A Pleasure to do Death With You

by Paul Charles

  Grace and her father nodded in agreement.

  The Chief only agreed to allowing his daughter to be present at the interrogation on the strict condition and even stricter promise that she did not actually partake in the interview.

  Manny Langenstein, the lawyer eventually appointed to Green Cap, seemed like a down-home kind of guy. Maybe in his late fifties and dressed like a stouter Colonel Custer with a bow tie, he looked healthy enough, but when he wheezed, it sounded like a death rattle. Too many years of lunch being nothing more substantial than coffee and cigarettes, Kennedy figured, seeing his nicotine-stained fingers. Langenstein took half an hour with his new (paid for by the state) client and then advised Grace he was ready for the interview to start. Manny paid Grace his respects and showed her the courtesy of holding out her seat for her.

  “Why’d you change lawyers, Dustin?” Kennedy asked, once the formalities for the tape and video recorders were respected.

  “I don’t want to be tied to that bitch...”

  Manny held up his forefinger to signal his client to stop. Oh no, Kennedy thought, Green Cap is going to be nursery-stepped through every sentence.

  “Dustin, I’d like to remind you,” Manny began in his slightly camp drawl, “there is a lady present, and I don’t want to hear that kind of language in these proceedings. Now, please answer the inspector’s questions.”

  “I don’t want to be tied to Miss Asher. She’s going straight to hell,” Dustin replied immediately.

  “Are you prepared to admit that you and Bobby Cohn attempted to steal something from Officer Grace Scott’s property two nights ago?” Kennedy asked.

  “Is Bobby Cohn being questioned too?” Dustin asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Kennedy replied, not admitting that the interview with Cohn wouldn’t take place until after this one.

  Dustin looked at Manny. Manny nodded. Dustin then looked back at Kennedy.

  “Yes, sir, that was me and Bobby Cohn,” he admitted.

  “What were you after?” Kennedy pushed.

  “That file with all the information on the death of Officer Scott’s husband,” Manny continued.

  This was going better than Kennedy hoped. He prepared himself for the sucker punch.

  “Why did you want that file, Dustin?” he continued.

  “Miss Asher saw you down by the bridge studying it. She said there was information in there we needed to make sure you didn’t see.”

  Manny Langenstein rolled his eyes to the heavens. Grace Scott started to take deep breaths.

  Florence Asher had obviously thought her visit, with Sophia Lawrence, to the Half Moon Bay station house was recorded in Officer Steve Scott’s file, and that this would lead the man from Scotland Yard directly to her.

  Kennedy felt he was walking on eggshells. He knew that if he asked the wrong question now, he could derail this. He decided to draw Dustin in a bit more, get him to incriminate himself more before stepping up to the big stuff.

  “So, Florence Asher sent you up to Chief Donohue’s ranch to steal this file?”

  “Yep,” Dustin said, looking at Manny who didn’t protest.

  “Did Miss Asher ask you to do anything else, Dustin?”

  “On that particular night?”

  “Well, let’s start with that particular night,” Kennedy replied.

  “No, that’s all we had to do for her that night,” Dustin replied.

  “She didn’t tell you to hurt me? I mean, come on, Dustin, you nearly ran me over.”

  “We thought you were gone for a walk and Mrs Scott had gone to bed. You surprised us. We were just trying to get out of there; we weren’t trying to run you over.”

  “Okay, Dustin, I accept that,” Kennedy said to Green Cap’s visible relief. “Did Florence Asher tell you why she wanted that particular file?”

  “Well, she said she’d been told you were a hot-shot Scotland Yard detective brought over to solve a case the locals hadn’t been able to. She said if we got the file, you’d have nothing to work with.”

  Kennedy could hear Grace taking deep breaths beside him. He realised how painful this must be for her. All she probably felt like doing was to jump across the table and kick this fool’s head in, but outwardly at least, she remained calm and collected.

  “Okay, Dustin,” Kennedy continued slowly, “so, here now, in front of your lawyer and Officer Scott and the tape and video recorder, are you prepared to admit to attempted robbery?”

