Who Murdered Garson Talmadge (2 page)

Who Murdered Garson Talmadge

A Matthew Kile Mystery

Prologue

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. I told 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.

Chapter 1

Six Years Later:

I was about to walk out my door to have breakfast with the tempting Clarice Talmadge and her septuagenarian husband, Garson Talmadge, without knowing Garson would be skipping breakfasts forever, not to mention lunches and dinners. The Talmadges lived on my floor, at the end of the hall in a twenty-five hundred square foot condo on the corner of the building with a balcony overlooking the white sand shoreline of Long Beach, California. Then my phone rang. It was Clarice, but she hadn’t called to ask how I liked my eggs. The cops were with her and they hadn’t been invited for breakfast.

A uniformed officer halted me at the door to the Talmadge condo. “My name’s Matt Kile,” I said, “I was asked to come down—”

The saxophone voice of Detective Sergeant Terrence Fidgery interrupted, “Let ‘im in.”

For seven years before my incarceration Fidge and I had worked homicides together for the Long Beach police department. Fidge was a solid detective, content with his work, a man who appeared to need nothing else. Well, perhaps a diet-and-exercise program, but Fidge was a man who would do anything to stay in shape except eat right, exercise, and drink less beer. I left the force ten years ago, but stayed in touch with Fidge and his wife, Brenda, whose pot always held enough for one more plate. I often sought out Fidge for his take on the first draft of my mystery novels.

The master bedroom where Garson Talmadge slept alone was immediately inside to the right. His door partially open. I could see Garson on the bed, his arm in an uncomfortable position he could no longer feel. Through the doorway I saw Clarice standing in the middle of the living room, clutching her little Chihuahua to her bosom, her wet eyes pleading for help. I envied the pooch. I put my open palm straight out toward her so she would not come to me, then my finger to my lips signaling her to stay quiet.

“I’ll be with you in a minute Matthew,” Fidge hollered from somewhere deeper into the condo.

I waited in the foyer while the police photographer finished shooting Garson’s bedroom. A liquid had been spilled or thrown against the bedroom door. I touched the wet carpet and smelled my fingers. Coffee. With cream, I thought. The photographer came out of Garson’s bedroom. I couldn’t place his name, but I’d seen him around. We exchanged nods as we passed in the doorway.

Sometimes you strain so hard listening for the quietest of sounds that you don’t hear the loudest. The shot that had hit my neighbor just above the bridge of his nose had come so fast that before he consciously heard it, he had stopped hearing everything.

The edge of Garson’s bedcovers was pulled back exposing a foot too white to be a living foot. A modest amount of dried blood soaked Garson’s pillowcase, and stippling surrounded the entry wound. My elderly neighbor had taken it from up close.

I started toward the bed, heard a crunching sound and stopped. The gold carpeting between the door and the bed had been sprinkled with what looked to be cornflakes. I stood still and looked around. A man’s billfold sat on the dresser in front of the mirror, the corners of a wad of cash edging out where the wallet folded over. Five boxes of cornflakes stood at attention along the wall at the end of the dresser, the flaps on the end box erect in mock salute, a bottle of Seagram’s Seven Crown serving as a bookend.

A hissing sound led my eyes to the sliding door entry to their ocean-facing balcony. The slider was open two inches with the air fighting its way inside like folks at the door to a popular after hour’s club. The room was cold enough that I would have closed the door, but not in a crime scene. I pulled the sleeve of my sweater down over my fingertips, reached as high as my six-three frame allowed and opened the slider far enough to stick my head outside. Halfway between the door and the railing, a zigzag print from the sole of a large deck shoe smudged the dewy balcony. The sole print testified that the step had been taken toward the condo. I pushed the slider back to its original two inches. Moving carefully to avoid the cornflakes, I went into the walk-in closet. There were no shoes with that sole pattern, and no shoes of any kind under or beside the bed. Garson had always struck me as an everything-in-its-place kind of guy. His room proved it. Whatever he had worn had been hung up or dropped in a hamper. He would not have wanted to see the jagged out-of-place blood stain that defaced his pillow.

