In Self Defense by Susan Sloan (phonics books .TXT) 📕

give it over to me, you know.  That boy’s robbed me blind so many times, it’s a wonder I still have a roof over my head.  He promised he was going to give me part of that big windfall he got the last time, but he never did.”

“Windfall?”

“Yeah,” the woman said.  “He did a job for someone -- he didn’t say what or for who -- and got a lot of money for it, too.”

“How do you know this?”

“I saw it -- that’s how I know.  He was flashing it around one day.  And then he just up and left.”

“Well, if you can help me locate him,” Erin assured her, her heart pounding at Moira Purdue’s words, “it’s possible something may come your way.”

“Yeah?  Well then, you might try talking to that buddy of his  -- what’s his name now -- oh yeah, Pogo.”

“Pogo?”

“Yeah, Pogo.  He lives over to Grapevine.  I think Ryan sometimes crashes with him.”

“You have a last name for this Pogo?”

The woman shrugged.  “Ain’t never needed to know it,” she said.  “But you remember now, if you find him, some of that money should rightly come to me.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll remember,” Erin said.

***

David stood before the jury for almost a full minute before he began to speak.

“It’s hard, sometimes, to know what to say at this point in a trial,” he said finally.  “I could tell you that I know my client, that I’ve known her almost her entire life, and that I know she could never have done what the prosecutor thinks she’s done.  But I know that wouldn’t sway you.  And it shouldn’t.  After all, you don’t know her, and you don’t really know me.  So why would you think that I would be saying anything other than what I thought I ought to say -- had to say -- in order to get her acquitted and put another victory notch in my belt?

“But the truth is -- the truth isn’t going to be very hard to find here.  The prosecutor wants you to believe that Clare Durant deliberately killed her husband to get back at him for wanting to divorce her.  But how does that stand up to the facts?”

David paused thoughtfully for a moment.  “Let’s see,” he continued.  “Fact one: she had a much better weapon at hand than a gun -- and she had already threatened him with it -- losing his job.  Fact two: by all accounts, the threat alone had been enough to change his mind about seeking a divorce.  Fact three: Richard Durant himself told his attorney that he and his wife were working things out, and as evidence of that, people who saw them together, and came here to testify, referred to them as seeming to be devoted.  So why wasn’t that the end of it?  It should have been, shouldn’t it?”

David took a few steps and then stopped and turned and looked directly at each of the jurors.

“Unless it’s because Richard Durant didn’t want it to end that way, and he had come up with a scenario that would allow him to keep his job and still marry his mistress,” the attorney resumed.  “And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is exactly what we believe happened.  What proof do we have?  First and foremost, there’s the mistress who testified that, right up to the night he died, he was still telling her they were going to be married.  Even after he told others he had given up his pursuit of a divorce and that he and his wife were working things out.  And then, within weeks of dropping the divorce idea, Clare Durant had the first in a series of very close calls with death.

“Coincidence, you say?”  David suggested, and then nodded, answering his own question.  “Sure, I suppose it could be.  But how convenient a series of coincidences it was!  Poison in the water she, and she alone in that house, drank?  Falling off a treacherous mountain trail the family should never even have been on?  Deliberately run off the road by a stranger in a black truck within weeks of fifty thousand dollars being taken out of a trust account?”

David shook his head.  “I don’t know about you, Ladies and Gentlemen, but for me, maybe one of those incidents might have been a coincidence -- but all three?  I don’t think so.

“I’ll tell you what I do think, though.  I think the police put the fear of God into Clare Durant about their stalker coming to get her.  I think Clare was lying in her bed in the dark that night, wide awake, her heart pounding so hard, I’m surprised that she was even able to hear the footsteps on the stairs.  And when that bedroom door opened, she didn’t stop to ask who it was, she didn’t wait to find out whether whoever it was had a weapon or not, she just emptied her gun into the shadow she saw.  And it’s just as she got up on the stand and told you herself -- she did it because she wanted to live.”

Here, David paused again, to look thoughtfully at the jurors.  “I can tell you that, had I been in her position, I most likely would have done the very same thing that she did,” he said softly.  “And I wonder how many of you would have, too.

“I believe Clare when she says she doesn’t know why she picked up her husband’s suitcase and put it in the closet.  I’ve seen people in shock.  They do all sorts of things they can’t later explain.  Often, they don’t even remember doing them.  Between you and me, I don’t think she remembers.  I don’t think she remembers much of anything about that night.

“Now it’s clear that the prosecutor wants you to believe that Clare made a plan and set the whole thing in motion as soon as she found out her husband was coming home a day early from his trip, dovetailing it ever so neatly into