Monument to Murder - Margaret Truman [2]
“Let me ask you something, Mrs. Watkins,” he said. “Your daughter’s murder happened sixteen years ago. How come you’ve just now decided to open it up?”
She chose her words carefully. “My son, Lucas—he was three years older than Louise when she was killed—is a man of God, Mr. Brixton. Lucas is pastor of the Southside United Freedom Church. He has been tormented ever since the day Louise was killed—not by her murder; that was bad enough—but by her having spent four years in prison for a murder that she did not commit. I should tell you, Mr. Brixton, that Louise was a problem child. She became addicted to drugs when she was thirteen and left home at seventeen, living on the streets, begging for money to support her habit, and I’m ashamed to say selling her body. She was eighteen when she went to prison, twenty-two years old when she was killed. In a way she acted honorably in taking money to keep someone else out of prison. It’s better than the other ways she’d sunk to on the streets.”
“Your son’s the one who wants the case reopened?”
“Yes, and I now agree with him. When Louise died, I felt it was best to allow her to rest in the sort of peace she hadn’t found when she was alive, to rest in God’s kingdom, to forget all the pain she had suffered, and to let me cherish my memories of her before she got into trouble. But Lucas has always said that Louise deserves to have her name cleansed, not for the way she lived her life in those final years but from the sin of having taken another person’s life. She didn’t kill that man in the parking lot, Mr. Brixton. She was paid to say that she did.”
“Your daughter told you that she’d been paid to assume responsibility but didn’t name the person who’d paid her?”
“She said she’d promised never to reveal it. I admired her for that.”
“What did she do with the money?” Brixton asked.
“She gave it to me.”
Her resolve not to cry crumbled and she wept silently, ladylike, never changing her erect posture, simply pulling a tissue from her purse and dabbing at her eyes. “Sorry,” she said softly.
“That’s all right,” he said. “Want some water?”
“No, thank you.”
“How much?” he asked.
“Pardon?”
“How much money was involved?”
“Ten thousand dollars.”
Four years behind bars, twenty-five hundred a year. She’d sold out cheap, although based upon the lifestyle her mother claimed she’d had, a bed and three squares a day might have seemed like winning an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii.
“She gave it to you just like that?” he asked.
“Actually, Mr. Brixton, Louise didn’t personally give me the money. It arrived shortly after she’d been convicted of the murder.”
“Who gave it to you then?”
“I don’t know. I returned home one day and there was an envelope wedged between my screen door and the other door. I opened it and found ten thousand dollars in cash. I was shocked, as you can imagine.”
“But you said you knew it came from your daughter.”
“Not at that moment. I mentioned it to her the next time I visited her in jail. That’s when she told me how she’d agreed to confess to the crime in return for the money. I pleaded with her to tell the authorities but she was adamant. She said that jail was the best place for her to get straightened out, get off drugs, and find God. She also said that she wanted me to have it for all the pain she’d caused me. That’s all she said. I pleaded with her again not to do it but Louise was always headstrong. I hid the money away.”
“Until now.”
“Yes, until now.”
Brixton surreptitiously glanced at his watch. Cigarette time.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll see what I can find out from friends still with the PD. My fee is four hundred a day plus expenses.”
He expected her to express shock. Instead, she issued her first smile of the morning and said, “That will be fine. I still have the ten thousand and I’m willing to spend all of it to clear her name.”
Brixton experienced dual silent emotions