Low Pressure

“Not at all. I did my job. His fate was up to the twelve jurors, not me.”

“Then what’s this little mea culpa chat about, Rupe?”

“I believe Bellamy Price shares the misgivings I had about Dale Moody’s investigation. In her book, the detective’s competence and integrity are brought into question.”

“So are the prosecutor’s.”

“She did that for dramatic effect, to create tension and conflict between those two characters. I didn’t take it personally. But apparently Dale Moody took offense at the way his character was portrayed, because since you and I spoke the other day, he’s come out of hiding.”

Van Durbin swiftly added two and two together. “Holy shit! Dale Moody did that to you?”

“Night before last. He jumped me and attacked so viciously I was powerless to defend myself.”

“You didn’t write Low Pressure. Why’d he attack you?”

“Your column. He saw me quoted in it.”

“You didn’t say anything derogatory about him.”

“No, but—”

“He knows you could have.”

Rupe didn’t respond but made a face that strongly hinted that the writer had guessed correctly. He reached up and touched his bandaged nose. “I think this demonstrates how afraid Moody is that you’ll turn up something that could prove to be embarrassing. Possibly criminal,” he added in an undertone.

Van Durbin gnawed on the eraser of his pencil as though weighing a decision, then hiked up his hip and withdrew a sheet of paper from his rear pants pocket. He unfolded the square and pushed it across the desk toward Rupe. “Recognize them?”

It was a grainy black-and-white photograph of Bellamy Price leaning over a balcony railing, looking terribly distressed. Behind her was a bare-chested Denton Carter. “Where was this taken? When?”

“Outside Carter’s apartment, night before last.”

“What was going on between them?”

“Don’t I wish I knew,” Van Durbin said, bobbing his eyebrows. “But that looks like a bandage around his waist to me. And get a load of his face. Doesn’t look as bad as yours, but he’d taken a pounding, too.”

When Rupe raised his eyebrow quizzically, Van Durbin shrugged.

“I don’t know who, what, when, where, or why.” He frowned with malice. “Never got a chance to ask him, either. He sicced the police on me and my photographer.”

He relayed what had happened and Rupe laughed in spite of t

he pain it caused.

Van Durbin scowled. “Funny now. Wasn’t then. Took me hours to get my editor on the phone so he could tell them I wasn’t a weenie-wagger. The point is, Denton Carter got crosswise with somebody.”

“You think it was Moody?”

Van Durbin turned his question around. “What do you think?”

Rupe thoughtfully settled against the back of his chair. “I don’t know. If one of them is bearing a grudge against the other, it should be Dent. Moody came down hard on him, and, if not for Dent’s alibi, he would have been tried for the crime.”

“Wait,” Van Durbin said, sitting forward. “Are you saying it could have gone either way? Dent Carter or Strickland?”

Rupe didn’t answer, letting the writer draw his own conclusions and hoping to Christ he would catch Rupe’s drift without being so smart as to see through the manipulation.

Lowering his voice to a confidential pitch, Van Durbin said, “Doesn’t that kinda contradict what you said earlier about second-guessing Strickland’s conviction?”

“I said Strickland’s fate was in the hands of the jurors.”