Critical Conditions

Twenty-five

I would have loved to spend the rest of the day riding my bike, but I’d promised to meet Cozier Maitlin at Dead Ed’s house. When I arrived, the crime scene tape was down and the front door was unlocked. Cozy walked in as if he knew what he was doing. I followed.

Singing drifted from somewhere deep in the big house, arriving at the front door winded by the long halls and bruised by the hard stone of the entry. Given my mood, and the circumstances, the music sounded almost profane.

“Hey Jude, don’t make it bad…”

The tenor’s voice was lush, rather rich for the lyrics, and he hugged the tune too tightly, as though it had been grafted to him. Every Beatles fan knew that this melody absolutely needed to float.

“Who is that, Cozy?” I asked.

Cozier Maitlin, at whose invitation and insistence I was about to witness, for the second time, the precise spot where one of his clients, my patient, had allegedly murdered a man, whispered his reply. “I could make a guess. Don’t you hear the edge? He sings like a prosecutor.”

I knew it was a dig. I bit anyway. “My wife is a prosecutor, Cozy. She sings quite sweetly.” It actually wasn’t true; Lauren couldn’t carry a tune in a suitcase. “Who were you expecting to meet us here? The detectives? Who?”

He shook his head, put his finger to his lips, and slid out of his loafers, which were large enough to sail refugee families from Cuba to Florida. He looked every bit of his six feet eight inches. I removed my own shoes and followed him up toward the bedroom wing of the house.

“Hey Jude, don’t let me…”

A canary-like whistle, in perfect pitch, replaced the lyrics, and I thought I heard the shuffle of footsteps searching to find the beat.

In front of me, Cozier Maitlin looked like a giraffe on the prowl. He tiptoed up the carpeted stairs.

The bedroom hallway was wide and bright, lit by a high clerestory, but the bedroom and bathroom doors had been placed unimaginatively, lining the hall as though it were a corridor in a dormitory. At the far end, a lithe figure in a business suit, his back to us, crossed from one open doorway and disappeared into another. He held his arms out as though he were cradling an imaginary partner. His feet were lively and he hovered lightly, as though he might have really been made of meringue.

“Who’s Gene Kelly?” I whispered.

With a devious smile, Cozy whispered, “You don’t know your old movies-or your dancers. That’s a Fred Astaire wannabe, not a Gene Kelly.” He shushed me before I had a chance to respond and preceded me down the hall. He stood in the doorway where the Fred Astaire impersonator had disappeared, and seemed to puff himself up like a prizefighter at weigh-in. I could barely see around him.

After a five-second wait, Cozy barked, “What the hell are you doing in here?”

I started at the sound.

Mitchell Crest, the chief trial deputy of the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office, started too. He came running from an adjacent bathroom, tripped over the base of a wooden valet, and fell on his face in the center of what appeared to be the master bedroom.

Cozy leaned against the doorframe and with supreme casualness said, “Oh, hello, Mitch, how are you doing? You’re a little early, aren’t you? I thought you said eleven-forty-five. And it didn’t cross my mind for a single second that it would be you snooping around in dead people’s bedrooms. Shame, shame on you.”

“Maitlin,” Crest said as he tried to lift himself up from the floor with some dignity, “if I didn’t get to beat you in court occasionally, I swear I’d have to kill you just to retain my mental health.”

“Careful, I have a witness with me, Mitch.”

I poked my head around Cozy and said, “Hello, Mitchell. It’s me.”

“Hi, Alan. Cozy, I could take out a billboard with a death threat against you and it wouldn’t make any difference. There isn’t a jury in the county that would consider your murder by a prosecutor anything other than justifiable homicide. So why are we here today? Why on earth am I doing you this courtesy? What do you want to see?”

“You’re taking requests? I think ‘Singing in the Rain’ would be a nice encore. Or, if you insist on staying with the Beatles, how about ‘I Am the Walrus’? Tough melody, though, for a dancer. Alan?”

Cozy was having more fun than Mitch was. I didn’t think playing along any longer was going to accomplish much. “Whatever you have to show us, Mitch. I would just like to see what you and the police think happened here.”

“Fine. This…is, um, the master bedroom. As you are well aware, the homicide took place downstairs, in what might be called the basement in a lesser house. Here, I prefer to think of it as the lower level. Follow me.”

We did, Cozy last. He seemed to linger upstairs as long as propriety would allow. A series of two wide, open staircases led from the second floor down to the bright lowest level where I had first joined Sam to consider the demise of Dead Ed Robilio.

