The 24th Letter ((Mystery/Thriller)) (3 page)

Father Callahan said, “I remember the press coverage.  You were at the top of your game as a homicide detective with Miami PD.  It was followed closely in the media because the victim was an internationally-known celebrity.”

O’Brien was silent.  A dull pain started above his left eye.  The adrenaline flowed, and he could almost hear his blood rushing through his temples.  “This man—this inmate—what’s his name?  What did he say?”

“Sam Spelling.  Said he saw the real killer hide the weapon—a knife.  Spelling fished it out of a dumpster, and he then succumbed to temptation.  Blackmailed the killer for a one-time payment of a hundred thousand.  Spelling went through the money, bought a lot of cocaine, wound up in prison.  He was supposed to testify in a big drug trial before

someone shot him today.  But his confession tonight with me, it related to your old case—the death of the supermodel and her ex-boyfriend on death row.”

“I assume that whoever shot him on the courthouse steps wanted him dead before he could testify in a drug trial, a trial that has nothing to do with Charlie Williams on death row.  Now, after a near death experience, he wants to clean the slate and confess…provide the identity of the person who killed Alexandria Cole, right?”

“Amen,” said Father Callahan.  That’s it.”

“Who’d he say killed her?” 

            “Didn’t say.  Just told me the name of the victim.  Soon as he gave me the victim’s name, I remembered the case, and I wanted to call you.  I asked that he write out the full confession—name names.  As you know, St. Francis is within walking distance to the hospital.  I’m going back there after he’s out of recovery to pick up the statement.”

            “I need to see that statement.” 

O’Brien pinched the bridge of his nose.  He never heard of Sam Spelling.  Most jailhouse snitches were repeat losers.  Habitual liars.  Cons used by corrupt defense attorneys to say they heard someone, someone other than the attorney’s client, brag about committing the crime.  O’Brien couldn’t remember one doing the opposite—confessing that another inmate, especially one on death row, was innocent.

“Are you there, Sean?”

“You said he was going under the knife, right?”

“I spoke with the doctor.  Spelling’s in bad shape.  Bullet barely missed his heart. 

“Father, does anyone else know what Spelling told you?  Does anyone know he’s going to sign his name to a statement that reveals the killer’s identity?”

“Don’t think so.  He whispered the details to me—the victim’s name, where he found the murder weapon.”  Father Callahan paused.  “I don’t know if it’s anything, but a reporter with the Sentinel approached me.  He said his name was Brian Cook.  Said he saw me speaking with Spelling.  He wanted to know if Spelling knew who shot him.”

“What did you tell the reporter?”

“Nothing.  I said what was shared with me remains confidential.”

“Did Spelling tell you where the murder weapon, the knife, is now?”

“He’s putting that in his statement, too.”

“If the knife still has detectable traces of the victim’s blood, then we can tie it to the murder.  If it has prints that match the identity of the person that Spelling says did it, we could have the killer.”

“And the disbelievers say divine intervention isn’t real.”  Father Callahan chuckled.

“Assuming Spelling is not lying, if he makes it through surgery, when the story’s in the press whoever shot Spelling will know he didn’t kill him.  If the guy who hit Spelling is a pro, and there’s a big payoff from taking Spelling out so he can’t testify in the trial, the hit man might come back.  He may kill Spelling before he can write out the details of who killed Alexandria Cole.  That’s if any of what he told you is true.  I’ll meet you there.”

“If you’re at the marina, you’re an hour from the hospital.  I’ll call and see when Spelling’s out of recovery, give him time to write the statement, and get with you.  It’ll probably be past dinner by then.  Tell you what…you need to have the physical copy of

this statement or letter.  I’d like to see you.  Meet me at St. Francis at eight o’ clock.  That’s only in ninety minutes.  I’ll give you whatever Spelling wrote.  You can take it from there.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Good to hear your voice, Sean.  I want to see you in mass more often.”

“I’d like that, too, Father, I really would.”

O’Brien set his phone on the table.  He looked at Max who stood on her hind legs, nose testing the marina air through the Jeep’s open side windshield.  The storm passed and the sky was clear, a golden light clung in the air like an aged photograph creating a temporary world without shadows.  It was about forty-five minutes before sunset, and a three-quarter moon was already climbing above the marina bay.

