by David Bishop
Fidge and I, walking as if we had swallowed single car garages, belched before getting into my Chrysler 300. I drove us to his place where we would hunker down and sift through the fascinating story of the murder of a pregnant woman, and an arrest with a direct eye witness, quickly followed by a dropping of charges and the release of Eddie Whittaker.
Fidge had originally thought Eddie Whittaker guilty. It certainly looked that way. But not after two witnesses independent of one another came forward to say they saw Eddie where he said he had gone. He claimed he spent the hours before, during, and after the murder of his fiancee driving to and from Buellton, California, where he dined in Pea Soup Anderson’s Restaurant. It was impossible, short of using a helicopter, to make it from the restaurant to the place of the murder in time to commit it. In the aggregate, the evidence said Eddie was innocent. The way the D.A. told it, he didn’t have enough to get a conviction. The charges were dropped and Eddie became a free man. After that the case settled in among the many unsolved in the Long Beach homicide department. A cold case, as they’re called on television. In real life, there simply isn’t the manpower to work cold cases. They languish in file cabinets waiting for the good fairy of law enforcement to unexpectedly drop new evidence or clues onto the department’s lap. Until then, the best the department could do was keep them dry and protected from excessive dust. Which to no great surprise meant the file on the murder of Ileana Corrigan, Eddie’s fiancee, had been handled only once in the past ten years. That happened when it was taken from its metal file coffin to a cardboard one in the department’s warehouse for old cases that had failed to trip over new inspiration.
“I always wanted to get back to this one,” Fidge said. “It was odd, but we had nothing to hang odd on, so it became one of those never-really-forgotten cases that snag on some hook in the dark corner of a cop’s mind. Truth is, I haven’t thought about it in many years, but it all flooded back when you brought it up. You don’t remember it at all?”
“Not a lick.”
“Well, it happened about a year after you went brain dead and shot your way into prison.”
Fidge had a way of making some things I did sound really stupid. And while I’ll admit it to you, but never to Fidge, this was because some of the things I did were really stupid.
“I remember that General Whittaker had a wonderful gun collection from World War II,” Fidge said, “including a British Welrod bolt-action silenced assassin’s pistol. I’d read about them, but never seen one. His was equipped for a 9mm cartridge, and had a rear set knob that had to be manually rotated to eject a cartridge and then pushed forward to introduce a new cartridge from the magazine into the chamber. I remember that gun like it was here on my kitchen table. It’s been reported the British forces carried one into Iraq, for the tradition. A Welrod assassin’s pistol has been in every British engagement from WWII forward.”
“Did you check all his weapons?”
Fidge nodded. “None of them had been used to kill the Corrigan woman. Oh, yeah, the Welrod assassin’s pistol was stolen about two years ago. He came down to the department to report the theft. Nothing else had been taken, so likely some worker or visitor in his home snatched it; it never turned up.”
“What’s the status on the murder weapon?”
“Never found. Still, it looked open and shut, and you know how much Captain Richard Dickson likes open and shut cases. But right fast it sprung a leak and all the evidence drained out. Our perp walked. No rumors. No talk of anybody being paid off. Nothing backchannel, it just went flat.”
“Captain Dick Dickson,” I said with a disgusting tone I saved just for him, “the man suffers from delusions of competence.”
As you have undoubtedly surmised, I don’t like the man and the feeling is mutual. He had been the only detective in the department with a smile on his face when I was arrested for the courthouse shooting. I did Captain Dickson a favor last year that I thought might chip some of the ice off our relationship, but no. One of our few truly private rights the government hasn’t infringed upon is our freedom to decide who we don’t like and why. The politically correct types would say Two Dicks and I had a personality conflict. But you should know that’s hogwash. Dickson has no personality. No cop I ever met liked him. That’s why Captain Richard Dickson was known around the department as Captain Two Dicks.
“Well,” Fidge said, “you’ll be pleased to know Two Dicks has been sick the last couple days. He’s hardly been in the station.”
“Let’s hope it’s nothing painless.”
Fidge and I shared a few bad and ugly stories about Two Dicks. I know the saying is, “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” but there were no good stories about the man.
