John Lutz - Serial

“Don’t think I’m not,” Pearl said.

“No, ma’am.”

“I can see how you got into trouble.”

For the first time, Wright smiled. Briefly he looked ten years younger and Pearl saw again what he might have been, and it made her sick.

She put away her pencil and notepad in her purse and stood up, careful not to lean her weight on the chair’s spindly arms.

“That’s it?” Wright asked.

“It.”

He looked disappointed. Probably he never got visitors unless someone in the neighborhood was raped or murdered.

“I was told my alibi checked out,” he said, as if struggling to maintain conversation, to keep her there. His starvation for human contact had overwhelmed his fear. Again Pearl felt a thrust of pity for him. To be such an outcast, to be shunned, could in itself be a disease.

But what could she do? She couldn’t give him back his reputation. His five years.

“How’s your back now?” she asked.

“Not good. I need an operation to repair some ruptured disks. Tell me the city’s gonna pay for that.”

“I would if I thought it’d help.”

“But it won’t.”

“It won’t,” Pearl said, and left him alone in the ruins.

“Wright is just a poor schmuck,” Pearl said, sitting at her desk in the Q amp;A offices. “My gut tells me he couldn’t kill anyone.”

“Anyone under the right circumstances can kill anyone else,” Quinn said. He was standing, with his sleeves rolled up, drinking a diet Coke.

“You really believe that?” Pearl asked.

Quinn wiped foam from his chin and stared at her, wondering how she could think otherwise, considering the experience she’d had as a cop. “Yeah. I don’t like it, but I believe it.”

Pearl knew he was right, but she didn’t feel like giving Quinn the satisfaction of agreeing with him. Besides, she was still feeling sorry for Adam Wright.

“Wright was in the hospital the night Millie Graff was killed,” she said. “He’d been collecting aluminum cans and hurt his back.”

“That’s his alibi? He hurt his back picking up an aluminum can?”

“Well, he didn’t admit he was a can collector, but I’m sure he is. The important thing is, he hurt his back and was hospitalized at the time of Millie’s murder.”

“You feel for this guy, Pearl?”

“His life is a load of shit. But aside from that, he really does have an alibi.”

“Did you check out his story?”

“No. I will.” Pearl had no doubt that hospital records, along with eyewitness accounts, would substantiate Adam Wright’s alibi. Still, she should be reserving judgment until she verified his alibi. Was she getting soft?

“You getting soft, Pearl?”

Damn it! Thinking parallel thoughts again. It angered her. It was almost as if her privacy was being invaded.

“You should move in with me permanently,” Quinn said. “We could be like an old married couple that finishes each other’s-”

“Sentences,” Pearl interrupted. She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t think so, Quinn.”

“We’re sleeping together some of the time, anyway, even if we are practicing celibacy.” Yancy Taggart, even dead, is still in the way.

“Almost celibacy,” Pearl said. Things had changed lately, and were still changing, but slowly.

“I said practicing,” Quinn said. “And I’m redecorating the brownstone for you.”

“That place is an investment,” Pearl said. “And eventually it’ll be a good one. That’s why you’re rehabbing it.”

Quinn smiled. “Pick a room and choose a color.”

“Your room, black.” She laughed. “Never mind. Anyway, if I moved in with you, my mother wouldn’t approve. She still calls it shacking up, like I’m young Barbara Stanwyck in one of those movies where she winds up in an electric chair.”

“Could happen,” Quinn said.

“Yeah, to anyone. You told me so just a few minutes ago.”

“Barbara Stanwyck. Didn’t she usually get last-minute reprieves in those movies?”

“Not all of them.”

“Think about it, Pearl. Please.”

“I have. And my gut feeling is that Adam Wright didn’t kill anyone.”

Quinn sighed, making sure it was loud enough for Pearl to hear. “Okay. Just check his story before we strike him from the list.”

“Of course,” Pearl said. “Quinn?”

“Yeah?”

“The brownstone tonight wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“Your air conditioner broken?” Quinn asked.

“I’ll break it if you want.”

Hogart, 1992

The day had started off unseasonably warm. Now brief snow flurries formed droplets on the windshield, so that occasionally the wipers were needed. Sheriff Wayne Westerley steered his Ford Crown Vic cruiser up the bumpy driveway from the county road to Beth Brannigan’s ramshackle frame house. The driveway, more of a road, really, was once graveled, but over the years mud and ruts had claimed most of the rock.

If Roy Brannigan hadn’t lit out on Beth when he learned she was pregnant, Westerley would have been on him to regravel the drive, just to save the suspension on the cruiser. But Westerley wasn’t about to utter a word that might cause more hardship for Beth.

He parked in front of the plank porch and sat for a moment behind the wheel while a stiff breeze blew flecks of snow almost horizontally across the windshield. When the bare tree limbs stopped swaying, he opened the door and climbed out.

Beth had heard his arrival and came out onto the porch. She was wearing a sacklike blue dress that hung from shoulders hunched against the cold. He saw that her feet were clad in fuzzy blue house slippers. Her hair was streaked red where the cold sunlight struck it. She wore no makeup that he could discern, and her eyes were the blue of her skirt. Normally a graceful woman, she stood somewhat awkwardly with her feet planted wide. It was late now in her pregnancy.

As Westerley approached from around the other side of the car, he absently started to put on his eight-point cap.

Beth smiled. “You don’t put on a hat when you’re about to enter a house, Sheriff.”

Westerley smiled back. This woman, with all she’d been through, and how she’d looked on the night of the rape and later in court, caused his throat to tighten up so words didn’t come easily. “Since you called and left a message with the dispatcher,” he said, “I figured it was an official visit.”

“Well, I guess it is. But it can be a hatless one.”

She held the front door open for him and he edged inside past her, smelling the fresh scent of perfumed soap or shampoo. It struck him that despite what had happened to her, a woman like Beth would get lonely with her husband gone. Then he cautioned himself not to think that way, even though Roy was a grade-A prick to have deserted his wife after what happened, just when she needed him most. Westerley reminded himself that this was an official visit, cap or no cap.

“You want some hot tea with lemon in it?” she asked. “I already got the water on.”

“Love some.”

Westerley lowered himself into a creaking green vinyl sofa and watched her walk into the kitchen, heard her clatter around in there. In a few minutes she returned carrying a tray with two steaming cups on it. There was a napkin on the tray with a stack of five Oreo cookies.

He thanked her for the cup as she handed it to him. She placed the tray on a table within his reach and then picked up the other cup. Westerley sipped and made a big deal out of sighing and licking his lips in appreciation.

She grinned. He saw that she wasn’t drinking her tea, but had put the cup back on the tray. Maybe something about being pregnant. Maybe in her state it tasted bad. She unconsciously touched her extended stomach, as if picking up his thought waves.