by David Bishop
“That won’t get you a conviction.”
“That’s just the part I’m telling ya. We got more and we’re still in the first inning.”
“What else have you that ties to her?”
“I’m not paid to report to you, Matthew. But I’ll tell you this, when the wife used her scarf and her dog’s pillow she moved it up to premeditated.”
“Maybe Garson did himself in?” I said.
“Usually they leave a note, and suicides don’t often worry about fingerprints and keeping their work quiet, not to mention the awkwardness of plugging themselves in the front of the skull.”
Fidge shrugged after discrediting suicide. I agreed with him. This wasn’t suicide. Still, I hadn’t seen Fidge shrug that way in years, but habits become habits by lasting over time. This Fidgery shrug meant, open and shut.
“I’m not going to tell you again, Matthew, get outta here. The medical examiner could be here any minute.”
“I’m going.” I used the back of my hand to pat the sergeant on the breast pocket of his dark-blue suit coat. “She can phone her attorney after you get her downtown, right?”
“Sure.”
“Who called this in?”
“Her.”
“What about the coffee?” I asked.
Fidge coughed into his fist. “Says she dropped the cup when she saw the hole in her sugar daddy’s noggin.”
I left my ex-partner in Garson’s bedroom and went to Clarice in the living room. “I’ll come see you once you’re permitted to have visitors.”
She shifted Asta from one arm to the other while blotting her eyes with the soft pads of her straightened fingers, the way women do to avoid smudging their eye makeup.
“Please take Asta,” she pleaded. “There’s no one else I can ask. I got her a continental clip three days ago. She won’t need another grooming for weeks. I’ll be home before that.”
I had once thought about getting a dog, but figured on one I could name Wolf or King. Then, after the incident with my father-in-law’s mad creature, I repressed the whole idea of a dog.
“I need another minute in the victim’s room,” Fidge said, leaning out of the doorway of Garson’s bedroom. “When I come out, I want a decision on that dog. It’s you or the catcher.”
“What’ll I do with a little dog like that?” I asked looking at Clarice.
“She won’t be any trouble.” Clarice’s eyes went all funny. “Please, Matt.”
I had always envied the way Sam Spade could stand up to the femme fatales who tried to play him. I had given that skill to my fictional detective, but no one had given it to me.
“All right,” I said, hoping I sounded less defeated than I felt. “Asta can stay with me.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“I’m sure of almost nothing. But, yes, Asta can stay with me.” I put my fingers against her lips and headed for her bedroom where I found no deck shoes with zigzag soles. I quickly looked in the bathroom, the kitchen, and the laundry room and found no zigzags there either. Fidge had likely already done this. He was a solid detective, so he would have seen the shoe print on the deck and the partially open glass door in Garson’s bedroom.
Back in the living room, I asked, “When did Garson start with the cornflakes?”
“Tally went all crazy after that call. He started carrying his gun around in his waistband, sleeping with it on the night stand. He kept insisting I go get six boxes of cornflakes. We fought about that. We fought about everything, about nothing. Day before yesterday, I stopped at the post office to mail a few house bills and something Tally wanted mailed to his attorney. On the way back I bought the damn cornflakes. Guess what? We still fought.” She leaned closer and whispered. “He scared me real bad. I wish I hadn’t—”
I grabbed her shoulders. “Save it for your attorney, you have no legal privilege over what you tell me.” But she kept talking anyway.
“Damn it, I didn’t shoot him. I was trying to say I wish I hadn’t gotten mad at him so much those last few days.” She stood clutching the dog, breathing slowly. Her eyes shut. Then she put down Asta and said, “Go with Uncle Matt.”
The hair ball leaped into my arms.
“She’ll sleep on the foot of your bed. You’ll need to get her a new pillow. Her pink one has a … hole in it. Take a few of her toys. She’ll be fine.”
Fidge again filled the bedroom doorway, “Just the mutt.”
“But Asta needs her toys. She—”
“Lady. Just the mutt or we call the pound. None of this is up for negotiation.”
I put my fingers under Clarice’s chin, raising her head. “Get your mind off this damn dog. You’re in a real mess. Do what Sergeant Fidgery tells you, but don’t talk about this to anyone until you get an attorney. A criminal attorney. A good one.”
Fidge came out of the bedroom wearing a grin wider than his flat nose. “I hope you and Asta will live happily ever after.” His eyes sort of twinkled, which is hard to imagine on the face genetics had passed down to Fidge.
“Now,” he said, “for the last time, Matthew, get lost.”
I lowered the dog to stop it from licking me on the mouth and walked out with Asta scrambling up my front, watching Clarice over my shoulder.
Chapter 2
Like yesterday, today started way too early. After a shower, three cups of coffee, a scan of the sports section, and four words in the crossword puzzle, I pulled my Chrysler 300 out of my building’s underground parking and pointed it toward town. The veil of salty wetness that had sneaked in while the city slept still coated everything that had spent the night outdoors. I turned on the windshield wipers, hit the defroster button, and headed for the city jail. Clarice had been temporarily held at the smaller Long Beach jail inside the police department. After her arraignment, she had been moved to the larger main jail on Pacific Avenue near Twentieth Street.
