The Original Alibi (Matt Kile) Read Online Free PDF

to commit it. In the aggregate, the evidence said Eddie was innocent. The way the D.A. told it, he didn’t have enough to get a conviction. The charges were dropped and Eddie became a free man. After that the case settled in among the many unsolved in the Long Beach homicide department. A cold case, as they’re called on television. In real life, there simply isn’t the manpower to work cold cases. They languish in file cabinets waiting for the good fairy of law enforcement to unexpectedly drop new evidence or clues onto the department’s lap. Until then, the best the department could do was keep them dry and protected from excessive dust. Which to no great surprise meant the file on the murder of Ileana Corrigan, Eddie’s fiancée, had been handled only once in the past ten years. That happened when it was taken from its metal file coffin to a cardboard one in the department’s warehouse for old cases that had failed to trip over new inspiration.
    “I always wanted to get back to this one,” Fidge said. “It was odd, but we had nothing to hang odd on, so it became one of those never-really-forgotten cases that snag on some hook in the dark corner of a cop’s mind. Truth is, I haven’t thought about it in many years, but it all flooded back when you brought it up. You don’t remember it at all?”
    “Not a lick.”
    “Well, it happened about a year after you went brain dead and shot your way into prison.”
    Fidge had a way of making some things I did sound really stupid. And while I’ll admit it to you, but never to Fidge, this was because some of the things I did were really stupid.
    “I remember that General Whittaker had a wonderful gun collection from World War II,” Fidge said, “including a British Welrod bolt-action silenced assassin’s pistol. I’d read about them, but never seen one. His was equipped for a 9mm cartridge, and had a rear set knob that had to be manually rotated to eject a cartridge and then pushed forward to introduce a new cartridge from the magazine into the chamber. I remember that gun like it was here on my kitchen table. It’s been reported the British forces carried one into Iraq, for the tradition. A Welrod assassin’s pistol has been in every British engagement from WWII forward.”
    “Did you check all his weapons?”
    Fidge nodded. “None of them had been used to kill the Corrigan woman. Oh, yeah, the Welrod assassin’s pistol was stolen about two years ago. He came down to the department to report the theft. Nothing else had been taken, so likely some worker or visitor in his home snatched it; it never turned up.”
    “What’s the status on the murder weapon?”
    “Never found. Still, it looked open and shut, and you know how much Captain Richard Dickson likes open and shut cases. But right fast it sprung a leak and all the evidence drained out. Our perp walked. No rumors. No talk of anybody being paid off. Nothing backchannel, it just went flat.”
    “Captain Dick Dickson,” I said with a disgusting tone I saved just for him, “the man suffers from delusions of competence.”
    As you have undoubtedly surmised, I don’t like the man and the feeling is mutual. He had been the only detective in the department with a smile on his face when I was arrested for the courthouse shooting. I did Captain Dickson a favor last year that I thought might chip some of the ice off our relationship, but no. One of our few truly private rights the government hasn’t infringed upon is our freedom to decide who we don’t like and why. The politically correct types would say Two Dicks and I had a personality conflict. But you should know that’s hogwash. Dickson has no personality. No cop I ever met liked him. That’s why Captain Richard Dickson was known around the department as Captain Two Dicks.
    “Well,” Fidge said, “you’ll be pleased to know Two Dicks has been sick the last couple days. He’s hardly been in the station.”
    “Let’s hope it’s nothing