Of course, Rinky could just as easily land back here tonight.
Harry returns to the defense table and chats with Rinky in low tones while Judge Long finishes the paperwork and Geraldine collects her next stack of documents from Clarence Wexler. Rinky nods at Harry, asks loudly if he can go now, and then feigns attention again as Harry keeps talking. Rinky understands that Judge Long just let him off the proverbial hook. As for the rest of it—the continuance without a finding, the likelihood of doing real time in the future—he doesn’t give a damn.
A prison guard shows up at the table and Rinky shoos him away with both hands. The guard looks at Harry and chuckles. Harry tells Rinky he has to return to lockup. He has to change clothes, retrieve noncontraband possessions, and sign off on release forms. Harry points to the guard and tells Rinky to go with him.
Rinky complies, but he’s not happy about it. He glares over his shoulder at all of us as he leaves the courtroom. This is a trick, his eyes say, and he knows every last one of us is in on it.
Harry packs up his old schoolbag, then sends a mock salute in Geraldine’s direction. “Ms. Guillotine,” he says.
She scowls at him. Clarence does too.
Harry laughs and turns to leave. “Wish me luck,” he says, pausing beside the Kydd and me.
Now it’s my turn to laugh. “Wish
you
luck? We’re the ones staring a first-degree murder charge in the face.”
“I know that,” he says as he heads for the center aisle. “But
I
have a date with Mrs. DeMateo.”
The Kydd laughs, but I don’t. I turn in my chair to watch Harry’s departure. He looks over his shoulder at me and his worried hazel eyes say it all. He can joke all he wants about Mrs. DeMateo but it’s not her case he’s preoccupied with at the moment. The case he’s concerned about is mine. And he’s not just concerned. He’s worried sick.
The grieving widow is turned out in yellow. She’s shed her hat and trench coat, revealing a long-sleeved, knee-length coat dress, butter yellow with slightly deeper-hued trim. I’m not certain, but I think yellow is one of those colors we’re not supposed to wear after Labor Day. Life’s rules don’t seem to apply to Louisa Rawlings, though. None of them.
A stern-looking matron relieves Louisa of her handcuffs and then delivers her to us. The Kydd stands and pulls the middle chair out from our table as they approach.
“Thank you, Kevin,” Louisa says as she sits between us. He nods at her and turns pink, but says nothing.
“How are you doing?” I ask her. She seems calm, composed, as if she consciously collected herself during her hours in lockup.
“I’m ready to go home,” she says, rubbing her wrists together. “This place is dreadful.”
She’s right, of course. Lockup is no picnic. But compared with the female violent offenders’ ward of the Barnstable County House of Correction—where Louisa will await trial if this case is bound over—it’s a veritable cocktail party. That’s a reality I won’t mention, at least not at the moment. Louisa will hear a lifetime’s worth of awful realities during the next fifteen minutes. No need to start early.
Geraldine leaves her table and saunters toward ours, her three-inch heels sounding like a metronome as they strike evenly against the wooden floor. Without looking at me—her eyes are focused on Louisa—she hands me a stack of documents. She stands still in front of our table, idly fingering a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of her camel-hair suit coat. She plans to stay awhile, it seems.
On top of the stack is a legal memorandum, a thick one, no doubt researched and authored by Clarence. Beneath it are a few preliminary analyses from the state crime lab as well as the Medical Examiner’s report, hot off the presses. I wonder if his signature is dry yet. I pass the stack to the Kydd and he digs in at once.
Geraldine is still planted in front of our table, blond head tilted to one side, thin arms now folded against her chest, green eyes boring into Louisa. She’s preparing for battle, antagonizing the enemy. Geraldine does this to murder defendants. All of them.
Louisa stares back at her, undaunted. I’m impressed. Murder defendants don’t do that to Geraldine. None of them.
Without a word, Geraldine pivots and strides back to her table. She retrieves another package, a duplicate of the one she gave me, no doubt. She walks to the bench and hands it up to Judge Long. He thanks her and dons his half-glasses.
“Who is that woman?” Louisa asks.
“She’s the District Attorney,” I tell her. “Geraldine Schilling.”
“Is she competent?”
I almost laugh out loud. Louisa may as well have asked if Barbra Streisand can carry a tune. “Yes,” I answer. “She’s quite effective.”
“Too bad she couldn’t find day care for her little boy.” Louisa nods toward the prosecutors’ table and I almost laugh out loud again. Our new Assistant DA looks like he just stepped out of an early episode of
The Brady Bunch
.
“Be careful,” I tell Louisa. “That’s Clarence Wexler. He’s older than he looks.”
