Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Read online

  The lofty, independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, and even the cogent reason, are felt to be dangers, everything that elevates the individual above the herd, and is a source of fear to the neighbour, is henceforth called evil, the tolerant, unassuming, self-adapting, self-equalizing disposition, the mediocrity of desires, attains to moral distinction and honour.

  It was a heck of a run-on sentence. I put the book back in the drawer, wondering about the kind of person who would write it, about the kind of person who would find it worth underlining. Of course, I’d studied literature in school and not philosophy. Maybe it was genius. Had Shorter done the underlining, I wondered, or had he bought the book used, already tattered and underlined?

  I pushed in the drawer and pulled out the next one, hoping to find it full of paperbacks by Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler, books about tough guys driven by their own relentless moral codes. No such luck. This drawer contained no books at all, just two uneven stacks of papers of differing sizes—more what you’d expect to find in a filing cabinet, except that these papers weren’t standing neatly on edge inside manila folders. I pulled out a stack and sat in the canting secretarial chair to paw through it. Medical receipts, receipts for auto repairs, owner’s manuals for a TV, a microwave, three washing machines, a dryer, a refrigerator . . . pretty much everything he had in the house and everything he had ever had, although I hadn’t yet seen the dryer or any of the washing machines. The other stack was more of the same, but there was actually a folder in this one that contained copies of the paperwork from Shorter’s purchase of the house almost thirty-five years ago—the deed, the deed of trust, the promissory note, the HUD-1 Settlement Statement, and the loan application. I wasn’t a real estate lawyer, and I didn’t see anything of interest. I pulled out the bottom drawer.

  The only thing there was a yellow box with a black phoenix on the cover, an intertwined S-R on its breast. At one end of the box was a black bar with the word Ruger in yellow letters on it. I pulled out the drawer all the way and pried open the top. A booklet of special instructions for the SP101 double-action revolver, .22-caliber Long Rifle rimfire cartridge, was inside. Underneath the booklet was the revolver itself, anodized silver with a black handle. If Bill Hill had been shot rather than stabbed, it might be an important piece of evidence. As it was, the police had left it, and I might as well, too. I closed the box and pushed in the drawer.

  A banging came from the front of the house, and the doorbell started ringing again: ding, ding, ding, ding, ding . . . Shorter’s neighbors were really beginning to tick me off. At the door I picked up the ax handle and jerked the door open.

  “What?” I said.

  Jenn and another woman, a chunky woman with strawberry-blonde hair, stepped away from me; the man behind them steadied the strawberry blonde as she teetered on the edge of the stoop. The eyes of the two women were fixed on the ax handle.

  “You’re just like him, aren’t you!” The voice of the strawberry blonde blatted out at me like an air horn with a head cold. “Just like Bob Shorter!”

  I let the end of the ax handle drop to the floor. “Sorry. People pounding on the door and ringing relentlessly tend to get on my nerves.”

  “Where did you get that?” Jenn asked, jabbing her chin at the ax handle.

  “It was propped beside the door. Here. I’ll put it back.” I closed the door enough to put the ax handle back in the corner, then opened it again. “Why don’t you all come in?”

  The two woman looked back at the man. I met his gaze. “I’m Robin Starling,” I said.

  “Mark Rehrer. I live over on the next street.” He pointed, and I leaned out to follow his gesture to a brick Cape Cod with dormers that needed painting. Rehrer was older than the women, perhaps in his middle fifties, and his short-cropped hair was white except for a dark strip that ran back from his forehead like a reverse skunk’s stripe.

  “Won’t you come in?” I said again.

  Still they hesitated, exchanging glances.

  “She did put down the ax handle,” Mark said.

  “And I left my broomstick in the car,” I said.

  None of them even smiled, but in the end they edged past me into the house. It was clear from the way they looked around that they’d never been in it before.

  “Straight ahead is the kitchen,” I said, playing nice and refraining from making any sudden moves. “There’s a table and two or three chairs.”

