I hesitated and turned to look over my shoulder and eyed the little man sitting with his hands clasped together atop the battered looking conference table. Just a small man. No jaw to speak of. Narrow nose. Stringy brown hair plowing toward utter baldness. Plain looking. So plain he was beginning to blend into the dull white paint of the wall directly behind him. I got the impression a couple of more minutes sitting in the wooden chair alone in the interrogation room and he’d simple vanish into thin air.
Vanish like a bad taste in your mouth. Or maybe a bad idea. Just slowly fade away.
Closing the door behind me I stood in the hallway and looked at my monolithic nightmare of partner and lifted an eyebrow and waited. He turned, glanced at me, saw the face I make when something’s bothering me and sneered openly at me.
“That’s our killer?” Frank grunted, turning to look at me with those little brown points for eyes as he ran a hand through the mop of carrot colored hair. “That guy put four rounds of a .357 magnum in to Rick Burns’ chest and then two in the face? Him? Sweet Jesus. You gotta be kidding me.”
“He said he did it. We found Burns’ body where he said we’d find it. Burns’ blood is on the guy’s shoes and trouser cuffs. Evidently the prints on the gun are his. What else do you want?”
“I want to know who killed Rick Burns,” growled by mountain gorilla wannabe for a partner, jabbing a pointed finger into my chest gently. “Just like you do, buddy. I know you don’t believe the guy’s story either.”
The problem was Roscoe Tanner, accountant, said he did it. Said he struggled with his boss for the gun he knew Burns always carried and then shot him six times. Just like that. Like it was an everyday thing. Point blank range. Two .357 rounds in the face. Made the guy’s head explode like a bowl of tossed jello.
I threw a smirk in his direction and nodded. I agreed with Frank. There was no way a Roscoe Simmons, accountant extraordinaire for one big time slime ball like Rick Burns, could take Burns’ own gun, a Smith &Wesson .357 magnum, from him and then fill Burns full of holes and Burns not do a damn thing to defend himself. But that’s what the forensics team at the crime scene confirmed. That’s what Roscoe said happened. That’s what the district attorney was going to use the moment he got his hands on this case.
If Roscoe was lucky he might get Life in prison. If not so lucky . . .
“So what do you want to do?” I asked, pushing hands into my slacks and staring at my friend eyeball to eyeball.
Frank and I stand about six foot four apiece. He’s eighty pounds heavier and about twice as strong. He looks like a reject from a madman’s deranged genetic lab experiment. On the other hand, I’ve been told I look like a dead man. A handsome dead man, mind you. But still, a dead man. Apparently I’m almost the spitting image of some dead movie actor from out of the 30’s. Yeah, he’s famous. And no. I’m not mentioning names.
So we make a good team as homicide detectives. I look like a half remembered handsome stiff only a movie buff would remember. He looks like a biological nightmare no one wants to remember. My name is Turner Hahn. His is Frank Morales. And for the last eight years we’ve worked the homicide desk out of the South Side Precinct.
“I’m thinking we’ve got witnesses over at Burns’ place who are keeping their mouths shut. We should go over and talk to a few of the employees. You know . . . persuasively. Like only we can.”
When some red headed giant about the size of Bigfoot sits you down in a chair and leans over you so closely his breath sends a shiver down the back of your neck, and in your ear he says in a gruff voice, “Tell us about the shooting,” you have a tendency to tell him about the shooting. I’m not suggesting Frank can be intimidating when he wants to be. I’m saying that, unless you know Frank as well as I do, he is always intimidating. Just his physical presence alone makes atheists suddenly become religious.
So we drove across town underneath an early evening sky threatening to open up and dump on us a biblical style deluge. It was that time of the year. Late spring. Humidity so thick you could cut the water vapor hanging in the air with a dull set of pliers. Towering white/grayish thunder cells visibly climbing for the stratosphere in ominous anticipation. The rumble of thunder constantly talking to you off in the distance. The kind of weather where the static electricity in the air makes mousey looking housewives reach for shotgun in the bedroom closet, or maybe a butcher’s cleaver from out of the kitchen counter knife set, and do a little house cleaning of their own. That kind of weather.
Burns owned a hotspot called Valentino’s Grotto. It was a dance club for the under thirties set who were just breaking into good money professional wise. Down in the warehouse district. The old warehouse’s ground floor was covered in black tile. The small tables and chairs surrounding the dance floor were virgin white in color. The far wall of the warehouse was nothing but gigantic speakers and a raised dais where, apparently, the DJ’s did their magic nightly. We were told by those who knew the place was a cash cow. Thursday through Sunday nights the place was packed. Money, both legally and illegally earned, dropped into Burns’ pockets by the dumpster loads.
