The Alibi

The Alibi
By Alan Tinker
© March 2004


Joe Naylor sat patiently in his car at the traffic lights pondering the complexities of life.
“Why is everything always so fucking complicated?” he thought, his fingers drumming along with the tune on the car radio as his internal voice began to rise in anger. “What is it about women that they just don’t get it? They go into relationships knowing the situation and then want to change it. Jesus fucking Christ.”
He’d made it plain enough from the start he wouldn’t leave his wife. He couldn’t leave his wife. He might be the force behind the business, and force was the operative word, but it was her money and if she ever found out about any of his dalliances he’d be out on his ear before you could say Jack Robinson.
He felt his face and ears redden as another wave of anger welled from deep inside his gut.
“This’ll be the last one”, he thought, once the rage had subsided. “I’ll finish it with her tonight and then no more. It’s just too bloody hard. I just hope she doesn’t get hysterical. Christ, she’s certainly an emotional lady this one. It was probably what made her so attractive. Passion by the bucket load. Most likely her Eastern European background.”
He smiled now, enjoying one of those internal private laughs you often allow when you’re alone with your thoughts. Their relationship had certainly been feisty. Feisty and fun. A feisty, fun fuckfest, that’s what it had been. His smile broadened. He must remember that. He might even use it tonight, just to ease the tension with her if things became too heated. She’d understand and appreciate that sort of description of it. After all, that’s all it was, right? All this talk about leaving his wife, setting up house together, it was just woman talk. Surely, she’d understand once he’d explained it fully to her.
He looked down at the clock on the dashboard. 7.00PM. He’d need to phone home in about 30 minutes to check in.
“Thank God for mobile phones”, he thought. “The saviour of the philanderer.”
Another internal laugh rippled through his stomach as he silently appreciated his own wit.
He had told his wife he was driving to Newcastle on a business trip and would stay overnight. It was better that way he’d explained. He could have a few drinks with dinner and not have to worry about being pulled over by a breathalyser unit. An excuse he’d used a few times before, and with his trusty mobile phone there was no need to have to explain why there were no beeps if the call was supposed to be long distance. What a Godsend!
If his timing was right, and it usually was (precision was something he prided himself on), he’d be arriving at her house right on 7.30. He’d park the car at the back of the house and make his call home with the engine still running and the radio on. All sounds that his wife would be aware of in the background to their brief conversation and that would support his weary advice that he wasn’t quite at the hotel yet, but not far away. No, he’d decided not to have dinner, just something light and then bed. The long drive and the meetings had exhausted him and he’d be going straight to bed. In other, words: “Don’t phone me at the hotel tonight, I’ll be sleeping”.
“Yep. All bases pretty well covered”. He felt satisfied
He ran over the possible scenarios once more just in case he’d missed something, but he’d done this so many times before, and he didn’t miss things. It was why he was as successful as he was. Now all he had to do was deal with this other crazy bitch.

