and the sagging flesh, his hair was still dark blond. His gaze moved over me appraisingly, as if he were considering a not-very-promising side of beef for purchase.
I approached him, extending my hand, but he kept his in his pockets.
“You’re a stringy thing,” he said, his lip curling to reveal yellow teeth so mottled with brown that they might have been rotting out of his head. “From the newspaper pictures, I thought you might be, but I couldn’t tell.”
I let my hand drop. As a female an inch shy of six feet, I had been called worse things than stringy. “What can I do for you?”
“Do we have to talk about it here in the open, in front of Madam Nosey there?” He jerked his head in the direction of the reception desk, where Carly sat stiffly, blinking. She was an attractive woman in her midthirties, but she did have a large nose made more prominent by the narrowness of her face.
“She goes by Carly,” I said.
“What?”
“Carly. And she has a last name, but it’s not Nosey.”
“Well?” he said.
I shook my head. “Come on back.”
He followed me through the archway that led into the little cluster of offices where my own was located. Of the three doors, only mine and that of a detective named Rodney Burns were open. My friend Brooke Marshall, who had the middle office, was off evaluating some company’s IT system.
“At least you’re pleasant to walk behind,” the old man muttered.
I stopped in my doorway and turned on him. “Look. I don’t know who you are or what you want. I don’t know what you said to Carly. But one more impolite remark, and we’re done. Do you understand me?”
He eyed me. “Are you this welcoming to all your clients?”
I cocked an eyebrow at him.
“Yes, I understand you. And for what it’s worth, I think you’ll do.”
“Do for what?”
He withdrew a hand from the pocket of his windbreaker. The hand clutched several folded sheets of paper limp with perspiration. He handed them to me. “I’m about to be arrested for murder,” he said as I unfolded the papers.
The document was a search warrant for the residence of Robert Shorter, 3412 Meander Lane, Richmond, Virginia. Midway down the page, it read, “This Search Warrant is issued in relation to an offense substantially described as follows: In violation of Virginia Code 18.2-32 to wit: First or Second Degree Murder.” I looked up.
“You’re Robert Shorter, I take it.”
“Bob Shorter. That’s me.”
I flipped the page to look at the search inventory, my nose wrinkling at the smell of stale cigarette smoke that rose off the document. The police had taken a denim shirt, a pair of pants, and nine kitchen knives. “Come on in.” I continued into my office and remained standing behind my desk until Shorter had taken a seat in one of the two client chairs.
I sat, dropping the papers on my desk. “Tell me about the shirt and pants they took.”
“They had blood on them.”
“Not yours?”
“No, not my blood. I never saw the blood until the police pulled the clothes out from under my hanging clothes.”
“They were on the floor?”
“On the floor between my shoes and the wall. What I think is that someone got into my house, took my clothes and got blood all over them, then brought them back and shoved them back there.”
“So they were your clothes,” I said.
“Yeah, they were my clothes.”
“Any signs of forcible entry?”
“Not that I could tell. Cops didn’t say anything about it, though I did see them looking at the lock on my back door.”
“So what’s your explanation?”
“I go for a walk every morning and evening. My neighbors all see me. Anyone would have had plenty of time to go in and do their mischief.”
“How would they have gotten in?”
“Don’t know. Though I used to keep a spare key out in my toolshed. They could have used that.”
“Is it gone?”
“I didn’t think to check. Wouldn’t mean anything, anyhow. If it’s there, maybe whoever used it put it back. Or he could have borrowed it while I was out on one of my walks anytime in the last ten years, made a copy, and put it back. Or it could be that it’s not even there anymore. It’s been years since I’ve seen it.”
“You said
he
.
Who do you see doing this?”
He shook his head. “Could have been a woman, any of my neighbors. They all hate me.”
“Do they also hate”—I flipped to the affidavit attached to the search warrant—“William Hill?”
“Bill? Probably not. He’s annoying as hell, always whining about his various health problems, both real and imagined, but I don’t know that people hate him. ’Course, I don’t talk to any of the neighbors much.”
“How about you? Do you hate Bill Hill?”
“He’s a pathetic son of a bitch, just sits and moons out the window. When the weather’s nice enough, he sits on his back patio, staring across at my house. It’s annoying as hell, but I don’t hate him for it. Once upon a time we were pretty good friends, but we had a falling-out, a practical joke that went a little wrong. That’s been years, though.”
“Someone stabbed him.”
“That’s what the papers say.”
“With your knife, do you think?”
