Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

Despite my better judgment and the nagging pain in the pit of my stomach that I called indigestion but knew for a fact was guilt, I went to visit Mark McAllister in the Memphis city jail. I didn’t want to be there. Early spring in Memphis is the best time of year, maybe the only good one when you consider the smoke-gray chill of winter, the rain and mud of fall, and the smothering heat of summer. As I passed through metal detectors, signed forms promising not to sue if I were unlucky enough to be killed by one of the inmates, and nodded hello to a sprinkling of deputy jailers who remembered me from my days as a Memphis homicide detective, I told myself that if I’d had the good sense to ignore McAllister’s call, I would have spent the afternoon fishing on the Mississippi or taking a long walk through Riverside Park. Those were lies, of course. If I’d hung up on McAllister, I would have been at the Refugee’s Lounge in Whitehaven, drinking draft beer, getting my elbows grimy on the sticky bar, and betting on the wrong teams in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

A three-hundred-pound deputy jailer with horn-rimmed glasses, acne scars, and hair the color of pipe rust grunted instructions. By the time he finished, he was wheezing, and his face had turned the color of his hair. I remembered him. Gil Brewer. A diabetic and closet alcoholic with a three-pack-a-day Marlboro habit. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he was cruel and stupid, I might have felt sorry for him.

“Some deal, huh, Charlie,” he said as he unlocked a green metal door. “Kid spends a lifetime looking for his old man just so he can pop him.” His gray eyes twinkled merrily. “Hey, that’s pretty frigging good. Pop his pop.” He wheezed laughter, coughed, and spat on the floor. “I hope you collected your fee up front.”

Brewer led me down a walkway lined with cells to a small holding room in the back. In every prison movie I’d ever seen, inmates greeted a new arrival by catcalling, hurling insults, and hanging on the bars of their cells, but as a cop and then as a private investigator I’d visited a few dozen jails and half as many prisons, and that had never happened. Ninety percent of the inmates barely registered anyone’s presence. The few who did watched quietly from their cells, their eyes either trapped and hopeless or cold and appraising. The only sounds that followed Brewer and me were a few coughs, a sneeze, Brewer’s wheeze, and the echo of our footsteps on the stained concrete floor.

Inside the holding room, Mark McAllister sat at a scarred picnic table that had been bolted to the floor. He wore handcuffs, shackles, and a standard-issue orange jumpsuit. When he looked up, I noticed a half-dozen cuts and scratches on his face and an ugly bruise just below his cheekbone. He looked smaller than he had in my office, younger, defeated, terrified. He should have been. He was charged with first-degree murder in the death of his biological father, the man I’d helped him find.

“I appreciate your coming, Mr. Raines,” he said, his voice as shaky as his smile. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

I sat across from him at the table. “I’m not sure why I did.”

Brewer snorted, dropped his bulk into a chair in the rear corner, passed gas, and scrubbed at a mustard stain on his chin. Then he reached for a National Enquirer and rattled the pages.

McAllister ignored him. “I know what they say, but I didn’t do nothing like that. I couldn’t do nothing like that, Mr. Raines, not to anybody, but especially not to my own father.”

Pure Missouri hills and as twangy as an out-of-tune banjo, his accent grated on my nerves and brought another sharp pain to the center of my gut. I’d hit middle age and had the paunch, the crow’s feet, and the receding hairline to prove it. I wasn’t happy to have been duped by a nineteen-year-old punk from Carlsbad, Missouri.

“Mr. Raines, you got to help me here...”

“You can drop the mister. Anybody who hires me under false pretenses and makes me complicit in a murder has earned the right to call me Charlie.”

He lowered his head, touched one of the cuts on his cheek. “I lied to you. I’m not saying I didn’t, but I figured if I told you everything, you wouldn’t take the job. But lying and killing are completely different things.”

When McAllister had shown up in my office to hire me to find a father that he hadn’t seen in seventeen years, he’d fed me a line. His mother had recently passed away. He was a welder at a factory in Missouri, took classes at a community college at night, and was just a month away from marrying his high-school sweetheart. Since he was an only child and had only a sprinkling of relatives, he’d decided to find the father who had deserted his family and fled to Memphis. The thought of the bride’s side of the church being packed with family while his side was completely empty made him sick to his stomach. I’d bought it all, even cut him a discount when he said he was using part of his mother’s life-insurance policy to pay me. Maybe it was because he seemed naive or maybe because my own father had left when I was ten and McAllister’s story touched a nerve.

The morning after I gave Mark his father’s address, Don McAllister was found dead, and I found out that most of what my client had said was fantasy. He wasn’t a welder or a community-college student or engaged to his childhood sweetheart. He was on parole for assault and battery, had spent half of his teenage years in reform school, and made his living by dealing drugs in his hometown.

“You’re wasting my time,” I said, angry all over again. “You lied to me, made me look like a fool at best and an accomplice in a murder at the worst. The only thing that’s keeping me from whipping your ass is that I don’t relish the idea of spending a week in lockup.”

He breathed deep, winced as if he’d taken in a lungful of needles. “I didn’t kill him, Mr. — Charlie.” He licked his lips. “I got drunk before I went to see him. Real drunk. I told myself I was just going to have one or two to calm my nerves, suck up my courage, you know? But two didn’t work so I kept drinking. Then I showed up at his house. When he opened the door, it took him a little while to realize who I was, and then he called me son.” McAllister closed his eyes. “He had no right to call me that. Not as soon as he saw me, not after what he did to me and my momma.”

“Listen...” I said.

“It made me want to cry,” McAllister said, his voice breaking. “And then it made me mad. I hauled off and hit him in the mouth.” He held up a scabbed and dirt-streaked right hand to show me the teeth marks. “Then I ran back to my car bawling like a baby. I remember pulling off the side of the road to throw up and stopping at a liquor store for another bottle. I guess I blacked out, because I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in my hotel room covered in puke and stinking like an outhouse.”

“Call a lawyer.”

“I didn’t kill him,” he said again. “Jesus, I just wanted to know him and know why he ditched us. That’s all I wanted. Now, I reckon, I’ll never know.”

I felt a tremor of sympathy and warned myself not to be a sap for a second time. Still, the tremor didn’t stop. What if the kid was telling the truth? What if it was just his bad fortune to find his old man on the night that somebody decided to shoot him? And hell, even if he had killed his father, who was I to judge? There’d been plenty of times I’d wanted to shoot my old man since he’d blundered back into my life.

“I know a good attorney, okay? I’ll contact him, have him come see you,” I said, cursing my own stupidity as I spoke the words. “That’s the best I can do.”