A Reasonable Doubt by Susan Sloan (free novels .txt) 📕

it anyway.  Spent the afternoons with his mother, though she didn’t know it half the time, poor woman.  Then he’d come and have supper with me and the wife.  After that, I’d drive him back to town, over to that bar where he was workin’.”

“And he never talked about Dale Scott?”

Graywolf shook his head.  “He never once mentioned the cop, or that he was havin’ trouble with anyone.  He never had a mean word to say about nobody, not even the folks that stiffed him for work he did.  He always said they probably had it tougher than he did.”

“And that Sunday?”

“As far as I remember, that Sunday wasn’t no different than any other,” Graywolf said.  “He came.  He spent time with his mother.  He ate his dinner.  He left.”

“What time was that, exactly?” Joe asked.

“Same as always,” the Indian said. “I had him over to the bar by nine o’clock.”  He shook his head.  “I gotta tell you, Mister, I don’t know what happened after I left him off.  He was perfectly fine when he got out of the truck, and he was thinkin’ perfectly clear, as far as I could tell.  So he had to have been provoked real bad to do anything like what it is they’re sayin’ he did.”

. . .

Miss Polly Peterson ran the Bayview Avenue Boarding House, and had been running it for more than forty years.  A round, comfortable spinster woman in her late seventies, she had seen them all come and go in her time -- from the misplaced and the displaced, to the proud and the pitiful, to those on their way up and those on their way down, to those who were simply passing through.

“And which of those categories would you say Jason Lightfoot falls into?” Joe inquired from an overstuffed chair in the parlor of the scrupulously tidy Victorian, as he politely tried to balance a cup of coffee and a plate with fresh blueberry muffins on his knees.

“Jason?” Miss Polly replied with a bright smile.  “Oh, he doesn’t fit into any of them.  He’s a lovely boy.”

Joe’s eyebrows shot up.  It was certainly not a term that he would have used to describe the Indian.  “How so?” he asked.

“He’s sweet-tempered, he’s got a good heart, and he wouldn’t hurt a soul,” she told the investigator.  “I don’t care what others may be saying.  They don’t know him the way some of us do.  And not one of us who really knows that boy can even begin to understand what all this nonsense is about.”

“He killed a policeman,” Joe reminded her.

“If he did, and mind you, I’m not saying that I believe he did any such thing, then he must have had a real good reason,” Miss Polly declared.  “The Jason I know would go a mile out of his way not to so much as step on a spider.  And he’s had a lot of opportunities, too.  All those people he’s done for over the years who never paid him, just took advantage of his good work and his good nature.  Believe me, he’s had plenty of reason and plenty of opportunities.  And he never did anything to any of them.”

“I take that to mean you like him?”

Miss Polly nodded.  “I most certainly do,” she said without the slightest hesitation.  “I know he has his problems with his mother -- her going into such a funk over losing his dad, and turning to the bottle and all.  And I know he has trouble with the bottle, himself.  But he’s a good boy.  I tried for years to get him to come stay with me, instead of living in that box of his.  Told him -- breakfast, lunch, dinner, laundry, and a clean room.  It wouldn’t cost him a penny.  Told him he could fix things up around the place for his rent, and I wouldn’t take advantage of him.  But he always just smiled and said he’d do for me anytime I wanted, but he liked living in that box.  Although I’m sure I don’t know why.”

“You think it was something about him wanting to be his own man, maybe?” Joe asked.

“Maybe,” Miss Polly conceded.  “But then again -- if he’d done what I told him he should do, well maybe he wouldn’t be in the situation he’s in now, would he?”

. . .

Joe sat at the bar, nursing a beer, as he waited.

The Last Call Bar & Grill -- a bit dark, a bit seedy, with well-worn wooden floors, good beer on tap, and the irresistible smell of hearty cooking -- was, for the most part, frequented by what the locals called boat people.  Billy Fugate had worked the docks in his youth and had learned, firsthand, just how much dockhands and fishermen liked their liquor.  He had bought the place from the previous owner’s widow some thirty years ago.

“Hear tell you wanna talk to me?” he said.

“Sure do, if you’ve got a few minutes,” Joe replied.

“I been waitin’ six months for someone to come talk to me,” the barkeeper said, leaning thick arms on the polished mahogany bar that had already seen over a century of use.  “But nobody ever did.  And now you come along, and hell, you ain’t even a cop no more.”

“You mean, the police never interviewed you?” Joe said, surprised.

“Nope,” Billy declared.  “Don’t know how many times I told Dancer, it ain’t right -- they want to convict a man for murder, they should at least talk to the people who know him.”

Joe smiled at that.  “I take that to mean Dancer’s a regular here.”

“As a matter of fact, he is,” Billy conceded.  “We were real happy when he showed up to watch out for Miss Lily.  And even though he thinks different, and still beats himself up over it, it wasn’t his fault -- what happened to her.”

“Well then, you were probably wondering why we didn’t show up to talk to you, either.”

“Not really,” the barkeeper said.  “Dancer told me you’d