******

Catherine Naylor glanced across at the radio clock on the table beside their bed. 19.15 its big, red digital numbers told her. Another fifteen minutes and he’d call. One thing about Joe was that if he said he was going to call at 7.30, he’d call at 7.30, on the dot. They’d talk for a couple of minutes about mundane things, he trying to impress her with the amount of time and effort he’d put into his day, she adopting the role of the loving, caring wife. After that, the rest of the night was hers and her plans had been laid.
She thought about the frequency of the country trips Joe had been taking over the past few months and wondered if he might be having an affair. She’d find out about it if he was and, if he was, she’d cut his balls out, and that just for beginners. For now though he served a purpose. He did a good job of running the business she’d inherited from her father. In fact, under Joe’s management the turnover of the business had almost doubled in a little under five years and they were now in quite a comfortable position with all the trappings of wealth; a big house, luxury cars, boat and properties, and an income that afforded her plenty of time to indulge her lifestyle; and, generally speaking, he was a pretty good husband, a good bloke to have around the house. Sure, his temper was sometimes a concern but that was usually reserved for business adversaries. She’d sat with him in a couple of meetings that hadn’t been proceeding the way he wanted them to and had seen the volcano erupt. Not a pretty sight, but it had always achieved the right result. She knew though, that he would never show that sort of aggression towards her, he enjoyed their lifestyle too much and she had laid out the rules very clearly before they were married. No second chances. One strike and you’re out baby. Yes, she’d find out if he was fooling around on her and God help him if he was, but that could come later.
Her first priorities tonight were getting him off the phone when he rang and then readying herself for the arrival of her guest. She felt a sudden rush of uncertainty through her body as she thought of the night ahead. It had been rather impulsive of her to invite him here. She had flirted with men she met at the social lunches she attended before, but it had never gone further than a teasing smile or suggestive double entendres whispered, almost jokingly. He had taken it further though. He had pursued her, almost with aggression. His interest in what she said seemed genuine, he laughed at the right times, raised his eyebrows at the right times and placed his hand lightly on her arm at the right times. Everything just seemed so natural. When she wrote her address on the back of a drink coaster for him, it seemed as though it was somebody else writing. A younger, more alive version of herself and, when she walked out of the restaurant to catch a taxi the feeling of unreality heightened.
“This can’t be real”, she thought. “I couldn’t have just invited an almost complete stranger to my home. Shit! What if he comes?”
Now, as she finished dressing, the sense of surrealism had been replaced by one of tingling anticipation. She’d only do it this once, just to see if she still had what it takes to be attractive to a man.
“ Just this once”, she thought, as the ringing telephone brought her back to the reality of the present.

