Sarah Cortez - Houston Noir

Curtis Simon wrote the check without comment. As he handed it over, he took a deep breath. “When do you think you’ll be able to survey the crime scene, Mr. Ainsworth?”

The detective said, “I’ll be out there first thing in the morning, probably before ten. Why do you ask?”

Curtis retreated with slumped shoulders and diverted eyes. “Oh, no real reason. I just feel like I can’t get on with my life as long as the police think I was involved.”

Ainsworth stood, anxious to get the tortured little man out of his office. He had considered offering him a drink, but decided a quick exit was the better plan. Once Curtis was gone, he could nurse the Scotch bottle the rest of the afternoon.

Curtis didn’t need encouragement. He jumped from his chair.

“I’ll let you know if there’s any progress tomorrow,” Ainsworth said, following his client to the door.

The next morning, Ainsworth slept late. After Curtis had left his office the previous evening, he’d finished a fifth of Scotch. He slept until after nine and only woke then because the garbage truck in the alley made a lot of noise emptying the giant container there for his office and other nonexistent tenants.

He prepared a cup of black coffee, topped it with a splash of Scotch, and drove to the hotel identified in the police report, where Jennifer Simon was shot in the parking lot. On the way, Ainsworth thought over his last few years, how he’d gotten to this point. He’d been a young cop in Houston for eight years when he was dispatched to the call that ended his career. The call was made by a mother, concerning the rape of her daughter. When he arrived at the scene, Ainsworth found a mother waiting at the curb with that five-year-old girl. The girl had blood on her legs; her dress was ripped. She stared at him with eyes that said no one was home inside her pretty head. She’d been viciously raped and sexually abused by the mother’s boyfriend. He was still inside the house.

Without waiting for backup, Ainsworth had walked into the house, pistol in hand. He found the boyfriend in the little girl’s room, beside the bed. A butcher knife lay on the bed, within the man’s reach. This memory triggered Ainsworth’s hands to clench into fists, and a bitter taste of bile burned his throat. He had raised his pistol and shot the man twice. As the body crumpled onto the floor, Ainsworth used the barrel of his pistol to push the knife off the bed, to the floor beside the man’s still body.

The inquiry was over quickly. An older child, the brother of the little girl, had heard Ainsworth enter the house and followed him to the door of the bedroom. Once the boy gave his statement, Ainsworth was suspended from the department. Luckily, there was quite a lot of support for him when the shooting made the evening news.

He made a deal with the district attorney, who didn’t want to try a case against a police officer who had shot a pedophile only minutes after the man had raped a child. Ainsworth pled guilty to manslaughter. The little girl didn’t have to testify. He received a six-month jail sentence and a short probation. The district attorney was elected to another term without opposition.

After the conviction, Ainsworth couldn’t get a private investigator’s license, so he worked under the auspices of an attorney who was an old friend. Even so, since leaving police work, he’d been on a spiral toward self-destruction, pulling himself out of the bottle just enough to survive whenever he lucked into a case. This time, it was one that would pay well. After that, he would drown himself in whiskey until another case came along. Or... well, who knew what turns life might take?

He parked in the hotel’s lot. Although the shooting had occurred early in the evening, the police had shown a photo of Jennifer Simon to all three desk clerks on shift that day and night. None of them admitted to having seen her before. Ainsworth wasn’t sure he would accomplish anything more than adding to the billable hours on his client’s tab, but Curtis had nearly begged him to take more of his money, so he’d walk the parking lot and interview the desk clerks again.

According to the diagram attached to the report, Jennifer’s car was parked in the middle of the parking area behind the hotel. Ainsworth walked the entire lot and found a quarter on the ground next to a minivan loaded with fishing equipment. But he discovered nothing of interest to the case. He made a pass around the lot’s perimeter, which was separated by a thick hedge from another, larger parking area for commercial businesses along the boulevard. The hedge was not well-trimmed; wind had blown newspapers and fast food wrappers against the line of vegetation.

Ainsworth strolled, thinking the grounds crew was shirking its duties. The sun emerged from behind a cloud, and he noticed the glint of an object struck by its rays. He leaned over, pushed branches aside, and discovered a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol on the ground, next to the trunk of a bush. Looking back toward the area where the shooting had taken place, Ainsworth realized he was as far from that location as one could be while still in what could be considered the rear parking lot of the hotel.

Ainsworth called his friend in the homicide office, told him what he had discovered, and agreed to wait for officers to arrive. Minutes later, a patrol car pulled up. The officer wrote down the information regarding why and how Ainsworth had discovered the weapon, placed it in an evidence bag, and drove away.

There was little for Ainsworth to do on the case until ballistics tests were run. True to his effort to maximize billable hours, he spent the next few days tailing Brodie Bancroft around Houston. Bancroft met no women except at a garden club event where he spoke. He either wasn’t a player or had suspended his extracurricular romantic liaisons while the murder investigation proceeded. After a week of following Bancroft for three hours each day and billing for eight, Ainsworth ended the surveillance. It wasn’t conscience that prompted him, but boredom with the astronaut’s routine.

Two weeks after he found the pistol, Ainsworth sat in his office just after noon, sipping on his third drink as he half-heartedly watched an old episode of Bonanza on the television set he’d purchased with Curtis Simon’s second retainer. The show was interrupted by a breaking news alert, indicated by the words Breaking News Alert flashed on the screen and several beeps loud enough to get the attention of every living thing within earshot, including the cockroaches that had been scampering about the detective’s feet.

There’d been a break in the Jennifer Simon murder case. High-profile — some would even say famed — astronaut Brodie Bancroft had been arrested. Officers had recovered the weapon used in the crime and learned it had been purchased by Bancroft several years earlier.

Later, Ainsworth watched the evening news. The astronaut’s attorney denied his client had been involved in the murder or an affair with the dead woman. The attorney claimed Bancroft had placed an ad in a local weekly to sell the pistol. He said Jennifer Simon responded to the ad, and they met at the La Madeleine Café to complete the transaction, for which there was no written record.

Donovan Ainsworth garnered some local attention during Bancroft’s trial, but squandered it on getting a few free drinks instead of increasing his client list. Curtis Simon reaped much sympathy as the betrayed spouse. Brodie Bancroft was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The judge gave him two weeks to get his affairs in order before imprisonment. Bancroft’s socialite wife filed for divorce.

Ainsworth sent Curtis Simon a final accounting of his time on the case, including his court appearances as a witness. It came out to an additional $2,000. There was no objection.