The Alibi

“It is.” Smilow turned back to her. “Dr. Ladd, you told us yesterday that you don’t own a gun.”

“I don’t.”

From a file, he produced a registration form, which Alex recognized. She scanned it, then passed it to Frank for his perusal. “I bought a pistol for protection. As you can see by the date, that was years ago. I no longer have it.”

“What happened to it?”

“Alex?” Frank Perkins leaned forward, a question in his eyes.

“It’s all right,” she assured him. “Beyond a few rudimentary lessons, I never even fired it. I kept it in a holster beneath the driver’s seat of my car and rarely thought about it. I even forgot about it when I traded the car in on a newer model.

“It wasn’t until weeks after the trade-in that I remembered the revolver was still beneath the seat. I called the dealership and explained to the manager what had happened. He offered to ask around. No one claimed to have any knowledge of it. I figured that someone cleaning the car, possibly even the person who later purchased it, had found the gun, thought ‘finders-keepers,’ and never returned it.”

“It’s a pistol that fires the caliber bullet that killed Lute Pettijohn.”

“A .38, yes. Hardly a collector’s item, Mr. Smilow.”

He smiled the cold smile she had come to associate with him. “Granted.” He rubbed his brow as though worried. “But here we’ve got proof of your owning a pistol, and an uncorroborated story of how you came to lose it. You were spotted at the scene about the time Mr. Pettijohn died. We’ve caught you in one lie about where you were that evening. And you haven’t provided an alibi.” He raised his shoulders. “Look at it from my perspective. All these circumstantial elements are beginning to add up.”

“To what?”

“To you being our killer.”

Alex opened her mouth to protest but was dismayed to find that she couldn’t speak. Frank Perkins spoke for her. “Are you prepared to book her, Smilow?”

He stared down at her for a long moment. “Not just yet.”

“Then we’re leaving.” This time the lawyer didn’t leave room for argument. Not that Alex felt like arguing. She was frightened, although she tried to keep her fear from showing.

An important part of her job was reading the expressions of her patients and interpreting their body language in order to gauge what they were thinking, which often differed from what they were saying. How they stood, or sat, or moved frequently contradicted their verbal assertions. Moreover, when they spoke, their phrasing and inflection sometimes conveyed more than the words themselves.

She applied her expertise to reading Smilow now. His face could have been carved from marble. Without even a nod toward diplomacy, he had looked her straight in the eye and accused her of murder. Only someone with absolute confidence in what he was doing could be that resolute and unemotional.

Steffi Mundell, on the other hand, seemed ready to hop up and down and clap her hands in glee. Based on her ex

perience of reading people, Alex could say accurately that the police felt the situation was definitely in their favor.

But their reactions weren’t as important to her as Hammond Cross’s. With a mix of anticipation and dread, she turned toward the door and looked at him.

One shoulder was propped against the wall. His ankles were crossed. His arms were folded over his midriff. The straighter of his two eyebrows was drawn down low, almost into a scowl. To an untrained eye, he might appear comfortable, even insouciant.

But readily apparent to Alex were the emotions roiling dangerously close to the surface. He wasn’t nearly as relaxed as he wanted to appear. The hooded eyes, the clenched jaw were dead giveaways. His folded arms and crossed ankles weren’t components of an indolent pose.

Indeed, they seemed essential to holding him together.

Chapter 20

He was a casting director’s dream for the role of “the nerd.” First because of his name—Harvey Knuckle. It was an open invitation to ridicule. Knuckle-head. What have you got for lunch today, Harvey, Knuckle-sandwiches? No-nuts-Knuckle. Let’s pop our Knuckle. Classmates and later co-workers had coined a variety of such taunts and they’d been merciless.

In addition to his name, Harvey Knuckle looked the part. Everything about him fit the stereotype. His eyeglasses were thick. He was pale and skinny and had chronic post-nasal drip. He wore a bow tie every day. When Charleston’s weather turned cold, he wore argyle V-neck sweaters beneath tweed jackets. In the summer they were substituted for short-sleeved shirts and seersucker suits.

His one saving grace, which ironically was also stereotypical, was that he was a computer genius. The very people around city hall who poked the most fun at him were at his mercy when their computers went on the fritz. A familiar refrain was, “Call Knuckle. Get him over here.”

On Tuesday evening, he entered the Shady Rest Lounge, shaking out his wet umbrella and apprehensively squinting into the smog of tobacco smoke.

Loretta Boothe, who had been watching for him, felt a twinge of sympathy. Harvey was a disagreeable little twerp, but he was entirely out of his element in the Shady Rest. He relaxed only marginally when he spotted her coming toward him.

“I thought I’d written down the wrong address. What a horrible place. Even the name sounds like a cemetery.”