A Capital Offense

by Gary Parker

  “Any other suspects?” Tyler asked.

  Connie shook her head.

  Tyler leaned forward, his thick torso centered on his desk. “Mrs. Brandon—”

  “Call me Connie.”

  “Okay, Connie, let me ask you a personal question.”

  Connie tilted her head, sensing a shift in his demeanor. “What kind of personal question?”

  “Well, this kind.” He lowered his eyes for an instant, then looked back at her. “How was your relationship with Mr. Brandon? . . . You know . . . any problems between you two? Recent fights? Marital issues that sometimes come up after a man and woman have been married for a few years?”

  Not liking the tone of the question, Connie immediately felt defensive. How dare he ask her that? Her face reddened and her heartbeat notched higher. But then she realized Tyler had to ask such questions. A man with problems at home and a failing business would more logically consider suicide than one with only a failing business.

  Quickly, she evaluated her marriage. Any unresolved issues that might have upset Jack, confused him, made him so despondent he would kill himself? None that she knew. But she couldn’t answer for Jack. Perhaps the issues she thought minor seemed larger to him, more serious. But she couldn’t imagine that any of their day-to-day disagreements drove him to his death. She answered Tyler.

  “Jack and I were like most couples, I guess. We had our tiffs from time to time, usually over little things, but nothing major that I can recall.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Connie pursed her lips. “Oh, I don’t know. He tended to run late all the time and I liked to arrive early. We’ve had that as a running battle ever since we’ve known each other. And I’m neater than he is, constantly harping on him to put dirty socks away, things like that. You know what I mean. Plus, I stayed on him to tell me more about certain things. He had a tendency to try to protect me.”

  “Give me an example.”

  Connie furrowed her brow. “Well . . . several years ago, a couple of years after we married, Jack opened the store. But, without much capital to get him through the lean times, the first years were tougher than he anticipated. The store almost went bankrupt. But Jack never told me.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “By mistake. At the tenth anniversary of the store, the banker who loaned Jack the money to start the store made a comment about the early problems as I handed him a glass of punch. He assumed I knew. Not wanting to appear ignorant, I just listened. He told me Jack had almost gone bankrupt, but he renegotiated the loan two different times and kept working at it.”

  “Did that upset you?”

  Connie smiled briefly. “It didn’t make me too happy, I can tell you that. When I told Jack my feelings that night after the party, he made light of it at first. He said, ‘You were pregnant with Daniel at the time. You had enough on your mind.’ I told him that didn’t matter. I could have gotten a job. Brought in some extra money.”

  “How did he respond?”

  “He promised to do better. Remember, we were young then, barely married two years. He did do better too.”

  “Anything else like that between you two?”

  Connie rubbed her forehead, trying to think. “Not really, no big issues. The times we did have fights, we worked hard to move past them. We’re both strong believers, you know. Jack since he was about twelve, me since I was sixteen. We tried to forgive each other our faults, just as God gave forgiveness to us. We had a good marriage, not one that would cause him to end his life.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Positive.”

  A heavy silence fell over the room. Tyler stared at her, his gray eyes locked on her face. Then, as if reaching for bad medicine, he pulled out a blue folder from his desk. The toothpick in his teeth suddenly snapped in two.

  Connie’s shoulders clenched, and a knot the size of a grapefruit filled her stomach. As if programmed over the last thirteen days to expect bad news, she detected another knife wound coming.

  Instinctively, she searched her heart for a word of strength, and one jumped to mind. Tyler opened the folder and studied the papers in it for a second. Bracing herself, Connie rolled the words of Paul through her head.

  “We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken . . . ”

  “I hate to tell you this,” said Tyler, turning the folder and pushing it across his desk to her. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to do it. But I don’t see any way around it.”

  Connie searched his eyes, testing them for sincerity, not sure if she could trust his expressed regret or not.

  “Tell me,” she said, wanting to read his eyes, to see the pleasure or pain they would communicate as he spoke. “Tell me what’s in the folder.”

  His gaze didn’t waver. “A woman came in,” he said. “A woman came in and said she and Jack Brandon were lovers.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  Though Tyler’s words shocked her, Connie didn’t wince. She had faced so much the last few days that even something this bizarre failed to knock her off her feet. Like a fighter conditioned to take a blow and keep on moving, she now felt toughened against anything.

  Hearing this new twist, she looked at Tyler, her stare as intent as his. For several seconds, she churned the idea around, wondering if it could be true. Did Jack have an affair? Did that explain his recent silences? Was he dealing with his guilt, the conscience that would surely have ripped a man of his convictions apart? It made a certain kind of sense. An affair would have eaten Jack up inside, maybe pushed him to the point that suicide seemed the only escape.

  But where were the signs of his infidelity? Connie searched her mind for any clues she might have missed. The smell of a woman’s perfume on his clothes, a smudge of lipstick somewhere, unexplained absences from home, guilty eyes? She found nothing amiss as she pondered the possibility. If Jack had fallen into an adulterous relationship, he kept it covered extremely well.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said, her voice strong. “The woman is lying.”

  “Why would she do that?” asked Tyler. “She gains nothing by telling us this.”