Fidge had made me a copy of all the documents in the case file so we were looking at the same information while we talked. He recalled the case as if it had happened yesterday instead of eleven years ago. The gist of it went like this: A young fellow hanging out on the beach had looked into Ileana Corrigan’s beach house and saw her murdered.
“We got the witness’s name?”
“It’s all in there,” he said, pointing toward the copied file in front of me, “along with a copy of the report on the stolen Welrod assassin’s pistol, which came nine years after the murder. Like I said, the Welrod wasn’t the murder weapon.”
“Where was the eye witness?”
“About a hundred yards or so out from the house, he had binoculars he used to look out to sea before it got dark. He had fallen asleep on the sand and saw the murder after he woke up. He picked Eddie Whittaker out of a group of pictures. The time of the murder, the witness said was 8:45 at night, and that jibed with the M.E.’s report. An attendant working in a gas station also pointed to Eddie’s picture as having bought gas a little after nine that same night. The station was an old one with a security camera the owner failed to use. The man working the station alone said Eddie paid cash. He remembered because so few folks used cash. The police picked up Eddie. Both the witness to the murder and the gas jockey picked Eddie out of a lineup.
“Two days later, Eddie was released after the D.A. dropped the charges. Eddie’s claim that he had driven up from Long Beach to have an dinner in Buellton was substantiated by a man and his wife who had dined at the same restaurant. A retired middle school principal who lived in Buellton also stepped forward to say he saw Eddie in the restaurant between 8:30 and 9:30.”
“Did Eddie have a credit card transaction or maybe a debit card he used for the dinner? And what about buying the gas? Oh, you said he paid cash for the gas.”
“No dice,” Fidge said. “I verified Eddie Whittaker had gotten pissed at his credit card company, cut up his card and closed the account. He had an application pending at a different local bank, his grandfather’s bank, to get a new credit card. He didn’t have a debit card. They weren’t as popular back then as they are now. So, he was using cash for everything during those few days.”
“That was convenient. That way there would be no paper trail as to where he was during the critical hours.”
“Convenient if he murdered his fiancee. Serendipitous, if he didn’t,” Fidge said. “Nothing else pointed anywhere then and nothing’s come up since. No con or suspect in any other case has offered anything about it to bargain for a better deal. It would seem the murderer has kept his exploits to himself. And you know how rare that is.”
It was rare. Thugs often brag to other thugs about their crimes, as if such behavior constituted something to brag about in the first place. And, later, the listening thug trades that knowledge to bargain with the police for a pass on some lesser charge.
“I understand Ileana Corrigan was pregnant when she was killed. Was a determination made that Eddie Whittaker was the father?”
“When I met with General Whittaker, the general insisted we make that determination. DNA testing was still gaining stature, but it was established. We would have anyway, particularly when Eddie quickly became a suspect, as it could h
ave gone to motive. He was the papa.”
“Bail?”
“Eddie Whittaker had a clean record so his attorney argued he posed no threat to the community. The issue of special circumstances was questionable and the D.A. decided not to pursue that. The bail was set at one million. The general posted the bond. Eddie Whittaker walked.”
Fidge offered another beer but I waved him off, then he said, “Have another, there’s something I wanna kick around.” I nodded and he pulled us two more, twisted the cap off mine, and passed it over. “You heard Salt ate his gun last weekend?”
“I read the piece in the paper. Did any of you pick up on him getting … I don’t know, funny, depressed, like that?”
“No. His partner, Washington, the black guy they call Pepper, had no idea, and if a guy’s partner doesn’t know”-Fidge interrupted himself with a shrug.
“Salt was divorced wasn’t he?” Fidge nodded. “Been a few years, right?”
He nodded again. “About as long as you and Helen. Why?”
“Just trying to get a handle on it.”
“Why is it us cops lead the league in divorce, alcoholism, and suicide?”
“Long hours,” I said, “lots of stress.”
“Hell, hedge fund managers deal with that. Course they make big bucks to salve the shit they handle.”
