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

  Cleaning my car windows was an activity I could do with Deeks, so I left my car in the driveway and went to get him. As I crossed the street, I felt joy bubbling up in me. It wasn’t just the release of tension after my confrontational afternoon, I thought. It was Deeks’s joy, infectious even in anticipation.

  I rang the doorbell and almost immediately heard the scrabbling of Deeks’s toenails on the tile floor of Dr. McDermott’s entrance hall, then the doctor’s dusty voice. “I know, boy—she’s here. She’s right outside. Here she is.”

  The door opened and Deeks’s shoulder clipped my leg as he exploded past me, leaped onto the lawn, and ran at full speed toward the street. Just before he reached it, he made a tight turn without slowing, his toenails throwing up grass clippings; then he was charging me.

  I stepped down onto the sidewalk, and he dropped into a sit in front of me, his sides heaving and his tongue lolling. I bent over to rub his sides, and he stood to jam his nose between my knees. “Hey, buddy,” I said. “Hey . . . it’s good to see you. It’s good to see you, too.” I rubbed his sides vigorously, then backed up a step for the more delicate work on his head and ears.

  From the front porch, Dr. McDermott said, “I always think he loves me more than he could love anyone until I see him with you.”

  I gave Deeks a few final slaps on his side, then straightened. “I have to say this is always one of the high points of my day.” Deeks pushed the side of his head against my thigh, and I scratched it with the tips of my fingers.

  “I was about to have some tea. Would you like some?”

  “Sure. Sounds good.”

  I sat at the kitchen table to give him room to work, watching Deeks trail after him, alert for any tidbit that might fall from the counter.

  “I’m trying something a bit different, actually,” Dr. McDermott said, taking a pitcher from the refrigerator. “I made the tea extra strong and have it steeping with sliced lemons and limes.” He filled two glasses with ice and poured them two-thirds full of tea. After going back to the refrigerator, he got out a liter bottle. “Then I top off with soda water and, voilà, sparkling tea.”

  He handed me one of the glasses, and I took a sip. “I like it. Not bad at all.”

  “How about a spoonful of sugar to finish it off? I’m going to add one to mine.”

  A spoonful of sugar is fifteen calories, but I was about to go running with Deeks and thought I could handle it. I held out my glass.

  “It’s really good,” I said, taking another sip.

  Dr. McDermott lowered himself into the chair across from me and sat back, his hand on his beaded glass. “So,” he said. “Tell me about your day.”

  “Oh, same old, same old.” I took another sip of the tea.

  “Come on. I’m here all day with nobody but Deacon to talk to. He’s a great listener, but otherwise not much of a conversationalist. Are you saying you spent all day in your office drafting documents?”

  “No. I don’t think I drafted any documents. I was at the courthouse this morning, drove over to the East End to prowl around a client’s house this afternoon.” I told him about it. He frowned at each appearance of the neighbors at the doors of the house and didn’t think the photos of Shorter’s homemade tombstones were as funny as I did. By the time I got to my defaced car windows, his fingers were rapping the table in agitation.

  “I swear, Robin, you do have a knack for ticking people off.”

  “And I don’t understand it. I don’t tick you off, do I? Deeks likes me.”

  “No. Maybe you’re not a threat to me the way you are to other people.”

  “I don’t mean to be a threat to anyone. I’m just out there doing my job.”

  “And as proud as I am of you, I sometimes wish you’d find another line of work.”

  I finished my tea and stood up, leaning over him to kiss his cheek and say, “Yes, Papa.” I went to rinse my glass at the sink.

  “You don’t have to wash up.”

  “Somebody has to.”

  “That’s true. That might be the best answer to my interfering suggestion that you find another line of work.”

  “Somebody has to do it?” I asked.

  “Somebody does,” he said.

  I changed into gym shorts and a running bra, hung my house key around my neck, and hit the road with Deeks. People were just getting home from work. Though Deeks and I did most of our running in the dark, we had encountered most of our neighbors before, including one old grouch who called after me, “That dog’s supposed to be on a leash, young lady.”

