Sleight of Hand

CHAPTER Fifty-Two

Horace Blair looked terrible. His hair was snarled and he was unshaven. There were dark circles under his eyes. The night before, the guards had placed an insane person in isolation and the man had howled like a dog for several hours before running out of steam. To make matters worse, the other inmates had added to the din by screaming at the lunatic and the guards. Horace had pressed his pillow over his ears, but his attempts to block out the manic baying and the angry shouts had failed, and he was exhausted.

Horace was used to being on the go constantly, so he found surviving the empty hours that comprised most of his day in jail very difficult. He could not help spending a lot of his idle time thinking about his case. When he could not sleep he found himself mulling over the evidence that had landed him in jail. Much of it made no sense. There were all these anonymous tips. There was the gun, which he had never seen until Frank Santoro held it up in front of his eyes. There was the other evidence the police had found in the trunk of his car. And Barry Lester! How had that little weasel learned the terms of his prenuptial agreement and the location of Carrie’s grave? But what bothered him the most was that damn key with his prints on it. How had a key to his front door found its way into Carrie’s grave?

Horace was trying to solve these seemingly impossible problems when the door to his cell opened.

“You have visitors,” the guard said.

Horace was eager for any change in his mind-numbing routine. The guard led him to a contact visiting room. He assumed that his visitor would be Charles Benedict. Instead he found Jack Pratt waiting for him.

“How are you holding up?” Pratt asked with genuine concern.

“How do you think?” Horace answered angrily. “I can’t sleep, I get no exercise, the food is inedible, and I’m facing the possibility that I may be executed for a crime I never committed. Not to mention the fact that the businesses I’ve cultivated all my life are swirling down the toilet.”

“Don’t worry about business. The people you’ve put in place are doing a great job.”

Suddenly all of the anger drained out of Blair. He looked like a beaten man.

“I don’t know how I’m going to get by in here. I’m going crazy.”

“You have to stay positive, Horace. You can’t let this thing beat you. And right now you’ve got to focus. We have something very urgent to discuss.”

Blair looked up.

“You have to change attorneys. You’re making a big mistake by having Benedict as your lawyer.”

“Why? What have you learned?”

“Very little that’s good and a lot that is very bad,” Pratt replied. “Even if I didn’t know what I’ve learned recently I’d be urging you to drop Benedict. He’s out of his depth with a case like this. He has handled a few murder cases but only one went to trial. Most of his caseload involves narcotics and prostitution. He’s had some success with those cases, but a friend in the commonwealth attorney’s office told me that there’s something fishy about the way some of his victories were achieved.”

“Such as?”

“Nikolai Orlansky is a mobster, Russian Mafia. A lot of Benedict’s business comes from him, and a lot of those cases have been dismissed because of missing witnesses or evidence, not because of anything Benedict has done. Basically he’s a lightweight, a .250 hitter. You need a big bat in your corner, Horace. You need to get rid of this guy. Especially after the way he f*cked up your bail hearing.”

“What do you mean?”

“In court a witness can’t testify to what another person has told him if the testimony is introduced to prove the truth of the statement. That’s the hearsay rule. For example, if you’re my witness and I ask you where the sun rises, you can’t say, ‘I don’t know, but Joe told me it rises in the east.’

“But there are exceptions to the hearsay rule. A witness can testify about something someone told him if a lawyer ‘opens the door’ by asking a question that invites the witness to testify to what someone else has told him.

“Benedict killed your chances for bail when he asked Detective Santoro questions that let Santoro testify about everything Barry Lester told him about the prenup and your supposed confession. That was an amateur mistake no decent lawyer would ever make.”

Blair looked crushed.

“Don’t beat yourself up for hiring Benedict,” Pratt said. “You didn’t have a lot of time to think after you were arrested and you trusted him because he gave you the DVD and didn’t ask for anything in return.”

Pratt paused. “Horace, we go back a long way, and you know I’m your friend as well as your attorney. Do you believe you can trust me?”

“Of course.”

“I’m going to tell you something that is going to be tough to hear. There’s another reason you have to get rid of Benedict. There’s a good possibility that he did not make a mistake at the bail hearing. He may have acted intentionally so you wouldn’t get bail.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There is someone waiting outside I want you to meet. Dana Cutler is a private investigator who knows more about your case than anyone else. She’s convinced me that Charles Benedict murdered Carrie and has been framing you for her murder from the start.”



Horace listened to Dana’s tale of her quest for a mythical golden scepter and the trail of clues that led her to the conclusion that Charles Benedict killed Carrie and framed him for her murder.

“There’s one piece of this puzzle I can’t solve,” Dana concluded. “If Benedict murdered your wife and is behind this frame, he had to get your front-door key. Did he have an opportunity to do that before the body was discovered?”

Horace looked completely defeated. “I’ve been a fool,” he said so softly that Dana had to strain to hear him.

“Benedict is a brilliant criminal,” Pratt said. “We’d all have fallen for his tricks.”

“I certainly did, and I know exactly how he got the key.”

Horace told Dana and Pratt about Benedict’s demonstration with the keys at his home on the evening he brought over the DVD.

“Do you remember telling me that you had seen Benedict perform magic at a Bar Association awards dinner, Jack?”

Pratt nodded.

“I know very little about magic but I imagine that a magician would have little trouble swapping my house key for a look-alike that would not open my front door.

“And the evidence in the trunk of my Bentley. The trunk was locked and there was no sign that it had been forced open, but Carrie had a key to the Bentley. After he murdered Carrie, Benedict could have made a copy and used the key to get into the trunk.”

“That must be it,” Pratt said. “But, unfortunately, this is all guesswork. However, Dana has a plan.”

Horace looked at the investigator. For the first time in a long while Horace Blair thought he might be saved.

“If I’ve learned one thing about Benedict,” Dana said, “it’s that he’s very, very smart. I have theories about every step he’s taken to frame you but I can’t prove any of them because Benedict dots every I and crosses every T. And that’s what’s going to trip him up.”