Black and Blueberry Die (A Fresh-Baked Mystery Book 11) Page 3

  Then she hung up and looked at Carolyn and Sam. Carolyn said, “What in the world was that all about?”

  Instead of answering directly, Phyllis said, “You were going to be here this morning, weren’t you?”

  “Actually, I plan to be here all day.”

  “Do you mind letting the air conditioner man in when he gets here?”

  “No, but where are you and Sam going to be?”

  Sam said, “I’ve got a hunch, but it sounds sorta crazy.”

  “Maybe not,” Phyllis said. “Mr. D’Angelo wants to talk to both of us, Sam—about Roxanne Jackson’s murder.”

  The microwave dinged to signal that it was done.

  Chapter 4

  Jimmy D’Angelo had said it would be fine for Phyllis and Sam to come to his office just off Weatherford’s downtown square later that morning, so they were able to enjoy their breakfast. Sam proclaimed the oatmeal muffins in a cup delicious, as were all of Phyllis’s recipes, according to him.

  “I think we should change clothes before we go see Mr. D’Angelo,” Phyllis said.

  “What’s wrong with the way we’re dressed?” Sam asked. “I’ve got on shoes.”

  “Going to a law office requires a certain degree of professionalism.”

  “Tell that to some of the folks I’ve seen goin’ in and out of that office. Anyway, we’re not goin’ to court—I hope.”

  “No, he just wants to talk to us. He didn’t come right out and say so, but I got the feeling he’s been hired to handle the appeal of Danny Jackson’s conviction.”

  Carolyn took a sip of coffee, cocked an eyebrow, and said, “I’m sure that is just a complete coincidence.”

  Phyllis knew what she meant by that. Under the circumstances, it was hard to believe anything other than that Mike had recommended D’Angelo to his old friend. Whether he had done it simply because Danny had asked him for the name of a good lawyer, or because Mike thought his mother would be more likely to get involved in the case that way, Phyllis couldn’t say, and she supposed it didn’t really matter.

  “Well, I’m going to put on nicer clothes,” she said. “You do what you want to, Sam.”

  “If you’re willin’ to be seen with me, I reckon it wouldn’t hurt to clean up a little,” he said. “You weren’t talkin’ about me puttin’ on a tie, though, were you?”

  “Heavens, no,” Phyllis said.

  Sam kept the blue jeans but put on a nice sports shirt. Phyllis changed to slacks and a blouse and sandals. They took her Lincoln. The square was only a few blocks away, but it was already warm enough outside that walking that far would be uncomfortable.

  Parking around the square could be a challenge, and it took several minutes to find a place. It was almost ten o’clock before they walked into the offices of Harvick, Webber, and Crane, the firm where Jimmy D’Angelo was an associate. The attractive blond receptionist knew them by now, so she gave them a smile and a friendly greeting and took them right to D’Angelo’s office.

  The lawyer stood up from the leather swivel chair behind his paper-littered desk and smiled, too, as he said, “Come in, come in. Good to see you again. It’s been a while.”

  “We’ve been stayin’ outta trouble,” Sam said dryly. “Haven’t needed a lawyer.”

  “Well, I’m glad there aren’t more people who can say that, or I might be out of business. How are you, Mrs. Newsom?”

  “I’m fine,” Phyllis said. “What about you, Mr. D’Angelo?”

  “Staying busy, thank goodness. Have a seat.”

  Two comfortable armchairs stood in front of the desk. Phyllis and Sam sat down, Sam hesitating just slightly so Phyllis would be seated first.

  D’Angelo resumed his seat and clasped his hands together in front of him. His fingers were short and on the pudgy side, like the rest of him. His broad face had a permanent flush that showed he had a fondness for too much rich food and liquor. Phyllis knew perfectly well that she had a tendency to be a little judgmental sometimes, so she always suppressed the impulse to urge him to take better care of himself. She doubted if it would do any good, anyway.

  “So,” D’Angelo said. “Danny Jackson. I understand that you’re acquainted with him.”

