Lack of Evidence--Pt 1

Chapter 1 - 3281wds

I was between clients and still thinking about the murder of Reginald Larsen when the phone rang. I let it ring three or four times before I picked the phone up off the carriage and set it back down. It began to ring again. I counted the number of rings up to ten, and then decided whoever it was could call forever for all I cared. I was in the middle of an exciting game of computer solitaire and it was late enough in the day for me to feel justified when I didn't reach for the phone.

Julie Davenport, a close friend and associate of mine, ran into my office. She halted when she saw me at my desk. Her office was only three doors down, but she was out of breath. She had run as fast as she could to answer the phone before the caller decided to hang up. For her benefit, I glanced at the caller ID. Unknown, it said.

"Aren't you going to answer it?" Julie asked.

"Nope," I answered.

"You should. We’re open for another ten minutes.” She took a strand of her long chestnut brown hair and twirled it around her finger.

“Everyone else has gone home.” I glanced at the clock: 8:20. “You can answer it if you want.”

“It might be Caleb.”

“He knows to call my cell.”

Caleb was a friend and fellow detective in the Tampa Police Department. He was probably calling to congratulate her on completing the Academy. Most private investigators do not make the effort complete the police academy. Out of eighteen PIs in the state of Florida, only Julie and I had completed the Academy. If she wasn’t my Assistant Detective, I’d be really worried about her competition. She had earned a lot of respect among the PI community, and from me also, because not only was she the only female PI in the state of Florida, which takes balls on its own merit, she had also completed the Academy, a feat that three other Florida privates with dicks had attempted and failed. If she wanted to, she could make it on her own. Having completed the Academy, she could also apply to have a desk at the Station, but like me she preferred working on the edges of the blue line.

“The phone is still not working in my office, so it could be a call for me, forwarded here.” The phone rang again. Her hand twitched toward it, then was still.

I answered the phone. “John Walker.” Julie lingered for a minute, curious of the caller.

“Mr. Walker, my name is Sam Koontz. My son Michael is dead.”

His words were fast and slurred, so it took me a minute to figure out what he’d just said. Michael Koontz. I banged my fist against the top of my head, trying to figure out where I knew that name from so I could care about his demise. Once I did figure it out, I still didn’t care too much that he was deceased. I lied anyway.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Koontz. I remember him. He and I were in a few classes together at USF. Can I do something for you?” Julie shook her head, smiled, and walked out. I was sorry to see her go. Out of all the detectives in the phone book, I wondered why Michael’s father had called me. I could think of one big reason why I should have been at the bottom of his calling list and his name was Michael. His son and I had known each other since he moved to Tampa and enrolled in the University of South Florida’s Criminology department. We were in most of the same classes and we were close friends up until our sophomore year when we took Theories of Criminal Behavior. I formed a few criminal behavior theories of my own as well as developed a new case study for the Abnormal Behavior and Criminality class when Michael stole my final research paper and turned it in. Assuming I’d merely misplaced the paper, I printed another copy and submitted it. After an appearance before the disciplinary committee to plead my case, they gave us both a failing grade in the class and put us on probation. Michael dropped out of the Criminology department, moved away, and began a degree in the Philosophy College at the University of Florida. I retook the class. It took me a year longer than I had planned to graduate as a Master of Arts in Criminology. I never heard from Michael again. Can’t say I was sorry to see him go.

I stood up from the desk and wandered over to the coffee machine, stretching the phone cord to its limit. I opened the top-left drawer below the coffee maker, pulled out two packs of sugar and poured the contents into an empty mug. I wondered what Julie was doing.

“My son was murdered, and I want you to help me find out who did it,” Sam said.

I poured the last cup of coffee into the mug, licked a drop off my finger, and sat back down at my desk. It was always the same. The detective was supposed to be able to solve every crime and catch every criminal. I would rather have gotten eighty dollars an hour taking sleazy photos of some jealous woman’s husband in the act of adultery than any amount of money investigating a case of suspected homicide. A relative of the deceased usually brought such cases to me because the client didn’t believe the coroner’s determination of an accidental death or suicide. Usually suicide. No one wants to believe their loved one would take their own life. These cases were, in my experience, a waste of time. Despite what is regularly seen on television, murder doesn’t happen that often and when a client insists that I reexamine the facts of the case, I usually agree with the coroner’s report.

I ruled the case of Reginald Larsen to be a suicide. Reginald was the owner of Greater Abundance, a producer of genetically enhanced seeds that he claimed would produce bigger plants than ordinarily possible. He wasn’t just breeding his plants to control genetic variation, which might have produced the same results; he claimed that he was able to manipulate the DNA of every type of plant, altering the number and size of the produce. His focus was on fruits and vegetables, and when he first came into my office, he was holding the smallest, but juciest, orange I had ever seen or tasted.

