Monument to Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

A recent vintage Ford sedan was parked in the Watkins driveway.
    He got out and went to the front door, rang the bell. Based upon his unanswered call, he didn’t expect to find her at home. But a curtain on a narrow vertical window next to the door was pulled aside, the sound of a sliding deadbolt was heard, and she opened the door.
    “I hope you don’t mind my just stopping by,” Brixton said. “I tried calling but got your answering machine.”
    “I’ve been letting the machine take calls,” she said.
    To avoid bill collectors? he wondered.
    “Please, come in,” she said, stepping aside to allow him to enter.
    An air conditioner in a living room window exhaled barely cool air into the tidy, pleasantly furnished room. A spinet piano occupied a short wall at the base of stairs leading to the second level. The hardwood floor glistened from a recent waxing, its center covered by a hooked rug of various colors. An older-model TV with its bulky back sat on a TV cart with wheels across from a couch covered in a green-and-white-striped fabric. Two chairs in a matching pattern flanked it.
    “Please, sit down,” she said. “Would you like some sweet tea? I made some fresh this morning.” Sweet tea was a Savannah stalwart enjoyed year-round, well-steeped tea with plenty of sugar added.
    “That would be nice,” Brixton said. “Thank you.”
    While Mrs. Watkins fussed in the kitchen, Brixton walked around the small living room, stopping to peruse books on a tall bookcase interspersed with a variety of small, framed photographs. There were photos on the piano, too, and a cluster of them hung on a wall near the TV, each one perfectly straight. Brixton could never get his photos to hang straight and wondered whether the lady of the house spent a good part of her day keeping them in line. One picture on a bookcase shelf caught his eye. It was a color photo of a group of six teenage girls, three black, three white. They seemed happy in the shot, mugging for the camera the way teenagers do. He’d just picked it up to take a closer look when she returned with the tea and he put the photo back on the shelf.
    “Is that your daughter in that picture?” he asked.
    “Oh, my, yes, it is.”
    “Looks like a happy occasion.”
    “It was. Louise was sixteen when it was taken, a year before she left home. She was taking drugs by then only I didn’t know it. I suppose I preferred not to know, turned a blind eye on what she was doing, wanted to believe only good things about her. What a glorious smile she had, light up a room. You can see it in that photograph.” She left, returning seconds later with two other pictures of her daughter. Louise Watkins had, indeed, been a pretty girl, and the smile her mother had cited was evident in both shots. Brixton thought that showing him the pictures might cause her to tear up but she didn’t. She placed them on a coffee table next to the pitcher of tea, and a plate of brownies, and urged him to sit and enjoy her offerings, which he did.
    She asked why he’d stopped by.
    “I just wanted to touch base with you again,” he answered. “I spent time with two colleagues from the police department. One is still there, the other has retired. He was the one who took down Louise’s confession.”
    “Detective Cleland,” she said. “A nice man. He testified at her sentencing hearing.”
    “Right. He told me that he never quite believed her confession. It sounded rehearsed to him.”
    A flash of spark lit up her eyes. “Exactly,” she said. “Louise was paid to say what she did.”
    Brixton nodded.
    “I asked Detective Cleland, and other policemen, to question her further, to press her to tell the truth,” she said, “but they didn’t. It was like they didn’t care enough to do it.”
    Brixton debated trying to explain why no one probed deeper at the department—that they were happy not to have another murder or manslaughter case to pursue. Confessions make everything so much easier