Текст книги "Hemingway's Ghost"
Автор книги: Layton Green
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Table of Contents
HEMINGWAY’S GHOST
About the Author
HEMINGWAY’S GHOST
A Novella of Suspense
by Layton Green
Copyright © 2011 by Layton Green
All rights reserved.
Cover Art by Emy Mixon
Ebook creation by Dellaster Design
First Ward 2011 Ebook Edition
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any semblance to actual events, locales, or persons is entirely coincidental.
HEMINGWAY’S GHOST
They gathered at Sloppy Joe’s, each more pathetic than the last, living another man’s life. When the police reported that the second body had washed ashore, ten yards from the waterlogged Panama hat, they knew something was terribly wrong.
Ernie’s hand shook as he reached for his whiskey, and he had to shout to be heard over the din of the crowded bar. “That’s two in one week. Someone’s got it in for us.”
“No shit,” Papa said, his bulk straining against his short-sleeved beige safari shirt. All four of them were wearing short-sleeved beige safari shirts. And trimmed white beards. And white shorts with black belts.
All four also had ruddy broad faces, small eyes, and high foreheads. The only difference was their size. Papa was the largest. He was too fat and never won the contests, but he bullied the others into doing what he wanted, so in a sense he was the best of the lot.
Ernie was the smallest, and Champ and Bumby were in the middle, closest in actual girth to the Man himself. Bumby won the most contests and the rest were jealous.
“You’d think the police would do more about it,” Champ said, mashing the mint leaves in his Mojito without his usual vigor. “We bring dollars to this sand trap. We’re the best in the world. How’d all these tourists like it if their precious Hemingways just up and moved to Paris, or Cuba, or God forbid to Ketchum?”
“Idiot,” Papa said, the whiff of fear behind his bravado typical of the town bully. Papa pretended he was an ex-con, but he had only been in jail for two DUIs and an assault—not even a proper battery—against his ex-wife. After his last business venture failed, a combination pawn shop and tanning salon in Daytona Beach, he declared bankruptcy and moved to a shack in Key Largo. After months of hearing how much he looked like the Man, he decided to turn pro in Key West. “You think there aren’t hundreds of fat old bastards waiting to grow their beards and claim our turf?”
“Is that right? And how’re they gonna to do this?” Ernie’s posture shifted so that he was a mirror image of the Man slouched at a bar, his voice hitting just the right grandiose tone as he waved at the bartender. “Bill! Another round here, why don’t ya?”
The tourists that were already staring at them from the next table began to laugh and point and take out their cameras.
“Shhh,” Bumby hissed, the only one at the table with any sense or class. He was a failed writer and a waiter at a four-star restaurant. “You know what he would’ve said to that? You’ll be replaced in one of two ways, gents: gradually or suddenly.”
“Bumby’s right,” Champ said. “We’re fearing for our lives here. We need to keep a low profile until we find out what’s going on.”
Papa almost fell out of his seat. “A low profile? We’re Hemingway impersonators, living in Key West.”
“All of you need to shut up and think,” Bumby said. “This all started the night after it happened. We know what we have to do, and we’re sitting around here getting schnockered because we’re all afraid to do it.”
Ernie licked his lips, and Champ muttered into his whiskey.
“I ain’t afraid of shit,” Papa said. “And this is ridiculous. Hemingway’s ghost isn’t talking to us through a Ouija board in his basement.”
“No?” Bumby said quietly. “Then how do you explain the letter?”
Papa’s mouth opened and then closed, and he returned to his whiskey.
“That’s what I thought.” Bumby slapped money on the table and stood. “Who’s with me?”
Ernie and Champ jumped out of their seats, jowls and bellies quivering with anxiety. Papa folded his massive arms and pursed his lips, regarding Bumby with eyes that were small and mean, but not unintelligent. His head began a slow nod, and then he knocked back his whiskey and grabbed his hat. “Fine. We’ll put this stupid idea to rest.”