  Dustin looked slightly relieved.

  “Yep, I’m prepared to admit to attempted robbery.”

  Kennedy said, “Do you mind if I just step out for a moment.”

  Everyone agreed, and Grace announced his departure for the benefit of the tape.

  Kennedy went straight to Chief Donohue who was monitoring the interview.

  “Do we now have enough to get a warrant to go up and search Asher’s side of the creek?”

  “Yes,” The chief replied.

  “Can we get an officer now to secure the site until such time as Grace and I can get up to inspect it? I’ve told Mactoo roughly where we think it might be.”

  “Done, Inspector. Now get back in there. There’s not been a single word said since you left.”

  Grace announced Kennedy’s return for the recordings.

  “Okay, Dustin, did Miss Asher pay you and Bobby Cohn to carry out this robbery?”

  “Attempted grand theft,” Manny corrected.

  “Yes. Sorry. Did Florence Asher pay you and Bobby Cohn to carry out this attempted grand theft?”

  Dustin, whose faithful battered green baseball cap had been placed on his knee in Kennedy’s absence, looked at Manny. Manny nodded positively to him.

  “Miss Asher blackmailed us to rob you.”

  Grace Scott visibly winced. This was the sting in the tail; this blackmail angle was Dustin’s way out.

  “A wee schoolgirl blackmailed two fine examples of the male species such as yourself and Bobby Cohn?” Kennedy hammed.

  “A wee schoolgirl, I don’t think so,” Dustin sneered back.

  “Did Florence Asher blackmail you into murdering Officer Steve Scott?” Kennedy asked. The blackmail angle worried him. Had that been the reason why lawyer Manny Langenstein had been persuading his client to cooperate? The new and apparently unexpected pressure was reddening up Dustin’s face something terrible.

  “We didn’t do murder, no, sir,” he replied immediately, his voiced rising in volume quite a bit. “She did that all by herself.”

  Grace Scott let out the breath she seemed to have been holding for twenty minutes.

  “You’re saying Miss Asher murdered Officer Steve Scott?” Kennedy asked, as Manny nodded silently.

  “I’m not saying she meant to, but that’s what happened, and Bobby Cohn, no matter what you offer him, will say exactly the same thing, because that’s the goddam truth.”

  “Okay, Dustin,” Kennedy continued as he heard a lot of rushing around in the corridor outside the interview room. Chief Donohue was probably on his way to arrest Florence Asher. “Tell us exactly what happened, please.”

  “Well, Bobby and I were in the old farmhouse and we got a call...” Dustin paused to collect his thoughts. “No, it’s better I go back to the start. What happened was Miss Archer was arrested for beating that girl up, you know, down on Main Street?”

  “Yes, we know all about that, Mr McClelland,” Grace replied in a clear, measured voice. Kennedy nodded to her to keep her promise with her father by not adding to the proceedings. He couldn’t work out how she was holding it together. Someone had just on-record accused another person of murdering her husband. Of course, he might only be doing so to save his own skin, but either way, somewhere in the middle of this scenario between Bobby Cohn, Dustin McClelland, and Florence Asher lay the truth.

  “Okay, Florence got off, like she always does, but during the investigation she met Officer Scott. I guess she took a fancy to him. Apparently he wasn’t interested, and he also humiliated he
r in front of her best friend, Sophia Lawrence.

  “Bobby met her on the farm early the next morning, and she was still hopping mad. She told Bobby she wanted to come and see him and me that night down in the old farmhouse and to make sure no one was there. She turned up half smashed, with three bottles of wine, looking more like a thirty-year-old hooker than a billionaire’s teenage daughter.

  “And then we went up to Bobby’s room and....”

  “As I said, Dustin, there is a lady present. I’m sure we don’t need you to draw pictures,” Manny interrupted.

  “Well, all I’ll say is, I didn’t know half the things she was up to. How does a teenager...”

  “Dustin, let’s say for the sake of this conversation, she seduced both of you and move on from there, okay?” Manny suggested.

  “Okay,” Kennedy replied.

