Chapter 15
Jenna Rodney was scared to death. A slight woman, with long brunette hair touching her waist, she pulled the front back in a wide gold barrette. She wore a plain white blouse and black skirt. She fiddled with the positioning of the microphone as Quick came to the lectern.
He spent very little time getting her background. She was twenty-eight, had lived in Delphi her whole life, finished high school but dropped out of college. For the past six years, she’d cleaned homes for a living.
“How did you become acquainted with the victim in this case, Tom Loomis?”
“A cousin of mine gave him my number. He posted in a neighborhood social media group that he was looking for someone reliable to clean his home. I’d been doing that sort of thing for extra money here and there.
But I had references. He had me come to the house to meet him, go over his expectations, then he hired me on the spot. ”
“What was the scope of your employment for Mr. Loomis?”
“The scope,” she said, adjusting the microphone once more.
“Just the usual stuff. His house isn’t very big.
Three bedrooms, two baths. There’s a basement but the main living space is on one floor.
I would clean and mop the kitchen, load any dishes he had in the sink into the dishwasher.
Run it. Empty it. Vacuum the living room.
Clean his bathrooms. Make his bed. And I did his laundry.
About every three months I’d come in and do a deeper clean.
You know, the fridge, baseboards, windows. ”
“When did you start?”
“Close to four years ago.”
“So you worked for Mr. Loomis before his marriage to the defendant?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Okay. How was Mr. Loomis as a boss?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, was he picky? Did he pay you fairly? Did you like working for him?”
“He was good,” she said. “He paid me a hundred a week. I cleaned for two to three hours. Mr. Loomis was a bachelor then and not very neat. But his house was easy to clean. He was always pleasant. Respectful. And he left me alone to do my work. In fact, after I’d worked for him for a while, he trusted me enough to let myself in and out of the house when he wasn’t there.
He left for work really early. I think five thirty.
So I’d get there around six and do my job while he was gone. ”
“You had access to his home,” Quick said. “How?”
“He gave me the garage door code. I would let myself in through the garage and he kept the door to the house through the garage unlocked. It leads straight into the laundry room. Like a mudroom.”
“Did you have a key to the house?”
“No.”
“Just the access code to the garage? That’s all you had?”
“Yes.”
“Has he ever changed the code since you started working there?”
“No,” she said. “It was a four-digit code.”
“How did he communicate that code to you?”
“He told me it,” she said. “I think I worked once or twice while he was in the house. Then he started having me come when he was at work. So he gave me the four-digit code.”
“And it was always the same one.”
“Correct.”
“You said you went in through a service door through the garage. Did you have a key to that door?”
“No. He would keep that unlocked for me.”
“Is there another way into the garage besides the main door that you had the code to?”
“There’s an exterior door at the back of the garage but you can’t use that one.”
“Why not?”
“There are boxes stacked against it that go all the way up to the ceiling.”
Quick introduced a few photographs of the interior of Tom Loomis’s garage.
As Jenna described, he had about ten black plastic totes stacked along the far wall.
They completely blocked the door leading out from the garage to Tom’s backyard.
Quick would get to it later, but I knew the crime scene investigators found that door locked from the inside when they later moved the totes.
“Got it,” Quick said. “Did you have much occasion to talk to Mr. Loomis? Get to know him personally?”
“I don’t know what you mean?”
“Well, what did you talk to him about when you did see him?”
Jenna shrugged. “Nothing special. I’d ask him if there was anything in particular he wanted me to take care of for him. Sometimes he’d plan a get-together at his house so he had me set his dining room table. One year he even paid me to put up his Christmas decorations.”
“Are you saying your conversations were all work related?”
A leading question if ever there was one. I let it go. I wanted Jenna to grow comfortable on the stand. Let her be candid. I needed her unguarded at the beginning of my cross-examination.
“Pretty much,” she said. “Though we did make light small talk. Around the holidays he’d ask me whether I was staying in town or going to my mom’s.
One year I was getting ready to buy a new car and Mr. Loomis gave me some advice about what to get.
And he had a friend at one of the dealerships who could get me a discount. ”
“Did you ever discuss Mr. Loomis’s personal life?”
“Objection,” I said. “To the extent Mr. Quick is heading down a path to hearsay testimony, let’s make that clear. This witness can’t testify about things Mr. Loomis may have told her.”
