Murder Pro Bono

by Don Porter

  O'Malley's car was still sitting at the pumps with no one around it. I put the car keys and the $2,000 in the front seat and scooted back to the convertible. I figured that the family would use the money to go back to Hawaii, but if they didn't, it wasn't a problem. None of them were wanted by any agencies that were bugging us. I drove around the corner and tooted. Maggie pulled out to follow me. George and O'Malley were still sitting in back. I turned left on Highway 50, and we stopped at the next station to gas up the cars. Those new cars get wonderful gas mileage, but the tanks are miniscule, so they still won't go past a service station. We segued to Interstate 80, took that into Reno, and with only two false turns and a stop at a pawnshop to pick up a pair of handcuffs, found Cannon International Airport.

  George and I pinned our detective badges onto our jackets. That helped explain why George and O'Malley were handcuffed together when we checked in for our flight. The Reno flight wasn't so crowded. George grabbed the seat behind the bulkhead and stuck O'Malley next to the window. Maggie and I sat right behind them. The plane hadn't yet backed away from the gate when Maggie's eyes closed and she started to slump. I put a fatherly arm around her shoulders, she nestled down and zonked out.

  We were flying over brown, thirsty-looking mountains when I noticed that O'Malley was sleeping on George's shoulder. George had his legs stretched out in front of him and didn't look too uncomfortable. I think the snores I was hearing were coming from George.

  Anyone who thinks that the world is all paved over and population is about to burst the seams should make that drive and that flight. From thirty thousand feet, I could see two hundred miles and I wasn't seeing any signs of civilization. I figured that would change when we got to the coast, but I couldn't stay awake that long.

  Chapter 15

  The car I had rented from the snazzy blonde at Hertz was still in the airport parking lot. We headed straight to the cop shop. We wanted to walk in of our own free will, not handcuffed by some traffic cop who happened to spot us. With a murder charge floating around, and possibly justified, it was not a good time to play cute with Cochran. On the other hand, if we'd had a choice, we just might not have taken O'Malley in. The problem was that he'd been yammering steadily for over four hours, and every other sentence was, “I didn't kill him.” Maybe it was sheer repetition, but I was beginning to believe him. I could see that George was waffling, and, of course, Maggie wanted to let him go because of his gorgeous blue eyes.

  We stopped in the hallway to take the handcuffs off. The desk sergeant recognized George and me and had already called Cochran before we got to the counter. If Cochran was glad to see us, he masked his feelings.

  “Well well, the three stooges. You decided to give yourselves up?”

  “Cochran, I'd like you to meet Mr. Reginald O'Malley. It has come to his attention that the police wish to question him, so he has come in of his own free will in order to cooperate. He has no idea why you wish to question him, because he is innocent of any wrongdoing. He also found this money belt lying beside the road, and since it doesn't belong to him, he wishes to turn it over to the police.” I laid the money belt on the counter, and noticed that the first two pouches were empty. They hadn't been when I extracted the two thousand dollars that we left for the family. I glanced at George; he rolled his eyes up to study the ceiling. My little speech wasn't much, but under the circumstances, it was the best I could do for O'Malley. Cochran jerked his head toward the holding cell and O'Malley marched in like a gentleman. When Cochran turned his back on us, we split.

  We dropped Maggie off at her apartment, then I let George out at our office building and went to return the car. It was a different blonde at the desk, equally snazzy, and also named Marilyn, but she didn't remember me either. I strolled back to the office, enjoying the contrast of Hawaii's palms and flowers with Nevada's sand and glitter, but I was wondering if Betty would remember me when she came back.

  I was surprised to hear rap music coming out of our office, but when I stepped inside, I saw a transistor radio attached with a rubber band to George's phone. It was blaring away, so the cops were still bugging us. Maybe they would stop, now that they had O'Malley. I did wonder if the guy who was listening preferred the rap music to the police whistle.

  George was leaning back in Maggie's chair with his feet on her desk. I perched on the edge. “Well, Sherlock, did O'Malley kill the gangster, or didn't he?”

