Рита Браун - The Purrfect Murder

“She’ll open her legs before your body is cold.” Mike could give as good as he got.

Jonathan slammed up against the cell bars between them. “I’ll strangle you if you get near enough.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

As it was Monday, the usual medley of drunks from the weekend had been released. Only the two of them were incarcerated.

Jonathan, clever in his way, lowered his anger and his voice. “Why didn’t you take the money and the jewelry and run?”

Mike got up, pacing. “Never thought I’d be caught. Every one of those women had something to hide. Affairs. Drinking or drug problems. The usual. I’d drop a few knowing hints, looks, and wait for a guilty flush. You’d be surprised how easy it can be. And you know, a few wanted it. Bored with their husbands.”

“You shouldn’t sleep with a woman if you don’t love her, if you don’t marry her.” Jonathan truly was a Puritan.

“You say. You miss a lot, buddy.” Mike smiled sarcastically. “Why didn’t you run? You might have gotten away with it. Killed more doctors.”

“I wanted to be caught. I wanted to be heard.”

“People think you’re nuts.”

Jonathan’s anger welled up again; he forced it down. “Saving lives, that’s crazy now. You said you were a member of Love of Life. What’s the matter with you?”

“I do think it’s murder.” Mike paused. “And I didn’t kill anyone.”

“I did,” Jonathan solemnly declared. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

“You helped it along.” Mike started to say, “And you hurt our cause,” but he didn’t, because they’d had that discussion before, at high decibel level.

“I’d do it again. We planned it. We gathered a lot of money for the cause, and my angel is keeping it. Love of Life doesn’t know of our great plan to shut down every abortion clinic and doctor in America. Those were my letters after I was in jail. I’d written them before. My angel thought of that so we’d get even more money for our cause. Killing Will would open their bank accounts to us. It would scare the money right out of them. We’d get everything out of those murdering women.”

“One of them turned out to be braver than you thought.” Mike meant Little Mim.

“God will take care of her in His own way and in His own time.” Jonathan, at first elated that a fellow traveler was in the cell next to him, had soured as he got to know Mike. “He’ll take care of you, too.”

“When you go before St. Peter, you’ll have bigger sins to confess than I do. I didn’t kill anybody. And now that Penny Lattimore has come out of hiding, I hope she’ll tell the sheriff that, yes, I put the touch on her, but I never threatened to kill her. I underestimated the sheriff. Pretending that Penny had disappeared scared some of the other women you’d blackmailed into going to him. At least that’s what I think. And I never, ever, threatened to kill Carla or Penny.”

“She’ll die.” Jonathan tightened his lips.

“We’ll all die.”

“She’s number two.”

Mike, stupid in some ways and no fool in others, pretended not to be galvanized by this information. “Carla was number one.”

“Was?”

“Refused to pay?”

“She paid, but after I was in jail she got hysterical. Carla got hysterical when Will was shot. My angel said you would have thought Carla’d been shot. Murdering woman.”

“Your angel?”

“My angel is doing God’s work. God speaks to me and I speak to her. As you know, God doesn’t speak to women. Carla had an abortion. She was a murdering woman. The only way these killers can atone for their monstrous sins is to give money to our cause so we can save more children. If they don’t, they die. My angel took care of Carla.”

“Why does your angel keep the money?” Mike pretended not to care that he’d just heard who killed Carla, even though he could not identify the woman.

“Idiot! How would it look if large sums of cash were handed to the treasurer? Love of Life won’t put the doctors out of business. Too scared. No real fire for the task. We need the money to complete our work. I’ll die, and my angel will have her revenge.”

Mike leaned back on his bunk. How could he get to Rick without Jonathan knowing? The man never seemed to sleep. If Mike asked the guard anything, Jonathan would know. But he’d heard from this fanatic’s own lips that his angel/accomplice had killed Carla.

There wasn’t but so much Mike could do about his crimes, but he could at least clear himself of murder. In an odd way he was glad he’d been caught, because he would have killed Harry. And killing was never his intention.

35

Rick walked with Coop across Jackson Park toward the courthouse downtown on Thursday, October 16. “What do you make of it?”

“He’s trying to save his skin.”

“Yes, but it is plausible.”

“Then we’d better put security on Penny Lattimore.”

“Marvin is rich enough to hire his own. I’ll call him. Remember, if we go over budget I have to face the commissioners; you don’t.”

“If I did, I’d wear a low-cut dress and show cleavage. Works every time.”

Rick laughed. “How would I know? I’ve never had the privilege.”

She laughed, too. “Really. They’ve done studies to show that when men think of sex they can’t think.”

“They needed to do studies for that?”

“Is pretty silly, isn’t it? How many thousands of years have we known what we are?”

Rick pulled out a cigarette, stopping to light it. He handed it to her for a puff. “Best damned things.”

“I used the five dollars I won from you when Jonathan Bechtal turned himself in.”

“You used more than that.” He took it back, inhaling deeply. “Murder is a sin and a crime, but I’ll be forced, on Judgment Day, to answer for leading you to cigarettes.”

“I smoke one a day.”

“You’ll smoke more.” He closed his eyes in pleasure after another long, long drag. “Well, we have a fascinating situation on our hands.”

“What’s funny is that Mike’s panty fetish has people more in an uproar than the murders.”

“New news.” Then Rick smiled wryly. “And it’s all about sex. That’s a lot more interesting than crimes committed over ideology, money, property. Sex makes everyone perk up.”

“Does, doesn’t it?”

“Lorenzo must have called.”

“You know,” she paused, “he did. I’ve seen him once for lunch, on my day off, and I like him. More than that I don’t know.”

“But you know if you’re attracted to him. You can’t invent that. Either it’s there or it isn’t.”

“Sex.” Coop smiled. “I think that’s why it’s so difficult for women to understand men like Mike. Intellectually we know why he did what he did, but emotionally it doesn’t compute. Never will.”

“Let me let you in on a little secret: it doesn’t compute with a lot of men, either. I find Mike more disgusting than Jonathan Bechtal. Bechtal is a fanatic, a lunatic. Mike abused public trust as well as abusing women. He’s a liar, a thief, in my mind a rapist, and a corrupt official. Anything that breaks down trust in government, to me, is a sin. And God knows, there’s a lot of it out there.”

“I agree. Without trust you have nothing in any kind of relationship. You know what I see now that I didn’t see before? I see the trust that Harry has with her pets and they have with her. Those animals may well have saved her life.”

“They did.” Rick’s cell rang and he flipped it open, listened intently, flipped it shut. “Come on, partner.”

She followed him at a run.

Closing the squad car door behind her, Coop breathlessly asked, “Penny?”

“No.” He hit the sirens and roared off. “Mike.”