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

noise as he caught sight of Joe coming through the front door of The Hangout.

“Thanks for meeting me,” Joe replied, dropping onto the barstool beside his former colleague.

“Any time,” Stiversen said with a smile.  “Still working the long hours, I see.”

“Yup,” Joe confirmed.

“Okay, you called me,” the police officer declared, as soon as a bottle of beer had been placed on the bar in front of his friend.  “So, what can I do for you that I can do for you without jeopardizing my job any more than I already have?”

Joe chuckled before he frowned.  “I guess what I want to know is how come Dale was where he was on the night he was killed?”

It was past nine, and Joe had been to every bar on both sides of lower Broad Street and then to every other bar within a reasonable distance of the place in the back alley where Scott’s body had been found.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, was there an operation going down that night that he was involved in?  Was there a raid that had been planned?  Was he meeting a contact?  I guess what I’m getting at, what I’m trying to figure out is -- what was he doing in the back alley that night?”

Stiversen looked blank.  “I don’t know as I’ve got an answer for you,” he said.  “Nobody ever said anything about what he was doing there.  I’m not even sure the question ever came up.  We just assumed he was out on his own and something in the alley caught his attention.  Maybe the chief would know more.”

“I guess I’ll have to ask him,” Joe said.

“Go ahead,” Stiversen said, gesturing with his head.  “He’s down at the other end.”

Sure enough, when he looked past his friend, Joe could see the police chief seated at the far end of the bar, engaged in an animated conversation with Port Hancock’s mayor.

“To tell you the truth, I haven’t a clue,” Kent McAllister said, when Joe made his way over.  “Dale and Randy worked the docks as part of their drug detail, but there was no operation on for that night -- at least, not one I was aware of.  In fact, best as I recall, neither one of them was even on the schedule for that night.  But you might double-check with Randy about that.”

. . .

“I don’t know what Dale was doing down on Broad Street that night,” Randy Hitchens, the clean-cut, boyish, earnest former partner of the deceased detective declared when Joe and Stiversen caught up with him on the second floor of the police station the next morning.  “We weren’t on duty.  In fact, I was home all night with a head cold.”

“And you didn’t see him, at any time that night?”

“No,” Hitchens confirmed.  “Like I said, I was in with a cold -- just me and a box of Kleenex.  Real romantic, huh?”

Stiversen wasn’t participating in the conversation, but he was listening.  He looked from Joe to Hitchens and then back to Joe again, but added nothing.

“Did you talk to him that night?” Joe persisted.

“Yeah, I did talk to him,” Hitchens said.  “It was sometime around eleven, I think, but he was calling from home and he didn’t say anything about going out.”  The detective’s pale blue eyes now reflected concern and remorse, and his voice was beginning to crack.  “I wish to hell I had.  Head cold or not, I’d have had his back.”

Joe nodded.  “Well, thanks, anyway.”

“He should have taken the deal, you know,” Hitchens said.

“What are you talking about?” Joe asked.  “What deal?”

“The thirty-to-life -- he should’ve taken it.”

“You know about that?”

“Sure,” Hitchens confirmed.  “Everyone knows about it.”

“Didn’t realize it was common knowledge,” Joe murmured.

“Don’t know how common the knowledge was, but as far as I’m concerned, it was better than he deserved,” the detective declared.  “Glad he turned it down, though.  This way, I’ll get to see him hang.”

Joe nodded thoughtfully, thanked the detective again, and then let Stiversen walk him down the stairs.

“Did you know, too, Arnie?” he asked.

“About the deal?” Stiversen replied.  “Yeah, I knew.  And I can’t say as I really blame Randy for feeling like he does.  If it had been my partner, I might be feeling the same way.”

“Yeah, well I guess it doesn’t much matter how I might feel,” Joe said.  “I still have a job to do.”

“I get that,” the police officer said.  “And as long as you get that I got to do my job, too, I’ll be happy to help you out any way I can.  As for Dale, I figure he probably just decided to go out on his own that night -- and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Could be,” Joe conceded.  But it didn’t make any sense, and he knew it.  And he had a gut feeling that Stiversen knew it, too.

. . .

Lauren Scott opened the door to her gracious Carey Meadows home on the east side of Port Hancock.  The pleasant residential neighborhood may not have been on the same scale as Morgan Hill, but it was certainly several steps up from the kind of community that a police officer could rightfully have afforded to live in.  It was generally assumed that Maynard Purcell had had a significant hand in its purchase.

“Come on in, Joe,” Lauren invited, her smile genuine.

The private investigator followed her across the foyer, through a large sunken living room, out a pair of French doors, and onto a slate patio.  A pot of fresh coffee and a plate of cookies sat on a glass-topped table.

“I don’t get many visitors now,” Lauren said, sitting in one of the chairs that surrounded the table, and pouring out two cups of coffee.  “Oh, my parents come over every couple of days, of course, and friends visit, but it’s not like it was, well, right after Dale died.”

“That must be a big relief,” Joe said.  “Having to put on a smiling face and keep it up when all