“I think it’s that cops deal with the crud all the time,” I said. “Lose perspective. Begin to think everybody’s a lowlife. Truth is only a couple percent of folks are rotten, but cops deal almost totally within that couple percentage. It starts to look like the whole world’s that way. You never get ahead of the cases, hell you never even catch up. You keep locking up the bad guys and the world keeps sending more.”
“But I don’t feel that way, Matt.”
“Course not. You lead the league in happiness.”
“Brenda. You know. It’s her. Her and the kids, they keep me rooted.”
“I don’t know why she puts up with you, but I sure hope she stays on the job.”
“Everyone said Salt’s wife always nagged him to can the job. She hated him being a cop. Wanted him to, I don’t know, drive a hack. Be a Wal-Mart greeter. Whatever. He couldn’t do it. He loved being a cop. So do I. Why do we love it? It’s a crummy job. The scum don’t like us. The citizens think we’re all on the take or hassling them for no reason. Every time we get into it with some piece of shit, the folks yell police brutality. The attorneys treat us like we’re idiots. The rules are tilted in favor of the crooks. Why in the hell do we love the job?”
“For all those reasons,” I offered as if I really knew. “Cops like to buck the system. Fight the odds. The thin blue line and all that shit. You hang onto Brenda, she’s aces.”
“Yeah,” Fidge said. Then he shook his head and raised his bottle. “To Salt. Rest in peace.”
“To Salt,” I repeated. “Let’s hope he went somewhere the scum can’t get in.”
“So, how’s the writing business? You got something new coming out soon?”
“In a couple of months. My publisher’s bugging me to get through the proof. I shouldn’t have taken the job from General Whittaker. I went there planning to turn him down.”
“What happened?”
“The old man’s a master strategist. He left me standing in the corner holding a wet paintbrush. I don’t know. In the end, as a soldier he did a lot for us. It could also be because I’m a dumb fuck. I guess that tells it best.”
“Why’s your publisher pressing you?”
“The way it works, the publisher pressures my agent. My agent pressures me. Everyone with a piece wants me to get the next book out.”
“Deadlines,” Fidge says while shaking his head. “Just like at the department, the suits upstairs keep pushing.”
“This is the last book I’m doing for him or any of the big name publishers. They’re not bad people, it’s just the publishing business has left them clinging to a leaky boat. Today’s book buyers are asked to pay too much because of all the layers that stand between the author and the reader. I’m going to start self-publishing. I’ll use a work-for-hire publisher so I can control the rights to my own books. That way I can set lower prices, make a good living and protect my readers from getting ripped off.”
“And you can work at a pace you choose without the suits putting the screws to you. So, how’s Helen?”
“How the hell would I know? We’re divorced.”
“Okay. How’s the divorce going?”
“Divorce is … it stinks. Hell. It’s shit.”
“If it’s shit, it would stink,” Fidge said. We looked at each other. Then he laughed. I laughed. “Fuck it, Matthew.”
We touched bottles. I nodded, and then picked up the pictures from the Corrigan scene. Fidge had made me copies of all the file docs but not the pictures. Other than showing Ileana dead, the photos revealed nothing.
“The place doesn’t look tossed. Anything stolen?” I asked.
“Not so’s we could tell. And I doubt it. Her jewelry box had some rather expensive pieces. Things I doubt a secretary could afford. Her folks were struggling middle class so the diamonds weren’t family presents.”
“Where’d she get them?”
“The neighbors spoke of a couple of luxury cars that would be there from time to time. They never saw the drivers. A good guess she had a couple of part-timers besides Eddie Whittaker. The landlord said the rent always came from her. On her salary, the rent would have been a stretch, the diamonds impossible.”
“Was she hooking?”
“No arrests. My guess, she did it for the rent and diamonds. She had a straight job and her boss and coworkers spoke well of her.”
“What did Eddie Whittaker have to say about all that?”
Fidge took a moment to glance at his case notes in the file. “He said he didn’t know of any other men in her life. As for the expensive stuff, he not only claimed he didn’t buy it, he said he never saw any of it. I sure remember his jaws being tight when I showed him. A check of his bank account and credit cards didn’t show any purchases or cash withdrawals that could cover even one piece of that jewelry.”
