Read Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes for Free Online Page B

might make a run to the big nursery out on Bayshore Boulevard. I’d buy colorful flowers, whatever the nursing people could recommend that needed little watering, since drought-induced rationing was still on.
    I heard a scrabbling sound and looked up in time to see an orange cat face peer over the back fence. Ralph, home for his supper. Moments later he was joined by his calico sister, Alice. For a few seconds both looked stunned at the loss of their jungle. Then, adaptable creatures that they were, they bounded down and raced for the house. Allie hissing as Ralph leapt over her on the steps. He gave her a condescending look and stalked inside to the food bowl. Allie flopped at my feet, and I scratched her with my toes as I went back to the transcript.
    The prosecutor’s closing argument repeated the points he’d made in his opening statement, tying them together more firmly to the evidence and dwelling on the heinousness of the crime. I skimmed it, then rechecked several portions of the actual testimony. There were a number of areas in the state’s case that seemed weak to me, but most of these had gone unchallenged by Lis Benedict’s attorney, a public defender and not a particularly good one.
    I wondered about her legal representation. Her husband, by all accounts, had been well paid, and Lis’s own family was affluent. Surely they could have afforded a better attorney. And what about the well-funded Institute for North American Studies? Why hadn’t they come to the aid of their staff member’s wife? I couldn’t pinpoint specific instances, but my impression was that no one had given Lis much support. Perhaps the rumors of a cover-up had some basis; perhaps Lis had been sacrificed to protect someone or something more important than she.
    I reviewed my mental list of weaknesses in the evidence. First, the note that Lis had allegedly forged to lure Cordy McKittridge to the dovecote. A friend of Cordy’s, Louise Wingfield, had testified as to its existence, but she never actually read it. Wingfield had merely recognized what she thought was Vincent Benedict’s handwriting on the envelope. Any competent attorney could have demolished the testimony, but Lis’s public defender had passed the witness.
    A second and, to me, vitally important area that had gone unexplored was the issue of the men in Cordy’s life. Her promiscuity had been whitewashed at the trial, the affair with Vincent Benedict made to seem a great, albeit illicit, love. But the recent recap of the case that had appeared in the Examiner pointed out that Cordy had been wild, was said to have engaged in affairs with two or more men at the Institute. Who was that other man—or men? Why hadn’t Lis’s attorney used Cordy’s reputation to cast suspicion on someone other than his client?
    The pennies had been used to close Cordy’s eyes bothered me, too. Joseph Stameroff had mentioned them in his opening statement, but then made no attempt to tie them to the defendant or to explain their symbolism. As he’d said, they were unusual coins no longer in wide circulation; surely proving they belonged to Lis Benedict would have cemented his case. And yet, after the initial mention, he’d let the subject drop.
    Finally, the testimony of the state’s star witness, ten-year-old Judy Benedict, was extremely tenuous. All she had been able to say about the stains on her mother’s clothing was that they were large and red. No clothing of Lis’s with either ink stains or bloodstains had ever been recovered. The evidence of the ring that Judy found among her mother’s possessions after the family had moved from Seacliff to a house in the nearby Outer Richmond district was straightforward enough; but Deputy District Attorney Stameroff’s contention that outsiders would have had no access to the residence seemed farfetched, and there was no proof that the ring hadn’t been placed