Execution of Innocence (2 page)

“No.”

“Does his father?”

“I don't know.”

Sharp continued. “Charlie’s dad drives trucks long-distance, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s out of town now. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“No.”

“Do you have any idea at all where Charlie might be?”

“No.”

Sharp paused and collected his thoughts. “Frankly, Mary, several of your answers disturb me. You have many holes in your timetable, too much time when you were just driving around doing nothing. Also, I sense that Dick was more important to you than you’re letting on.”

For once Mary looked him straight in the eye. “He was not that important to me, Lieutenant Sharp. I'm sad that he's dead. I'm sad for Hannah, but I'm more worried about Charlie.”

“Do you think the same person who killed Dick could have gotten to Charlie?” Riles asked.

Mary grimaced. “I don't know.”

“Can you think of any enemies Dick had?” Sharp asked.

“He was popular. Popular people always have enemies.”

“Name some,” Sharp said.

“I can't.”

“Did Charlie have any enemies?”

“None that I know of.”

“What does Charlie do? Besides go to school?”

“He works as a mechanic for Dryer's Time Up on Main.”

“And what do you do? Do you work?”

“Yeah. At the library.”

“Are you going to college next year?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Stanford, Palo Alto.”

“That's big time. You must be pretty smart.”

“I do all right.”

“Is Charlie going to college?”

Mary lowered her head. “No, Charlie probably won’t even graduate.”

There was affection in her voice, but also sorrow. Maybe even a trace of despair. Sharp studied her cute, tired face and tried to imagine her shooting Dick in the face and was surprised to discover that it didn't seem totally impossible. He wanted to reach out and touch her dark brown hair, see what those wet stains were. Maybe his hand would have come back red. One thing was sure, he was going to check her out before she left the station.

“Would it be fair to say you and Charlie are from different sides of the track?” Sharp asked.

Mary looked up and smiled faintly. “Yeah. That would be fair.” Then her head dropped and she added in a wounded voice, “I really love him.”

CHAPTER TWO

Maple High had a total student population of eight hundred and thirty, and because of that relatively small number, everyone pretty much knew everyone else. Mary had been acquainted with Charlie, from a distance, throughout her freshman, sophomore, and junior years. But it was only in early December of her senior year, when Charlie fixed and then broke her car, that she decided she wanted him.

She told him angrily that he broke it, but he said it was about to fall apart, and he was probably right. It was a Monday afternoon when she pulled her sputtering Honda Civic into Dryer's Tune Up just off the town square. The car had a quarter of a million miles on it and it ran faster in Reverse than Drive, but she was hoping it would hang on until she could move to Palo Alto and start college. Stanford was practically all she thought about these days, although she had applied to half a dozen other colleges as back-ups. But to be at Stanford was her dream because that was where her mother and father had gone to school and met. Now if Stanford would just accept her A-minus average and her nonexistent bank account.

Maple, where she lived, was not the sort of city that sent many kids to one of the best colleges in the land. Located in southern Oregon, not far from California’s Mt. Shasta, the town was at an elevation of forty-five hundred feet and often suffered serious snow-bound winters. Because of the weather the total population never rose above ten thousand, and that included tourists and passing truck drivers. Yet the surrounding pines and hills always inspired Mary. She was anxious to break away from her small town but she knew she would miss it after she was gone.

As she parked that auspicious day and got out of her car, Charlie looked up from under the hood of a Ford Explorer so dirty it looked as if it had unsuccessfully dodged a mud slide. He was pretty dirty himself, with an oily face and jeans. If someone had told her right then she would soon be head over heels in love with this guy she would have wanted to know the person's IQ. He wiped his nose on the back of his arm as she walked over. He had a wrench in one hand and a hamburger in the other. Yeah, he liked Pennzoil on his meat and bun. She wrinkled her nose before she spoke to him.

“Charlie?” she said as if maybe she had the wrong one.

“Yeah?” He had pretty blue eyes but they weren’t dancing with joy at the sight of her. His black hair was long and stringy and hung over his broad shoulders like strips of leather. He took a bite of his hamburger and chewed slowly, his handsome jaw moving with a casual rhythm unconnected to her haste.

