Monument to Murder - Margaret Truman [1]
“My daughter was murdered.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Tell me more.”
“It happened sixteen years ago, in 1994.”
And she expects me to remember that far back?
“My daughter had recently been released from prison when she was killed. Murdered in cold blood.”
“How was she killed?” he asked.
“She was shot on the street. Someone in a car drove by and fired at her.”
“They ever find the shooter?”
“No.”
Brixton drew a deep breath and came forward in his squeaky swivel chair. “If you’re here to ask me to try and solve your daughter’s murder, Mrs. Watkins, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you. That’s a police matter. I’m a private investigator.”
She looked in the direction of the office’s only window, in which the air conditioner did its blessed work, and returned to him. “There’s more to Louise’s death than the fact that she was murdered.”
He squirmed against a back spasm. He wanted a cigarette. He didn’t smoke in the office because Cynthia had put down her size-seven foot and threatened to quit if he did. It looked like he was in for a lengthy tale and he hoped that when it was over he’d at least have a paying client. Business had been slow, as slow as the way people walked in summery Savannah.
“Go on,” he said to Mrs. Watkins as Cynthia carried in his iced coffee. “Stay around,” he told Cynthia, “take some notes.”
If having a third person in the room recording what she said unnerved Mrs. Watkins, she didn’t show it. She said matter-of-factly, “My daughter was paid to go to prison.”
Cynthia stopped writing and looked at Brixton.
“That’s an unusual allegation, Mrs. Watkins,” he said.
“But it’s true.”
“You’re claiming that your daughter was paid to take the rap for someone else?”
“Yes, that is what I am saying.”
“What was she in the can—in prison for?”
“Manslaughter. She was accused of having stabbed someone to death.”
The case started to come back to him in fragments. Sure. Louise Watkins. Drug addict. Eighteen or nineteen years old. High as a kite on drugs and booze. He hadn’t caught that case while with Savannah PD but was close to the detective who had. Brixton had been with the Savannah PD for eight years at the time it took place and had been promoted to detective just one year prior to that.
The stabbing had occurred in Augie’s parking lot, one of those clubs that come and go and lure the gotta-be-hip crowd, the young crowd, with a bouncer at the door making sure the teenyboppers he let in showed enough skin, and the macho young guys weren’t wearing flip-flops on dirty feet. Class act all the way, until it was closed by the department’s narcs for selling drugs over and under the bar. As Brixton recalled, she’d claimed the guy had tried to rape her and had stabbed him in self-defense, which the judge evidently bought when he sentenced her, a lenient sentence that had nettled Brixton’s fellow cops.
“The case is coming back to me now. How much time did she do?”
“She was in prison for four years.”
Four years for stabbing a guy to death. She got off easy.
“So, you’re claiming that your daughter didn’t do it.”
“That’s right, Mr. Brixton.”
“So, who did?”
“I don’t know, but I believe my daughter when she said she wasn’t the one, that she’d been paid to confess to it.”
“Paid? Somebody at the club paid her to say that she’d killed the guy?”
A nod, and stiffening at the disbelief in his tone.
“Who?” he repeated.
“I don’t know. That’s why I’ve come to you, Mr. Brixton. I was hoping that you could find out for me.”
He took a swig of coffee, swiveled in his chair, and grimaced against a shooting pain in his right knee. Brixton’s chiropractor called him his retirement fund, a walking orthopedic nightmare, arthritis in every joint, spinal X-rays that read like a train wreck, and one knee that bowed out five degrees, causing him to walk as though carrying a loaded suitcase on the opposite side. Taking a bullet in the bad knee hadn’t helped. Not that he didn’t get around pretty good. It was just that there was always pain, sometimes worse