  “Hey, Mr. Carmichael.”

  He harrumphed as we went by. Deeks paused only long enough to sniff the air in his direction. No one else that evening seemed to mind that Deeks went tearing through their yards, or disappearing into their bushes, or wagging up to greet them as they got out of their cars or went out to get their mail. Some waved; some called out a greeting. One bent over Deeks and gave his side a rub.

  We did a three-miler. It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that I ran three miles and Deeks ran six or more, dashing off to check out this smell or that, then running back to check on me. Once he charged at a plump cat sitting at the end of its driveway.

  “No, Deeks,” I called after him, but I needn’t have bothered. The cat didn’t react to Deeks’s charge other than to turn its head toward him and watch him come. Deeks pulled up short, not knowing what to do with a cat who wouldn’t run. He looked at me, wagged his tail uncertainly, then trotted over to run beside me for a while.

  “Embarrassed you, didn’t he?” I said conversationally, but Deeks ignored me, and, after a minute or so, he found something else of interest to run off and investigate.

  I was in the driveway washing the shoe polish off my windows when my cell phone rang. I put the hose down to fish the phone out of the pocket of my gym shorts, and Deeks lapped the water that arched from the end of it in a tiny fountain.

  “Hey, Paul.”

  “Hey. Where are you?”

  “At home.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m around back in the driveway. Someone scrawled graffiti on my car windows, and I’m washing the whole car while I’m at it.”

  “I’m coming out,” he said.

  “You’re inside?”

  “All of us are.”

  “All of you?”

  “Yeah. Hang on a minute.”

  “All of us” turned out to be Paul and Brooke and Mike. They came out through the garage, Mike saying, “We brought Italian. I thought we were going to have to eat without you.”

  Paul said, “We also brought two bottles of Sangiovese—Mike did.” Mike McMillan, in addition to being Brooke’s fiancé, was Paul’s best friend and had been since high school.

  “Hey,” Brooke said. “This dog is wet.” She pushed at Deeks, who was trying to rub his head against her leg.

  “Deeks! At least he’s not jumping on you.”

  She had both of her hands on his head now, fending him off.

  “He keeps leaping in front of the hose,” I said. “We’ve been running, so he’s hot and naturally assumes I got the hose out for his benefit.”

  Paul kissed my cheek, which was damp with soapy water and probably salty with dried sweat, but neither seemed to bother him. “Where did you pick up the graffiti?” He peered at the windshield, moving his head to change the angle. “Lawyer Bitch? Is that what it says?”

  “The worst was Evil’s Whore on this side, I think. It freaked out a boy and his momma on the way home.”

  “That’s pretty personal. I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it, either. Wait. ‘Evil’s Whore’ isn’t personal. What are you trying to say? What’s ‘Evil’s Whore’ got to do with me?”

  “I meant Lawyer . . . you know. Whoever did this knows what you do for a living. Where did it happen?”

  “Tell you about it over dinner. Here, you guys finish this, and I’ll get cleaned up.” I picked up the bucket, which
contained soapy water and a sopping T-shirt for scrubbing, and handed it to Paul, kissing him on the mouth as I made the transfer.

  “We’ll get all wet,” Brooke said. “We’re not dressed for it.”

  “Deeks will help you.” I went inside, feeling only a twinge of guilt at using my feminine wiles to get Paul to take over washing my car. After all, everyone wanted to eat as soon as possible.

  It probably says something about the Robin-centric nature of my universe that I assumed the evening’s conversation would be about me and my new case. We weren’t halfway through our salads, though, before I detected tension between Brooke and Mike. It took longer than it should have, but, as I say, I was distracted by thoughts of myself and what was going on in my own life.

  “So,” I said to Brooke, who was sitting across from me at the kitchen table. “How was your day?”

  “Fine.”

