The Woman (34 page)
Authors: David Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #Suspense, #Thrillers, #General, #Mystery & Detective
“And that made killing Ben okay?”
“Maybe not okay, but necessary. Efficient.”
“Why?”
“Ben was having an attack of conscience. He had decided to go to the authorities. That would have brought all of us into the light, Webster, Cynthia, you, the captain, maybe me. Cynthia is dead, no reason to sully her memory. Webster has already been exposed. So why let Ben create problems for you and the captain. It’s more efficient to just let the guilty suffer and that included Ben.”
“It would have exposed the corrupt public officials who sold out to Webster.”
“Now you know why the captain left Webster’s hidden file cabinet open to be found. Get them exposed without involving you, me, or himself.”
They had finished breakfast, returned to the car, and driven for a half hour before either of them spoke again.
“So,” Linda asked, “what are your plans? Are you and Ryan off on another adventure?”
“Not me. I told the captain I planned to call it quits. Actually, I had before this but, well, when he told me it was for you, I relented.”
“Will you be sticking around Sea Crest for a while?”
“Actually, I thought I might apply to fill Ben’s job. I am his only deputy, and at the moment Sea Crest is without a police department. The county sheriff is likely providing temporary coverage. There’s a military file on me as Clark Ryerson, so that name’ll hold up when they do the background check. Beyond that, there’s a lady in town I haven’t quit trying to date.”
“Then Clark isn’t your real name?”
“No.”
“What is your real name?”
“Gene.”
“And you and Ryan have been friends since you were boys, right?”
“Yes.”
“Ryan told me you were dead,” Linda said, looking at the man she had just learned was really named Gene.
“The captain, well, both of us really, feel that in his line of work, it is best he be seen as an island. No family. No long friends. Alone. He’s less vulnerable that way. His family, more safe. So, yes, Gene is dead, sort of. But Clark is alive and well, and I like the name.”
As they turned onto the coast road that approached Sea Crest from the south, Linda asked, “What is your last name?”
“Ryerson. Clark Ryerson. That’s my name now and forever.”
“What’s Ryan’s real name?”
“Not important.”
THE END
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. If you have found errors of fact or location, I would like to hear about them. As for any errors you might imagine in spelling or choice of words, I often have characters speak incorrectly intentionally, for that is how I envision that character would speak. I will reply to all emails that respect these requests. And with your email address, I will send you announcements for my upcoming novels. Thank you for reading this story and please visit my Internet site: www.davidbishopbooks.com I’d love to hear from you.
David Bishop
An excerpt from David Bishop’s novel,
Who Murdered Garson Talmadge, a Matt Kile Mystery
begins on the following page.
Prologue
It’s funny the way a kiss stays with you. Lingers. How you can feel it long after it ends. I understood what amputees meant when they spoke of mystery limbs. It’s there, but it isn’t. You know it isn’t. But you feel it is. While I was in prison, my wife divorced me. 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 that’s 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. My old suit fit a bit 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 billowing 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 Detective Terrence Fidgery. We arrested the scum and he readily confessed.
The judge ruled our search illegal and all that followed bad fruit, including the thug’s confession. Cute words for giving a 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 possibly 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 people treat 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. 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 said. “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 by this guy, 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. The husband/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, and finally had the time to do. When I got out, I had 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.
Six Years Later:
I had been 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 on the corner 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—”
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 to fill one more plate. I often sought out Fidge for his up-to-date cop’s angle for my mystery novels.
The master bedroom, where Garson Talmadge slept alone, was immediately inside to the right; his door loitered partially open. Clarice stood in the middle of the living room, clutching her Chihuahua, her wet eyes pleading for help. 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. A moment later, 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 Garson Talmadge 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 and heard a crunching sound. I 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 rigid in mock salute.
A hissing sound led my gaze to the sliding door to their ocean-facing balcony. The slider was open two inches with the air fighting to get inside. 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 toward the condo. I pushed the slider back to its original two inches. Moving 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. Whatever clothing Garson had worn, had not been left over the high-back leather chair or the bed’s foot rail. Garson had always struck me as an everything-in-its-place kind of guy; his room proved it. He would not have wanted to see the jagged out-of-place blood stain on his pillow.
Sergeant Fidgery came through the doorway, his posture slouched, his stride short. “Hey, Matthew, just finished your latest,
Murder on Overtime
. Your best yet.”
“Thanks, Fidge. As always, your technical tips helped. Where’s your new partner?”
“What’s this new stuff? 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.”