The Original Alibi mk-1

  The Original Alibi

  ( Matt Kile - 1 )

  David Bishop

  David Bishop

  The Original Alibi

  Chapter 1

  “I believe that’s your phone, dear,” the woman’s husband said. She stopped walking and fished her cell from the pocket of her windbreaker.

  “Hello, Mrs. Yarbrough,” said a voice into her ear. “I see you are enjoying your first early evening walk on the beach with your new puppy. She’s such a cutie. Have you and Mr. Yarbrough named the pooch?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you stay on the line after what is about to happen.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mrs. Yarbrough demanded, “Who are you?”

  The leash Mrs. Yarbrough held went limp. Her white poodle slumped to the sand. “Robbie, what happened? Snookie is, I don’t know, she’s just … down.” Mrs. Yarbrough held her cell phone as if she no longer knew she had it in her hand.

  Robert, her husband, bent down. His knees displaced the sand next to Snookie. “She’s dead, Mel. I think Snookie’s been shot.”

  Melanie Yarbrough began bouncing on her toes, frantically waving her hands. She dropped her phone onto the beach, then bent down next to her husband and touched Snookie. He took her in his arms while she sobbed softly.

  Several minutes later, Robert Yarbrough picked up his wife’s cell phone, shook off the sand, and had started to close the top when he heard a loud voice. He held the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

  “I’ve been waiting. Sorry about Snookie. It was necessary. You should know I took no pleasure in it.”

  “Did you do this?” Mr. Yarbrough asked. “Who the hell are you?”

  “To your left, near the partially burnt log, I’ve left a box for you to use to take Snookie home. It’s the right size. The inside has a soft new towel. It should do nicely.”

  “You shot Snookie? Why?”

  “Take Snookie home and bury her in your wife’s garden. You will hear from me. In the meantime, be glad you were not walking your newest grandson, Bobby, named after you, I presume. Your wife sometimes walks the little tike on a leash just as she walked Snookie today. I will know if you say anything about this, to anyone. If you do, Bobby Junior will be my next target.”

  “But what do you want? Why us?”

  “All that will be made clear. Do not fret needlessly. There will be no more violence if you do as you’re told. What will be required of you will not be difficult. It will not cost you any money. And it will be painless, if you follow orders. We’ll talk soon.”

  The phone went dead.

  Chapter 2

  Eleven Years Later

  “Don’t forget, boss, we got a ten o’clock appointment. It’s eight now.” Axel handed me the morning paper, and put down a tray holding a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, a carafe of coffee, two cups, and a small plate of buttered English muffins.

  It was pleasant enough sitting on the balcony, a little chilly but that’s why they made robes.

  Axel had been working for me only a couple of weeks, but we’d known each other for years in a very different setting. We were cellmates during my four years in state prison. I looked up. “Isn’t that my shirt you’re wearing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And my belt, why are you wearing my belt?”

  “You wouldn’t want your pants to fall down, would you, boss?”

  “No, of course I wouldn’t. And before you set up any more of these appointments, let me remind you I write mysteries. I don’t handle cases in real life.”

  “You was a homicide dick and a good one from what I hear. And you got yourself a PI license.”

  “I wanted to prove I could get the license after the governor pardoned me. I write murder mysteries.”

  “Aren’t you cold out here, boss?” Axel wrapped his arms around himself, gripping his biceps. “You wanna go inside?”

  “It’s a little nippy, but I’ll stick for a while. I do wish they made robes in various lengths. No reason they can’t.” I’d been six-three since the eleventh grade but over the years robes kept getting shorter.

  Axel had been inside close to forty years, during which he became as sweet a senior citizen as you’ll ever know. Forty-one years ago, a half-million dollar payroll had been taken by a lone gunman, without violence. The jury had found Axel guilty. Axel had never changed his claim of innocence, but he has sometimes winked at me when the subject came up. The fact they had never found the money is likely why they held onto Axel over the years, while letting out younger hard-asses because of the overpopulation of prisons. For his last five years he had been an administrative assistant for the warden, doing a lot of his online research. Axel was a whiz using computers. I helped his parole along with the promise of a job.

  In these first few weeks, his duties included trips to the dry cleaners and doing the home laundry and keeping the place clean. Axel always kept our cell neat, and he carried that forward to caring for my condo. I had to go with him to shop for groceries because Axel wasn’t up to speed on driving anymore. He planned to take care of that but hadn’t as yet. As you can see, his job description lacked clarity, it would evolve or so we imagined.

  Unfortunately, we wore clothes similar enough in size for Axel was an even six feet. For each wearing, he had hand-altered my slacks by rolling up the pant legs. He also adjusted for our different waist measurements. I wear size thirty-eight. I’m guessing his at thirty-six, maybe thirty-four because he had my belt two notches tighter, which meant there would now be his-and-mine cinch marks in the leather.

  “Boss, you remember that movie where Jack Nicholson’s character said, ‘never waste a boner and never trust a fart.’ Well, that man was a prophet.” Then Axel rushed inside. The Bucket List was a wonderful movie, but I didn’t like him quoting that line while he was wearing my slacks. I settled back and looked at the newspaper with an eye out for Axel’s return.

