“The defense rests?” Judge Cox asked on the record.
“We do, Your Honor,” Peyton Bennett confirmed.
My best friend did not look happy. I’d come late after arranging for a locksmith, then delivering a new set of keys to my landlord.
If anyone had asked, I’d have said I was at trial to support my friend. The truth was, however, that I needed the distraction of someone else’s problems to make me forget my own. I was here to make one hundred percent sure that the difference between this Clarke woman and me was as stark as the difference between the rain forest and the desert.
Sinclair had not called me back. All of my calls had gone straight to his voicemail. His set of the shiny new brass keys hung heavy in my pocket. I’d set a two-week deadline in my head. If he reached out, then he’d get a second chance. If he walked away from the greatest love of his life—his words, not mine—then I’d heal my broken heart the best I could and move on.
Judge Cox turned from the defense table to Long who was alone at the prosecution table.
“And the State?”
“We have a single rebuttal witness, Your Honor. We call Monica Mae Ellis to the stand.”
I had to blink twice when the witness came through the double doors. Monica Mae was a younger version of Juliana Clarke. I craned my neck and stared at the jury and the gallery wondering if everyone else saw it. Kendrick Walker had a type. The new woman was merely a younger version of the one who’d left him. For a moment I had a glimpse of myself versus Deborah Bloom but dismissed it because she and I were far more different than these two.
The deputy swore her in. I had to wonder what this woman would say. What was she there to rebut? What in the heck had happened to the defendant’s daughter? I’d have thought not wanting your mother to go to jail would be the most important thing in a girl’s life. Maybe it was more problematic. Maybe the daughter blamed the mother. So many complicated relationships to navigate around a story of violence. I didn’t envy a single one of them.
“Ms. Ellis, how did you know the victim?”
“I work as an architectural draftsman at Fernsby,” Ellis answered.
Oh my God, and practically the same job as well. Talk about carbon copy. Well, either that or Walker had preyed upon a subordinate at work and had taken advantage of the power dynamic. Both scenarios felt like a punch in the gut. I squirmed in my seat.
“Is that how you met Kendrick Walker?”
“Rick? Yeah. He was the one who hired me. I was pretty grateful because it’s kind of a guy’s world, you know, but he was willing to take a chance on me.”
“When did you two become romantically involved?”
“After she up and left him one day. No notice or nothing. He was really sad at work and some stuff was slipping through the cracks. I kind of went in and picked up the slack before the other partners noticed. He was the sole support of his wife and his daughter, who was first in private school, then was going to be in college. If he lost his job, lots of people were going to be screwed, so I stepped in to help. It was like he was in a fog of sadness and grief, then one day it was like Rick looked up and noticed how much I was helping him.”
“When did you move into his house?”
“I’d only just gotten my degree when I moved here to Cleveland. I’m from Pittsburgh. Anyway, I kind of moved into an apartment here without really looking around. One day the landlord says that he wants to move back into the house I’m renting with like no notice. I was telling Rick and he said I should just move in with him. I could save money and we could see if our relationship had legs, you know?”
“How long had you lived there by September of this year?” Long asked using a pen to tick at her notepad. I imagined, like any lawyer would, she was going through a checklist of questions and topics to cover making sure nothing got left out. With a trial there was no second bite at the apple.
“Like nine months. My landlord pulled that crap during the holidays last year. That was some shit. Excuse me, everyone. I have a potty mouth.”
And a penchant for drama, I thought.
“Right, so you’d moved in most of your personal items? Is that fair to say?”
“I don’t know about that. Rick kind of wanted to keep the house as it was. So like I could put my clothes in the guest room closet. He was kind of waiting for Juliana to get all her stuff. He also had like furniture in every room, so I just put the junk I’d bought on Craigslist.”
“Did Sienna live with you during the time you were at the house on Shelburne Road?”
“She was kind of in and out. Like she was there that first Christmas. I don’t think she liked the way her dad doted on me though. He like bought me some really nice jewelry from Tiffany’s and a designer handbag from Kate Spade. He’d gotten her the same bag in a different color and like a charm bracelet from the jewelry store. I think she didn’t like that my blue box was bigger than hers. She yelled abuse at him and stormed out. She didn’t really come back for more than a night or two after that.”
“Were you home the night that the victim was killed?”
“Yeah, of course. It was Sunday. It wasn’t like I was going out anywhere. There’s nothing to do on a Sunday night anyway in Cleveland. It’s supposed to be a city on the rise, but I think Pittsburgh is doing a better job.”
I almost felt bad for Long. Monica Mae was…extra. They may have looked alike, with an obvious twenty-year age difference, of course, but where Clarke was all polish and New York sophistication, Ellis was…not.
“What time was it when Sienna came over?”
“I don’t know. Give me a second. There was no Steelers or Browns or Ravens game. It was the week off between preseason and the full season. I think I was just flipping through cable. You know, a thousand channels, nothing to watch. Rick had been out on some site doing a visit. He’d only gotten home like ten minutes before his daughter walked in. She didn’t call or knock or even use the doorbell. Just came right in like she owned the place.”
“Would five thirty be a fair assessment?”
Ellis shrugged.
“It was still light out. The news hadn’t come on.”
“When did you see Sienna in person on that Sunday?”
“So I was watching whatever. I think it was skating, by the way, ice-skating…figure skating. Something they put on when there was no football and NASCAR was done. Some skinny girl is like twirling like a dervish and one of the judges said something. Not judge, announcer. Anyway, I couldn’t hear what they said. They whisper like talking would disturb the skaters when you know they’re in a booth.”