  “Then why did she come forward? Why not keep it to herself and spare me this added pain?”

  Tyler popped a fresh toothpick into his mouth. “I think it’s plain. She came in because she thinks Jack did commit suicide and she wanted us to know why. She said he had been agonizing over the last few weeks, trying to decide what to do. He didn’t want to leave you and the kids, but he wanted to be with her too. She had given him an ultimatum—either divorce you and marry her or she was going to break off the affair. As she sees it, he broke down under the strain.”

  “So she came in, exposing herself to public ridicule as a home wrecker, to save you the hassle of a murder investigation. Is that it?”

  Tyler leaned back. “Yeah, that’s it. She read the stories in the papers, knew we were trying to decide whether to declare Jack’s death a suicide or a homicide. She thought her story would help us.”

  “A real public servant, that’s what she is,” said Connie, her disbelief becoming more pronounced by the second.

  “We do have a few of those out there,” said Tyler. “What’s the problem with that?”

  “No problem with her being a public servant, but I think she had another motive.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “It’s simple, unless you’re already leaning toward the suicide theory. She wants the death declared a suicide because she doesn’t want a murder investigation. As easy as that.”

  “So you think it’s a smoke screen?”

  “It makes as much sense as the suicide notion.”

  “If you’re already leaning toward the murder theory.”

  Connie smiled, but only slightly. “You’ve got as much evidence for one as the other.”

  “I think you overstate that. We don’t have any solid evidence
of a murder, but we do have some evidence pointing to a suicide. We have this woman’s statement, the bad loan, the note from the computer, and the drugs found in the body. I think we can make the suicide case fairly strongly.”

  “The note was a fake,” said Connie, surprised at the confidence in her voice.

  “How so?”

  “It referred to Kate, not Katie. It came to me last night. Jack never called his baby Kate in her whole life.”

  “But the note did call you Sunset, a name nobody else used but him.”

  “You know that?”

  “Sure, I do my homework.”

  “Then if you know he called me Sunset, other people obviously do too. Whoever wrote the note simply knew us well enough to know Jack’s pet name for me.”

  “How many people could that be?”

  Connie did a quick calculation. “Heaven only knows. A few close friends, but they might tell a few close friends, who tell . . . you know how that happens. Hundreds of people could know. If someone wanted to make a note look authentic, a touch like the name ‘Sunset’ makes a lot of sense. We didn’t keep it a secret.”

  “So you’re saying whoever wrote the note knew your nickname but blew it with Katie’s.”

  “Exactly. Even in a distressed state, Jack would never refer to his baby girl by anything but her real name.”

  “It could be a simple typing mistake.”

  “It could be, but I just don’t believe it. One thing Jack was neat about was his writing. If he put his name to it, he wanted it right. I can’t believe he’d leave a typing mistake in his last words.”

  Tyler rocked forward and locked his hands together, his elbows on his desk. “If you’re right, then the woman was lying—plain and simple—lying to make us look away from a murder.”

  Connie nodded. “Makes sense to me. Who’s the woman?”

  Tyler grunted at her. “I can’t tell you that!” he said. “For obvious reasons.”

  “Does she live in Jefferson City? Somebody I might know, can you tell me that much?”

  Tyler stared at the ceiling for a moment, then sighed. “I guess that won’t hurt. No, she doesn’t live around here.”

  “Then where? Jack didn’t travel much. It had to be someone fairly close by. Columbia maybe? He goes over there fairly often.”

  She raised her eyebrows, silently asking Tyler for confirmation. He shook his head. Connie swallowed, then waited for several more seconds. Tyler stayed quiet. Convinced he wouldn’t say anything more and anxious to get moving, she stood to leave. If Tyler wouldn’t help her, she would try another tactic. She wanted to talk to this woman.

  “Hold on a second,” said Tyler, motioning her back into her seat. “I know we need to see this woman again. If she is lying, then maybe she can lead us to the person who put her up to it. But before you go running all over mid-Missouri trying to find her, let me see what I can do. I’ll call her back in, go over her statement again.”

  Pleased, Connie obeyed and sat back down. Tyler pulled the folder back across the desk, rifled through it until he found the page he was looking for, then punched a number into his phone. Several seconds passed while he waited on a response. Connie watched him, grateful for his quick action. His toothpick rolled to the center of his mouth and stayed there, hanging on his bottom lip. Another ten seconds passed. He lay the phone back in its cradle, then raised his eyes to Connie.

  “Well?” she said.

  Tyler spoke softly. “The phone number she gave me has been disconnected.”

  “The plot thickens.”

  Tyler rubbed his hands through his beard. “Indeed it does. Maybe she moved.”

  “Or maybe she didn’t pay her phone bill,” said Connie, more than a bit of sarcasm in her voice. “Look, I don’t know why you don’t just admit it, this woman is bogus. Somebody paid her to come in here and say what she said, and now she’s disappeared.” As Connie spoke, her frustration mounted and the anger created by the adultery charge, anger she had bottled up until now, boiled over.

  “I bet you a dime to a doughnut that if you call Columbia, and I’m sure that’s where she is, and get a patrol officer to go by whatever address she gave you, you’ll find either a false address or an empty apartment! Go ahead and call, get someone by there!”

