Proof of Intent Read online

“Have you lost it, Miles?” I said.

  Miles looked around vaguely. There were bags under his eyes and the skin sagged in the hollows under his cheekbones. “I got . . . I got scared, Charley.”

  “Well, I’m here, and we’re going to work things out. Now put the cannon down for a minute, okay?”

  Miles nodded, locked the door, then walked into the living room, where he set the Smith on the coffee table.

  “Explain to me precisely what happened here,” I said.

  “I got a call from Denkerberg,” Miles said. “About an hour and a half ago. She said she was calling to make sure I was home. I go, ‘Obviously I’m home.’ She goes, ‘Well, don’t go anywhere. I need to talk to you.’ That’s when I called you. If she really needed to talk, she’d have been all peaches and cream. As much as she’s capable of it anyway. Plus, she’d have called you first so that you’d be present for the interview.”

  “So you figured she was coming to arrest you.”

  Miles nodded miserably.

  “What did you do when she got here?”

  “She showed up on the doorstep. I told her she couldn’t come in. She got real insistent. So I . . . ah, I kind of . . .”

  “You pulled your gun.”

  “Well. Not actually. I was wearing my shoulder holster, and I just sort of put . . . I kind of rested my hand on the grip.”

  I felt like shaking him. “Did she show you a warrant?”

  Miles shook his head no.

  “Then what?”

  “She started to pull her pistol . . .”

  “So you punched her?”

  “Punched her!” His eyes widened. “Is that what those morons are saying? Give me a break. No, what happened is I could see that she was about to draw down on me—with no legal justification, I might add—so I just sort of reached out the door and shoved her. Just to keep her out of the house. She kind of stumbled back, and I slammed the door.”

  “And that’s it? Next thing you know, we’ve got this?” I waved my hand at the flashing lights and camera crews outside.

  Miles shrugged. “I may have yelled a couple things out the window.”

  “Great. You wave the gun around, too?”

  Miles avoided my eyes.

  “Miles, Miles, Miles . . .” I sighed loudly.

  Miles started pacing up and down.

  “Okay, let me think. First, you’re sure she didn’t show you a warrant?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  I smiled. “What you did, nothing personal, Miles, but this was pretty asinine. Nevertheless, we can salvage this. Give me a minute, okay?”

  I went back to the door, walked across the lawn again, smiling pleasantly. Charley Sloan, out for a nice afternoon constitutional. I noticed there were now four TV trucks on the scene. When I reached Chief Bower, I laughed genially. Not for the chief’s benefit and certainly not because anything funny had happened, but because I knew I was on camera. Cameras love a friendly face.

  “I hope you plan to take disciplinary action against Chantall Denkerberg,” I said. My face was jolly, but my tone was not.

  “Excuse me?” the chief said, eyes narrowing.

  “You are aware she tried to force entry into an established and lawful residence without legal authorization?” That wasn’t precisely what had happened, but it was close enough. The main thing was that I needed to put the chief on the defensive. “I think probably breaking and entering would be about right. Maybe throw in some battery, just for good measure.”

  “Give me a break, Sloan. It’s a crime scene. She has the right of access.”

  “Three days ago it was a crime scene. Your own people cleared him to take possession when you were done. Now it’s his home again. I don’t know what she’s saying happened, but she had no warrant, and she tried to force her way in there, Chief, and that’s against the law. At that point Miles basically just showed her his gun. Didn’t draw it, didn’t point it, just let her observe that he had it—a right he has, I might add, under protection of the Constitution of the United States of America. Then when she tried to draw down on him, he nudged her backward so he could close the door to his own lawful residence. End of story.”

  “Bullshit,” Bower said. “He was yelling out the window about how he was going to kill anybody who set foot on his lawn.”

  “Any of these folks have that on tape?” I waved at the TV trucks. I knew they hadn’t because I’d seen the first TV truck roll up myself. “If not, it’s the word of small-town cop against a world-famous author.”

  Bower rolled his eyes and turned his head away from me.

