I Scarce Can Die (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 5)

by Michael Wallace

  “How did Connie get along with the rest of the cast?” Gordon asked.

  The delay before anyone answered was a giveaway.

  “She was pretty friendly,” Kevin finally said. “I don’t think she was really close with anybody, but she got along.”

  Amy turned to him. “Well, one reason she wasn’t really close was that she made fun of people behind their backs. And she was totally inappropriate. She even wanted to be naked under the bathrobe when Kevin carried her in at the end of Act Two!”

  “Now, Amy,” Harrison said, “Dill wouldn’t have allowed that. It was a family show after all.”

  “Dill was very clear about that when I talked to him,” Gordon said.

  “And I think she was trying to be outrageous more than anything else,” Holmes said. “She was a good mimic and she had a wicked sense of humor. Some of her impressions were spot on.”

  “Like the one of me?” Amy said.

  “Now, honey,” Kevin said. “You don’t know that was true.”

  “Heather Colson said it was.”

  “You have to take what Heather says with a grain of salt,” Holmes said. He turned to Gordon. “I don’t know how much you know, but Connie had a tough life. She was married to a drunk who eventually killed her, and they probably didn’t get out much because of his drinking. When she got the part in the play and found she could really do it, I do think it was an epiphany for her. Yeah, it made her a bit sassy, but I don’t think you can read too much into that.”

  “So you saw her change over the course of doing the play?” Gordon said.

  “She definitely came out of her shell.”

  “She was ready to come out of some other things, too,” Amy said. “She was flirting shamelessly with Kevin.”

  “That may be,” Holmes said, “but she was flirting with me and with Dill and with a couple of other men in the cast. She was acting out a bit, but I never thought she meant anything by it.”

  “You know, I wonder,” Amy said almost dreamily, “if she got the part by sleeping with Dill. That would explain a lot.”

  “I suppose it’s possible she did,” Holmes said, “but she didn’t have to. I was there for her audition, and so were you, Amy. I know you would have made a really good Tracy, but even so, you have to admit: Connie nailed the Dutch Muffin Ear line.”

  AT THREE MINUTES PAST NOON, Peter walked into the courthouse. The tide of people heading the other direction told him his strategy of coming during lunch hour was correct. He wasn’t entirely sure he knew what he was looking for, but he was sure he wanted as few people as possible to see him looking for it.

  The sign in the lobby directed him to the auditor-controller’s office down the hall to the left. Entering the office, he was pleased to see only one employee present, a woman at her desk, head down, reviewing a clutch of documents. When he’d been standing at the counter a half-minute without being noticed, he coughed gently.

  The woman looked up, and there was a jolt of mutual recognition.

  “Hello,” she said, in her normal greet-the-customer voice. Then, speaking in a half whisper, “You were at the meeting Monday night. From out of town.”

  “And I remember you, too. Karen, right? I’m Peter.”

  She nodded and smiled. She was in her early forties with short black hair, brown eyes, a well-rounded figure, and a saucy, raspy voice.

  “So what brings you to the auditor-controller’s office, Peter? Last time I looked, the Visitors Bureau didn’t include us in their list of attractions.”

  “I’m following up a lead on a mystery,” he whispered.

  “A lead in a mystery? God, that’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in this office since Marlene Muncie slipped on some coffee on the floor and threatened to sue. And it’s not every day a handsome stranger comes in with something like this. I’m at your service.”

  At 46 years of age, 20 pounds of excess weight, and with a scraggly beard that defied proper trimming, Peter was not the man who would have been picked out of a lineup based on the description “handsome.” Being a man, however, he took the compliment as his due and leaned over the counter.

  “First of all,” he said, “are the records in your office computerized?”

  “Only for the last five years. Before that, it’s all on paper, and we’d have to retrieve a lot of it from storage in Green Valley.”