  “Ask me an easy question. Don't you want to know why the sky is blue?”

  “No, I was wondering why grass is green, and that reminded me that the money belt was missing a few lumps. Any theories about that?” I asked.

  “Maybe the FBI decided to pay O'Malley's bill? After all, he saved them a lot of work, so they're probably grateful.”

  “Yeah, I've always heard that the FBI is basically a philanthropic organization. Have you ever heard of felony grand theft?”

  “No, but I have heard what happens to bankrolls when they spend a few days in Las Vegas. Anyhow, that FBI money was intended to promote law and order. What better way than keeping a struggling detective agency from going broke? If there is ever an accounting, they will find that the missing cash more or less equals our expenses, but that is sheer coincidence.”

  “Okay,” I said, “and since we know from Detective School 101, lesson one, that there is no such thing as coincidence, then the money probably never existed. Now, about my first question, did O'Malley murder the gangster?”

  “Dick, I would like to say that he did. If I could say that, then we could go down to Fat Fat, have a couple of drinks, and start our lives all over. Unfortunately, based on my vast experience of listening to lies, I'm afraid that just this one time, O'Malley was finally telling the truth.”

  “Then the solution is clear. Let's hire a first class detective agency to find who really did the murder, and go start our lives over at Fat Fat anyhow.”

  Cy saw us coming and mixed; he hadn't noticed that we'd been gone. That's an interesting thing about the jet age. You can be halfway around the world one day, back the next, and it feels as if nothing has happened. George beat me to the bar, tested the three vacant stools, and took the stable one. I found one that wouldn't tip over, if I kept a firm grip on some anchoring protrusion. The rum and Coke were suitably anchoring.

  “Do they have enough evidence to bust O'Malley for the murder?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure, plenty of evidence, but it's all circumstantial.” George was being facetious. To understand what he was really saying, you may need some information from Detective School 201. Detective novels and TV shows have given us the impression that there is something wrong, or weak, about circumstantial evidence, but in the real world, that is not the case.

  Except for direct eyewitness testimony, all evidence is circumstantial. For instance, if you hear a shot behind you and spin around to see one guy falling with a bullet wound and another guy holding a smoking gun, that is circumstantial evidence. It may be that the gun you saw was shooting blanks, and the victim was shot by a third person waiting in the wings. If it's a detective novel or a movie, that's probably the case. The point is that you didn't see the bullet come from the perp's gun and enter the victim. All you saw was a set of circumstances, and that is where reasonable doubt comes in. We were having doubts about O'Malley's guilt; but, were they reasonable?

  Four rum and Cokes in quick succession make everything seem reasonable.

  Chapter 16

  It was Dallas who walked into the office, but a barely recognizable one, and Maggie did not rush to open the window. Dallas was dressed in a practical plaid shirt, jeans, and shoes that she could run in, but she was clean. Maggie ushered her straight into the office, so I put down the newspaper. I had taken Cochran's advice, dug a three-day-old paper out of the trash in the lobby, and read the police report of the latest murder. It was a sanitized version of what O'Malley had told us, and it didn't mention the brains, or the water pipe.

  I pulled up a client chair for
Dallas, and George and I perched on the edges of our desks again.

  “You got to get him out.”

  It was time to play good cop/bad cop. I took over the good. “Dallas, he's the prime suspect in a murder. If bail is offered, it's going to be seven figures, and even that's not likely because, as we noticed, he's a serious flight risk.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but O'Malley didn't kill no one.”

  “What makes you so sure? He's not exactly a paragon of truthfulness. He hasn't given us a straight answer to anything yet.”

  “Well, sure, he doesn't trust you, and maybe I shouldn't either, but O'Malley probably didn't tell you the whole truth about the murder. See, the reason we know he didn't do it is that we were all hiding behind the hedge, and Bruno went to the door with him.”

