Who Murdered Garson Talmadge (7 page)

Chapter 8

If bigamy were legal, I’d have stood right beside Fidge at his wedding and we would have both married Brenda, but bigamy isn’t legal, so Brenda became Mrs. Fidgery. Besides when they were wed, I had already been married and had two daughters. As for Brenda, truth was I mostly loved her cooking, that and her personality. She could be a bit dirty-mouthed at times, but never in front of her kids, and never in a meanspirited fashion. She just loved to laugh and had a raunchy side that made me smile just to think about.

Fidge had already dropped his son off at Little League practice. Their daughter, Becky, had spent Saturday night at a girlfriend’s house for a slumber party, a staple of Americana. The girls were at the age where they would still be sleeping after staying up half the night whispering about which boys at school were the cutest.

I’m not sure at what age females learn the word cute, but it is a decidedly female word. Men do not say cute. Maybe when referring to puppies or new born babies if the guy is in mixed company. There are differences, you know, between the sexes despite what the modern folks say, and cute is one of those differences. Have you ever heard a man say, “Oh, that dress looks cute on you?” No way. Cute is not a guy word. We may not have a lot that is left to us as pure guy stuff, but not saying
cute
is one of our oases.

Brenda had made pancakes and eggs and bacon, and fresh tomato juice in a mean-looking machine that got me to imagining how it might be used to encourage some thug to confess. Without their kids to help, the three of us would never finish all the food, but it was a grand feast, the kind made doubly good through being shared with the best of friends.

“My old man deals with his boss, Two Dicks, all week,” Brenda said, walking toward me. “When you come around, I get to deal with my own version of Two Dicks. How’s it hanging Matthew?”

Like Fidge, Brenda called me Matthew. Probably because that’s the way she had always heard her husband refer to me. I kissed her on the lips, a peck, and hugged her, a brief closeness that answered her question.

She raised her eyebrows and said, “Yummy.”

Like I said, Brenda had a raunchy sense of humor. And, like I said, I loved it. She was fun.

We chatted until we were all stuffed. Mostly talk of our respective families and some about my writing. Over coffee, we talked politics hoping the subject didn’t cause us indigestion. We talked about the war and immigration, but mostly about how our elected officials, having mismanaged so much of the federal budget for so long, were now trying to right the ship by squeezing Social Security and cutting back on Medicare. None of us were seniors yet, but wrong is still wrong.

Then Brenda broke up the table chatter.

“Why don’t you boys go on in the den so you can talk your serious shit. I need to clean up in here anyway.” She refilled our coffee cups and headed for the kitchen sink after Fidge gave her a love swat on her backside. Brenda was a man’s woman. She looked back and said, “Later, after the company leaves, before the kids get home.”

Just before we walked out of the room, she hiked her house dress halfway up her thighs, pinning it against the front of the counter. “Matthew,” she said, “I told the kids to be home by two, so don’t you be taking up all our time.” She wiggled her ass to punctuate her message. She did have great legs, particularly in the eyes of a man in my condition.

In the den, Fidge pulled the door shut. “Brad Fisher is defending Clarice Talmadge, right?”

I nodded.

“You know, Fisher’s tight with Two Dicks.”

“What?”

“Their mothers are lifelong gal pals. The two families get together from time to time.”

“This situation just keeps getting better and better,” I said while shaking my head.

“Well, Matthew, by now you’ve likely learned that the reputed late night phone calls between the victim and his kids happened. The old guy had planned to put his wife out to pasture.”

“The first part, sure,” I said, before taking a heat-checking sip of my coffee. “The calls happened, but Susan got it secondhand from her brother, not from her father.”

Fidge took a half pint of brandy from a drawer and added a jigger’s worth to his coffee. He pointed the bottle toward me. I held up my cup. He splashed some in.

“Have you checked on the two kids’ stories about where they were?”

“Yeah. Although, they aren’t exactly suspects.”

“They could graduate. Did they check out?”

“Susan’s is airtight. Charles is a bit loose, but it would have to run like a Swiss watch for him to be the places we confirmed he was, plus driving time, and get over to knock off his daddy.”

“So Charles is unlikely, but possible.”

“It would be reaaaal tight. You know, Matthew, we’ve never been on opposite sides of a case before. It do seem odd.”

I moved my head back and forth like a slow motion Kobe Bryant fake before going up for a jumper. “No big deal. We both want the killer put away, that puts us on the same side. We just don’t agree on who that is.”

“True,” Fidge said. “But I got somebody in custody for that role. You don’t.”

