Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) by Michael Monhollon Page A

middle-aged folk, and so far most of them are female.”
    “Females can be as vicious as they come,” Paul said. Mike’s eyes started to move toward Brooke, but he stopped them. “And ordinary, middle-aged folks can turn violent, too, when they’re threatened,” Paul continued. “You’re stepping into the middle of a neighborhood feud, and you might just get caught in the cross fire.”
    Brooke’s gaze went to Mike, and for a moment their eyes met. I’d been thinking I could wait until I had Brooke alone to get the story from her, but not knowing the cause of the trouble between them was getting to me.
    “Okay, what’s going on?” I said. “I know Paul knows, and either Brooke or he can tell me about it later, but why don’t we get it all out in the open?”
    “Get what out in the open?” Brooke said. She’d finished her salad and was using her plastic fork to move her noodles around.
    “Whatever’s going on between you and Mike.”
    Brooke looked at Mike, who put down his own fork and took a breath. He said, “An old girlfriend came by my office today to see if I could help her aunt with a Social Security disability claim. Brooke was coming over for lunch, and they kind of met in my lobby.” Mike had a two-room office suite in the James Center, a block over from Brooke’s and my offices.
    “ Old girlfriend doesn’t quite cover it,” Brooke said. She picked up her wineglass but put it down again without drinking anything. “They were engaged to be married, a little fact I didn’t find out about until today.”
    “We weren’t really engaged to be married,” Mike said.
    “No? You didn’t ask her to marry you? And she didn’t accept?”
    “She accepted and told me not to tell anyone. That’s not an engagement, that’s a . . . whatever it was, she didn’t want anyone to know about it. And two nights later, she was spending the night with an old boyfriend to make sure she was ready to say good-bye to that relationship.”
    “Which it turned out she was,” Brooke said.
    “As you can imagine,” Mike said, speaking to me, “things deteriorated pretty quickly from there. Our engagement lasted about forty-five minutes. After that, what we had was not an engagement. What we had was one big, hairy mess.”
    “Why did you ask her to marry you if you weren’t in love with her?” Brooke asked.
    He hesitated. “I didn’t say I wasn’t in love with her,” he said.
    “So you were in love.”
    “I suppose I was.”
    “Suppose?”
    “It was a long time ago. The feelings are gone. The interest I had in her is gone. There’s no point trying to reconstruct how I felt or didn’t feel.”
    “It’s been less than two years,” Brooke told me.
    “What’s her name?” I asked.
    Mike rolled his eyes ceiling-ward.
    “Sarah Fleckman,” Brooke said.
    “Sarah Fleckman the lawyer?”
    “Oh, great,” Mike said.
    “You know her?” Brooke asked me.
    “Not well. I’ve met her.” She was a serious, attractive woman about my age, with thick, dark hair.
    “She looks like me—don’t you think?” Brooke said.
    Mike said, “She looks nothing like you.”
    “Give me a pair of dark-framed glasses and dye my hair dark brown, and you’ve got Sarah Fleckman.”
    “No, you don’t,” I said.
    “Thank you,” Mike said.
    “I told her the same thing,” Paul said. “Though the big difference is that Brooke is a very pleasant person, and Sarah is a grade-A—”
    “Don’t say it,” Mike said. “You two never liked each other. There’s no point in rehashing old differences.”
    “You see?” Brooke asked me. “He defends her.”
    “Oh, for the love of—” Mike broke off.
    “The love of Mike?” I said. I gave him a smile, but really, he should have let Paul call Sarah whatever he wanted to.
    “He usually says the love of Pete,” Paul said.
    “So who is Pete, and why is Mike so fond of him? That’s the big question—don’t you think?” I looked at Brooke.
    “You’re not taking