  “I’ve known Danny for more than twenty years,” Phyllis said. “He and my son Mike have been friends since they were in junior high together.”

  “I never met the young fella myself,” Sam said. “I’ve heard a lot about him, though.”

  “I got a call from him yesterday afternoon. I went over to Fort Worth to see him, and he asked me to handle his appeal.”

  That confirmed Phyllis’s hunch. She said, “Have you taken the case?”

  “To be honest with you, I haven’t made up my mind yet. Murder cases are a real challenge, and I like a challenge. They can be good publicity, too. But they can get awfully ugly.” D’Angelo shrugged. “I got a feeling this one might. But I’m interested enough I decided to do two things. One of ’em is talking to you.”

  “I’m sure Mike gave Danny your name, if that’s what you’re wondering about,” Phyllis said. “He knows we worked with you on those other cases.”

  “And he wants you to help his friend, right?” D’Angelo said. “I’m guessing here, but that makes sense to me.”

  Phyllis nodded and said, “He came to see me and talked to me about Danny yesterday afternoon. He’s convinced that Danny didn’t kill his wife.”

  “You said you’d done two things,” Sam put in. “What’s the second one?”

  D’Angelo tapped a blunt fingertip on a stack of papers on his desk and said, “I got a copy of the trial transcript faxed over from the Tarrant County DA’s office. Care to take a look through it, Mrs. Newsom?”

  Phyllis hadn’t been able to stop herself from leaning forward slightly when D’Angelo mentioned the transcript. She knew he could tell she was eager to find out what it contained, so there was no point in denying that.

  “Yes, I’d like to.”

  D’Angelo pushed the papers toward her.

  “Why don’t you take it in the conference room and look through it?” he suggested. “I have a few other things to take care of this morning. We can talk when you’ve finished with it.”

  “All right,” Phyllis said.

  They knew where the conference room was from their previous visits to the office. Phyllis gathered up the transcript, which made a surprisingly thin sheaf of papers. But then, from what she’d read and been told, the trial had been short and simple.

  The conference room was behind massive oak double doors. Inside was a long, gleaming hardwood table with heavy wooden chairs around it. The walls were dark wood, decorated with framed portraits of the firm’s partners and some landscapes. The thick carpet helped muffle sound and gave the big room a hushed atmosphere, almost like a church.

  Phyllis and Sam sat down side by side at the table. Phyllis began reading the transcript, passing each sheet to Sam as she finished it. She valued his opinion about these cases, and sometimes he spotted things that she had missed.

  Trial transcripts made for pretty dull reading, she discovered. There was a lot of what amounted to boilerplate at the beginning: jury selection, reading of the charge, opening statements.

  Then came the meat of what she was looking for—the testimony of the witnesses called by the prosecution, beginning with the Fort Worth police officer who had responded to Danny Jackson’s 911 call about finding his wife bloody and unresponsive.

  Danny had been cooperative, but in a shocked, disoriented state. An ambulance had arrived within minutes of the officer, and the EMTs had quickly determined that Roxanne Jackson was dead on the scene. Homicide detectives had been summoned, along with a forensics unit. Danny was isolated within the building from the crime scene and held for questioning.

  That interrogation had established Roxanne and Danny’s identities, where they worked, and where they had been that day. Phyllis had already heard Danny’s story, and reading the transcript confirmed that it
had been reported accurately in the newspaper.

  But examination of the shop’s front and rear doors showed no signs of breaking and entering. A call to the shop’s owner had established that the doors should have been locked. Roxanne had been working on restocking the hair care products the salon sold, and the shop was closed for the day. This immediately cast doubts on Danny’s speculation—which he had voiced to the detectives—about Roxanne interrupting a burglary. It appeared that she must have let the killer in, which would indicate she knew him. The woman who had gotten a license to carry a handgun because she was nervous about leaving work late wouldn’t have unlocked the door for a stranger.

  The medical examiner had testified that Roxanne had no defensive wounds on her hands. Her jaw was broken on the left side, leading him to theorize that Roxanne’s assailant was right-handed—like Danny—and had struck her there first, with enough force to render her unconscious, then carried out the rest of the beating that had taken her life. That explained the lack of defensive wounds.