Mary was about to be late for work, and Miss Soulte, her supervisor at the library, was always looking for an excuse to fire her. Mary thought the woman hated her because she thought Miss Mary was no longer a virgin, which was not true. Mary was as virgin as an unopened copy of
Cosmopolitan
. She had a rich imagination and poor prospects, although she did get asked out regularly enough, but by guys who had thrown spitballs at her in kindergarten. That was the trouble with growing up in a small town. The male population was largely made up of specimens she had seen develop from sperm and ovum. Not that she knew much about Charlie. He took another bite of his hamburger and waited for her to say something.

“I need a time up,” she said.

“Shouldn’t you see a doctor?”

She blushed, although she didn't think he was being funny. She gestured to her car. “It's speeding up and slowing down all the time, even when I don't do anything. I don't know what’s the matter with it.”

He studied her car. “It's old,” he said.

She frowned. “Should I go somewhere else?”

He shrugged. “If you're in a hurry.”

She glanced at her watch. “I am in a hurry. I have to get to the library.”

“I never heard of anyone who was in a hurry to get to the library.”

She sighed and put her hands on her hips. “I work there.”

He set his hamburger down and wiped his hands. He finally smiled—he had a nice smile. “I know where you work, Mary,” he said.

He offered to drive her to work and said her car wouldn't be ready until tomorrow. She said that was OK, a friend at the library could give her a ride home and a ride to school the next day. She didn't talk to him about money. She had heard that he was good at what he did and never overcharged. Riding to the library with him, she noticed he hardly looked over at her.

But that evening when she got home she was surprised to see her car parked out front, and even more surprised to find Charlie inside the house sitting with her mother eating cookies and drinking milk. He had cleaned himself up but still didn’t look like a milk drinker. As her mother excused herself, Mary sat at the kitchen table with him and noticed for the first time that Charlie had a powerful stare. He seemed more interested in her than he had that afternoon. She asked about the car and he shook his head.

“I tuned it up and changed the oil but it’s still ready to fall apart,” he said.

“It can't fall apart,” she said. “I need it until next September.”

“It's a car, not a person. You can't tell it what to do.”

“I don't know about that. It's my car. I can tell it what I want. How much do I owe you?”

He bit into a cookie. “Ten bucks.”

“No. Charge me what's fair.”

“Fifty bucks.”

She frowned. “That's a lot.”

He waved his hand. “You don't owe me anything, Mary. Accept it as a favor.”

She was afraid she'd have to repay his favor by going out with him. Not that that was such a horrible idea, at the moment. Still, she wanted to do what was right. She opened her purse.

“Can I give you thirty?” she asked. “It’s all I have right now.”

He looked at her. “You don’t owe me anything, I promise.”

It was amazing how easily he saw through her, she thought. His unkempt manner didn’t mean he was stupid, she had to remind herself. She put her purse aside.

“Thanks,” she said. “I really mean it. Have you been here long?”

“Ten minutes.”

“You drove my car over?” she asked.

“I didn’t walk it over.”

“Do you need a ride home?”

“I can walk,” he said.

“No. It’s cold outside. I'll give you a ride. Where do you live?”

“By the train track, off Strater.”

That was Maple City's worst section, its own personal ghetto. Mary winced at the thought of anyone living there, but then decided it was better than fighting sandstorms in a thatched house in Saharan Africa. Charlie continued to study her. Once again he seemed to read her mind.

“I don't need much,” he said.

Mary stood and forced a smile. For some reason his remark had embarrassed her. “I should take you home now,” she said. “I have to study for a few hours before I go to bed.”

He also stood. “I haven't studied since third grade.”

“I should have known you then. Third grade was the last time I took it easy.”

She gave him a ride across town, to a makeshift house at the end of a forlorn block. There was no front lawn, only a dirt space big enough to park a pickup truck and collect the trash. She had just pulled in his driveway when her car engine made a terrible grinding sound and then died. She thought she smelled something burning. Looking over at him with fire in her eyes, she yelled, “What did you do to my car?”

He shrugged, unmoved. “I told you.”

She tried to restart it, but failed. “But it was working fine before!”

“It was not fine before. It's an old car.”

“At least it ran! Now I can’t even start it!”

“You just threw a rod.”

“A rod? What does that mean?”

