Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 6) (18 page)

“So one of the three really has something against Murdoch,” Spellman said.

“Some old grudge, maybe, that we haven’t learned about yet.”

Merrick looked at Spellman. “Sam here knows all the players. I say let’s turn him loose on this.”

“No offense, Sam, but it’s just a theory.”

“Still makes more sense,” Merrick said, “than hauling a body around. You kill her in one place and then wrap her up and stash her in a car trunk and take her someplace else. A lot of things could go wrong. But if you could get her into the empty house, kill her and leave her there—a lot safer than transporting her all over hell.”

“You’ve saved yourself blackmail money,” I said, “and you’ve turned Ross Murdoch into a murderer. How does he explain a body in his bomb shelter?”

“Cliffie comes and arrests you,” Spellman said, “and the entire potential jury pool has already assumed your guilt.”

“Like I say,” Merrick said, “I think Sam here should start working this idea right away. He knows the players and he knows the town. I want to spend the day looking at all the crime scene data that idiot chief-of-police claims to’ve collected. He’s got one guy on his staff who graduated from the academy in Des Moines and knows something about crime scenes. Hopefully, the chief let him handle all the scientific evidence.”

“He probably did,” Spellman laughed. “Cliffie was too busy primping for the cameras and telling everybody how he was going to make life safe again here in Dodge City. How the hell’d this guy ever get his job?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

Spellman smiled. “I’ll bet it is.”

Scotty McBain sat outside his shack of an office. The day was too sweet with warm autumn to be inside. He sat in his chair and had his feet propped up on an empty wooden Pepsi case stood on its end. He was reading a Fredric Brown paperback,
The Screaming Mimi.

“You’ve got good taste in books.”

He looked up and smiled. He’s got a small, terrier-like face with a large mouth and easy grin. “Hey, if it ain’t the perfesser.”

Dad’s friends from the plant started calling me that when I got the undergraduate scholarship to the U of Iowa. I was not only the first kid in my family to go to college, I was the first to go down at the plant. Simple reason. I was born during the war. Their kids were born after. They’d be hitting college in a few years.

Scotty wore a faded khaki shirt and trousers. A uniform, like. He took his feet down from the Pepsi case and stood up, touching his hands to his lower back. “I’m gettin’ old.” Before I could disagree politely, he said, “You can have your pick today.”

He nodded to two stacked rows of aluminum canoes set against the front left wall of his office. Most of them were in good condition. A few yards away, the river ran, smelling faintly of fish. Out on the water a red speedboat moved fast and vivid through the water. The small dock he’d built for himself was a spot for keggers during the summer. The men, mostly veterans who worked with Dad at the plant, would play a softball game (it was jokingly called The Very Slow Pitch League) and then end up drinking beer half the night at Scotty’s dock. Dad used to take me along sometimes when I was ten or so. I loved the war stories. Even then I knew they were exaggerated for effect but I didn’t care. Every once in a while the stories weren’t bravado, though, and one of the guys would choke up and start crying, thinking of some friend dead back there in Europe or the South Pacific, and it was funny because it was the only time I’d ever seen a male person cry when the other male persons around him didn’t get uptight or ashamed. Couple of them would go over to the guy and slide their hand around his shoulder and kinda stay there like that till the guy stopped crying. My cousin was like that when he came back from Korea. Up and down the emotional scale a lot. He finally ended up in the bughouse, though nobody in the family ever brought it up. If somebody asked how Tim was doing, Mom and Dad would just say that he was “away for a while.”

“No canoes today, Scotty. Sorry. I’m working on something and I was hoping maybe you could help me a little bit.”

“Me? Now that’s a new one. Some kind of criminal case, you mean?”

“Uh-huh. I’m told there’s a woman lives up the road in a trailer. Used to be friends with Karen Hastings.”

He frowned. “Ross Murdoch. That boy’s in trouble.” Stuck a Chesterfield between his lips. “Too bad. He was the only one of those rich guys who was decent. He’d come out here once in a while with his daughter when she was high school age. They were both real nice. Just average people, like. Not puttin’ on any airs or anything, not askin’ for any special treatment. They’d always go to that little summer house he kept over there on that hill across the bend down there. You can’t see it from here. But he enjoyed it, I know that much.” He grinned. “Wouldn’t be bad, though, havin’ a girl as good lookin’ as Karen was stashed away somewhere.”