  “I may be in luck, then, because I think this was in 1996. I’m trying to trace a check that we think is a government warrant, and this seemed like the place to start. Unfortunately, all I have is an amount and what may be a date.”

  “If it’s ours, that’s all you need.” She held open the swinging door at the side of the counter. “Come in and sit next to me at the computer.”

  “Are you sure I’m not imposing?”

  “Do I look overworked? Come on.”

  He entered the employee area, and she pulled up a swivel chair from another desk and logged into her computer.

  “All right,” she said a minute later. “I’m in the warrants. What time frame and amount are we looking at?”

  “How about June of 1996, and the amount is …” he took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, “$34,079.14.”

  Her fingers flew across the keyboard. “Got it,” she said. “First try. Check number 57184, issued June 6, 1996, to Harrison Lumber and Building Supply for building supplies for the courthouse annex.”

  “That was easy,” Peter said. “Does Harrison do a lot of business with the county?”

  “A ton. In fact a few years ago, the Board of Supervisors decided to just run a standing contract with him for $120K every fiscal year so the county can order supplies without any hassle. He’s the only game in town, you know.”

  “And the fiscal year is July to June?”

  “Right. So this was probably his last billing for the year.”

  “Would you mind pursuing this a bit further?”

  “Not at all. I’m dying to know what this is all about.”

  “I’m not sure myself, but it’s getting interesting. Now can you see how many checks were written to Harrison between January and May of 1996?”

  “No problem.” Her fingers tickled the keyboard again. “Looks like two. In March 1996 there was one for $11,744.27 for supplies for the Bellota bridge repair, and in early April there was another one for $35,667.22 for, hmm, building supplies for the courthouse annex. Now that’s not right.”

  She typed in another command, and the first invoice came up again.

  “Since this one was also for courthouse annex supplies, it should have been marked ‘second shipment’ or something to differentiate it from the one in April. Oh, but this was June 6th. Joe was gone then.”

  “Joe?”

  “Joe Hazen, the Auditor-Controller. He’d have caught that, but it came through on his vacation.”

  “You remember when your boss took a vacation two years ago?”

  “It’s not a magic trick. He takes off two weeks every year from Memorial Day to the end of the first week in June to go to a rodeo in Nevada and visit his brother. Everybody in town knows that.”

  “Can you humor me some more?” Peter asked. “Can you look up Harrison’s contract for that fiscal year and see how much he got paid by the county?”

  “Easy peasy.” Her fingers began flying again. “Just log into contracts, then search by vendor, then click payments, and voila! It looks like Harrison left all of $754.36 on the table that year.”

  “But without that last invoice, he’d have been thirty-five grand short of using up his contract?”

  “I can see where you’re going with this, but the explanation’s probably pretty simple. Fred, the backup guy, was getting close to retirement, and I don’t think he was sweating the details then.” Her face suddenly darkened. “God, I’d almost forgotten. Connie Baxter, the woman who was going to replace Fred, was murdered a couple of weeks before he retired.”

  “What a tragedy,” Peter murmured.


  “Her husband, who should have been in the program, took a hammer to her.” She shivered. “He’s in prison now.”

  “We all have to find our own bottom,” Peter said. “Maybe that’s his.”

  She nodded. “So are you coming to the meeting tonight?”

  “I plan to.”

  “I don’t suppose I could interest you in a cup of coffee afterward?”

  “You certainly could, but I didn’t realize any place in town was open that late.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “My place will be open.”

  A RUMBLE OF DISTANT THUNDER greeted Gordon as he left Harrison’s. Wednesday had begun as a fine autumn day, but by 2:30 dark clouds had taken over the sky entirely, and Gordon’s knew it would be raining soon. He drove to the house, saw that Peter wasn’t there, and headed back to Mooney’s for coffee.

