The Original Alibi (Matt Kile) (27 page)

I disassembled the Welrod and wrapped in a newspaper and handed it to Eddie. “Drive over the Terminal Island Bridge and toss this piece by piece. Stop in an empty lot several miles off the route you drive and burn the newspaper. Then come back immediately. We call the police when you return. Karen, you and Eddie were in here with the general. The shot came from outside, through the opened door. I arrived about five minutes later. After I helped settle things, I spent some time looking around outside. Then we called the police.”

“Why can’t we just say you were here with us the whole time?”

“Because of my police background, Sergeant Fidgery would expect me to have behaved in a certain manner. I would have taken flight outside immediately, before the shooter could get away without being seen. No. My skills cannot have been here. You two were shocked. Stunned. Dumbfounded. You did nothing. You just froze. I arrived after the murder of the general’s longtime friend and loyal staff man.”

The general spoke for the first time. “This isn’t necessary. Call the police. I will confess.”

“General. No. You don’t want to saddle Eddie and Karen with having to deal with this. You will never be tried, and never imprisoned. Truth is, you simply don’t have enough time left for any real legal proceeding. You don’t want this hanging over them forever. Scandal sheet gossip, talk shows, my guess is even a made-for-TV movie. There could be legal challenges to your will, who knows. Don’t make this your legacy to them. If you insist on confessing, the fact that Karen is not your daughter will come out. After that she will always be known as the daughter of the man who killed General Whittaker’s great grandson. You don’t want that for her.”

I explained that Cliff had been absent at my instruction. That he had remained loyal to the family and his not being around should in no way be held against him. I also advised them to not share what really happened with Cliff. It will provide no benefit, and each person who knows stretches the rubber band closer to the breaking point.

Eddie walked over to the general. “Grandfather, Mr. Kile is right. We need to get moving. Do it his way.” The general looked up and said, “Okay, Eddie.”

“And, Grandfather,” Eddie said, “Karen is your daughter. That is how she was raised. It is time for all this to stop poisoning this family. Please contact Reginald Franklin and have him revise your will to provide equal portions for Karen and myself. Charles, of course, should no longer be included, but Cliff should and also Ileana’s parents, just as you have them now. Have Franklin bring your new will here immediately for your signature.” The general started to speak, but Eddie put his hand on the general’s shoulder. “Grandfather, your will has caused too much pain, too many suspicions among us all. I’m sorry for the way I have acted. It’s time I grow up, past time. I want you to do this.”

“We need to get moving, folks,” I said. “Time is an important element in these things.” I turned to face Eddie. “Pick up Charles and put him on the couch. The police won’t like your having moved the body. You didn’t know any better. You acted from caring. That’s part of why I couldn’t have been here. I would have prevented you from moving him. And remember, all of you, Charles was facing the open door to the patio when he was shot.”

Then I stepped closer to Karen. “Take the general upstairs. I want him to shower. Scrub his hair. Clean his knuckles and under his fingernails, his ears and inside his nostrils. Everything he is wearing is to be immediately put in the washing machine with the hottest water possible, including his lap blanket, even his slippers. Clean his glasses, very well. Soak them while he is in the shower. When he’s out, put his wheelchair in the shower and wash it, including the leather seat and back. Have him put on different clothes and come back downstairs. By that time Eddie should be back. Come on now. We’ve got no more than an hour. I came fifteen minutes after the shot and spent about a half an hour outside, then we called the police. Let’s get a move on. Now! Oh. Karen, get the doors and windows open down here. We can’t smell it right now, but the shot fired in here was supposed to have been fired from outside. Get this place aired. Close it up when you come downstairs. Okay. Scat.”

Eddie moved Charles onto the couch. Then Eddie took the wrapped gun from me and left for the garage in a jog. Karen pushed the general’s wheelchair out the door toward the elevator. With them gone from the room, I went out the glass door to do the things I would do if looking around for the shooter or anything left behind. I made sure my footprints were in the garden and across the lawn. I went out into the driveway and along the side of the house noticing the things there sufficiently to be able to discuss where I had looked.

*

Karen brought the general back downstairs a few minutes before Eddie got back. When they returned the general was in his wheelchair with the tube from the oxygen tank aiding his breathing. They had swapped out the seat and back cushion of the wheelchair from the leather one they had scrubbed to a fabric covered set. He handed me an envelope. “Your fee, Matt. You have served my family well.”

We went back over the facts of how we would play it. I cautioned them to put it in their own words so it wouldn’t sound rehearsed. We moved the time of the shooting up so that only about forty minutes had passed before I called Fidge to report the murder of the general’s devoted friend, Charles Bickers.

Someday I will tell Fidge what really went down this day at the home of General Whittaker, after the general has died, in a few days.

This wasn’t perfect justice. Not in an antiseptic textbook fashion anyway. But like I said earlier, I remain more interested in getting things as close to right as possible than I am in how that gets accomplished. And the hell with the details.

The End

Note to Readers

It is for you that I write so I would love to hear from you now that you have finishing reading the story. I can be reached by email at
[email protected]
, please no attachments. For those of you who write or who aspire to write I encourage you to write, rewrite, and write again until your prose live on the pages the way it lives in your mind. I will reply to all emails that do not contain an attachment. And with your email address, I will send you announcements for my upcoming novels. Thank you for reading this story. I’d love to hear from you.

