CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: A Silent Trust
“Let’s talk about something else for a minute,” Connery began again. “An eyewitness saw you running away from the scene the night Cynthia and Kevin were killed. What were you doing there?”
“I was probably sleeping in the alley. I hang out on that corner all the time doing odd jobs for Johnny DeMario.”
“Your friends seem to have a habit of dying around you. Who’s next? Horace Long?”
Blair laughed. “Good luck to anyone trying to take him out. That man has survived dope dealers, booze, slum living, and Nam. He’s the guy I’d want to stand next to when a tornado strikes.”
“Are the murders of Cynthia Maxwell and Thomas Abbott connected?”
“Why don’t you ask Quentin Latrice?”
“Now why would I ask Latrice?”
“Latrice is a lapidary.”
“A gem cutter?”
“Now you’re getting warm,” Blair said, smiling. “All this mayhem may be over some gems.”
“What gems?”
“I don’t know. I just have a hunch.”
“A hunch?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Have you come up with that theory simply because Quentin Latrice is a lapidary?”
Shrugging, Blair said, “Call me crazy.”
“I’d call you a man who’s holding back information,” Connery surmised. “But I’m a real sport because I’m going to share some information with you.”
“Oh, yeah? Like what?”
“The murderer had used Kevin Massey’s rock pick to kill him and Cynthia Maxwell, but afterward he took the time to put it back in Kevin’s apartment.”
It was Blair’s turn to sit forward because he just couldn’t believe that. Why had he imagined seeing Latrice drop the pick when he hadn’t? Everything else in his memory made sense except that.
“There was no forced entry into Kevin’s apartment until you came along,” Connery continued, “and his keys were still on his body. Whoever killed him knew who he was and where he lived, and quite possibly had a spare set of keys. The place had looked as if it had been ransacked the first time I saw it, and before you entered the apartment. Someone was looking for something that they thought Kevin had. This tells me that Kevin hadn’t been an innocent bystander at all, but rather a man targeted for assassination.”
“Good work, Connery.” Blair nodded his approval, but still couldn’t hide his puzzlement.
“What? Is there something wrong with the way I’ve worked things out?”
Blair smiled, staring up at the ceiling for a minute and shaking his head. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
“It just doesn’t make much sense, does it? Why would a murderer put the pick back in Kevin’s apartment? Why would he take that chance?”
“I don’t know,” Connery said. “Another hazy point is, why would the murderer go to the trouble of getting Kevin’s rock pick to kill him in the first place? Kevin wouldn’t have been carrying it on him, would he?”
“Not unless he wanted to crack open some rocks on Baker Street.”
“Then how did the murderer get it? Whoever killed him had to have had a second set of keys to Kevin’s apartment.”
“I guess Kevin must’ve had the pick with him, but why?”
“The only thing I can see is that he carried it to use as a weapon,” Connery said. “He was in trouble, and he knew it.”
Blair nodded.
“Another strange fact is that Cynthia Maxwell’s prints were on the tool, too, when we found it.”
“Does that surprise you? I mean, she was getting her skull caved in. Common sense should tell you that she’d raise her hands to defend herself.”
“Yes, but her prints were found on the handle, as if she’d been holding the rock pick at some time.”
“Now that’s curious,” Blair said, raising his eyebrows.
“It’s very curious,” Connery said, “especially since Cynthia was killed first, before Kevin Massey was.”
“How do you know that?”
“From the coroner’s report, the position of the bodies…. Whose blood was on top of whose on the pavement. Whose blood, flesh, and hair were first into the grooves of the rock pick…. Things like that.”
“I see,” Blair said, nodding slowly.
“It would really help me out to know what you found in Kevin Massey’s apartment last night,” Connery said, changing the subject.
“But I didn’t find anything.”
“Obstruction of justice is also against the law, Blair.”
“I know it,” he said. “Look, Quentin Latrice is a serious rockhound. I’m sure he wouldn’t want to mess up any of his own rock picks by bashing it over somebody’s head.”
“So you believe that this Quentin Latrice murdered Cynthia Maxwell and Kevin Massey?”
“That’s exactly right.”
Connery stared at Blair with great concern. “Did you see him do it?”
“Yes, I actually saw him kill Cynthia.”
“You know far too much about these murders. An officer should be with you around the clock.”
“That would be too much like being in jail. No thanks.”
“I can help you.”
“You’ll put a bunch of Mikel Smith’s friends on my tail to watch over me.” Blair pretended to shudder. “I feel protected already.”
“Are you saying Detective Smith is involved in all this with Latrice? He explained to us that he’d gone over to Abbott’s house to follow up on some leads to his investigation of the Maxwell-Massey case, and he stumbled in on the perpetrator Latrice after he’d already murdered Abbott and Deitweiler.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I admit that there are a lot of holes in his story.”
“Yeah, like, did he put the handcuffs on himself, or what?”