  They passed through the doorway into the kitchen, each of them hunching his or her shoulders in turn. A bunch of brown-speckled bananas lay on the counter, and by the sink a plate and glass and fork sat on a dish towel. The table was against the wall opposite the sink and refrigerator, one chair at each end and one in the middle.

  “There are three chairs,” I said. “One for each of you. Have a seat.” I went past them and pushed up to sit on the counter.

  Nobody sat. With all of them still on their feet, the kitchen seemed very small.

  I held up the bananas. “There are four bananas. We could each have one. Other than that, I’m afraid I don’t have anything to offer you.”

  “I wouldn’t eat nothing of his,” Jenn said darkly.

  “I don’t guess I would, either,” I said. I put the bananas down and waited. Still, nobody sat down. Nobody said anything.

  “Is anybody going to tell me why you’re here?” I asked.

  Mark Rehrer cleared his throat. “You can’t represent Bob Shorter. We’re here to tell you that. To convince you, if we can.”

  “He’s evil!” the strawberry blonde boomed in her hoarse voice. “I don’t see how you can not know that, if you’ve met him.”

  “Why do you care? Some lawyer’s going to represent him. What difference does it make whether it’s me or someone else?”

  The two women looked at Mark, who cleared his throat.

  “We’ve read about you,” he said. “In the paper.”

  “You don’t never lose!” the strawberry blonde said.

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” I said. “Are you Valerie Shaw?”

  She looked at Jenn, who said, “I didn’t tell her.”

  “It’s not voodoo,” I said. “You were one of the ones who called in claiming Bob Shorter was a danger to the community.”

  After a moment she said, “I knew I shouldn’t have given my name.”

  “Sure you should’ve,” Jenn said. “It’s helped to keep him in jail where he belongs.”

  “Do you?” Mark asked me. “Lose?”

  “I do. I’m only six for ten in civil jury trials, which is a respectable record but hardly extraordinary.”

  “I’m not talking civil trials,” Mark said. “Have you ever lost a criminal case?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t had many criminal cases. I have a perfect record so far because I’m young and inexperienced. And lucky. I have to concede there’s a good bit of luck in there.”

  “So what are you doing here?” Jenn asked. “This is the second time you’ve been here to his house, and this ain’t no courtroom.”

  “I’m looking for facts.”

  “Have you found any?” Mark asked.

  “None so far, nothing that points to Shorter’s guilt or his innocence.”

  “You’re not going to find anything that points to his innocence,” Valerie said.

  “Maybe not. It’s my time, and I’m choosing to spend a little of it here.”

  “He’s a bad, bad man!” Jenn said.

  “So I’ve heard. I’d be interested in hearing specifics.”

  The women looked at each other. Mark Rehrer said, “He does whatever he can to harass and intimidate us. He hates us all.”

  “Bill Hill?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell me about his relationship with Bill Hill.”

  “We’re not here to help you.”

  “We’re here to convince you to quit!” Valerie said.

  “So convince me Shorter hated Bill Hill.”
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  “And you’ll quit?” Mark said.

  My head twitched, a tiny, involuntary shrug.

  “Then there’s no point in talking to you, is there?” he said.

  “What matters is the truth,” I said. “Good or bad, exculpatory or incriminating. With the truth, we can have justice, whether that means Shorter goes free or he gets strapped to a gurney and given a lethal injection.”

  “We don’t care about the truth if it helps Bob Shorter,” Valerie said.

  “Without the truth, we’re all blind people striking at each other in the dark.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Jenn said.

  Actually, it wasn’t. I’d been stretching for a bit of poetic imagery.

  After another twenty minutes or so, it became clear they weren’t going to tell me anything useful. It probably became equally clear to them that I wasn’t going to drop the case. Eventually they shuffled out of the kitchen in the direction of the front door, but the women stopped dead in the living room, and Mark Rehrer stopped to keep from running into them from behind. I pushed past them and went to the door. The women were looking at the ax handle, still leaning in the corner like an evil talisman. I opened the door to hide it from view.

