Pale Gray for Guilt (17 page)

"Under what circumstances did you first see Mr. McGee?"

"I only saw him two times before that, both on the same day. It was back in October. I don't know the exact day. He was a friend of theirs and he came in a nice boat to visit them. He took them over to Broward Beach in the boat that night for dinner and I sat with the little boys. So I met him when I came over to sit, and then I saw him again when they came back."

"Did they seem friendly, McGee and the Bannons?"

"I… guess so."

"You seem hesitant. Why?"

"I had the feeling it was Mrs. Bannon he came to See."

"What gave. you that feeling?"

"Well, actually I saw him three times that day. It was an awful hot day. Mr. Bannon and Mr. McGee had fixed Mr. Bannon's car. Then Mr. Bannon went off to get the boys from school. I saw Mrs. Bannon taking a pitcher of iced tea to one of the units. I wanted to ask her about something she was going to bring me from town, to save a trip. I needed it in my work and I went down there to where she took the iced tea, thinking she would come right out. When she didn't, I sort of looked in the window. I didn't know his name then, not until later. But I saw Mr. McGee and Mrs. Bannon laying on the bed, kissing."

"Did you notice anything else that day in October that seemed odd or unusual to you?"

"No sir. Nothing else at all, sir."

"What did you do after McGee drove away?"

"Well, I thought I better wait a little while in case he forgot something and came back. So I looked for the wire some more and I found it. I left and made sure the door was locked and then I ran all the way to our car. I threw the key in the bushes when I was getting into the car, the room key."

"Why did you do that?"

"I was very frightened, I guess. I didn't want anybody to know I'd been in the motel."

"I show you a motel room key. Is this that same key you threw away?"

"I think so. Yes sir. That's the key."

"Did you relate all this to your husband?"

"No sir. I didn't tell him anything."

"Why not?"

"Because he said I shouldn't go out there, and even though I did find the silver wire, he was still right about that. I wish I hadn't gone out there that Sunday morning."

"Will you tell us why you finally came forward, Mrs. Denn?"

"I thought they would catch Mr. McGee. But they didn't. I worried and worried about it and the other night I told my husband the whole thing and he said I had to come and see you. I begged him not to make me do it but he said I had to. That's why I'm here."

Sheriff Burgoon turned it off. "There's more. But it covers the same ground. It doesn't bring up anything new. It's an eyeball witness, boy, with nothing to gain or lose. We took her out there and she showed us the window and you get a real good view from there."

He had demoted me back to boy, heartened by his evidence.

"I think she saw almost exactly what she says she saw, sheriff."

"Want to change your mind about a lawyer?"

"Motive, opportunity, weapon, and an eyewitness. Sheriff, don't you think it's all wrapped up just a little too neatly?"

"A man can be damn unlucky."

"How true. I wonder just who he is."

"Suppose you make a little sense."

"Okay. Here is something that the unlucky man, whoever he is, had to take a chance on. He had to take a chance on there being some probability or possibility of my being in this area at that time, and my having no way to prove I wasn't."

"It's going to take a pretty good piece of proof."

"I can place myself aboard my houseboat where I live, the Busted Flush, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, at nine o'clock that Sunday morning. Does the rest of the tape establish her best guess as to the time I'm supposed to have left after the murder?"

"Maybe eight thirty, give or take fifteen minutes," he said. "But let's get to just how you place yourself there and how come you'd remember it so good."

"Because I arrived at Bannon's place the following afternoon and found out he was dead. I found out he had died the previous morning. Somehow you remember what you were doing at the time a good friend died."

"And just what were you doing?"

"Socializing, Sheriff Burgoon. Being a jolly host, right out in front of everybody. I think that I could probably come up with the names of at least twenty people who saw me and talked to me between nine and ten o'clock that morning. Some of them are totally unreliable. I don't pick them for social standing and credit rating, and I wouldn't ask you or anyone to believe them if they swore on every Bible in Shawana County. But there are a half dozen well worth believing. Suppose you write down the names and addresses and pick a couple of names off the list and question them by phone right now any way you feel like. Try any trick or trap you can think up."

"What did you mean saying she saw almost exactly what she says she saw, mister?"

"She saw everything except me doing it. She saw somebody else do it, and that changes your theory about nothing to gain or lose."

"How do you mean?"

"Somebody prepped her pretty good, Sheriff. I might even have thought that she saw somebody she sincerely mistook for me. But the iced tea sequence was a little too much."

"Didn't happen?"

"I got hot and sweaty helping Tush fix the spring shackle on his car. I showered in the motel unit they loaned me. I had just finished dressing when Jan brought the pitcher of tea and two glasses. We talked about the problems they were having. Maybe fat-girl even looked in the window. But no bed and no kisses. Nothing like that between us. Not even any thought of it on either side. At the moment I happen to own the Bannon place, Sheriff. I bought it from Jan Bannon. Why in hell would I do that?"

"You are the one bought it!"

"I'm here today to try to resell it to Press LaFrance."

Burgoon looked very thoughtful. "He's surely been wanting it so bad he could taste it. Trying to put some kind of parcel together for resale. Don't he own a patch out there, Tom?"

"Fifty acres right behind."

Burgoon nodded. "Probably could move it if he had river frontage to go with it."

Tom scrubbed his snow-white brush cut and coughed and said, "Bunny, that Bannon woman didn't seem to me to be that kind of woman when I had to go out there and roust her and the kids out and seal it up. That's one part of this job I surely hate. We tried to make it easy as we could, but there isn't any good way to make it easy. She was one upset woman and you can believe it."