“You did that?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you smash up his face, too?”
“That I can’t say, but he does look more attractive that way, don’t you think?”
Connery didn’t respond.
“Listen to your gut, Detective. You and Smith share the same office space and you know what he’s capable of.” Blair wanted Connery to know that he was on his side, but station houses and not having enough alcohol to get wasted on always made him sick. “Now, are you going to arrest me or not?”
“No. I believe you about Latrice and Detective Smith. The problem is, I need proof. And I need lots of proof to implicate a police detective in this squad. Smith is a veteran who’s really respected on the force, and I’m the new guy. What do I know? I’m almost like an outsider around here.”
“Here’s another tip, Detective. Find out all you can about Vinnie Moorland’s suicide.”
“Vinnie Moorland?”
“Yes, an old friend of mine whose death was handled by Detective Smith. Let me know what you find out.”
“Hey, wait a minute. Isn’t that the guy you’d been questioned about a few years ago?”
“That’s right. I’ve felt responsible for Vinnie’s death all this time, but now I’m not so sure.” Blair bit his lip. “Help me to clear my name, will you?”
“The Moorland case was closed years ago.”
“So they say,” Blair said. “Check it out.”
“I’ve got my hands full with Abbott and Deitweiler.”
“Then let me help you out,” Blair said. “I’ll testify in a court of law that I saw Quentin Latrice kill Cynthia Maxwell and Ingrid Deitweiler. I’ll also testify that I saw Latrice drop the rock pick beside the bodies before he left the scene.”
“Before?”
“That’s right,” Blair said. “You’ll have to fill in the rest yourself. Also….”
“What?”
“A woman named Mercedes Whent knows something about all of this.”
“How do you mean?”
“Let’s just say I have a feeling about it, that’s all
.”
“I can’t make convictions on feelings, but thanks for enlightening me. I can use all the help I can get.”
Blair studied Connery’s eager face with a silent trust, a trust he was only starting to reserve for a chosen few. “Why don’t you believe that I killed Kevin and Cynthia? You said so yourself that my fingerprints were on the murder weapon in Kevin’s apartment.”
“True, but you were right: the murderer had left the rock pick at the scene. I believe someone from the department put it back in Kevin’s apartment but forgot to document it.”
“Did the officer also try to wipe it clean? I’ll bet he didn’t document that, either.”
Connery didn’t answer.
“Who’s being so careless in your department? Is it Smith?”
“I don’t know.”
“Smitty’s investigating Cynthia and Kevin’s murders. Who reported the murders to him?”
“Nobody,” Connery said, embarrassed by the obvious implication. “Detective Smith came across the bodies himself. He said he just happened by shortly after those people had been killed.”
“Do you actually believe that bull?”
“I have to, at least until I can prove otherwise.”
“But you know that the man is tampering with evidence!”
“I can’t prove that anybody has been tampering with the evidence.”
“What did the pick do? Walk back to Kevin’s crib?”
Detective Connery merely shrugged his shoulders.
“If Smitty’s the man in charge of the Maxwell-Massey murder case, why are you the guy who’s asking all the questions about it?”
“The boys upstairs told me to help him out.”
“Don’t tell me that they don’t trust him.”
“They have to. There’s no evidence yet to suggest otherwise.”
“Tell me something. If you knew that the pick was the murder weapon, why wasn’t it confiscated three days ago?”
“It was my find. Detective Smith had searched Kevin’s apartment but had over-looked the pick. When I found out for sure that it was the murder weapon, I wanted to see if anyone would come back for it. You picked it up, but you didn’t take it. That tells me you had no idea what you were holding.”
“I didn’t,” Blair said. He raised his arms for a moment, stretching. “It’s unusual for a man with Smith’s experience to overlook such a vital piece of evidence, unless he did so on purpose.”
“That’s not for me to say.”
“You realize that he was the one who put it back in Kevin’s apartment, hoping that no one else would find it.”
“Now that’s not for you to say.”
“Thinking like that has allowed Smith to get away with murder for years, it seems to me.”
Raising his head and giving Blair a hard look, Connery was obviously expressing his discontentment over Blair’s loose tongue, and his signals were coming in loud and clear. Blair decided to drop the badmouthing, at least for now.
“It stands to reason that if Smith and Latrice are in cahoots together, then Smith would try to cover up for him.”
“Cover up,” Connery said. “Now that’s an expression we don’t use around here about a police officer without proof.”
“Well, you’d better start looking for the proof before someone else gets killed.” Blair stretched his neck muscles because they were getting stiff. “So, am I free to hit the streets again, or are you going to put me up in one of those cushy jail cells?”
“You can go for now. Stay in town, though.”
“Where would I go?” Blair asked, standing up with a smirk on his face.
Detective Connery studied him with close regard. “You look like the kind of man who could do anything once you set your mind to it.” He stood up also. “Ask the office professional out front for another cup of coffee. You can take it with you.”