I Scarce Can Die (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 5)

by Michael Wallace

  “Very interesting. I’ve spent hours reading that trial transcript, and it’s beginning to look as if the jury never heard the good stuff.”

  Wednesday October 21

  POPE’S OFFICE OPENED at 8:30, and Gordon was immediately admitted. After repairing to the conference room with coffee, they sipped for nearly two minutes, each man waiting for the other to open the conversation.

  “So you think you have something,” Pope finally said.

  “I know I have something. What I don’t know is how important it is and where it’ll lead.” He paused for coffee. “I’ve read the trial transcript and looked through some of the documents in the box you gave me. Would you mind if I start with a couple of questions first?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “In the sheriff’s report, there was a listing of the contents of Connie’s purse. I was intrigued by the $900 in 20s rolled up with a rubber band, and I was wondering what you made of it.”

  Pope nodded. “What I made of it was that it didn’t help the theory that Connie had been killed by someone breaking into the house. And since that was the closest thing I had to an alternative theory of the crime, I tried to play it down. Without much success, I might add.”

  “Williams used it pretty effectively in his closing argument, I thought.”

  “Of course he did. He’s not stupid. And the jury obviously didn’t think much of the stray robber theory.”

  “Did it strike you as odd that Connie would have that much money on her?”

  “You know, it did when I first saw it, but then it made a bit of sense. Married couples are always hiding money from each other, and when the husband’s apt to drink away the paycheck, the wife might decide to keep some of it out of his reach.”

  “And you didn’t hear of anything else she may have been doing to pick up extra money?”

  “Nothing like that ever came up.”

  “Fair enough. It was just a point that caught my attention. But that’s not the big thing. What I really wanted to ask about was the medical summary.”

  “All right. It seemed pretty straightforward to me.”

  “It was, as far as it went. But my friend, Dr. Peter Delaney, was wondering why they gave you a summary report rather than the full autopsy.”

  “Strictly a matter of time efficiency. Williams asked if I’d be OK with the summary and promised that it would contain everything that would come up at trial. Unless I missed something, he lived up to his word.”

  “I’d agree with that,” Gordon said. “The problem isn’t with what was in that report, but with what was left out of it.”

  Pope gave him a skeptical look. Gordon continued.

  “That brings me to my big something. I have it from a very good source that the full autopsy report states that semen was found in Connie, indicating she’d had sex, in all likelihood consensual, within a couple of hours of when she was killed.”

  Gordon paused for a sip of coffee, finishing his cup.

  “And DNA testing showed it didn’t belong to Gary.”

  Pope stared at Gordon for 15 seconds with his mouth open. When he finally spoke, it was almost in a whisper.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Nor did it belong to anyone in the state’s DNA database. So we’re probably looking at some local talent here. Any idea who it could be?”

  Pope shook his head. “I never heard even a rumor about it. But this changes everything.”

  “Seems to suggest an alternate theory or two.”

  “Absolutely it does. And Williams had no business holding that back.” He sat up and took a deep breath to compose himself. “You’re sure of this?”

  “Like I said, the source is good. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Can’t you demand, as Gary’s attorney, to see the full report, even at this late date?”

  “I’m sure Williams will cough it up. But why didn’t he disclose that information in the first place?”

  Gordon shrugged. “I can think of all sorts of possible answers, but you should probably ask him.”

  “I’ll get on it right away.”

  Pope slumped back in his chair. He looked deflated, and Gordon suspected that his professional pride was more than a bit wounded.

  “I feel like such a fool,” Pope finally said. “You know, this is a small town, and we trust each other. I had to pull together a defense case in a short time and on a tight budget. I would have liked another forensic opinion on the blood spatters, but it was either that or go for a defense psychiatrist, and I thought the shrink was the better use of the money. Now I feel like I let Gary down.”

  “From my reading of the transcript, you did a good job with the case you had. The problem was you didn’t have all the relevant facts. I don’t know where those facts will lead, but good luck.”

  He stood up, and they shook hands.

  “And keep me posted,” Gordon said as he walked out the door.

  “WELL?” PETER ASKED.

  Gordon threw his messenger bag on the couch and sat next to it.

  “He was completely surprised, and not too happy — as you might imagine.”

  “No, I wouldn’t think so. What’s next?”

  “He’s going to demand a full copy of the autopsy report. After that, I don’t know. That was a good catch of yours — about his getting the summary, not the full report.”

  “I have a nodding familiarity with these things. Just Gary’s luck he got an attorney who didn’t. Makes you wonder what else was missing.”

  “It does. The holes in this case are getting bigger all the time.”

  “You know, there’s a danger here, Gordon, and as your friend, I feel I should say something.”

  Gordon nodded.

  “You came up here promising to look into the case and see if there was anything to show Gary might be innocent. And you’ve really put yourself into it. But whether you know it or not, you’re at risk yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Two things. First of all, you have to guard against letting your bias get in the way of how you look at the evidence. You said one of the ways a case goes wrong is that the cops get an idea in their heads that they got the perp and ignore the inconvenient evidence that might suggest another alternative.”

  “Which it’s looking as if they did here.”

