Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

I willed my eyes to go to the body, still in its tank top and sweatpants with the untied strings. “I never met this young woman, but I saw her on your high school campus around two thirty P.M. I believe that’s Gloria Carson.”

“As in girlfriend of Devonne Tinch?”

“Yes. I saw Gloria’s mother about half an hour later, at the Carson house, but she wouldn’t let me inside.”

Smith motioned toward the body. “Joggers found her. Popular place after five, but pretty much empty earlier in the day.”

I looked down again. “That’s a pretty nasty head wound for so little blood here.”

“Agreed. Preliminary is fractured skull, but done elsewhere.”

“One silver lining.”

Smith looked at me like we were playing poker. “I’d love to hear it.”

“My client’s in jail.”

“Meaning, it couldn’t have been him.”

“That’s right.”

“His brother isn’t.”

I was about to tell Smith I didn’t think Maurice “High Life” Tinch would be in any shape to make his way to Calem when I heard what sounded like Mrs. Carson’s voice, crying out her daughter’s name.

Desperately.

Smith squeezed her eyes shut. “Cuddy, you seen Mystic River yet?”

I knew what she meant. “No, but I’ve read the book.”

Sergeant Detective Aphrodite Smith closed her notebook and began to walk toward Mrs. Carson’s voice. “Well, now we both get to act in the play.”

“My husband is away on his business in New York City.” Mrs. Carson swiped a handkerchief across her nose, then brought it against her eyes. “I must telephone to him.”

Since I knew the poor woman, even just slightly, Smith asked me to stay as we waited in the Carsons’ darkened living room for a neighbor to drop off her own child with another family and come to comfort the bereaved.

Smith said, “We believe your daughter was killed somewhere else and then moved to the park. Mr. Cuddy here saw her with Lisabeth Hamilton just after classes ended today. Do you have any idea where Gloria might have gone from the high school?”

“No.” The hankie came down to half-mast. “She did not come home yet, but that is not unusual. Even after Devonne — her...” Mrs. Carson seemed to leave us for a moment. Then, “In Cuba, when I am very young, there was a man from Holland. He tells me once the story of the stork. The way I believe him, little babies come from eggs, like the birds. For years I would see a shell on the ground, broken, and I would smile, even to look up at the sky, because for me, it meant a new life had just begun itself.”

The hankie covered Mrs. Carson’s eyes again. “Only now somebody has killed my little bird, and Gloria is gone from my sky forever.”

Aphrodite Smith looked over at me now, and I decided I was also glad I’d never dated a police detective.

Given the head start I had on Maurice Tinch’s likely whereabouts, I found him in the nearby tavern before the unmarked sedan parked in front of his three-decker began a canvas of the neighborhood.

Still on the corner stool, Tinch caught me coming into the bar. He’d just about finished peeling the label off the fifth of five empty bottles of High Life. You could bet he’d finished the beer itself long before.

“The man who likes to buy me beer.”

I took the next stool again, but waved off the approaching bartender.

“You do that with every bottle you drink?”

“The way I pace myself. I don’t drink the next one until I finish scraping off the last.”

“You been pacing yourself here since I saw you?”

“Uh-oh.” He stopped his fingernail and actually engaged my eyes. “Now that sound to me like a police question.”

“It soon will be. Gloria Carson, Devonne’s girlfriend, was killed out in Calem sometime this afternoon.”

“Well, well.” A shake of the head as he doubled his efforts on the label. “Seem like that town just bad luck for everybody, don’t it?”

I glanced toward the beer cooler. “Our bartender be willing to alibi you?”

“Like they call it in the movies, I am iron-clad. Been sitting here since twelve noon, and I left my fine stool only to go to the Men’s. And Devonne, he in jail, so he be free on this one too.”

“Any ideas who might not be?”

“Like I say before, Devonne never bring any of his ‘society’ friends around. Besides, I think he like it fine, visiting his girl-friend’s house out there. Her daddy travel a lot, her momma got to go to the store and such. Privacy, if you catch onto my drift.”

“Your brother and Gloria Carson made love in her parents’ house?”

“Wouldn’t be up to our bloodline if he didn’t.” Maurice Tinch finished with the label. “My, my, what do you know? Looks like you come just in the nick of time.”

V

“Any good news?”

From the way Devonne Tinch toned his voice in the jail’s little conference room, I didn’t think he’d yet heard about Gloria Carson.

There is no easy way to tell someone that kind of bad news, so I decided to go for shock value in the hope of opening him up.

“Devonne, Gloria’s dead.”

His hard eyes bore into me. “Say what?”

“Somebody caved in her skull, then dumped her body in a public park under some trees.”