Lesser Crimes Read online

  “I took the ring,” Lee said. “I can’t deny that.”

  “There would also be the charges of battery.” Paxton shifted papers to look at the photos of a middle-aged man with bruises on his face and skull. “How did these happen?”

  “I didn’t like how he touched me without my consent.”

  “And you couldn’t just denounce him?”

  This time it was Ava who looked at her senior partner, raising her eyebrows.

  “Oh, all right,” Paxton said. “I get it. No one would have listened.”

  “What about your sister?” Ava asked. “That’s a good story to tell. You took care of her.”

  “No!” Lee cried. “No, Cora is to be kept out of this.”

  “But do you know where she is?”

  Again, Lee didn’t answer. Paxton stood up, shoving his hands in his pockets, and circled the room. “No witness to anything good you’ve ever done, several witnesses to assault, battery, robbery. No alibi for the night of the murder: you freely admit you went to your mother’s house, where the murder took place — and according to the last people who saw you, you’d have made it there in plenty of time to kill Joe. No sign of your sister to testify on your behalf, your mother was asleep that night, plenty of people saw you threaten Joe for just pushing your sister into a room and leaving her without food for a while.”

  He stopped and turned toward Lee, cocking his head.

  “I guess it doesn’t look good for me,” Lee said, still tearing the napkin.

  “Well, there is a lot of time ahead,” Paxton replied. “We might find out things, when we get discovery. James has said money will be no object, so we can have all the evidence the prosecution will hand over triple-examined by the best people in the country. In the world, maybe.”

  James. He would never ask for her permission to go through her life. James would always decide on his own; he would always act. If he ever learned her reasons, he would dismiss them. He wouldn’t be able to understand why things had to be just so. Why she was willing to go to jail so that they would remain just so.

  Lee couldn’t allow James to decide, but there was nothing she could do to stop him, except refuse the counsel he had hired. She could do that.

  “I need to see him,” she said.

  Paxton took his place across from her again. “He’s in Charlotte getting your bail. It’s a million dollars cash, and that needs some engineering by major banks. But in any case, he said he won’t come.”

  “Tell him he has to. Tell him I need to speak to him.”

  “I’ve told him several times. And he doesn’t look like the sort of person to change his mind once it’s made up.”

  No, he wasn’t that sort of person at all, and he was angry — which made him even more stubborn. James was determined that she should not waste her life in prison, and he wasn’t going to let things go because she asked him.

  Paxton cleared his throat. “He told me to give you a message, though.”

  “What?”

  The attorney interlaced his fingers. “He said to tell you that if you refuse counsel, or if at any part of this process you plead guilty, you will never see him again."

  FOUR

  “Do you swear to say the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

  “I do.”

  James had heard the sentence in just about every cop show or legal drama he had ever watched. It was now being said in a small courtroom with wooden paneling and a large American flag. He had also seen more flags than he could count since arriving in North Carolina: inside buildings, outside private homes, on lapels, on bumper stickers. There had also been a few Confederate flags stuck to the windows of trucks on the highway.

  Twenty people were in the courtroom, apart from the DAs, defense attorneys and officers. A couple of people who looked like reporters were taking note for a state or city newspaper, James supposed, although Joseph Keane’s murder was a five-year-old story that hadn’t raised an enormous amount of interest even in a relatively peaceful county like Guilford.

  Greensboro felt small to a Londoner, although it occupied a good amount of territory. It had a cluster of buildings like the pieces in a Monopoly game and red-brick tobacco warehouses turned into homes or restaurants. Its angular lines and sharp shadows on clean gray sidewalks also made it resemble a movie set. Leafy suburbs sprawled out, with gabled houses and tidy yards.

  Judge William Bennett lowered his hand after swearing in the witness. Bennett was fat, his black robe making a triangle out of the body behind the bench, and his eyes were squeezed almost shut in a face that now turned toward the prosecution.

  A handsome black woman in a trouser suit stood and moved to a podium between the two desks representing the state and the defense. She introduced herself as Cynthia Williams and addressed the witness, a young police officer in uniform. He had pale eyes, auburn hair cut close to his head and the slightly belligerent look of someone who had a little authority but felt he ought to have more.

  “Could you state your name for the court, please?” Williams asked.

  “Caleb Samuel Brooks.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Hawkshaw police department, ma’am.”

  “Were you on duty on the morning of November 29th, 2013?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did you receive a call?”

  “I did, ma’am.”

  “What was the nature of the call?”

  “Dispatcher advised that there was a man found dead in 247 Howard Lane.”

  “Who had called 911?”

  “The deceased’s wife.”

  “Did you immediately make your way there?”

  “I did.”

  “Were you alone?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Is that usual?”

  “Yes, ma’am. We have a population of about eight thousand and a small police force. There isn’t much that happens in Hawkshaw, so most of the time we’ll be answering a phone call on our own.”

  “Even a possible homicide call, like this one?”

  “It wasn’t stated that it was homicide, just that a man was dead.”

  “Did you know the man?”

  “Yes, Joe Keane.”

