Low Pressure

“But my father?”

“Look, I’m no

t going to apologize to you for doing my job.”

Because she didn’t want to antagonize him into silence, she backed off that. “I don’t understand why Allen Strickland didn’t come under suspicion immediately. Even according to your own notes… At least I assume this is your handwriting.” She held up the top sheet.

He nodded.

It was a copy of what appeared to be a page torn from a spiral notebook, covered with boldly scrawled annotations. Most had been written in a cryptic shorthand that only Moody would be able to decipher, but some of it was legible. A red pen had been used to underscore one of the notations: a name with a star beside it.

She scanned the page. “You wrote down the names of witnesses who mentioned Allen Strickland when you interviewed them?”

Moody nodded.

“At least some of them must’ve remembered seeing the way he and Susan were dancing together,” she said. “Why wasn’t he the prime suspect from the beginning?”

Obviously the question made Moody uneasy. Beneath his heavy, crinkled eyelids, his eyes shifted to several points in the room, including Dent, before returning to Bellamy. “He might’ve been, except that your folks were the first people I talked to. They gave me Dent’s name and told me about the argument he’d had with Susan that morning.”

“So I shot straight to the top of your list.”

“Yeah. I didn’t go back to Allen Strickland till you’d been eliminated.”

“Allen was another likely choice. But even then you didn’t think he’d committed the crime, did you?” Bellamy said. “Why not?”

He took a sip of his drink.

“Why not?” she repeated.

“First time I questioned him, he told me that Susan had turned him down flat and had made fun of him for trying.”

“And you believed that?” she asked.

“Usually a guy, especially a ladies’ man like him, doesn’t admit to being turned down, so I figured he was telling the truth. At least partially. Then there was his brother.”

She and Dent exchanged a look.

“What?” Moody asked.

“We’d like to hear this first,” she said. “Go on, please.”

He took a draw on his cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “I questioned them separately. Allen’s brother—Ray was his name—told me that he knew what Allen had in mind when he left the pavilion with Susan. Wink, wink. Ray stayed behind, drank some more beer, flirted and tried to get lucky himself. But when the weather turned bad, he got worried. He was reluctant to interrupt anything that Allen had going, but…”

“Being his brother’s keeper,” Dent said.

Moody raised his glass as though saluting him. “Ray told us detectives that he went into the woods, but met Allen on the hiking path, making his way back.” He gestured to the file. “Notes on several interviews with him are in there. But in one, he told me that Allen was ‘fuckin’ furious.’”

“He admitted that?”

“He did. But he also said he didn’t blame his brother for being angry, because he could hear your sister’s laughter. She even called out, ‘Don’t go away mad, Allen.’ And then she told him to go home and jack off while thinking about her. Words to that effect.”

Bellamy felt Dent’s eyes on her, watching to see how she would respond. She tried to keep her expression schooled.

“Anyhow, both the brothers, during individual interviews, told me the same thing. That Allen had left Susan in the woods, laughing at him.”

“Why didn’t this testimony come out during the trial?” she asked. “Since the case was built on circumstantial evidence, it would have provided strong reasonable doubt.”

“It would have, yes. Allen’s court-appointed attorney was relying heavily on Ray’s testimony,” Dale said. “That’s why he was fit to be tied when Ray didn’t show up the morning he was scheduled to be on the stand. The lawyer couldn’t account for his witness’s whereabouts or provide a reason for his failure to appear.