  “By the same token, you need to be sure you don’t get so fixated on proving Gary innocent that you disregard the evidence of his guilt. Which, for all the gaps in the story, is still pretty considerable. Just keep that in mind.”

  Gordon sighed. “All right. Point taken. What’s the second thing?”

  “The second thing is that if Gary didn’t kill Connie, someone else in town almost certainly did, and that someone may not take too kindly to your snooping around. So be careful out there.”

  Gordon was letting that sink in when his phone rang. It was Elizabeth.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” he answered.

  “Knock it off, Gordon. Do you have a second?”

  “For you? Always.”

  “Sounds like you need more coffee. Listen. Last night, what with the excitement hangover from Tony’s Tip Top Tavern, I clean forgot to tell you I won’t be in tonight. Some of the faculty members in the English Department are going out to dinner, and I’ve been invited.”

  “Does that mean they think you’re going to get your job permanently?”

  “I sure hope so, but they’re a fun group and I’d go anyway. However, since I’m seeing Connie’s sister tomorrow, I wanted to touch base and see if there was anything new you wanted me to ask her.”

  “Good point. Hold on for a second.” He opened his bag, took out a notebook, and flipped to the notes he’d made the night before.

  “Three things. Two of them have to do with money and one with love.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “You have something to write with? Good. First, Connie had $900 in 20-dollar bills in her purse the night she was killed. I’d
be interested to know if she told her sister anything about an extra source of income or if her sister thinks she could have saved that much money from the household budget.”

  “Okay. Nine hundred dollars. Got it.”

  “Second. There was a scrap of paper in her purse that had a number scribbled on it: 34,079.14.”

  “Sounds like a dollar amount of some sort.”

  “You’re on the same page as Peter and me. See if you can ask her whether that amount of money makes sense for anything in Connie’s life. It may have nothing to do with the case, but even being able to rule it out would help.”

  “All right. With all these numbers, I’m starting to feel like an accountant. When do we get to love?”

  “Right now. We’ve already established that Gary thought there might be someone else. Pump the sister about it. See if she got any sense about such a thing, and also pump her for all the information you can get about The Philadelphia Story. I imagine she went up to see Connie star in it. Maybe she noticed something nobody else has so far.”

  “I’ll pump with extreme care and tact. And speaking of love, have you come across ‘Mike’ yet?”

  “Sorry. Nobody by that name anywhere in this case.”

  “Okay. If there’s nothing else, I have to leave for my 11 o’clock class. I’m meeting the sister at two tomorrow. If you think of anything else, let me know by then.”

  “Will do. Love you.”

  “Love you.”

  Gordon turned to Peter.

  “So are you going to come with me to the meeting at Harrison’s?”

  Peter shook his head. “I was going to do a little investigating of my own.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ll tell you later if it pans out.”

  “I should be finished at Harrison’s by 2:30. If you’re done with your investigation by then, we could sneak in a few hours on the lower Bellota before it gets dark.”

  “I should be, and I’d like that very much. By the way, I heard you saying to Elizabeth something about a name that hadn’t turned up?”

  Gordon’s phone rang.

  “Quill Gordon.”

  “Basil Dill here. How are you doing today?”

  “I’m doing just fine. And yourself?”

  “A bit tired, but otherwise all right. I got up early today because I was having trouble sleeping.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I thought you might be interested in the reason. I woke up at four o’clock, and realized that there had been something unusual between Connie Baxter and someone in the cast.”

  Gordon sat up and reached for his pen and notebook. “I’m all ears.”

  “The problem is, I can’t remember what it was.”

  Gordon slumped back in the couch.

  “But it’ll come to me,” Dill continued. “And while it’s on my mind, I wanted to know if you’d like me to call you when it does.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “All right then.” He paused. “I really enjoyed our conversation yesterday. I love talking about my work, but not many people around here want to hear about it.”

  “I enjoyed it, too,” Gordon said. “Keep in touch.”

  He turned to Peter.

  “Basil Dill,” he said. “He remembered something, but he doesn’t remember what it was.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Anyway, he’ll call when he remembers what he remembered.”

  Gordon’s phone rang again. He recognized Pope’s number.

  “I wanted to let you know,” Pope said, “That I’m meeting with Williams and Sheriff Ketch this afternoon at 3:30. You’re invited.”

  Gordon looked at Peter and shook his head. “I’ll be there,” he said. “At the DA’s office?”

  “No, that’s the kicker. They’re coming to my office. That’s never happened before.”

  “They don’t want anyone else to know something’s going on.”

  “That’s what I figure. I can count on you, then?”

  “Yes, you can. Three-thirty, right? See you.”

  He turned to Peter.

  “The trip to the lower Bellota just got put on hold, I’m afraid. Pope’s meeting the DA and sheriff then and wants me there.”

  “Then you should go. We can fish tomorrow.”

  AFTER CROSSING THE BRIDGE over the Bellota, the road from the state highway into Dutchtown hits Main Street. A right turn takes the traveler into the town proper. A left turn leads out of town and along the river before petering out after two miles. Harrison’s Lumber and Building Supply is a quarter mile up that road. Gordon turned in and followed a driveway that threaded a needle between piles of freshly milled planks before arriving at a two-story central building.