Everyone agreed Rick Burns was a festering boil on the ass end of humanity. Nobody was lamenting his passing. No one was surprised in the way his debit card was cancelled. But interestingly . . . no one believed for a moment Roscoe Tanner, accountant and trusted employee of Rick Burns, had the gumption to swat a fly off his ledger books, much lest take Burns’ gun away from him and plug him six times in the chest.
Rick Burns was brutally murdered. But Roscoe Tanner didn’t do it. Or, at least, that’s what the ten or so people we talked to in the empty club told us. Roscoe was just too nice of a guy to harm anyone.
So we stood in Burns’ private office, where the murder was committed, and stared at each other. We’d just interviewed everyone who was there that night Burns was shot. Everyone had alibis. No one believed Roscoe was as murderer. Obviously he was being framed. By whom no body could say. The list of potential suspects, they said, was almost the entire city.
Like I said. Rick Burns wasn’t a nice guy.
“So what do we have right now proving or disproving our man Roscoe’s guilt or innocence,” I said, leaning up against the office door and sneering at my partner casually.
“One,” Frank nodded, lifting a hand and one finger up to begin the discussion. “We have a murder weapon, Burns’ own .357, freshly fired and with Roscoe’s fingerprints all over it. If the little guy wasn’t the shooter, whoever did pull the trigger was smart enough, and cool enough, to wipe prints off the gun and then somehow make our little man pick up the gun and grip it firmly enough to add his prints.”
“Two,” I went on, lifting a hand up with two upraised fingers flying. “Everyone knew Burns was here in the office all night long. But no one heard the shooting because of the damn music outside was so loud everyone went home completely deaf.”
“Three,” Frank chimed in. “The only person anyone saw coming into or leaving the office was Roscoe Tanner. The only one.”
“No one from within the club saw anyone coming or going. Except Roscoe,” I said, shaking my head and smiling. “But there’s another door leading into the office. It goes out to an alley behind the building. Someone could have come in that way and plugged our beloved departed.”
We turned together and stared for a moment or two at the second entrance. And then we decided to check it out. The door led to a flight of stairs leading down into the alley. The alley would be, at the time of the shooting, as black as a closed Pennsylvania coal mine at midnight. But interestingly enough we found something. A small glittering piece of plastic lying on the cement right beside the bottom step of the flight of stairs. A small tube of lipstick.
We stood in the alley looking down at the tube of lipstick. It was Frank who broke the silence.
“What would make a faceless little man admit he killed a man with the man’s own gun and not give us a motive as to why he did it?”
“A woman,” I said offhandedly.
“It’s always a woman,” Frank said as we eyed the lipstick lying beside the steps.
“That, my friend, is a very sexist attitude to take. You should be in a deep fit of profound angst for uttering such a thing,” I said, looking at Frank, and grinning.
“I know. I should be,” the red headed giant nodded solemnly. “But I don’t give a rat’s ass about angst. Or whatever the hell you said.”
“Problem is,” I pointed out quietly. “Who? This place pulls beautiful women in every night. There’s no security cameras out here. So who are we looking for?”
Police work. You ask questions. You dig for clues. You slump into your chair back at the station and mull over things. You put the pieces of the puzzle together one way. And then you try it in a different direction. Finally you get lucky. Something happens. An off the wall idea pans out and suddenly your staring at a possibility.
The off the wall idea was to check out possible security camera tapes from establishments that flanked Valentino’s Grotto. Maybe something would pop. What popped was a tape from an auto parts store facing the street a half block away from the murder scene. Just around the corner from the street running past the warehouse nightclub. The camera faced down the street and had a clear view of the alley entrance. The same alley that ran directly behind the club. At around the time of the murder a car came roaring out of the alley, the driver of the car sawing at the wheel to make a screaming right hand turn before blasting away at full throttle.
The driver was a woman. A redhead. Driving a red Camero convertible. In the bucket seat beside her was a man. A man we instantly recognized. A guy by the name of Henry Rodriguez. One of Rick Burns disc jockeys.
A little more digging and we found out the woman’s name was Samantha Carter. She was an employee of Rick Burns as well. A few more questions thrown out randomly and we find out Henry and Samantha were in a blazing inferno of a romantic fling with each other. We also heard each had recently had heated exchanges, if not outright shouting matches, with their boss about a week before the murder. Over money. Lots of money. It didn’t take long to find’em and have them brought down to the precinct.
“Found something curious about you two,” Frank began, kicking a chair back from underneath the table and plopping down a size fourteen in the middle of the chair and leaning forward to brace an elbow on the upraised knee, “Night before last almost a half million dollars was deposited in an account you two share. A half million. So I gotta ask. Where does a DJ and a waitress suddenly come up with five hundred thousand big ones in the middle of the week like that?”
