Chill Factor (25 page)

His mouth twitched. “To see a friend. An old friend. I needed some … I was upset, spending all that time in the house … seeing a side of my mother I didn’t know existed. I needed someone I could … talk to.” His gaze wavered guiltily toward Dixie.

“You stayed with this friend overnight?”

“At a hotel.”

“And you were together Thursday morning, when Officer Harris was shot?”

“Yes.”

Belle made another dot on her tablet. “Then you have an alibi.”

“Not one I can make public.”

The lawyer sighed and flicked a glance at Dixie. “I’m assuming you don’t want this—friend—to be contacted, but trust me, Marty, chivalry is overrated. Nothing is worth spending your life in jail. Eventually, you’ll have to reveal her name.”

He stared mutely down at his fingers tapping on the table. “That’s not an option. You have to find a better solution.”

Wearily, Belle shook her head. “What about the second shooting? Where were you this afternoon?”

“Same friend. And don’t ask. Just don’t. This is one part of my life I will not muck up.”

“Same hotel?”

“We met at a park to … talk.”

“Which park?”

“Near Montrose.”

“That’s only a few miles from the crime scene. Did anyone see you?”

“I don’t think so.”

Belle stood and crossed the room to stare through the plate glass toward downtown.

Dixie cleared her throat. “Marty, why don’t you just tell it, all of it? Everything withheld will only sabotage you later, and Belle can’t fight this without the facts.”

He slid his gaze to meet hers, eyes filled with confused anguish. Then he dropped his forehead against the heels of his hands and clutched handfuls of his carefully styled hair. Dixie had the urge to reach over and pat his arm, tell him this would all go away if he told the truth. But would it?

Finally, still staring down at the table, he tugged his tie loose and nodded.

“You asked me once why I moved away, Dixie. I had … something to hide, at least I thought so at the time. Now … I don’t know. Everything came apart anyway. After I met Ashton, we opened the gallery, and business mushroomed. I thought, okay, it’s time. I can’t go on living one life in Dallas, another when I visit Houston—or my family visits me—a lie that’s getting harder and harder to hold together. Remember our senior prom?”

The night her rhinestones kept popping. Dixie nodded.

“You asked why I insisted on dancing right up close to the bandstand,” he said. “You even commented that the lead guitar player looked like Sean Cassidy. What you never realized is … I had a panting, lovesick crush on the guy. My first real crush—although I always watched
The Brady Bunch
to see Greg, not Marcia.”

Marty’s revelation didn’t come as quite the shock he obviously expected. Dixie
had
noticed the way he looked at that lead guitar player.

“I told Mom and Dad two Christmases ago,” he continued. “The year I brought Ashton down to visit. After Christmas dinner, he flew back, and I told them—we were lovers, Ashton and I.”

Marty cleared his throat and took a sip of water.

“Dad—he was never much of a talker, as you know—he just stared at me for two or three minutes, not saying a word. Then he rose from that damn chair he always sat in and walked into his bedroom and shut the door. Still hadn’t come out when I left the next day. And Mom—can you believe this?—Mom begged me to see a doctor. Said there had to be something we
could do. Like I had a sickness. Like her brain was stuck in the fifties. Where had they lived the past forty years?”

He stopped abruptly. Then he swiveled his chair toward the same view of downtown that Belle continued to stare at. Dixie knew the attorney was giving Marty a measure of privacy, her way of encouraging communication.

Dixie preferred observing Marty’s face as he talked.

“When Dad died, Mom blamed me. Oh, she never came right out and said, ‘You killed him, Marty.’ She’d say, ‘He never got over it, Marty. He never did.’ But Mom tried to accept my life after that. She came to our big show last fall and stayed three days. That’s when I invited her to move to Dallas—not to sell the old homestead, but … to spend time with us. I’d rent her a town house. ‘No,’ she told me. ‘I don’t fit here. I don’t fit much of anywhere anymore, but certainly not here.’ Not long after that I noticed the changes. Small things at first—her voice on the phone, firmer, more exact, then her clothes. When I flew down for Christmas, she wore a silk jogging suit. Silk. You ever know Mom to spring for silk, Dixie? ‘Dacron’s fine,’ she’d say. ‘Washable. Where would I wear silk? To weed the flower beds?’ There she stood in this silk periwinkle jogging suit. And she’d been exercising, dieting. She’d lost ten pounds.”

