Against the Evidence

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

To the California police the murder of Lilian Blake seems an open-and-shut case. In less than twenty-four hours they have arrested and charged Harry Nielsen, a mentally disabled youth. At first only Harry's mother believes his innocence, insisting he is too kind-hearted to kill anything. She begs Jesse Falkenstein to accept the case, which he does reluctantly, sure the police have the right man. But as Jesse starts to dig around, curious scraps of evidence begin to accumulate. He formulates an alternate theory of the crime, and his conclusions expose both Jesse and his wife to a situation of extreme danger . . . 'Her best book' New York Times

Release date: July 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

The bathroom door was pushed open and the doorbell rang at the same moment. “Nell!” shouted Jesse.

“Just a minute, darling, the door.” Nell’s voice floated back down the hall.

Jesse regarded the intruder bitterly, heaving himself upright in the tub and reaching for his towel. “And they say cats are curious,” he muttered to himself. Must definitely fix that
latch somehow, though it might not do much good—the firmest-fitting latch might prove a weak reed with something over a hundred and fifty pounds leaning on it.

The intruder sat down on the floor, entirely occupying the space between the bathtub and the opposite wall, and watched interestedly as Jesse toweled himself. “No modesty, no sense of
shame,” said Jesse.

Nell came down the hall and looked in. “Oh, dear,” she said.

“Which you may well say. Not that I’m so damn modest,” said Jesse, “but once in a while we do have guests, and they use the bathroom. Very disconcerting to have the door
shoved open and an interested observer stroll in. As happened, you recall, with that Manders woman and my sister Fran, not to speak of old Mrs. Forsythe. Reason she took her business
elsewhere—nice staid, solid firm like Peabody and Sparkle, instead of an erratic fly-by-night like me. And,” he added, gesturing with the towel, “it’s all your
fault.”

“Yes, I know,” said Nell. “Fran didn’t mind, she thought it was funny. There’s a woman to see you. Darling, come out—”

“Like this?” said Jesse. “What d’you mean, a woman to see me? Tell her to come to the office in the morning. I don’t see clients at home. Especially in a state of
nature.”

“I didn’t mean you,” said Nell. “At least, not right away—you had better put some clothes on, or she’ll think you’re starving to death so you
can’t be a very good lawyer. It’s maddening, I feed you well enough, but you stay so bony. Come out now, darling, let Jesse out of the tub to get some clothes on.” She
tugged the intruder by his collar, and got him up to his feet.

“The office,” said Jesse. “I’m hungry, and I want to relax after the day I’ve had. Never saw old Botts so difficult. Maybe he’s got ulcers.”

“Well,” said Nell, “I wish you would see her—if just to tell her to come to the office. She needs somebody, that I can see, poor soul, and it’s a casserole and
various other things that’ll keep hot and still be all right. Now come out, Athelstane. Give Jesse some room.”

“Athelstane,” said Jesse. The intruder, excited and pleased to hear his name spoken, rose up and attempted to wash Nell’s face; she dodged him expertly, still tugging.
“I am not so very damn Anglophile that you’d notice, and why to God I have to be stuck with— You ask me, he’s what the head doctors call a voyeur. Pushing into the
bathroom when the door’s shut—”

“He doesn’t like closed doors,” said Nell. “He’s gregarious.”

“Now that you can say again. The typical extrovert. And if there’s anything more obnoxious— Why the hell should I see this woman here and now?”

“Jesse, she’s desperate. You can tell—not that she’s trying to cover it up. You know. Please do. Just to see what she wants, what’s wrong.”

“Oh, hell,” said Jesse. “Between you and Athelstane and the climate—”

“Among,” said Nell. “Among, for more than two objects of comparison.”

“It is written in the aphorisms of Jeshu ben Shirah in the Torah,” said Jesse, “An evil wife is a yoke shaken to and fro. Since when does a virtuous woman criticize
her husband? What kind of desperate? Is she a beautiful statuesque blonde with a jealous husband she wants to divorce?”

“Would I be urging you to see her if she was?”

“Were.”

“Was,” said Nell. “No, she’s not. I just felt awfully sorry for her, the little she said. I shouldn’t think it’s anything like that at all. It won’t
take ten minutes to say you’ll take her on, or shunt her off to somebody else. And maybe you’d better take Athelstane into the bedroom with you, he might scare her.”

