Monument to Murder - Margaret Truman [8]
“You look good, Joe.”
Cleland patted his sizable belly and laughed. “Hard as a rock,” he said. “So, you want to talk about Louise Watkins. Funny, lots of perps I dealt with are all fuzzy in my brain but I remember her. I remember when she came into the barracks and told the desk officer she wanted to confess to a killing.” His laugh was rueful this time. “They called me to the desk and I took her back into one of the interrogation rooms. Man, she was pitiful, looked like she could use a good meal.”
“She’d been running loose for too long,” Brixton said. “She just blurted out her confession to you?”
Cleland nodded his large head. “That’s about it, Robert. She rolled through her so-called confession like she’d been rehearsing it for weeks.”
“‘So-called confession’?”
“That’s the way it struck me. I mean, it didn’t set right the way she did it. I sat there wonderin’ why she was doing it. Hell, chances were that no one would ever link her to that stabbing, no earthly reason for her to give herself up. Of course, she did tell us where the knife was. We dragged that portion of the inlet and there it was, just like she said.”
“Prints?”
“Partials. The lab said they were sufficient to make a match with her.”
Brixton wondered why Louise’s mother hadn’t mentioned that. “Did you press her?”
“Sure, but she never backed off from what she’d said, just repeated it almost word-for-word. I had her write out her statement, watched her hands shake while she did. I left her alone for a while and talked to the chief about my suspicions that she might be lying.”
“And he said?” Brixton waved away his response. “No,” he said, “I can imagine what he said. He told you not to look a gift horse in the mouth. You had a live one, which meant the stabbing wouldn’t end up in the cold-case file.”
“‘Sometimes we get lucky,’ was what he said.”
“Not lucky for her,” Brixton said. “You testified at her sentencing.”
“Sure did. The public defender just went through the motions. Hell, she’d already been found guilty based on her confession, so he focused on the sentencing. Her mother, a good woman, testified on her behalf. So did an older brother. He was going to divinity school I believe.”
“Seems like their testimony worked,” Brixton said. “She only got four years.”
“That’s right. The DA wasn’t happy about it but I was. The way I figured it, she’d get straight behind bars, come out and maybe put some sort of a life together without drugs and booze. I’d kept up with her while she was incarcerated. A friend of mine at the prison worked with the kid and kept me in the loop. Louise Watkins made good use of her prison time, Bob, earned her GED, took advantage of the drug-rehab program, and came out clean.” His laugh was more of a grunt. “My friend, she told me that Louise had a real talent for numbers, could do all sorts of math in her head. She—my friend—was going to help find Louise a job with an accounting firm or something else where she could use that talent. But then—”
“Then she was gunned down.”
“That hurt, Robert. I had intended to contact her when she was released to see if I could help her find her way. I never had any kids and maybe was looking to play daddy to somebody. I never got the chance.”
“What would you say if I suggested that she might have taken the rap for someone else?”
“You mean for a friend? That would have to have been one special friend.”
“For money. Ten grand.”
“Who?”
Brixton shrugged. “That’s one of the things I’m being paid to find out, along with who shot her.”
“You really think you can do that?”
Another shrug. “I’ll try. Did she say anything, anything when you were with her that might help me?”
Cleland finished a cream puff and a swallow of coffee. “No,” he said. “I wanted to question her further but the chief nixed that, told me to take the statement, cuff her, and turn her over to the DA’s office. That’s what I did.”
“What about the guy who got stabbed? From what I’ve heard, she claimed he’d tried to rape