  The ground floor held a retail hardware section, with an outdoor patio of garden plants and supplies. Gordon waited for the lone customer to complete his purchase, and told the cashier Lee Harrison was expecting him. She picked up the phone, punched in an extension, conveyed the information, and directed him to a stairway in the middle of the far wall. He waited at the bottom of the stairs for less than a minute before a man came down. He was six feet tall, heavy-set in a muscular way, bald, and had a beaked nose that gave him the look of a predatory bird.

  “Lee Harrison,” he said in a deep voice, squeezing Gordon’s hand to the point of pain.

  “Quill Gordon,” he said, squeezing back as hard as he could.

  “You have a firm handshake,” Harrison said, stepping back. “A sign of character. Follow me.”

  Gordon followed Harrison’s gray corduroy trousers and blue chambray shirt up the stairs and down a hallway to a conference room with a small table and six chairs. Harrison took a seat at one end of the oval table and motioned Gordon to the seat at the opposite end. Introductions were made all around.

  To Gordon’s left was Dick Holmes, the insurance agent who played C.K. Dexter Haven in The Philadelphia Story. He was in his mid- to late thirties, modestly handsome in a genial sort of way, with short, dark-brown hair that hugged his head like a toupee. His gray checked sports coat, blue shirt and patterned blue tie were conventionally tasteful.

  On Gordon’s right were Kevin and Amy Hawkins. One look at Kevin, and Gordon could see the high school athlete whose best years were behind him when he graduated. In his early thirties, with black wavy hair, Kevin still looked reasonably fit, but when he spoke, his voice was higher pitched than one would have expected. Amy was an attractive blonde with straight hair falling six inches below her shoulders. Her round face might have come across warmer had it not been for the hint of a pout that seemed to come and go. There was a bit of pout in her voice as well.

  An amateur detective has no standing to investigate or interview people and must therefore practice deception on occasion. Gordon hadn’t been given enough time to come up with a really good lie, so he went with the best one he could think of on short notice. It bothered him slightly that lying in this case wasn’t bothering him much.

  “I’m sorry to be imposing on your time,” he said, as the others murmured that it really was no imposition at all. “I promised my friend I’d talk to Basil Dill when I came here on a fishing trip, and before I knew it, Dill had set up a meeting with all of you. I appreciate your taking the time.”

  Everyone nodded pleasantly.

  “My college roommate works for the San Francisco Chronicle, and he heard about Connie Baxter through a friend of her sister’s. He thought there might be a feature in it and asked me to do a little preliminary work for him before he went to the editors with it.”

  Harrison shifted in his chair.

  “But she was killed more than two years ago, and there wasn’t any mystery about it,” he said. “Isn’t that kind of old for a news story?”

  “It would be if he were writing about the murder and the trial. But the angle he’s interested in is how acting in the play changed Connie and might have given her life new direction if she hadn’t been killed. Her sister — I�
��m sure some of you must have met her …”

  “Nice woman,” Holmes said. “I talked to her for a few minutes after one of the performances. She was really excited about the changes she was seeing in Connie.”

  “There you go,” Gordon said. “That’s the sort of thing my friend would be looking for. But before we get into that, Mr. Harrison …”

  “Call me Lee.”

  “All right, Lee. I noticed from the programs Basil Dill gave me that you were the underwriter of The Philadelphia Story. Can you tell me how that came about?”

  “Sure. It was pretty clear by the end of the second season that this summer theater thing was a going concern. They sold out or close to it most nights, and it got people into town to buy dinner and dessert. A good thing for the economy. Then the kids got involved the second year and really liked it.”

  “I played Alice Sycamore in You Can’t Take it with You,” Amy said. “And Kevin played Tony.”

  “The young lovers?” Gordon asked.

  “That’s right.” She turned to her husband. “We were good, weren’t we, honey?”

  “We were good,” Kevin said.

  “I was expecting — hoping, I mean — to play Tracy in The Philadelphia Story, but Connie got the part instead,” she continued. “Still, Kevin and I played the reporter and photographer, who were secretly in love with each other. They were good parts, weren’t they?”

  “Always good working with you,” Kevin said.

  “Anyway,” Harrison said, “I could see the good coming of it. Dill had run over budget on You Can’t Take it with You. A lot of props, and that big fireworks scene. It wasn’t all that much money, but the county was bent out of shape over it. So when he asked me to put up a three thousand dollar guarantee against cost overruns or slow ticket sales, I said yes.”

  “Had Connie been involved in the plays before that year?” Gordon asked.

  “Not at all,” Holmes said. “I’m not sure she was even in the audience for them.”

  “Everyone thought I was going to be Tracy,” Amy said.

  “I kind of assumed that myself,” Harrison said. “But when Dill went with Connie, I accepted that. If you want a man to do a job — whether it’s putting on a play or running an office — you have to give him his head and let him do it until he shows you he can’t. It turned out all right, I guess. He only went six hundred over budget, and the crowds were good.”