With appreciation,

David Bishop

P.S. I have one more writing project in mind for release this year. A single short story titled,
Money & Muder, a Matt Kile Mystery
, short story. I will also be working on another mystery for release in the first half of 2013, titled
Death of a Bankster, a Maddie Richards Mystery
.
Death of a Bankster
is a working title, but at this point it appears firm. To stay current on these endeavors and other announcements, please visit my website from time to time or stay in touch with me through email, Facebook or Twitter.

http://www.davidbishopbooks.com

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An Excerpt from the Original Matt Kile Mystery begins on the next page.

Who Murdered Garson Talmadge

An Excerpt:

The Original Alibi
was the second Matt Kile Mystery. For those of you who have yet to read
Who Murdered Garson Talmadge
, the mystery that established Matt Kile as one of America’s leading fictional detectives, I have provided an excerpt beginning on the next page. Enjoy and please do let me know your thoughts on my mysteries.

[email protected]

Who Murdered Garson Talmadge

It’s funny the way a kiss stays with you. How it lingers. How you can feel it long after it ends. I understand what amputees mean when they speak of phantom limbs. It’s there, but it isn’t. You know it isn’t. But you feel it’s still with you. While I was in prison, my wife divorced me; I thought she was with me, but she wasn’t. She said I destroyed our marriage in a moment of rage in a search for some kind of perverted justice. I didn’t think it was perverted, but I didn’t blame her for the divorce.

But enough sad stuff. Yesterday I left the smells and perversions of men and, wearing the same clothes I had worn the last day of my trial, reentered the world of three-dimensional women, and meals you choose for yourself; things I used to take for granted, but don’t any longer. My old suit fit looser and had a musty smell, but nothing could be bad on a con’s first day of freedom. I tilted my head back and inhaled. Free air smelled different, felt different tossing my hair and puffing my shirt.

I had no excuses. I had been guilty. I knew that. The jury knew that. The city knew that. The whole damn country knew. I had shot the guy in front of the TV cameras, emptied my gun into him. He had raped and killed a woman, then killed her three children for having walked in during his deed. The homicide team of Kile and Fidgery had found the evidence that linked the man I killed to the crime. Sergeant Matthew Kile, that was me, still is me, only now there’s no
Sergeant
in front of my name, and my then partner, Detective Terrence Fidgery. We arrested the scum and he readily confessed.

The judge ruled our search illegal and all that followed bad fruit, which included the thug’s confession. Cute words for giving a rapist-killer a get-out-of-jail-free card. In chambers the judge had wrung his hands while saying, “I have to let him walk.” Judges talk about their rules of evidence as though they had replaced the rules about right and wrong. Justice isn’t about guilt and innocence, not anymore. Over time, criminal trials had become a game for wins and losses between district attorneys and the mouthpieces for the accused. Heavy wins get defense attorneys bigger fees. For district attorneys, wins mean advancement into higher office and maybe even a political career. They should take the robes away from the judges and make them wear striped shirts like referees in other sports.

On the courthouse steps, the news hounds had surrounded the rapist-killer like he was a movie star. Fame or infamy can make you a celebrity, and America treats celebrity like virtue.

I still see the woman’s husband, the father of the dead children, stepping out from the crowd, standing there looking at the man who had murdered his family, palpable fury filling his eyes. His body pulsing from the strain of controlled rage that was fraying around the edges, ready to explode. The justice system had failed him, and, because we all rely on it, failed us all. Because I had been the arresting officer, I had also failed him.

The thug spit on the father and punched him, knocking him down onto the dirty-white marble stairs; he rolled all the way to the bottom, stopping on the sidewalk. The police arrested the man we all knew to be a murderer, charging him with assault and battery.

The thug laughed. “I’ll plead to assault,” he boasted. “Is this a great country or what?”

At that moment, without a conscious decision to do so, I drew my service revolver and fired until my gun emptied. The lowlife went down. The sentence he deserved, delivered.

The district attorney tried me for murder-two. The same judge who had let the thug walk gave me seven years. Three months after my incarceration, the surviving husband and father, a wealthy business owner, funded a public opinion poll that showed more than eighty percent of the people felt the judge was wrong, with an excess of two-thirds thinking I did right. All I knew was the world was better off without that piece of shit, and people who would have been damaged in the future, had this guy lived, would now be safe. That was enough; it had to be.

A big reward offered by the husband/father eventually found a witness who had bought a woman’s Rolex from the man I killed. The Rolex had belonged to the murdered woman. Eventually, the father convinced the governor to grant me what is technically known in California as a Certificate of Rehabilitation and Pardon. My time served, four years.

While in prison I had started writing mysteries, something I had always wanted to do, I finally had the time to do. During my second year inside, I secured a literary agent and a publisher. I guessed, they figured that stories written by a former homicide cop and convicted murderer would sell.

My literary agent had wanted to meet me at the gate, but I said no. After walking far enough to put the prison out of sight, I paid a cabbie part of the modest advance on my first novel to drive me to Long Beach, California, telling the hack not to talk to me during the drive. He probably thought that a bit odd, but that was his concern, not mine. If I had wanted to gab, I would have let my literary agent meet me. This trip was about looking out a window without bars, about being able to close my eyes without first checking to see who was nearby. In short, I wanted to quietly absorb the subtleties of freedom regained.