Dead Ringer by Ken Douglas Read Free Book Online

pair of hippy cops.
    “ You have a warrant?” Bruce said.
    “ We need one?” Norton shifted on the sofa, caught Gay’s eyes, smiled. It was sincere.
    “ If you don’t, you’re gonna be looking for a new job.” Bruce had a sneer in his voice now.
    “ Relax, counselor.” Alvarez tapped his chest, indicating he had the warrant in his inside coat pocket. “We’re covered. As we were when we came in the other day and looked around.”
    “ You were here Monday,” Gay cut in, “but you didn’t go in her house.”
    “ We came back Wednesday, about 2:00, 2:30, something like that,” Alvarez said.
    That figured, she thought, Danny’s day off. He’d have told her, had he known. “We were at the movies, me and the girls. My daughter and Jasmine.”
    “ Say again,” Norton said from the sofa. He looked so relaxed in his rumpled cord sportcoat, brown over a plain yellow shirt and faded brown Dockers. The other one seemed uptight in a three piece suit.
    “ You got a hearing problem?” Bruce said, confrontational. He was a big man, probably a bully when he was in school, Gay thought.
    “ Sorry,” Norton said. “We thought your wife and daughter had disappeared. Now I hear your daughter is still around and I’m curious.”
    “ Nobody’s disappeared.” Gay clenched her fists again. None of the men noticed. “It’s Spring Break, so Margo doesn’t have any classes. She’s spending the holiday up in Big Bear. Jazz is staying with me.”
    “ Doing what?” Alvarez wanted to know.
    “ She’s on a writer’s retreat.”
    “ Boy, you guys are stupid!” Bruce Kenyon said. But Gay knew he hadn’t known where Margo was either. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have shown up at her doorstep like he did every Saturday afternoon to annoy her by taking his daughter for whatever was left of the day. Had he known she wasn’t home and Jazz was staying next door, he wouldn’t have bothered.
    “ Don’t fuck with us.” Norton smiled when he said it. The effect was ghostly.
    “ Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” Bruce said.
    “ I think he’s serious,” Alvarez said to Bruce.
    “ Fujimori raped that little girl two weeks after you got him off,” Norton said. “How’d you feel about that?”
    “ The DA didn’t have a case.”
    “ Yeah, well you lost on the second one.”
    “ Can’t win ’em all.”
    “ He got paroled last month.”
    “ And you guys let him get killed. Some police force.”
    “ That’s it.” Norton was up quicker than Gay thought a man could move. He grabbed Kenyon by the arm, spun him around, cuffed him and slammed him face down on the sofa he’d just vacated. “Frisk him!”
    “ Pleasure.” Alvarez ran his hands over Bruce, checking everywhere. He wasn’t gentle. When he finished, he pulled him up by his shirt collar, turned him and set him down on the sofa, hands behind his back.
    “ You guys are off base here.” Bruce didn’t seem so arrogant anymore.
    “ Maybe. But we got a couple witnesses say you were in a car parked outside when Fujimori was shot. Everyone knows how crazy your wife was about him getting out,” Norton said.
    “ I was following Margo. She went in the store after Frankie. I didn’t have anything to do with him getting shot. Besides, she’s the one who wants the bastard put away, not me. I’m his lawyer for Christ’s sake.”
    “ Your wife didn’t take off before the police showed up. You did. You haven’t been cooperating with us, she has,” Alvarez said.
    “ Did she tell you I was there? Is she the one?”
    “ Get him out of here,” Norton said.
    “ Get up!” Alvarez grabbed Bruce by the arm, jerked him off the sofa, dragged him toward the door.
    “ I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.” He was whining. “I didn’t have any reason to talk to the cops. I was just trying to catch Margo harassing Frankie, so I could get a restraining order against her.”
    “ You make me sick.” Norton turned as Alvarez led Kenyon