“Who told you I was coming to the hotel, Sheriff?”
“Wasn’t it Freddy dug that up, Tom?” Burgoon asked. When Tom nodded, Burgoon said, “Didn’t you say you were coming here to see Press LaFrance? Then, that answers it, sure enough. Freddy Hazzard is Press’s nephew, his sister’s eldest boy. He’s my youngest deputy, mister. You saw him at the hotel, the lanky one.”
“Is he the son of one of your County Commissioners?”
“Sure is. Monk’s boy. But that’s got no bearing on me taking him on. Freddy came out of service with a good record in the M.P and he earns his pay right down the line.”
“Didn’t somebody say that it was somebody named Freddy who found the body?”
“That’s right. On a routine patrol at nine thirty. You see, I had a note for Bannon from his missus, and she’d left a suitcase here for him, and I didn’t know but what Bannon might hitch a ride to his place or come by boat or something. She’d said he was planning to be back Friday or Saturday, so I had the boys keeping an eye on it out there off and on.” He peered at me. “You getting at something?”
“I don’t know, Sheriff. I’m going to check out all right. You have a hunch I will, and you hate to admit it to yourself because it’s such a nice neat painless little case.”
He slapped his hand on the desk top. “But why would some other damned fool, if somebody else besides you did it, why would they want to pick you for it? They should know there was a chance you’d be in the clear. Why not some description to fit somebody we’d look for and never find?”
“Suppose this person heard, second hand, that I had a theory somebody had done too good a job of working Tush Bannon over and killed him, then dropped the engine on him to hide the traces, and fixed the wire to make it look like suicide?”
“If you can prove you said that to anybody at any time, mister, it might be more help than this list of folks I wrote down.”
“I told that same person that maybe it was somebody who was trying to do him a favor and do Monk Hazzard a favor, by trying to take some of the spunk out of Bannon so he would leave quietly. Because the person I was talking to has been trying to get that land.”
“LaFrance?” Burgoon said, almost whispering it.
“Tom, you think Press ought to come in for a little talk?”
“Can I make a suggestion, Sheriff?” I asked.
“You mean you’ve got another way to make things worse than they are right now?”
“Isn’t the weakest place the fat girl? She lied and she’ll know who made her lie. Don’t you think she could be brought in to make a positive identification?”
“You ever been in this line of work?”
“Not directly.”
“You got a record, mister?”
“Four arrests. No convictions, Sheriff. Nothing ever even came to trial.”
‘Now, just what would those arrests have been for, mister?“
“Assault, which turned out to be self-defense. Breaking and entering, and it turned out I had the owner’s permission. Conspiracy, and somebody decided to withdraw the charges. Piracy on the high seas, dismissed for lack of evidence.”
“You’re not exactly in any rut, are you? Tom, send somebody after that Arlene Denn.”
After he left, I said to the Sheriff, “When did she make that statement?”
“Saturday, starting about… maybe eleven in the morning.”
“Did you try to have me picked up in Lauderdale?”
“Sure did.”
“And Deputy Hazzard found out yesterday in the late afternoon that I would be at the hotel this morning?”
“He got the tip last night and phoned me at home.”
“Did he have any objections to the way you set it up to take me?”
“Well… he did say maybe if I stationed him across there, like on the roof of the service station with a carbine, it would be good insurance if you smelled something and decided not to go into the hotel at all.” He shook his head. “Freddy is a good boy. It doesn’t fit the way you want me to think it fits.”
“I’m not trying to sell you anything.”
In twenty minutes Tom brought her in. She stopped abruptly just inside the door and gave me a single glassy blue look and looked away. She wore a paint-spattered man’s T-shirt hanging outside her bulging jeans, and apparently nothing under the T-shirt.
“Move over near Tom and let her set in that chair,” he said to me. She sat and stared at Burgoon, her face so vapid she looked dimwitted.
“Now then, Arlie,” said Burgoon, “we had a nice talk day before yesterday and you helped us a lot and we appreciate it. Now, don’t you be nervous. There’s another part of it you’ve got to do. Do you know that man setting over there by Tom.”
“… Yes sir.”
“What’s his name, Arlie?”
“The one I told you about. Mr. MeGee.”
“Now, you turn and look at him and be sure and if you, are sure it’s the man you saw dropping that engine onto Mr. Bannon, you point your finger at him and you say, ‘That’s the same man.’ ”
She turned and she looked at the wall about a foot over my head and stabbed a finger at me and said, “That’s the same man.”
“You had a clear view of him on the morning of December seventeenth? No chance of a mistake?”
“No Sir!”
‘Now, don’t be nervous. You’re doing just fine. We’ve got another little problem you can help us with. It turns out Mr. McGee was way down in Fort Lauderdale that same identical morning at the same time you think you saw him, and he was on a boat with some very important people. A federal judge and a state senator and a famous surgeon, and they say he. was right there at that same time. Now, Arlie, just how in the wide world are we going to get around that?“
She stared fixedly at him, her mouth sagging open. “Arlie, are those big people lying and are you the one telling the truth, so help you God?”
“I saw what I saw.”
“Who told you to make up these lies, Arlie?”
“I told you what I saw.”
“Now, Arlie, you recall what I said before, about you having the right to be represented by a lawyer and so on?”
“So?”
“I’m telling you again, girl. You don’t have to answer any questions. Because I think I’m going to hold you and book you.”
She shrugged plump shoulders. “Do what you feel like.”
Crickety little Burgoon glanced over at Tom and then looked at the fat girl again. “Girl, I don’t think you rightly know just how much trouble you’re asking for. You see, I know you’re lying.”
Tom, responding to his signal, came in on cue. “Bunny, why in God’s name you being so kindly to this fat dumb slut? Let me run her on out to the stockade and turn her over to Miss Mary. Leave her out there three or four days and Miss Mary would purely enjoy sweatin‘ off fifteen pounds of slop and teaching her some manners. She’d have a nice attitude when you have her brought back in.”
Arlene Denn turned and stared at Tom. She bit her lip and swallowed and looked back at Burgoon, who said, “Now, if we have to come to that, Tom, we’ll come to that. But this isn’t any ninety-day county case. And this isn’t any one to five up to the state women’s prison. What the law of the State of Florida says is that giving false testimony in a capital case, or withholding evidence in a capital case is punishable by a maximum sentence of imprisonment for the rest of her natural life.”
She stiffened as much as her figure permitted, sat up straight and said, “You’ve got to be kidding, Sheriff!”
“You know how to read, girl?”
“Of course I know how to read!”
He dug a battered manual out of a desk drawer, licked his thumb and found the right page. He handed it across to her. “Second paragraph down. That there is sort of a short form of everything against the law. It’s what new deputies have to study up on and pass a test.”