“She come down here a lot?”

“Not a lot but four, five times a summer. Janice Wilson was the one who came down a lot.”

“She the one lives up the road in the trailer?”

“Uh-huh. Little silver Airstream. Just about right for one woman, I guess. She gave me a beer one day after I worked on her car. Sat inside her trailer. She’s got it fixed up pretty good.” A smile. “Just like she’s got herself fixed up pretty good. She just wore a halter and shorts that day. Tell you, I felt like I was eighteen again. Smart gal, too. Lotsa books in her trailer. A little distant, though, that’s the only thing. She’s friendly and all but you never feel she’s opening up at all. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“S’pose Cliffie’ll be checkin’ her out, too.”

“I suppose.” I stared out at the choppy water. Then back at Scotty. “I hear she’s got a temper.”

He laughed. “Yep. She sure does. Especially with men who put the make on her real obvious-like. She’s strictly look-but-don’t-touch.”

“Ever see her with anybody except the Hastings woman?”

He thought a moment. “Nope. Don’t think so.”

“No other girl friends? No male friends?”

“I’ll give it some thought, Sam. But off the top of my head, I’d say no. Wasn’t like she hung around here or anything.”

I looked up the road. “Well, I’ll see if she’s in. See if she’ll talk to me.”

He gave me a friendly fake-punch on the arm. “Sure wish I was your age again and got to hang around gals like Janice Wilson. Sure wish I was.”

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER, I
started making my rounds. Janice Wilson hadn’t been in so I decided to get the real scut work over with. I called Mike Hardin in the hospital. He sounded strong and sure on the phone. “The afternoon before Ross found her in the bomb shelter? I’d have to think about it.”

I heard a nurse squeak into the room.

“She doesn’t think I should talk to you, McCain,” he said. “She claims I’m too weak. How do you like that? She’s standing at the end of my bed with her hands on her hips. She’s got very nice hips.” Then: “I just remembered. Hunting. I was hunting. You can check with my secretary, if you’d like.”

“Who’d you go with?”

“Go with? I only hunt alone if I can help it. Hunting’s something I take very seriously. I hate to spoil it by turning it into a social event. A bunch of middle-aged drunks wandering around in the boonies, that’s not my style.”

“So you don’t have an alibi.”

“I don’t like the tone of that. If I tell you I was hunting, I was hunting. My secretary knows.”

“She knows what you told her.”

“You know what? I think this pretty nurse standing at the end of my bed has a real good idea. I’m not going to talk to you any more.”

He slammed the phone.

Peter Carlson took my call. “I should tell you, I have a lawyer now.” He spoke as if from a great height, the way he did to all humanity.

“You tell your lawyer that you fell in love with Karen Hastings?”

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, McCain.”

“Don’t I? And if I’m not mistaken, you roughed her up some, too. I guess that’s one way of expressing your love.”

“This is all bullshit and if you start spreading it around, I’ll sue you for libel.”

“Slander. Common mistake. Libel is the written word.”

“What is it you want, anyway?”

“Where were you the afternoon before Karen Hastings’s body was found?”

“Right here in my office.”

“You have witnesses?”

“Several, in fact. We had a staff meeting that afternoon.”

“All afternoon?”

“Most of it. We didn’t get started till one-thirty. I think I’ve said all I’m going to now, McCain.”

He hung up, too.

He had what seemed to be an alibi but it was one of those that could be taken apart and found wanting, I was sure. If the meeting at the Murdoch mansion was prearranged, the killer could have met her there—or picked her up and driven her there himself—killed her and left, all within an hour or so.