O’Brien thought about the man he sent to death row—Charlie Williams.  Was he innocent, and would live long enough to see another full moon?     

SEVEN

O’Brien locked his Jeep and started toward gate 7-F, the dock that led to where he kept his old boat moored.  Max ran behind him, stopping to investigate the world with her nose.  He walked by the Tiki Hut, an open-air bar disguised as a restaurant, which was adjacent to Ponce Marina.  He could smell the scent of blackened grouper, garlic shrimp, and beer.  A dozen tourists sat at the wooden tables, ate fish sandwiches, sipped from longneck bottles of beer, and watched seagulls fight for pieces of bread tossed in the marina water.  The isinglass, which was lowered on rainy days, was rolled up allowing a cross-breeze to carry the scent of seafood over the marina.

“Well, hello stranger,” said Kim Davis, an attractive brunette who worked the bar.  She was in her early forties, radiant smile, deep tan, and jeans that hugged every pore from her navel down.  She smiled at O’Brien. “You look like you could use a beer.”

“I’d like that, Kim, but I don’t have time right now.”

She wiped her hands on a towel, stepped out from behind the bar, and knelt down to greet Max, handing her a tiny piece of fried fish.  “You are so darn cute!”  Max’s tail blurred, gulping down the fish in a single bite.  Kim stood, her eyes searching O’Brien’s face.  “So, if you don’t mind me asking, did you attend a funeral?”

“An old case of mine has resurrected.  I’m just tying to make sense of it.”

“You want to talk about it?  I’ll be off in an hour.”

O’Brien managed a smile. “I appreciate that, but I have to run.  Come on, Max.”

“If you get thirsty, I’ll deliver to your boat.”  She smiled.

O’Brien smiled and stepped to the gate.  He worked the combination lock and waited for Max to trot by him.  As they walked down the long dock, O’Brien watched the charter fishing fleet churn through the pass.  The party boats were filled with sunburned tourists who would soon be posing next to their catches.

O’Brien’s boat,
Jupiter,
a thirty-eight foot Bayliner, was a boat he’d bought for ten cents on the dollar in a Miami DEA auction.  It was twenty years old when he bought it.  He’d restored the boat, doing much of the work himself.     

Docked two boats up from
Jupiter
was
Gibraltar
, a 42 Grand Banks trawler.  Its owner, Dave Collins, bought the boat new and spent half his time on it, while spending the rest of the time in a beachside condo, the property he retained from his ex-wife during a territorial divorce war.

Collins was in his mid sixties, thick chest, and knotted arms from decades of exercise, full head of white air, inquisitive blue-gray pewter eyes, and always a four-day stubble on his face.  He was chopping a large Vidalia onion in the galley when he saw O’Brien coming down the dock.  Collins stepped onto his cockpit.

“Who’s following whom?  Miss Max and Sean, just in time for dinner.  Is this the weekend you’re replacing the zincs on
Jupiter?
” 

“
Jupiter
needs some quality time.  But now something’s come up, and Max needs a dogsitter.”

Collins chuckled.  “You don’t even have to ask.  Hi, Max.”

Max leaned in toward Collins, her nose quivering. 

Dave said, “She smells the sauce I’m brewing.  Nick Cronus gave me his special, Old World, recipe when he was in with a catch last week.  I’ve got some fresh grouper to ladle it on.  Come aboard.  We’ll eat and drink.  Not necessarily in that order.”

“I can’t drink.  I have to meet a priest in a few minutes.  Booze probably wouldn’t go over too well, although I have plenty of reasons to get hammered.”  O’Brien knelt down by Max and scratched her behind the ears.  He looked straight at Collins, his eyes searching his friend’s face.  “Dave, what’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made?”

“You want the top-ten list or just the one enormous fuck up I’ve thought about for the last few years?”

“Yeah, that one sounds like a qualifier.”

“Staying too long at a job I didn’t believe in anymore.  Everybody is dealt the same deck of time, twenty-four—seven.  If you’re real dumb, you waste that deck, holding the cards too close, afraid to really gamble and do what you should.  So you stay in the game too long, and in the end you’ve only cheated yourself.”  Collins sipped his glass of red wine and added, “All right.  Since we’re fessin’ up.  Let’s hear your mistake of a lifetime, although I’ve had considerably more time to screw up things than you.”