He whirled his chair to face Dixie, his features more animated.

“I
liked
seeing the changes—a positive sign, I thought. Hah! That’s when she asked me not to bring Ashton home again. Said she understood and wanted me to be happy, but she couldn’t bear it if her friends knew.”

He finished the water and stared blankly into the glass.

“This spring, Ashton and I started having … problems. He’s such a damn scrooge, at times. Especially about money. It was his money—and
my
brilliant talent, if I may brag a little—that started Essence Gallery. Ever notice how easily money falls into neat rows of figures you can add up and subtract and roll into one big green stick to brandish over someone? Talent simply …
is.
Talent flows into your soul. Talent sparkles. But it takes Ashton’s money to keep the doors open until we attract the deep pockets. We were in the middle of a stinko argument when this whole crazy mess with Mom came out of nowhere.
The police call, telling me she’s dead. I arrive and … and there’s speculation it was
suicide?”
He closed his eyes. “I needed someone I could talk to, someone who really knew
me.”

Apparently relieved to have spilled his secrets, he looked squarely at Dixie. He must’ve found what he sought in her eyes, because he continued talking.

“I called my friend—the one who brought me out, years before I moved away. Older than me. The son of a … friend of Dad’s. I think maybe Dad figured that part out later, after I dropped the bomb that Christmas. Anyway, he’s not … I can’t drag him into this. Ashton may be tight with money, but my friend’s situation is … hell, it’s
impossible.”

Although Dixie believed him, believed that his mother’s death had rattled Marty enough to seek the comfort of an old friend, she could also see him loading all his misery into a rifle and aiming it at the officers who’d canceled any chance of Marty ever mending the rift with his family. Marty’s emotional expression had always leaned toward extreme. And the convenient “friend who doesn’t deserve to be dragged down into the dirt” dramatically completed the scenario.

Dixie could hear Barney’s gentle words, as if he were sitting beside her,
A foolish friend is twice the burden of your gravest enemy.

“Did the cops identify the weapon that killed either Harris or Tally?” Dixie asked Belle.

“They’re not saying.” Belle returned to the table. “And since they didn’t charge Marty we can’t ask. But we know they found receipts for all the rifles in Bill’s gun cabinet. Apparently, he kept excellent records. One additional receipt, for a …” She consulted her notes. “Remington 30.06 Springfield, with a rangefinder telescopic sight, didn’t match any of the rifles accounted for. A notation on the sales ticket gave them the hint they needed: Marty’s birthday.”

Marty frowned, hair sticking up where he’d clutched it.

“My first year at college—Dad and I went hunting during the holidays. But I sold that rifle after I moved to Dallas and needed cash. They can’t be saying my rifle killed those cops.”

“What they’re saying is you had access to the type of weapon
it takes to kill a man from five hundred yards,” Dixie said, filling in the blanks.

“But I’m telling you, I
sold
that rifle.”

Belle made a third dot on her legal pad. “If you keep records as good as your father’s, you’ll have the bill of sale to prove it.”

“Listen, I needed money, and a guy offered me three hundred bucks—cash. I took it.”

“You remember the guy’s name?” Belle asked.

“No.” Marty raked at his hair. “But there’s no way it could be that gun. Sold twelve years ago in Dallas? What are the odds?”

Dixie made a mental note to find out from Rashly—provided he’d speak to her—if he had ballistics test results yet. By now the police investigators should know where the sniper holed up to shoot Tally. And they might have found some spent casings, if the shooter was in too much of a hurry to pick up his brass. Riflings on the lead, which probably flattened on impact, might not be precise enough to indicate a specific model.

“Let’s get real clear, Marty,” Belle said. “This is no ordinary shooting you’re suspected of. In a legal system where every opinion has a counter opinion,
nobody
likes cop killers. If enough people are convinced you murdered those officers, evidence will stack up to prove it. Trust me.”

The lines in Marty’s face flattened out. “You mean, the police will
manufacture
the evidence they need?” For the first time, he looked more scared than miserable.

“They simply won’t notice anything that doesn’t point in the right direction,” Dixie told him. “The direction they’re convinced leads to the killer.”