The four of them shuffled into the balmy air and waddled down Duval, huddled together like a giant white globular porkpie, each wondering if he would be the next found floating by the shore, throat slit and bloated.
I watched and smiled.
They cut over on Petronia and then walked down Whitehead until they could see the great house brooding in the darkness behind the brick wall. I could almost smell the jasmine drifting on the breeze. After the gaggle of Japanese tourists moved on, the Hemingways slipped into a thicket of palms and followed the wall to the rear of the property, where the wall was not as high and they could step onto a ladder set out by the caretaker.
The caretaker, God bless him, was a very greedy man. Months ago Papa figured out they could pay him fifty dollars and he would let them climb onto the grounds at night and wallow in their secret intimacy with the Man.
Because as different as the four of them were, the one thing they had in common, for different reasons, was their hero worship of Ernest Miller Hemingway.
Bumby of course revered him as a writer, and as a fellow uneducated closet intellectual. Ernie was once a Golden Gloves champ and loved Hemingway because he was the ideal man’s man. Champ loved the outdoors and was an avid fisherman, and also had a passion for adventurous, muscular literature (he didn’t really get, nor did he care about, the Man’s subtlety and sensitivity). Papa loved him because he embodied the type of man who did whatever the fuck he wanted, all the time.
They stood hidden in the jungle-like foliage on the other side of the wall, scrutinized by the small army of cats that patrolled the grounds, the mewling drowned by the battalion of crickets. To their right was the outline of the caretaker’s dilapidated house, a smudge of grey and brown in the darkness. The tourists took care not to walk too close to it. It looked abandoned, but the Hemingways knew otherwise.
I knew otherwise.
Ernie whispered, “Is it clear?”
“Clear of what?” Papa said. “That shit-for-brains doesn’t care what we do, and he’s been letting us in for months.”
“There’s something about him gives me the willies, like when you tell him something and he looks at you for an extra second as if he didn’t hear you. I don’t want him looking over our shoulders.”
“The light’s off. He’s asleep or strokin’ it.”
Bumby ignored them both and stepped onto the garden pathway, feeling the familiar tingle that he was striding down the lawn with one of the wives on his arm, adoring worshippers at the gates, the next masterpiece in the works, the world his personal fiefdom. What Bumby wouldn’t admit even to himself was the repressed jealousy that every writer has of the great ones. Not of the writers who get rich; that’s a skin-deep kind of jealousy and easily shrugged off, the same kind of jealousy one has for a suitor who wins out because of money or family, rather than because he makes the girl weak in her knees.
No, this jealousy festered in Bumby like an open sore, so painful it was murderous, because when it came to writing, the Man was truly great. So great that Bumby knew, deep down in his soul, that he himself had no business picking up a pen, and should stick to telling rich New Yorkers what vintage to drink with their ginger-braised lamb chops. Bumby had been writing for thirty-five of his fifty years, had never been published, and knew it was never going to change. Still, he loved writing, and loved the caché it gave him with the island’s burned-out waitresses who thought he was about to make it big.
He heard the others creeping behind him, although they had never crept until recently. Not until they had gone down into the basement, talked to the Man through the Ouija Board, and discovered that his troubled mad spirit roamed these grounds.
They shuffled down the outdoor stairs at the rear of the house, to the locked door at the bottom of the stairwell. Ernie bent over the simple lock and opened the door with a credit card. They all cringed as it creaked open.
They did four different things: Ernie flicked the light and locked the door behind them, Champ took the Ouija Board out of a burlap sack and started arranging it on the brick floor, Papa lit a cigarette and pulled out his flask of whiskey that was engraved with a cheap likeness of the Man’s face, and Bumby went to read the love letter again.