“I agree,” Judge Castor said. “Do you understand that, Ms. Rodney, you’re restrained from talking about things Mr. Loomis may have said to you?”
“Your Honor,” Quick said. “I only asked if this witness ever discussed Mr. Loomis’s personal life. I haven’t asked what they discussed.”
“Fine,” the judge said. “Then you may answer that question only whether you had the discussions.”
Jenna looked puzzled. “Oh, you mean now? Answer now?”
“Yes,” the judge said.
“Um … kind of. I knew when things started getting serious with Katy. With Mrs. Loomis.”
“Why is that?” Quick asked.
“Well, she started staying over more and more. Mr. Loomis introduced us.”
“When was this?”
“Hmm. I think it was a little over two years ago.”
“So you’d been working for Tom Loomis as a bachelor for a couple of years by then?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you have an opinion of Katy Leary?”
“You’re asking if I liked her? What I thought of her?”
“Yes,” Quick answered.
“She was nice,” Jenna replied. “Kind of … I don’t know how else to describe it. She was kind of a spaz. High energy. Talked a mile a minute. But she seemed crazy about Mr. Loomis and they got serious pretty quickly.”
“What do you mean?”
Jenna cast a nervous glance at Katy. “Well, it was just kind of like … he introduced me to her one morning when I came to the house. She’d clearly spent the night.
And I’m not saying that because I’m judging.
I just mean by the time I met her, she’d already started staying weekends at Mr. Loomis’s house, is all.
Then, I don’t know, maybe two months after I met her the first time, they were making plans to get married. ”
“I see,” Quick said. “Did you have any sense of how Tom felt about that?”
“How he felt? I don’t … I mean, he seemed happy, if that’s what you mean.
They both did. Like they could never keep their hands off each other.
But I want to make this really clear. I don’t want to sound like I’m in my client’s business like that.
It’s none of my business. I’m there to do a job.
That’s all. I’m not friends with my clients.
They’re my clients. We’re friendly. But that’s not the same thing. I’m professional.”
“Of course,” Quick said. “I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t.” He walked back to the lectern and seemed rattled for a moment. But he quickly collected himself.
“Ms. Rodney, were you in a position to observe the state of Mr. and Mrs. Loomis’s relationship?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, were you aware of any tension between them?”
She shifted in her seat. “I only know that Mrs. Loomis moved out for a little while about a year after they got married.”
“How did you become aware of that?
“Well, she wasn’t there. Katy was always there when I showed up on Fridays.
Tom would get up before five, I think, then head to work.
I got there at six or a little before. Katy would be up and getting dressed.
She’d have a cup of coffee and want to chit chat with me.
Sometimes for as much as a half an hour.
Anyway, there came a point when she just wasn’t there.
But I never asked. I told you, their personal life was none of my business. ”
“Okay,” Quick said. “Jenna, did you ever witness or hear Katy and Tom Loomis arguing with each other? Now, I’m not asking you what you might have overheard in terms of specific things they said. I’m only asking if you witnessed them fighting.”
“Kind of,” she said. “There were a couple of times, right before Katy moved out that time, that I could hear yelling when I came through the garage door. I don’t know what it was about.
I didn’t hear what they said and I wasn’t trying to.
I would just kind of make as much noise as I could when entering the house so they knew I was there.
As soon as they did, the yelling stopped and they were fine. Cheerful.”
“I see,” Quick said. “All right. So let’s focus on the morning of March 14th. That was a Friday morning, right?”
“Yes.”
“Can you walk me through the start of your day?”
She brushed a hair from her eye. “Fridays are my long days. I work for three different clients. The Gentle Paws Vet Clinic on Wood Lane. I get there by three thirty in the morning and clean for two hours. Then I’d do the Loomis residence from six to usually eight or nine.
Then I go straight to the Cecils’ house.
It’s a twenty-minute drive from the Loomis’s.
I normally would get there by ten or so. ”
“So you were at Gentle Paws the morning of the 14th of March?”
“Yes. I worked there that morning. I left a little after five thirty, then headed to Tom’s house.”
“Can you recall what time you arrived at the Loomis house?”
“A few minutes before six. Like always.”
“What did you do?”