Sergeant Fidgery came through the doorway, his posture slouched, his stride short. “Hey, Matthew, I just finished your latest,
The Blackmail Club,
it’s your best yet.”

“Thanks, Fidge. As always, your technical tips helped. Where’s your new partner?”

“What’s with the new? You know George has been with me since, well, since that stupid stunt you pulled on the courthouse steps ten years ago.”

“Anybody since me will always seem new. So, then, where’s George?”

“Sick,” Fidge said. “I’m soloing. That’s why I approved your coming down here. I need you to remember how to behave in a crime scene.”

“By the way, happy birthday old man. Sorry I didn’t make the party last weekend. Forty-seven, right?”

“Forty-seven,” Fidge said sarcastically. “We go through this every year. I’m forty-seven, you’re forty-six, but only for a few months, then you’ll be forty-seven like me. Brenda said to tell you she hasn’t forgiven you for missing the party.”

“You know I would’ve been there if I could. My agent scheduled a book signing way over in the San Fernando Valley without checking the date with me. She won’t do that again.”

“No sweat, Matthew. I’m just yanking your chain. Brenda understands.”

“Thanks. Look, I stepped on the cornflakes before I saw them. They blended with the carpeting. It looks like the flakes had been walked on before I got here. You?”

“Who the hell expects cornflakes on gold carpet?” Fidge asked. “Christ, on any color carpet.” Fidge put a steadying hand on my shoulder, crossed one knee with his opposite ankle and looked at his sole, then the other. Neither of us saw anything on the soles of his shoes.

“Did Clarice walk on them?” I asked.

“Says so. Says she got up, threw a load of clothes in the washer, put the coffee on, showered and slipped into what she called ‘a little thing,’ and then came in here to wake her old man.”

“What about the uniform at the door,” I asked, “did he come in, too?”

“I cursed when I stepped on the flakes,” Fidge said, shaking his head. “A bit too loudly, I guess. Officer Cardiff came running. Now stop poking around, Matthew. I let the wife call you because she said she had been with you last night and that you might have a key to this place, not so’s you could play detective. Tell me about her, and keep your voice down.”

“What can I say? She’s got her own teeth, great hair, and this and that.”

“Yeah. Right off I noticed her this and that. Also the ‘little thing’ she put over her this and that when she got up this morning; it’s hanging behind her bathroom door. You ought to take a look. Then maybe you’ve already seen it, with her in it.” He looked at me from the corner of his eye. “I haven’t heard you deny she was with you so tell me about her visit.”

“Clarice came down during the night. Said she thought someone would try to kill her husband. I didn’t take her seriously, but she had been right.”

“What time did she get there?”

“It was dark, had been for a while. I had been zonked. I went to bed around ten. Midnight would be a good guess.”

“What did she say? I want all of it and I want it exactly. Everything.”

“Page one: The doorbell woke me a few minutes after midnight. I found Mrs. Talmadge leaning against my door jamb wearing a man’s white button-down shirt, a strategic gap formed by the mismatching of a southern buttonhole with a northern button. Her blonde hair teased her shoulders. She had on a pair of shiny gold sandals, her toenails painted red to match the Bloody Mary she held, a celery stalk stood tall in the short glass.”

“Knock it off, Matthew; this isn’t one of your novels. You know what I want. Give.”

I nodded. “Her opening line was ‘something bad is gonna happen.’ She brushed past me, her sandals slipping as she stepped down into my sunken living room, her shirttail failing to fully cover her backside. Oops. I forgot. You said no descriptions. I asked her what she was talking about. She said, ‘somebody’s going to kill Tally.’ That’s her pet name for her dead husband.”

“Then what did she do?” Fidge asked.

“She took a big drink, chomped the end off the celery stick that had poked her in the cheek, and oozed her bottom over the arm of my leather chair, creating two small miracles. She didn’t spill a drop, and her face showed no reaction when her bare bottom settled onto the cool leather.”