  “She took both our mobile numbers, said she needed the numbers for when she felt like a bit more action, and that was it.

  “Next day we both get a text from her with a video she managed to take on her phone the night before of the both of us with her. What she had done was real smart, because on the night she was in charge, telling us what to do to her, but on the video it looked like we were the ones taking advantage of her.

  “She said in the text that she would pick us up in her car that evening after work. When she did, she said she had something to do that she needed our help with. Bobby started to paw at her, and she said, ‘There’ll be no more of that, mister, and if you don’t do what I say, my father will get a copy of the video with our cosy little get-together last night. As I’m still a minor, I imagine he’d want to go straight to the police with it. That is after he’s kicked a new...’” Green Hat paused and looked at Grace before continuing, “‘kicked a new back end in for both of you.’

  “She drove around town until we saw Officer Scott, and we did that every night for a week, checking out his routine. The next Tuesday, she told us to bring our pick-up and some rope. She brought ski masks as well. We’d worked out... she’d worked out, that every Tuesday he went to the gym.”

  “That’s right, and I’d always had dinner with my dad on Tuesday evenings,” Grace said with a start, as if she was just realising where this was going.

  “We parked right next to his car in the parking lot, and as he was about to get in his car, Bobby came around from the back of our trailer and shoved a cloth she’d soaked with chloroform over his face. He passed out immediately.”

  “Where did she ever manage to get chloroform from?” Grace asked in spite of herself.

  “From Craigslist, she said,” Dustin replied. His lawyer nodded for him to continue with his confession. “We tied Officer Scott up, gagged him, and hauled him into the back of the trailer, and she had us drive him straight into the big barn at the back of the old farmhouse.

  “When he was still unconscious, she slutted herself up again, to, she said, make him realise what he’d been missing. That’s when we found he’d dissed her in front of her friend the previous week. She was after revenge. She was still seething. He took a long while to come around, and all the time she was drinking from a bottle of wine. Bobby and I kept to the other side of the barn; we were shitting ourselves. On the one hand, we’d kidnapped a police officer; and on the other hand, we were both looking at statutory rape, at the least. As he came around she went through this rap with him about realising he’d only said no to her because there was a witness, but now they were alone she would give him one more chance.

  “She removed his gag and tried to kiss him. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, taking another swig from her bottle of wine, ‘we’ll get there.’ She took off her skirt and blouse and danced in front of him. When she moved her body up close, Officer Scott spat at her and started to yell for help. He was hollering at the top of his voice. She screamed at him to keep quiet, ‘You’re going to ruin it,’ she said. He called her a pathetic child and started to shout for help again. She warned him to shut up. She called for us by name, the idiot. We stayed where we were, behind the hay.

  “All of a sudden we heard an almighty thud, and the officer stopped shouting.

  “She cussed at us, calling us cowards and ordering us to come over and help get rid of him. She said it was an accident. She claimed she’d only tapped him on the head with the wine bottle to shut him up, and she’d just knocked him unconscious. She told us we should throw him in the creek, and when he woke in the morning he’d forget all about it. All he’d have would be a sore head. She kept saying no one had ever said no to her before.

  “Officer Scott didn’t seem alive to me, but Florence insisted he was. We backed the truck into the barn, threw him in the back and drove over to the creek. We trailed him over to the high bank and rolled him in.

  “I said, ‘What if he drowns?’

  “She said, ‘I read somewhere that drowning is the best way to murder someone, because it’s so difficult to prove it wasn’t an accident.’ No sooner was his body in the creek than she’d started to text all her friends, using the excuse of her dad being away to get them over to her house for a party so she’d have an alibi.”

  “One final thing,” Kennedy said; “did Miss Asher help you lift Officer Scott’s body into the truck?”

  “Yes. Me and Bobby were making hard work of it, and she had a hissy fit, calling us mommy’s boys. She might not look it, but she’s real strong.”

  “Then when you drove the truck over to the creek, did she help you take Officer Scott off the back of the truck and over to the trailer?” Kennedy continued. It was vitally important they get this information on record now before her lawyers got involved.

