Her Lost Alibi: A gripping suspense thriller. (An Amber Cross Thriller Book 1)

by David F. Berens

  She glanced at the scrawling handwriting on the police report. The first letter was definitely a “B,” but the rest of the word was completely illegible. She walked over to Minter’s desk and found that his computer was thankfully not password protected. She ran a quick internet search of the baby’s full name and her birthdate.

  She got a hit in a local paper called the City Connect serving Pembroke Pines.

  Mr. and Mrs. Jorge Jimenez are honoring the birth of their child, Arianna Rita Jimenez, born 6/13/2010 with a christening ceremony to be held at the St. Mark Catholic Church on Flamingo Road. She scrolled up and saw the date of the paper. It was the Saturday edition, 6/19/2010. The date of the christening ceremony was Sunday, 6/20/2010.

  “The same day Eric Torres was shot.”

  She looked back at the police report. He claimed he was in Florida for … the birth? Or the baptism? If he was in Florida for the christening, his alibi checked out. But if he was only in Florida for the birth …

  She went back to the table and stared at the piles of paper. There had to be something in that mess of information that would nail this down. If Morales had been in Florida for the birth, all of the witnesses could very well confirm his alibi for the 13th, but if he had left before the christening (or as the police officer might have noted, the “baptism,”) his alibis would be useless.

  She rubbed her eyes; it was late and she was intoxicated. This probably wasn’t the best time to work this out. Minter was still snoring loudly on the balcony and Amber decided maybe that was the best thing to do at this point. Maybe she’d have one more glass of her mother’s favorite wine and call it a night. It was after midnight now, so the anniversary had come and gone again and—

  Amber froze, staring at the clock. 2:47 a.m. She pulled her phone from her pocket. She verified today’s date: June 14th, the day after her mother had passed all those years ago.

  The pieces clicked into place. She was the lost alibi. When she had gone to Florida to talk to her father about the case, she had suddenly remembered the traumatic events that had happened. And she was certain of the date because it had been the anniversary of her mother’s death. The sermon her father had given that day had been about death … and about life. The new life that had been given to Gemma and Jorge Jimenez. The baby had been born on that day and Marcario Morales had been in town.

  So, one thing was certain, Morales had been in Florida on June 13th, 2010. But was he still there on the 20th, the day that Eric Torres was shot and killed in New York?

  21

  Compulsive Behavior

  For the second time that she could remember ever doing so in her life, Amber Cross woke up with her face pressed to the table. She had drooled a little, making a wet ring of saliva on the yellow legal pad she had been scrawling out her thoughts on last night. Her handwriting looked as if a three-year-old had transcribed as she dictated, revealing that she might’ve been a bit more intoxicated than she realized.

  Luckily, she could decipher most of it and was able to get back to her post-midnight train of thought.

  “Well, well,” a voice chimed from the door of the office. “Sleeping Beauty has arisen from her magical slumber.”

  In the doorway stood Minter Tweed. He was wearing the same pale blue suit he’d had on the night before … or maybe he actually had a closet full of similar suits, she couldn’t be sure. His face was bright and cheery, showing no sign of the amount of alcohol he had surely consumed last night. In his left hand, he held a cardboard drink tray with three paper cups issuing steam. In the right, he held a small, white paper bag, the top carefully folded over three times. She glanced at the grandfather clock and saw that it was just past ten o’clock. The sun beaming in from the balcony proclaimed that the weather had turned and it looked like it was going to be a beautiful Savannah day.

  “I’m sorry, Minter,” she said, her voice hoarse from his second-hand pipe smoke on the balcony last night. “I didn’t mean to crash here. I guess I was tired.”

  “No need for apologies. I have done much the same thing when on the trail of truth and justice.” He sat the paper bag in front of her and placed one of the cups next to it. “This ought to get the veritable engine of the mind going again. Let me deliver this to Mattie. I shall return.”

  She took a sip of the coffee. It was delicious and the hot liquid soothed her throat. She took a few minutes to simply sit and eat without thinking about the case. She needed a mental clean slate before she dove in. Minter returned and sat across the massive table from her. He placed his coffee on the table and put his palms face down on two stacks of paper in front of him.

  “What shall we begin with today?” He asked. “I have a feeling you were onto something last night.”

  “I think so, but I’m not sure where to start,” she said, shuffling through a file folder. “I think I need to go back to the beginning.”

  “Hmmm,” Minter steepled his fingers across his lips under his formidable mustache. “That is a novel idea. Retrace our steps, as it were.”

  Amber considered this for a second, then asked, “Do you have a whiteboard?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  He stood and walked to the wood paneled wall featuring a large antique map of Savannah. With his fingertips, he pulled the bottom of the map and it flew upward like a spring-loaded window blind. A pristine whiteboard appeared beneath it. A tray held a box of unopened markers.

  “Never have had the opportunity to use it.” He opened the box and pulled out a black marker. “Shall I?”

  “Oh, sure. Let’s see. First, let’s put the names: Marcario Morales, Eric Torres, and,” she paused, “and Joseph Cross.”

  She went through each detail, trying not to leave anything out. Crime scene, timeline, witnesses. A thought struck her. “The witnesses,” she said. “Do we know their names?”

