David Bishop - The Original Alibi

“I believe that’s your phone, dear,” the woman’s husband said. She stopped walking and fished her cell from the pocket of her windbreaker.

“Hello, Mrs. Yarbrough,” said a voice into her ear. “I see you are enjoying your first early evening walk on the beach with your new puppy. She’s such a cutie. Have you and Mr. Yarbrough named the pooch?”

“Who is this?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you stay on the line after what is about to happen.”

“What are you talking about?” Mrs. Yarbrough demanded, “Who are you?”

The leash Mrs. Yarbrough held went limp. Her white poodle slumped to the sand. “Robbie, what happened? Snookie is, I don’t know, she’s just … down.” Mrs. Yarbrough held her cell phone as if she no longer knew she had it in her hand.

Robert, her husband, bent down. His knees displaced the sand next to Snookie. “She’s dead, Mel. I think Snookie’s been shot.”

Melanie Yarbrough began bouncing on her toes, frantically waving her hands. She dropped her phone onto the beach, then bent down next to her husband and touched Snookie. He took her in his arms while she sobbed softly.

Several minutes later, Robert Yarbrough picked up his wife’s cell phone, shook off the sand, and had started to close the top when he heard a loud voice. He held the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“I’ve been waiting. Sorry about Snookie. It was necessary. You should know I took no pleasure in it.”

“Did you do this?” Mr. Yarbrough asked. “Who the hell are you?”

“To your left, near the partially burnt log, I’ve left a box for you to use to take Snookie home. It’s the right size. The inside has a soft new towel. It should do nicely.”

“You shot Snookie? Why?”

“Take Snookie home and bury her in your wife’s garden. You will hear from me. In the meantime, be glad you were not walking your newest grandson, Bobby, named after you, I presume. Your wife sometimes walks the little tike on a leash just as she walked Snookie today. I will know if you say anything about this, to anyone. If you do, Bobby Junior will be my next target.”

“But what do you want? Why us?”

“All that will be made clear. Do not fret needlessly. There will be no more violence if you do as you’re told. What will be required of you will not be difficult. It will not cost you any money. And it will be painless, if you follow orders. We’ll talk soon.”

The phone went dead.

Eleven Years Later

“ Don’t forget, boss, we got a ten o’clock appointment. It’s eight now.” Axel handed me the morning paper, and put down a tray holding a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, a carafe of coffee, two cups, and a small plate of buttered English muffins.

It was pleasant enough sitting on the balcony, a little chilly but that’s why they made robes.

Axel had been working for me only a couple of weeks, but we’d known each other for years in a very different setting. We were cellmates during my four years in state prison. I looked up. “Isn’t that my shirt you’re wearing?”

“Yeah.”

“And my belt, why are you wearing my belt?”

“You wouldn’t want your pants to fall down, would you, boss?”

“No, of course I wouldn’t. And before you set up any more of these appointments, let me remind you I write mysteries. I don’t handle cases in real life.”

“You was a homicide dick and a good one from what I hear. And you got yourself a PI license.”

“I wanted to prove I could get the license after the governor pardoned me. I write murder mysteries.”

“Aren’t you cold out here, boss?” Axel wrapped his arms around himself, gripping his biceps. “You wanna go inside?”

“It’s a little nippy, but I’ll stick for a while. I do wish they made robes in various lengths. No reason they can’t.” I’d been six-three since the eleventh grade but over the years robes kept getting shorter.

Axel had been inside close to forty years, during which he became as sweet a senior citizen as you’ll ever know. Forty-one years ago, a half-million dollar payroll had been taken by a lone gunman, without violence. The jury had found Axel guilty. Axel had never changed his claim of innocence, but he has sometimes winked at me when the subject came up. The fact they had never found the money is likely why they held onto Axel over the years, while letting out younger hard-asses because of the overpopulation of prisons. For his last five years he had been an administrative assistant for the warden, doing a lot of his online research. Axel was a whiz using computers. I helped his parole along with the promise of a job.

In these first few weeks, his duties included trips to the dry cleaners and doing the home laundry and keeping the place clean. Axel always kept our cell neat, and he carried that forward to caring for my condo. I had to go with him to shop for groceries because Axel wasn’t up to speed on driving anymore. He planned to take care of that but hadn’t as yet. As you can see, his job description lacked clarity, it would evolve or so we imagined.

Unfortunately, we wore clothes similar enough in size for Axel was an even six feet. For each wearing, he had hand-altered my slacks by rolling up the pant legs. He also adjusted for our different waist measurements. I wear size thirty-eight. I’m guessing his at thirty-six, maybe thirty-four because he had my belt two notches tighter, which meant there would now be his-and-mine cinch marks in the leather.

“Boss, you remember that movie where Jack Nicholson’s character said, ‘never waste a boner and never trust a fart.’ Well, that man was a prophet.” Then Axel rushed inside. The Bucket List was a wonderful movie, but I didn’t like him quoting that line while he was wearing my slacks. I settled back and looked at the newspaper with an eye out for Axel’s return.

A few minutes later, Axel came back out. I felt some relief from his still wearing the same pair of my pants. He ran his hand across his mostly hairless head, and then wiped that hand on the backside of my pants.

“You helped save Clarice Talmadge,” he said, as if he had never left the conversation. “I kept up with that story before you got me sprung.”

I looked over at a gull circling past the balcony just off the railing. “I didn’t get you sprung. The parole board was about to release you anyway. You’d been in long enough. I just tossed a job offer in the mix. That’s all.”

“That’s what tipped the scales.” Axel looked over at the gull that squawked while making its third pass.

Axel was sort of like a friend you took under your wing after he had spent thirty to forty years in a coma. I knew why the gulls, there were three now, were squawking. Axel sometimes threw pieces of bread out over the rail and, with me out here, he hadn’t this morning. Feeding the birds was against building policy. I’d have to speak to him about it, but for now I couldn’t refuse him the kind of small pleasures he had been denied for decades.

“You got out because you were no longer a threat to society, maybe to my wardrobe, but not to society.”

“Well, that don’t change the brilliant way you saved Clarice Talmadge’s ass and, from what I’ve seen in the hallway, I’m glad you did, although from what I hear the woman’s not the swiftest card in the deck.”

“Now where did you hear that?”

“From Clara Birnbaum down on my floor, the former school teacher, she says Clarice spells Cincinnati with an ‘s.’”

“That’s Clara. She’s a good lady but she’s jealous of Clarice.”