Fidge screwed up his face.

“Okay. Okay, just the facts, Sergeant. I asked why she thought that. She said, ‘Three days ago, I answered the phone. Some guy with a raspy voice asked for Gar. Only he made it sound like jar. I told him there’s no jar here and hung up.’”

“Was her dead husband there?”

“No. But her live husband was.” Fidge gave me the finger. I ignored his bad manners and continued. “She said her husband, sitting at the table drinking coffee, turned white when she mentioned
Gar
. To illustrate the color she held up her short white shirttail, her unblemished skin imitating melted milk chocolate. She had no tan line. I know you said to can the descriptions, but I figured you’d like that one.”

“What did her husband say?”

“He told her that some former business acquaintances in Europe used to call him Gar. Then he told her to hang up when they called back.”

Fidge put one hand in the air like he had been busted back to directing traffic. “When? Not if?”

“I asked her that, too. She definitely said, ‘when they called back.’ And, before you ask, she said there were no more such calls, at least not while she was at home. She got in Garson’s face about that call again the next morning, and they again fought.”

“How well did you know this guy?”

“Not all that well,” I said. “I went out to dinner two or three times with the Talmadges. Garson was a bon vivant. He and I played poker with a few men in the building, maybe four times.”

“Did the Talmadges go to dinner with you or did you go with them?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Who invited whom?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Who drove? That’s usually the person who extended the invitation.”

“That I remember. Clarice. She gets motion sickness in a car. She’s found it doesn’t happen when she drives. Garson said it had something to do with her vision and hearing senses getting the same stimulus.”

“When I was a kid,” Fidge said, “my uncle always drove for the same reason. You mentioned you played poker with the deceased and a few other men in the building. The wife’s about thirty-five and a real looker. The dead guy’s around eighty. Was she also playing with some of the other men in the building, and I don’t mean poker?”

“Yeah.”

“You?”

“I expect it’ll come out, so here it is. One afternoon, two days before they moved in last spring, Clarice knocked on my door. I had seen her and Garson in the building earlier, but hadn’t been introduced. She said … no, she didn’t say, I assumed she and Garson were father and daughter.”

“But she didn’t say otherwise, right?”

“She didn’t say otherwise. Before she left we did the deed, you know. Then I found out they were married. It’s rumored several other fellows in the building have also taken turns. I don’t know any names, but I suspect you’ll find wives eager to spill their suspicions.”

“Someday,” Fidge said, “I need to give you my sex-without-deep-feelings-is-worthless speech. I just don’t have time right now.”

“Oh, too bad, I’ve been so looking forward to that one. But it’s a load of bull. Sex for pure lust is not worthless. Not all of us are fortunate enough to have someone we love deeply in our lives every time we get a case of the galloping hornies.”

“You’ve obviously given this a lot of thought, Matthew. But may I bring you back to why we’re together this morning?”

“You brought it up.” I sighed. “Go ahead.”

“What do you know about Garson Talmadge’s background?”

“Less than I know about his eating habits. During one of the dinners, Garson said he came from Europe, but shied from anything beyond generalities. I can tell you he spoke some words with the softer consonants common to the French. Once when the poker talk came around to Iraq, Garson pronounced ‘Allah’ with the back of his tongue raised to touch his soft palate as is done with Arabic.”

The sun broke through the clouds to reflect off the ocean and brighten Garson’s bedroom. We moved a bit to avoid the glare. Fidge walked over to look at a desk along the bedroom wall which held a computer setup and also a typewriter. “Don’t see many people with a typewriter these days.” Then he asked, “What else happened while she was at your place?”

“She took another bite from the celery stalk. A drip of Bloody Mary fell onto her skin to slalom down her abundant cleavage until blossoming into a pink splotch on her white shirt.”

“Knock off the colorful bullshit, Matthew.”

“You know, you’re the only person since my mother who regularly calls me Matthew. Brings back memories. I like it.”