I took in details that had escaped my consciousness after the initial visit. A long wall of French doors faced east. The main room was set up as a home theater, complete with a wet bar, a dozen rocker seats, and a carnival-style popcorn popper. I couldn’t imagine inviting ten people over to watch a video. Maybe it was just me.

Someone, either Ed or his wife, had a fondness for contemporary acrylics. Huge canvases covered two big walls. A Remington sculpture sat on top of a bird’s-eye maple table that I imagined contained the video projector for the home theater.

Mitch said, “This way.”

A short hall led to a closed door that led to the room where I’d seen Dead Ed in the bag on the floor. Mitch opened the door to the room and stepped aside, so we could precede him in.

He said, “This is where she shot him.”

The room was more barren than I recalled.

“Where’s the furniture?”

“Evidence. You want to see pictures of how it looked, I’m happy to arrange that. We have lots of pictures. Lots and lots of pictures.”

My memory said that the furniture had been mostly heavy walnut pieces chosen from some decorator’s vision of the home office for the macho man.

I heard Cozy’s breathing change. With every advocate’s bone in his huge body, his impulse was to defend his client against this prosecutor’s claim that Merritt had shot someone down here. But now wasn’t the time. Cozy would get an opportunity to argue Merritt’s innocence with Mitchell Crest in court soon enough.

Too soon, actually.

“Story is this: Victim’s wife came home from a weekend at some Navaho spiritual cleansing thing in Taos and found him. Bloody, bloody scene, truly messy, one of the worst. I feel sorry for her, what she walked in on. Two shots had been fired resulting in two wounds, one to the upper abdomen, second one some minutes later to the head-specifically the face-right next to the nose. Coroner thinks the second one was the fatal shot, although the victim eventually would have bled out from the chest wound. As you both know,” Mitchell paused for effect, “no weapon was found at this location.” Mitchell allowed himself a half-smile, knowing that it was I who had inadvertently led the police to the murder weapon.

“Bloody footprints that tentatively match the type of shoe later discovered under your client’s bed, Cozy, leave the scene, go out through that theater room there, and then finally out those garden-level doors, around the side of the house, and…gone. Dogs had the scent for quite a ways, then lost it just east of Broadway, about six blocks from what turns out to be your patient’s house, Alan. That is, coincidentally, the same place we recovered the murder weapon. Based on environmental and scene circumstances, coroner estimates that the victim died sometime between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, so he had been dead awhile when his wife got here on Monday, which was a few minutes before noon. Her alibi is solid, by the way, we talked to her spiritual guru in Taos. We found the wife’s bloody footprints all over the lower level of the house, too. After she found the deceased, she ran around out there like a chicken with its head cut off. She used the phone in the wet bar to call 911.”

All around the room I spied evidence of a meticulous once-over by the crime scene investigation team. Chemicals for raising fingerprints coated everything that could reveal a latent image. Sections of the wool Berber carpet had been cut out and removed. I knew that every last square centimeter of the surface had been dusted and vacuumed and photographed and videotaped. I wondered what trace evidence had been removed by the CSIs in their sweep.

“Prints?”

“In this room, the victim’s-Dr. Robilio’s-the suspect’s-Merritt Strait’s-the wife’s, and the housekeeper’s. That’s it. Your patient’s and the wife’s latents are nicely fossilized in Dr. Robilio’s blood, by the way. Out there-” he pointed toward the family room “-there are lots of latents that aren’t yet identified. The housekeeping is not as good as you would like.”

Cozy asked, “No unknowns in the office? Not even one?”

Mitchell grinned. “A few strays. That’s to be expected. We’re ruling out family and business associates.”

“Entry was how, Mitchell? How are you imagining that a fifteen-year-old got in to do this?”

“No forced entry. Maybe she came in the same doors she left by, maybe he let her in, I mean, wouldn’t you let her in if she came to your door? A cute kid in a basketball uniform? But we don’t have that pinned down yet. Neither the victim nor the suspect is doing much talking to us right now.”

“And the weapon?”

“His.”

“How did she find his gun?”

“I don’t know, counselor. Have you thought of asking her?”

Cozy ignored him. “What were you doing upstairs, Mitch? In the master bedroom? Did you find some evidence up there that I should know about?”

Mitch turned his back and took a step toward the door before he pirouetted and answered.

“Not now, Cozy.”

“What do you mean, not now? I have a right to anything you find. You know that.”

“It’s a little early in the game to start jabbering about disclosure, isn’t it, Cozy? Your client is a suspect; she hasn’t been charged. And don’t forget I’m doing you a huge courtesy here. Act grateful.”