Jesse draped his dressing gown around him and said, “For the first and only time. I did think once, well, when we acquire a proper house and settle down to raising a family, at least
he’ll be a hell of a watch dog. You say he’s gregarious— I say he’s undiscriminating. He just likes everybody. Any amateur burglar he’d welcome with open paws. All
right, all right. Ten minutes.”

Shut into the bedroom, he began to dress, muttering to himself. Whoever the woman was, she could take him as she found him; he wasn’t going to put on a clean shirt at this time of day for
anybody, when he wasn’t going out anywhere. In such weather. Very little rhyme or reason to Southern California seasons at the best of times, but it looked like being a bad summer when the
first hundred-degree temperatures arrived in June.

Athelstane, belatedly aware of a stranger in the apartment, was now leaning against the bedroom door, which fortunately opened inward. He turned an anxious expression on Jesse.

And no wonder at all that Mrs. Forsythe, though a personal acquaintance, had taken her damage suit elsewhere; even without the bathroom incident—

He remembered another of old Jeshu’s aphorisms about women. Watch over an impudent eye: and marvel not if she trespass against thee. Only too true.



The trouble was, bridegrooms were apt to be too indulgent. Eight months ago, he could still have been called a bridegroom, a month married; and also he’d had half his mind on that Cotter
case when Nell called to report on the latest apartments she’d been looking at. No, none of them would do; there was no sense moving out of Jesse’s bachelor flat until they found
something really nice—but there was this puppy. The people who’d had this apartment she’d gone to see, it seemed, a nice young couple (so the manager said)—planning to buy
a house and looking around—they’d been killed together in a freeway accident, and no relatives or anyone. His company had taken care of the funeral and so on, but they’d had this
puppy. Nobody wanted him or knew what to do with him, and the manager had been feeding him—he said it seemed a shame to send him to the pound when he’d heard the young fellow say
they’d paid over a hundred bucks for him—but his wife didn’t like dogs much and—

“Whose wife?”

“The manager’s, dearest,” said Nell. “He’s a lovely puppy, and the man says he’ll be glad to let anyone have him who’d give him a good home.”

“What brand is he?”

“I think he must be a boxer,” Nell had said rather doubtfully. “Only his ears and tail haven’t been cropped, and he’s a little different color than any boxer
I’ve seen. The manager doesn’t know either. Yes, I know it’s really too big a dog for an apartment, but he’s sweet, Jesse— I couldn’t bear for him to go
to the pound, and the man says he’ll have to get rid of him somehow. . . . Oh, yes, he’s advertised, tried to sell him, but no luck. . . . Well, he looks more like a boxer than anything
else. His name’s Athelstane, and he’s ten months old, that’s all the manager knows—not really a puppy, and all housebroken and so on— Jesse, would you mind if
I took him?”

And with his mind on the Cotter statement, and reflecting that Nell would be the one to take this oddly-come-by orphan out for exercise, Jesse had indulgently given permission. And come home
that night to be confronted with something incontestably canine but very dubiously a boxer. Or if he was, a much outsized one.

“I know he’s too big,” said Nell anxiously, “but isn’t he beautiful? He’s got a marvelous disposition.”

“I see he has,” said Jesse, as Athelstane attempted to climb into his lap. “He doesn’t look much like a boxer to me. His nose is too long, and he’s got
dewlaps.”

“Maybe he’s not a very good one, and they were cheated on him,” said Nell.

At that date, last November, Athelstane had stood a bit over two feet high at the shoulders and tipped the scales at some ninety pounds; they had consoled each other that at ten months he must
have practically all his growth. But as time passed and he continued to grow, and to look less and less like any common garden variety of canine, they had begun to wonder. And then there came the
day they found out—the knowledgeable woman Nell met in the park, who admired her nice young mastiff.

“I went and got a book at the library, and it’s so. It might be him, in the picture. What’s called a dark fawn-brindle English mastiff. Not a bull mastiff,
they’re smaller. And it says—”

“I can see what it says,” Jesse said dismally, looking at the book. “Full growth attained at approximately two and a half years. Minimum standard thirty inches at the shoulder,
a hundred and forty pounds. Good God. And he’s only a year old now and eats three pounds of meat a day. I don’t know how you get into these things. In a three-room apartment, and we had
a hell of a hunt for it after you saddled us with this monster, too.”