  “Thought not,” I said. “But look, all of that’s irrelevant now. Denkerberg came here to talk to my client. If you want to talk to Miles, I’d be more than happy to bring him by the station right this minute. But I got news for you, he’s not coming out as long as all the Gestapo stuff is going on out here.” I gave a big sweep of my arm, taking in the pumped-up S-TAC boys, the parade of flashing lights, the uniformed police, the TV trucks.

  Bower laughed derisively.

  “I don’t see the humor,” I said sharply. “You’ve got a rogue officer over there who just unlawfully provoked a potentially life-threatening situation with the grieving spouse of a murder victim. Now I’d hate to have to file suit against the city over some silly little misunderstanding like this. Put a leash on the S-TAC guys, send them back to their cage, and Miles will happily come down and chat.”

  Chief Bower scowled.

  “Are you that eager to have people talk about Pickeral Point in the same breath as Ruby Ridge and Waco? I give you my word, Chief. Fifteen minutes after the last cop is gone, Miles Dane is standing in your station house. Then it’s your move.”

  “He’s agreed to this?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Chief Bower sighed, turned to the patrol sergeant on the scene. “You heard him. Everybody out. Now!”

  The fifteen minutes gave me an opportunity to make a little statement to the TV crews, which went live on the moon news. I made sure the cameras were aimed so they could see the S-TAC boys packing up in their black van. I smiled a lot and made a statement about the Pickeral Point police that, while sounding complimentary on its face, had the obvious implication that they were bumbling idiots. I praised their “restraint,” in the same breath that I referred to Detective Denkerberg as “a confused female officer.” I may have even used the phrase “storm trooper” once or twice. It was all a bit of a cheap shot. But it also served to put them on notice that if they came after Miles Dane, Charley Sloan wouldn’t take it lying down.

  Then I went inside 221 Riverside Boulevard, and said, “Okay, Miles, comb your hair and put on a white shirt and a pair of khakis.”

  “A white shirt? I never wear white.”

  “And I’m telling you, white shirt. Until I say you differently, black has disappeared from your wardrobe.”

  Ten

  We drove to the police station in my car. For reasons known only to the four members of the city council (all of them, not coincidentally, heavily involved in the real estate business), the new Pickeral Point police station had been built way on the western outskirts of town in the middle of a very large field. The field—which had been sold to the city for three times its value, naturally—had once been devoted to the cultivation of soybeans. Since the soybeans were long gone, there was now plenty of room for all the TV trucks to spread out, their antennae thrusting pugnaciously at the sky. They weren’t just local stations either, I noticed. CNN and CNBC were both also represented. And if CNN and CNBC were there today, tomorrow it would be national crews from NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox.

  I took Miles by the arm and led him inside the building. Chantall Denkerberg was waiting at the front desk. She had a smear of dirt up the side of her blue suit—presumably from falling down the stairs of Miles’s house.

  “Confused, Mr. Sloan?” she said, smiling coldly and holding a piece of paper in front of my face. I got the feeling she hadn’t apprecia
ted my confused-female-officer speech on TV. “Here’s an arrest warrant. Is this confusing to you?”

  I saw in a flash what had happened. She had almost certainly had the warrant in her pocket when she had rolled up at Miles’s house. She had gone over there hoping to con him into talking some more. But if he wasn’t willing to talk, she had intended to serve the warrant.

  Miles saw the piece of folded paper in her hand, stopped, then took a step backward. The color drained out of his face. “No!” he said. “No, I can’t—”

  He tried to step backward again, but Denkerberg was too fast for him. I don’t think Sister Herman Marie had ever slapped a prayer book upside my head as quickly as she leapt on my client. She grabbed him by his dark mane of hair, yanked him over backward, and slung him to the floor. Then she had a knee in his spine, his arm twisted behind his back.

  “Confused? Huh? Who’s confused now?” she said, twisting his arm a little tighter with each word.

  Chief Bower watched from the other side of the room, a smirk on his broad face.