  Leaning forward, she grabbed Tyler’s phone and handed it to him, her brown eyes flashing. “Go ahead,” she insisted. “Call the authorities in Columbia!”

  Tyler stood from his chair, his body looming over her. A smile crawled out of his beard, and the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Just relax, there, Mrs. Brandon. Don’t go blowing a gasket. I’ll check it out, and yes, in Columbia. If you’re right, and I think you might be, we’ll start a search for this woman. In the meantime, I advise you to go back home and let us do our work. I’ll keep you up to date. Is that a deal?” He reached for the phone.

  Breathing heavily, Connie handed it to him. “I want to know what you find out about this woman,” she said, still not quite satisfied.

  “You’ll be the first one I’ll call.”

  A disturbing possibility hit Connie. “Do you know if this woman is married?”

  Tyler stroked his beard. “She said she wasn’t, but she might have lied. If she had an affair with Jack, she would have motive to lie.”

  “And her husband would have motive to murder Jack.”

  Tyler nodded. “We’ll check that possibility too.”

  “Who else knows about the woman?” Connie asked.

  “Not many people, my boss and me, that’s about it.”

  “Can you keep it that way?”

  Tyler stared at her. Her face showed distress, her eyes narrowed, her neck red with tension.

  “I can keep it quiet for a few days,” he said. “Maybe longer. If we decide it’s a suicide and the investigation ends, probably no one else will ever know.”

  “But if it’s murder?”

  “Well, then everyone will eventually know. The investigation will continue, the story will stay hot. Things like this do get out.”

  Connie bit her lip. What a mess. To protect her husband’s reputation she now had incentive to call his death a suicide. Without another word, she stood and stalked out of Tyler’s office, realizing as she did that he watched her every step of the way.

  *****

  With Connie out of the office, Tyler pulled his toothpick from his mouth, picked up his phone, and punched in a number. Waiting for an answer, he swiveled his chair around and peered through his window, scanning the parking lot below. He spotted Connie as she moved across the lot. When she reached a blue van, she paused and glanced back at the police building. Tyler sighed. The woman had a tough row to hoe. A man on the other end of the line picked up the phone. Tyler swiveled back around and focused on the call.

  “You said you wanted me to keep you up to date on the Brandon investigation,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I just saw Mrs. Brandon, and she definitely believes someone murdered her husband.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s getting trickier by the minute.”

  “It still looks like a suicide to me.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I’ve got a few items to sift through, a few calls to make.”

  “Good, make those calls. And keep me informed.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  Tyler put down the phone. He didn’t like calls like the one he just made. But in a political town like Jefferson City, he sometimes had to make them. Nothing really wrong with it, just outside the lines a bit. Just so long as it didn’t hurt anybody, he didn’t mind keeping the powerful in the know.

  Rubbing his beard, he thought once more of Connie Brandon. A remarkable woman, he decided. Smart as a whip and a backbone as tough as tungsten steel. Any other woman would still be in bed, crying her eyes out. But she was in his office, busting his chops about a woman who had disappeared after claiming an affair with her husband.

  T
yler picked up the phone again. If he didn’t want Connie Brandon to take a chunk of his hide the next time he saw her, he better get some Columbia guys to check out the woman who claimed the affair with Brandon.

  *****

  When Connie left Tyler’s office, she drove immediately to the Good Books Store. It had opened again the Friday after Jack’s funeral. Andy and Leslie Starks, a husband-and-wife team, were keeping the place going until Connie decided what to do with it. Right now, she had no idea. If the numbers on the accounting sheet reflected any kind of long-term trend, she definitely needed to sell. With the equity in her home her only nest egg, she couldn’t pour any more money into an enterprise that even Jack couldn’t make successful.

  Parking behind the store, she hustled inside the back door and into Jack’s cramped office space. Immediately, she saw Andy, a tall man with glasses as thick as silver dollars and clothes that never seemed quite long enough, at Jack’s desk, his thin frame hunched over a stack of papers. Excellent with people and a lover of books, Andy had worked for Jack for seven years and did everything he could to make sure every customer found the one thing he or she liked to read.

  “How’s it going today, Andy?” Connie asked, her words cheery.

  Andy jumped up quickly and opened his long arms to embrace her.

  “Okay, Connie—actually a lot of people in the last few days. They’re all buying something. Leslie and a couple of high school kids are busy as bees. Seems like everyone wants to make up for the business we lost while we were closed, like they want to help us get over this slump.”

  Connie stared past the open office door into the store. She started to go in for a quick look around, then decided against it. She had other things on her mind today. She motioned for Andy to sit again. He did, and she pushed some books off a chair by the desk and sat down too.

  “Tell me about the slump, Andy. How bad is it?”

  Andy took off his glasses and wiped them with his tie, then slipped them over his ears again. “Oh, it’s pretty bad, but it always is around tax time. From Christmas until Easter or tax day, whichever comes first, we’re slow. It’s the nature of retail. People start buying again when they get their refunds. From now until Christmas, with only a short lull in August, we’ll do fine.”