“Perky little thing, isn’t he?”
I’d never thought of Clarence as perky before, but I suppose he is. “He’s Geraldine’s latest protégé,” I tell her.
“He’s an attorney?”
I nod.
“He’s licensed?”
“As of last month he is. Fresh out of law school. Just passed the bar.”
Louisa doesn’t seem troubled by the fact that her day-care candidate is just a few years younger than her most recent paramour. She shakes her head as if she knows for sure now that the entire profession has gone to the dogs.
Wanda Morgan reads out a lengthy docket number and then announces
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts versus Louisa Coleman Rawlings
. Louisa jumps a little beside me. She looks somewhat surprised, hurt even, as if it were terribly impertinent of Wanda to mention Louisa’s name in open court.
Geraldine is still on her feet, facing the judge. “Your Honor, Mrs. Rawlings stands charged with first-degree murder, based on extreme atrocity or cruelty, in the bludgeoning death of her husband, Herbert Andrew Rawlings.”
For a moment the room falls quiet, the only sound a sharp intake of breath from the chair next to mine.
“As you can see from Dr. Ramsey’s report, the cause of death is drowning, secondary to head trauma.”
Dr. Ramsey took over as Barnstable County’s Medical Examiner little more than a year ago. He’s already proved, more than once, that he’s damned good at his new job. Geraldine isn’t taking any chances with the Rawlings case. She went straight to the top gun.
“The victim’s injuries are consistent with a single blow from behind with a blunt object,” she continues. “Dr. Ramsey concludes that the blow rendered Mr. Rawlings unconscious, after which he was bound with rope at the wrists and ankles, and then dumped into the ocean, still breathing.”
Geraldine pauses and turns to fire a theatrical glare at Louisa, but the attempt at drama is wasted. Louisa doesn’t notice. She’s rigid in her chair, her eyes closed, her left fist pressed against her mouth. Two tears seep out from beneath her long lashes and meander down her right cheek.
“When the Chatham police questioned the defendant as to her whereabouts when her husband disappeared…”
Geraldine pauses again and stares at our table until Louisa opens her eyes.
“…she lied.”
Louisa turns to me and shakes her head, but her eyes are worried.
“The defendant stands to inherit a substantial estate as a result of her husband’s death,” Geraldine continues. “Two million in life insurance proceeds if we’d all been duped into thinking his death was an accident, but that’s just the beginning. Mr. Rawlings’s net worth exceeded six million exclusive of insurance. And his will names the defendant as the sole beneficiary.”
Judge Long takes a minute to scan Geraldine’s paperwork and Louisa leans toward me during the lull. “That’s wrong,” she whispers, shaking her head. “I didn’t lie to anybody. And the life insurance part is wrong too. There’s only a million.”
“Okay,” I tell her.
So Louisa Rawlings is unaware of the double indemnity clause. My gut tells me to leave her in the dark on that issue—at least for a while.
“Ms. Nickerson,” the judge says without looking up from his papers, “how does your client plead?”
I stand to address the court but another voice fills the room first. “Not at all guilty, Your Honor,” Louisa says from her chair.
“Not at all,” she repeats when I look down. For a moment, she seems to think I’m the one she needs to convince.
Judge Long stares at her.
Geraldine does too.
“Not the least little bit,” Louisa adds. She’s wiped her tears away, but her cheeks are still wet and her mascara is smudged.
I lean over to silence her, but think better of it when I take in the judge’s expression. He’s not reading anymore. He’s looking at Louisa, his eyes wide, his smile quite different from the one he earlier bestowed upon the rest of us. If he were a white man, his cheeks would probably be red right now. I wonder if there’s a male on the planet who’s immune to Louisa Rawlings’s charms.
I clear my throat and Judge Long seems to snap out of his reverie. He smiles at me, still looking a bit bemused. “Should I take that as a garden-variety not-guilty plea, Attorney Nickerson?”
“Yes, Your Honor, you should.”
The judge turns his attention back to Geraldine. “Attorney Schilling,” he says, taking his half-glasses off and tapping the documents with them, “I’m sure it’s all in here, but enlighten me, please. You’ve mentioned a possible motive—and you seem to have reason to believe this defendant was less than forthcoming with the Chatham police officers. But what have you got in the way of physical evidence that ties this woman to the crime?”
Now we’re getting somewhere. Judge Long won’t hold any criminal defendant on the basis of motive alone, even a plausible motive. If Louisa Rawlings is telling the truth—and my gut says she is now, even if she didn’t come clean with the cops—then the Commonwealth won’t have any physical evidence implicating her. That won’t get us out of the woods permanently, of course; Geraldine’s just begun to sink her teeth into this one. But it will buy us some time.