  She’d never had a chance to fight back.

  And the knuckles of Danny Jackson’s right hand were skinned and bruised.

  “Well, it’s not hard to see why they thought Danny was guilty,” Phyllis commented as she paused in her reading.

  Sam nodded and pointed at the sheet of paper he was holding.

  “It’s a pretty plausible scenario. No signs of a break-in. Evidence that indicates she knew her attacker, otherwise she wouldn’t have let him get close enough to knock her out like that. Wounds on Danny’s hand that looked like he’d been beatin’ on something, not to mention him bein’ covered with her blood. Shoot, I probably would have arrested him, too.”

  “And no alibi,” Phyllis said. “Also, the detectives talked to everyone who worked around there, and no one saw any strangers hanging around the salon or the shopping center where it’s located.”

  “Nobody saw much of anything,” Sam said. “We’ll have to take a look at the place ourselves, though. Maybe the cops overlooked somebody.”

  “You’re assuming we’re going to get involved in this.”

  Sam shrugged and said, “Sure. But I’m curious to see what Danny had to say for himself.”

  “So am I,” Phyllis said.

  Danny’s defense attorney had cross-examined each of the witnesses as the prosecution’s case went on, but he couldn’t shake them from their testimony that there was nothing to indicate a burglary. The medical evidence was strong, too, although the lawyer had gotten the medical examiner to admit that he couldn’t be sure the blow to the jaw had been struck first and had indeed rendered Roxanne unconscious.

  “But the fact that there were no defensive wounds on the victim’s hands or anywhere else is indisputable,” the ME had testified. “In my professional opinion, that indicates the initial blow—whichever one it was—knocked her out so she couldn’t fight back. And then the attacker methodically went on to beat her to death.”

  The defense had objected to that last sentence as inflammatory and prejudicial and the judge had ordered it stricken, but the damage, of course, had already been done.

  Other testimony had addressed the question of motive. Two of Roxanne’s co-workers at Paul’s Beauty Salon had testified they had heard and seen Roxanne and Danny arguing on several occasions when Danny had come by the salon. The issue seemed to be finances, as it often was when couples clashed. Danny and Roxanne had put quite a bit of money into buying the old farm property and remodeling the house, and even though she had a steady job, the business in which he was a partner ate up most of those profits. So for the most part, they were living on what she made, and her friends at the salon said she had resented that.

  “So they were arguin’,” Sam said, “and it got outta hand.”

  “That’s certainly how the prosecution made it sound,” Phyllis agreed. “And of course, it could have easily happened just that way.”

  “Yep. Mike doesn’t believe it, though.”

  Phyllis went back to the transcript. The prosecution had rested its case. Danny’s attorney hadn’t mounted much of a defense. A couple of Danny’s friends and his business partner, Brian Flynn, had testified that he was a great guy and was devoted to Roxanne and would never hurt her. But under cross-examination by the prosecution, even they had admitted that the couple had argued in the past.

  To cap things off, Danny had taken the stand in his own defense, telling his version of what had happened that terrible evening in what came across, even in the printed transcript, as a calm, steady voice. But there had been more hesitation the farther he went in the story, and Phyllis could almost see him there in the witness chair, his voice breaking slightly as the strain deepened on his face.

  When asked about the wounds on his hand, he had explained that he’d banged it up when a fender he was working on had fallen on it. That seemed reasonable enough, but there was no way to prove it because it had happened after his partner left the shop that day. When pressed on cross-examination about the arguments, he’d had no choice but to admit that he and Roxanne had had a few fights about money.

  “Like any married couple that’s struggling to get ahead,” he had declared. “With the economy the way it is now and just getting worse all the time, not that many people our age even try anymore. Of course we fussed at each other some. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love her or that I would...that I would...”

  Danny hadn’t been able to go on. His emotions had gotten the better of him. But of course the prosecutor had implied that was just an act to get the jury to feel sorry for him.