  A few minutes later, Axel came back out. I felt some relief from his still wearing the same pair of my pants. He ran his hand across his mostly hairless head, and then wiped that hand on the backside of my pants.

  “You helped save Clarice Talmadge,” he said, as if he had never left the conversation. “I kept up with that story before you got me sprung.”

  I looked over at a gull circling past the balcony just off the railing. “I didn’t get you sprung. The parole board was about to release you anyway. You’d been in long enough. I just tossed a job offer in the mix. That’s all.”

  “That’s what tipped the scales.” Axel looked over at the gull that squawked while making its third pass.

  Axel was sort of like a friend you took under your wing after he had spent thirty to forty years in a coma. I knew why the gulls, there were three now, were squawking. Axel sometimes threw pieces of bread out over the rail and, with me out here, he hadn’t this morning. Feeding the birds was against building policy. I’d have to speak to him about it, but for now I couldn’t refuse him the kind of small pleasures he had been denied for decades.

  “You got out because you were no longer a threat to society, maybe to my wardrobe, but not to society.”

  “Well, that don’t change the brilliant way you saved Clarice Talmadge’s ass and, from what I’ve seen in the hallway, I’m glad you did, although from what I hear the woman’s not the swiftest card in the deck.”

  “Now where did you hear that?”

  “From Clara Birnbaum down on my floor, the former school teacher, she says Clarice spells Cincinnati with an ‘s.’”

  “That’s Clara. She’s a good lady but she’s jealous of Clarice.”

  “Anyway, the point is you helped her with he
r case. So, you still dig investigating stuff.”

  “That was different. Clarice was a neighbor and a friend accused of killing her husband, Garson Talmadge. I handled the investigation for her defense attorney.”

  “This case’ll be different too, boss,” he said while picking up the coffee carafe.

  “How many times do I need to tell you to stop calling me boss? It’s not necessary.”

  “Seems right to me, after all I work for you.”

  “You can’t call me Matt, but you can wear my pants?” I held up my empty cup.

  “Now you got it, boss.” He filled my cup with a smirk on his face.

  “The appointment, fill me in.”

  Axel took a seat and poured himself a little coffee. “Not much yet to tell. This guy, Franklin’s his name, Reginald Franklin III, how’s that for a handle, he’s an attorney with a client who needs your help. He freely admitted his client specified Matthew Kile as the investigator he wanted. Admitting that up front told me he ain’t shopping the job, so money’s not an issue. I told him it would be a grand for this morning, just to talk and see if you’ll handle the case. He understands that money’s gone whether or not you join up. He didn’t quibble. He’s bringing the check.”

  I expected Axel would be around during the Franklin meeting. Axel didn’t really have a set schedule. If I needed him, I told him and he’d be there. Otherwise, he came and went as he pleased and when he wasn’t around I fended for myself. Like I said, his duties were evolving. I think Axel saw himself as my Kato or Dr. Watson or some such character. If I had my choice, I’d prefer him to be Archie Goodwin, the able assistant of Nero Wolfe, but then I would fail in comparison to Wolfe. My waistline was likely only half of Wolfe’s girth, not to mention my falling well short of his genius.

  “So what do you have going today?” I asked.

  “After our meeting with Franklin, I’ve got a few close-by errands then I’ll hoof it over and have lunch with the fellas at Mackie’s. Don’t worry, boss, Franklin won’t know I’m around unless you call for me.”

  “You think Franklin could be the real client?”

  “No way, he’s fronting for someone. I could tell by his voice. He wasn’t uptight. He did tell me it was some old case the cops have tossed aside. The dude’s a smoker, so get him out on the balcony if he tries to light up. A pipe, I think. I could hear him inhale and bite down on the stem the way pipers do.”

  After all those years in the big house, as Axel still called prison, he had mastered reading the tone and pace of people’s voices. He can read body language or faces, cons or bulls. All the old timers could do it, at least the ones with an ample helping of brains and judgment.

  “The odds say I won’t take this new case.”

  “Why not? You’ve about done up the book you was working on. And, hey, a grand’s nothing to sneeze at. You know?”

  Chapter 3

  It was the fourth of December, three weeks before Christmas to the day, when I parked my new Ford Expedition in the turnaround in front of the home of General Whittaker, the client of the attorney, Reginald Franklin III. The general’s home, an elegant place with a second floor, looked to be about six thousand square feet, and sat on a small cliff south of Long Beach, California, which backed up to the Pacific Ocean.

  The door was opened by a man approximately fifty-five years of age. He appeared to be house staff. He wore a white shirt with a starched collar, the rest of his dress being black. He was a stout man, but not fat. His pants were hitched up closer to his neck than his navel. His ears reached out from his head like they were expected to catch fly balls rather than words.

  He looked me up and down without disclosing the impression he gleaned from having done so. “Good evening, Mr. Kile. You’re expected.” Seeing my surprise at being recognized, he added, “Your picture is on the dust covers of your books. My name is Charles, Mr. Kile.”

  Few people called them dust covers any longer so Charles was a reader and, apparently, one not yet converted to reading eBooks.