“I told you not to touch that until we decide what to do about it,” Papa said, as Bumby pried loose a brick in the corner and pulled out an envelope whose seal had stood for decades until broken by the six of them last week. An envelope whose location had been revealed to them by the Man himself, speaking from the mysterious ether to which the Ouija Board granted access. They had left it there for the time being because they couldn’t agree on who should keep it. Their fear that someone else might steal it was eclipsed by their fear that one of them might sell the letter behind the others’ backs.
Papa said, “I’ve been making inquiries in Miami. We’ll have a buyer before long.”
“A buyer,” Bumby murmured to himself. He held the letter in his palms, cradling it as gently as possible, as he read words from the master that no living person outside of that room had ever seen.
“We’re not selling it yet,” Champ said, his reverence for the letter trumped by his yearning to buy a proper fishing boat. Champ and Ernie were day laborers for a construction company owned by a Mexican, which embarrassed Champ. Champ spent all his hard-earned money in the island’s dive bars, and he was also embarrassed that he couldn’t afford anything other than his twenty-year-old pontoon boat. If he ever hooked a marlin, he knew he would end up upside down on a rock in the Bermuda Triangle. “There’s got to be more,” he said, “and we’ll sell everything together.”
Papa blew smoke in Champ’s face. “I said I’m lining up a buyer, pisshead. It takes time. It’s not like selling a goddamned baseball card.”
Champ was Ernie’s best friend, and Ernie’s stomach clenched as the smoke swirled in Champ’s face. Ernie knew in theory he could take Papa in a fight, but Ernie was a physical coward outside of the boxing ring, where there were no rules or referees. “So who’s the buyer?”
“Don’t you worry about that. A contact from the joint is all you need to know.”
“Yeah, well, we’re doing the transaction together. All four of us.”
Papa showed his teeth and said nothing. Ernie hated him for it, but hated himself more. The truth was that the Man would have thought Ernie to be the lowest of men, the kind of man who ran from the battlefield.
Champ finished setting up the Ouija Board and they all gathered around it. It had belonged to Champ’s grandfather. The wooden board was splintering at the edges, the Gothic lettering fading. It had been Bumby’s idea, one night when they were all plastered at Sloppy’s: why not try and contact the Man to whom they spent their lives in dedication, and what better place to do it than at his former residence? They had nothing better to do, other than chase wrinkled whores down Duval.
None of them had actually expected anything to happen, none of them thought they would hear from a tortured revenant who claimed to be the ghost of the Man himself.
Bumby’s nervous eyes flitted over the small group, no doubt realizing that the last time they were here there had been six of them. Now Max and Scotty were lying on their dead broke backs in the Key West cemetery.
Champ placed the planchette in the center of the board, and they all hovered over it, each placing a fingertip on the plastic wedge. They moved the planchette around in circles to warm it up, then eased off the pressure, letting their fingertips rest lightly on the piece.
“Who’s first?” Champ whispered.
“Stop whispering,” Papa said. “There’s no one else here.”
“He’s here,” Ernie said. “He told us exactly who he was, including intimate details of his life.”
Papa gritted his teeth. “Maybe that’s because these boards respond to subconscious thought, and there were six Hemingway impersonators asking the questions. Maybe, just maybe, we wanted him to be here.”
“And the letter?” Bumby said.
Papa sneered. “You’re not as clever as you think you are, you know. There’s an easy answer for that, and it’s the same answer to the question of who killed poor Max and Scotty.”
“What’s that?” Champ said.
Papa grinned his words. “One of us knew about it.”
The rest of them grew still as they realized the thought did carry some weight, even though it wasn’t completely logical. For instance, if whoever hid the letter was killing off the rest of them, why reveal the hiding place? Besides, the one-page letter to a mistress, signed by the Man himself, was a thrilling find possibly worth a few grand on the black market, but hardly worth murder.
Idiots.
Bumby took a deep breath. “That’s ridiculous. The four of us were drinking the night Max was killed.”
“Yeah,” Papa said, “except you left early, and the rest of us closed it down.”