“Something else we found out,” I threw in, standing across the table from them, casually leaning against the wall with hands in my slacks. “We’ve got eight witnesses who claim they heard Burns accusing you two were scamming thousands of dollars out of the till and had been doing it for years. They say they heard him yelling at you several times over the course of the last month. They even heard him telling you he was going to kill both of you if you didn’t pay every cent back by the end of the month.”
The two sitting behind the wooden table were poster children for the perpetually terrified. Both looked scared to death. Like they’d had seen the outskirts of Hell in their rear view mirror and didn’t like the site, or smells, of the place. Rodriguez especially looked like he was going to pitch over from a coronary.
“Look . . . detectives,” he began, lifting a hand up pleadingly. “That money isn’t ours. We got up this morning and went down to the bank to draw out some money and that’s when we get hit with the news we’re half a million to the good. It doesn’t make sense. We . . we’re scared shitless, fellas. Someone’s trying to hang us for Rick’s murder. So we ran. Left the money in our account and just decided to skip out while we had a chance.”
“Nick is telling you the truth. Rick’s gone all crazy over the last few weeks,” the redhead jumped in quickly. Her hands were shaking. The pupils of her eyes were nothing but pinpoints from the fear coursing through her veins. Her forehead had tiny little beads of sweat forming across it like a fresh crop of dandelions popping up. “He’s accused us of stealing money from him. He’s accused Roscoe. He’s accused just about everyone who works for him! I’m telling you, we’re innocent. We didn’t steal nothing and we sure as hell didn’t kill Rick! We’re innocent!”
I glanced at Frank. Frank, frowning, still leaning on one knee, eyed me for a moment but kept silent. We know what fear is. Know the genuine from the fake. Silently we both agreed. These two were scared to death.
“Did Roscoe skim the money off the top?” I asked, looking back the lovers.
“I . . . we . . . really don’t know,” Rodriguez answered, grinning nervously, after glancing at the woman, and not sounding convincing at all. “I mean, come on. If anyone would know how to bilk money from behind Rick’s back it would have to be Roscoe. I mean, you know, Roscoe was Rick’s accountant. Jesus. He knew more about where all of Rick’s bank accounts were, for chrissake!”
“So Burns discovers who the real thief is, accuses him in his office, and this tiny little man takes Rick’s gun and shoots him dead? Is that what you’re telling us?” Frank rumbled, sounding obviously unconvinced.
The two in front of us glanced at each other and then back at us. Rodriguez had this look of a guy about ready to heave up this morning’s breakfast. The woman who called herself Samantha Carter was trying to calm herself down. But she was too fidgety. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. One leg kept rattling up and down like an errant jack hammer. Fear was making them as jittery as moths caught in a spider web.
“Come on,” I said, grinning and looking directly at Rodriguez. “What are you hiding? You might as well talk. We’re going to find out anyway.”
“Listen, it wasn’t our idea! It was Roscoe’s!” Rodriguez blurted out suddenly. Like a weak dam straining to let loose flood waters on an unsuspecting village. “All we wanted was a ten, maybe twenty, thousand and then we were going to split. Leave town and never come back. But then Roscoe . . . Roscoe caught us and . . . ”
“He told us with a little patience and some luck we could split with maybe one, maybe two million dollars and no one would know the difference,” she said, erupting like an avalanche, eager to get the words out of her mouth. “And it was working, too! Until . . . until.”
“Until Rick’s cousin, Lawrence shows up. Jesus! If you think Rick was scary you should have got a chance to eyeball Lawrence. That guy was a certified nut job!”
“What a minute,” Frank growled, throwing up an open palm at the two demanding silence as he dropped his foot off the wooden chair and stood up. “You’re saying you were skimming the till and then Roscoe catches you. But Roscoe’s skimming money off the top as well and he involves the two of you into his own little scheme. Is that what you are saying?”
“Yes,” the two said at the same time, nodding heads simultaneously as well. “That’s what we’re saying. Roscoe had this plan in place for the last five years. Been skimming money from underneath Rick’s eyes for I don’t know how long. Our job was to take bags of money, and I mean big bags of greenbacks, and drive across the state to a small bank in some godforsaken little town and stuff the money into a series of safe deposit boxes.”
“How long has this been going on?” I asked.
“With us transporting the loot? A little over a year,” the woman answered, smiling weakly. “We got about two hundred thousand in our box. Give or take a couple of thousand.”
“So where did this five hundred thousand come from?” Frank asked.
“That’s what we’re trying to tell you!” Rodriguez yelped excitedly, almost jumping out of his seat. “We haven’t a fucking clue! It just shows up the day after Rick is murdered. Don’t know where it came from. Don’t know who deposited it. But I gotta tell ya, it scares the hell out of us. Enough for us to decide to leave town. And we were when you caught us.”
“Tell us about Rick’s cousin. This Lawrence,” I said, lifting a curious eyebrow. “Where does he fit into this picture?”