  If that was true, it hadn’t worked. Less than an hour after both sides had rested, made their closing statements, and the judge had given his instructions to the jury, those twelve peers had been back with a verdict of guilty on one count of second-degree murder. The next day, that same jury had sentenced Danny to thirty years in prison...a sentence he would start serving at the penitentiary in Huntsville as soon as the paperwork got straightened out.

  Phyllis handed the last page of the transcript to Sam. It took him only a moment to read it, turn it over, and add it to the stack of papers he’d made in front of him.

  “Who’s goin’ first?” he asked.

  “You can,” Phyllis said.

  “There’s nothing that jumps out at me. Looks like the cops made a good, solid case. Not air-tight, mind you. There aren’t any eyewitnesses, and there’s not a lot of physical evidence. But what is there points to Danny.” Sam tapped the stack of papers. “From the looks of this, his lawyer didn’t do much to help him, but he didn’t foul up anything, either.”

  Phyllis nodded slowly and said, “That’s the way I see it, too. But there’s no indication that anyone—either the sheriff’s department investigator or Danny’s attorney—looked into the question of who else might have had a reason for wanting Roxanne dead. They also didn’t check for Danny’s blood on the bumper to see if his story was true.”

  Sam frowned and thought about that, then said, “Everybody just went with the conventional wisdom that the spouse is always the prime suspect. What evidence there was, matched up with Danny just fine, so that was that. Can’t blame ’em too much. There’s a reason something becomes conventional wisdom.”

  “Because it’s usually right,” Phyllis said. “But not always.”

  “Nope,” Sam said. “Not always.”

  “And there’s something else...”

  Sam leaned toward her and asked, “You got an idea?”

  “No, it’s not clear enough in my head to call it an idea. It’s more just a...sense...that something’s not right, that the facts don’t match up quite as neatly as they appear to at first glance.”

  “That’s enough for me,” Sam said with an emphatic nod. “If you’ve got doubts that Danny’s guilty, we got to look into it.”

  “I think you’re right.” Phyllis pushed back the heavy chair. “Let’s go talk to Mr. D’Angelo.”

  Chapter 5

  “I’
ll let Mr. Jackson know I’m going to take his case, and I’ll file an appeal immediately,” Jimmy D’Angelo said as he sat back in his chair, laced his fingers together on his ample belly, and grinned at Phyllis and Sam. “I’ll also file a motion requesting that he continues to be held in custody in the Tarrant County jail rather than transferred to TDC in Huntsville.”

  “Will that be better?” Phyllis asked.

  “County’s no bed and breakfast,” D’Angelo said with a shrug, “but I’d rather have him close by. It’s a legitimate request since I’ll need to confer with my client...and so will my investigators.”

  He pointed both forefingers across the desk at Phyllis and Sam, with his thumbs raised to make them look like guns.

  “That still seems strange to me,” Phyllis said. “We have absolutely no qualifications to be investigators.”

  “Other than solving a dozen murders.” D’Angelo chuckled. “All right, I’ll get the wheels in motion.” He made a shooing motion with his hands. “Go do what you do. Just let me know how it’s going. I’ll go over to Fort Worth and talk to Danny and try to be encouraging.”

  As they left the office, Sam said, “Mike’s gonna be happy. Or at least, maybe not quite as worried about his old friend. I don’t reckon he’ll be happy until Danny is cleared.”

  “Things could still turn out badly,” Phyllis reminded him. “Mr. D’Angelo won’t be able to get Danny’s conviction set aside without strong evidence that he’s not guilty. That’s going to require discovering who did kill Roxanne. Reasonable doubt won’t be enough.”

  “So we’ll find the real killer,” Sam said confidently.

  “And hope that it doesn’t turn out to be Danny himself.”

  “Yeah, there’s that,” Sam admitted.

  Phyllis wasn’t sure of Mike’s work schedule, so she didn’t want to call his cell phone to let him know she was going to look into the case. She might wake him. She would call Sarah a little later, she decided, and ask her to have Mike call back when it was convenient for him.