Geraldine turns away from the bench and sends an index-finger signal to Clarence Wexler. My stomach somersaults. I know that look on her face. She’s got something. Or at least she thinks she does.
Clarence jumps to his feet and rushes forward as if summoned by God Himself. He’s holding an evidence bag, a large one. From here, I can’t make out what’s in it.
I start toward the bench so I can see, but I stop when the Kydd slides two sheets of paper across the table to me. One is a report from the crime lab. The other is Clarence’s summary of the lab report’s contents. I lean over to read and my eyes absorb the words as Geraldine speaks.
“What we’ve got,” she says, “is this. On it are skin fragments from the victim’s skull. And two of his hairs. And traces of his blood.”
Geraldine pauses for a moment and I look up. “Also on it,” she says, “are Louisa Coleman Rawlings’s fingerprints. No one else’s.”
Judge Long takes the evidence bag and holds it up to the light. “But what
is
it?” he asks.
“It’s a decorative plumbing fixture,” Geraldine replies. “A brass swan.”
Judge Long called a thirty-minute recess to give the defense time to examine the Commonwealth’s surprise exhibit, time to digest the contents of the lab report, time to construct our own version of what it all means. Normally, the prosecutor is required to disclose all such evidence before presenting it in court. Trial by ambush went out with the Dark Ages.
The disclosure rule is always malleable at this stage of the game, though. The government’s version of probable cause came to light today, not yesterday. And since Geraldine’s office received the report from the Commonwealth’s crime lab just an hour or so before open session began, Judge Long ruled that the Common-wealth’s failure to disclose was harmless.
As a practical matter, of course, the judge is right. This judge usually is.
We’ll be given ample opportunity to have an independent lab examine the brass swan before this case gets to trial. We’ll hire our own forensic experts to analyze DNA, to determine blood type, and to identify fingerprints. But the answers I want right now can’t come from a lab or a physician or a scientist. They have to come from Louisa Rawlings. And so far at least, she doesn’t seem to have any.
She’s shivering, though it’s not the least bit cold in here. We’re in the jury deliberation room, across the hall from the main courtroom. Louisa and the Kydd are seated at a long, narrow table; I’m on my feet. The Commonwealth’s documents are spread out in front of the Kydd and he’s still wading through them. The bagged brass swan is in front of Louisa. She doesn’t touch it.
I take it from the table and hold it up to the fluorescent light. It’s the mother swan, not one of her two cygnets. Portions of the skin fragments Geraldine referred to would have been scraped off at the crime lab for analysis, but two remain affixed to the brass. Even through the plastic, the fragments are easy to see with the naked eye. And I’ll be damned if they were there twenty-four hours ago.
We’ll get to the swan in a minute. I have another issue on my mind. “Louisa,” I ask, “did you have brunch at the club last Sunday morning?”
She stares at me for a moment before she answers. “No,” she says. “I didn’t. Truth is, I found my companions rather dull. And I had a lot on my mind. I bought a coffee and drove to Lighthouse Beach with it.”
“But you told Mitch Walker you ate at the club.”
“No, I didn’t. I told him exactly what I told you—that I’d been
invited
to play nine holes and have brunch. He didn’t ask anything else about it.”
I shake my head at her.
“What was I supposed to do?” she asks. “Volunteer that I needed time alone to think about my impending divorce? Tell the cop I didn’t want to go home until I was pretty sure my husband had gone for the day?”
She can protest all she wants. Her eyes tell me she knows how stupid she was.
“Well, your clever little answer is what landed you here, Louisa. And this”—I hold the swan out toward her—“just might keep you in.”
I set the wrapped fixture back on the table, closer to Louisa than it was before, hoping she’ll shed some light on its current condition. She recoils from it, shaking her head. “I can’t explain this,” she says, her voice trembling along with the rest of her. “It makes no sense.”
“Hold on,” the Kydd says, pulling a page free from a stapled packet. I walk behind him, so I can look over his shoulder and read. He’s holding a sheet divided into three columns. It’s the inventory of items confiscated by the two guys from the state crime lab. The swan is near the bottom of the list.
The Kydd runs his finger horizontally across the page on the swan line. The middle column, the widest of the three, gives a brief description of the item identified in column one. The final entry, in the third column, tells where it was found. The brass swan, the state guys claim, was discovered in the Rawlings’s basement.
“What was it doing down in the basement?” the Kydd asks Louisa.