  The rain began to fall as soon as he was inside. There was no preamble or buildup — just an instant deluge, punctuated shortly by a flash of lightning and a loud blast of thunder. Mooney’s was nearly deserted, and Gordon took his latte to a table by the window, where he watched the rain fall, splashing big drops on the deck. His mind swung backward to the meeting at Harrison’s and forward to the meeting soon to be held at Pope’s. The back-and-forth kept him from settling on anything. At 3:15 he finished his drink, tossed the paper cup, and headed for the attorney’s office.

  He was able to park close enough to avoid getting soaked. The receptionist sent him straight to the conference room where Pope was waiting.

  “I’m going to tell them you’re an investigator working with me, if that’s all right,” Pope said as they shook hands.

  “Suits me,” Gordon said. “What did you say to get them to respond so fast?”

  “I caught Williams as he was coming back from morning arraignments. I told him I’d learned there might be a problem with the evidence at the Baxter trial and that we needed to talk as soon as possible before I made my next move. He asked if he could call me right back, and ten minutes later said he and Ketch could come over at 3:30.”

  The rain was falling hard outside, drumming on the roof and spattering the windows. The receptionist ducked her head in.

  “District Attorney Williams and Sheriff Ketch are here,” she said. “Shall I send them in?” Pope nodded.

  Williams was in his early forties and about five-eight, with sandy hair and a look of righteousness and bantam confidence that comes to a prosecutor who knows he only has to try the cases he wants to file. Ketch, wearing gray slacks, a blazer and a dark red tie, stood six-two with a chunky build, a crew cut, and the expression of resigned weariness that comes to a man who knows most people will never change. Ketch’s eyes darted around the conference room from instinct, casing it before he sat down.

  After introducing Gordon and exchanging pleasantries, Pope reached into the briefcase next to his chair, removed a document, and slid it across the table to Williams.

  “You remember this, I’m sure, Bryce,” Pope said.

  Williams looked at the first sheet, nodded, and pushed it to his side.

  “This is the summary of the full medical report you gave me before Gary Baxter’s trial,” Pope continued.

  “Is that the problem? Come on, Brad. Everything we brought up at the trial was in this report. We played fair with you.”

  “I’ll give you that,” Pope said. “But right now I’m more interested in what was left out of it.” He leaned forward toward the sheriff and DA. “Like the fact that semen was found in Connie Baxter during the autopsy and it didn’t come from Gary.”

  Whatever Williams and Ketch were expecting, it hadn’t been this. It showed in their faces, and they were silent for several seconds before speaking simultaneously.

  “There was a reason for that,” Williams said, with less than full conviction.

  “We were doing you a favor,” Ketch said.

  “A favor?” Pope said. “Withholding critical evidence was a favor?”

  “Stop and think about it for a minute,” Ketch said. “It’s pretty obvious what happened, isn’t it? Gary came home that night and found his wife with another man, or saw something that told him someone else had been there. He lost it and killed her. The case was pretty good without a motive; with that, it would have been airtight.”

  “And why, pray tell, were you doing me such a big fat favor?” Pope said softly.

  “Let me answer that,” Williams said. “Jack wanted to use that evidence at trial, but as a prosecutor, I have to consider the interests of justice. Convicting Gary Baxter was obviously the main point of justice, but another issue is the impact the evidence in court will have on people who were innocent of the crime. We have to take that into account, too.

  “Connie’s sister was in court every day of the trial. How would she have felt having it dragged out before the whole town and printed in the newspaper that Connie was fooling around on her husband? We didn’t know who the man was, so if that had come out in court, every man in town who so much as sold Connie Baxter a bottle of aspirin would have become an object of rumor-mongering. That evidence would have caused a lot of problems with a lot of innocent people, and I didn’t feel it was necessary to get a conviction. That’s all there was to it. It wouldn’t have helped you at all.”

  When Pope didn’t immediately respond, Gordon stepped in.

  “I’m a bit of a latecomer to this case, but it seems to me both of you are making a big assumption here. You’re looking at that medical evidence strictly as the basis of a motive for Gary committing the crime. What if it was the motive for someone else killing her?”

