Chasing Justice: A Matt Royal Mystery (13 page)

“I’m familiar with The White America Party,” Corbin said. “They’re an unpleasant little group that never caused much trouble. They sometimes hang out on street corners holding racist signs and hollering at passing cars.”

“Do you know anything about Bobby Pelletier’s murder?” J.D. asked.

“I followed that pretty closely. I was working gangs at the time, so I had an interest in what happened. We never did find any evidence of who shot him. I thought it might be one of the black gangs who did it, but we had pretty good intel on them and we never heard a whisper.”

“Do you have any theories?” I asked.

“Yeah, lots. Bobby was a real bastard and he’d pissed off a lot of people. We had so many suspects we couldn’t even begin to narrow them down. He ran with a lowlife bunch, and a lot of them hated his guts. His murder was just about inevitable.”

“Were they ever involved in illegal activities?” J.D. asked. “Drugs, guns, that sort of thing?”

“If they were, we never found any evidence of it.”

“Do you have any ideas on why Officer Tatum would be killed right after a misdemeanor file disappeared?” I asked.

“No, other than they’re probably connected.”

“How so?” I asked.

“I think it would take a lot of coincidences to have that file disappear just after Detective Duncan called about it, and then to have Tatum killed the same day.”

“I agree,” J.D. said. “But what could be in that file that would cause somebody to murder a cop?”

Corbin shrugged. “Got me.”

“We went to see Bobby Pelletier’s widow yesterday,” J.D. said. “She’s in bad shape.”

“Connie,” Corbin said. “She was quite a character in the day.”

“How so?”

“Bobby was the leader, but Connie ran the show.”

“How was that?” J.D. asked.

“Most of their followers were ignorant shit-kickers who couldn’t earn a living if their lives depended on it. Come to think of it, I guess their lives did depend on making a living. Anyway, Connie was able to get most of them jobs, menial things like washing dishes in third-class restaurants or cleaning toilets in what they used to euphemistically call gentlemen’s clubs—bars where they water the drinks and feature topless dancers. She gave her members a place to sleep in an old warehouse down by the river. It wasn’t much, but it was better than the streets.”

“Where did they get the money to support their activities?” I asked.

Corbin emitted a short bark of a laugh. “What activities? Other than the street corner sign thing, they didn’t have any activities.”

“Can we get a look at the murder file on Bobby Pelletier?” J.D. asked.

“Sure,” Corbin said. “I don’t know what good it’ll do you, but I’ll run you a copy.” He turned to his computer and booted it up. He entered some commands, stopped, frowned, and entered some more. He picked up his phone and punched in a four-digit number. “Bubba,” he said, “I can’t find a file in the system. Can you pull it up for me? The Bobby Pelletier murder. Happened about ten years ago.”

Corbin hung up and said, “Some kind of glitch in the system. Bubba’s the information technology guy. A real wizard. He’ll have it for us in a minute.”

The phone rang. Corbin answered. “What do you mean, gone?”

Silence on our end, then, “Goddamnit, Bubba, how does a file disappear with all the security you’ve rigged into the system? This is the goddamned police department, for Christ’s sake.” He slammed the phone into its cradle, looked up and said, “Bobby’s file’s disappeared from the system. Let me check the records room and see if they have the original.”

Within a few minutes, we knew that the original file was gone, too. It had apparently been checked out by the same detective who took Darlene’s file.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

By mid-afternoon, J.D. and I were in a taxi on the way to the airport when Brad Corbin called with the news that Connie Pelletier’s body had been found in her living room. She’d been shot in the back of the head. At first glance, the forensics people thought the bullet was the same caliber as the one that killed Officer Tatum. They’d know more when ballistics finished with it.

“I think we’d better stick around another day or so,” J.D. said.

I nodded. “Driver, can you take us back to our hotel?”

“It’s kind of sad,” J.D. said. “She was a pitiful excuse for a human being, but she’d seen so much grief and hatred in her life, and look where it ended. In that hovel she lived in with a bullet in the back of her head. Do you think she saw it coming?”

“She probably did, and she probably welcomed it. She was just tired of living.”

“I wonder what happened in her early life to set her on that path.”

