Tom Lowe - The 24th Letter

“I can’t drink. I have to meet a priest in a few minutes. Booze probably wouldn’t go over too well, although I have plenty of reasons to get hammered.” O’Brien knelt down by Max and scratched her behind the ears. He looked straight at Collins, his eyes searching his friend’s face. “Dave, what’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made?”

“You want the top-ten list or just the one enormous fuck up I’ve thought about for the last few years?”

“Yeah, that one sounds like a qualifier.”

“Staying too long at a job I didn’t believe in anymore. Everybody is dealt the same deck of time, twenty-four-seven. If you’re real dumb, you waste that deck, holding the cards too close, afraid to really gamble and do what you should. So you stay in the game too long, and in the end you’ve only cheated yourself.” Collins sipped his glass of red wine and added, “All right. Since we’re fessin’ up. Let’s hear your mistake of a lifetime, although I’ve had considerably more time to screw up things than you.”

O’Brien looked at his watch. “In eighty-four hours, I could be the reason an innocent man dies.”

Dave Collins put his wine glass down on the table in the center of the cockpit. He rubbed the end of a finger across the stubble of his right cheek, his eyes filled with challenge. He said, “We’re talking about mistakes that have already happened, in the past tense. It sounds like yours is in the future, at least eighty-four hours in the future. So it’s not a mistake, at least not yet.”

“It’s a horrific dominoes effect. The last one that falls is the execution of a potentially innocent man. The first one that started this was when I arrested the man eleven years ago. State’s giving him a lethal cocktail. I have to do something to stop it.”

Collins inhaled through his nostrils like a vacuum cleaner, his big chest swelling, and as he exhaled, a slight whistle sound came from his pursed lips. “Step aboard. This sounds like some deep defecation my friend. I’ll shut up and listen while I’m preparing Grouper ‘Cronus style.’ You can begin at the beginning.”

O’Brien lifted Max up, stepped into the cockpit, and followed Collins into the galley.

Max sat patiently, watching Collins’s every move as he prepared the food. He squeezed a cut lemon over a large piece of grouper while O’Brien was finishing the story. O’Brien left nothing out, telling him everything he could remember from the murder scene to the jury returning with a guilty-as-charged verdict.

Collins closed the door to the small oven, sat on a barstool, swirled the syrah in his glass. “Okay, Sean…you believe this con, Sam Spelling, saw the killer, found the murder weapon, hid the knife, and blackmailed the killer eleven years ago?”

“Considering the circumstances, a deathbed confession with a priest I know well and trust, the fact that somebody took a shot at Spelling…yeah, maybe.”

“But, as you said, you don’t know if that shot was linked to Alexandria’s murder…especially after more than a decade. It’s probably to keep Spelling’s testimony out of the drug trial. What else? I sense something beyond the confession.”

“I always wondered if I got the right guy.”

“Why?”

“The case was too easy. Some of the points didn’t quite add up. The case against Charlie Williams was clean-cut, maybe too clean.”

Collins sipped his wine, swallowed thoughtfully. “Well, as you know, crimes of passion often are clean-cut in a dirty way. They usually don’t start out to be a murder. The argument escalates, and the killer goes crazy. He or she usually shoots more than they have to. In the event a knife is the weapon of choice, they’ll often repeatedly stab the victim beyond a single, fatal wound. The crime scenes are sloppy, but the trail leading to the killer is seldom sloppy, it’s damn obvious.”

“And I think that was it. It was too obvious. Williams fit the profile, an agitated and jilted lover. A man desperate to have his true love back. He gets in a fight with her and kills her. With the exception of a bartender, who remembered serving him three fingers of straight bourbon near the time of Alexandria Cole’s murder, he has no alibi to fit the time-line. The forensic evidence leading to him was overwhelming.”

O’Brien stood and walked around the boat’s salon. A small color TV was on in the corner. The sound was turned down. O’Brien said, “And that’s it!”

“What do you mean, that’s it?”

“That’s what bugged me then about the investigation. Charlie Williams is a farm boy from North Carolina. He may have killed and butchered a few hogs on the family farm, but now I don’t believe he killed Alexandria Cole. I think he was set up, the real killer is someone who knows forensics, a perp that’s so good he can make it look like Williams did it.”

“If so, what do you do now?”

“I meet Father Callahan. Get Spelling’s written statement, assuming he can write after coming out of recovery.”

“And that’s assuming he makes it to recovery.”

“I know. I’m waiting Father Callahan’s call. Then I call Miami PD and let them quietly pick up whoever it names in the statement. Then I call the governor’s office. He issues a stay of execution, and Charlie Williams is released. We put the real killer on trial, and I finish a bottle of Irish whiskey to try and forget why I ever got into law enforcement in the first place. If I did send the wrong man to prison…how the hell do I make that up to him?”

Dave said nothing, his eyes filled with thought.

O’Brien looked at the television. He saw a reporter standing in front of Baptist Hospital. “Where’s the sound?”

“Second button on the right.”

O’Brien turned up the sound in time to hear the reporter say, “And police still don’t know who took the fatal shot that killed Sam Spelling, a man whose testimony was, according to prosecutors, key in the high-profile bank robbery and cocaine trail of Spelling’s former partner, Larry Kirkman and three other men believed tied to a Miami crime family. Despite his undergoing three hours of surgery, Spelling died later in his hospital room due to complications from a rifle bullet that officials said hit him in the chest. And now police have a homicide on their hands with very few clues to go on at this time. This is Jeremy Levy, News Eleven.”

O’Brien reached for his cell phone, quickly hitting buttons.

“What’s the urgency, Sean? You calling that reporter’s boss, something he said?”

“Yes, it was something he said. I’m not calling the television station, I’m calling Father Callahan.”

“Why?”

“Because Father Callahan was supposed to call me when Spelling went into recovery, or at least when he was coming out of it.”

“But it looks like Spelling never recovered. It happens.”

“But why hasn’t Callahan called? That worries me. The reporter said Spelling died after surgery in his hospital room. I want to make sure Spelling died from a gunshot wound.”

Detective Dan Grant, African-American, tall, broad shouldered, light skinned, held a television remote control. He pointed it toward a TV as another detective and two officers watched the newscasts from a doctors’ lounge in the hospital. Grant flipped through channels and saw the story on the other stations. He turned to the detective, a smaller wiry man, and said, “Let’s hope this buys us some extra time. We’ll keep an officer at Spelling’s door.”

Sam Spelling’s right hand trembled so much he didn’t know if he could finish the letter. An IV was taped to the back of his hand. He was glad he’d started writing in block letters. A kindly nurse, a few months shy of retirement, gave him a pad of lined paper, legal size. Spelling wanted to keep what he had to say to a single page. After surgery, after recovery, his chest felt like an iron vice was squeezing it. You brought me outta there alive, God. I’m gonna do my end. Get this done for Father John.