David Bishop - The Original Alibi

“‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m with ya. Just don’t pull that trigger.’

“He said, ‘When you see him in the news, you’re to go to the cops. Tell them that a few minutes past nine the night the woman was killed, this guy bought gas from you at the station. That he paid cash. You don’t recall his car, but you remember him because so few people pay cash these days.’

“When I tried to look back over my shoulder, he hit me in the side of the head with his frigging flashlight. ‘Eyes front,’ he said. ‘Study this picture.’ He pointed out a slight nick in the side of the dude’s ear and his square chin. His hair, you know, stuff to help me remember the guy. ‘They’ll do a lineup. Pick him out. Then stick to your story. That’s it, a piece of cake for ten thousand. Drop the ball and I’ll drop you and you won’t get up.’

“I did it just that way. I got my other eight thousand and nothing after that until you show up now. I wouldn’t be telling you shit if that other witness hadn’t gotten iced.”

“Do you remember the guy’s name that you identified?”

“Sure. Eddie Whittaker. Something like that falls in your lap, you remember, man.”

After a few more questions I verified he had not previously known Eddie or Cory Jackson and that he got the rest of his money after Eddie had been released. Pretty much the same story I had gotten from Cory Jackson, secondhand through his half brother, Quirt Brown.

The other three witnesses, the ones who caused Eddie to be released, were more reliable than Cory Jackson and Tommy Montoya. As I recalled, one was a local retired middle school principal and the other two were a husband and wife. He retired from a career as a bank manager, back in the days when bankers were considered respectable. She retired from being a registered nurse. From the D.A.’s viewpoint, three solid citizens trumped a pair of losers so it added up to cutting Eddie Whittaker loose. Right now, things were looking good for the general; his grandson Eddie was coming up clean as a choir boy.

I could see three possibilities, maybe more would come to me later. The first went something like this: Somebody had wanted Ileana dead for their own reasons and felt it would work best if there was a patsy set to take the fall and close the investigation into her death. It could have been one of the sugar daddies who were paying her rent and buying her expensive baubles. Thus the real killer bribed and frightened Jackson and Montoya into falsely setting up Eddie Whittaker as the patsy. The plan soured when three law-abiding citizens just happened to see Eddie dining right where he said he had dined.

Number two spread out this way: The murderer didn’t know Eddie or Ileana, using them both as a ruse in a violent confidence game wherein the real target was the general, or, more accurately, the general’s bank account. This scenario required the killer have a complex plan that would include the two losers to falsely accuse Eddie, and some citizens with solid credentials to come forward to alibi Eddie off the hot seat. Of course, for the second part to happen, the general would first need to pay the shakedown. If he didn’t, Eddie would take the fall. It would also require the illicit cooperation of three people we generally don’t think of being the types who take part in this kind of chicanery.

The last but not least scenario was that Eddie did kill his fiancee. But this stacking of the facts would again require the assumption that three good people would falsely testify to get him off the hook. If they were salt of the earth folks as they appeared on the surface, they would not agree to commit perjury in a murder case. Fidge said the D.A. looked into the three of them and they had all come up solid.

I needed to confront Eddie. To get in his face and get a read on him. First, I needed to get the wheels in motion to find out everything I could about the bank manager, the RN, and the retired middle-school principal. That meant bringing Axel on board may have been a really good idea. Of course he was handicapped because he still hadn’t gotten his license to drive.

*

It had been a long day, but I wasn’t ready to sleep. Not yet. I had planned to talk with Axel, but he had gone downstairs to his place by the time I got back. We’d talk in the morning. I took off my day clothes, down to my shorts, pulled on a t-shirt and my too-short robe. Then turned on some Miles Davis and cracked the slider to the patio so the sounds of Mr. Davis could follow me outside. I got a snifter of Irish for sipping, and tugged on my Dodgers’ cap with a sweat ring obvious even in the ambient light.

Sitting in the patio recliner reminded me of late nights in prison. Just the quiet, after Axel had fallen asleep on the upper bunk. I’d think about whatever and leave my senses to snag on sounds and stray light. Out here on the patio, I didn’t have all the sounds and sightings down pat. Not yet, but I would. There was a greater variety of sounds here than in prison. Inside it mostly came down to differentiating between the steps of the various guards. Other sounds were mostly the farts, snores, coughs, and sometimes muffled sobs of inmates. Newer cons usually paced their cells, but that generally ended in a few weeks. Once in a while, a light would slide silently through the lockup when a guard opened a distant door. Lights and sounds were the only things that really escaped from anywhere inside stir.

My life had become much different from what I expected while growing up. It started for me, like it may have started for you. Mom could make any hurt go away. Dad could fix anything. The nuns who taught at the Catholic school weren’t gods; they just demanded to be treated as such. But we learned. We had to, our lives depended on our doing so. None of this mushy treatment kids get today in the public schools.

When my age rolled into double figures I started to see the world differently. Mom and dad weren’t perfect. They didn’t have all the answers. By the teen years, my head was where most teens’ were, angry at my folks for letting me down. For not deserving to be on the pedestal I had put them on, a pedestal I now realize they never claimed they deserved. At that point, in ever growing gobs, I turned to the real source of knowledge, other teenagers. My pals became the center of my universe. Along about that same time the girls started sticking their noses under the boys’ tent and things changed again. Tits. Legs. I still don’t understand how the girls all seemed to instinctively know how to look from the corner of their eyes, or turn to display the profiles of their breasts. Billy Bataglia, my tightest bud, said the girls learned it watching the vamps in the movies. That was about the time the girls started riding the cotton pony a few days each month, while we struggled to learn that women had two personalities when one was more than we were ready to handle. That last point, still hasn’t changed all that much.

Life kept advancing. I no longer carried my Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox. I spent mornings watching the clock in the classroom, urging it to move quicker. When lunchtime finally came, I dashed to the cafeteria and sat near Marilyn who had just transferred into our school from who knows where-heaven would have been my guess. She wore tight sweaters. Tight enough that rumors claimed the school had once called her mother to come and take her home to change clothes. One of the boys who happened to be in the office at the time said Marilyn’s mother had bigger bazooms and wore a tighter sweater than her daughter. That boy, who had been sent to the vice principal’s office for a paddling, likely smiled all the way through it.

By the age of sixteen, Mom and Dad’s image was totally tarnished, and Hoppy was out of my life except for watching him on TV when no one else was home. Life had lost its black or white clarity. I started knocking ever bigger hunks out of my childhood ideas about good and evil, reshaping it all into what I somehow concluded was reality. When I got confused my friends had the answers. The world of teens is the world where the blind arrogantly lead the blind, feeling smarter while the whole bunch of them stumble through puberty.