  “I’m going to be here a little longer,” I said. “Shall I expect a return visit with torches and pitchforks?”

  Mark shook his head. Jenn said, “No, you’ve picked your side, and we can see there ain’t no use trying to get you to change your mind.” They went out, and I closed the door. For a while I stood looking down at the ax handle. It was a little darker near each end, perhaps where Shorter had gripped it, but it really was just an ax handle. I went back to the kitchen.

  No facts occupied the refrigerator, either incriminating or exculpatory, just a tub of plain yogurt, a carton with two eggs in it, a half loaf of bread, and, in the door, a square bottle of honey bourbon. A carton of chocolate ice cream and a half-empty package of frozen peas were in the freezer compartment.

  I went to the back door, where wooden steps led down to an unfenced yard of hard-packed dirt with a Caprice Classic of indeterminate color sitting not far from the bottom of the steps—Shorter’s car, presumably.

  Opposite the back door to the house was another door. I opened it to see wooden steps leading down into darkness. I groped for a light switch and found one, but nothing happened when I flipped it.

  I started down the steps. The third one squeaked loudly, and I stopped. Cue the spooky music, I thought. I shifted my weight, and the step squeaked again. I took a breath and went down a few more steps. The air had a musty smell. Did Shorter ever come down here? Not much light filtered down from the kitchen, and I couldn’t see a thing.

  Upstairs the neighbors started on the doorbell again, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Maybe they were back with their torches and pitchforks after all. Just as I found another switch at the bottom of the steps, somebody started banging on the door. This light switch worked, and a bare bulb came on in the middle of a ceiling that had been dry-walled, but never taped and painted. I was in a basement with a concrete floor that had a drain in the middle of it. A washing machine and clothes dryer were in the corner, next to a sofa that might have been rescued from somebody’s curb. That was it except for a boxer’s speed bag bolted to the ceiling. My brother had had one of those things in our basement when I was growing up.

  The banging and doorbell ringing stopped, and I went to the bag and hit it with the heel of my fist: wap, wap, wap. I looked back up the stairs, but all was quiet. I raised both hands and struck the bag with my left hand, then my right, then my left. Punch, wap, wap, wap, punch, wap, wap, wap, punch, wap, wap, wap. It got my heart rate up in a hurry. Had Shorter been a boxer in his younger days? What was his story?

  I gave the bag a last hard punch and was about to head back upstairs when I noticed a door of painted plywood, about two feet by three feet, set high in the wall. I yanked on the handle, and the door screeched open to reveal a crawl space with a dirt floor about four feet above the floor of the basement. Just inside was a rough stack of plywood boards, variously shaped, with poles attached to them. Grabbing the poles attached to the top board, I worked it through the crawl space door. It was painted gray on both sides, with a pretty good rendition of a skull in one corner. Most of the board was covered with stenciled lettering:

  Here lies Jenn

  Died in her sin

  This 10-foot trench

  Won’t hold her stench

  1190

  The three-quarter-inch plywood was cut in the shape of a tombstone, although one shoulder of it had been hacked away, exposing raw and splintered wood. The poles were four-foot pieces of rebar that were attached to the back of the wooden tombstone with U-bolts; bits of dirt still clung to the rebar. Assuming the tombstone had been planted in Shorter’s yard last Halloween, it was more evidence of his deliberate harassment of his neighbors, if more was needed.

  A tapping started somewhere overhead, sounding as if it might be coming from the back door rather than the front. At least whoever was doing it was still outside the house. I ignored the tapping and dragged out another board by its rebar stakes. It turned out to be another tombstone even larger than the first.

  Old Man Rehrer

  Cut his wife from ear to ear

  She died, he fried

  Now they’re together

  Side by side

  1820

  The tapping stopped. “Ms. Starling! Ms. Robin Starling!” The voice was muffled, but I thought it might be Valerie Shaw, which was appropriate enough given that the third board was a mock-up of another tombstone, this one directed at her.