The sheriff asked me for the names of my witnesses and wrote them down.

I thought of something else. How come they had been waiting for me at the hotel? And did that have anything to do with LaFrance's evasiveness when I had phoned him?

"Who told you I was coming to the hotel, Sheriff?"

"Wasn't it Freddy dug that up, Tom?" Burgoon asked. When Tom nodded, Burgoon said, "Didn't you say you were coming here to see Press LaFrance? Then, that answers it, sure enough. Freddy Hazzard is Press's nephew, his sister's eldest boy. He's my youngest deputy, mister. You saw him at the hotel, the lanky one."

"Is he the son of one of your County Commissioners?"

"Sure is. Monk's boy. But that's got no bearing on me taking him on. Freddy came out of service with a good record in the M.P and he earns his pay right down the line."

"Didn't somebody say that it was somebody named Freddy who found the body?"

"That's right. On a routine patrol at nine thirty. You see, I had a note for Bannon from his missus, and she'd left a suitcase here for him, and I didn't know but what Bannon might hitch a ride to his place or come by boat or something. She'd said he was planning to be back Friday or Saturday, so I had the boys keeping an eye on it out there off and on." He peered at me. "You getting at something?"

"I don't know, Sheriff. I'm going to check out all right. You have a hunch I will, and you hate to admit it to yourself because it's such a nice neat painless little case."

He slapped his hand on the desk top. "But why would some other damned fool, if somebody else besides you did it, why would they want to pick you for it? They should know there was a chance you'd be in the clear. Why not some description to fit somebody we'd look for and never find?"

"Suppose this person heard, second hand, that I had a theory somebody had done too good a job of working Tush Bannon over and killed him, then dropped the engine on him to hide the traces, and fixed the wire to make it look like suicide?"

"If you can prove you said that to anybody at any time, mister, it might be more help than this list of folks I wrote down."

"I told that same person that maybe it was somebody who was trying to do him a favor and do Monk Hazzard a favor, by trying to take some of the spunk out of Bannon so he would leave quietly. Because the person I was talking to has been trying to get that land."

"LaFrance?" Burgoon said, almost whispering it.

"Tom, you think Press ought to come in for a little talk?"

"Can I make a suggestion, Sheriff?" I asked.

"You mean you've got another way to make things worse than they are right now?"

"Isn't the weakest place the fat girl? She lied and she'll know who made her lie. Don't you think she could be brought in to make a positive identification?"

"You ever been in this line of work?"

"Not directly."

"You got a record, mister?"

"Four arrests. No convictions, Sheriff. Nothing ever even came to trial."

'Now, just what would those arrests have been for, mister?"

"Assault, which turned out to be self-defense. Breaking and entering, and it turned out I had the owner's permission. Conspiracy, and somebody decided to withdraw the charges. Piracy on the high seas, dismissed for lack of evidence."

"You're not exactly in any rut, are you? Tom, send somebody after that Arlene Denn."

After he left, I said to the Sheriff, "When did she make that statement?"

"Saturday, starting about… maybe eleven in the morning."

"Did you try to have me picked up in Lauderdale?"

"Sure did."

"And Deputy Hazzard found out yesterday in the late afternoon that I would be at the hotel this morning?"

"He got the tip last night and phoned me at home."

"Did he have any objections to the way you set it up to take me?"

"Well… he did say maybe if I stationed him across there, like on the roof of the service station with a carbine, it would be good insurance if you smelled something and decided not to go into the hotel at all." He shook his head. "Freddy is a good boy. It doesn't fit the way you want me to think it fits."

"I'm not trying to sell you anything."

In twenty minutes Tom brought her in. She stopped abruptly just inside the door and gave me a single glassy blue look and looked away. She wore a paint-spattered man's T-shirt hanging outside her bulging jeans, and apparently nothing under the T-shirt.

"Move over near Tom and let her set in that chair," he said to me. She sat and stared at Burgoon, her face so vapid she looked dimwitted.

"Now then, Arlie," said Burgoon, "we had a nice talk day before yesterday and you helped us a lot and we appreciate it. Now, don't you be nervous. There's another part of it you've got to do. Do you know that man setting over there by Tom."

"… Yes sir."

"What's his name, Arlie?"

"The one I told you about. Mr. MeGee."

"Now, you turn and look at him and be sure and if you, are sure it's the man you saw dropping that engine onto Mr. Bannon, you point your finger at him and you say, 'That's the same man.' "

She turned and she looked at the wall about a foot over my head and stabbed a finger at me and said, "That's the same man."

"You had a clear view of him on the morning of December seventeenth? No chance of a mistake?"

"No Sir!"

'Now, don't be nervous. You're doing just fine. We've got another little problem you can help us with. It turns out Mr. McGee was way down in Fort Lauderdale that same identical morning at the same time you think you saw him, and he was on a boat with some very important people. A federal judge and a state senator and a famous surgeon, and they say he. was right there at that same time. Now, Arlie, just how in the wide world are we going to get around that?"

She stared fixedly at him, her mouth sagging open. "Arlie, are those big people lying and are you the one telling the truth, so help you God?"

"I saw what I saw."

"Who told you to make up these lies, Arlie?"

"I told you what I saw."

"Now, Arlie, you recall what I said before, about you having the right to be represented by a lawyer and so on?"

"So?"

"I'm telling you again, girl. You don't have to answer any questions. Because I think I'm going to hold you and book you."

She shrugged plump shoulders. "Do what you feel like."