“We’ll never know,” I said. “Sometimes the gods just drop a bag of crap on some children and they never get out from under it. They just can’t figure it out. Life is difficult and they give up at an early age and just go with the flow. And the flow is like sewage running downhill. For some of those people, hate becomes a shield that tempers the stark reality of their lives. And it’s a vicious cycle. Each generation breeds another generation of broken people, as mired in hopelessness as those who went before.”

“How did you get out of it, Matt? You were born into a family of alcoholics. They were poor, lived a hardscrabble life, didn’t have much education, and yet, you became a successful lawyer.”

“I don’t understand it, J.D. Some make it out, and others don’t. Maybe it’s pride. Or raw ambition and a willingness to work hard and sacrifice everything that makes life sweet, just to feed the ambition monster. I don’t know the answer, but I know what despair feels like. It can be a killer. And I felt it in that little house yesterday.”

J.D. kissed me on the cheek and called Detective Corbin to tell him we were coming back to town. He suggested we meet him at Connie’s house. I called the hotel and booked us another room.

The taxi took us to the hotel, and we again dropped our bags with the concierge. He’d put them in our newly assigned room. Then we went back to that little bit of hell where Connie Pelletier had lived and died.

Two police cruisers were parked in front of the house next to an unmarked Crown Victoria that was so obviously a cop car I wondered why they even bothered to keep it unmarked. A crime scene van was parked behind the cruisers.

A uniformed cop was standing on the little front porch. J.D. told him Detective Corbin was expecting us. We walked into the living room to see that nothing had changed, except for the twisted body of Connie Pelletier lying on the shag carpet. Technicians were working the scene, so we hung back at the edge of the room, waiting for Corbin to finish talking to another cop.

“Do you have a time of death?” J.D. asked, when Corbin joined us.

“The medical examiner’s man thinks she was probably killed last evening. Between six and midnight.”

“Who found her?” I asked.

“One of the neighborhood kids heard the dog barking and came up on the porch and looked in the window and saw the body. His mom called us. The kid said the dog hardly ever barked, so it got his attention.”

“Where’s the dog?” I asked.

“Animal Control just left with him. They aren’t sure they’ll be able to save him. He’s pretty bad off, and really old.”

“Any idea who shot Connie?” J.D. asked.

“No. So far the techs haven’t turned up anything. The scene’s clean as a whistle.”

“Professional?”

“Probably. If it turns out that the same gun killed Tatum, I’ll put money on both murders being professional hits.”

“I wonder if it has anything to do with my investigation,” J.D. said.

“Maybe. I’d like to get a complete statement from you guys about your visit with Connie. I should be finished here in a few minutes. Maybe we could go somewhere for a drink.”

“Do you mind if we look around a bit?” J.D. asked.

“No, but would you mind if I have one of the crime scene people go with you? If you see anything you think might be pertinent, I’ll want a record of it.”

J.D. nodded and Corbin waved over one of the techs and introduced us.

* * *

The rest of the house was as untidy as the living room. A hall led toward the back of the house, with a kitchen and bath on one side and two small bedrooms on the other. Connie had slept in one of the bedrooms and used the other as an office of sorts. It contained an ancient roll-top desk, a chest of drawers, a dresser, and a bookcase. The few books stacked on the shelves seemed to be self-published racist screeds, of little interest to anyone other than idiots.

“Have you checked the drawers?” J.D. asked.

“We haven’t gotten to them, yet,” the tech said.

“Do you mind if I take a look?”

“Go ahead, but put these on.” He handed her a pair of latex gloves.

J.D. found it in the third drawer she searched. An old snapshot of a woman holding a baby. She showed it to me. We couldn’t be sure, but the woman could have been Connie, when she was young. J.D. laid the photo on the dresser and took a picture of it with her cell phone. She put it back in the drawer where she’d found it and finished searching the others.

“Nothing but old handouts and bills for printing, that sort of thing,” J.D. said when she’d finished the search. She thanked the tech and we left him to his investigation. Corbin asked us to meet him at a bar in the French Quarter in one hour. He said it would be quiet and he’d bring his tape recorder.

* * *

The bar was empty at five o’clock. It was a small place, cozy, even elegant. There was a bandstand set up for a three-piece combo, about a dozen tables scattered around the floor, and a bar in the back that stretched across the width of the room. Other than the three of us, the bartender was the only person in the place.