  Minter sucked air through his teeth. “I believe we have a statement from each of them. Ah, yes, here it is.”

  He handed her two single-sided sheets of paper. “This is it?” She asked. “They convicted Morales with these two sheets of paper.”

  “Occam’s Razor, my dear. The explanation that is the simplest is most likely true.”

  She scanned the first statement. It was pretty straightforward. A woman—in her teens at the time of the murder—said she was hanging out with Marc and Eric the night of the shooting. They were having an argument. Eric got pissed and took off. Marc followed him. She followed them. By the time she got there, she saw Marc standing over Eric holding the gun. Her signature at the bottom was nearly as illegible as Amber’s crayon-eque notes from the night before, but the two initials were clear: O.G.

  “Couldn’t be … could it?” She asked, inhaling a long slow breath.

  “My dear, I am horrible at mind reading,” Minter said. “Just ask my second wife.”

  She held up a finger. “I’ll be right back.”

  Without explaining to him, she jogged downstairs, crossed the sidewalk to the police station, ignored Fat Rick’s snarky comment about her hair, and began rifling through her trash can. It didn’t take long before she found the note Rita had brought her from the tip line.

  Another piece snapped into place. The name of the tipster was Olanta Greene. Back in Minter’s conference room, she gave him a cursory explanation as she dialed the number she left. When Olanta answered, she gave Minter the universal “shush” sign.

  Within minutes, the two women had fallen into what felt more like a conversation about the wacky men in their lives than an interview. Olanta’s accent was decidedly Brooklyn, but she revealed that she had moved to New York to become an actress. As with many of the wannabe superstars that stepped off Greyhound buses with delusions of grandeur, she soon became a waitress and moved into a matchbox apartment.

  “Yeah, I was dating Marc at the time,” she said. “He was a barback or bartender or something like that. Happens all the time in the service industry.”

  Amber nodded along as
she listened, her pen scratching across her pad in something just better than short hand.

  “I don’t know what it was, maybe because they looked so much alike back then and all, but me and Eric, well, we had a one-night thing. Marc didn’t even come to me when he found out. He just went straight to Eric. Told him he had disrespected him.”

  Minter gave Amber a questioning look, but she waved him off.

  “It was okay for a while, but then Marc really changed.”

  “Changed how?”

  “He started talking all crazy about Eric and how he was going to show him what happened when someone disrespected him and all. He just got really obsessed and stuff.”

  “Did you keep seeing Marc?”

  “I did for a while, but then he really got paranoid and weird.”

  “He was always checking the door like fifty times when we went out to be sure it was locked. It was like he thought people were out to get him,” Olanta said. “And God with the hand washing. He scrubbed his hands until they cracked and bled sometimes. He got all O.C.D. and shit.”

  Amber wrote the letters O.C.D. and circled them a few times. The picture was getting clearer all the time.

  “It all came to a head when they bumped into each other at that package store that night.”

  “Wait, so they ran into each other at a liquor store?”

  “That’s what I heard,” she said. “Like literally, Marc bumped his shoulder into Eric’s almost knocking him down.”

  “They say Eric just passed him by, paid for his beer, and walked out.” She paused for a moment. “And I know that probably pissed Marc off even more. It’s one thing to disrespect a man with his girl, but to just walk away from him? That wasn’t going to fly.”

  Amber’s pen had stopped. This was all new territory. She wondered if anyone had ever heard this account of the murder.

  “What I heard was that Marc followed Eric all the way to the Oracle Lounge, back in that day, you could pay a bottle fee and bring in your own booze. He and Eric got into it and the bouncers threw them both out into the back alley. I was waiting tables at the Oracle and saw the whole thing. When I saw them get tossed, I ran outside. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, maybe two, that I made it out there. By that time, Marc had shot him twice. I fainted straight away. Didn’t wake up until the police were there.”

  Amber was stunned. This version of the story didn’t make any sense. It didn’t line up with what her father had told her. “But … but, you didn’t actually see Marc shoot him?”

  For a second, Olanta seemed defensive, “I know what you’re going to say, but like I told you. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes between the time they got kicked out, and the time I got out there. And when I did, I saw Marc crouched over Eric with the gun in his hand.”

  Olanta told her she’d eventually given up on becoming a star and moved to Cleveland. Amber thanked her for her time and hung up.

  “And?” Minter drawled, squinting his eyes quizzically.

  “I am beginning to think our innocent man was not so innocent. I have a hunch that he was in New York. If he was, I think he actually might have shot Eric Torres.”

  “Certainly would be a tidy little bow to wrap around the case if that were so,” Minter said, scratching his chin and chewing on his pipe. “But hunches in this business need proof. What proof have you got that Marcario Morales could have been in New York on June 13th, 2010? Are all the alibi witnesses lying? And why wasn’t there any gunshot residue on his hands? And, most important of all, why did your father tell you he had something to do with it?”

  She barely heard Minter ask the questions. She was staring over his shoulder at the whiteboard on the wall. In one shocking moment, it all became clear.

