Part 28 (2/2)
”Hank Jordan's prints were on the Jeep's door.”
”Lemme grab my pants!”
Chapter 22.
This time, when Savannah and Dirk marched into the Santa Tesla police station, they didn't even bother with the formalities of stopping at the front desk and waiting to be invited in.
As they hurried by Kenny Bates II, he shouted out, ”Hey! You hold on a minute! You can't go back there!”
He came out from behind the desk and stood in front of them.
”No. You don't want to do that,” Dirk said.
”If it's the chief you want to see, I-I have to call her on the phone f-first,” he stammered.
Savannah stepped up to him, nose to nose, and said, ”Move, or I swear I'll hurt you.”
Something in her eye must have told him that she meant it, because he moved out of her way and returned to his desk.
They could hear him phoning someone, but they were already at the chief's office door, so the alert did little good.
Dirk knocked once; then, without waiting for an invitation, he opened the door.
Chief La Cross was jumping up from her chair as Savannah entered after him. ”Stop right there! How dare you barge into my office like that!” She reached for the phone on her desk and punched a number. ”Get in here right now. I have two people who-”
Dirk reached over, took the phone from her, and hung it up. ”You don't want to do that,” he said. ”Believe me.”
”Unless,” Savannah added, ”you want them to walk in here in the middle of you telling us why you lied to us and covered up for Hank Jordan. Maybe they want to hear why their chief would give an ex-con a fake alibi for a murder.”
Two large, young cops barged into the room. Savannah recognized them as the two who had been milling about the beach at the murder scene.
But before they could grab Savannah or Dirk, Chief La Cross said, ”Never mind, Franklin. It's okay, Rhodes. I've got it under control. You can leave. Close the door behind you.”
As soon as the patrolmen were gone and the door shut, Savannah walked over to one of the chairs beside La Cross's desk and sat down. Dirk did the same in the chair on the other side.
”You might as well take off your coat and stay awhile.” Savannah tossed her purse onto the desk. ”We got plenty to talk about.”
”Actually, Chief,” Dirk said, ”it's you who's gonna be doin' the talkin'. Why did you say Hank Jordan was here at the station all morning on Sunday, when Amelia Northrop was killed, when you-and now we-know he wasn't?”
Savannah looked from Dirk to the chief and was impressed with how convincing his accusation was. Of course, they didn't know any of this for certain. But if you were going to accuse a chief of police of conspiring to murder, you didn't do it timidly.
And Dirk's bluff worked.
La Cross sat down abruptly in her chair and began to shake like a palm tree in a Pacific typhoon. She looked like she was going to burst into tears at any moment.
”Why did you lie for him, Charlotte?” Savannah asked, her voice much gentler than Dirk's.
She often played ”good cop” to his ”bad.”
”Because he asked me to” was the unexpected reply. ”And because I was in love with him.”
Savannah looked over at Dirk and saw that he was taken aback by this, too. They had both been expecting a denial.
Charlotte and that nasty dimwit, Hank? Really?
The only word that came to Savannah's mind was ”yuck.”
”Yuck,” Dirk said.
There it was. Great minds did think alike.
”You were in love with ol' Hank Jordan?” Savannah asked. ”Well, I wouldn't have guessed that, but I reckon you must've seen something in him that I didn't.”
Chief La Cross looked at her, stunned. Then she turned to Dirk. ”What are you talking about? Hank Jordan? I wasn't in love with that slimeball. I was talking about William.”
Savannah's brain pulled the emergency brake, skidded to a stop, and did a U-turn. ”What? You just said . . . Oh . . . it was William who asked you to cover for Hank? To give him an alibi?”
La Cross nodded as tears started to roll down her cheeks.
”How did he talk you into doing something as stupid as that?” Dirk asked with his usual tact.
”He said Hank was innocent, that he had nothing to do with Amelia's death. William said Hank was with him that morning, and they were doing something that had to do with the casino.”
”Like what?” Savannah asked.
”He said he couldn't tell me, that it was confidential and it might put me in a compromising situation if I knew. But he a.s.sured me it was all legal and honest.”
”And you believed him?”
La Cross began to cry in earnest. It was a sad, ugly sight as she wept bitterly. Harsh, wracking sobs shook her entire body. ”Yes, I believed him about a lot of things,” she said, choking on her own tears. ”I was crazy about him. He told me he felt the same way about me.”
Savannah reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of tissues. She handed them to Charlotte, who blew her nose violently into them, then handed them back to Savannah.
She stared at the wad of sodden tissues in her palm for a moment; then she spotted a trash can nearby and quickly deposited them there.
So much for showing compa.s.sion to a fellow human being, she thought.
”He was just using me to get his d.a.m.ned casino. He needed some obstacles removed, and as police chief, I could do it. But now that the road's clear for him, he's dumping me.”
It occurred to Savannah that as Charlotte La Cross sat there at her desk, sobbing her face off over a guy, Santa Tesla's chief of police looked a bit like a distraught teenager who had just lost her first love.
The thought also crossed Savannah's mind that William Northrop might have, indeed, been the first serious love affair Charlotte had ever experienced. Dirk had suggested that she wasn't an attractive woman by any measure, but, more important, she had a cold, standoffish personality that probably didn't attract a lot of people-friends or lovers.
”Let me get this straight,” Dirk said. ”Northrop told you that he and Hank knew each other. And that they were together doing some sort of casino stuff on Sunday morning when Amelia was killed?”
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