Murder, She Wrote

by Jessica Fletcher

  Chapter Seven

  “Coming to Cabot Cove?” I repeated.

  “Or maybe he’s already been here,” Brian said.

  “Why would they think that?”

  “I don’t know if you remember our lawyer.”

  “Wes Caruthers.”

  “You heard?”

  “I understand that he fell off his boat and drowned.”

  Brian shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Maureen told me the sheriff’s office thought he hit his head when he fell and may have knocked himself out.”

  “That’s what they said at first, but now they’re thinking someone may have clocked him, that it wasn’t an accident after all.”

  “That’s a very different story. Does the newspaper say Darryl Jepson is suspected of murdering Caruthers?”

  “Not in so many words. They called him a ‘person of interest,’ but the murder took place right after he broke out of prison. Caruthers had been our lawyer and Jepson blamed him for doing a lousy job, so they immediately thought of him.”

  “But you don’t believe it?”

  Brian heaved a sigh. “I don’t know what to believe. We haven’t talked since I got out. My new lawyer advised me not to keep in touch with him. Not that we were ever that good friends, but the murder trial brought us together. Only thing was, I wasn’t there when the grocer got stabbed and he was. And he never told the cops that I wasn’t with him.”

  “Did he say he was innocent, too?”

  Brian snorted. “Everyone in prison says they didn’t do it. That’s why they didn’t believe me. And why should they? We were all a bunch of losers.”

  “But you really didn’t commit the crime,” I said. “You weren’t even there.”

  “I almost was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We had arranged to meet up—me, him, and a couple of the guys—at the market. He wanted to boost some food and then we’d all get together down at the railroad tracks and have a picnic. I’m ashamed to say we’d done it before.”

  “But you never made it there?”

  “No. And I can thank Alice’s old man for that.”

  “Really?”

  “He always brought out the worst in me.”

  “Tell me about that day.”

  “It’s ironic, really. What happened was . . .”

  * * *

  Brian told me in detail what had transpired that day.

  His father, Tom, staggered to the door of the trailer, leaned out, and roared. “Brian Kinney, get your butt in here.”

  “What do you want, Pop?” Brian said, using an oily rag to wipe his hands. “I’m trying to get this stupid engine started.”

  “I want you to go down to the package store and get me a fifth of gin.”

  “I can’t drive anywhere if the car won’t start, and they’re not going to sell me a bottle anyway. The sheriff took away my fake ID the last time I tried.”

  “You tell ’em it’s for me. They’ll let you take it. Here.” He waved a twenty-dollar bill at his son.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Never mind where I get my money,” Tom Kinney said. “I got it and you’re going to buy me my bottle. And bring back the change.”

  According to Brian, he’d pocketed the twenty and pulled up his bike from where it lay on its side in the tall grass. He was supposed to meet Jepson and two of his buddies at the mini-mart, where each of them would shoplift something for the picnic. Brian looked at the grungy piece of paper his buddy Jepson had stuffed in his back pocket the day before. “Donuts or cookys,” it read. Stinky never could spell, Brian thought.

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “I’d brought potatoes the last time,” he told me, a whole bag that the Pelletiers’ housekeeper, Helen, was throwing out because the potatoes had eyes growing. The boys had made a campfire near the tracks, dug out the eyes with their fingernails, and roasted the spuds on sticks, laughing when Brian dropped his into the fire and had to fish out his charred lunch with a tire iron.

  “Did you buy your father his liquor?” I asked.

  “No. I coasted downhill to the main road from the trailer park and sat on my bike at the intersection. If I’d taken a left turn, I would have been downtown where all the stores were, you know, where it ends at the docks. The package store was on the way, just on the outskirts of town. The mini-mart was next door. I figured I could pay for the bottle, stash it somewhere safe, pick up the cookies for the picnic, and get down to the tracks before the others. They’d never know that I’d bought the cookies instead of stealing them, and I planned to pick up the bottle on the way home. By the time I got back my father would be so eager for the drink he’d forget about the change from the twenty, or I could tell him the truth and say I got hungry and bought some cookies. I’d bring back the box to prove it.”

  “That’s a lot of planning for a young man to have to do,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “Anyway, while I was sitting there at the intersection, a gray Mercedes came down the road. I recognized it immediately as Alice’s father’s car. I didn’t want him to see me, so I pulled on the bill of my cap and ducked my head so her old man wouldn’t recognize me. Fat chance! Pelletier knew where me and my father lived. He was always raising it with his kid Alice.” He snickered. “Her father never knew that I’d heard him.”

  “What would he say to her?” I asked.

  “Stuff like ‘I don’t care how nice you think he is. Your mother would have wanted better for you, and I do, too.’ He called me and my friends bums, asked her how Alice expected a young man with no future to keep her in the manner she was accustomed to. ‘Who’s going to buy you your nice clothes and put good food on the table?’ He kept calling me a loser, just like my father, trailer trash. It went on and on. He even said I wore dirty shirts. I hated everything he said.”

  “Where were you so that you could hear him say these things?” I asked.