  “Miles Dane,” Detective Denkerberg whispered, “you are under arrest for the murder of Diana Dane.” Then she gave him his Miranda warning while he grunted in pain.

  “Is this entirely necessary?” I said to Bower.

  “Making little crocodile-tears speeches live on the TV, it cuts both ways.”

  “You think?”

  “It just don’t pay, making cops out to be morons,” Chief Bower said, still smirking. Then he left the room.

  I stood there and tried to look cool. But I didn’t feel cool. The police knew something that I didn’t. Even as angry as she was, Chantall Denkerberg was a pro; she wouldn’t have moved this quickly against Miles without evidence.

  What did she have that I didn’t know about?

  Eleven

  The police made it clear to me they wouldn’t do me any favors in processing Miles. By the time they got done booking him, it would be too late to get him over to the courthouse for his arraignment.

  All of which meant Miles would spend the night in jail. I tried to call in favors hither and yon, hoping to get a special court appearance for him. No dice. The word had gotten around that I’d profaned the High and Holy Church of Law Enforcement on TV—national TV, as it turned out, with CNN and CNBC running my entire speech every half hour, right after the China trade agreement story—so I got nothing but irritable stares as I made my rounds in the criminal justice community.

  Finally, I gave up and slunk back to my office.

  As I walked into my office, my secretary, Mrs. Fenton, looked like she was in a snit. “Don’t blame me,” she said. “I tried.”

  I wasn’t really paying attention to her. “Tried what?” I said vaguely as I walked into my cluttered office.

  I had more or less inherited my office from an old lawyer in Pickeral Point who died a few years back. I kept his furniture, the pictures on the walls, everything. Situated at the top of a flight of rusting iron stairs on the second floor of a small brick commercial building just off the town square, it’s the sort of place that would put you in mind of an English gentlemen’s club fallen on hard times. Heavy wood tables and desks, brass lamps with green shades, red Spanish leather upholstery. The leather is cracked, the wood is chipped, and the prints of pointers and woodcock and pheasants seemed to defy Mrs. Fenton’s constant efforts at keeping them plumb and level.

  But the place is me. Or at least it’s how I like to think of myself. Good solid stuff, a little the worse for wear.

  Oh, and there’s a view, too. You go past my secretary’s desk and into my office, there’s a big picture window that takes up one entire wall. It looks over the boardwalk and onto the river. I’d have kept the place just for the view.

  It was as I looked out at my view—a big breakbulk freighter was chugging by—that I saw what Mrs. Fenton was in her snit about. Silhouetted against the big window, back turned, was a woman. All I could see of her face was that she had a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, the smoke trailing up around her head. Mrs. Fenton has a thing about cigarette smoke. Out on the river in front of the woman in my office was an echo of that cigarette, trails of toffee-colored mist rising up off the river. A bottle of Ronrico spiced rum was open on the desk.

  “Lisa?” I said.

  My daughter turned and looked at me stonily. Lisa, luckily, favors her mother in looks. I may not have married stable women, or nice women, or sober women. But they were all fine-looking girls, I’ll give them that. Lisa is about five-two, with long rich brown hair that meets her brow in a widow’s peak, a pert nose, a square Irish jaw, large brown eyes, and a lovely smile.

  Just then, however, she was not smiling. She wore a pair of jeans that could have stood a wash and a shapeless sweater that hid her body. The last time I’d seen her she was verging on plump. Now she looked wan, undernourished, a good fifteen pounds lighter.

  “You look terrible,” I said.

  “Marvelous to see you, too, Dad.” She gave me a bored smile and sat down heavily in my chair.

  “You also look plastered.”

  “Oh just taking a little vacation from sobriety. Off to the islands, don’t you know?” Her tone was arch, an ironic put-on, as she took a swig of the awful Ronrico. She wasn’t stumbling drunk or slurring her words, but it was obvious she’d already had a few.

  A distant part of my brain wanted to join her, to match her pull for pull. Off to the islands. Let the problems of Lisa Sloan and Miles Dane float away on the same aromatic tide.