*********

Jimmy Evans left the public bar of the Tropicana Hotel shortly before closing time at 10.00pm. The Tropicana was Jimmy’s watering hole; a non-descript sort of pub, typical of those in the outer suburbs, which seem to take on the persona of their regular clientele. Jimmy liked to have a couple of drinks and a few of his favourite little pills before he went on a job. The mixture seemed to get rid of the butterflies he felt in his stomach and heighten his sense of awareness. He liked to feel he had all his senses about him when he was on a job.
He’d been caught once because he hadn’t heard someone coming behind him and had been on the receiving end of a hiding. Normally he could be in a house, get at least a VCR and be out again within a few minutes, and it didn’t matter if the owners were in the house or not, provided they were sleeping he wouldn’t disturb them. He’d been caught this one time however when the owner, and it was just his luck that it was a big, muscly guy, hadn’t been sleeping and had heard him. Jimmy hadn’t been aware of anything out of the ordinary until he felt the explosion of pain on his right ear and had then gone down under a barrage of punches. By the time the police arrived to take him away he was covered with bruises and had blood flowing out of a cut over his eye and from his broken nose. It was funny to have such a feeling of gratitude to the coppers for taking him away. His mates all laughed too when he told them the story.
Since then he’d been extra careful. He didn’t want to get caught like that again, he hated the pain of being hit, and he was on a good behaviour bond, a warning from the courts because it had been his first offence. Next time might mean jail and that thought didn’t appeal to him at all.
Generally though he’d been pretty lucky in his “night time” career. One of his mates had once said he was an opportunist. He wasn’t exactly sure what that meant but he figured it meant that he was lucky and, if that were the case, then he’d have to agree. He thought about the luck that had him driving tonight to the “better off” side of town. It was just before lunch when the rich looking bitch had come bossing her way up to the key cutting kiosk where he worked with a bunch of keys to be duplicated and instructions to have them finished by the time she came back in twenty minutes
“I’m sorry ma’am,” he’d tried to explain, “but I’ve got other jobs to do, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do them by then.”
“Look sonny,” she said, opening her purse and flicking through a wad of notes, “Here’s an extra five dollars. The other jobs can wait, there’s nobody here waiting to pick them up is there? I’ll be back in twenty minutes to pick up my keys. Don’t make me wait. I’ve got an important lunch to get to.”
And with that she was gone leaving Jimmy standing gaping. His initial thought was, “Fuck you bitch. Being rich doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do.”
Then, as if inspired, another idea came to mind. He had noticed the address on the driver’s licence she kept in the front pocket of her purse. It was a ritzy address and sure to be full of expensive and easily transported goods.
“Sure”, he thought, “I’ll cut the keys, as a matter of fact I’ll even cut two sets and, as an added service I’ll even test them for you to make sure they fit. Don’t want an uppity bitch like you not being satisfied with the workmanship”.
He spent most of the afternoon daydreaming about what he’d do with the money he expected to make out the keys. Sure, there was a chance that they might not be house keys, but he felt lucky and with all the gold that bitch had hanging off her it would be worth a risk to get in through a window anyhow if the situation was right.
He turned into the street he had written on the piece of paper and drove slowly, looking for the house number. Once he found the house he increased his speed, drove to the end of the street, waited five minutes and then drove back, parking his car two houses away and on the opposite side of the street. He sat there in the dark, watching. By the time the lights in the house went out two hours later he had finished another two stubbies of beer and swallowed a couple more pills. He waited another hour and then pulled the black beanie down over his ears and quietly opened the car door. He didn’t lock the car when he left it to cross the road, there was nothing in it to steal and he didn’t want to have to be messing around with keys if he had to make a running getaway. As he approached the darkened house he felt for the keys in his pocket, holding them in his latex gloved hand so they didn’t jangle in the quiet of the night. He felt the adrenalin begin to surge through his body. Tonight would be something special.
The third key he tried slipped smoothly into the lock and Jimmy turned it quietly. Leaning lightly against the door he stiffened momentarily as the door opened, waiting for an alarm to sound that would send him racing back to his car. Ten seconds felt like minutes but he waited, listening for sounds inside the house, and then, satisfied, eased himself through the partially opened door. He used the small amount of light filtering in from outside to locate a door off the hallway and then closed the outside door and stood motionless in the dark. Feeling his breath, his heart and chest beating, his eyes straining, but everywhere was quiet and still.
He moved quietly along the wall to the door he had seen up ahead and crept inside the room. He shone his small penlight around the room and was disappointed there didn’t appear to be anything here that might be of value to him. He noticed a large, expensive looking desk by the window and decided to check it for any cash or credit cards that might be left in one of the drawers. Turning the penlight off, he made his way through the dark to the desk and began opening drawers and searching with experienced fingers for anything of value. He touched upon something hard and almost recoiled with the realisation of what it was, his mind going into excited chatter.
“Fuck! It’s a gun!” he thought. “This has got to be worth something.”
This thought immediately replaced by, “The guys’ll think I’m something if I’m waving a fucking gun in their smart faces. Man! I’m made!”
He slid the gun out of the drawer, held it briefly in his hand, feeling his newfound status, and then put it quickly into the pocket of his jacket. He’d keep the gun, but he still needed something more to show for the long drive over here.
Quietly, but with a feeling of invincibility he’d never felt before, Jimmy continued through the house until he found the room he was looking for. He made his way across the room to the VCR, reached behind it to disconnect the cables and was ready to turn and make his way back out when his eyes were stung by sudden brightness that exploded in the room.
Almost instinctively he tensed and cowered, waiting for the blow to land hard against his head. But there was no blow this time, only a woman’s voice, demanding, aggressive.
“What are you doing there you little bastard? Get out of there! Greg, come here quick!”
He turned, measuring the distance between the woman and himself, looking frantically for a way past her to the door. He felt the weight in his jacket pocket against his hip and his plan of escape sprang immediately to mind.
“I know you, you little shit,” she screamed as she came menacingly closer.
Then the man was at the door, his voice joining hers, their words losing meaning as the noise began to build to a crescendo inside Jimmy’s racing brain. He pulled the gun out of his pocket and began waving it at the woman.
“Shut up! Shut up you bitch. Leave me alone”
The voices kept at him, louder and louder. His voice was also in there somewhere. All this noise was making it hard for him to think what to do and it was getting louder and louder until there was a much louder noise and a flash. The woman wasn’t yelling anymore. He thought she must have fallen over some furniture as he looked down at her lying on the floor, but the man was still yelling. He rushed towards him, hoping to knock him off balance, waving his hands, he heard the explosion again and then the man was gone too and finally the yelling had stopped and there were only the echoing explosions in his head.
Jimmy ran to the door he had let himself in by, not bothered now with the noise he made. He slammed the door behind him to slow their chase and raced down the road to his car. He waited and watched before he started the engine, looking for somebody to come after him, but nobody came. They must be phoning the police, he thought. Time to get out of here fast.
******