  22

  The Art of Penmanship

  She stood up and walked to the board with Minter Tweed’s notes. She picked up the red marker and began to draw lines between each of the critical details. As she did, the whole thing played like a movie in her mind. When she finished, she turned around to see Minter packing his pipe with tobacco.

  “Well?” She asked, waving her hand behind her at the whiteboard.

  He squinted at it, tilted his head, and scratched at his silver curly hair. He said nothing for a moment.

  “So, what do you think?” She finally said.

  “I think the art of penmanship is lost on the youth of this world.”

  She tapped a finger hard on the board, smudging part of a line she had drawn. “It’s him. Marcario is not innocent. He shot Eric Torres.”

  “A jury said so back in the day, but you have spent the better part of a week proving otherwise,” Minter said. “Perhaps if you enlighten me on your … discovery, I’ll see it more clearly.”

  She took a deep breath. “June 20th, 2010, Eric Torres is gunned down on a New York Street.”

  Each time she made a statement, she tapped the board leaving red dots all over it.

  “Two eye witnesses say they saw Marcario Morales at the scene though neither saw him pull the trigger. He was brought in for questioning and railroaded into prison.”

  “Open and shut,” Minter chimed in.

  “It would seem that way,” she said. “But then I came along to review the file. I found the alibi list that would’ve freed him. Over a dozen people saying he was in Florida for the baptism of a friend’s baby.”

  Minter began to rub at his beard and chew on the end of the pipe.

  “One of them being my father,” she said, a sudden catch in her throat. “And ultimately … me.”

  I was in Florida at the same time Morales was … I could’ve provided an alibi for him as well.”

  “Then Mr. Morales is innocent.” Minter held his hands wide mimicking the scales of justice, “right?”

  “Wrong.”

  Amber shuffled through some papers until she found the alibi list that Morales had provided for the police officers. She put the sheet in front of Minter and pointed to a single name. Beside the poorly penned line that read: Gemma Jimenez there was one word. It was nearly illegible, but it clearly started with a “B.”

  “He wasn’t in Florida for the Baptism, like we all thought—well, like I thought.” She tapped the word. “He was in Florida for the birth of the child.”

  Minter shrugged. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  Amber went back to the board and changed to a blue marker. “Marcario Morales was in Florida for the birth of the Jimenez child on June 13th, 2020. He was not in Florida for the baptism on June 20th, 2020, the day that Eric Torres was shot.”

  A glimmer of something began to light up in Minter’s eyes. “And you know this how?”

  “My father did not perform a baptism that day, he simply gave a sermon on the life of the child … and the death … of my mother.” She briefly cleared the emotion from her throat. “You know, circle of life and all.”

  Minter was nodding now, his arms crossed, the pipe still firmly in his jaw.

  “The same day Morales came to my house and attempted to assault me.”

  A long moment of silence hung in the air. She walked back over and tapped the alibi list. “Gemma Jimenez told me she threw Morales out shortly after the birth … I think she said on Thursday. He was basically a thug at that time and she didn’t want him around influencing her husband.” She stared at the whiteboard now covered with what could have passed for an original Jackson Pollock painting. “And my father, pretty much followed him back to New York and tried to get revenge for the assault. I guess he never did. It was really hard to tell what he was saying he’d done after the stroke.”

  Amber sat down in a conference chair in a heavy slump. “He played us. He played me. He worked the whole system of people, knowing that it had been a long time ago and that the dates would get mixed up. I mean, no one actually saw him do it. The witnesses just saw him afterward. His hands were clean of gunshot residue because at that time, he was just developing his O.C.D. issues. He probably washed h
is hands a hundred times before the police got him into the station to run the test.”

  “And you helped him go free,” Minter said, a slight tone of awe in his voice.

  “Not a big help to point that out right now,” she said, rubbing her temples with her fingers.

  “Then, I believe it is incumbent on you to get him back in prison,” Minter said, matter-of-factly.

  “But he’s free. He was declared innocent.”

  “No, no, my dear,” Minter said, with a wag of his finger. “His conviction was vacated. He was not exonerated by the court. A vacated criminal conviction nullifies the conviction, but the appeal court may direct the trial court to re-examine a particular issue in the case, and thereupon the conviction may be reinstated depending on the trial court's decision.”

  “So, what then? What do I do now?”

  The twinkle in Minter Tweed’s eyes had grown into a full-on fireworks display. “You, my dear, must go back to the scene of the crime. Only there will you discover the truth.”

  “Scene of the crime?” She asked.

  Minter nodded. Amber thought about all she had discovered in the last couple of days. She snapped her fingers. “The Oracle Lounge.”

  He smiled broadly and glanced at the phone on his desk. “Why don’t you give them a call?”

  Amber nearly bounded over to the heavy, manly desk. She picked up the receiver, clutching it so hard, her knuckles were white. A quick internet search gave her the number of the Oracle. She dialed it.

  After a few seconds, an older man answered. For a long moment, she wasn’t exactly sure what she was going to ask. Witness, she needed a more reliable witness.

  “Cameras,” she said to the man. “Do you have security cameras that face the outside of the building?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Two of ‘em. One points down toward Sal’s, the other points at down at the door.”