He wanted me to find out why his work was being sabotaged. His plants were dying and he just knew it was the work of one of his enemies. Three days later he was dead. He jumped off the roof of his own building. Just a few hours before Sam Koontz called I was giving Theresa Stevenson, Reginald’s bride-to-be, ten thousand dollars to settle a suit she brought against me because I couldn’t solve her fiancé’s supposed murder.

For the past three months, by request and handsome reward from Theresa Stevenson, I had searched for a killer. After exhausting every available lead, I concluded that it was a suicide, just as the coroner had written in his report. I still had some doubts about the case because of a few suspicious details, primarily that he didn’t leave a suicide note, but I was at the end of every lead in the case. She threatened to sue for malpractice, confusing me with a doctor, then hired a lawyer that sued me for breach of contract. I was in no mood to deal with the litigation, so I settled with her by paying back a fraction of what she had altogether given me throughout the three months I’d investigated the case, the most expensive and laborious of my career.

I said to Sam, “Finding a murderer is the job of the police. I can’t help you.” I didn’t really want to be involved in another supposed homicide case, especially not when it was the case of someone with whom there was mutual disrespect.

“I can’t call the police. Michael talked so highly of you that I was sure you’d help me.” Flattering bullshit, I thought. Why would Michael praise me to his father after what had happened between us?

I glanced at the clock on the wall and said, “Mr. Koontz, our office is closed. I was just about to leave and go home. My last appointment was an hour ago. Why don’t you go to the police?” In truth, it would take me five minutes to get home and my last appointment was when Larsen walked into my office three months ago. I’d visited his grave at Loveland Cemetery several times since I took his case. My home was on the top floor of the building. I had this three-layer office built with the idea that I could rent it out and that many other investigators would be able to have all their offices in one place on the first floor, with the second and third floors having enough apartments for them all to live in the building, comfortably, but not even Julie would sleep here.

“I think a policeman was involved in his death. I’m telling you, I can’t go to the police.”

Julie walked into the office doorway just as I dropped the coffee in my lap and jumped out of my chair. “Dammit!” I said. I irrationally worried for a second that the coffee was still fresh and hot. If it had been, I was sure I would not still be able to have children. The coffee wasn’t hot, though it did leave a nice incriminating stain in the crotch area. I would surely hear a joke about private dicks later from Julie.

Corruption inside the police office was not inconceivable, but the matter-of-factness of the murder accusation was unsettling. The chief of police Frank Tarin ran a tight house. I could hardly imagine one of his men as a murderer, and I knew most of them. I made a mental note to call Caleb and see what, if anything, he’d heard about a local cop gone bad. I also wanted to call to make sure that I would be consulting on the case.

“Sit down," I whispered to Julie. She did. I was glad to have her at my side. Sitting back down myself, I picked up the phone again and apologized for the interruption: “Sorry about that, Sam. Did you say an officer was involved in the murder? Why do you think that?”

As was standard procedure, I grabbed a tape recorder from my desk. I wanted to catch every word. I put Sam on speakerphone. If this guy wasn’t legit, I wanted to confront him with the slip of his own tongue. If he was, I was going to get paid big for this case and I didn’t want to screw anything up. Julie uncovered a notepad from my cluttered desk and began to take her own notes.

“I can’t tell you,” Sam said. I watched Julie scribble this on the pad, pressing too hard, leaving indentations through several layers in a dark ink smear. She was never one who enjoyed games of suspense.

I said, “I can’t take this case and risk my neck just because you have a hunch, Mr. Koontz. Besides being a PI, I also work closely with the police, so if you are going to make accusations, I need you to back them up. Tell me why you think the police were involved in your son’s death.”

“I think it would be more effective if I showed you something. I took it from the crime scene."

I pressed stop on the recorder. Julie stopped writing. I wanted to scream, “Are you goddamn insane?” into the phone as loud as I could, but instead I calmly opened my top desk drawer and threw in the recorder and the pad. I would burn them later. The thought that an officer might have killed his son kept me from hanging up the phone right then.

I said, “Come to my office, Mr. Koontz,” and I hung up the phone.

“Julie,” I said. “I need you to play this one quiet until I get every detail straightened out in this case.”

“I know when to keep my mouth shut,” she said. “I won’t say a word to anyone. Trust me." She relaxed and slouched in the seat.

I called my lawyer, Max Treynor, to see what he might advise a client to do who had stolen evidence from a crime scene. After briefly describing the situation, he cut me off, “He isn’t your client unless you take the case, so don’t.” Then he hung up the phone. His advice was probably wise.