  “Don’t waste your time on that argument,” Ketch said. “We had a confession from her husband, who’d been fighting with her for years. Now, I don’t approve of what she did, but she didn’t have an easy life, and I can understand how she might want something more than she was getting from her husband. But it’s her husband who’d want to kill her for that — not the other guy.”

  “Oh, really?” Gordon said. “What if Connie had made a decision that the other guy’s wife needed to be told what was going on? What if she was blackmailing the other guy? She had nine hundred bucks in her purse, after all.”

  “Married people are always hiding money from each other,” Williams said. “And the cash simply showed she wasn’t killed in a robbery. Nothing more.”

  “Did you look into where it came from?” Gordon persisted. “Did you make any effort to find out who her lover was?”

  “Get real, Gordon,” Ketch said. “You don’t just go door to door asking respectable citizens, ‘Oh, by the way, were you doing Connie Baxter?’ There was no evidence but a lot of rumor. Someone even said old man Harrison might have had something going with her, which is ridiculous.”

  “Is it? I don’t know.”

  Pope raised a hand to stop the discussion.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “We’re getting off topic here. The critical issue is that when I represented Gary, I didn’t have the full medical report. The sensible remedy would be for you to provide it to me now. After that, we’ll see where it leads.”

  Ketch and Williams sat stone-faced. Williams finally replied.

  “I don’t know about that, Brad. This is highly irregular …”

  “So is withholding evidence of an alternate theory of the crime,” Gordon said.

  “That’s not what we were doing, Brad, and you know it,” Williams said, addressing Pope. “But a request to see evidence more than two years after a trial’s ended? I’ve never encountered that before. I need to think about it.”

  Pope looked at Williams for a minute before answering.

  “You know what, Bryce? I’ve always felt you were a fair man, and this doesn’t change that opinion. And as a fair man, I think you’d have to admit I have a claim. Now I don’t know what I’m going to do with that report when I get it, but I do know I’m going to get it. So the way I see it, there are two ways we can go on this. Either you can send it to me tomor
row, in which case it stays between us for the time being, or you can force me to petition the court for it. If I do that, it becomes a matter of public record, and you know that the Canyon Call checks filings at the courthouse. It’s up to you.”

  Pope leaned back in his chair and kept his eye on the DA and sheriff. For a full 30 seconds they sat rigidly and impassively, then Williams turned to Ketch, who responded with an almost imperceptible shrug. The DA turned back to Pope.

  “You’ll have it by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. But don’t get carried away, Brad. Your client’s still guilty.”

  THE DOWNPOUR HAD EASED, but scattered showers, accompanied by intermittent lightning and thunder continued. Gordon and Peter decided that barbecuing was problematic and decided to go out for dinner. Having a lot to discuss and wanting some privacy to do it, they headed out of town. Three miles upriver, toward Pass City, at Williamson’s Bellota River Resort, they turned right from the highway, drove over a rickety one-lane bridge spanning the river and reached a complex of cabins flanking a central log building. Williamson’s was winding down the season and serving dinner Wednesday through Sunday, mostly to a handful of guests who had come for hunting or late-season fishing. At six o’clock three of 15 tables in the dining area were occupied. To the surprise of the hostess, they requested a table in the corner by the kitchen door, where they could be alone.

  The table, one of two in that nook, was near a fireplace, where a log fire was burning. Through the large windows facing the river, they could see the deck, looking forlorn with its chairs and tables pulled off to the side and covered for the winter. They couldn’t see the river but were all right with that. The house special on Wednesday was spaghetti, and they both ordered it.

  Over salad, they filled each other in on the events of that afternoon. When the spaghetti arrived, they turned to the question of what the new information meant.

  “I wish I’d known about that county check to Harrison when we had the meeting,” Gordon said. “All I was looking for at the time was who might be Connie’s lover.”