“Not yet, but I’m working on it.”

We sat for a minute or two, just sipping. Not sure what to say or not say. Fidge had been right. Things were surely different from how we worked together in the old days.

“I can’t believe how your kids have grown,” I said finally. “You’re getting old, not Brenda, just you.”

“It happens, Matthew. So, how much should we tell each other about this case? Problem being we both can expect to eventually be on the stand, not that we haven’t fudged on our testimony a time or two in the past.”

I smiled. “Anything you say to me that is off the record, I will never repeat to anyone whether or not I’m sworn in.”

Fidge nodded. “Same here, however that could mean we may not be able to use stuff if we’d have to disclose the other was the source, even if using it would help our position. In the end, all that means is that we’ll each officially know only what we would have known without what we tell each other, if we hadn’t opened up.”

“I agree, even without asking you to explain what the hell you just said.” We laughed and clanked our beverage containers, making our agreement in the same manner real men had been making agreements since the beginning of beverage containers.

“Okay, then,” Fidge said. “Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get to work.”

We talked for about an hour and it turned out Fidge had very little I didn’t know, and I had nothing he didn’t know other than that the kids’ mother was Iraqi. The cops had sworn statements from Charles and Susan, with the phone records in support. Fisher and I had expected all that. They also had three neighbors ready to testify about Garson and Clarice arguing loudly for days. That was no surprise. Several wives were eager to testify about Clarice and their husbands, although from my way of looking at it the husbands had made their own decisions and were equally wrong as Clarice. Still, the most widely held view in our society said women on the make were not supposed to bark up another women’s tree.

Clarice’s prints were not on the murder weapon, the cop’s explanation: she used the scarf. They were betting that not many could scale the outside of the building to reach the Talmadge’s fourth floor balcony, and there were no clawing marks on the balcony edge or railing. Fidge admitted that position was flimsy, that a killer could come up the outside using a padded grappling hook and basic rope-climbing skills.

The killer coming in that way, however, from what was known, could not exit that same way. It would be impossible to close the door behind him to two inches and make it to the rail without leaving an exit footprint. The killer could have left using a key taken from inside the house, but Garson’s key was in his pocket and Clarice’s key was in her purse. In her statement, Clarice had said the household had no spare key. As for other keys, the building had tight key control, and all keys had been accounted for. Fidge also made me say again that I never had a key to the Talmadge condo.

This line of thinking led us to the obvious, if the killer had somehow gotten a key to aid his exit, then he would not have needed the Ninja bit on the outside wall to get in. This take on it suggested the zigzag footprint on the deck might be unrelated to the murder.

Fidge confirmed he had not found a shoe with the sole print pattern that matched the balcony footprint and had been unable to tie it to any building workman or service provider. He didn’t see that print as much of anything. It remained a loose end which meant it would be hard for either the defense or prosecutor to make much out of it. The mystery of it could help Fisher if he could tie in something else suggestive of an outside killer. I shared my suspicions about the two kids killing their father. Fidge shrugged off all of that. I could see why.

“Matthew, you know your involvement with this dame is going to come out. I had to put it in my report, you know, the part about her claiming to have been with you in your place. Of course, the press got it. This is a juicy story, old guy with millions and a sexy younger wife; the media will shadow us every step of the way.”

“I understand. I know you couldn’t avoid it.” Fidge nodded, his head lowered a bit while he did.

Fidge and I had absorbed all the coffee and brandy and wishful thinking we could. So we broke off our discussions, agreeing we would talk again when one of us had something substantive to share.

I found Brenda in the kitchen baking beer bread. I thanked her for the best breakfast I’d had since, well, since the last time I’d eaten with her family. And she thanked me for leaving a couple of hours before the kids were due home. The woman had an overactive sex drive; although I admit not knowing where the line is that one crosses to be oversexed. But their lovemaking was a good thing. It was about the only aerobic exercise in Fidge’s life.

Chapter 9

“Susan’s a real fox,” I said to Brad Fisher while we talked on the phone as I drove home from having breakfast with Fidge and Brenda. “She’ll make a strong witness for the D.A. Fortunately she didn’t hear anything directly from her father, only through her brother who will not likely be a good witness. Daddy’s efforts to make Charles into an enforcer failed miserably. He doesn’t have the spine for it. He’ll open up like an oyster if we ever need to crack our way in.”

“What did you find out from the two of them?” Fisher asked.

