Page 187 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Slow Burn

Quincy’s alibi depended on his landlord. At first the guy didn’t
want to admit to watching the Nasty Channel, and I thought we had
Quincy dead to rights. But when he learned the seriousness of the
charge, he showed us his cable TV bill and provided his tenant with a
corroborating story. I dug, but came up with nothing on the landlord.
Too bad.
I went back to the trailer park and got tough with Quigley’s
gambling associates. Per Labelle’s orders I didn’t reveal young Mr.
Carbone’s secrets of success at poker; that might have driven the
suspect into hiding, and we wanted to keep tabs on him. In any
event, the computerized cash register ticket was enough to keep his
neck out of the noose.
Out at the university I spent an hour enveloped in pipe smoke,
courtesy of Dr. Homunculus’ briar. He had no idea Quentin was not
a graduate student engaged in scholarly pursuits. The clock in his
computer was less than a minute different than Quentin’s, and both
were pretty close to the time on my very precise digital watch. The
messages he printed out were the same as Quentin’s, down to the last
untranslatable on-line communications code.
While I was doing all this legwork Labelle stayed in her office,
sifting through evidence and making charts, graphs and God-knows-
what sort of timelines and inventories of incidental information. She
was on the phone, too, delving into the quints’ history and habits.
Nevertheless, on the Monday following the beginning of our
investigation, we could not place any of the five identical Carbones at
the murder scene and had no other credible suspects in sight.
I met Labelle in the morning as usual. Despite my best intentions,
I simply couldn’t get up early enough to attend the martial arts
workout downstairs. Maybe I relied too heavily on the .38 Special I
carried under my jacket. She never criticized me openly for it, but I
could tell she found me wanting in this area. I was to learn my lesson
very quickly, however.
Labelle got down to work, saying very little. She had made a list of
all the suspects’ clothing she could see in their rooms; that grabbed
her attention for a few minutes. Then she reviewed some printouts
provided by the university library. Finally, about 9:30, she looked me
in the eye. It was a look of triumph.

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