“I had to open the restaurant the next morning. I went straight to bed.”
“Bumby didn’t kill anyone,” Ernie said, although his voice didn’t drip with conviction. “Let’s do what we came to do and talk about this later. So who’s first?”
“Let’s start how we did the last time,” Champ said, then lowered his voice to a somber drone. “Is anyone there?”
They all stilled, making sure not to influence the planchette, then waited in uneasy silence until the planchette made a skittish progression to the word in capital letters in the top right corner. The hairs rose on the backs of their necks.
-YES-
Champ swallowed. “Who are you?”
-ME-
“Stupid,” Papa said to Champ, then, “Are you Churchill?”
-NO-
“Mother Teresa?”
-NO-
“John Updike?”
-NO-
“Ernest Miller Hemingway?”
-YES-
Papa hesitated, and the other three glanced nervously around the dusty room, as if waiting for someone to jump out of hiding.
But there was no one there.
Bumby said, “What year is this?”
-1961-
“The year he died,” Ernie murmured. “For sure it’s him again.”
“What’d you do last night?” Bumby said, and Champ looked at him sideways.
-GOT TIGHT ON ABSINTHE-
“Did he drink absinthe?” Champ whispered, as if spirits could only hear loud voices.
“Of course he did,” Papa said. “He drank everything.”
Bumby leaned forward while maintaining the lightest of pressure on the planchette. “Do you know who this is?”
-PAULINE-
“Do you know where you are?”
For the first time, the planchette failed to go to a letter or a word. Instead it moved in a slow, jerky circle, stopping and then starting on various letters, as if unsure of what to do.
Bumby gave the Ouija Board a sad, pitying look. “He’s quite mad, isn’t he? Poor guy doesn’t even know he’s dead.”
A greedy light illuminated Ernie’s eyes, and he spoke in a high-pitched voice. “Ernest, do you remember those secret pages you told me about? Those poems you wrote for me? I’ve forgotten where they are. Can you tell me so I can make sure they’re safe?”
-CORNER BRICK-
Good lord, the poor sap wouldn’t want Pauline to find those!
“No, not the letter. The other pages.”
There was a pause, and then-
—TOLSTOY-
The four of them looked at each other in confusion, and then Bumby’s eyes widened. He said, “It’s still there?”
-YES-
Bumby’s face quivered with excitement, and then softened. “Ernest?”
-YES-
“I love you.”
Before they got a response Bumby sprang to his feet as fast as a round and tired fifty year old man can spring, and the others followed suit. Champ gathered the Ouija Board.
“Tolstoy?” Ernie said. “What the hell’s he mean by that?”
Papa snorted. “Nothing, you half-wit. Surely he can’t think it’s 1961 and he’s with Pauline. I guess one of our subconscious screwed that one up.”
“It’s him all right,” Bumby said. “He’s just confused.”
“It’s not him.”
“We’re about to find out once and for all,” Bumby said.
“How’s that?”
“Because I know where Tolstoy is.”
They followed Bumby up the stairs and into the humid night air. He led them down the garden path around the back of the house, then veered off to the right once they passed the pool house. The caretaker’s house was now visible to their right, a grim patch of blighted architecture hovering on the corner of the property.
Papa leered at Bumby. “I love you? You’re creeping me out with that shit.”
“He thought we were Pauline, and I was giving him some peace. I think he deserves it.”
“That’s sure not what it sounded like.”
Bumby cut onto a smaller path that wound through dense vegetation. They shrank from the spider webs strewn between the palms and banana trees. After a short ways the path opened onto a small clearing filled with miniature headstones and a number of carved stone blocks set into the ground. The stones bore the names of famous people: Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe, Errol Flynn.
“The cat graveyard?” Ernie said. “There’s no Tolstoy here.”
“This graveyard was built after his death,” Papa said. “So it can’t be him.”
