Diane Davidson - The Main Corpse

I put my cup down. Suddenly I longed to be back in my own kitchen, where homicide, arrests, and missing partners who had embezzled enormous sums of other people’s money couldn’t touch me. “Let’s start over. What is the status of the Royce investigation?”

“Okay,” Armstrong said grimly. He knew he was giving me terrible news. “De Groot and Hersey were up at the site first. Shockley sent them because the report we’d gotten said the two people who might be hurt were involved somehow with Prospect Financial. It’s getting to be a joke around here, how hysterical the captain is about his retirement account. Anyway, the trucker had driven some beat-up kid to the hospital, name of Perkins. Apparently you know him, too?”

I nodded. “Macguire’s my assistant. He wants to be a cop, so that’s why he started following Marla and Tony around after Tony’s partner disappeared.”

Armstrong raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment on Macguire’s detecting ambitions. Beside me, I heard Tom sigh softly. “Anyway,” Armstrong continued, “there was a report of a mountain lion mauling a dog by Bride’s Creek, not too far from the Grizzly Creek campsites. Wildlife Service was already there, so when I heard the radio report on this possibly injured couple, I drove up to the campsite. De Groot and Hersey were already there.” He pursed his lips. “I’ve never seen Grizzly Creek so high. I sure wouldn’t want to camp there. If you fell in, lost your balance fishing, you’d never survive. And something was really wrong at the site. Firewood everywhere. Pots and pans. Clothing. Sleeping bags. In all that mud, it could have been two, three sets of footprints. Hard to tell. One set was from a man’s boots.” He looked at me. “The boots belonged to Royce, We know that. Expensive leather, hand-tooled. We found one boot by the creekbank. The other’s missing.”

I groaned. The trail led to the creek. So far, the evidence seemed to point to Tony Royce – alive or dead – having been dumped in the water. Not for the first time, I wondered if Marla was telling the whole truth. Maybe she had fought with Tony. Maybe she had pushed him into the water in self-defense. But what could they have been fighting about? I closed my eyes, then opened them and said resolutely, dreading the worst, “How can you charge somebody with murder when you don’t have a corpse?”

“You can,” Armstrong answered matter-of-factly. Tom nodded. “People kill people and dispose of the body. If we’ve got enough circumstantial evidence, we can get a conviction, Miss G., even without a corpse. And as far as that high water goes-well, we get fishermen missing all the time in the springtime, don’t pick up their bodies downstream for six weeks to three months, whenever the water recedes… .”

Assume Marla is telling the truth, I ordered myself: Go from there. “Marla said she was beaten up at night,” I insisted. “I don’t believe anyone was fishing. Also, Marla was and is physically wrecked. I doubt she’d have had the strength to push anyone into the water. Or to drag a body from the campsite to the creek.”

Armstrong gave me that I’ve-seen-it-all cop look that always drives me crazy. “Maybe it was dusk. Point is, the water is high, and some people had a fight about something, and it looks as if Korman pushed Royce in. Where else could he be? We probably won’t find him until his body catches on a rock in front of somebody’s creekside house.” He got up and bought a cup of hot chocolate from the vending machine.

“But that’s just not possible,” I maintained. “Think about it. Marla had her car. If they’d had a disagreement, why wouldn’t she just drive away?”

Armstrong began a patient explanation. “Tom heard about the three-way scam theory. I’ll tell you what I heard. Captain told the guy who sits by me that Tony Royce lost a lot of Korman’s money over some investment. Captain even saw her arguing about it with Royce’s partner Lipscomb only last week. And so another of our captain’s theories is that maybe Royce didn’t show enough interest in recouping Ms. Korman’s big investment. She was furious. Fought with Royce at the campsite. But not before she took something of his. Maybe that’s what they fought about. She wanted some payback and he wouldn’t give it to her. Apparently, Royce had this gold watch he wore all the time. Not worth as much as what he owed her, but worth something. And then they found the watch at her house, right?”

“You mean, when they did their little search? Yes, they found a watch in the bathroom. But she says he left it there all the time.”

Armstrong shrugged. He drained his cup and tossed it into the garbage pail.

I said, “A watch, a boot, and several sets of unidentified footprints don’t equal a murder arrest. I’m sorry. Shockley’s theories are lame.”

Armstrong crossed his arms. “Okay, then there’s the bloody shirt. Did you ever see Tony Royce in a white shirt, initials monogrammed on the pocket? It was in the locked trunk of Korman’s car.” He glanced at Tom. “You know how Hersey is with those lock picks – “

“Wait, wait,” I said. “They searched her trunk without a warrant? I just can’t believe – “

“Exigent circumstances, Goldy,” Tom told me. “The investigators have a messed-up campsite, a report of a teenager who’s been beaten, two people missing, they’re going to think, There might be somebody in this trunk dying, we need to get him out. When it’s a matter of life or death, we can break into somebody’s trunk. And before you ask, they can tell it’s blood on the shirt with a chemical test. It’ll take them at least a week with typing and matching to see if the blood belonged to Tony Royce.”

“That’s not all they found in the trunk,” Armstrong added. “They found her keys, which would explain why she had to walk out and get a ride. So anyway, they’re up there with all this stuff and they decide to call in and find out what’s going on with this Marla Korman. And when they do, it turns out she’s had a complaint lodged against her from a few years ago, the guy she used to be married to. That was about money, too. Neighbor called it in as a domestic, and by the time the cops got there, this Doctor Korman had a dislocated shoulder. Get this-Shockley called up Korman this morning in Honolulu. The doc said, ‘Yeah, my ex is as strong as an ox, has a bad temper, is always threatening violence when she doesn’t get what she wants, and unlike a lot of women, has no fear about turning her violence on men.’ “

I drank more of the coffee, shuddered, and tried to think. “I’m sorry, but I really cannot believe all this. I mean, I’m not saying you’re lying, but this is such an incredible amount of baloney that it’s ridiculous. Our ex-husband was physically abusive, and you have the photographs of me covered with bruises in your files to prove it.”

“Do they have photos like that of Marla?” asked Armstrong.

“No,” I replied, “she filed for divorce after the incident with the shoulder dislocation. She stood up to him a lot better than I managed to. And ended the marriage a lot quicker.”

Armstrong sighed, and we were all quiet for a minute. Finally Tom asked, “Do you have a theory as to what happened, Miss G.?”

“Yes, I do.” I tried to soften my indignation to earnestness. “I think the person you want is Albert Lipscomb. He disappeared after Marla accused him of using assays from a disreputable lab. The assays are crucial for a mine to be successful, because they are analyses of ore in the mine. They tell you how much gold is in your ore. If you don’t have reliable assays, you’re not going to have a gold-producing mine, it’s that simple. When Marla found out what he was up to, Lipscomb panicked. He stole over three million dollars from the partnership account, and now he’s killed Tony and set Marla up somehow. For heaven’s sake, she saw him, or