Nearly twenty minutes later, a short, pot-bellied, and partially bald man stepped into the office. He was soaked from head to toe, but I didn’t remember it raining. He was formally dressed in a white shirt, a black vest, slacks, and a tie. The whole professional ensemble was ruined though, I thought, by the yarmulke on his head. I didn’t remember Michael being a Jewish boy. It surprised me that his father was. Sam held a manila envelope with gloved hands.

He emptied the contents of the envelope on my desk: a blue and gold police-issue badge. “It was at the crime scene, so I took it before they had a chance to remove it and cover this whole thing up.”

I backed away from the desk as if he had released a pound of anthrax. Max’s advice was ringing in my mind. There was an officer’s badge on my desk. There was blood on it.

“Calm down. I collected it with gloves and I put it in this envelope. I’ve seen enough TV to know to do that,” Sam said. Noticing Julie for the first time, he stretched out his hand. It was shaking. They shook hands and he said, “Is it alright for us to talk with her here?”

“You already admitted, in front of her, to at least seven different crimes. I can barely count the violations on both hands that you could be charged with. Tampering with evidence, leaving the scene of the crime, and murder are a few. Start talking.” I pulled the notepad Julie had been using earlier from the desk and jotted down the police badge number -- A454.

“I will pay you five hundred dollars an hour for this case.” Five hundred dollars was expensive even for an expensive PI. Theresa Larsen had paid me three hundred. I played it like I didn’t care about the money.

I said, “I can’t take this case. I know people on the force and I can help you in a limited capacity, but I am going to have to tell the chief you came in here and both Julie and I will be forced to testify to what we saw in that envelope.”

Julie looked harshly at me, then turned her glare to Sam. “What the hell were you doing at the crime scene in the first place?”

I said, “Where is the crime scene, for that matter?”

“Take this case,” Sam said. “I didn’t kill my son and I need you to figure out how to prove that. If you promise to take this case, I will tell you everything you need to know. If you decide not to take the case and the killer goes free, you will have it branded into your conscious forever.”

Did I mention Julie doesn’t take kindly to suspense. She was chomping at the bit, crouched forward in her seat, and I could tell she was about to lose her cool with Sam. Sam, like most clients, would probably decide to tell me everything whether I took the case or not, just to get it off his chest. I was counting on it. I wasn’t going to get any deeper without knowing every little detail. I said, “Relax, Julie. Sam’s going to tell us everything. Sam, we have no ethical obligation to stick our necks out when you haven't given us any reason to. Tell us everything. Then, if I don’t think you are lying or leaving something out of the story, I will consider taking the case. No promises.” This satisfied Julie, and she visibly relaxed back into her seat. At least Max could give me credit for leaving myself a way out.

“My son and I were having our weekly Sabbath meal together."

"What is his address?"

"Two twenty-five south Primrose Lane. We started to read the Torah, and then I decided to go outside to pray. I usually go outside to a little shack my son built in the back of the house and this night was no different. It is used only for prayer and hitbodedut – solitary reflection. It was maybe 7:40. I was in there for ten minutes, at the most, when I heard three gunshots, one after the other. I went inside and found my son in the kitchen, dead, lying with his body facing the wall, snuggled against it.” Sam broke down to tears. Julie offered him a Kleenex, but he shook his head and continued. “I lay over him as the Messiah did to the boy in the New Testament. He didn’t wake up. It was then that I saw the badge, buried under the right side of his body where it met the wall. I immediately called you.”

I wasn’t convinced that he was completely truthful, but it didn’t matter. I caught the tone in his voice and so did Julie. She looked at me and clenched her fists. I thought she was going to hit Sam. I reached over the desk and put a hand on her shoulder. Sam hadn’t wasted any time calling me. Immediately, right that second, Sam had called me. “Jesus! You called me from the crime scene. I can’t believe it.”

“Oy veh, you sound like an evangelical preacher. Are you going to take the case?”

I had no choice now, because the police would undoubtedly trace the phone calls going in and out of the crime scene, one of which would be mine. “Yes, I will on one condition.”

“What?”

“Get yourself a lawyer.”

“Okay.”

“Go to the offices of Blake and Shelby and ask for Tyler Blake. He is a good friend of mine. Tell the receptionist I sent you. Then tell Tyler everything that you told me. Before he has the chance to call the cops, and as soon as you mention that you stole evidence he will probably pick up the phone, tell him to call me instead. It might also help if you can afford to pay him as much as you are paying me.”

Sam walked out the door.

Julie said, "When I came in here I wanted to ask you if you want to grab a bite to eat before going home. I’m not really hungry now. But, I still need to talk to you about the Reginald Larsen case. I noticed something when I was putting away his folder.”

“We've got a crime scene to go to. Tell me about the case on the way."

“Did you notice Sam’s wet clothes?”

“He took a shower in his dead son’s bathroom to wash off the blood from contact with the body.”

“He’s not the killer. Killers aren’t that stupid, are they?”