Bumby grinned, then plunged into the foliage, brushing aside fronds and vines, the others on his heels. “The graveyard was built after he died, but Tolstoy was his cat—he revered Tolstoy for his descriptions of war—and it’s a little known fact that Tolstoy was the first cat buried on the property, and that he was buried by Hemingway himself.”
Champ snapped his fingers. “Yeah, I remember reading that in one of the bios.”
Ten feet behind the cat cemetery, almost obscured by the vegetation, was a rectangular stone set into the ground. Bumby kicked away the vines and weeds and bent down.
He read aloud. “Here lies Tolstoi, our beloved friend and ally.”
Ernie and Champ looked shocked, and Ernie reached down and pried the stone loose. Packed earth lay beneath. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured.
Bumby said, “It’s clear, gentleman, that this grave hasn’t been disturbed in quite some time.” He looked upwards, at the night sky that was already tinged with pink light. Lester would be up soon, and the first worshippers were probably already drooling at the gates. “We’ll come back tomorrow night with a shovel, and I think it’s safe to say that if we find something, we can know for sure who led us to it.”
Ernie and Champ nodded, and Papa crossed his arms and said nothing.
The next day they lost Champ.
A fishermen found him face up in the harbor, his poor lifeless head bumping gently against the concrete wall next to Monty’s Seafood Palace. The fisherman screamed, and then a group of early-bird tourists from Utah rushed over and screamed, the people across the street in Key Lime Nirvana screamed, and then it was business as usual on the block.
Papa heard the news first. He was down the street in Mallory Square, preening for the morning crowd, and when he heard the screams he felt a cold prickle of fear. He gathered up his tips and went down to the harbor to see what the fuss was about. His face went white when he saw the police gathered around poor Champ, and he called Bumby and Ernie and told them to meet him right goddamn now at the pastry place on Duval.
Papa was shoving down his second apple cinnamon croissant when Ernie and Bumby joined him at the patio table, both as pale as he had been. Ernie’s eyes were red and he was about to lose it, which the Man most certainly would have frowned upon in public.
Papa looked straight at Bumby. He didn’t really think Bumby had done it, or Papa wouldn’t have been sitting there, but it was a good opportunity to act tough and put Bumby in his place. “So where’d you go after we split last night?”
Bumby’s mouth dropped. “That’s all you have to say, you Neanderthal? One of my closest friends was just murdered and you ask me where I was?”
Papa guffawed. “Closest friends. He thought you were a lily-livered writer who didn’t know how to steer a boat.”
“Shut up, Papa. Not now.”
“So where were you?”
“None of your damned business. If you don’t trust me then why don’t you go to the police?”
Papa cocked his head as he chewed. “Maybe we all should. Together.”
“Fine by me.”
Ernie said, “You don’t think he’s doing it?”
“Who?”
Ernie looked nervously around the patio, which had begun to fill with patrons. He lowered his voice. “You know who. Because we disturbed him.”
Papa stared at him for a moment, then shook his head and turned back to Bumby. “What are the possible motives for these murders? By my count we have competition-”
“Competition?”
“For the Head Hemingway.”
“Then I suppose that makes you suspect numero uno.”
Papa chuckled. “Cheap shot. If it was me I’d have done it a long time ago.”
“Maybe you came in last place at the finals one too many times. Maybe a herd of tourists left you standing with your dick in your hand in Mallory Square and came to one of us one too many times.” Bumby leaned in. “Maybe you finally snapped, Papa. Maybe your deeds finally matched your tough words.”
“You’re lucky I don’t pound your flabby ass right here. We’ll see how many adoring fans you get after I turn your charming red alcoholic face into a purple mess.” He tried to stare Bumby down, but Bumby wasn’t even looking at him anymore.
“Jealousy,” Bumby said as he watched the early shoppers whisk down Duval, “is one motive, or maybe someone doesn’t want us poking around the old house. Maybe there’s something there someone doesn’t want us to find.”
