He stares at my desk like it is the very grave of his wife. “They had nothing to go on.”
“Who worked the case?”
“A guy named Gillispie. Trevor Gillispie. I’ll never forget that name. It was the only one I got through the whole ordeal.”
Trevor Gillispie was a pretty good detective when it came to property crimes. He transferred to sex crimes and failed miserably. Of course, about that time the rumor was that his wife caught him with another man. Gillispie stayed on the job through his separation and ugly divorce. Then, about a year later he ate his gun. He’ll be no help now.
“So,” I say and shoot the whiskey. “Let me speed this up. Gillispie doesn’t turn up anything. Eventually the case goes cold.”
“Yes.”
“You get the famous Saint Ansgar Victim Letter where you’re told the case is being closed but will be reopened as soon as any new developments arise.”
“Yes.”
The SAPD had reams of those things, preprinted and just waiting to be rubberstamped with a signature and mailed. Box after box of form letters waiting to be the last domino in someone’s horrible chain of events.
“And your wife, in her despair, commits suicide,” I say this, aware of how cold it sounds. I suppose I could have said took her own life, fell to her own hand, ended her suffering or some bullshit along those lines. Sugar-coating a decision never did anyone any good.
“She, uhhh...Sheila couldn’t come out of her suffering. She was so damn despondent. And I was no help,” Petticoat says. If everything he’s said is true up to this point, he was lying there next to her unconscious the entire time her life was being systematically dismantled. When a man vows before God to love, cherish, honor, protect, blah blah blah and then he doesn’t do it when it matters most, I can see the torture. The guilt.
“So in the end Sheila...she ended her suffering.”
Ahhh. Good choice of words, Petticoat. I light a new smoke. “And now you want me to find the rapist?”
“Yes.”
“And then hand him over to the police?” Here comes the assassin part.
“Of course,” Petticoat says, as if the raging need to cause this criminal tenfold the agony he has suffered doesn’t factor in to our deal at all.
Petticoat shrugs and looks away with some empty amusement and huffs out with a dry laugh. “Well, maybe he can fall down once or twice as you’re walking him up the steps to headquarters.”
I sit back, watching as he places his hands on the steering wheel of our conversation and starts a gradual but irrevocable turn.
A change of tone as clear as the difference between life and death. “You’ll get another ten grand if you accept me as a client.”
Petticoat opens his blazer and I see four more stacks of bills inside a pocket. He’s done them up very deliberately. Show off. He wants to appeal to my fiscal side.
“Twenty more upon delivery.”
“Delivery? Or conviction?”
“Delivery.”
I give him a skeptical eye. “This is a great deal for me, Mr. Petticoat.”
He nods. He knows business. This is too great for me.
“It makes me suspicious.”
“Why? You don’t have bills to pay?”
“Money is money. If I’m that strapped for cash I can just walk down the street and find a drug dealer to shake down.” I crush out my smoke and steeple my fingers in front of me, elbows on the desk. “You don’t get the street reputation I have for being gentle with the scum of the earth. So let me lay this out for you.”
“Please do, Mr. Buckner. I’m getting the feeling you think I’m trying to take a dishonest angle with you.”
“Dishonest? Maybe. Suspicious? Abso-fucking-lutely.”