“Then you’ll have to find evidence that proves I didn’t do it.”

Friendship wears a price tag, lass.
“Marty, you’ve seen bubble-wrapped items hanging on store racks?” Dixie asked. “Toys, tools, kitchen implements—stuck to a piece of cardboard, with plastic molded over the whole thing? The cops will have this case sealed up tighter than one of those plastic bubbles.”

“But they have to
prove
I did it. If I didn’t do it, they can’t prove it.”

“Technically, yes,” Belle said quietly. “But
juries
don’t like cop killers, either. They’ll be eager to convict.”

Dixie laid a hand on Marty’s arm. “If you have an alibi, now is a good time to use it. Before every police officer and some key prosecutors in this city have invested energy in proving they arrested the right man.”

She could feel him tremble through his tailored jacket, but his mouth tightened and he shook his head.

“I lose either way. If Ashton finds out who I was with, I kiss everything good-bye—my home, my business. My
life.
Ashton’s told me, if he ever caught me with anyone—but this friend,
especially
—we’re through.”

“I thought you were partners,” Dixie commented. “Don’t you have a partnership agreement?”

“Not on paper.”

Of course not.

Leaving Marty at the conference table, Belle motioned Dixie into the next room.

“Even if he gives us the name of his friend, it may not be enough.”

“Why not?” Putting herself in the prosecutor’s shoes, Dixie had already mentally earmarked the problems with Marty’s defense, but she wanted to hear Belle’s take.

“First, the gay angle. Voir dire could take weeks and we still might not weed out the homophobes. The fact that Marty and his Houston lover have both lied about their relationship for years could taint any testimony from this mystery man. Second, supposing we get past the gay lies, can his lover convince a jury that Marty never left the hotel that night? Never went out for cigarettes or snacks or magazines? The lover never fell asleep? And third, there’s all those rifles. A jury—with the prosecutor’s help—will picture Marty sitting at his mother’s house, mad as hell that not one but
nine
officers shot at her, and staring at his father’s rifles—a tried-and-true Texas code for settling disputes. A jury—again with the prosecutor’s help—will appreciate Marty’s rage, may even feel some of that rage themselves. They’ll forget that none of the guns in that case is the murder weapon, or that Marty’s missing rifle can’t be positively identified as the murder weapon. They’ll see the missing rifle as
‘proof’ of concealment. The mere presence of those other guns, and the fact that Marty knows how to shoot them, will slant the jury’s opinion. They’ll feel sorry for Marty’s loss. They’ll speculate on how
they
might have acted in his shoes. And in the end, they’ll believe he did it.”

Yep.
That’s pretty much how Dixie’d figured it. “What now?”

“I’ll try to find out exactly what the prosecution’s holding. You, first and most important, keep Marty in sight at all times.”

“In case another officer is killed.”

“Lord, I don’t want that to happen, Dixie. But we both know it would take suspicion off Marty—provided we absolutely can prove his whereabouts at the time.”

A foolish friend is a heavier burden …
“And second?”

“Find some better suspects.”

Saturday, 4:30
A.M
.

By habit, Dixie wasn’t a runner. She preferred bending-lifting-stretching exercises, reserved running for the racquetball court, where it actually accomplished something—when a ball went high and wide—but she awoke knowing she
had
to exercise yesterday’s frustrations out of her muscles.

She pulled on baggy shorts and athletic shoes, drew a comb through her hair, not even taking time to brush the sleep off her teeth, and called to Mud as she ran down the driveway, through the gate, out to the main road, and away from town. The air felt heavy with overnight moisture. Clouds in the west promised a chance of rain later.

Mud, delighted with this new game, sprinted alongside for a while, then dashed ahead to scare out a squirrel. Dixie sprinted past the Pine house without looking and continued to a gravel road that cut back into undeveloped acreage. So much had happened last night that she hadn’t had time to think about. Not consciously. While she slept, her brain had whittled at the information, trying to shape it. Several times during the night she’d awakened with a half-formed idea, but as she tried to bring it closer, to
see
it, the image dissolved like wet rice paper. Once she’d grasped a picture of Parker, strikingly handsome in his white shorts on a fine sailboat, his
laughter whipping in the wind like the sails. An instant later the image vanished.