“In my mind, it’s never too early to poke at a prosecutor. What did you find upstairs? I saw lots of dust up there, Mitch. Whose latents did you find?”

“We were being thorough. Me? I was just looking around, Cozy. That’s all. You want to go back up there and jerk off, go ahead. You know the rules, though.”

Maitlin was not going to be so easily deterred. “Difference between us is I don’t know what to look for upstairs. What did the police find that makes upstairs important? Don’t make this difficult for me, Mitch. There’s no margin in it. You know I’ll find out soon enough. Did you find my client’s fingerprints upstairs?”

Mitchell Crest wanted to talk about something else. “If it turns out there is anything to discuss about evidence that was recovered upstairs, ‘soon enough’ is fine with me. Alan, have you seen what you wanted to see?”

“I guess. May I have a few more minutes?”

He looked at his watch to let me know what an imposition my request was. “Yeah.”

I walked around looking at everything, not knowing what was important. I was cataloguing. The initial scan felt familiar; it was like the starting minutes of psychotherapy. Everything was important. Nothing at all was clear.

“What’s in there?” I asked, pointing at a closed door on the opposite side of the theater.

“Exercise equipment. A home gym, treadmill, bike, stair-stepper. Dr. Robilio liked his toys.”

“May I?”

“Go right ahead.”

I walked into the spacious exercise room and checked out the high-end stuff while I listened to Cozy continue his maneuvers with Mitchell Crest.

“I’ll file a motion to discover what you have. Is that what you want?”

“Go ahead, Cozy. I enjoy your motions. They almost always amuse me.”

I rejoined them and as soon as it seemed they had concluded their jabbering, which seemed listless and pro forma to me, I asked, “What’s that other door?”

“Laundry room. You want to go in there, too?”

“Should I?”

Mitchell looked at me as though I were crazy for asking. “That’s up to you. They use Tide. And liquid fabric softener. No dryer sheets.”

“I think I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Are we done, then?”

“Yes,” Cozy said. He seemed satisfied. About what, I didn’t know.

Mitchell locked up and left us in the driveway, where Cozy and I leaned against his BMW.

“I met with Merritt’s stepfather this morning, Cozy. He signed a release for me to talk with you. He told me that he’d been here to put pressure on Dr. Robilio a couple of days before he died.”

“Really?”

He didn’t seem surprised.

“Trent says the meeting left him quite angry. Talked about it at home with Brenda. Merritt may have heard it.”

“Did he threaten the doctor?”

“No. But he was belligerent. And he says he told his wife he’d kill Robilio if he thought it would do any good. He’s afraid maybe he gave Merritt the idea.”

“I already knew he’d been here. My investigator interviewed all the neighbors. One of them remembered his car from earlier in the week. I assume the police already know all this, too.”

“Is that what you were pressing Mitchell about?”

“Upstairs? I was fishing, trying to get Mitchell to admit they had Trent’s prints.”

“And they don’t?”

“They’re not saying. Something is confusing them or they would have taken Merritt into custody already. There’s too much evidence and this is too political a case for so much procrastination.”

I thought about the delay. “You know, they may not have file prints for John, Cozy. He’s new in the state. He may not even have bothered to get a Colorado driver’s license.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. Wonder if they’ve thought of it. We’ll keep it to ourselves for now. Where’s he from? Where’d he live before?”

“Kansas, I think. Wichita.”

“Okay.”

“Cozy, is there something else that’s important about the master bedroom? What was Mitchell doing up there? Any idea?”

“I don’t know. An inconsistency of some kind. Typically, the prosecution doesn’t hesitate to gloat about things that they consider to be crystal clear.”

“Are Merritt’s prints up there?”

“I’m guessing yes. But I don’t know.”

“John’s?”

“Don’t know that, either.”

“Do Merritt’s prints make burglary more likely as a motive?”

“If they are there, I suppose. More than that, it just makes it more difficult for the police to pin down a scenario. The handgun that killed him? The wife says he kept it upstairs in a little box in a drawer in his bedside table. Somebody went upstairs and retrieved the weapon. Him? Was he afraid of her? Did he think there was an intruder in the house? Her? If she was planning on killing him, she wouldn’t break in hoping to find a weapon, would she? But she’s a kid. Who knows what she was thinking? See, it’s confusing.”

He concluded, “They think she did it. They’re not sure how it came down. That’s why they’re hesitating.”

I stuffed my hands in my pockets.

Cozy said, “I like a client who knows when to keep her mouth shut. But this is over the top. I need this kid to talk to me, Alan. Do something.”