A Murder of Justice

THIRTY-TWO

Frank stirred two Equals into his coffee. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”

Jose shut his notebook and tucked his pen in an inside coat pocket. The only other customer in the Starbucks was a thin kid with a ponytail, sharing a table at the back with his parrot. The kid was busily writing in a journal, stopping to feed the parrot chunks of a sweet roll.

Frank sipped at the coffee. He’d read somewhere that during World War II, the Germans had had to make coffee from burnt acorns, and he often wondered if they’d sold the recipe to Starbucks. It was awful stuff, but at least Starbucks was consistently awful. You knew what you’d get wherever you went.

“The lady pulled your chain, didn’t she?” he asked Jose.

Jose nodded. “Senorita’s got cojones. A true believer.” He stared out the window at the gray stone building across P Street. “Helluva thing,” he said wistfully, “older I get, the more I wonder…”

“About?”

“Oh, things I used to know were so… rock-bottom certain.”

“She got you thinking, didn’t she?”

“Made me remember,” Jose said, “something my daddy once told me about Jackson, Mississippi, back when he was a kid.”

“Yeah?”

“Dry state then. No hard booze. Only three-two beer. You wanted hard stuff, you saw the local bootlegger. Night and day, trucks ran the stuff into Jackson from over in Louisiana, ’cross the river to Vicksburg. Folks finally got fed up and got wet/dry on the ballot. Preachers came out for dry. Raised hell on Sundays. Just before the elections, papers carried the story that the bootleggers were paying off the preachers.”

“What happened?”

“Mississippi went wet. Bootleggers lost their asses.”

Frank was about to say something, when Jose’s cell went off.

Jose answered, listened, then flipped his cell shut. “R.C.,” he said. “Has a show-and-tell down at impound.”

We’d finished dusting for prints,” Calkins said. He stood beside Skeeter’s Taurus. Everything that would open was open: hood, trunk, all four doors, even the gas-filler hatch. The seats had been taken out. Halogen droplights illuminated every crevice.

“Nothing but Skeeter’s and Pencil’s. Then, when we were vacuuming for fibers…”

Calkins paused and stepped nearer to the car, picked up a yardstick, and pointed inside.

“… we found this.”

“This” was a heavy insulated cable running from the engine compartment, along the floor of the car, and disappearing into the trunk.

Calkins led Frank and Jose around to the trunk.

“Comes in here.” He motioned with his chin.

Frank saw the cable snaking along the inner fender, then disappearing under the mat that covered the trunk floor. Calkins lifted the mat. The spare tire had been removed from the storage well. The cable ran into a curved section of the well. He reached down into the well, and with a metallic snap, the section popped loose to reveal a small compartment with a black box inside.

“Guts of a top-end Nakamichi cassette recorder.” Calkins tapped the box with the yardstick. “Microphone pick-ups in the floor, headliner, headrests.”

Jose examined the box. “No buttons.”

“Remoted to the car’s regular sound system,” Calkins explained. “Do some trickery like turning off the music, and you turn on the recorder.”

“Skeeter and Pencil knew it was there?”

“Oh, yes,” Calkins said. “Their prints all over it. I’d say they were the ones who installed it.” He stepped to a workbench and picked up a brown paper bag, then held it open to reveal a cassette to Frank and Jose. “Skeeter’s prints are on the cassette.” He anticipated the next question: “But the tape itself is blank except for you, Jose.”

“Me?”

Calkins smiled. “Has you asking, ‘Who was the nine-one-one?’ You must have keyed the recorder when you turned off the rap at the scene.”

“Yeah,” Jose said, “about a million years ago.”

Calkins regarded the recorder in its hiding place with admiration. “They went to a lot of trouble.”

“Car was his office,” Frank said. “He had had more time, he’d probably have had a fax and a computer rig in there.” He stared at the car, Skeeter’s office, trying to work out the permutations, the possibilities, trying to catalogue what was in front of him, integrate it into the jumble of fact, supposition, and downright hunches.

After this’s over, we’ll look back and wonder why it was we didn’t see how everything fit and why we didn’t understand it right away. And we’ll tidy it up. We’ll discard the implausible theories, get rid of the dead ends we screwed around with, forget about the rabbits we went chasing after. And maybe Hoser and I will lecture at the academy about how this led to that and that led to this and finally to how it all ended up with a closed case. And we’ll screw up the rookies’ minds, because they’ll think that’s the way things really happen.