Lawrence Block - The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Murder was easy. But how did you get away with it?

No alibi could save her. She could be at a state dinner at the White House when her husband was killed, and they’d haul her in just the same, and be sure she’d had a hand in it. And somewhere along the way they’d take a look at him.

And even if they both held up, and there were no witnesses and zero physical evidence, Radburn and his fellows in law enforcement would know.

He thought about the movie, Double Indemnity . Thought about Edward G. Robinson, dogged and resourceful. Radburn was a good old country boy, enjoying his meals and his TV, but would he be any less dogged? Any less resourceful?

No evidence? Nothing that would stand up in court?

The Otterbein children could still file a wrongful death suit. The standards of proof were very different in civil court, and you didn’t need the unanimous agreement of the jurors. If you had a preponderance of the evidence and the requisite number of jurors, you got your decision.

And it would keep her from collecting a dime. The insurance company would freeze her claim or deny it outright, and there’d be no inheritance. All she’d wind up with, along with her widow’s weeds, was a reputation that would cling to her like a bad smell for the rest of her life.

Lisa Yarrow. Her husband was murdered, you know. Oh, they could never prove anything, but she was behind it. I mean, it was common knowledge.

Moving away wouldn’t help. Not with the 24-hour news cycle, not with CNN and MSNBC, not with Nancy Grace and American Justice and three or four cable channels with round-the-clock true crime shows. Not with the fucking internet.

“He can run but he can’t hide.” Joe Louis had said that of Billy Conn, and he’d been talking about a boxing ring twenty feet square. Now it was true of the whole world. You could run, but you couldn’t hide.

So how could you get away with it?

He remembered a lecture at John Jay, a retired medical examiner talking about his life’s work. “The best way to commit murder and get away with it,” he said, “is to make it look like something other than murder. If it goes in the books as natural or accidental death, nobody’s going to put you in jail for it.

“So how do you achieve that enviable result? Well, there are two very good ways, and the first is to push the victim from a high window. From a sufficient height, the chances of survival are virtually nil. And, in the absence of witnesses, there’s no way anybody can possibly tell whether the late lamented jumped or fell or was pushed.”

And the fellow had waited for someone to ask him the other very good way.

“Oh, that’s simple,” he’d said, when the question came. “Nothing to it, really. Just commit your homicide in Chicago.”

That got the expected laugh, and made it clear what opinion the ME held of his counterpart in Cook County. And finding a high enough window within fifty miles of Gallatin County was about as feasible as hauling George Otterbein to Chicago and drowning him in Lake Michigan.

Still, there had to be a way.

He put in time online, doing all manner of searches, then dutifully clearing his history and deleting cookies. With his police background and his present line of work, he had legitimate reasons to bone up on forensics, but even so he didn’t want to leave a trail.

His amateur dusting and cleaning would do for now. And when it was all over, assuming it went as he intended for it to go, he might want to take an extra precaution and drop his laptop — or at the very least the hard drive — into the creek behind the house. The brackish water would finish the job.

Forensics. He’d watched the cop shows, the fictional ones like CSI and Law & Order , and he knew that they drove real-life cops and prosecutors nuts, because it was all so much easier on TV. Most departments didn’t have the resources for that kind of testing, especially in a North Florida backwater.

But there was still DNA, wherever you were. And there were still tox screens. And if George Otterbein died in a car crash, somebody would give the vehicle the automotive equivalent of an all-out autopsy, which is what George would get if he had a heart attack or stroked out or drowned in the bathtub.

Okay, nobody said this was going to be easy.

He left the house, drove into town, caught Sheriff Radburn in his office. “Nothing,” he reported. “If there’s a boyfriend, he must be living in her attic. I leave her alone most of the time, but whenever I track her there’s nothing doing. She goes shopping, she gets her hair done, she goes to work, she goes home. I’m wasting my time and the county’s money.”

“But not too much of either, I don’t suppose.”

“No, and some of it I won’t bill for. I got on her tail the other day and she led me to a mall way the hell south of town. There was a movie house at one end of it, and that’s where she went.”

“So you turned around and came home?”

“No, I watched the movie, and I’m not planning to bill the county for my ticket.”

“Well, that’s good to know.”

“There’s something else you should know,” he said. “I dropped in on George Otterbein a few days ago. I wanted a look at him, so I turned up at his office with some story about a missing heir with the same name.”

“Oh?”

“He poured me a drink and listened to what I had to say, and it didn’t lead anywhere because there was nowhere for it to lead. And then a few days later he called me and hired me.”

The sheriff leaned back in his chair. “To check on his wife,” he said.

“No, he never even mentioned her. What he wanted was for me to run some background checks on some of his tenants. I like to call it legwork, but the fingers get more exercise than the legs.”

“How’s that?”

He mimed typing. “They do the walking,” he said, “through the internet. The point is, if I’m working for him—”

“You shouldn’t be investigating his wife.”

“I’m not sure of the ethics of it,” he said, “but it’s not as though I was getting anywhere.”

“No, Doak, and I’m beginning to agree with you that there’s nowhere to get. I think she was serious enough when she told Gonson to set her up with a hit man, and I think something scared her off. It’s beginning to look like she’s staying scared.”

“Or just realized murder’s a bigger step than she’s prepared to take.”

“Or that,” Radburn said. “Oh, if George turns up with a couple of bullets in him, she’s the first person I’ll want to talk to. Think it’ll happen?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. Meantime, at least you got yourself a client.”

He drove from Radburn’s office to Stapleton Terrace and parked where he could keep an eye on the house. There was a single car parked out in front, a Korean compact that he recognized as Ashley Hannon’s.

Go and get yourself pregnant, he thought, and Georgie Boy’ll spring for a Lexus.

He checked his watch. Just past ten-thirty, and maybe she was a lady of leisure, maybe she never rolled out of bed before noon. Or maybe she was out jogging. She was young and fit, and people were crazy enough to do that sort of thing, even in Florida with summer coming on.

No, there she was, walking out her front door, dressed like those Eastern European girls who’d bored him senseless playing tennis on TV. The same blonde hair, but hers was curly. A short white skirt, a white top. No headband, and no tennis racquet, either, just a canvas tote bag over her shoulder and a set of keys in her hand, and she triggered the remote to unlock the car door, got in it and drove off.

George had given him a key, but not without getting an explanation first. Two of them, in fact, because the first one Doak floated got shot down.