Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [28]
“From the looks of your vehicle I would guess you’re also cops.”
“Oh, yeah, that too.”
“Where’re you from?”
“Spokane,” I said.
He took off the cap and crumpled it into his back pocket. His hair was long, unkempt, and black. He was tall and stooped a bit and sad.
“But we’re not here as cops,” I said.
“Or maybe we are,” said Odd.
“Odd, you got something you want to ask this man, as a police officer?”
“No, Quinn, you go ahead.”
“Or otherwise?”
“Not just yet.”
Odd might have needed to stand back and look at him for awhile. After all, it was possible that this grease monkey had been his boyfriend in another life, thirtysome years ago. Something like that happened to me once, in the real world, when I went back to Pennsylvania to bury my mother and met up again with my high school boyfriend, “Our Johnny.” Let me tell you, it was a major jolt. How’d he get so heavy? Where did all that rich wavy hair go? What were those gin blossoms doing on his nose? In Karl’s case, I’d be wondering, how’d he lose those two fingers?
“We’ve just come from the Coyotes, you know them?” I asked him.
“Know them all. Which ones?”
“The old ones, David and his wife.”
“Sure, I know them. Jimmy’s folks.”
“Jimmy’s folks, right. We talked about this and that, sitting on their porch, threw a ball for the dog, and then we looked at Jimmy’s old four-by…they still have it, you know.”
“Yeah, tribals can’t sell a car somebody’s died in.”
“Anyway, we bounced around a couple ideas about how Jimmy and Jeannie wound up murdered…”
“You’re here for that?”
“No, we’re here on an entirely different matter, but since we had time to kill, we’re visiting and talking and trying to come up with a profile of the kind of man who could shotgun two kids. The Coyotes didn’t say much but they listened and after a while they came to understand that we were actually trying to figure out who did this thing. That’s when they said to us, ‘Everybody knows who did it.’ Well, I was shocked. Weren ‘t you shocked, Odd? A little? I mean, we spent all that time there and conjectured right and left and at the end of it, they say, everybody knows who killed their son. Karl Gutshall did it.”
“They always did believe that,” said Karl.
I was disappointed. I’d hoped to unhinge him a little.
“Why would they believe that?”
“It made sense to them, then, and they never let go of it. Not even when I was cleared by the police, who did their best to scare something out of me, and I was a scared kid, believe me, but you can’t scare something out of a kid if it’s not in him to begin with. I could never do anything like that, not then, not now, not ever.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“I don’t get it. Why are you here, two cops from Spokane?”
“You were Jeannie’s boyfriend. She dumped you for James. You had a shotgun, recently fired. You had no alibi.”
“So they did say, the Coyotes.”
“They said that much.”
“Okay, I don’t know who you are, and it bothers me that after all these years I could be pulled away from my work to go through another third degree, and, mister, you, I don’t like the way you’re boring a hole through me,” he said, turning to Odd, “but let me bring you up to speed and then you can get the hell away from me.”
“Take it easy, don’t get all worked up.”
“I didn’t have an alibi because nobody who sleeps alone in his own bed had an alibi that night. It was the middle of the night. Everybody was home, asleep. That’s my alibi. My mother, my father, my brother, we were all asleep. Sure, I had a shotgun, still do, most people on the island had a shotgun and most of them had been recently fired, because we had a rabbit problem you can’t imagine. The more of ‘em you shot, the more there were the next day. I don’t ever want to eat rabbit again as long as I live. And, yes, Jeannie dumped me, but it wasn’t for James.”
Angry, he pulled his cap back out of his pocket, slammed it on his head, and rubbed it in. But he didn’t go back to the Suburban he had up on the lift. I couldn’t tell if he were steamed because of