Her Lost Alibi by David Berens (e reader .txt) 📕

Amber considered this for a second, then asked, “Do you have a whiteboard?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

He stood and walked to the wood paneled wall featuring a large antique map of Savannah. With his fingertips, he pulled the bottom of the map and it flew upward like a spring-loaded window blind. A pristine whiteboard appeared beneath it. A tray held a box of unopened markers.

“Never have had the opportunity to use it.” He opened the box and pulled out a black marker. “Shall I?”

“Oh, sure. Let’s see. First, let’s put the names: Marcario Morales, Eric Torres, and,” she paused, “and Joseph Cross.”

She went through each detail, trying not to leave anything out. Crime scene, timeline, witnesses. A thought struck her. “The witnesses,” she said. “Do we know their names?”

Minter sucked air through his teeth. “I believe we have a statement from each of them. Ah, yes, here it is.”

He handed her two single-sided sheets of paper. “This is it?” She asked. “They convicted Morales with these two sheets of paper.”

“Occam’s Razor, my dear. The explanation that is the simplest is most likely true.”

She scanned the first statement. It was pretty straightforward. A woman—in her teens at the time of the murder—said she was hanging out with Marc and Eric the night of the shooting. They were having an argument. Eric got pissed and took off. Marc followed him. She followed them. By the time she got there, she saw Marc standing over Eric holding the gun. Her signature at the bottom was nearly as illegible as Amber’s crayon-eque notes from the night before, but the two initials were clear: O.G.

“Couldn’t be … could it?” She asked, inhaling a long slow breath.

“My dear, I am horrible at mind reading,” Minter said. “Just ask my second wife.”

She held up a finger. “I’ll be right back.”

Without explaining to him, she jogged downstairs, crossed the sidewalk to the police station, ignored Fat Rick’s snarky comment about her hair, and began rifling through her trash can. It didn’t take long before she found the note Rita had brought her from the tip line.

Another piece snapped into place. The name of the tipster was Olanta Greene. Back in Minter’s conference room, she gave him a cursory explanation as she dialed the number she left. When Olanta answered, she gave Minter the universal “shush” sign.

Within minutes, the two women had fallen into what felt more like a conversation about the wacky men in their lives than an interview. Olanta’s accent was decidedly Brooklyn, but she revealed that she had moved to New York to become an actress. As with many of the wannabe superstars that stepped off Greyhound buses with delusions of grandeur, she soon became a waitress and moved into a matchbox apartment.

“Yeah, I was dating Marc at the time,” she said. “He was a barback or bartender or something like that. Happens all the time in the service industry.”

Amber nodded along as she listened, her pen scratching across her pad in something just better than short hand.

“I don’t know what it was, maybe because they looked so much alike back then and all, but me and Eric, well, we had a one-night thing. Marc didn’t even come to me when he found out. He just went straight to Eric. Told him he had disrespected him.”

Minter gave Amber a questioning look, but she waved him off.

“It was okay for a while, but then Marc really changed.”

“Changed how?”

“He started talking all crazy about Eric and how he was going to show him what happened when someone disrespected him and all. He just got really obsessed and stuff.”

“Did you keep seeing Marc?”

“I did for a while, but then he really got paranoid and weird.”

“He was always checking the door like fifty times when we went out to be sure it was locked. It was like he thought people were out to get him,” Olanta said. “And God with the hand washing. He scrubbed his hands until they cracked and bled sometimes. He got all O.C.D. and shit.”

Amber wrote the letters O.C.D. and circled them a few times. The picture was getting clearer all the time.

“It all came to a head when they bumped into each other at that package store that night.”

“Wait, so they ran into each other at a liquor store?”

“That’s what I heard,” she said. “Like literally, Marc bumped his shoulder into Eric’s almost knocking him down.”

“They say Eric just passed him by, paid for his beer, and walked out.” She paused for a moment. “And I know that probably pissed Marc off even more. It’s one thing to disrespect a man with his girl, but to just walk away from him? That wasn’t going to fly.”

Amber’s pen had stopped. This was all new territory. She wondered if anyone had ever heard this account of the murder.

“What I heard was that Marc followed Eric all the way to the Oracle Lounge, back in that day, you could pay a bottle fee and bring in your own booze. He and Eric got into it and the bouncers threw them both out into the back alley. I was waiting tables at the Oracle and saw the whole thing. When I saw them get tossed, I ran outside. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, maybe two, that I made it out there. By that time, Marc had shot him twice. I fainted straight away. Didn’t wake up until the police were there.”

Amber was stunned. This version of the story didn’t make any sense. It didn’t line up with what her father had told her. “But … but, you didn’t actually see Marc shoot him?”

For a second, Olanta seemed defensive, “I know what you’re going to say, but like I told you. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes between the time they got kicked out, and the time I got out there. And when I did, I saw Marc crouched over Eric with the gun in