The Original Alibi (Matt Kile) (4 page)

The general smiled. If tonight had been a chess game, this would be the point where I leaned forward and tipped over my king. But I had no king to tip over. Instead, I illustrated my capitulation by leaning forward and picking up the check for the thousand dollars.

Like Axel had said, a grand’s nothing to sneeze at.

Chapter 4

The fog had silently come ashore before I left General Whittaker’s house, dressing the outdoors in wet. Everything obscured as if veiled in the angel breath that adorned the general’s Christmas tree. The time to drive home was twice what it took to get there.

I had lingered an extra fifteen minutes to visit with Charles, mostly just to get his cell number so I could reach him later when I was ready to talk. I quickly learned he was more than the general’s houseman. He also served as administrative assistant, with his own assistant, a maid and cook for the pure household duties. He gave me the numbers and names for the general’s CPA, banker, and investment broker. Charles agreed to call ahead to clear the runway for me to get in and get answers. The general’s attorney, Reginald Franklin III, and I had already met.

Charles also told me about Cliff, who drove for the general. Cliff had been a sniper in the Marine Corps when on duty, and then as now a hard drinking man off duty. One night, off the base, Cliff had gotten into an argument with a superior officer. The confrontation was not Cliff’s first altercation over a woman’s favors. When it was over Cliff had nearly killed the officer. He spent some time in the brig before being dishonorably discharged.

*

I walked in my door at eleven to find Axel waiting up like a nervous mom on the night of her daughter’s prom, taking his self-proclaimed duties as case nanny a bit too seriously.

Before Axel got paroled I had considered getting a shell parakeet. They are well known talkers. There are times when I’m so slammed writing a novel that I want to hear a voice other than the characters that live in my head, but a voice that wouldn’t demand any more of my time than I cared to give at the moment. A voice I could shut off by simply dropping a dark cloth over its cage. Another advantage, one I hadn’t considered previously, the parakeet would not wear my trousers, but then I don’t need to clean the bottom of Axel’s cage. So, I imagine on balance things had worked out well enough.

Last week, I bought Axel a one-bedroom in my condo building on the floor below mine. In any event, a decent investment as the prices had dropped along with the rest of the ugly real estate market. Axel spent most of his non-sleeping hours in my place, at least those hours he didn’t spent in Mackie’s, a local bistro and watering hole owned and operated by one of his ex-prison pals. Mackie’s prison term had expired the year before I went in, so I had only recently met Mackie. The year after he got out he received a significant inheritance, a portion of which went to buy a seedy bar in a good neighborhood a few blocks from our building. After remodeling, Mackie’s opened and immediately became a gathering place for ex-cons. Mostly older ex-cons who had retired from whichever careers had incarcerated them. Mackie and Axel had been inside together for twenty-five years; they were tight.

“I knew you’d take the case, boss. Give me the dirt. All of it.”

“This stuff is confidential, Axel. These are real people, not characters in my novels.”

“Hey, I’m your assistant. Telling me is like, well, telling yourself.”

“Except I’ll keep it to myself.”

“Who would I tell, boss?”

“Half the ex-cons in Long Beach, that’s who, your pals at Mackie’s Bistro.”

“Hey, there’ll be times you’ll need my pals. Trust me on that one. There’s a lot of talent in Mackie’s, people who know how things really go down. The whos of the whats and whens. They’ll be cases where—”

“Not cases. This is an exception, one case.”

“Talmadge was one case. This here’s number two.”

“Okay. One more case. But that’s it. After this one I’m a writer, period.”

“Sure, boss, whatever you say. Still, every professional shares stuff with their staff; I’m your staff. I won’t repeat nothin’. Well, nothing touchy anyway. I was never no snitch inside. You know that. The same thing goes on the outside, with your cases.” I frowned. Axel revised his comment. “Okay, your case, singular. Just one, now open up.”