Last spring, my ex-wife and I started sharing dinners, movies, and what was now her bed a few nights a week. We still cared, but she couldn’t get past the anger and betrayal she felt over my having gunned down the thug outside the courthouse. After nearly a month of our running in place, I put a stop to the experiment. The ending of most relationships digs an emotional hole that refills with emptiness; ours was no exception.
Hemingway had said something like the best way to get over a woman is to get a new one. I hadn’t decided whether to take Hemingway’s advice or to write a novel, use her name, and have her killed—heinously. For a few weeks after I pulled the plug on our mutual effort, I considered both, a sort of double exorcism.
Then I met Clarice, who was bright and funny as well as passionate. The only problem, Clarice was married. I hadn’t known that, and I hadn’t bothered asking. My libido was screaming, “Any port in a storm,” and Clarice was a dock slip built to hold a good sized yacht so I powered on in.
* * *
The Long Beach jail, one of California’s largest, booked about eighteen thousand inmates annually. That seems like a huge number of bookings, but then Long Beach was California’s sixth largest city, and America’s thirty-eighth biggest with a population around half a million. To most people Long Beach doesn’t seem that big, probably because it butts up to Los Angeles without an obvious border crossing.
The lobby chairs of the Long Beach jailhouse were all occupied with people jabbering in multiple languages. I figured all of them were talking about seeing a loved one and cursing someone else for the poor choices made by the loser they had come to visit. The air felt tight from the fear which grips everyone in a jail, even those working hard at showing tough. The mothers who had brought babies were trying to keep them from crying. But the babies had it right. Jail was a place that could make anyone cry.
For now, Clarice’s world was the place writers had given names like stir, the slammer, the joint, the pokie, and a thousand others. But not the big house, that name referred to prison not a jail. Whatever the name, except in the movies, escapes were rare. Once y
ou went in, you stayed in until they let you walk out or they carried you out.
Eventually I was called through a heavy door and left to walk behind a row of uncomfortable looking chairs. Visitation was limited to fifteen minutes. I chose the first place to sit where the chairs to each side of me were not occupied by other visitors. A moment later, Clarice entered through a door like the one I had come through, only her door was on the inmate side of the glass partition. This was a big difference, huge, I could leave at will, while she would be forcibly detained. Her entrance started the clock on our fifteen minutes. She walked toward me behind a row of chairs on her side, forced a smile, not much of one, and sat down.
We were separated by a pane of glass as thick as old coke bottles. I picked up the dirty phone on my side. She picked up the dirty phone on her side. She put the flat of her other hand on the unbreakable glass, the pads of her fingers turning white from the pressure. I covered her hand with my own, the insulation of the cold glass denying the heat from her fingers.
She ignored the tide of tears spilling through her black lashes. “The prosecutor convinced the judge I was a flight risk. He denied bail. They photographed and fingerprinted me, then some dyke with a mustache felt me up during a strip search. After that I got shoved in the shower.”
By the time Clarice finished, her voice had raised several decibels. The visiting room guard walked over and leaned down next to her. I couldn’t see his face, but a good guess went something like: behave yourself or this visit’s over and that gorgeous fanny of yours goes back in lockup.
She lowered her head and nodded. The guard stepped back. I gave her a minute to compose herself.
I had called ahead to get the official words. Clarice Talmadge had been charged with capital murder, also known as first degree murder with special circumstances, under California Penal Code 187 (a). The fancy title meant that if she was found guilty of having murdered her husband for financial gain, one of more than twenty different situations which constitute capital murder in California, she would face either the death penalty or life imprisonment without a possibility of parole.
Clarice jerked her hand up to swipe at a running tear. Then let her hand freefall onto her lap. Her face looked whiter than I had ever seen it, probably due to the shower and no makeup. Still, the woman was lovely. The jailhouse orange jumpsuit brought the emerald out of her bluish-green eyes. Her naturally creamy skin made me wonder why she ever bothered with makeup. Even her lips had a natural hot-pink hue, her tongue having the enviable task of keeping them moist.
She brought the phone back up to her ear.
“Asta’s a strange name for a dog.” I said, hoping to pull her out of her funk.
Her unpainted lips thinned and trembled. “How is my baby? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. Slept on the foot of my bed just like you said she would. We’re getting along swell. I got the food and snacks you told me about. No problem. Where’d you come up with the name Asta?”
Clarice’s head and shoulders swiveled to her left as a heavyset Hispanic inmate moved toward her, then quickly spun to the right to confirm the big woman had continued on by. Caught up in her jailhouse vigilance, I also watched the large woman until she sat in a chair two cubicles beyond Clarice.
“Tally bought Asta for me,” Clarice said, returning from the distraction. “He named her after a dog owned by some guy named Nick Charles. I told him this Charles must be one of his friends I never met. Tally just smiled. He likes his jokes—liked his private jokes. Then he said something about my being too young to understand.”
“I don’t think the police are going to be looking too hard for anyone else to pin this on.” It was a hard message, but one she needed to hear. She took it without reaction.
