First Cases II by Robert J Randisi

Author:Robert J Randisi [Randisi, Robert J]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“Henrie O.!” Lavinia’s voice rose in dismay Tuesday morning. The familiar nickname is special to only my oldest and dearest of friends. It was coined by my late husband, who always claimed I packed more twists and surprises into a single day than O. Henry ever thought about investing in a short story. Rather gallant of Richard, I always thought. “Oh, Henrie O., are you all right?”

“Of course I am,” I replied briskly and perhaps a little irritably. Lavinia does have a tendency to bleat. “It wasn’t nice, but the point is, Lavinia, the damn fool police have arrested that pathetic Calvin, and he didn’t do it. So, I need some facts.”

That settled Lavinia down. Lavinia is quite good with facts. Despite her motherly, meatloaf appearance, she was a top financial reporter in Chicago for many years. I made a sheaf of notes.

That was how I spent the day, gathering data, a good deal of it on the victim.

Mollie Epsley was twenty-seven. Never married. Which didn’t surprise me, despite her remarkable blonde loveliness. She’d finished high school, attended a secretarial school, and refined her skills at a paralegal institute. She was by all accounts very quick, very competent, and very overbearing. She found it difficult to hold jobs, and I didn’t have any trouble finding out why. As the office manager at one law firm snapped, “She wouldn’t mind her own business. Always poking and prying, wanting to know too much about people. And the more they tried not to tell her, the more determined she was to know.”

This sounded promising. “Did she try to use her knowledge for gain?”

The office manager quickly backed off. “Oh, no, nothing like that. She loved to gossip. She liked to know things about people and tell the world. Especially things that would make them uncomfortable. She was a nasty, spiteful woman.”

I would agree to that.

Calvin came off as one of life’s losers.

“Just a damn sap,” his cousin said sadly. “No guts. No sense. But believe me, Mrs. Collins, he would never hurt anyone. He would have been better off if he had lashed out now and then. But he didn’t, and I’ll never believe he could strangle anyone. I don’t care how awful she was to him.”

So Calvin was ineffectual and pathetic, but neither of those qualities translated to violence. However, a cousin’s testimony and my opinion wouldn’t sway the lieutenant. No. I had to come up with some hard facts if Calvin were to be saved.

Some of my legwork had already been accomplished by Judi Myerson, an enterprising reporter for the local newspaper. She hadn’t written the lead story on the murder. That belonged to the police reporter, Sam Frizzell. I scanned it, but it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know. After all, I’d been right on the spot. But Judi, probably a young reporter, was assigned to do a sidebar on the Scholar’s Inn apartments and the residents’ reactions to the murder. I could tell she’d put heart and soul into it and come up with very little.

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