The secretary behind the desk wasn't half bad. She was way too young for me, but that gets to be more the case every year. That's because I keep getting older but the secretaries seem to stay the same age. Just once, I'd like to walk into a lawyer's office and see a woman with big, heavy tits instead of small and perky tits and with an ass big enough I'd have something to hold on to.
She looked up from her computer screen, smiled, and asked how she could help me. I said I was Harry Meers and I had an appointment with Theodore Sanders. She tapped her keyboard a couple of times, then picked up the handset on her phone and punched a button under the keypad.
After a couple of seconds, she said, "Mr. Sanders, there's a Harry Meers here for your two o'clock appointment".
A couple of seconds later she said, "I'll tell him".
She put down the phone, then looked up at me, batted her eyelids, and said, "Mr. Sanders will be with you in just a minute."
After that, she stopped looking at me and started looking at her computer screen again. A little while later, the door behind her opened and a guy in a fitted black suit with a blue shirt and a red bow tie stepped out.
I could tell the guy was a pussy when I first saw him, and he confirmed that with his handshake. Shaking his hand was like holding a dead fish - cold and kinda clammy - and I've known women with a lot stronger grip.
"Mr. Meers, I appreciate the reasons Mrs. Wright hired you to look into this case, but I doubt you're going to find out anything more than we already know."
}{
That's what the woman who'd called my office phone had said this asshole was going to say. Her name was Theresa Wright and she was calling on behalf of her sister, Darlene Matthews, because Darlene was in jail and accused of murdering her husband.
Now, normally, I don't take cases from people accused of actual crimes. That's what the cops are for. I'd much rather follow some bastard and take a few pictures of him fucking his secretary or look for somebody who somebody else lost track of. I also know a lot of the local cops and they're good at what they do, so I figure if they haul you to jail and charge you, they've probably got your sorry ass down cold. This one sounded a little odd though. I told Theresa to come to my office and I'd see what I could do.
Theresa was one of those women you look at and wonder why they don't try to look like a woman. It wasn't that she was ugly or anything. She would probably have been about average if she'd done something with her short, brown hair and if she'd used even a little makeup. Her dress was too long and too loose to show me any figure she might have had. She sat down across from me and started to explain the situation.
"Mr. Meers, my sister is in jail and she's been accused of killing her husband. Darlene has always been a little wild, but she's not a killer. Like I told you, they don't even know for sure that Martin is dead. All they know is he's not at home and Darlene's the one who reported him missing five days ago."
She'd told me that on the phone, and that's what led me to ask her to my office. Having a body is pretty much a necessity in order to charge a person with murder. Since there was no dead Martin, the cops must have had some other really strong evidence.
When a person is reported missing and they suspect foul play, the first person who becomes what they call a "person of interest" is the person who made the report. People will do that because they think it takes them off the list of suspects. All it really does is tell the cops this is someone they should look at long and hard.
If that missing person is married and it looks like they might be dead instead of just missing, the prime suspect is always the spouse. That's because the statistics bear that out. Almost half of all murders of spouses are done by the other spouse. Usually it's the husband who kills the wife, but the other way around is pretty common too.
It usually isn't all that hard to find evidence proving one spouse killed the other because people don't understand all the tools the police have at their disposal today. Crime labs don't just match fingerprints and bullets like they used to. Today, they can identify the chemistry of metals, plastics, carpet fibers, and a shit load of other things, and DNA testing has pretty much eliminated any other method for proving who's who.
"OK, Theresa. If he's just missing, why do they think Martin's dead."
Theresa frowned.
"They found this stupid thing on his computer at work that said if he ever disappeared, they should arrest Darlene because she killed him."
"That's all?"
Theresa nodded.
"Well, that and the blood they say she tried to wash out of her living room rug."
OK, now we were getting to what made the cops think the guy was dead. They might not need a body if there was enough other evidence, and I knew the guys and girls down at the Crime Lab were pretty good at finding that other evidence.
I wanted to be honest with the woman.
"Theresa, this doesn't sound good for your sister. I don't know if I can help you."
She started to cry then.
"Mr. Meers, you just have to help us. The police think she did it, and Darlene told me her lawyer thinks she did. He didn't even try to get the judge to give her bail. He said she should plead guilty so she gets a shorter sentence."
That last sentence made me stop and think. Five days wasn't long enough for any lawyer worth a shit to tell his client to plead guilty. They'd have wanted to first get the client out of the tank and then go over every detail of the case to look for holes in the evidence. Only after that evidence was so tight there was no other way out would the lawyer advise a client to plead guilty.
There must be a lot more evidence than Theresa knew about. The police and the DA wouldn't tell her shit about the case since she wasn't directly involved, but they would have to share all they had with Darlene's lawyer. It seemed strange that a lawyer wouldn't tell Darlene what she was up against and that Darlene wouldn't tell her sister.
"Theresa, It sounds to me like the DA thinks he has an open and shut case. Are you sure that's all Darlene told you? If it is, it sounds to me like she needs a better lawyer."
Theresa sniffed and then blew her nose on a tissue.
"Yes, that's all she knows. She knows she needs a different lawyer, but she doesn't have enough money to do that. This one is a public defender."