“Their stories were similar enough to suggest a rehearsal. Susan is a law school grad so she’s likely trying to coach her brother, but he’s a chauvinist, so he’s refusing her direction to some degree. We may be able to play them against one another at some point. The cops have checked their alibis and they seem okay, at least for now.”

“So you got nothing heavy duty?”

“Susan confirmed her real mother was Iraqi. Charles Talmadge showed me his cell phone statement to date for the month. He had gone online and printed it. Be prepared, and all that stuff. The call from his dad was there, just like he told the cops. But we were expecting that. So, yeah, I’ve got nothing heavy duty, but we’re only in the second inning.”

“I’ve gotten a copy of the in-and-out calls on Garson Talmadge’s phone,” Brad said. “The old guy called his son all right. Then he must have turned his phone off, but there was a message later from his daughter. The phone records show the two of them didn’t talk before he died.”

“Anything significant in her message?”

“No. Just, ‘call me, Papa. We need to talk.’”

“So that’s it?”

“The victim’s phone records showed no history of calls real late at night between Garson and either of his kids. So something out of the ordinary was going on that night.”

“Those calls will score for the D.A.”

“Hell, those calls are an NBA three-pointer,” Brad said while I turned onto Ocean Boulevard. “The jury will assume family calls that time of night to have been about something big, like a decision to change a will. Anyway, we can’t do much about any of that. You need to find me something that will call his kids’ veracity into question, particularly the son because Susan didn’t actually talk to her father.”

“Like the song says, right now,
I got plenty of nothin’
. Maybe a few feelings I can’t square in my mind.”

“Such as?”

“Garson must’ve been a cold-blooded son of a bitch to raise his son to be muscle in the dangerous world of weapons deals. Charles also said something about the old man using Susan to seduce customers, offer bribes or curry favors in some fashion. What father would do that?”

Saying it was like having a piano fall on me, but Brad said it first.

“What if he’s not their father?”

“That’s just what I was thinking,” I said. “We got no reason to question he is, other than you’d have to be a class-A prick to use your kids that way.”

“How do we find out?”

“I’d like your okay to go to Europe—France, to start. But first I need to find some names and addresses over there, somebody who might know something. If his death is a carryover from his gun running days, the answers are over there, not here.”

“I’ve got a copy of Garson’s immigrations application,” Brad said. “It came in by courier late Friday, also his ten-year-old citizenship application. A glance is all I’ve taken so far. There was one address in France, don’t recall whose. Sappho and Charaxus are definitely shown as his children, I did notice that. They came over with him.”

“You at the office?” I asked.

“At home.”

“You got an hour? Let’s meet at your office. Let me get a look at that stuff. I might find a French connection.”

“I can be there in twenty,” Brad said. “I can’t stay long. My in-laws are coming over for a late-afternoon barbeque.”

We were about to hang up when Fisher paused the way people do when they are deciding whether or not to say something more. Then he did. “I’m going to see Clarice tomorrow at noon. It’s mostly technical legal mumbo-jumbo. But in light of this discussion, I’d like you there as well. I have never spoken to her about France, Garson’s ex, the background on his two kids or any of that stuff. Have you and she ever talked about any of that?”

“Not a word.”

“Well, before we send you off to France, we should. Women rarely marry a man who has been married previously without asking about the prior marriage, any kids, where they lived, like that. Gals are different from guys that way. Europe, even France is a big place without something to point you somewhere.”

“I’ll come by your office at eleven in the morning. We’ll go together. We can kick it around some more on the way.”

“I’m expecting a copy of Garson’s will tomorrow morning, also the prenuptial. They should arrive before you do. Now, let’s get moving, remember my wife’s folks are coming.”

“See you in twenty minutes. We’ll be done in time for your barbeque. Take some pictures. I’d love to see how you look in an apron, maybe one of those tall chef’s hats. A red scarf would be a nice touch, or perhaps a wine sommelier’s pewter saucer on a chain around your neck.”

“You are a writer, aren’t you?”

We hung up listening to each other laugh.

* * *

Forty minutes later, I drove up the embankment from the underground parking in Brad Fisher’s building. On the car seat beside me lay a folder holding copies of Garson’s immigration and citizenship papers. On both documents, Garson had listed a Paris address. At the time Garson applied to come here on a temporary basis, he had listed the address as his home. Years later, when applying for citizenship, he had listed the same address as his home before coming to America. Maybe his ex-wife, Chantal, still lived there. Odds said no, but maybe the French were less transient than modern Americans. Brad’s staff had been unable to come up with a phone number for the ex.

We were hoping Clarice would point me in some clearer direction.