“After we met,” she said, as if she had not heard my harsh message, “I researched you in the online archives. You don’t know it, but I’m hot stuff searching on that Internet.” She moved the phone to her other hand, the aluminum wrapped cord draping across her mouth like surreal braces. “I read all I could find about your career as a cop.”
“Then you know I went to prison and why.”
“I know, and I agree with the majority of the people in the poll. I’m glad you shot the bastard. He deserved it.”
“I appreciate that. In any event, I doubt I would have lasted much longer as a cop.”
“Why?”
“The easy answer is the department thought I had too much Mike Hammer in me, while I thought the department had too much Casper Milquetoast. In my novels, I define and dole out justice the way it feels right to me. My readers must agree that justice isn’t always best found in a courtroom. They keep buying my books.”
“So your departmental papers show, terminated: too much Mike Hammer?”
“Well, they glossed it over as insubordination. I never have been any good at letting someone play smart when they’re talking stupid, just because they’re the boss.”
Clarice moved in her chair, my gaze moved with her. She said, “One of the articles mentioned you’re also a private detective.”
“True. After my pardon they couldn’t deny me a PI’s license. Investigative work was my profession, but the law wouldn’t allow me a permit to carry a weapon. I’m not sure why I got the private license. Maybe I thought it would add to my mystique as a crime novelist.”
“Maybe because it lets you feel in some way you’re still a detective.” She grinned for the first time since I arrived, and then said, “The job that made you happier than being a novelist.”
When they were being nice, the biddies in our building referred to Clarice as the airhead on the fourth floor, but my instincts told me Clarice was Phi Beta Kappa in street savvy.
“Methinks the lady has brains as well as beauty.”
“My mother was a lady. I think of myself as a woman. There is a difference you know?”
“No. I didn’t know. As a writer, I’m naturally curious.”
She explained. “When a lady sees a man who attracts her she thinks of herself as a flirt. When a woman does, she thinks of herself as a prick teaser.”
“I like it. May I use it?”
“Of course, but it requires you recognize one from the other.”
“I’ll do my best. Now, our time is limited so let’s get back to your situation.”
“You said the cops won’t look much beyond me, so I need you to find out who killed Tally.”
“Except in the pages of my books, I haven’t worked a case in a lot a years. You don’t want me. At best, I’m a rusty ex-detective.”
“I’ve known a few smart men, Matt, even a couple of honest ones. But you’re both. That’s rare and it’s just what I need.”
“Don’t make me out to be holy, you know my record.”
“You plugging that guy shows you cared about the victim and about justice. That you’re passionate about what you believe in. I need you to believe in me.”
“I don’t know.” I kept shaking my head long after I finished saying it. “I just don’t think I’m the man for this job.”
“You are exactly the man for the job. You were with me. And you know I couldn’t kill Tally … You know that, don’t you Matt?”
Sam Spade would easily know whether or not Clarice was working me, but I couldn’t tell. In the end it mattered little. I had always had difficulty re-corking an opened curiosity.
“No promises,” I said. “I’ll think on it. But, as long as I’m here, I do have a question about last night.”
The always perfect polish on her fingernails was chipped when she turned the back of her hand toward me and wiggled her fingers. “Bring it on.”
“When you got home from my place, did you look in on Garson?”
“No. His door was shut. He usually went to bed before me. He’d close his door when he turned off his TV. Unless he called out, I would never go in after he shut his door … Why do you ask?”
“It would have told us whether or not he had been killed
while you were with me.” Her expression told me she understood.
“I expect,” she said, “the autopsy will show Tally died while I was with you.”
“That will show a range of time that will likely cover part of the time you were with me and some time you weren’t. But we don’t have the autopsy yet.”
She didn’t say anything, just looked down and pursed her lips.
“You handling this place okay?”
She shrugged. “It’s nasty and that’s just the surface. Look at these outfits. How’s a girl gonna look good in this ugly thing?” She tugged hard enough to billow the loose-fitting orange material over her bust, then glanced toward the door and the guard.
“You’d look good in anything,” I said, meaning it, “but this is not a place for looking sensuous. Let your hair go. Don’t bathe unless they insist, but cooperate when they do.”
“No sweat, Matt. I hold a brown belt in karate. If any of the lesbos in this place put a hand on me, they’ll wish they hadn’t.”
“Also, this is not a place to get in a fight. Walk and talk with confidence, not cockiness. Stay to yourself, but don’t act like a victim or like you’re too good for the rest of ‘em.”
She smiled for the second time. “Seeing we’re talking outfits here, I see you wore your trench coat. That ought to help you get into your detective persona.”
The trench coat may have been a little over the top into my novelist side, but I wasn’t about to confess that to Clarice. “Morning fog,” I said. “Wet. Now, did you get an attorney?”
“I called Sidney Blackton.” She stroked her fingers on the glass the way she might to tickle the open palm of my hand. “He was Tally’s lawyer for all his U.S. business deals.”
“You need a criminal mouthpiece, not a corporate attorney.”
“That’s what Blackton told me. He sent over Brad Fisher who went with me to the arraignment. I gave Fisher your name and told him you’d help. Was that okay? Do you know Fisher?”
