Liberty Square: A Kate Delafield Mystery by Forrest Katherine V

Author:Forrest, Katherine V. [Forrest, Katherine V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781883523664
Publisher: Spinsters Ink
Published: 2018-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

“It’s of no importance at all,” Kate told Carver.

She, Carver, and Duffy sat together in the Concord Room, at the same table where she had earlier found Aimee and Bernie. For this interview there was no tape recorder. Duffy was again drinking coffee, sitting calmly back in his chair, cup and saucer in hand; Carver leaned toward Kate in grim ferocity.

His lips hardly moved as he spoke: “Give me at least one good reason, Detective Delafield, why we should believe that your engagement to Charles A. Pearson has no importance to this case.”

She could imagine that many suspects had been impaled on Carver’s feral stare, especially with Duffy’s body English communicating that he had surrendered full rein to his partner. “I can give you at least three,” she answered, and ticked them off on her fingers. “First and foremost, it was twenty-five years ago, and over with back then. Second, Cap is an MIA. Third, when we talked before all you said was that you’d found a reference to Cap in Allan’s room—why would I attach any significance to that?”

“Detective,” Carver said, his tone no less hostile, “we have no way of telling what you were doing in that room—”

“I gave you my statement.”

“—and frankly, it’s pretty clear you have no intention of coming clean with us.”

Kate held his stare and did not reply.

In the silence, Duffy offered, “Well, Kate’s a detective.”

The smile that split Carver’s face was so brilliant that Kate thought of a coconut cracking open to reveal its dazzling white contents. “You do keep your own counsel, Detective,” Carver said.

As if you don’t, she thought.

“I admire cops like that,” he said.

“We all do it,” she said neutrally.

Duffy leaned forward, put his elbows on the table, and looked at her with cool gray eyes, all evidence of congeniality gone. “Tell us about Cap Pearson.”

Hoping to narrow their area of interest, Kate temporized. “What do you want to know?”

“Detective,” Carver said with a chastising head shake, “answer the question.”

“I met him right after I was in-country,” Kate began, trying to dredge up memory and to arrange her thoughts at the same time. “Cap arrived two days after I did. He was the only junior officer I’d met up to that point who hadn’t been sent right to the field. Infantry-trained officers normally see action the first part of their tour, then rotate to the rear. But Cap was assigned to S-Five.”

She waved off Duffy’s offer of coffee; she’d had so much to drink she felt waterlogged. “S-Five was a goodwill program, a small unit of Marines dealing directly with Vietnamese in the countryside. Building roads, digging wells, minor medical care, things like that.” She said with a half-smile, “It was called the Civic Action Program. We used to tease Cap that he’d been assigned to the program because it had the same initials he did. But he was perfect for it—he was the quintessential all-American boy.”

“That’s how Rachel Summer described him. Melanie Shaw says he was…” Duffy paused, as if to quote her, “a fine-looking young man with great charisma and great character.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.