  “I just flew all the way to New York to find you,” I said.

  Lisa looked at me curiously. “Really.”

  I nodded.

  “Isn’t that quaint. Were you going to save me from myself?”

  There are maudlin drunks, there are happy drunks, there are thrill-seeking drunks . . . Apparently, though, Lisa took after her Irish forbears: She was a fighting drunk.

  I threw her the keys to my house. “Take a cab back to my place. Sleep it off. When you wake up sober, we’ll talk.”

  She gave me the sarcastic smile again. “I was kind of looking for work. You got anything around here for a law school dropout with a drinking problem?”

  The truth was, my practice was already stretched a little thin. And with the Dane business heating up, I really did need some help. But I wasn’t going to broach that subject with a drunk woman.

  “We can talk about it later.”

  “You know I’d earn my keep. I’ve worked for you before.”

  “When you’re sober,” I said sharply.

  She sighed theatrically. “Oh well. I suppose there’s always prostitution.”

  “Dammit, Lisa . . .” I was about to launch into her, but then I clamped my mouth shut. What was the point? I am of the firm opinion—and this is confirmed by my own experience with a wide variety of wives, girlfriends, law partners, and concerned friends who tried to talk sense into me back when I was drinking—that trying to reason with a drunk person about his or her condition is not just a vast waste of time, but is actually counterproductive. It makes people defensive and angry, which only increases their interest in the bottle.

  It’s agonizing to watch someone you love do self-destructive things and know that trying to intervene or make decisions for them is the worst thing you can do. But sometimes that’s just the way it is.

  The phone rang.

  “Can you get that, Mrs. Fenton?” I called.

  The phone continued to ring. I supposed Mrs. Fenton had discreetly gone off to powder her nose so that Lisa and I could talk in privacy.

  “For Pete’s sake, Lisa, I’ve got work to do,” I said. I knew I seemed unfeeling, but in her current combative condition, the best thing I could do was get Lisa back to my house in hopes she might go to sleep and wake up in a saner frame of mind. I took the bottle of Ron Rico off the desk, set it on the floor, picked up my ringing phone. “Charley Sloan.”

  “You that big lawyer?” It was the voice of a
young man. “The one off the TV?” I could hear the noise of jail in the background. When you’ve practiced law as long as I have, you learn to recognize the sound.

  “I’m Charley Sloan. Who am I speaking to?”

  “Yeah, my name is Leon. I’m down here at the jail. I was wondering if you could come get me out.” He sounded very young, if not particularly frightened about his predicament.

  “Okay, Leon. Full name.”

  “Leon James Prouty.”

  “What have you been charged with, young man?”

  “Uh. They said I was doing some midnight landscaping.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Like if you was to find a yard where somebody had just did some landscaping, and you was to dig up all the new bushes and throw ’em in a truck, drive off with them? That’s what you’d call midnight landscaping.”

  “So the charge would be grand theft?”

  “I guess. Plus, you know how they do, make up a bunch of shit, try to scare you? Criminal trespass, breaking and entering, receiving—so on, so forth.”

  “You at the city jail?”

  “Pickeral Point police station.”

  “Okay, good. So have you been booked?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You got money, Leon? I don’t work for free.”

  “How much this gonna cost me?”

  I picked a number out of the air, just to see if he was serious. “We could probably get you started for five hundred. If you should happen to go to trial, considerably more.”

  “Oh. No problem. Can I write you a check?”

  “You’re making a joke, right?”

  “I’ll get it from the ATM as soon as you spring me.”

  A thief with a bank account. What a pleasant novelty. Most of my clients keep their life savings in a fat wad in their front pocket. “I’ll be right down,” I said. “I trust you haven’t given a statement to the police?”

  “No sir. I don’t say jack to them clowns.”

  “Keep it that way. I’ll be right down.”

  I hung up the phone and turned to Lisa. “I’ve got to run. Go back to my house and just sit tight for a while, okay?”