  “Yes. She helped us trail Officer Scott over to the creek, and then she seemed to enjoy rolling him into the creek by herself.”

  Dustin McClelland stopped talking. He seemed relieved to have gotten the confession off his chest.

  Manny Langenstein half-heartedly tried to plea bargain for his client.

  Kennedy, who knew he was way, way outside his jurisdiction, said a point blank, “No!”

  “I might be better to throw my client to the mercy of the court,” Manny continued.

  “I believe when the video of Dustin, Bobby, and Florence is shown in court, you may not find much mercy there,” Kennedy suggested. “I would recommend your client plead guilty to all his involvement.”

  Which is exactly what Dustin McClelland did.

  Bobby Cohn painted a fairly similar, if equally unpalatable, picture.

  Chapter Sixty

  Kennedy was standing in the interview room as Officer Grace Scott led a legal parade up the corridor towards him. She held a cuffed Florence Asher by her arm, followed very quickly by two expensively suited lawyer types, followed by Officer Kevin MacCormac. Back at the opened front door stood Florence’s father on his cell phone, obviously making calls to every politician he’d ever supported trying to call in a favour for his daughter.

  Grace nodded Kennedy back into the interview room.

  “Someone shut the door or we’ll have a blowback,” Grace shouted, as she came right up to the interview room. “Whoops!” she shouted as the door in front of Kennedy banged shut so quickly it caught Kennedy by surprise. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if Grace Scott, with a subtle nudge at the last possible second, presented Florence Asher’s face, nose first, to the vicious backswing of the door.

  “My nose, you fucking bitch,” Florence screamed as her cuffed hands rose to the crimson blood now flowing from her nose. “You’ve ruined my beautiful nose, my best feature!” she screamed as the lawyers fussed around her.

  “Oh don’t worry, sweetie,” Grace said. “Your daddy can buy you a new one, but I’d have him wait for, say, twenty-five years until you get released. I have a feeling that by the time you get out there are going to be several other body parts in need of replacement from wear and tear, if you see what I mean.”

  The lawyers were kicking up a storm, mentioning private hospitals, specialist surge
ons, transferring over the bridge, and “immediately!”

  “We have a good local doctor who’ll do just fine,” Grace announced. “We’ve got a cop killer here; she’s not getting out of our sight for one second, mister. The next time she’ll be free from us will be when we hand her over to Governor Olin G. Blackwell.”

  When it all cooled down and Asher’s lawyers had assured Florence and her father that Alcatraz had long since closed down, they eventually got around to the inevitable discussion about a plea bargain. Chief Scott turned them down flat with, “No deals, gentlemen. We’re going for murder one. If she pleads guilty, we’ll mention this to the judge. He’s instructed to take guilty pleas into consideration when passing sentencing.”

  The lawyers suggested fighting it out. Of course they would; they’d receive bigger retainers and pay cheques for themselves.

  Mr Asher advised his lawyers and Chief Donohue that his daughter would plead guilty. The chief realised Asher most likely had some other end game up his sleeve, but for now he and his daughter would settle for the plea of guilty.

  ***

  The chief took Grace, Kennedy, and Mactoo to Cockney Corner for about an hour for a couple of drinks. They all knew they’d won, but there was no one really in the mood for celebrating. Officer Steve Scott, the thirty-eight-year-old, blue-eyed husband of Grace Scott, née Donohue, was dead, and no victory was ever going to bring him back. The scales of justice never really balance out.

  “You know, I thought about this last night when I went to bed,” Grace started, following a few minutes silent contemplation as they all stared into their drinks. “The saddest thing about death is how close it is to living, and then today when I was thinking about this some more, I realised that if that tramp Asher had fancied Mactoo here instead of Steve, then Steve would be here tonight having a drink.”

  “Hold on there, Grace,” Mactoo protested. “I’m not sure I go along completely with you on this one.”

  “I didn’t mean that Mactoo had to sacrifice his life. I just meant that if Florence Asher had been attracted to Mactoo instead of my Steve, he would have been happy to take that particular teeny-bopper bullet for us, wouldn’t you, Mactoo?”