  “Do you mean Joseph Warren Keane?”

  “I do.”

  “What was your relationship to Mr. Keane?”

  The officer shrugged. “I knew him. I reckon I know most everybody in town.”

  “Was it Mr. Keane’s house that you were being called to?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. I mean, it was his wife’s house. I guess it was his too, ’cause they got married, but it was originally her house.”

  “Was his wife the person who made the call?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you state her name?”

  “April Miller — or April Keane, at the time.”

  “Does she go by April Miller or April Keane now?”

  “April Keane, ma’am.”

  James glanced at the blonde woman sitting two rows behind the prosecution. She had a bit of Lee in her; the eyes were of the same extraordinary green, and her full lips were similar to her daughter’s. But there the resemblance ended: April Keane was in her early forties, but her skin was blotched and her hair both brassy and straggly. She had looked at James with an alert, almost greedy air of curiosity. He had only returned her look once and she had smiled then, half raising a hand as if she knew him.

  Her eager greeting, combined with a knowing smile, disturbed him. What, for one thing, was she doing behind the prosecution? Should she not sit behind her daughter, where he was, in a show of support?

  Lee wore her hair up and the back of her neck seemed vulnerable to him — pale and still too thin after the ordeal she had undergone. She didn’t belong in a detention center, not after almost dying. The cruel impartiality of the law angered James, but she was now flanked by Paxton and by Ava Cuthrell, two capable people. He needed to think that everything would b
e all right, and he wanted to concentrate on what was being said.

  The bare outline of Joe Keane’s murder was available on the internet. Client-attorney privilege forbade Paxton to tell James what Lee had told him, although it was James who paid him; but Paxton had already explained that Lee hadn’t said much at all.

  Lee had kept many secrets, and some of them would be revealed now.

  “What did you find when you arrived at 247 Howard Lane?” Williams pursued.

  “When I arrived, the door was open, and Mrs. Keane was standing outside in her bathrobe,” Brooks said. “I also noticed that she was wearing some fluffy-type slippers, and that they had blood on them.”

  “Did she seem upset?”

  “She seemed a little bit …” Brooks looked at April Keane. “A bit hysterical?”

  April nodded, encouraging him. Lee turned in profile to look at her mother. Her lashes fell over her eyes almost at once, and she faced forward again. It was as if she were thinking, “What’s the use?”

  Stop thinking like that, Lee.

  “What did Mrs. Keane say to you then?” Williams continued.

  “She said she thought Joe was dead, and that there was a lot of blood all over.”

  “Could you describe what you saw upon entering the house?”

  “Well, right away when you enter, to the left a little bit, you have the stairs. Joe was lying at the bottom of the steps on his side, and there was blood beneath his head, sort of pooling, you know? And there were spots and then smudges of blood on the wall, and then drops of blood leading to the door and out.”

  “Did you notice all that as you walked in?”

  “I did, ma’am.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I … I went to the body first, to see if he was really dead, because April —Mrs. Keane — couldn’t swear one hundred percent that he was. She said that she hadn’t had the courage to touch him. I sort of crouched by him and tried to see if he was breathing — and Mrs. Keane ran and found me a metal tray so I could put it to his nose, but I couldn’t see it being clouded by breath. I had to touch his neck, but he was very cold, and the blood was all congealed.”

  “Meaning that it looked like he had been there a while?”

  “Yes, as far as I could tell.”

  “And did you turn the body, to feel his pulse?”

  “No, I felt it on his neck, same way he was lying on the ground. I ascertained at that point that he really was dead.”

  Brooks pronounced words like “congealed” and “ascertained” syllable by syllable.

  “Did you inform Mrs. Keane that her husband was dead?” Williams asked.

  “I did.”

  “How did she react?”

  “She put her hand to her mouth and cursed a few times. Then she backed away and started to cry.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I was going to call it in, but I heard someone moving on the floor above and I asked her if it was her daughter.”

  “Which daughter?”

  The officer shot a quick look at Lee. “I asked her if it was Lynette.”

  “Do you mean the defendant?” Williams asked, motioning toward Lee.

  “Yes. I said, ‘Is Lynn up there?’ And she said it was probably Cora.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Well, Cora was only eight years old, and if she was waking up she was going to see her stepfather just lying there dead and a lotta blood, so I called out for her to stay put, and I climbed up real quick, grabbed her, asked her to keep her eyes shut and carried her downstairs.”

  The judge, who had been listening to him with chin on hand now asked, “Did you disturb the stairs by running up to stop her coming down?”

  “Yes, sir. Although I avoided the blood on the carpet of the stairs so as not to mess up the crime scene.”

  “Did you know it was a crime scene?”

  “Well … I didn’t know, no sir, not at the time when I told Cora to stay in her room. I thought Joe had fallen down the stairs or something. It was only after that I saw the poker.”

  “Do you mean the fireplace poker, which has been established as the crime weapon?” Williams asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Where was it?”

  “It was by Joe’s body. Like it had been dropped next to him.”

  “Did you see any blood on the poker?”