  She continued to chew her salad savagely, and even crispy leaves of iceberg lettuce didn’t call for that. Paul gave me an infinitesimal head shake. Aside from a quick shift of his gaze in Brooke’s direction, Mike didn’t react.

  “That good, huh?” I said.

  Mike said, “You were going to tell us about the graffiti on your car windows?”

  “I can do that.” I gave them a brief synopsis over my chicken marsala, conscious that whatever we were not talking about was more engaging than my material. I caught Paul’s gaze, but he ignored my lifted eyebrow as he finished chewing his mouthful of chicken parmesan and swallowed.

  “I know you think of these neighbors of Shorter’s as a bunch of harmless busybodies,” he said, “but you shouldn’t underestimate their capacity for violence.”

  “These are ordinary, middle-aged folk, and so far most of them are female.”

  “Females can be as vicious as they come,” Paul said. Mike’s eyes started to move toward Brooke, but he stopped them. “And ordinary, middle-aged folks can turn violent, too, when they’re threatened,” Paul continued. “You’re stepping into the middle of a neighborhood feud, and you might just get caught in the cross fire.”

  Brooke’s gaze went to Mike, and for a moment their eyes met. I’d been thinking I could wait until I had Brooke alone to get the story from her, but not knowing the cause of the trouble between them was getting to me.

  “Okay, what’s going on?” I said. “I know Paul knows, and either Brooke or he can tell me about it later, but why don’t we get it all out in the open?”

  “Get what out in the open?” Brooke said. She’d finished her salad and was using her plastic fork to move her noodles around.

  “Whatever’s going on between you and Mike.”

  Brooke looked at Mike, who put down his own fork and took a breath. He said, “An old girlfriend came by my office today to see if I could help her aunt with a Social Security disability claim. Brooke was coming over for lunch, and they kind of met in my lobby.” Mike had a two-room office suite in the James Center, a block over from Brooke’s and my offices.

  “Old girlfriend doesn’t quite cover it,” Brooke said. She picked up her wineglass but put it down again without drinking anything. “They were engaged to be married, a little fact I didn’t find out about until today.”

  “We weren’t really engaged to be married,” Mike said.

  “No? You didn’t ask her to marry you? And she didn’t accept?”

  “She accepted and told me not to tell anyone. That’s not an engagement, that’s a . . . whatever it was, she didn’t want anyone to know about it. And two nights later, she was spending the night with an old boyfriend to make sure she was ready to say good-bye to that relationship.”

  “Which it turned out she was,” Brooke said.

  “As you can imagine,” Mike said, speaking to me, “things deteriorated pretty quickly from there. Our engagement lasted about forty-five minutes. After that, what we had was not an engagement. What we had was one big, hairy mess.”

  “Why did you ask her to marry you if you weren’t in love with her?” Brooke asked.

  He hesitated. “I didn’t say I wasn’t in love with her,” he said.

  “So you were in love.”

  “I suppose I was.”

  “Suppose?”

  “It was a long time ago. The feelings are gone. The interest I had in her is gone. There’s no point trying to reconstruct how I felt or didn’t feel.”

  “It’s been less than two years,” Brooke told me.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  Mike rolled his eyes ceiling-ward.

  “Sarah Fleckman,” Brooke said.

  “Sarah Fleckman the lawyer?”

  “Oh, great,” Mike said.

  “You know her?” Brooke asked me.

  “Not well. I’ve met her.” She was a serious, attractive woman about my age, with thick, dark hair.

  “She looks like me—don’t you think?” Brooke said.

  Mike said, “She looks nothing like you.”

  “Give me a pair of dark-framed glasses and dye my hair dark brown, and you’ve got Sarah Fleckman.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Mike said.

  “I told her the same thing,” Paul said. “Though the big difference is that Brooke is a very pleasant person, and Sarah is a grade-A—”

  “Don’t say it,” Mike said. “You two never liked each other. There’s no point in rehashing old differences.”

