Murder Inside the Beltway by Margaret Truman

Author:Margaret Truman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780345509666
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2008-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Hall contacted Patmos’s two alibi witnesses, both of whom confirmed that he’d been at the fundraiser.

“Was he there all night?” Hall asked each.

One of them laughed. “How should I know?” he said. “There were hundreds of people milling around. I saw Jimmy at the start of the evening. I think I saw him at the end when he left with Senator Barrett.”

“And in between?”

“I’m sure he was there.”

“Because you saw him there all evening?”

“No. I mean, why would he leave? Hey, what’s this all about? Is Jimmy in some kind of trouble?”

“No, not at all,” Hall said. “Just a routine inquiry. Thanks for your time.”

“He doesn’t have an alibi,” she told Jackson after ending the second call. “He could have skipped out of the event for hours without anybody noticing.”

“He’s like the rest of the men who we only know were involved with her because they showed up on tape. Buying her services as a hooker is one thing, coming up with evidence that they were involved in her murder is another. Know what I think? I think that the Curzon murder is never going to be solved, not unless one of her johns has a burst of conscience and strolls into Metro pleading to be locked up.”

“That’d be nice,” Mary said.

“I suppose we might as well go back to Curzon’s apartment building,” Jackson said through a yawn.

“Late night?” she asked as they walked to their car.

“Yeah. Couldn’t sleep. I tried you and—”

“I heard your messages. I caught dinner and a movie with Betty. I thought I told you I was planning to do that.”

“Maybe you did. I must have forgotten.”

“You sounded agitated. Right word?”

He smiled. “As good a word as any to describe how I felt. I had a long talk with my father.”

“About the job?”

“Uh-huh. I told him I was thinking of quitting.”

“And he said?”

“He told me not to let Hatcher drive me away.”

“Good advice.”

“My dad always has good advice, but I don’t always listen.”

“Sounds like you’re listening this time.”

“Maybe I’m growing up.”

They spent the rest of the day canvassing residents of Rosalie’s building again, including the elderly couple who lived downstairs from the victim.

“Sorry to bother you,” Jackson told the wife when she finally let them in after spending what seemed an eternity at the peephole, and asking questions of him through the closed door.

“We thought you and your husband might have remembered something about the night your neighbor was killed that you didn’t recall the first time we questioned you,” Mary said.

She shook her head. “Like I told you the last time, I mind my own business.”

A cynical grunt came from her husband, who sat in a chair and continued to read a newspaper.

“I know this is a difficult question, ma’am,” Jackson said, “but were you and your husband aware of what Ms. Curzon did for a living?”

She energetically worked her mouth as though having inadvertently chewed a hot pepper at a Chinese restaurant.

“She was a whore,” the husband said. “Nice looking, too.”

“Harry!”

“Well,” he said, dropping

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