  George didn't explode; it was more of an implosion. He couldn't sit still anymore, so he stomped over to the window, but it didn't seem to help much. It still took him a while to get control, enough even to be the bad cop. “If there were witnesses, why the devil didn't he say so? Why should we believe you any more than we do him?”

  “Because O'Malley is an honorable man.” I wondered if she was quoting Shakespeare, but then, Brutus was guilty too, if you don't put too fine a point on it.

  George deflated and slunk back to his desk. “Would you mind defining honorable for us?”

  “He didn't want to get the family involved. Willie figured that if we told the truth, they'd lock us all up.”

  I had a sneaking suspicion that Willie had been right about that. My other suspicion was that Dallas was telling us the truth. She was sitting straight in her chair, hands in her lap. She wasn't picking at her clothes, or swiping at her hair, and she was meeting eyes with both of us. Someone who is dissembling picks out the weakest link, usually me, and makes a show of honest eye contact. Dallas was just broadcasting to the world. That may not be a lie detector test, but it's probably more accurate.

  I tried another tack. “Dallas, if we do get involved, are you guys going to disappear on us again?”

  “No, we're staying at the Waikiki Grand, and we'll be there until you get O'Malley out.”

  The Waikiki Grand was named quite a while ago. It's on Kapahulu Avenue, across from the zoo, and the Grand part doesn't fit it anymore, but it is quite a step up from living under a bridge.

  “How are you paying for the hotel?”

  “Oh, didn't O'Malley tell you? Bruno has the money.”

  “What money? Just how much did you steal from the belt?” That was George, and I could see his mind wincing, wondering what we had turned over to the cops in the money belt.

  “Not that money. We have our own money now. Sure, we borrowed a little from the belt for airline tickets and some clothes, but when we got to Vegas, O'Malley felt the luck of the Irish coming on. We were having breakfast at the hotel and a girl came around selling Lotto tickets. O'Malley bought one, used our birthdays for numbers, and won $30,000 so we put the original money back in the belt. Bruno is keeping the rest, and we're registered under his real name. He's Ernest Brunowski if you need to find us.”

  That was an interesting development. We'd been expecting a flap over missing money, and there was about twelve thousand dollars missing; the two thousand that I had stolen, and around ten thousand that George had lifted. I decided to deal with that later.

  “What can you tell us about the scene of the crime? I don't suppose that you saw any mafia staff cars driving away, or Jack the Ripper slinking through the bushes?”

  “Yeah, well, actually we did. We went up to St. Louis Heights by bus, and when we got off, we nearly got run over by a television repair truck. It came from the direction of the house, doing sixty miles an hour, and blasted right through a stop sign. We didn't think anything about it at the time, but afterward, we wondered.”

  “Wonderful.” George sat down at his desk, ready to write. “Which TV company was it?”

  “Well, we didn't notice that. Like I said, we didn't think much about it at the time, and afterward all we remembered was the TV repair sign.”

  “What color was it?” George was still poised to write.

  “We're not sure about that, either. Those streetlights are funny, like they made us look blue, so everything looks either blue or black. Maybe the sign was black.”

  “Yeah, maybe it was.” George didn't bother to write that down. “If you see the truck again, you will write down some names and phone numbers and give us a call?”

  “Oh, sure, and thanks a lot for getting O'Malley off.” Apparently that ended the interview, because Dallas got up and walked out.

  George and I went back to sit at our desks and looked at each other. No help there. We got up in unison and walked over to stare out the window. Afternoon sunshine was backlighting the Waianae Mountains and sparkling silver flashes from the harbor, but mostly the sun was in our eyes. You had to be careful not to look at the sun, or it would blind you, and we were already feeling blind enough.

  “How many TV repair shops in town?” George asked.

  “Surely not more than a hundred, maybe a hundred-fifty if you count the whole island. Want me to call them all and ask if they've murdered anyone recently?”

  “Good place to start, unless you'd like to run up and check out the scene of the crime.” George snapped his fingers as if he'd just had a brilliant idea. “Those repairmen are always handing out business cards, there are probably a few lying on the sidewalk.”

