A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(16)

“Maybe I’ll give it a try if I live.”

At last, she thought. “Tell me why the police are after you.”

“It started, as a lot of stupid stories do, in a bar. I was there, and so was a guy named Nick Bauermeister. I didn’t know his name at the time, but I noticed him. He was about thirty I’d say, maybe a little older. He was drunk and loud. It was around midnight and I was getting ready to go home, because I always figure if you haven’t met somebody who will change your life by midnight, she isn’t coming.”

“Good policy,” said Jane.

“I thought it was fairly practical,” he said. “I was heading for the door and this guy stepped in my way.”

“Why?”

“Stupid and drunk.”

“How big was this guy?”

“Slightly bigger than me.”

“Bigger than you? Wow.”

“Slightly. He looked like a bleary-eyed Viking. He took a poke at me and I sidestepped and dropped him. He was one of those hopeless guys who does that, and then gets up. It’s the getting up that hurts you.”

“I can see how that might be,” said Jane.

“Well, sure. I’m just going home. All he has to do is lie there for less than ten seconds while he thinks about why I might not have been his best choice. But he’s not a thinking man. He’s the ‘back up in your face’ guy. So when he came for me again, I knew I’d have to hit him a little harder and faster. I did. Maybe five times. Then I went home.”

“And?”

“And the next day the police came to my house after work to say that they’d picked this Nick guy up off the floor and taken him to the hospital last night. They were considering charging me with assault.”

“And you said . . .”

“I said, ‘I hope you won’t waste your time doing that, because the bar was full of regulars who saw him take a swing at me out of drunken belligerence. That’s probably why nobody helped him up before you got there. They didn’t want to have to knock him back down themselves.’”

“I take it the police decided to waste their time.”

“They did. They made it misdemeanor assault. I pleaded self-defense, and they set a hearing. It was supposed to be May third. I got a public defender and lined up a dozen witnesses. Then, on April twenty-fifth, the cops came to my place again. They said this Nick Bauermeister had gotten murdered, and they liked me as the suspect.”

“How was he killed?”

“He was shot with something on the order of a thirty-aught-six rifle from a moderate distance—maybe a hundred yards. He lived in the country with a girlfriend, and they shot him through a lighted window at night. This was not great, because in the western half of the state there are probably six people who couldn’t have made that shot, and I don’t know any of them. But because I’d been in the army and gone to Iraq and Afghanistan, I made a great sniper suspect. Prosecutors love it when you’ve served your country.”

“So they just assumed you killed him because of that fight?”

“Well, you know how we are.”

“Who? Veterans?”

“Indians.”

“Wily,” she said. “Skulking around in the woods, tracking and hunting people.”

“Yep.”

“In other words, they didn’t have any real suspects?”

“Apparently not.”

“Do you have an alibi for the night of the murder?”

“I was at my mother’s house until nine, and then went home and got to bed around ten. I had to be at work on a construction job at six the next morning.”

“You had witnesses to the fight in the bar, and I assume the police didn’t have a murder weapon or anybody to place you at the crime scene.”

“Right. No evidence.”

“So why did you take off?”

“Because evidence was starting to appear.”

“What kind?”

“Somebody who said he sold me a thirty-aught-six rifle for cash at a garage sale. Not just sold some guy a rifle. Sold one to me, picked my picture out of a stack of pictures, and remembered my name.”

“Interesting. Did you know him?”

“Never seen him; never heard his name before. I’ll bet I haven’t gone to a garage sale since my mother took me at the age of fifteen. Right about then I used to outgrow my clothes in a couple of hours, so she bought some of them secondhand.”

“What is his name?”

“Slawicky,” said Jimmy. “Walter Slawicky.”

“That’s progress. We know the name of the man who is trying to frame you. Or one of them, if there are more.”

“Not enough progress.”

“It wasn’t a good idea to take off.”

“Wasn’t it?” he said.

“They’re looking hard for you, Jimmy.”

“How hard?”

“They’re watching your mother’s house. As soon as I drove up and sat down on the porch, two state policemen drove up, probably to see if the car that had just arrived had brought you home. And there’s a state cop who’s a regular tracker a few miles behind me. I looked in his wallet to be sure that’s what he was. His name is Isaac Lloyd, and he’s a sergeant.”