“Sienna? You saw her?” Long asked. Keeping a dog on a racetrack was easier than this.
“Right, so like she’s stomping around upstairs. I thought at first it was Rick, but he came in asking me if we had the little onions he likes to have in his drink. It’s called a Gibson, his drink. It’s like a martini but with an onion. He thinks the thing I like to drink with gin and cranberry and lime is too sweet.”
“She was stomping?” Long was trying to bring it back. It was going to be, I could see, a struggle.
“Yeah, and when he asked me about the tiny onions, I realized it wasn’t him. So I was like, I think Sienna’s here otherwise we have a burglar and I need to get my gun.”
“You carry a gun?”
“Of course. My daddy said no woman’s safe without a pistol in her pocketbook.”
“Sienna was upstairs?”
“I was like, Rick, go check on all that commotion. Make sure it’s the girl and not your ex or, you know, a burglar. No one in the Heights seems to lock their doors. A couple of neighbors just wandered in to say hello a while back. I said to Rick, you check and I’ll get the jar of onions you couldn’t find. I swear to God, men wouldn’t be able to find their ding-a-ling if it weren’t attached.”
Half the jury laughed out loud at that, the female half.
“Did Kendrick Walker go upstairs?”
“He didn’t come back. I put his onions on the counter. Got the gin out from the freezer and a glass. I was even thinking of making the drink. But Rick was so particular and would throw it out when I didn’t make it right that I didn’t bother. I told him if I couldn’t make it like his wife had, he could get back together with her and I’d make myself scarce or he could mix it himself. He went with doing it on his own. I was proud that I got him trained like that real quick. Told him I wasn’t the kind of woman to wait on him hand and foot. Not like that one. She was a doormat. If she’d stood up for herself—”
“Your Honor,” Long interrupted her own witness, the bid to the judge, a plea.
“Ms. Ellis, you weren’t here for the other witnesses’ testimony, so I’ll tell you what I told them. Please answer the question asked and confine your answer to that. Ms. Long?”
“Did you go upstairs?” the prosecutor continued.
“Eventually. It was like fifteen minutes and…wait. That’s it, right. I already said too much, didn’t I?”
“You’re doing fine,” Judge Cox soothed.
“What happened when you went upstairs?”
“I heard Rick and Sienna talking, so I walked in to say hi to the girl. I mean, we’re not friends or anything, but to not acknowledge her wouldn’t be right and my parents raised me to do what’s right.”
“Then what?”
“She yells at me to get out of her room. She was all like, ‘you may think you own this place, but this room is mine at least for a few more days.’
“Look, I’m not Sienna’s mother or anyone’s mother, but backtalking to adults points to poor parenting.” Her glare at Juliana Clarke lacked subtlety, but so did everything else she did, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, though it did. “I was telling her that she needed to adjust her attitude while she was in her father’s house.”
“What did the victim do?”
“He sided with me. Rick pointed out that I’d been nothing but nice to her, which was true. He said that I’d stayed out of her way and that she was being crazy unreasonable. Then Sienna gets even more salty. She tells Rick that she’ll never be back after she leaves for college. That at least she has a place that she feels welcome. Obviously she was talking about her house.” Ellis didn’t point to Clarke, but she might as well have.
“Did you or Kendrick Walker say anything in response?”
“Of course. That girl was being ri-dic-u-lous.” Ellis drew out the last four-syllable word with an eye roll and lip curl. “He pointed out that not only was he paying for the floor under her feet, but that he was paying for Juliana’s Shaker Square condo as well.”
“So they were arguing?”
“Yeah, about whether Juliana was having an affair and why she’d leave her husband and child and house behind. Then Sienna points to me and says that her mother’s not the bad one, he is because he’s got me as a girlfriend. I got hot at that one. I mean we really love…loved each other. I wasn’t just some rebound girl.”
“And then what?”
“He was talking about cutting Sienna off, money-wise. She finished packing up whatever she’d come for, zipped her duffel, and yelled that she was calling her mother because she hadn’t driven her own car over.”
“Would you say they were both angry?”
“Of course. It was an argument. He was trying to put his ungrateful child in her place and Sienna wanted to just say what she wanted with no consequences. I didn’t see her text her mother, but her phone dinged. Then she got cagey with her bag. I kind of had to wonder what she could have forgotten that she hadn’t picked up in one of her other trips. So I pulled at her duffel.”
“Why?”
“I just wanted to have a look inside to make sure she wasn’t taking something of mine or that her mother hadn’t sent her in on some kind of spy mission.”
“After Sienna’s phone sounded, did you notice Juliana Clarke entering the house?”
“Kind of? Rick ran downstairs and started yelling. I figured it was her. He was mad because obviously she’d turned Sienna against him, against us. Then Sienna comes down with the bag. She kind of looked at her mother and father and screamed at them to stop yelling at each other. They were already getting divorced, so there was no need for all that.”
“Did Sienna leave then?”
“No, she ran into her father’s study. I went behind her. She had no business being in there and I was really starting to think her mother had sent her over to collect financial documents or some kind of evidence to use against Rick in the divorce. I needed to make sure Sienna or Juliana wasn’t going to do anything to hurt him.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. They were screaming. I was trying to get Sienna to leave. Then all of a sudden there was quiet. I went into the kitchen and Juliana had that fancy party thing in her hand and Sienna ran out the back door. Then the police were there.”
“Thank you, Ms. Ellis, no further questions.”