  “I was hiding in Alice’s closet. I remember looking down at my stained T-shirt. It was one of my favorites, the one with a picture of Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead on the front.” His laugh was rueful. “Jerry’s beard had a red splotch on it from when my father hurled a pot of spaghetti sauce at me for forgetting to bring home his bottle. It wasn’t my old man’s fault. He was drunk at the time and didn’t really mean it. He even apologized later, but I never could get out the stain no matter how many times I scrubbed it.”

  “I’m so sorry you had to hear that, Brian,” I said.

  “Alice told me that, too, when her father left the room, slamming the door behind him. I told her that I knew he must have told her that a million times.”

  “Did she agree?”

  “Yeah, but she told me to not pay attention to him. You know what she did then, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “What?”

  “She kissed me. After that, man, I was hers forever.”

  “You were saying that you were on your bike when Alice’s father approached in his car.”

  “Right. His Mercedes sped past me, its wheels kicking up dust and gravel that sprayed all over me and my bike.”

  Brian went on to say how much he hated Alice’s father back then. He found it ironic that he lived with his father and Alice lived with her father, too. Both men had been widowed and were left to raise a young child alone. Alice had been seven when her mother succumbed to the flu. Brian was three when his mother died giving birth to a stillborn boy. He said that he often thought about his mother and the brother he never got to see, and thought his father probably did, too.

  “How did you and Alice meet?” I asked.

  “At school. Maybe we got together because neither of us had a mother. Most of the kids in school had two parents even if they didn’t always live with both of them. Not having a mother was
rare, I guess, nothing to brag about, but at least Alice and I had something in common.”

  But their shared experience ended there, according to Brian. Brian lived in a ramshackle trailer park of dirt roads and abandoned vehicles euphemistically named Ocean Heights Mobile Homes. Alice’s home was in a neighborhood of manicured lawns with flowering bushes and swimming pools. Pelletier owned a car dealership, forever tooling around in the latest luxury model. Tom Kinney, if he ever worked, did odd jobs for a day’s pay and pushed his son to learn to fix their jalopy that sometimes ran and sometimes didn’t.

  I brought Brian back to when he’d been on his bike and Mr. Pelletier had roared past him in his Mercedes.

  “I figured that as long as Alice’s father was going into town, it was a perfect time for me to visit her. I could see the guys anytime, and my father could live without his bottle. He probably had another one stashed in the cabinet above the stove, provided he was sober enough to remember where it was. All I wanted was some time alone with Alice without her miserable father cursing me and chasing me out. Spending time with her was going to be a treat, a way to get back at him who thought himself so high-and-mighty.”

  “Did you see Alice that day?” I asked. “Was she home when you went there?”

  “Yeah, she was there. She greeted me at the door. She’d seen me walking my bike up the driveway. She was scared, said that he’d be coming right back, had gone to deliver something to a customer. I said that was too bad because I wanted to buy her lunch. I remember waving my father’s twenty-dollar bill at her.”

  “Did you take her to lunch?”

  “No. She said she’d make lunch for us. I knew their housekeeper, Helen, and I asked Alice if she was in the kitchen. She said that she was and warned me that Helen would tell her father if she saw me.” He shifted position on the chair and rubbed his eyes. It was obviously painful for him to relive the scene he was describing.

  “I thought Helen liked me,” he said, “but Alice explained that her father told Helen she’d better report to him every time I was even near the place if she wanted to keep her job.”

  “So, what did you and Alice do?”

  “Alice told me to take my bike around to the side of the house and that she’d grab something for us from the kitchen so we could ride to the lake and have our own picnic.”

  “And that’s what you did?” I asked.

  Brian chuckled. “Yeah. I remember thinking that I’d blown off one picnic but was about to have another, and I got to keep my old man’s twenty. Anyway, Alice was wearing her backpack, and we pedaled to the long road leading into the wilderness area where there are trails for hiking, lakes for swimming, and plenty of places to lie in the sun and enjoy some privacy.”

  * * *

  Brian stopped talking and apologized for having bent my ear.

  “Please don’t apologize,” I said. “I’m flattered that you confided in me.”

  “I guess the irony of it all,” he said, using his toe to set the chair slowly rocking, “is that it never occurred to me that I’d have to prove where I was that afternoon.”

  “And why should it?” I said. “We all go about our lives without worrying we’ll have to provide evidence of our activities to the police.”

  “You’re right, I know, Mrs. Fletcher. If I hadn’t been so eager to sneak behind Alice’s father’s back, I would have gotten caught up in whatever Darryl was doing at the mini-mart.”

  “Then it was lucky that you made that decision.”

  He laughed softly. “Boy, when Pelletier heard Alice testify that I was with her the whole time, I thought the steam coming off him would lift the hair right off his head.”

  “Is he more accepting of you now?”

  “Just barely. But Alice told him if he wants to see his granddaughter, he’d better behave. He tolerates me, but I’m sure he still thinks I’m a lowlife.” He was quiet for a moment. “I sent her back to his house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I heard about the prison break, I was afraid my old buddy Jepson would come looking for me, and I didn’t want Alice and Emma anywhere he could get his hands on them.”

