“Was she in love with you?” Dewey asked.
“Yeah. She started talking about leaving Trane; she wanted us to run away together.”
“How’d you feel about that?”
“I wanted her to divorce him first,” Strawn told him candidly. “Hell, why just run off and leave all that alimony behind?”
“Real sentimental, aren’t you.” It wasn’t really a question.
Strawn shrugged. “Just practical.”
“What makes you think she killed her husband?”
“It just figures, man. There was nobody else in the picture. She must have figured that if she sued for divorce, he would countersue, maybe name me, and then she’d get nothing. If she got nothing, she wouldn’t get me either, because I wasn’t about to run off with her unless she had some dough.”
Dewey changed the subject from motive to method. If she did kill Trane, why would she use an ice pick? If she s so crazy about you, why choose a weapon that’s going to make you the instant prime suspect?”
“Leonora didn’t know about my first trial,” Strawn pointed out. “Nobody around here did. Even the local cops didn’t know until they ran my name through the state criminal-records computer. Hell, I wasn’t even arrested until two days after the body was found.”
Dewey mentally reviewed what he knew of the case from earlier stories that Fred Simply had sent in. “His wife testified that she found the body, didn’t she?”
“Yeah. Leonora said he hadn’t come home all night, that she had spent the evening alone in her bedroom, reading. She said the next morning when she got up, she called the cook to serve her breakfast on the east veranda. That was her favorite side of the house; I had ringed the whole patio with yellow roses, which were also her favorite. Anyway, she testified that she was having breakfast, looking across the east grounds of the estate, when she noticed a lot of activity among some blackbirds down where the boundary hedge separates the property from the road. She was curious, she said, so she walked across the lawn to see what the birds were so excited about. She claims she found her husband’s body just beyond the hedge, in a gully at the side of the road.”
“And you think she’s lying?”
Strawn shook his head. “I didn’t say she was lying. It’s probably all true. Except that she knew she’d find him there — because she left him there.”
“How would she have done it, do you think?” Dewey asked.
Strawn shrugged again. “Like I said, Trane was a real nut about the estate’s grounds. He used to walk around admiring the flower beds, the hedges, the lawn. Maybe he did come home that evening; maybe that much of Leonora’s story was a lie. Maybe he came home, and while it was still daylight he decided to walk around the grounds. Maybe that’s where he was when Leonora got him with the ice pick.”
“Wouldn’t the servants have seen him?”
“Not necessarily. There was only a housekeeper and a cook; they’re usually busy with their work.”
Dewey had been holding a question in the back of his mind, waiting for a good time to spring it. He decided now was the time. “Speaking of ice picks, the one you used to kill your wife was never found. What’d you do with it?”
“I put it in the foot of an old hunting boot,” Strawn admitted without hesitation. “Then I laced a brick in the uppers of both boots, tied them together, and dropped them in the Tarrant River in Birmingham. In the deepest part.”
“Now the same kind of weapon is missing in the Trane killing.” Dewey shook his head. “I don’t know, Strawn. It’s just too pat to be coincidence.”
“But it has to be coincidence!” the condemned man said desperately. “I’m innocent! I — didn’t — do — it!”
“All right, maybe you didn’t,” Dewey conceded. “But so what? Do you expect Leonora Trane to admit that she did? Or are you suggesting that I go out to the estate and beat a confession out of her?”
“I want you to investigate what I’ve told you,” Strawn said, suddenly calm again. “Everybody down here was so goddamned sure that the killer had to be me, nobody did any looking anywhere else. Maybe if you talk to Leonora, you can trick her into telling you where the goddamned ice pick is. Maybe if you look at the police report and the autopsy report and whatever the hell else you can get your hands on, something might point to her or to someone else. You can at least try, Taylor — to keep an innocent man from going to the chair.”
Dewey Taylor pushed his chair back and stood up. “I’ll do what I can, Strawn,” he said evenly. “But not for the reason you just gave. Because you and I both know you’re not an innocent man. You haven’t been for ten years.”
On his way out of the courthouse, Dewey stopped in at the county coroners office. “Dewey Taylor of the Birmingham Herald,” he told the clerk on duty. “I’d like to get a copy of the autopsy findings on George Trane.”
The report was a matter of public record; Dewey had his copy in ten minutes. He walked back to his motel room, ignored three messages from Fred Simply, and stretched out on the bed with another Gordon’s over free ice to read the report.
George Trane, according to the state medical examiner who had come down from Montgomery to do the autopsy, had died from a single puncture wound in the right ventricle. The wound was approximately three inches deep and one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, indicating that it had been made by an ice pick or similar instrument. There was no other damage to the body except a small bruise on the right temple which may or may not have been sustained prior to death. The victim was described as an adult male of fifty-six years, five feet eleven in height, 155 in weight, minus his appendix and gall bladder but with all other organs intact. A minor benign tumor, of which he was not even aware, was found on his prostate gland. The stomach contained no undigested food.
Routine report, Dewey thought. He flipped to the last page to see if a crime lab analysis had been made. It had, and appeared to be just as routine as the autopsy. At death, the victim had been wearing a summer-weight tan business suit, tan shirt, brown-and-yellow-striped necktie, brown leather belt, white undershirt, white briefs, tan over-the-calf socks, and brown leather loafers. The suit coat, shirt, and undershirt bore common puncture holes similar in size to the death wound. They, as well as the belt, trousers, and briefs, were saturated with an estimated three and one-quarter pints of discharged blood. Examination of the outer apparel produced nine separate minute samples of lint and one of thread. The victim’s trouser and coat pockets had been vacuumed and found to contain specimens of lint, fuzz, paper waste, tobacco shreds, and minute quantities of dirt. The soles of the victim’s shoes were scraped and the resultant residue analyzed as common street and ground dirt with no unique qualities. Scrapings from the victim’s fingernails produced ultra-minute particles of dirt, traces of hair oil, some slight rubber cement residue, a particle of dried table mustard, and several minuscule grains of sugar.
Real exciting, Dewey thought. He put the report aside and sipped his drink, staring at nothing. It would be so easy, he thought, to just file the story straight and forget the whole thing. Strawn was a desperate man; he’d say anything to anybody if there was even a remote chance that it would help him. And yet — there was something about him, something about his eyes, his voice, the way he begged for help, that had caught hold of Dewey Taylor and would not let go.