“It means your engine is wrecked.”

She pounded on the steering wheel. “My engine can't be wrecked! I need this car!”

“I doubt the car understands that.”

She pointed a finger at his calm expression. “You are responsible for this! You will pay for this!”

“I changed the spark plugs, points, oil, and reset the carburator. I didn't touch the engine.”

“Right. It’s just a coincidence my engine exploded in your driveway.”

“It is a coincidence.” He opened the door. “My truck's here. I'll give you a ride home.”

Frustrated, she got out, pulling her down jacket tight. Usually in December, Maple was below freezing at night. Yet there had been no snow this year, not yet. The overhead stars were hard points of light. She chased him as he strolled toward his truck.

“I can't leave my car here,” she said.

“It sure ain’t going anywhere tonight.”

“You're impossible, you know that?”

He grinned at her as he opened his truck door.

“And you’re a bitch, Mary, did you know that?”

She refused to open her side door. “I am not a bitch. No one calls me a bitch.”

“Get in and shut up. Remember, you have to study tonight.”

She opened the door of his creaky truck. She spoke with scorn.

“What are you doing tonight, drinking beer?” she asked.

Charlie just smiled and said nothing. God, how annoying he was.

In the morning her car was parked out in front of her house with a huge red ribbon tied around it. When she started it, she was amazed how soft it purred, like a new car. Only later did she learn Charlie had stayed up the whole night to rebuild her entire engine. He had practically given her a new car. When she called him to thank him, to pay him, he just laughed and told her to forget it. But she knew she was going to have trouble forgetting him. She asked him out and he said he'd be honored.

That was the beginning; that was the end.

CHAPTER THREE

Lieutenant Sharp and Lieutenant Riles decided to have a mini-conference in the hallway. After telling Mary to relax, they left the interrogation room and huddled next to a water cooler that doled out water as lousy as the coffee they made out of it later. Riles looked worried, but Sharp thought they were making progress.

“She's not being straight with us,” Riles complained.

“She's eighteen years old. We're cops. It's the middle of the night. I'd expect her to have her facts a little messed up.”

“No. A guy she dated is dead. Her boyfriend is missing. She's not stupid, she knows how serious this is.”

“I didn't say she was stupid,” Sharp said. “Just confused.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” Riles said.

Sharp considered the something he couldn't quite find in Mary's eyes. “Maybe not,” he admitted. “Do you want to take over the questioning?”

“No. You’re doing a good job. But I would like a second opinion. Let's get Dick’s sister in here. But let’s talk to her together. I don't want to split up.”

“We’ll have to keep Mary waiting.”

“Let her wait,” Riles said.

Before going to fetch Hannah from the clutches of her unpleasant father, they stopped in to see Dr. Kohner and dead Dick. Normally the body would have been brought to the morgue for an autopsy but the place had burned down the previous month when Dr. Kohner had accidentally set some chemicals on fire with his lit pipe. Neither of the officers was happy to see that Dr. Kohner was smoking a pipe as he worked on sawing Dick's head open. Riles was older and had seen many autopsies but Sharp had to take a deep breath as Dr. Kohner literally opened up half of Dick’s skull. The boy's gray brain sagged onto the makeshift autopsy table and thick blood trickled down a stainless steel gully that had been set up to capture the overflow. There was a portable X-ray machine in one corner. Before picking up the saw, the coroner had taken plenty of pictures. Dr. Kohner looked up and grinned when he saw Sharp pale.

Dr. Kohner was a mixture of German and Japanese. He often joked he was a product of Germany's alliance with Japan during World War II, and it was true he must have been born sometime before the war. He wore a thin mustache as white as a line of sugar and his hair was closely cropped to reveal amazingly youthful skin. He stood firmly erect, and although he was always friendly, he clearly preferred the company of the dead. There was an unverified rumor that he had been a surgeon before he was forced into pathology for refusing to close a patient from whom he had just removed an appendix. The joke was that the patient had been his own father. It was probably all a lie, but operating on his own father would not have intimidated Dr. Kohner. He had once remarked that his only regret in life was that he wouldn’t be able to perform the autopsy on himself. Seemed he wanted to see what was really in there. He gestured to Sharp with his pipe.