“Stacks up like a straight gal with at least one sugar daddy?”
“That’s how I added it, but I never got no names. Her gal pals at work only knew about Eddie Whittaker. We had some unidentified prints at the scene we could never connect up. They could’ve been left by Mr. Jewelry Buyer, or the cable guy, or somebody who came to some party she threw.”
Fidge and I talked about the case for a while longer, but nothing more worthy of mention. The precise facts were plain and clear, a quick arrest of Eddie followed by his quicker release. Since then, eleven years of wind pudding.
I went out Fidge’s back door. My stomach had processed enough of the burger and fries that my bloat had shrunk from the size of a garage to the size of a golf cart. The beers had tasted good, but I expected a coming clash with the banana milk shake I drank with my burger.
I stopped at the supermarket and then gassed up the car. When I got home, Axel was not there. My guess he was still down at Mackie’s with his buds. Some nights he went over to Clara Birnbaum’s to watch an old movie. After putting the groceries away, I went down the hall to see Clarice Talmadge. Clarice was the widow I had helped when she had been arrested for murdering her husband, Garson, about a year ago. Clarice had been innocent of anything more than an overactive sex life, with the kind of body you see featured on television helping to sell Cadillacs and cosmetics.
Since her husband’s murder, I periodically made myself available to Clarice. I also liked her. She’s smart, and has a great sense of humor, nearly as bawdy as Fidge’s wife. When her husband, Garson, died, with what he left her, she became wealthy. Clarice and I had close to a divorced man’s perfect relationship. No strings. No pressure. She enjoyed that and she had no desire to marry again. She also liked to sleep alone so there was no awkwardness about getting up and going home afterwards. Like I said, Clar
ice is the perfect set up for a divorced guy, particularly one still stirring hot ashes for his ex-wife. But keep that to yourself.
Around one in the morning, I drifted back down the hall to my place. Axel had returned and was waiting up like Dr. Watson always did for Sherlock Holmes. I spent the next hour bringing my loyal staff man up on what Fidge had told me. The cop’s file was cold with no real leads. The file did have the names and addresses for all the witnesses. Those who got Eddie Whittaker arrested, as well as those who got him released. That gave me some places to begin poking around. Hopefully some of the addresses would still be good.
*
At six a.m. Fidge woke me. He was at the beach and it was raining, a drizzle more than a rain, but the gusts off the ocean were hearty with a wind chill number he said I wouldn’t want to know. He told me to come down. He’d explain then.
When I got there, I saw Fidge wearing a black stocking cap. From the back he looked like a chest of drawers balancing a bowling ball.
The main attraction turned out to be a soggy homicide lying in the surf. The ID pulled from the dead guy’s wet wallet identified him as Cory Jackson. After a minute, the name came to me and I knew why Fidge had called me to share the event. People always say, the name rang a bell, but I always thought that was silly. Cory Jackson had been the eyewitness who had seen Eddie Whittaker’s fiancee, Ileana Corrigan, murdered in her beach house. Mr. Jackson worked at a restaurant up the beach from where we stood over his body. At least he worked there back on the day he pointed his finger at Eddie Whittaker. The restaurant didn’t serve the fishing trade so it would be closed this early. Later in the day, Fidge would check to see if Jackson still worked there. The important point being that while both Jackson and the restaurant had been closed only the restaurant would reopen. The hole in Cory Jackson’s forehead was bigger and rougher around the edges than the hole in the back of his head. He had been shot from behind.
There were no tracks, not even Jackson’s. The tide had come and gone, smoothing the sand on its way out. This suggested he had been shot sometime last night before the high tide came fully in. His wet clothes seconded that motion. There were no powder burns around the entry wound so the shooter had not been especially close. Neither Fidge nor I mentioned the old Whittaker case, but we were both thinking the same thing. Someone involved in that eleven-year-old case may have chosen to remove the only supposed eyewitness to the killing of Ileana Corrigan. That, or Cory Jackson getting rubbed out the day after I started messing in the case was pure coincidence. In my view, such coincidences were rarely coincidences.