“Rick and Lawrence were partners in a couple of gambling joints. They’re into the numbers racket as well. They way I hear it Lawrence paid an unannounced call on Rick one day about six weeks ago demanding money. Big chunks of money. From what I hear the meeting wasn’t pleasant for Rick.”
“That’s about the time Rick started accusing everyone of stealing,” the woman put in, shrugging. “Me . . . Nick . . . Roscoe. Anyone who had access to the till. I mean he just went crazy! And scary! He was threatening to shoot every one if we didn’t return everything we took from him. And I believed him!”
Frank and I looked at each other and nodded. We booked Rodriguez and Carter on a couple of money laundering charges and then pulled Roscoe out of his holding cell and sat his skinny little rumpus back down on the hot seat in the interrogation room again. Frank waited until the little man was sitting composed in the chair, his hands on his lap, a look of neutrality in his eyes, a blank face painted on his features as he looked up at us. The big guy nodded and began walking around the long conference table. Walked slowly, menacingly, around the table and moved behind the sitting little accountant before reaching out with big paws for hands and violently gripping the wooden backrest of the chair Roscoe was sitting in. The chair lurched to one side so violently the little man had to reach down and grip the chair’s seat to hang on.
Bending down Frank put his lips an inch or two away from Roscoe’s right air and began speaking softly. Almost pleasantly.
“Here’s what we think happened, Roscoe. You were caught. Caught with your hands in the cookie jar. For years you’ve been quietly moving money, money not officially recorded into one or another of Rick’s accounts, into some safe place only you knew about. But then the boss wakes up. He puts two and two together. And you come out stinking to high heaven. He confronts you. Demands he wants every cent back or he’s going to kill you. You know he means what he says. He is going to kill you. ”
“But you don’t kill him. Not you,” I said, smiling, as Frank . . . still bent over close to Roscoe’s right ear, glances at me and almost grins. “There’s not a violent bone in your body. Murdering someone is beyond your realm of possibilities.”
“But Rick’s cousin, Lawrence, is quite capable of pulling the trigger,” Frank whispered gently. “You come up with a plan to keep the money, or most of it at least, and at the same time removed Rick from the scene nice and neat. You contact Lawrence, concoct a story on how his cousin has been bilking him for years from the profits earned, and then sit back and wait for the fireworks to begin. That’s how it went down, isn’t it. That’s how you got rid of the guy who was going to kill you and keep a sizeable chunk of coin as well.”
“That’s . . . not what happened, detectives. It’s more complicated than that.”
It turned out Roscoe told the truth. It was complicated.
Ten hours later Frank and I found ourselves walking across the white sands of a South Florida beach littered with beautiful suntanned bodies wearing very enticing, and very marginal, bikinis. We tried to fit in. We were dressed in cargo shorts, crazy patterned Hawaiian shirts, and flip flops. Not surprisingly we were the most over dressed two there. We didn’t mind the curious looks and amusing faces as we kept walking toward the ocean. We came to a stop in front of a small man lying on a beach towel half asleep. His body was as white as a lump of pasty dough. He had hairy legs and a hairy chest. When we came to a halt we blocked the sun out. Our shadows apparently stretched out across the sands like two grave stones. Somehow the guy lying on the beach towel knew. Reaching up slowly with a hand he pulled off the dark shades covering his eyes, sat up, turned, and stared at us in silence.
Rick Burns didn’t look surprised at all to find us standing over him. It was as if he kinda thought it inevitable. Without saying a word he climbed to his feet, pushed the shades back on his face, then slipped both hands behind his back and waited for them to be cuffed.
Rick Burns killed his cousin Lawrence. Knowing that they were almost exact copies coming out of the same mold, and knowing that genetic testing could not tell the difference from one to the other, he figured he had found the perfect way out of his partnership with his cousin. He made a deal with Roscoe. If Roscoe would take the fall for the murder he could keep half of the money the little accountant had stolen from him over the years. Half came to ten million dollars. Burns convinced Roscoe no one would ever believe he had murdered anyone. At first the investigation would center around Roscoe. But eventually he thought the cops would discover the half million stashed in the bank account of Nick Rodriguez and Samantha Carter. He made sure everyone in the club heard his accusations accusing them of stealing his money. He made sure threats of killing them were heard by a number of employees. He was convinced the cops would eventually charge Rodriguez and Carter for the murder of Rick Burns.
And when they did, the real Rick Burns and the sneaky little accountant would disappear into the night and never be seen again.
Problem was Rick made one slight miscalculation. Apparently he had never heard of the old cliché about there was no honor among thieves. Too bad. ‘Cause the old cliché is the truth.
There is no honor among thieves.
by 
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What a story! Great story man.
Thanks, Chris. Much appreciated.
B.R.’s a good man, but if he fights like he writes then I wouldn’t mess with him …