Casey Daniels - Dead Man Talking

“Your testimony was shaky.” Just in case he’d forgotten, I waved the newspaper article with the headline that said the same thing. “You didn’t have much of an alibi.”

“I was in Cleveland, I’ll admit that much. I was visiting my folks. Helen went out that evening. By the time I got home, she was in bed, asleep.”

“You changed your story a couple times when they questioned you about Vera. First you said you’d cut your finger the morning she died. In your office. You said she helped you bandage it. Then when the prosecutor questioned you…” I consulted the article again, just to make sure I had my facts lined up right. “You said it was in the afternoon, after lunch.”

“Morning? Lunchtime? What difference did something as stupid as a cut on my hand make in light of what happened to Vera? I got mixed up. I was nervous.”

“Just like you were nervous when they asked about those motel receipts?” That was in another article. I read it over again. “It says here the police found four receipts from the Lake View Motel in your office. All from dates when you happened to be conveniently out of the office at Central State.”

“And none of them had my name on them.” Lamar gave me the kind of tight-jawed, unblinking glare I imagined he’d aimed at the prosecutor when he asked the same sorts of questions. “If they were mine, why would I be stupid enough to keep them? In my office, no less. Obviously, somebody planted them.”

“But you could never prove that. Just like you couldn’t prove that you didn’t kill Vera.”

“Somebody else did and pinned it on me.”

Which reminded me of the talk I’d had with Darcy Coleman a couple days earlier. “Could it have been Mack Raphael?” I asked.

“You found out about him, huh?” Lamar looked me over and nodded, obviously impressed with my detective skills. It was about damn time. “I wondered how long it would take you to dig up that little piece of information. So, you talked to somebody about the case and that somebody… does that somebody think Bad Dog is the one who framed me?”

“That somebody is your old secretary, Darcy Coleman,” I informed him. “And she didn’t come right out and say it, but yeah, I think she’d like nothing better than to find out that Bad Dog is the one who engineered the whole thing. Bad Dog or somebody else. Anybody else, in fact. When you were convicted, she felt betrayed.”

His expression softened. “She was a good kid. Smart, too. I mean, obviously, you saw that. She must be smart if she realized I didn’t do it.”

Was that a dig because I wasn’t willing to take him at his word? Just in case, I figured I’d better point out that he wasn’t the only one with issues about how the case was being handled. “You could have saved me a lot of time if you’d just told me about Bad Dog yourself.” I didn’t bother to add that he also would have saved me the psychological damage of seeing Darcy and her cronies (get it?) in their birthday suits. “You never mentioned Reno Bob, either.”

“You needed independent verification. If I gave you the names of the most obvious suspects, there was no reason for you to listen. I’m biased, after all. This way, you can see that there are others who believe in my innocence. Did Darcy tell you about Rodney Beers, too?”

Since it happened after Lamar was already dead, I filled him in on Rodney’s conversion and subsequent confession. “You want to help me out here and tell me if there’s anybody else we’re missing?”

“Hundreds of people, I suppose. Aren’t the suspect interviews in the file?”

They were, and together, Lamar and I read them over. Quinn was right, Mack Raphael had never even been mentioned. Neither had Reno Bob Oates.

“They were both incarcerated at the time,” Lamar said. “Of course the police didn’t suspect them.”

“And you did?” I shook my head in wonder. “Call me a little crazy, but it’s hard to figure out how a guy in prison could kill anybody.”

“You’ve never been in a prison.” He turned that eagle-eye stare on me one more time before we got back to reading.

The rest of the interview file wasn’t all that helpful. The cops had talked to a few other people in connection with the case. For one reason or another, they were all eliminated as suspects.

With a sigh of frustration, I shoved the interview pages back in the file and pulled out the crime scene photos.

Sure, I’m a private investigator. And sure, I’ve solved a bunch of murders in the time since I’d been bonked on the head and received what my ghostly clients like to call my Gift. But here’s the thing: when I meet my clients, they’re already dead, and because they’re ghosts, they look just like they looked when they were alive. They’re the age they were when they died, and they’re wearing the kinds of clothes they wore when they were alive. Even my second client, Didi Bowman, who’d been tossed off a bridge, looked like she had before her body met the concrete some two hundred feet below.

Thank goodness.

That was all good news because I tend to get queasy at the sight of blood and gore. I’m not a big fan of violence, either. I mean, I’d been shot, right? So I had every right to be skittish when it came to that sort of thing. I’d also been almost pitched off a bridge, too, and I’d been dumped in the lake, and-

Well, let’s just leave it at that, a reminder that a private detective’s life is not an easy one.

Let’s also say that I’m not used to this sort of up-close-and-personal look at the aftermath of a crime.

There were maybe a dozen or so crime scene photos, eight-by-tens, all black and white. For a couple minutes, I shuffled through them, briefly glancing at the one on the top of the pile before I put it on the bottom and moved on to the next. At that point, I wasn’t looking at details. In fact, I was hardly looking at all. I was just trying to get an overall impression, a sense of the time and the place. While I was at it, I hoped maybe I’d get desensitized to the horror of it all, too.

The pictures, see, made my blood run cold.

I got back to the first photo and started through again, forcing myself to slow down and take a longer look. The first picture was an overall shot of the motel, similar to the photo I’d seen in the newspaper article. The next one was a close-up of the door to room 12. The next picture took my breath away. Not because it showed Vera’s body. In fact, I had to search to even find it, crumpled where it was on the floor between the dresser and the bed.

No, that wasn’t what caught my attention.

Neither was the fact that the Lake View looked like a generic motel: cheap furniture, standard bed, dresser, nightstand, chair, lamps.

What caught my attention and made my stomach flip was the obvious ferocity of what had happened in that room.

One of the lamps was smashed to smithereens, shards of it sparkling from the threadbare carpet and its shade crushed and lying on the bed. The dresser was bumped away from its normal spot against the wall, at least three feet from where it should have been. I could tell because the fine folks at the Lake View hadn’t moved the furniture the last time the room was painted. The wall behind where the dresser normally stood was a couple shades darker than the rest of the wall around it. The mirror that should have hung over the dresser was shattered in a million spiderweb pieces. The sheets on the bed were thrown back and twisted, and I’d bet any money that if I was looking at a color photo, that splatter of polka dots across them would have been bloodred.

“Wow.” I blinked away the tears that sprang to my eyes and tried not to think about the horror of what must have happened in that room. “The place is a wreck. There must have been an awful lot of noise. You’d think someone would have called the cops.”