She looks blank. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I take the inventory sheet from him and put it in front of her, on top of the bagged exhibit, my index finger directing her attention to the swan line. “Did you remove it from the hot tub for some reason?” Surely Louisa would have noticed if the mother swan had migrated from the Queen’s Spa.
She’s silent. After a moment, she sits a little straighter, tapping the sheet. “Wait,” she says, “that must be the other swan.”
“The
other
swan?” I wonder how many brass swans one household can support.
“Yes,” she says, more animated now. “When the plumbing fixtures first arrived, just a week or so before we moved in, the plumber called us in Greenwich to say the largest master-bath faucet was defective, stripped threads or some such thing. Anyhow, there was no way he could create a proper seal. It was leaking from the base of the neck.”
“So you ordered a replacement?” I ask.
“Herb did,” she says. “He called the plumbing supply company—a place in Ohio, I think it was—and they agreed to ship a new one right away. We’d spent a buck or two on them, after all.”
“What happened to the first one?”
“The plumber left it on top of one of the bathroom sinks. I found it the day we moved in. Herb was out on the dock, fussing with the boat as usual, and I carried the swan out to the back deck to ask him what I should do with it.”
Hence her prints. “And what did he say?”
“He said to just leave it there, on the picnic table; he’d take care of it. He said he’d agreed to ship it back to the company. They thought it could be refurbished. He must have moved it into the basement and then…”
“And then he never got around to it,” I finish for her.
She nods, her spurt of animation visibly fading.
“Who had access to the basement, Louisa?”
Her eyes grow wider. “Anyone who wanted it, I suppose. Herb always went down through the bulkhead in the yard. He kept his tools and boating equipment down there.”
“Is that the only way to get there?”
She shakes her head. “No. There’s a stairway from the kitchen, but it’s steep. Herb never used it, as far as I know. He always used the bulkhead.”
A rhythmic series of knocks breaks the silence and then Wanda peeks in. “You folks ready?” she asks. “The judge wants to wrap it up.”
“Two minutes,” I tell her. She nods and leaves, the wooden door clicking shut behind her, and I turn back to Louisa with Taylor Peterson’s theory running through my head. “Shift gears with me for a minute,” I tell her.
She nods.
“Who did your husband normally take out on the boat with him?”
She laughs. “It’d be easier to tell you who he didn’t take. Herb would have taken the mailman if the mailman would have gone. Herb loved that damned boat, loved showing her off as much as anything.”
“Did you go with him?”
“On occasion,” she says. “It’s not my cup of tea, tossing about on the waves. But I’d go with him once in a while to keep him company.”
“What about Glen Powers?” I ask. “You mentioned he and Herb had boating in common.”
She shakes her head. “They weren’t
that
chummy,” she says. “Herb and Glen would
talk
about boats occasionally. But they never went out on one together.”
“Steven Collier?” I try next.
“Sometimes,” she says. “They’d take the
Carolina Girl
out on a weekend afternoon every now and then. But Steven has his own boat, so it wasn’t that often. They spent more time together talking about gear than they did on the water.”
I’m not getting much here, but I may as well finish my short list. “Anastasia?” I ask. “Lance Phillips?”
She laughs again. “Herb had Anastasia around boats all the time when she was a child, hoping to get her hooked. But alas, the dear girl grew up to loathe the great outdoors. And Lance gets sea-sick in the shower.”
Well, this discussion has got me nowhere.
“We’d better head across the hall,” I tell her. “I think we’ve used up our two minutes.”
I take the inventory sheet from her and hand it back to the Kydd. He restacks his documents and then leads the way out of the jury room. Louisa follows. Mother Swan and I bring up the rear.
“Louisa,” I say as we cross the hallway, “when we go back inside, it’s probably best if you let me do the talking.”
She glances over her shoulder as we enter the courtroom, her perfect eyebrows arched. “All of it?” She’s incredulous.
“Yes,” I tell her. “All of it.”
She looks disappointed, as if I’ve just taken all the fun out of this for her. She settles into the chair the Kydd offers and then turns to face me. “I went to law school too, you know.”
“I’m aware of that,” I remind her. “So did Clarence.”
She glances over at young Clarence and nods, conceding my point, and her expression grows more somber. The bailiff tells us to rise as Judge Long emerges from chambers, but Louisa leans closer to me before she complies. “Who would do such a thing to Herb?” she asks. Genuine sadness fills her dark brown eyes.
I shake my head as we stand, but say nothing. My question is more basic than that. It makes perfect sense that Louisa’s prints are all over the Commonwealth’s exhibit.
But where the hell are Herb’s?