O’Brien looked at his watch.  “In eighty-four hours, I could be the reason an innocent man dies.”

EIGHT

Dave Collins put his wine glass down on the table in the center of the cockpit.  He rubbed the end of a finger across the stubble of his right cheek, his eyes filled with challenge.  He said, “We’re talking about mistakes that have already happened, in the past tense.  It sounds like yours is in the future, at least eighty-four hours in the future.  So it’s not a mistake, at least not yet.”

“It’s a horrific dominoes effect.  The last one that falls is the execution of a potentially innocent man.  The first one that started this was when I arrested the man eleven years ago.  State’s giving him a lethal cocktail.  I have to do something to stop it.”

Collins inhaled through his nostrils like a vacuum cleaner, his big chest swelling, and as he exhaled, a slight whistle sound came from his pursed lips. “Step aboard.  This sounds like some deep defecation my friend.  I’ll shut up and listen while I’m preparing Grouper ‘Cronus style.’  You can begin at the beginning.”

O’Brien lifted Max up, stepped into the cockpit, and followed Collins into the galley.     

#

MAX SAT PATIENTLY, watching Collins’s every move as he prepared the food.  He squeezed a cut lemon over a large piece of grouper while O’Brien was finishing the story.  O’Brien left nothing out, telling him everything he could remember from the murder scene to the jury returning with a guilty-as-charged verdict.

Collins closed the door to the small oven, sat on a barstool, swirled the syrah in his glass. “Okay, Sean…you believe this con, Sam Spelling, saw the killer, found the murder weapon, hid the knife, and blackmailed the killer eleven years ago?”

“Considering the circumstances, a deathbed confession with a priest I know well and trust, the fact that somebody took a shot at Spelling…yeah, maybe.”

“But, as you said, you don’t know if that shot was linked to Alexandria’s murder…especially after more than a decade.  It’s probably to keep Spelling’s testimony out of the drug trial.  What else?  I sense something beyond the confession.”

“I always wondered if I got the right guy.”

“Why?”

“The case was too easy.  Some of the points didn’t quite add up.  The case against Charlie Williams was clean-cut, maybe too clean.”  

Collins sipped his wine, swallowed thoughtfully.  “Well, as you know, crimes of passion often are clean-cut in a dirty way.  They usually don’t start out to be a murder.  The argument escalates, and the killer goes crazy.  He or she usually shoots more than they have to.  In the event a knife is the weapon of choice, they’ll often repeatedly stab the victim beyond a single, fatal wound.  The crime scenes are sloppy, but the trail leading to the killer is seldom sloppy, it’s damn obvious.”

“And I think that was it.  It was too obvious.  Williams fit the profile, an agitated and jilted lover.  A man desperate to have his true love back.  He gets in a fight with her and kills her.  With the exception of a bartender, who remembered serving him three

fingers of straight bourbon near the time of Alexandria Cole’s murder, he has no alibi to fit the time-line.  The forensic evidence leading to him was overwhelming.”

O’Brien stood and walked around the boat’s salon.  A small color TV was on in the corner.  The sound was turned down.  O’Brien said, “And that’s it!”

“What do you mean, that’s it?”

“That’s what bugged me then about the investigation.  Charlie Williams is a farm boy from North Carolina.  He may have killed and butchered a few hogs on the family farm, but now I don’t believe he killed Alexandria Cole.  I think he was set up, the real killer is someone who knows forensics, a perp that’s so good he can make it look like Williams did it.”

“If so, what do you do now?”

“I meet Father Callahan.  Get Spelling’s written statement, assuming he can write after coming out of recovery.”

“And that’s assuming he makes it to recovery.”

“I know.  I’m waiting Father Callahan’s call.  Then I call Miami PD and let them quietly pick up whoever it names in the statement.  Then I call the governor’s office.  He issues a stay of execution, and Charlie Williams is released.  We put the real killer on trial, and I finish a bottle of Irish whiskey to try and forget why I ever got into law enforcement in the first place.  If I did send the wrong man to prison…how the hell do I make that up to him?”

Dave said nothing, his eyes filled with thought.    

O’Brien looked at the television.  He saw a reporter standing in front of Baptist Hospital.  “Where’s the sound?”