David Bishop - The Original Alibi

“To Salt,” I repeated. “Let’s hope he went somewhere the scum can’t get in.”

“So, how’s the writing business? You got something new coming out soon?”

“In a couple of months. My publisher’s bugging me to get through the proof. I shouldn’t have taken the job from General Whittaker. I went there planning to turn him down.”

“What happened?”

“The old man’s a master strategist. He left me standing in the corner holding a wet paintbrush. I don’t know. In the end, as a soldier he did a lot for us. It could also be because I’m a dumb fuck. I guess that tells it best.”

“Why’s your publisher pressing you?”

“The way it works, the publisher pressures my agent. My agent pressures me. Everyone with a piece wants me to get the next book out.”

“Deadlines,” Fidge says while shaking his head. “Just like at the department, the suits upstairs keep pushing.”

“This is the last book I’m doing for him or any of the big name publishers. They’re not bad people, it’s just the publishing business has left them clinging to a leaky boat. Today’s book buyers are asked to pay too much because of all the layers that stand between the author and the reader. I’m going to start self-publishing. I’ll use a work-for-hire publisher so I can control the rights to my own books. That way I can set lower prices, make a good living and protect my readers from getting ripped off.”

“And you can work at a pace you choose without the suits putting the screws to you. So, how’s Helen?”

“How the hell would I know? We’re divorced.”

“Okay. How’s the divorce going?”

“Divorce is … it stinks. Hell. It’s shit.”

“If it’s shit, it would stink,” Fidge said. We looked at each other. Then he laughed. I laughed. “Fuck it, Matthew.”

We touched bottles. I nodded, and then picked up the pictures from the Corrigan scene. Fidge had made me copies of all the file docs but not the pictures. Other than showing Ileana dead, the photos revealed nothing.

“The place doesn’t look tossed. Anything stolen?” I asked.

“Not so’s we could tell. And I doubt it. Her jewelry box had some rather expensive pieces. Things I doubt a secretary could afford. Her folks were struggling middle class so the diamonds weren’t family presents.”

“Where’d she get them?”

“The neighbors spoke of a couple of luxury cars that would be there from time to time. They never saw the drivers. A good guess she had a couple of part-timers besides Eddie Whittaker. The landlord said the rent always came from her. On her salary, the rent would have been a stretch, the diamonds impossible.”

“Was she hooking?”

“No arrests. My guess, she did it for the rent and diamonds. She had a straight job and her boss and coworkers spoke well of her.”

“What did Eddie Whittaker have to say about all that?”

Fidge took a moment to glance at his case notes in the file. “He said he didn’t know of any other men in her life. As for the expensive stuff, he not only claimed he didn’t buy it, he said he never saw any of it. I sure remember his jaws being tight when I showed him. A check of his bank account and credit cards didn’t show any purchases or cash withdrawals that could cover even one piece of that jewelry.”

“Stacks up like a straight gal with at least one sugar daddy?”

“That’s how I added it, but I never got no names. Her gal pals at work only knew about Eddie Whittaker. We had some unidentified prints at the scene we could never connect up. They could’ve been left by Mr. Jewelry Buyer, or the cable guy, or somebody who came to some party she threw.”

Fidge and I talked about the case for a while longer, but nothing more worthy of mention. The precise facts were plain and clear, a quick arrest of Eddie followed by his quicker release. Since then, eleven years of wind pudding.

I went out Fidge’s back door. My stomach had processed enough of the burger and fries that my bloat had shrunk from the size of a garage to the size of a golf cart. The beers had tasted good, but I expected a coming clash with the banana milk shake I drank with my burger.

I stopped at the supermarket and then gassed up the car. When I got home, Axel was not there. My guess he was still down at Mackie’s with his buds. Some nights he went over to Clara Birnbaum’s to watch an old movie. After putting the groceries away, I went down the hall to see Clarice Talmadge. Clarice was the widow I had helped when she had been arrested for murdering her husband, Garson, about a year ago. Clarice had been innocent of anything more than an overactive sex life, with the kind of body you see featured on television helping to sell Cadillacs and cosmetics.

Since her husband’s murder, I periodically made myself available to Clarice. I also liked her. She’s smart, and has a great sense of humor, nearly as bawdy as Fidge’s wife. When her husband, Garson, died, with what he left her, she became wealthy. Clarice and I had close to a divorced man’s perfect relationship. No strings. No pressure. She enjoyed that and she had no desire to marry again. She also liked to sleep alone so there was no awkwardness about getting up and going home afterwards. Like I said, Clarice is the perfect set up for a divorced guy, particularly one still stirring hot ashes for his ex-wife. But keep that to yourself.

Around one in the morning, I drifted back down the hall to my place. Axel had returned and was waiting up like Dr. Watson always did for Sherlock Holmes. I spent the next hour bringing my loyal staff man up on what Fidge had told me. The cop’s file was cold with no real leads. The file did have the names and addresses for all the witnesses. Those who got Eddie Whittaker arrested, as well as those who got him released. That gave me some places to begin poking around. Hopefully some of the addresses would still be good.

*

At six a.m. Fidge woke me. He was at the beach and it was raining, a drizzle more than a rain, but the gusts off the ocean were hearty with a wind chill number he said I wouldn’t want to know. He told me to come down. He’d explain then.

When I got there, I saw Fidge wearing a black stocking cap. From the back he looked like a chest of drawers balancing a bowling ball.

The main attraction turned out to be a soggy homicide lying in the surf. The ID pulled from the dead guy’s wet wallet identified him as Cory Jackson. After a minute, the name came to me and I knew why Fidge had called me to share the event. People always say, the name rang a bell, but I always thought that was silly. Cory Jackson had been the eyewitness who had seen Eddie Whittaker’s fiancee, Ileana Corrigan, murdered in her beach house. Mr. Jackson worked at a restaurant up the beach from where we stood over his body. At least he worked there back on the day he pointed his finger at Eddie Whittaker. The restaurant didn’t serve the fishing trade so it would be closed this early. Later in the day, Fidge would check to see if Jackson still worked there. The important point being that while both Jackson and the restaurant had been closed only the restaurant would reopen. The hole in Cory Jackson’s forehead was bigger and rougher around the edges than the hole in the back of his head. He had been shot from behind.

There were no tracks, not even Jackson’s. The tide had come and gone, smoothing the sand on its way out. This suggested he had been shot sometime last night before the high tide came fully in. His wet clothes seconded that motion. There were no powder burns around the entry wound so the shooter had not been especially close. Neither Fidge nor I mentioned the old Whittaker case, but we were both thinking the same thing. Someone involved in that eleven-year-old case may have chosen to remove the only supposed eyewitness to the killing of Ileana Corrigan. That, or Cory Jackson getting rubbed out the day after I started messing in the case was pure coincidence. In my view, such coincidences were rarely coincidences.