  “Good thinking. I'll grab a magnifying glass. Have you seen my meerschaum pipe and deerstalker lately?”

  “I hocked them to pay the rent. Meet at one in the morning. Say in that big parking lot behind the restaurants in Kaimuki?”

  He saw me wince, so he rubbed salt in my wound.

  “Stay sober.”

  I stabbed him back. “For a nighttime operation, see if you can find a shirt that's no brighter than a streetlight.”

  Chapter 17

  We parked the Jag two blocks up the hill above the mansion and walked. From the top of St. Louis Heights, we were looking down on the beehive of Waikiki, but not hearing it. That gave it an eerie quality, like watching television with the sound turned down. Instead of traffic and laughter, we were hearing crickets and night birds and the sound of our own footsteps on the concrete sidewalk.

  Streetlights covered the intersections, but between them it was dark enough that we could see the stars, and the path of moonlight on the ocean had a tranquil, earthy quality that's too often missing in Hawaii. The redolence of plumeria and citrus blossoms on the breeze added to the rural feeling. You get those same scents in Waikiki, but they are interspersed with coconut oil and the smell of frying fast food, so they never evoke the reality of a pleasant tropical night.

  We had walked a block downhill and started across on the street below the mansion when we heard a rumbling that could have been thunder. A rusty old four-door Toyota Tercel came up the hill ahead of us and turned to meet us. The thunder was drumbeats coming from a serious amplifier, almost loud enough to rock the car. The car slowed down as it approached and stopped in the street beside us. Both rear doors opened and two young men climbed out and walked toward us. The one on my side was all smiles and bonhomie. He shouted to be heard over the drum. “Hey, Bruddah, have you got the time?”

  If you live in America, you've probably been mugged a few times and recognize the classic approach. The point is to get close enough to reach you without arousing suspicion. You are supposed to extend your left wrist to consult your watch, so I did that. I noticed that the other guy, on George's side, was holding a baseball bat down beside his leg, so these guys were serious and the normal rules of society were suspended.

  I stared at my watch, trying to read it in the dim light. That infernal drumbeat was vibrating my skull, so it was hard to concentrate. The bruddah came right up to me and reached for my left wrist like he wanted to look for himself. I grabbed his right wrist with my right hand, his hand with my left, ducked under his ar
m, and stood up. That put me behind him with his arm up between his shoulder blades. By all means, try that trick at home, but do it slowly because you may accidentally jerk your partner's shoulder out of the socket. The point of ducking under is that if you just twist the wrist you may get involved in a test of strength, but going under and turning will twist any arm. This guy didn't look too big or powerful, but why take chances?

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the other guy make the mistake of swinging his bat down toward George's head. When the bat went by, George had moved his head, grabbed the bat handle and helped it swing right on down. The crunch when it hit the guy‘s shin was audible, even over the drumbeats. The front doors popped open and two more guys charged us. George's batter was rolling on the ground screaming, and George had the bat, so no problem there. The guy on my side was coming fast, and too big to fool around with. I bent my hostage forward at the waist. (With his arm between his shoulders blades, he'll cooperate with any move you make.) We ran two steps to meet the charger and I aimed the hostage's head for the oncoming gut. At the last second, I gave the hostage a kick that would have him singing soprano for a month. I heard his scream, even over the drum.

  The head connected with the gut and the new guy bent over, gasping for breath and leading with his chin. I know it's tempting, but never, ever, hit a chin with a closed fist. That only works in movies and detective novels. Doing it in the real world will get you broken fingers and a sprained wrist. Boxers do it in the ring, but remember, their fingers and wrists are taped and gloves are supporting their wrists and providing an inch of padding. It's okay to use a fist on a belly, and it feels good on a particularly offensive nose, but if you must punch a nose, do it sideways. If you hit the nose straight on, you may drive bone fragments into the brain and kill the guy. If you intend to kill him, aim the blow slightly upward.