“But we couldn’t let him go to the pound. The woman said they’re quite rare and valuable. And we won’t always be in an apartment.”

“Go on, tell me we’re lucky to get such a specimen free. He’s so valuable, we sell him and get back some of his upkeep.”

“Darling, he doesn’t mean it,” said Nell to Athelstane. And perfectly aware of this, Athelstane had leaned over the arm of the chair and applied a long pink tongue to
Jesse’s ear.

Athelstane had not yet been banished to the pound or elsewhere. At this moment, leaning on the bedroom door watching Jesse dress, Athelestane stood nearly three feet high and weighed slightly
more than Jesse. He had sad black jowls, long black ears, a long snaky black-tipped tail, melancholy brown eyes and a large wet black nose. And a congenital dislike, as Nell pointed out, of closed
doors. He made an impatient whuffling noise and Jesse said, “All right, let me get my pants on, can’t you?”

Women. Wives. Why she couldn’t have told this female politely to come to his office in the morning—

It was still up in the nineties, and he’d been looking forward to a leisurely drink before dinner, and dinner, and a restful evening thinking about the Blackwell suit while the phonograph
soothed him via Bach.

“Hell,” he said, and opened the bedroom door.



“Mrs. Nielsen,” said Nell sotto voce.

Yes, trouble, thought Jesse. Bad trouble, some kind. A plain middle-aged woman, dowdy, shabbily dressed, what the statistics would call lower middle class. And very frightened. He had seen a lot
of frightened people; some took it one way, some the other. Nell’s word for this one was right: desperate. She looked at him out of pale china-blue eyes through thick rimless lenses that
magnified her slow tears, and said on a little gasp, “I’m awful sorry to break in on you like this at your home, Mr. Falkenstein, but I just had to. The policeman said, a
lawyer—”

“That’s all right. Don’t be afraid of the dog, he’s very friendly. Suppose you tell me what it’s all about.” Jesse sat down opposite her.

“I got you outta the phone book.” She had a handkerchief wadded in one hand, dabbed continually at her cheeks. “I never had call to know a lawyer. And I went to the address it
said, but the lady there, she was just leaving, she said you’d be going right home when you got outta court, and when I said how important it was, she told me— I hadda come on the bus,
it took awhile—”

Yes, muddle-headed, sympathetic spinster Miss Williams. Never mind. “A policeman,” murmured Jesse. “Something criminal? What’s the charge?”

“Oh, sir, he never done it, he never done such a thing! It’s cruel, come and arrest him—my Harry!—say he done that! He never, I know, he couldn’t’ve! I
don’t rightly understand what makes them think he did, but it’s not so. A lawyer could show them it’s not so, that’s what you—” The handkerchief came up
again.

“Your husband, your son?” asked Jesse patiently. “What’s the charge?”

“He never. My son Harry, sir. My husband’s dead these ten years. It’s so, I can’t rightly say it isn’t, Harry’s not—not just like everybody
else. They didn’t let him go to regular school after the first couple years; he went to a special school for the ones like him—it cost a little bit, whatever you could pay, you know,
but they said he ought to. And he liked it, he always got along good, he’s always been a good boy, everybody likes Harry. They taught him more’n you’d think he could take
in—he makes change good, if you give him time—and I raised him to be honest and polite too, acourse. He’s just slow, they said—backward, you know. But everybody
likes Harry, he’s always nice and friendly with everybody—way he was raised. Lots o’ people stop by his stand regular for their cigarettes and papers and magazines. He’s got
the little newsstand in the lobby of the Ames Building, he’s smart enough to do that—if he isn’t just as bright as everybody—”

“Mmh,” said Jesse, absently fondling Athelstane’s ears. “The charge?”