“It’ll get a little rowdy later,” Corbin said. “They play some wonderful jazz here, and there are quite a few regulars.”

“Are you one of them?” I asked.

“Yep. I love good jazz.” He put his digital recorder on the table and switched it on. “Tell me about Connie.”

We told him about our visit, what was said, our impressions of Connie, our suspicions that she was lying to us about Darlene and maybe some other things. J.D. told him about the picture she’d found in the desk drawer in Connie’s house. The interview took about thirty minutes, during which I sipped a Miller Lite, J.D. had a white wine, and Corbin drank sour mash whiskey, straight.

“Are you headed back to Florida tomorrow?” Corbin asked.

“Unless you need us for something else,” J.D. said.

“Nah. If something comes up, I’ll give you a call.”

“Will you make sure to get a DNA sample from Connie?” J.D. asked.

“We will. I’ll send you the results as soon as I get them.”

We had one more drink while J.D. and Corbin told old cop stories and laughed about their jobs and the peccadillos in which they sometimes found themselves.

I called the airline and made a reservation for a six a.m. flight to Tampa. Via Atlanta, of course. That meant we had to leave the hotel by four to get to the airport by four-thirty. It would be a long day. J.D. and I had a quick meal in the hotel restaurant and went to bed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It was nearing one o’clock on Saturday afternoon when we crossed the Manatee Avenue Bridge onto Anna Maria Island. We stopped at Duffy’s for a burger and drove onto Longboat Key. I had called Maggie Bannister, the widow of the man Abby Lester was accused of killing. She agreed to see me mid-afternoon. I took J.D. with me.

I’d never met Maggie Bannister, but that wasn’t all that unusual, even on a small island. While our off-season population was probably no larger than three or four thousand residents, the winter crowded the island with twenty-five thousand people. We had an ever-shifting population, so I regularly met someone I probably should have known, but didn’t.

The Bannister home sprawled along a choice piece of bayfront property just south of Longbeach Village, where I lived. The lot was large and stretched from Gulf of Mexico Drive to the bay. We drove down a winding lane lined with Royal Palm trees until we came to a house that appeared to be one of the few remaining homes built in the 1960s. Most of the others had met the wrecking ball, and their lots were now filled with mansions. I knocked on the door and was greeted by a woman in her mid-thirties. She was attractive, blond, and smiling.

“Mr. Royal,” she said. “Do come in.”

I introduced J.D., and we followed her into the living room where we had a view of the bay and the Sister Keys. She offered us something to drink. We both declined. We sat, J.D. and I on a sofa and Maggie Bannister in a chair across from us. She was sipping from a tall glass of something clear. Water, I hoped. “I appreciate your seeing us, Mrs. Bannister,” I said. “I know this is a difficult time.”

“Please call me Maggie,” she said. “I’m surprised our paths haven’t crossed before, Matt. It’s a small island, after all. I heard you’re representing Abby Lester.”

“Yes. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Maggie laughed. “Matt, let’s get off on the right foot here. That bastard’s death is not a loss to me. In fact, it’s a great relief. He was mean clear through, just plain evil. He thought nothing of beating the hell out of me when he felt like it, and he was always dipping his wick in some little slut he found in bars or whorehouses, or God knows where. I’m just glad he’s gone.”

I realized then that she had been drinking. She hid it well, but the cadence of her speech was just a little off, and there were squint lines at the edges of her eyes, like she was trying to focus. “Did you kill him, Maggie?” I asked.

She sat, her face still, no expression whatsoever. Then, “A reasonable question, Matt, under the circumstances. But no, I didn’t kill him. I might have, given the chance, but I have a perfect alibi for the time he was murdered.”

“May I ask what that alibi is?”

“I was with a person of impeccable credentials who’ll testify to my whereabouts.”

“Who was that?” I asked.

Maggie smiled. “I can’t divulge that, Matt. I’m sorry, but it might put a good man in an impossible situation.”

“I can find out, you know. Depositions and all that.”

“I’m sorry, but I won’t talk even if the court orders me to. If I’m charged with the crime, and I don’t think I will be, my friend will testify on my behalf, but that’s the only way it’ll happen.”