  “Do you think he’d hurt them?”

  “I wasn’t going to take the chance. Alice didn’t want to go, said we don’t live anywhere near the Canadian border and there was nothing to worry about.”

  “But you said the authorities now think he’s headed this way.”

  “Right. It took some convincing, but I dropped Alice and the baby off at her father’s house before I came here.”

  “Why do you think Darryl would seek you out?”

  “He blames me for not being at the mini-mart to back him up.”

  “But didn’t he have other friends there?”

  “They were supposed to be, but I wasn’t there so I don’t know who else showed up.”

  “You know that witnesses saw two people running away from the store after the grocer was stabbed,” I said.

  “That’s what they said.”

  “Who were the other guys you and Darryl were supposed to meet? Did you ever give the sheriff their names?”

  “No. I wasn’t about to turn in my friends to protect myself. For all I know the grocer could have been stabbed by someone from out of town. I wasn’t there. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t know anything.” His voice had gotten louder as his emotions were raised.

  “Brian, a man lost his life in a robbery. Don’t you think his family deserves to know that his killer was apprehended and punished for the crime? Wouldn’t you want that if it were someone in your family?”

  “But it isn’t. I’m sorry, Mrs. Fletcher. Please don’t ask me to be a snitch.”

  “Who asked you to be a snitch?”

  “Sheriff Metzger. He said if I was really innocent, I would help him put the right guys behind bars.”

  “He was trying to help you.”

  “He was trying to help himself.”

  “And you turned him down.”

  “And spent seven years in prison, thanks to him.”

  Chapter Eight

  Brian left shortly after our conversation. I was disappointed that he blamed Mort for the time he spent in the state correctional facility, but I understood the bitterness that he felt at having been unjustly convicted. I pushed open the screen door to find Maureen sitting on the bench of the picnic table dabbing away tears with a tissue.

  “Oh, my goodness. Are you in pain?” I asked, placing the paper bag Brian had given me on the table. “Why didn’t you call for me?”

  “I’m okay,” she said, sniffling. “I just feel so bad for Brian and I wish he didn’t hate Mort so much. He was only doing his duty as sheriff.”

  “I don’t think he hates Mort. Brian’s just hurt that people believed the worst of him. And they did. Were you listening the whole time?”

  She nodded. “Most of it, I guess. I heard the car and then heard you go outside to greet him. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop at first, but when I started listening, I got caught up in the story, and I thought it would be more rude to interrupt than to let him continue talking. Do you think he really knows who else was at the mini-mart that day?”

  “I think he knows who was supposed to have been there, but he’s correct when he says he wasn’t there and can’t know who showed up.”

  Maureen groped in the paper bag and pulled out the aluminum foil packet. “I got hungry when I heard you guys eating the cookies.”

  “They’re for us. Finish them up. And Alice sent a bottle of lotion for your sunburn.”

  “I don’t even know her and I like her already.”

  “She’s a good person.”

  Maureen took a bite of cookie and chewed thoughtfully. “I can understand Brian not wanting to be a snitch. Nobody likes a tattletale.”

  “Tattletale. Snitch. Th
ey’re such negative terms,” I said, “but that attitude hampers authorities trying to get to the root of a crime. I wish parents didn’t teach their children not to tattle. It starts right there.”

  “But a kid who’s always telling on his friends is just trying to make himself look more important at the other kid’s expense. Don’t you think parents should discourage that?”

  “Sure, in those instances, but children need to be taught the difference between a selfish act and a praiseworthy one. It’s not only appropriate but important for them to tell an adult when someone else is doing something unsafe or being cruel to another child or committing a crime. We need to encourage trust in the authorities, whether it’s a parent, a teacher, or the police.”

  “That’s a hard habit to break,” Maureen said. “I mean, you’re talking years of thinking it’s a sin to tattle on people who are doing something wrong. It’s like a code of honor.”

  “We need to make it a code of dishonor.”

  “Mort has told me stories of his fellow police officers in New York City who refused to inform on colleagues even when they were breaking the law. It was one of the reasons he wanted to move up to Maine and come work in Cabot Cove. He wanted to be away from the politics and the hypocrisy.”

  I smiled. “And is he?”

  “I guess he couldn’t escape all of it.”

  “I imagine not,” I said. “But enough philosophizing. We need to get some sleep if we’re to catch the biggest trout in Moon Lake.”

  Maureen balled up the aluminum foil that had held the cookies and dropped it into the bag.

  “Don’t forget Alice’s miracle cure,” I said, handing her the bottle of aloe lotion.

  “I’ll put some on right now. My skin is feeling a little tight. Do I still look like a tomato?”

  “You’re not as ripe as you were before, thank goodness.”

  * * *

  My travel alarm went off at six thirty the next morning, and I looked over at Maureen to see if her sunburn had gotten any better overnight. Her eyes were still swollen. I thought the tears she’d shed probably hadn’t helped improve the situation.