A little gasp. “Oh, Mr. Falkenstein, it’s murder! This girl that got murdered—and I guess, you know—she worked in the building, right there, and—
But he never! It’s a wicked lie, say it was Harry! Cruel—he couldn’t even rightly understand why they was taking him away, he was scared. Harry gets scared awful easy—and
what they’re doing to him at that jail, I just can’t bear to— Oh, please, sir, you go and find out what they think they’ve got against him, and show it isn’t so!
Harry’d never in this world do such a thing.”

Jesse glanced at Nell, quiet a little apart from Mrs. Nielsen, and back to Athelstane. Athelstane’s perennially sorrowful countenance mirrored his own feelings. Harry, he thought: one like
that. He supposed that “and I guess, you know,” meant rape. A nasty case: considering the quality of the L.A.P.D. as a professional force, probably a straightforward case. He opened his
mouth to tell Mrs. Nielsen about the Public Defenders’ office, and shut it again. Not that he expected Mrs. Nielsen would be good for a nice fat fee, but that office was always pretty busy:
not even the newest of those eager young lawyers could be spared to run over to the County Jail just to hold the hand of a backward boy.

“I don’t know what lawyers cost,” she said nervously, “but I got enough money to pay you, Mr. Falkenstein. I—I own a little rental property. We always saved as we
could and Sam was kinda lucky on a couple of deals. And Harry’s little stand—well, it don’t bring in much, but something—and it’s something for him to do, not much a
boy like Harry can do, and it’s not good for anybody, sit around all the time. But— Oh, please, sir, if you’d just go and find out—show them it can’t be
so—”

“You don’t want to worry about the police, you know,” said Jesse. “Not monsters. Quite humane and reasonable these days. He’s not being mistreated.” She just
went on looking at him, dumb and frightened and pleading. “Look,” he said, “suppose I go down after dinner and see what’s going on, and let you know. That O.K.? And then
we’ll see where he stands. If you’ll give me your phone number—”

“Oh, thank you, sir, if you just would—but I haven’t got a phone.”

“Your address then,” said Jesse with a mental sigh. He needn’t take the thing on. Tell her where she stood, shunt her off to the Public Defenders’ office.

“Oh, I do thank you, sir— I don’t know if you want any money now—” She made a gesture at opening her shabby plastic bag.

“No, I don’t know that it’ll be a case for me. Maybe they’ve just taken him in for questioning, you know.” In all probability, the sensible course would be to plead
him guilty, get it over. One like that wouldn’t get the gas chamber; they’d tuck him away safe, that was all.

“Oh, d’you think that’s so, Mr. Falkenstein? Oh, if only it was—”

He got the woman out at last, still stammering incoherent gratitude and defense of her poor Harry. Nell vanished into the kitchen, unprecedentedly silent, to put dinner on the table. Jesse made
himself a drink and set a stack of Bach fugues on the phonograph as background, but the expected sensation of relaxation did not follow.

“Damn,” he said to his drink. Why had he said he’d do even that much? A cut-and-dried thing, probably. Time wasted on a very uninteresting case. And that poor damned woman, he
couldn’t morally put in much of a bill.

When Nell called him to dinner he asked her plaintively why he’d done it. Nell looked at him sidelong with her nice dark-fringed gray eyes and said, “You shouldn’t have got her
hopes up like that, saying maybe they’d let him go.”

“I know, damn it. Had to say something. It looks cut and dried, from the little she said. The police don’t make an arrest without some good solid evidence. And one like that—
What she wants is the Public Defender, a nice quiet plea of guilty-as-charged, and stash the fellow away in Atascadero, where he can’t do it again.”

“Well,” said Nell, pouring coffee, “there was a time I might have ended up with the Public Defender, if you’d acted all so disinterested as that then.”

“Don’t remind me. I aged ten years. Not exactly the same sort of thing.”

“It won’t hurt you to go and see. Even the police make mistakes—they’re only human.”

“I’m going,” said Jesse. “I said I would. But I don’t think it’s anything for me. . . . And you know better than to beg at the table,” he added to
Athelstane, who was watching every mouthful he took. Athelstane sighed. “What impressed you about her enough to make me see her?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Nell. “It’s just irrational, I know. She reminded me of Mrs. Giddings. You know my father was the complete atheist, but
Mother’d been raised very strict Methodist, and she sent me to Sunday school for a while. Until Dad got violent about filling innocent minds with nonsen. . .