The greed dripped from Papa’s words. “Maybe there really are lost pages, or even a new book. Can you imagine? It’d be worth millions.”
“Even assuming there is one, which is impossible,” Bumby said, “who would know about it and keep it secret?”
“Maybe it’s that half-wit caretaker.”
“He’s creepy enough, but why give us access in the first place?”
“Yeah, it don’t make sense.” Papa snapped his fingers. “What about that wealthy douchebag from France? The one who always pays us to do his birthday?”
“Jean-Paul? In the huge house a few doors down? He is one of the biggest donors to the museum.”
“And,” Papa said with a flash of insight, “if there’s something valuable in there, he probably wants to keep it for himself. Probably goes in there at night and wanks it while he looks at it.”
“Maybe he pays off the caretaker too. It could make sense—maybe he was in there the same night we were, and saw what we were doing.”
Ernie started to weep quietly, and Bumby put his hand over Ernie’s. “God, Ernie, I’m sorry. We’ve been acting like a bunch of horses’ asses.” He pulled out a flask and three tumblers, poured everyone a shot, and held up his glass. “To Champ, a good man, a great fisherman, and an even better Hemingway. May his soul rest in peace above the waters and pages he loved so dear.”
“Here here,” Ernie said, and even Papa felt empty.
They clinked glasses, downed their shots and sat in silence for the rest of the morning.
For lunch they had lobster rolls at Blue Heaven, an eclectic little spot where the Man used to referee boxing matches. They smacked their fat lips at the delicious food, had another couple of drinks to work up their courage, and piled into Papa’s rusty golf cart for the ride to the police station.
They parked and crossed Roosevelt, the Atlantic Ocean hovering in the background, palms rustling, a rare overcast sky the only blemish. They bunched together as they walked inside the station, not wanting to be singled out, a product of living on the outskirts of society.
The station was full of the usual drunks and deadbeats who stuffed the town like a rotten Thanksgiving turkey. They came to Key West in droves, those who couldn’t make it anywhere else and then pretended they were living it up in paradise, whooping and hollering down the packaged edginess of Duval and eking out a pathetic existence in the rat-infested dives and trailer parks outside Old Town.
The Hemingways grimaced as the cops stopped working to watch them, wondering who ordered the practical joke. Papa strode to the front desk and slapped his beefy forearms down. “We need to speak to a detective.”
The bald cop behind the desk looked up from his papers and pushed his glasses higher up on his Roman nose. “What’s that, pops?”
“I said we need to talk to a detective.”
“About what?”
“About the murders.”
The cop’s eyebrows rose and he picked up a phone. “Sarge, you’ve got some…people…in here say they want to talk about the murders.”
The cop nodded at the phone, hung up and then led them down a hallway to a tiny glass-walled office overlooking the ocean. The plate on the door read “Sergeant Cohn.” The cop opened the door and they filed inside.
Sergeant Cohn was an average-sized man with a round face and droopy eyes that gave him a hangdog look. He had sandy hair and sunspots on his forehead, and looked more like a dentist with a golfing habit than a cop.
Papa seemed to gain courage from Sergeant Cohn’s bland appearance. “We want to know why more isn’t being done—”
“Sit down,” Sergeant Cohn said.
They sat.
“I imagine you’re some of the most nervous people in town right now,” he said. His voice, though quiet, possessed an assumption of control that was far more intimidating than bluster. “We’re not going to discuss my job and how I’m doing it. All three of you were on my short list of people to see today, so I’m glad you came. Now, do any of you have anything to tell me about this investigation?”
They remained silent, and he smiled a most non-dentist smile. “If you do, I suggest you tell me right now, because I will find out.”
Papa wanted to blurt out that Bumby had no alibi, but he could hardly lead the Sergeant down that path.
“Nah,” Papa said, with a poor attempt at humility. “We’re afraid we’re next on the list, and wanted to know if you knew anything we should know about.”
