Page 175 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

“Mr. Kriturs,” she resumed calmly, as if she hadn’t just heated me
to the boiling point yet again, “was not at his residence when the
second murder was committed. You found him late the next day at a
motel near the racetrack. He told you he was having the duplex
painted and getting security bars installed on the windows, so he and
his tenant were staying away a couple of nights while the place aired
out. You drove by his duplex, and it would have been obvious to
anyone passing by that it was temporarily unoccupied during the
remodeling. Was he in contact with any acquaintances at the track?”
“No. He kept to himself. He likes to gamble, but he’s not a party
animal.”
“Harder to find but easier to isolate than those sociable types,”
pontificated Lieutenant Gramercy. “Ms. Creighton, the student
waitress, does not work on weeknights, and, having no classes
scheduled, went upstate for a couple of days to visit high school
friends and do research in the library at the local college. Only those
three young women knew she was coming, and they putatively had
no connection with the Simulian family.”
I rolled my eyes. She did not notice.
“Juror number eight, Grant Bloch, was at home, asleep upstairs
that night. His mother evidently did not keep him up.”
“Another easy mark, given that fire escape,” I said. “I don’t think
he felt himself in any danger until Rea Rainger died. From his
responses, I concluded that he had formed an attachment to her
during the deliberations. The testimony had been rather abstract and
boring to him, and the verdict merely a sort of word game. Rea’s
death suddenly made the menace of the Simulians terribly real. As I
was leaving his house, I heard him crying out to his invalid mother
for comfort. Pathetic!”
“Perhaps,” replied Labelle. Did she think the guy was acting, or
was it my analysis of his character that was open to doubt? “Jerry Ko
was safe on the fifteenth: he and a couple of his coworkers were
taking a drag racer out to the desert on a trailer, an overnight trip.
You couldn’t locate him at all until the following night. Curtis E. Carr
said he was asleep behind his shop—but he did start closing his
windows at night and locking up more tightly. Eva Reddy thought
she spent the previous night at her own place, but couldn’t be sure;
you could smell alcohol on her breath. You found Mitch Bowan at

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