Page 39 of The Happy Month

Karen and I began flipping through the materials Harris had brought that morning. She beat me.

“Found it. Officer Jared Kelly. Arrived at 7815 Via Amorita at twelve-twenty-five. He finds Mr. and Mrs. Michaels standing outside the house. They tell him to go inside where Larry Wilkes is holding the body of Pete Michaels. Sobbing. He kept saying, “He’s dead. He’s dead. How can he be dead?”

“Got it,” Lydia said.

I was still looking for it.

“There’s nothing here about remorse. The first thing Officer Kelly did was look for the gun. He found it just by the door.”

Finally, I found the report, too. As I started skimming, I asked, “What’s the relationship between where the gun was found and where Pete Michaels died?”

“There’s a drawing on the next page,” Karen said.

I flipped the page. The drawing was of the living room. The furniture was sketched as boxes, there were X’s for Larry and Pete. They were on the floor at the far end of the sofa. There was a small drawing of a gun right next to the front door.

“How far do you think they are from the gun?” I asked.

“If the living room is twenty feet, they’re fifteen feet away,” Lydia estimated.

“How would that happen?” I asked. “The DA is saying Larry came to the door. He would know that Pete lived with his parents and his brother. He wouldn’t know where they were, so he would have knocked or rang the doorbell. Pete would have been shot very close to where his body fell.”

“Are there photos?” Lydia asked.

“Copies,” Karen said.

“Xerox copies?”

“Yes.”

“That scum bag. We’re going to need actual photographs.”

“The copies are about ten pages back from the officer’s report,” Karen said.

Lin arrived with the appetizers. I asked for a Coke. The tea was a bit thin for me. I kept my eyes on the copy of the crime scene photo. The quality was terrible. I could makeout Pete’s body in a pool of blood. But then, most of the carpet was very dark. I couldn’t tell if there was a trail of blood leading across the room. I flipped through the photos. There was something I didn’t see.

“If he was shot at the door, there would be blood on other parts of the carpet, and they would have taken specific photos of those stains. And there aren’t any.”

“So he couldn’t have been shot at the door and then walked over to the sofa,” Lydia said, munching on a wonton.

“How close was the killer when Pete was shot?”

“The coroner and the ballistic expert both testified within a few feet.”

“So, the killer is allowed into the house. They walk deeper into the living room. They may have talked for a short period and then Pete is shot. The killer then wipes the gun clean and leaves the house, dropping the gun next to the door. But their version is that Larry wiped the gun clean, dropped it by the door, and then returned to Pete’s body.”

“I’ve got the ballistics report,” Karen said. “It says they found smudged fingerprints, none that could be identified. Oh, wait, they did find a fingerprint on the barrel. There was a fingerprint guy who testified, right?”

“Yes,” Lydia said. “That fingerprint does not belong to Larry or Andy Showalter. They assumed it belonged to the person who sold the gun to Andy.”

“It could belong to Sammy Blanchard,” I said.

Karen asked. “Is that the girl in the sketches?”

“Yes,” I said, then asked. “How did Harris handle that at trial?”

“Badly,” Lydia said. “He could have suggested the fingerprint as proof of another killer but didn’t. He just accepted the prosecution’s theory about its being the seller’s fingerprint.”

I picked up a wonton and set it on the tiny plate Lin had brought. I spooned on some of the delicious sauce that was mainly sugar and red dye. Taking a bite, it was wonderful, as I knew it would be. Chewing, I flipped through to the witness statements. Karen and Lydia were discussing whether the size of the fingerprint could tell you whether it was a sixteen-year-old girl. Lydia had never heard of anything like that; Karen said she’d research it.