  “You see?” Brooke asked me. “He defends her.”

  “Oh, for the love of—” Mike broke off.

  “The love of Mike?” I said. I gave him a smile, but really, he should have let Paul call Sarah whatever he wanted to.

  “He usually says the love of Pete,” Paul said.

  “So who is Pete, and why is Mike so fond of him? That’s the big question—don’t you think?” I looked at Brooke.

  “You’re not taking this seriously,” she said.

  “If they haven’t seen each other in nearly two years . . .”

  “Then why hasn’t he told me about her?”

  “Our engagement is about us,” Mike said. “It seemed too early to be rehashing old relationships. It’s hard even to think about them.”

  “You’re saying you never think about her? Sarah never crosses your mind?”

  “I haven’t asked you about your old boyfriends,” Mike said.

  Brooke stood. “That’s because I haven’t had any,” she said. There were tears on her cheeks. She tossed her mane of red hair and stalked out of the kitchen. A few seconds later, a door slammed at the back of the house.

  Deeks, who had gotten to his feet when she stood, looked at me anxiously. Paul and Mike were looking at me, too, Mike with an expression almost identical to Deeks’s.

  “I have to say I didn’t see that coming,” Mike said.

  “In college she told everyone she was dating a minor-league baseball player. I think it was a way of keeping guys at a distance.” I’d heard the story over glasses of wine late one night when she’d been rooming with me.

  “She told people she was dating a baseball player, and she wasn’t?” Mike said.

  “She knew a baseball player. I think they did something together once or twice. By telling people she was dating him, she could have guy friendships without all the pressure.”

  “That girl has boundary issues,” Paul said.

  “Whatever that means,” I said to him, conscious of the irritation in my voice. “I’ll go talk to her.”

  I left the kitchen, and Deeks followed me.

  It took me fifteen or twenty minutes to talk Brooke off the ledge. First she was angry with Mike, then with herself. When she got over both of those, she was too embarrassed to come back to the table. By the time we rejoined the others, my chicken marsala was cold. On the plus side, I had already eaten a bit over half of it, and even cold chicken marsala is still pretty good. Brooke went back to picking at her own food, and I covered my plate with plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator. Then,
thinking a little more social lubricant was called for, I added what was left of the second bottle of Chianti to our wineglasses.

  The next morning I was at my desk when Brooke came in. She sat in one of my client chairs and let her purse and her computer bag droop to the floor beside her. “Sorry,” she said. “I know I behaved badly.”

  I waved a hand. “You were upset.”

  She nodded, mouth pursed.

  “More upset than I would have expected from you running into one of Mike’s old girlfriends. There’re bound to be a few of those out there, you know.”

  “Not that he was engaged to, hopefully.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “What kind of man goes around asking women to marry him?”

  “One that wants to get married, maybe. I think what you really resent is that Mike proposed to you so soon.”

  “Well? What’s wrong with dating awhile?”

  “Love at first sight?”

  “Yeah, you’d think that, but now we know this is just how Mike operates. He goes straight to the marriage proposal before the girl is ready for it—twice now that we know of.”

  “He’s what, thirty-two years old? He may be at that point in his life when he’s done with dating.”

  She took in a breath and blew it out, her gaze dropping to my desk.

  “You know . . .” I let it hang there.

  She raised her gaze.

  “He might not be so anxious to buy the cow if he was getting a little milk on the side.”

  “I’ll ignore the bovine metaphor,” she said, “but that’s really rich coming from you. And how do you know how much milk I’m giving away?”

  I was suddenly embarrassed. “Mike and Paul are best friends,” I said. “They talk.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And Paul and I talk.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Besides, you evidently know something about the milk I’m giving away. It’s a two-way street.”

  “You’re giving away diddly-squat. Paul goes panting around after you just like Deeks, and what does he get for it? An occasional peck on the cheek, maybe one that hits the corner of his mouth if you’re feeling generous.”