“Could be. I can’t find my paring knife, and I don’t remember it among the knives the police took. Last time I remember seeing it, I left it on the counter after cutting myself up an apple. That’s been a few days.”
“Was it part of the same set as the knives the police took?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I think it was.”
I went back with him over the timeline. Bill Hill’s body had been discovered the day before, on Sunday, sometime in the late afternoon. By evening, the police were searching Bob Shorter’s house.
“I’m not sure when it was the murder’s supposed to have happened,” Shorter said. “Not yesterday, I think. The day before, or the day before that.”
“Maybe as early as Friday?”
“Yes.”
“So on Friday or Saturday, someone walked into your house, maybe one of your neighbors, maybe using the key he found in your toolshed. He found your knife and some of your clothes, walked them over to Bill Hill’s house . . . how far away is that, by the way?”
“Just across the street and around the corner.”
“Carried your knife and clothes around the corner, stabbed Bill Hill, a man whom nobody hates, carried the bloody clothes, but evidently not the knife . . .” I paused, raising my eyebrows.
“Not the knife,” Shorter confirmed.
“. . . back to your house and jammed them into the back of your closet for the police to find.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Tell me about this note that Bill left,” I said, tapping the warrant and its accompanying affidavit.
“All I know is what it says right there. Evidently Bill scrawled my name on something before he died. From something one of the cops said, he may have written it in his own blood.”
I leaned back in my chair, studying Shorter. My office was not a big one, and the smell of stale tobacco was becoming overpowering. Although he met my gaze squarely, the whole thing didn’t feel right. There was something entirely too self-possessed about Bob Shorter, given that it looked as if he was about to face murder charges. Under the circumstances, I didn’t like his calm demeanor, and I was pretty sure I didn’t like him. “There are a lot of lawyers in Richmond,” I said. “Why come to me?”
“I’m in a fix.” He turned his hands so that they rested on his thighs palms up, the movement drawing my attention to the yellow-brown stains on the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. “I’m in a fix, and I know it. It may be that nobody can get me out of it. If so, if this is my last hurrah, I might as well have a long-legged—”
I lowered my chin, looking at him steadily.
“Hell, you’re not going to tell me your legs are short. Anyway, I read about you in the newspaper. It seems to me you have an unconventional way of doing things, and to my mind you’ve got a better chance of breaking a frame-up like this than some paunchy, middle-aged shyster who sits around on his flabby ass all day drafting documents and waiting for the police to uncover the facts he’s going to have to deal with.”
I didn’t respond, just sat looking at him.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m here because your ass ain’t flabby.” He bared his nicotine-stained teeth at me.
I stood. “I don’t want your case. Thank you for coming in.”
He stayed in his seat, tilting his head to keep his eyes on my face. “Now don’t be like that. Okay, I said something I shouldn’t of. I’m sorry. I can make it up to you.”
“I doubt it.”
He stood, too. Instead of turning to leave, he reached into his jacket’s inside pocket and came out with a checkbook.
I shook my head. “You’re wasting your time.”
He opened the checkbook and tore out a check that had evidently been filled out in advance. He laid it on my desk, turning it so that the writing faced me, and pushed it toward me. The check had my name on it and was made out for $30,000, about twenty times what I had in the bank at the moment.
“I know I don’t got what you might call a winsome personality, so I compensate. A lot of times I find a big check will make up for my failure to honor some of the social niceties.” He grinned his rotting-corpse grin at me.
I picked up the check.
“That’s not a retainer—it’s a fee,” he said. “You get to keep it regardless of how much time you put in, regardless of what results you get. How about it?”
“Don’t you want to wait for an arrest? You don’t even know there’s a case yet.”
“That’s my lookout. I got some bloody clothes and a missing knife, and I don’t see any other explanation for it but that somebody’s framing me. I want to be ready for ’em.”
“I don’t know what you said to my receptionist, but if you upset her again, I’m done—and, short of a court order, I won’t be returning your check. I’ll keep every penny of it I can get away with.”
He started to cackle, but it broke down into a smoker’s cough. When he recovered, he said, “You’re a ruthless bitch, aren’t you? I like that. That’s why I’m here.”
“And of course, if this check bounces, everything’s off.”
We had some paperwork to fill out. When we had finished it, I walked him out and stood just inside the glass doors of the executive suites until the elevator doors on the opposite side of the hall had closed on him, cutting off his yellowed face from view.
“He’s a dreadful, dreadful man,” Carly said behind me. “Tell me you’re not going to take his case.”