“Mr. Keating,” Rawlings said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Boggs. Who killed Char … Evan Keating?”
“I did,” Charley said.
“Why?”
“It was self-defense. I’m sorry, I mean it was in defense of another’s life.”
“Whose life?” Tommy asked.
“Gigi’s. Evan was about to kill her, and I shot him in the head. I was afraid that if I shot him anywhere else, his gun would go off.”
“We found Charley’s gun,” Tommy said. “I mean your gun. Whosever gun it was who lived in the boathouse. It hadn’t been fi red.”
“Evan’s gun,” Charley said. “He had two of them. I shot him with the other one.”
“And where is the other one?”
“I ditched it in the sea, off Key West.”
“Can you point out the spot?”
“I don’t think so; it was a dark night.”
“Why did … the other guy want to kill Gigi?”
“Because Gigi had stolen his drugs from a hiding place in the wheelhouse of his boat. Oh, and some from his motorcycle, too.”
“And what did Gigi do with the drugs?”
“I dropped them into the sea, along with Evan’s gun.”
“How much drugs?”
“I’m not sure; seven or eight bags, I think. I didn’t want to be involved in the drug business, so I got rid of the stuff.”
Tommy picked up a phone and dialed an extension. “Bring me a fingerprint kit,” he said.
A moment later a female officer came into the conference room and fingerprinted Charley, while the others watched silently. She finished, and Charley went into an adjoining bathroom to wash his hands.
1 61
S t u a r t W o o d s
“We have an earlier set of prints on Evan Keating,” Tommy said to the woman. “Bring them to me, please.”
She left, and Charley returned and sat down.
“Tell me how you got to be Charley and the other guy got to be Evan,” Tommy said.
“Evan and I traded places nearly a year ago. I knew my father would try to find me at some stage, and I didn’t want that to happen, and Evan didn’t want to hear from his father, either. We did it to confuse anybody who might be looking for us.”
Tommy seemed to run out of questions, then the woman returned with the two fingerprint cards. Tommy examined them both with a loupe. “These two sets of prints are identical,” Tommy said to Charley. “You’re Evan Keating.”
“No, I’m Charley Boggs; the card just has Evan’s name on it instead of mine. We did that when your people picked us up a couple of weeks ago.”
Tommy looked at the female officer. “Get me the prints of Charley Boggs we took from his corpse.”
She went away.