  At 48

  Val had no mate

  Now at last

  She’s met her fate

  1724

  Upstairs all had fallen silent. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but I pulled out the last board, this one cut in the shape of an arrow. Red-and-green circles had been painted along the edges like a border of lightbulbs. The lettering said only, “Insane Asylum.” Whose house had it been pointed at, I wondered, and was this another Halloween decoration, or was this Shorter’s version of a cheery Christmas greeting?

  I propped up the tombstones and the arrow pointing the way to the insane asylum, and I used my phone to take a picture of each of them—not because I had a professional use for the pictures, but because I thought Paul would get a kick out of them. When I was done, I stacked everything back in the crawl space and shut the door.

  I went up the stairs, stepping over the squeaky third step, and looked out the mullioned windows that made up the top half of the back door. Whoever had been there tapping was now gone.

  I left the house through the front door, turning to lock it carefully behind me, then stood on the stoop a moment looking out over the neighborhood, at Jenn’s house and Mark’s, at Bill Hill’s and Melissa Stimmler’s. Several of the houses needed paint, and patches of weeds added bits of green to the thin March lawns. I knew where everyone lived but Valerie Shaw. I wondered if her house was one I could see from Shorter’s front stoop.

  I was halfway to my car, stepping flagstone to flagstone to keep my heels from sinking into the lawn, when I noticed that someone had written on my car windows with what looked like white shoe polish. “Devil’s Advocate” was written on my rear windshield in tall, narrow letters, and “Mouth of Satan” covered most of the windows on the passenger side. The neighbors seemed to have adopted Bob Shorter’s method of discourse: We killed Robin, and nobody’s sobbin’ . . .

  Glittering stickers with the numerals 1192 marked Shorter’s mailbox. I looked over at Jenn Entwistle’s mailbox and saw that her street number was 1190, which had been the date of death on her tombstone. Shorter wasn’t leaving much room for doubt about the target of his gibe.

  Shaking my head, I walked around to the driver’s side of my car. “Evil’s Whore” was scrawled on the driver-side windows, and the front windshield’s message was in such fat letters th
at it was going to be difficult to drive. It said, “Lawyer Bitch.” I scanned the nearby houses, looking for a face at any of the windows, but I didn’t see anyone.

  I got in my car and noticed a folded piece of copy paper under one of the windshield wipers. Evidently everything Shorter’s neighbors wanted to say couldn’t be fit on my car windows. I opened the door again and triggered the windshield wiper, clamping my fingers down on the paper as the wiper brought it to me. The wiper didn’t smear the shoe polish, but it didn’t do anything to wipe it off, either.

  I sat back and unfolded the paper to read the handwritten message: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It was a line spoken by Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2. Of course, I recognized it: I was an English major turned lawyer. Who on this street was able to quote Shakespeare, though?

  I looked back at the paper in my hands. The first thing we do . . . The message had the unexpected effect of lightening my spirits. I didn’t like Bob Shorter, I didn’t think he was a good man, and his neighbors had begun to make me feel bad about it being my job to defend him. In Henry VI, Dick the Butcher had been an anarchist trying to throw England into chaos. The first step toward anarchy, he argued, was to take down England’s system of justice by killing all the lawyers and judges. The message under the windshield had the paradoxical effect of reaffirming the importance of my place in the system.

  Chapter 5

  One downstroke of the H in bitch was directly in my line of sight. I drove home leaning to one side so I could see through the middle of the C. At one point, stopped at a light, I noticed a boy in the car stopped next to me staring, tugging at his mother’s arm, and tapping excitedly on his window. I smiled at them both through the crossbars of the E in Evil’s Whore and wiggled my fingers. The mother jerked at her son as if pulling him away from a smoking hot plate.

  I got home about four o’clock. I know what you’re thinking: I kept pretty good hours for a young lawyer on the make. I liked to tell myself that I was able to do it because I worked so efficiently at the office. A less hopeful explanation was that my practice was so small that I didn’t have enough work to keep me busy, but I preferred the first one.