So I cracked like an egg and gave up what I knew. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but Axel had been right. As the poets often write, no man is best alone. Everybody trusts somebody and there’s no place you get to know a man better than in a cell. Nothing I ever told Axel came back to me in the yard, so, okay, Axel was my staff, well, sort of. He always said. “Our cell’s our home and home stuff don’t get repeated in the yard.” Our current home was much nicer than the one we had in those days, but that principle seemed one of Axel’s core beliefs.

“Actually, I don’t know all that much,” I began. “I’ve called Sergeant Fidgery. I’m taking him and his family to lunch tomorrow. He made copies of the relevant police files. We’ll get into those at his house in the afternoon. The department is carrying the Whittaker case as an unsolved … for them it’s the Ileana Corrigan homicide case, but they haven’t done anything with it for more than ten years.”

“He’s the one you told me all about while we were inside? One of those two guys who came to see you a lot. Fidge, right?”

“Yeah. Ten years we were together.”

“So, what do you know at this point?”

“The pregnant fiancée of the general’s grandson, Eddie Whittaker, was murdered in a house she rented on the beach up the coast toward Malibu. There were two witnesses. One who claimed he saw Eddie in the house doing the killing. The other said he saw Eddie in the immediate area fifteen or so minutes later. The cops arrested Eddie. A week or so later, witnesses came forward saying they had seen Eddie in a different location. The D.A. dropped the charges and Eddie walked. I’ll know more after I talk with Fidge. I’m going to bed. Let yourself out.”

“Where are you meeting Fidge?”

“At noon at Red Robin, I’m taking his whole family to lunch. Then we’ll go back to his place. He has a great family so it’ll be a nice Saturday.”

“Okay, boss, but I’ll want a full report.”

“Maybe. The odds will improve if you’re wearing your own pants when I get back.”

Chapter 5

Fidge and I had, if anything, grown closer since I left the force. More accurately, since the department tossed me, and the system threw me in prison with Axel. Not that I blame them. I shot a man in plain sight of the cops and the press so I got what I deserved, I suppose. But then so did the guy I shot.

Fidge had never seen a form of exercise he didn’t enjoy watching, a meal he couldn’t eat, or a beer that didn’t meet his standards. He also lusted after his wife, Brenda, a hunger she returned in kind. She was a great mom, a super cook, and a solid friend. I always suspected that in a former life Brenda had been a braless bar wench serving the King’s musketeers while wearing a revealing top stretched out over the ends of her bare shoulders. In this life, she was Fidge’s Dulcinea. Fidge adored her. For that matter, so did I. Brenda was a man’s woman, and a friend’s wife, and she knew more naughty jokes and double entendres than anyone I knew.

After we had Red Robin burgers, a stack of onion rings, and milk shakes all around, Fidge and I walked his wife and children to their SUV. Brenda was driving their teens to the homes of their friends. Then she planned to fill her afternoon with errands.

Fidge and I, walking as if we had swallowed single car garages, belched before getting into my Chrysler 300. I drove us to his place where we would hunker down and sift through the fascinating story of the murder of a pregnant woman, and an arrest with a direct eye witness, quickly followed by a dropping of charges and the release of Eddie Whittaker.

Fidge had originally thought Eddie Whittaker guilty. It certainly looked that way. But not after two witnesses independent of one another came forward to say they saw Eddie where he said he had gone. He claimed he spent the hours before, during, and after the murder of his fiancée driving to and from Buellton, California, where he dined in Pea Soup Anderson’s Restaurant. It was impossible, short of using a helicopter, to make it from the restaurant to the place of the murder in time to commit it. In the aggregate, the evidence said Eddie was innocent. The way the D.A. told it, he didn’t have enough to get a conviction. The charges were dropped and Eddie became a free man. After that the case settled in among the many unsolved in the Long Beach homicide department. A cold case, as they’re called on television. In real life, there simply isn’t the manpower to work cold cases. They languish in file cabinets waiting for the good fairy of law enforcement to unexpectedly drop new evidence or clues onto the department’s lap. Until then, the best the department could do was keep them dry and protected from excessive dust. Which to no great surprise meant the file on the murder of Ileana Corrigan, Eddie’s fiancée, had been handled only once in the past ten years. That happened when it was taken from its metal file coffin to a cardboard one in the department’s warehouse for old cases that had failed to trip over new inspiration.