Things hadn’t gone exactly as Joe Naylor had planned. He’d expected a certain amount of anger and volatility and thought he’d be able to deal with that. He’d expected tears and anguish and thought he’d be able to deal with that as well. But he’d figured, when it was all boiled down, it had just been a fling and she’d eventually see it that way too. He hadn’t really expected her to threaten to tell his wife, and the more she suggested it the more his rage at her impertinence and selfishness grew.
He hadn’t meant to hit her. But when she picked up the phone to call his home he just lost control momentarily. He must have snatched the handset from her and hit her with that. By the time he had regained his composure she was laying on the floor, her face a bloodied mess, and he was holding the handset, which was dripping blood and other matter he supposed were parts of her skull.
It had taken him most of the night to clean up, get her body down to the boat, motor out to the middle of the bay and dump the weighted package in a location he hoped it would never be found. He thought back over what he had done and felt satisfied that he had left no trails.
“Attention to detail”, he thought, “There’s no substitute for it.”
Now though, he was feeling tired, extremely tired. Maybe he should’ve gone straight home instead of coming into the office, but then that would have been a departure from the normal. Not something he wanted to do now. No, he’d make his way through the day and try to suppress the irritation that surged inside him whenever anyone spoke to him. Just get through it an hour at a time. He’d have an early night and a good long sleep tonight and tomorrow he’d be back in control.
He estimated it to be shortly before lunchtime when Rosie, his secretary, knocked on his door. He had been sitting at his desk going over the events of last night in his tired mind, checking and re-checking that he’d done everything to remove any evidence of his presence there or even the fact that there’d been an incident.
When Rosie came into his office and announced that there were two police detectives to see him his first reaction was to just gape.
“It couldn’t be,” he thought. “They can’t have found anything, not this quickly. It couldn’t happen this quickly.”
His mind raced through the possibilities. “It must be something else. I just have to bluff my way through this. They can’t have found anything. I was careful, so careful”.
He forced what he hoped was a genuine smile to his face as he extended his hand to greet the detectives, and then led them to the sofas beneath the window overlooking the factory yard.
“Well gentlemen, how can I help you?” he asked, searching their faces for some glimmer of what and how much they already knew.
There was a pause before the elder looking of the two detectives spoke. Probably a pause of only a matter of seconds, but to Joe it seemed an eternity. He coughed lightly to clear his throat, looked down at the notebook he was holding in his hand and asked,
“Mr Naylor, when was the last time you spoke with your wife?”

******

Joe Naylor sat in the wood panelled courtroom and pondered the complexities of life.
The police prosecutor was summing up the police case, and although the he kept referring to Joe as the defendant it seemed to Joe as if he must be talking about somebody else.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the police evidence is primarily circumstantial but, and you must ask yourself this, how far can coincidence go before it becomes too much. The defendant’s wife and her lover were found shot dead in the defendant’s house. Ballistics evidence has shown that the gun used to murder the two victims was of the same make and calibre as a gun registered in the name of the defendant. If we are to believe the defendant the weapon disappeared mysteriously from his office desk and has never been located. There was no evidence of forced entry to the house, which indicates that the murderer was given admission by the victims, an unlikely event given the illicit nature of their rendezvous, or that the murderer had a key. Finally, the defendant is unable to provide any details as to his whereabouts on the night of the murder. His early claim that he had been away on a business trip were unsubstantiated and proven to be false. What did he have to hide? Only that he had not been away that night, that he had suspected his wife of being unfaithful and had lain in wait, caught her with her lover and, in a fit of rage, for which he is well known, murdered them both. There can be only one verdict in this matter ladies and gentlemen, you must find this man guilty as charged of the murder of his wife and her lover.”

END