  “Please follow me.” Charles was an average sized man. He looked fit and confident in his ability to do his job. He led me into a wide junction in the hallway, next to a wonderfully decorated Christmas tree, tall enough to grace both the ground floor and the second story which was open overhead. “Please wait here, Mr. Kile, while I let the general know you’ve arrived.”

  Noise or movement caused me to step beyond the tree and look up the stairwell to my left. From the balcony, a nubile brunette wearing a black something that aggressively fell within the category of lingerie, said, “You must be Mr. Kile.” It wasn’t a question. Not the way she said it.

  I smiled and nodded. One of the principles I live by is that seeing a woman in skimpy lingerie meant, at the very least, the relationship automatically advanced to a first name basis. I said, “Call me, Matt.” We exchanged smiles, only they weren’t equal. Hers was framed in red and had a gloss that reflected the top light on the Christmas tree.

  “Well, Matt,” she said, “Charles sat a tray on the side table when he went to answer the door. Would you be a sweetheart and finish bringing it up?” She added, “Please,” while leaning her forearms on the banister, her brown hair sliding around her shoulders. At least I assumed her forearms were on the banister. I wanted to be a good sweetheart so I picked up the tray which held one glass and a decanter of something you and I would guess was alcoholic and started up the stairs.

  “This is a lovely home,” I said after advancing a short distance.

  “Yes it is. During the general’s career, toward the end when he was a member of the joint chiefs, this home entertained two U.S. presidents and one pope.”

  “With you wearing a much different outfit, I’m sure.”

  “I was living with my mother then, and a little young during those years to wear something like this.” She stood straight, bust out, and turned slowly to be certain I understood the full meaning of “something like this.”

  I actually preferred her enhancing the banister, but if that sounded like a complaint, you know it lacked substance. I had come not expecting to see anyone more attractive than a long-retired general. I was ten steps from her when Charles silently arrived beside me and took the tray. I stopped, wishing that Charles had waited for me at the bottom of the stairs.

  “The general will see you now, Mr. Kile. Please follow me back downstairs to the study.”

  As we turned, she revealed her red, patent leather heels by coming down the stairs far enough to take the tray from Charles. She was old enough to realize that platform heels and skimpy lingerie went together like me and a warm feeling. Had I worn a hat, modesty would have required I hold it in front of myself as she came closer. She glanced down briefly then looked into my eyes. We exchanged one of those smiles that meant the kinds of things that smilers in such situations are never sure about. Then I switched my attention so as not to ruin her first impression by tripping and rolling down the stairs.

  Her voice slid around me the way hot fudge slides around cold ice cream. “I hope we can continue getting acquainted some other time.” I held the railing and turned to see her again displayed on the banister.

  “I’d like that,” I said. Then I followed Charles down the stairs. Well, I did after wishing I might one day be reincarnated as a banister, but not just any banister, her banister.

  “Matt.” I turned back and looked up at her. “Ditch the tie. You can do better.” Then she turned her head, tossing her brown hair across her shoulders, and retreated into a room with double doors directly behind where she had stood.

  “Charles, who was the lady?”

  “Karen Whittaker, sir, the general’s daughter. She’s thirty-five, in case you’re curious about that. The general was a late-season poppa.” His tone did not disclose disapproval, but I did detect a slight shake of his head.

  “Why, Charles, I understood it was bad form to speak of a woman’s age.”

  “Yes, sir. But not Karen. She’s pr
oud of being thirty-five and looking twenty-five. She works at it. Hard.” We shared those brief looks that men share. I’d explain, but the guys would kick me out of the club because they know women read my books.

  *

  General Whittaker rose from his chair, slowly, but agile for his age. His body looked slender compared to the pictures I’d seen of him in his robust years, yet he still had a military bearing. A burgundy colored jacket, not exactly a smoking jacket, but not a sport coat either, covered a long-sleeved khaki shirt. The jacket had been tailored to expose a matching measure of shirt cuff on each of his arms which were thin enough that the garment hung as cleanly as it would on a store mannequin. He was well dressed and neat except for a tangled crop of white hair freely growing from his ears. His wrists were frail. The skin on the backs of his hands, mottled. Still, his handshake remained mildly firm, yet cool to the touch.

  “Mr. Kile,” he said, “as you stated in one of your books, I like people better than principles, and people without principles best of all. From what I’ve learned, you should be one of my favorites. And I like your tie, but you didn’t need to wear one on my account.”

  So far I had learned that my ties were a matter that could divide families. I agreed with the general, I liked the tie, but I doubted I would ever wear it again. Women who show cleavage don’t fully realize the power they possess over mortal men, and please don’t tell ‘em.

  “Are you married, Mr. Kile?”

  “Once.”

  “Divorced?”

  I nodded without hiding my irritation at his questions.

  “Too bad.”

  “My ex-wife would disagree with you.”

  “Kids?”

  “With due respect, General, that’s enough of that. This isn’t a lonely hearts meeting.”

  He smiled. His face revealed that he did not often smile.

  “Before we get started I want to return the check your attorney, Mr. Franklin, gave me yesterday.” I put it on his desk. “I can’t help you with your case.”