Ed Gorman - Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Scotty wore a faded khaki shirt and trousers. A uniform, like. He took his feet down from the Pepsi case and stood up, touching his hands to his lower back. “I’m gettin’ old.” Before I could disagree politely, he said, “You can have your pick today.”

He nodded to two stacked rows of aluminum canoes set against the front left wall of his office. Most of them were in good condition. A few yards away, the river ran, smelling faintly of fish. Out on the water a red speedboat moved fast and vivid through the water. The small dock he’d built for himself was a spot for keggers during the summer. The men, mostly veterans who worked with Dad at the plant, would play a softball game (it was jokingly called The Very Slow Pitch League) and then end up drinking beer half the night at Scotty’s dock. Dad used to take me along sometimes when I was ten or so. I loved the war stories. Even then I knew they were exaggerated for effect but I didn’t care. Every once in a while the stories weren’t bravado, though, and one of the guys would choke up and start crying, thinking of some friend dead back there in Europe or the South Pacific, and it was funny because it was the only time I’d ever seen a male person cry when the other male persons around him didn’t get uptight or ashamed. Couple of them would go over to the guy and slide their hand around his shoulder and kinda stay there like that till the guy stopped crying. My cousin was like that when he came back from Korea. Up and down the emotional scale a lot. He finally ended up in the bughouse, though nobody in the family ever brought it up. If somebody asked how Tim was doing, Mom and Dad would just say that he was “away for a while.”

“No canoes today, Scotty. Sorry. I’m working on something and I was hoping maybe you could help me a little bit.”

“Me? Now that’s a new one. Some kind of criminal case, you mean?”

“Uh-huh. I’m told there’s a woman lives up the road in a trailer. Used to be friends with Karen Hastings.”

He frowned. “Ross Murdoch. That boy’s in trouble.” Stuck a Chesterfield between his lips. “Too bad. He was the only one of those rich guys who was decent. He’d come out here once in a while with his daughter when she was high school age. They were both real nice. Just average people, like. Not puttin’ on any airs or anything, not askin’ for any special treatment. They’d always go to that little summer house he kept over there on that hill across the bend down there. You can’t see it from here. But he enjoyed it, I know that much.” He grinned. “Wouldn’t be bad, though, havin’ a girl as good lookin’ as Karen was stashed away somewhere.”

“She come down here a lot?”

“Not a lot but four, five times a summer. Janice Wilson was the one who came down a lot.”

“She the one lives up the road in the trailer?”

“Uh-huh. Little silver Airstream. Just about right for one woman, I guess. She gave me a beer one day after I worked on her car. Sat inside her trailer. She’s got it fixed up pretty good.” A smile. “Just like she’s got herself fixed up pretty good. She just wore a halter and shorts that day. Tell you, I felt like I was eighteen again. Smart gal, too. Lotsa books in her trailer. A little distant, though, that’s the only thing. She’s friendly and all but you never feel she’s opening up at all. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“S’pose Cliffie’ll be checkin’ her out, too.”

“I suppose.” I stared out at the choppy water. Then back at Scotty. “I hear she’s got a temper.”

He laughed. “Yep. She sure does. Especially with men who put the make on her real obvious-like. She’s strictly look-but-don’t-touch.”

“Ever see her with anybody except the Hastings woman?”

He thought a moment. “Nope. Don’t think so.”

“No other girl friends? No male friends?”

“I’ll give it some thought, Sam. But off the top of my head, I’d say no. Wasn’t like she hung around here or anything.”

I looked up the road. “Well, I’ll see if she’s in. See if she’ll talk to me.”

He gave me a friendly fake-punch on the arm. “Sure wish I was your age again and got to hang around gals like Janice Wilson. Sure wish I was.”

SEVENTEEN

THIRTY MINUTES LATER, I started making my rounds. Janice Wilson hadn’t been in so I decided to get the real scut work over with. I called Mike Hardin in the hospital. He sounded strong and sure on the phone. “The afternoon before Ross found her in the bomb shelter? I’d have to think about it.”

I heard a nurse squeak into the room.

“She doesn’t think I should talk to you, McCain,” he said. “She claims I’m too weak. How do you like that? She’s standing at the end of my bed with her hands on her hips. She’s got very nice hips.” Then: “I just remembered. Hunting. I was hunting. You can check with my secretary, if you’d like.”

“Who’d you go with?”

“Go with? I only hunt alone if I can help it. Hunting’s something I take very seriously. I hate to spoil it by turning it into a social event. A bunch of middle-aged drunks wandering around in the boonies, that’s not my style.”

“So you don’t have an alibi.”

“I don’t like the tone of that. If I tell you I was hunting, I was hunting. My secretary knows.”

“She knows what you told her.”

“You know what? I think this pretty nurse standing at the end of my bed has a real good idea. I’m not going to talk to you any more.”

He slammed the phone.

Peter Carlson took my call. “I should tell you, I have a lawyer now.” He spoke as if from a great height, the way he did to all humanity.

“You tell your lawyer that you fell in love with Karen Hastings?”

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, McCain.”

“Don’t I? And if I’m not mistaken, you roughed her up some, too. I guess that’s one way of expressing your love.”

“This is all bullshit and if you start spreading it around, I’ll sue you for libel.”

“Slander. Common mistake. Libel is the written word.”

“What is it you want, anyway?”

“Where were you the afternoon before Karen Hastings’s body was found?”

“Right here in my office.”

“You have witnesses?”

“Several, in fact. We had a staff meeting that afternoon.”

“All afternoon?”

“Most of it. We didn’t get started till one-thirty. I think I’ve said all I’m going to now, McCain.”

He hung up, too.

He had what seemed to be an alibi but it was one of those that could be taken apart and found wanting, I was sure. If the meeting at the Murdoch mansion was prearranged, the killer could have met her there—or picked her up and driven her there himself—killed her and left, all within an hour or so.

When you study trials in law school, you see how many juries are swayed by small lies, particularly alibis. While it sounds reasonable for a man to forget what he’d been doing for two or three hours a month or two previous, it presents a great opportunity for the prosecutor. If the DA can prove that the man did a couple of things he’d almost certainly remember—made a substantial purchase, spent a substantial amount of time with somebody, was involved in a substantial traffic accident—the prosecutor can then say that he finds it odd that the man on trial would forget that. He can also say that the traffic accident incident took no more than forty-five minutes according to the other driver and the cops on the scene—leaving the man on trial with two hours he still can’t account for. Where were you the other two hours? You’re not going to get a conviction on the basis of these questions but you are going to make the jury wonder if the man is honest and forthright. And he has left the two unaccounted-for hours dangling out there. Trials are mosaics. They rarely have the kind of aha! moments you see on TV.