Sergeant Cohn looked at them in turn, holding his gaze on each one until they looked away. “I don’t suppose this has anything to do with the Hemingway look-alike contest at the end of this month? The one with the five thousand dollar prize?” He looked at Papa, and cocked his head towards Bumby. “The one I believe your friend here has won three years in a row?”
Bumby was surprised that Sergeant Cohn had recognized him.
“Of course not,” Papa said. “I mean, yeah I’d love to win that, but five thou is hardly worth killing someone over.”
“What you meant to say, I’m sure, was that no contest, no amount of money, is worth killing anyone over.”
“Sure, yeah, of course,” Papa sat back in indignation. “I’m not so good with words sometimes.”
“You do realize you’re one of two Hemingways on the island with a criminal record, and the only regular Hemingway still alive who’s never placed in the money?”
“Don’t remind me,” Papa muttered. “But I ain’t killed no one.”
The Sergeant shifted his gaze to Bumby. “Congratulations on being the top Hemingway impersonator in the world.” He nodded in approval as he studied Bumby. “You’ve even got those knowing eyes, the strained look on your forehead, the creases next to the nose. A model of Hemingway perfection, and a writer to boot! You other two must be a little jealous.”
Bumby started to relax, and the Sergeant said, “Funny, though. I’ve been asking around, and it seems that on the night of the last murder you left the bar before these other two gents.”
Bumby opened his mouth to retort, but the Sergeant held up his hand. “You and I can chat another time, by ourselves, about your alibis and your prior with a knife.” Bumby’s face fell.
That was interesting; I didn’t know the old fartwad had it in him. He must have accidentally stabbed someone with his pen.
“Now let me ask you gents a question. I’m having a little trouble with a certain piece of evidence. The coroner tells me that with two of the victims, one of who was Champ, there was evidence of a struggle. Well, not so much a struggle, but more of a beating. It seems these two victims both had stomach bruising, as well as broken noses and bruised temples.” He looked at Ernie. “The coroner tells me that were he a betting man, he’d bet that someone with some boxing skill had a hand in at least these two murders.”
Ernie whispered, “It is him,” at the same time Papa’s mouth dropped and he turned to stare at Ernie.
“What was that?” the Sergeant said to Ernie.
“Nuttin’,” Ernie mumbled.
The Sergeant picked up a pen and started twirling it. “A funny statistic: do you realize that in the vast majority of murder raps, the victims are killed by someone they know?”
Ernie’s eyes narrowed. “Why’s everyone looking at me? Yeah I’m a fighter, so what. Champ was my best friend, so you can just kill that crazy thought right now.”
“I see. Your best friend who you beat up five years ago for sleeping with your now ex-wife?”
Ernie waved a hand, but his voice was weaker than before. “We settled that, and got past it. Bitch was sleepin’ with half the Hemingways, not just Champ, and Champ and me weren’t so close then anyway, you know?”
The Sergeant just smiled.
“Anyway, like you said, I was in the bar.”
“I wasn’t clear, and I apologize. According to the coroner, Champ’s time of death was approximately 4am, and all of you had already left Sloppy’s.”
“Hey,” Papa said. “We came in here for some answers and you’re here accusing us of killing our friend!”
“Ah, the passion of the wicked man falsely accused. There’s nothing quite like it. If, of course, that’s indeed the case here.”
“Whatever. I’m outta here,” Papa said, though his eyes flicked to the Sergeant for approval.
The Sergeant shooed them away. “Please, please, enjoy your day. I hope I answered your questions. Like I said, I’ll be stopping by to see you soon.”
They shuffled towards the door and the Sergeant said, “Oh, and gentlemen? You do good work here. I’m a huge fan, you know. The Old Man and The Sea’s my personal favorite. That part when the sharks are circling is just genius, I tell you. There’s always a force in the universe more powerful than the last. Anyway,” he said, glancing at the mass of thunderclouds in the background, “stay dry.”