“I always wanted to get back to this one,” Fidge said. “It was odd, but we had nothing to hang odd on, so it became one of those never-really-forgotten cases that snag on some hook in the dark corner of a cop’s mind. Truth is, I haven’t thought about it in many years, but it all flooded back when you brought it up. You don’t remember it at all?”

“Not a lick.”

“Well, it happened about a year after you went brain dead and shot your way into prison.”

Fidge had a way of making some things I did sound really stupid. And while I’ll admit it to you, but never to Fidge, this was because some of the things I did were really stupid.

“I remember that General Whittaker had a wonderful gun collection from World War II,” Fidge said, “including a British Welrod bolt-action silenced assassin’s pistol. I’d read about them, but never seen one. His was equipped for a 9mm cartridge, and had a rear set knob that had to be manually rotated to eject a cartridge and then pushed forward to introduce a new cartridge from the magazine into the chamber. I remember that gun like it was here on my kitchen table. It’s been reported the British forces carried one into Iraq, for the tradition. A Welrod assassin’s pistol has been in every British engagement from WWII forward.”

“Did you check all his weapons?”

Fidge nodded. “None of them had been used to kill the Corrigan woman. Oh, yeah, the Welrod assassin’s pistol was stolen about two years ago. He came down to the department to report the theft. Nothing else had been taken, so likely some worker or visitor in his home snatched it; it never turned up.”

“What’s the status on the murder weapon?”

“Never found. Still, it looked open and shut, and you know how much Captain Richard Dickson likes open and shut cases. But right fast it sprung a leak and all the evidence drained out. Our perp walked. No rumors. No talk of anybody being paid off. Nothing backchannel, it just went flat.”

“Captain Dick Dickson,” I said with a disgusting tone I saved just for him, “the man suffers from delusions of competence.”

As you have undoubtedly surmised, I don’t like the man and the feeling is mutual. He had been the only detective in the department with a smile on his face when I was arrested for the courthouse shooting. I did Captain Dickson a favor last year that I thought might chip some of the ice off our relationship, but no. One of our few truly private rights the government hasn’t infringed upon is our freedom to decide who we don’t like and why. The politically correct types would say Two Dicks and I had a personality conflict. But you should know that’s hogwash. Dickson has no personality. No cop I ever met liked him. That’s why Captain Richard Dickson was known around the department as Captain Two Dicks.

“Well,” Fidge said, “you’ll be pleased to know Two Dicks has been sick the last couple days. He’s hardly been in the station.”

“Let’s hope it’s nothing painless.”

Fidge and I shared a few bad and ugly stories about Two Dicks. I know the saying is, “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” but there were no good stories about the man.

Fidge had made me a copy of all the documents in the case file so we were looking at the same information while we talked. He recalled the case as if it had happened yesterday instead of eleven years ago. The gist of it went like this: A young fellow hanging out on the beach had looked into Ileana Corrigan’s beach house and saw her murdered.

“We got the witness’s name?”

“It’s all in there,” he said, pointing toward the copied file in front of me, “along with a copy of the report on the stolen Welrod assassin’s pistol, which came nine years after the murder. Like I said, the Welrod wasn’t the murder weapon.”

“Where was the eye witness?”

“About a hundred yards or so out from the house, he had binoculars he used to look out to sea before it got dark. He had fallen asleep on the sand and saw the murder after he woke up. He picked Eddie Whittaker out of a group of pictures. The time of the murder, the witness said was 8:45 at night, and that jibed with the M.E.’s report. An attendant working in a gas station also pointed to Eddie’s picture as having bought gas a little after nine that same night. The station was an old one with a security camera the owner failed to use. The man working the station alone said Eddie paid cash. He remembered because so few folks used cash. The police picked up Eddie. Both the witness to the murder and the gas jockey picked Eddie out of a lineup.