When you study trials in law school, you see how many juries are swayed by small lies, particularly alibis. While it sounds reasonable for a man to forget what he’d been doing for two or three hours a month or two previous, it presents a great opportunity for the prosecutor. If the DA can prove that the man did a couple of things he’d almost certainly remember—made a substantial purchase, spent a substantial amount of time with somebody, was involved in a substantial traffic accident—the prosecutor can then say that he finds it odd that the man on trial would forget that. He can also say that the traffic accident incident took no more than forty-five minutes according to the other driver and the cops on the scene—leaving the man on trial with two hours he still can’t account for. Where were you the other two hours? You’re not going to get a conviction on the basis of these questions but you are going to make the jury wonder if the man is honest and forthright. And he has left the two unaccounted-for hours dangling out there. Trials are mosaics. They rarely have the kind of aha! moments you see on TV.

My final call was to Gavin Wheeler. He was a mite drunk, especially considering that it was barely eleven a.m. “I walk down the street and they stare at me like I’m some kind of monster. Or they snicker. People who always used to speak to me, say hello to me, smile at me. It’s like they’re embarrassed to see me. All my life I’ve tried to build up my reputation. I’m not some nobody from the Hills any more. I’ve got a name, I’ve got money, I’ve got some power. Or I had ’em, anyway, McCain. I don’t know why the hell I ever got into this thing. My poor wife won’t leave the house. She went to the grocery store nine o’clock last night when it was just about closing time. There weren’t any customers but everybody who worked in the store stood there whispering about her. A couple of them even made a couple of smart remarks. I did that. Me. All the years she’s stayed married with me—and I ain’t no prince to live with, believe me—and look what I do to her. We should be thinking of retiring now. But we’re gonna have to get clear the hell away from here.”

I’d waited him out. “The afternoon before Karen Hastings’s body was found in Murdoch’s house. You happen to remember what you were doing?”

He had an answer right away. “Driving back from Davenport. Had to look at some property over there.”

“Alone.”

“Yes, alone.”

I could sense that he would be most unhappy if I pushed beyond this point. I didn’t feel up to arguing with an eleven a.m. drunk. I said thank you and hung up.

I was just going through my notebook, transferring some of the notations to a larger sheet of paper, when the phone rang.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. McCain.”

“I’m Mr. McCain.”

“My name’s Janice Wilson. Scotty told me you were looking for me. I need to drive into town, anyway. Why don’t I stop by your office in two hours or so?”

“That’d be fine. I appreciate the call.”

That’s the best way of all, when they come to you.

The Judge has paid exactly two visits to my office. Today was the second one. In her tailored gray suit with the long leather and very dramatic gray gloves, she had the imperious elegance of a fading movie queen. Every move was straight from finishing school, every utterance straight from her upper-class New England education. I’m pretty sure she once gave lessons to Katherine Hepburn in haughtiness.

“You really do need to get better digs, McCain.”

“So I hear.”

I said this as I walked around my desk, brushed off the better of the two client chairs, and held one out for her. She looked at it as if I’d just bought it at a leper colony garage sale. But she put her important ass in my unimportant chair, lighted a Parliament and dramatically exhaled smoke. She saw the rubber band before I did. A lone rubber band sitting near the edge of my desk. How could she resist picking it up, using her thumb and forefinger as a bow, and firing it at me the way she usually did? But we were both getting crafty. She pretended not to see it and I pretended not to see her pretending not to see it. She went so far in trying to fake me out that she sat all the way back in her chair and raised her eyes to meet mine.

“I’m here because Deirdre Murdoch asked me to be.”

“Deirdre? Why doesn’t she call me herself?”

“She’s in a panic now since she found out there’ll be no bail.”

“No bail?”

“The judge—me—has decided there’ll be no bail.”

“But why?”

“I’m recusing myself from this whole matter. But until a new judge is selected, I’m not going along with bail. I’m too good a friend of the family.”

“So meanwhile he sits in jail.”

She paused a moment. I wondered if she was thinking about the rubber band. She loved playing Pearl-Harbor-sneak-attack.

“I came here, McCain, to ask a simple question. I wanted to see your face when you answered it. Irene Murdoch is an old friend of mine. I’m afraid she’ll have to go back into the sanitarium.”

“I know. Deirdre told me.”

“Thank God for Deirdre. Ross was gone so much—the only lasting friendships Irene has had were with me and Deirdre.”

“I guess I don’t know what your question is.”

“It’s a very simple question, McCain. Because if I don’t get the answer I want, I’ll have to start preparing Irene and Deirdre for the worst.”