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

“I don’t think so.”

He lifted his head, wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. “You don’t believe his son did it?”

“I did, but now I don’t think so.”

“I hope that’s true. You have no idea how I’ve blamed myself, how guilty I’ve felt.”

“The photographs. Did he date them?”

“Most photographers do.”

“Did he?”

He puffed his cheeks as if he were trying to figure out a complex equation and then nodded. “Yes, I’m certain he did.”

“Bring me the portfolio.”

Three hours later, I found Elswick and Johnson at the Alligator, drinking their way through their lunch hour. Elswick glared; Johnson wiped his mouth on a paper napkin, balled it up, and dropped it on a plate smeared with barbecue sauce and ketchup.

“You guys are going to have to find a new patsy,” I said.

Elswick glanced at Johnson and then back at me. “Are you drunk or just stupid, Raines?”

I sat at their table, reached into the pocket of my windbreaker, clicked on a microcassette recorder, and then pulled out my pack of Kools. “Mark McAllister is going to walk for his father’s murder.”

“Both,” Johnson said. “He’s drunk and he’s stupid.”

“I found the kid an alibi. As it turns out, while his old man was being murdered, Mark McAllister was in the process of being robbed by a Whitehaven hooker and her pimp.”

“That’s a good one, Raines. You keep saying it enough times, someone might believe you.”

“But not us,” Elswick added.

I lit a cigarette, ignored their frowns. “Her conscience was bothering her. Hooker or not, she didn’t want to see an innocent kid go down for a murder he didn’t commit. She’s already given her statement to Nate Randolph. Now, her pimp’s a different story, a hard case who drifted into town a few weeks ago, drifted out right after the murder.”

“This is crap, Raines,” Elswick said.

I blew a lungful of smoke in his face. “You guys didn’t find what you were looking for. You killed Don McAllister for nothing. He didn’t have the photographs and had no idea what they meant anyway.” I smiled. “A friend of mine blew up the picture. I could even see the latex gloves you guys wore to cover the gunpowder residue when you knocked off Little Vinnie’s bagman at Riverside Park.”

“Man, you’ve lost your mind,” Johnson said, but neither of them made a move to walk away.

“My friend found the film, went back, developed a couple more pictures. You guys are never the stars but you’re there in three of them.”

“Waste of time,” Elswick said. “Let’s get out of here.”

I snubbed my cigarette, went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “With computer enhancement, I bet you could read the serial numbers on the .22 that Johnson dropped in that trash can next to the tulip bed. You seemed surprised. That’s when you realized you’d been photographed, right?”

“To hell with you, Raines,” Elswick said.

“Something needs to be done about corruption in the police force. You have any idea how many desk-sitters were willing to let me look at your logs when I waved around a hundred dollars?” I lit another cigarette, changed my mind, and dropped it into Elswick’s glass. “You two were unaccounted for every time one of Montesi’s men got robbed and killed, and you caught the McAllister case because you were the first to arrive at the scene. Just happened to be in the neighborhood, huh?” I leaned forward. “Your witness put Mark McAllister on the scene earlier. When you found him, everything fell into place.” I met Elswick’s clear blue eyes. “But now it’s unraveling. It’s not going to take a lot of leaning on Gil Brewer before he rolls over on you two for hiring him to hang Mark McAllister in his cell.”

Something passed between them. I had a good idea that something was an unspoken agreement to rid the world of Gil Brewer at their first opportunity. But that was all right with me. I didn’t see that the world would be any worse off with his passing.

“You think you can prove any of it, take it to Internal Affairs,” Elswick said. “After they clear us, maybe we’ll have a long talk with you about slander.”

“Or maybe we won’t bother to talk,” Johnson said.

“Just stay away from Mark McAllister. The kid’s a jerk, but he doesn’t deserve to be framed for murder. When he gets better, let him walk away. If you do, you’ll save yourselves the grief of an I.A. investigation.”

“Let’s pretend this crap is true, and let’s say that the kid walks, you wouldn’t go whispering a bunch of nonsense in Lieutenant Randolph’s ear?”

“Right.”

“And this photograph that doesn’t exist...” Elswick said.

“Would stay in my lawyer’s safe. We’ll call it protection against any bad decision you might make.”

“That’s pretty good,” Johnson said. “You ought to write for television.”

They stood in unison. “Thanks for your help with everything, Charlie,” Elswick said. “I hate to see a case come to a dead end, but better it go Cold Case than an innocent kid spend the rest of his life in prison.”

“We’ll see you around,” Johnson said. “Give your client our best wishes and tell him that we’re sorry for the misunderstanding.”

A week and a half later, I sat on a bench at the Riverside Park, smoking a cigarette and waiting. In the last couple of days, the weather had warmed and the air had gotten muggy, a reminder that summer heat was hunkering on the horizon. Still, I wore a windbreaker and sweated as I watched kids run helter-skelter through the playground. It was the kind of day that Don McAllister would have loved.

When Mark McAllister was released, Blake Roberts went with me to pick him up and drop him at the bus station. It was awkward. Roberts kept looking at the kid as if he wanted to grab him, kiss him, and remind him to eat his vegetables. McAllister didn’t have a lot to say, but the sneer on his lips and the hardness in his eyes said he knew exactly what kind of relationship Roberts had had with his father. Still, when Roberts told Mark that his father had loved him, truly loved him, the kid managed to smile and shed a quick tear that I hope was genuine.

Later that evening, I finished my last two obligations to the McAllister case. The first was easy. I found Loretta Hampton trolling for tricks outside a Whitehaven nightclub, slipped her an envelope with five one-hundred-dollar bills, her price for providing Mark McAllister with an alibi. The second was harder. I spent an hour and a half sitting in my car, nipping from a half-pint of bourbon and telling myself that I wasn’t going to do what I had in mind. Then I picked up an oversized envelope with Don McAllister’s photographs, copies I’d made of the police logs, and the microcassette tape that I’d recorded at the Alligator. None of it was solid evidence or had a chance of holding up in court, but I was parked outside of a strip club on Brooks Road, not the hall of justice.

Now I finished my smoke, ignored frowns from a couple of health freaks who were jogging the River Walk, and then spotted the man I’d been waiting for. He looked as out of place in a park filled with toddlers and their adoring parents as the Pope would have looked in one of the strip clubs or massage parlors that the man operated. He was tall, muscled, in his early sixties. He wore jeans, a black leather jacket with studs, dark glasses, and lots of rings — a habit that had earned him his street name. Johnny Rings. I’d known him off and on for fifteen years. In that time he’d risen from a part-time bookie to captain of one of the Montesi crews.

“Nice day, huh?” he said, sitting beside me on the bench and slicking back his hairspray-stiff hair. “I need to get out of the office more, enjoy the weather.”