  “Yes, ma’am. The end of it, the pointy part and the part that curves as well — all that was bloody, up till maybe one half of it?”

  Williams raised her eyes from the notes she had placed before her. “What did you do then?”

  “I asked Mrs. Keane what happened. And she said she didn’t know, she had woken up, brushed her teeth and her hair, and when she went down the staircase she saw the blood marks on the walls and the blood on the carpet, and round the bend she saw Joe. She said that she managed to go down and see he was unresponsive, and that’s when she made the call.”

  “What did you do then?” Williams repeated in a monotone, returning to her notes.

  “I called the station and told them we had a dead body, and then I started to bag the evidence.”

  “Is that standard?”

  “Again, ma’am, it’s a very small town — and we hadn’t really had any murders. It doesn’t happen there. But it’s what we’re taught to do, bag the evidence, photograph things as they are and keep anyone from messing the crime scene until a homicide detective and a forensics team from Greensboro can come.”

  “Did someone else come at that point, from your station?”

  Brooks nodded at a young man with dark hair and a uniform jacket stretched over muscular shoulders who sat among the public.

  “Yes, ma’am. My colleague, Officer Noah Wright, came over to help.”

  “I’ve no more questions, Your Honor,” Williams said.

  The judge turned to the defense desk. “Mr. Paxton?”

  Paxton took his place behind the podium and leaned on it with his left elbow as his right hand idly played with his glasses. “Officer Brooks, how do you know the defendant?”

  The witness’ pale eyes flew to Lee and back to Paxton. “How do I know—?”

  “How do you know Lynette Annamae Miller? When did you meet her?”

  “In school.”

  “Do you mean Andrew Jackson Junior High School?”

  “Yes.”

  “I believe you were twelve and she eleven at the time?” Paxton put on his glasses to consult his notes. “Both of you in sixth grade?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she was arriving from Raleigh to live here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you become friends?”

  Brooks shrugged. “Not very much.”

  “What about later? In High School?” Again, Paxton consulted his notes. “James K. Polk High School. Did you make friends then?”

  The man’s eyes again sought Lee’s, but she wasn’t looking at him.

  Paxton raised his eyebrows at Brooks. “Well?”

  “Yes, we made friends.”

  “More than friends? Were you, in fact, her boyfriend for two years, between 2009 and 2011?”

  Brooks cleared his throat before saying, “Yes.”

  “As a matter of interest, who broke up with whom?”

  Williams stood. “Your Honor, how is this relevant?”

  The judge waved a hand, allowing the question. He was interested in the answer and leaned forward to hear it.

  “We broke up a few times,” Brooks said with a scowl.

  “The last time — the definitive time: who broke up?”

  “She did.”

  “And did you at that time, and at several other times in front of witnesses, tell her …” Paxton looked at his notes, although James suspected he didn’t need to. “ ‘You’ll never be rid of me except in your grave, Lynette’ — or variations of that sentence?”

  Brooks shrugged. “That’s just stupid stuff people say when they
break up.”

  “But did you not say to the defendant about three weeks before Joseph Keane’s death, two full years after she had broken up with you, and I quote: ‘I will make your life hell, you know I can do it?’ ”

  The officer looked over at Bennett, as if appealing to him, but the judge waited for his answer with hooded eyes.

  “It’s stupid stuff, you say it to your ex or something, or she says it to you without meaning it.”

  “Two years after breaking up? I suppose that time has a different meaning in a small town with relatively few girls around your age.”

  Officer Brooks’ look had turned sullen. “There were other girls. She wasn’t the only one in town, no matter what she thought.”

  “And then you are the one who answers a distress call at her mother’s house,” Paxton went on, ignoring him. “And you are the one who — without the slightest previous experience of homicide cases — ‘bags,’ as you called it, the evidence. You’re the one who stays in charge of the murder weapon and the crime scene.”

  Williams stood again. “Your Honor, this is a preliminary hearing to establish probable cause. Discrediting a witness should be done in front of a grand jury at a trial.”

  Paxton turned an innocent face to Bennett. “But Your Honor, I am stating facts. The officer who answered the call and bagged the evidence was the defendant’s boyfriend for two years and was heard telling her he could make her life hell. He had no experience in homicides, and yet he was in charge of the evidence. Nevertheless, as far as we are concerned the witness is excused.”

  Wasting no time, Williams returned to the podium. “The state now calls on April Marjorie Keane.”

  Officer Brooks left the witness box and swaggered past the defense table, staring at Lee. His eyes fell on James, too, and two deep vertical lines appeared between his brows. He took a seat across the way and smoldered as April took the stand.

  Mrs. Keane swiveled a little toward the judge and gave him a coy look, like a woman who still takes a man’s admiration for granted even while no longer being able to rely on it. Bennett swore her in, going back to the slight boredom he had displayed before. Williams once again asked the witness to state her name and her address; again, the day of her husband’s death was discussed: she had woken up, found him at the bottom of the stairs and called the police. Her account did not vary from Brooks’, and her accent was broader than anyone else’s so far.