A phone call came in for Deputy Chief Fairchild. He sat at Bern’s desk to take it. He listened for a time and then said, “What’s the other thing?” He listened again and finally said, “You should have told me the last one first, and then you could have skipped the other.”
He hung up and shook his head, smiling but exasperated. “Some people got the horse sense of a horsefly. First a big thing about Smitty going out to ask that Feeney some more questions and finds out Feeney has packed up and left, rural mailbox and all. And then he tells me they got a report in from the Alabama state police that Bern’s BMW turned up over past Montgomery in the small hours. Pair of young latinos in it from the New Orleans area. Got chased for speeding, tried to run a roadblock, flipped the car, totaled it, killed them both. So there’s our answer, men. We can stop this rooting around in these here papers.”
After Himmer had left, Fairchild and Wade had some coffee in Wade’s office. With the door shut, Wade said, “This wraps it up?”
“It does for sure. Saves the taxpayers a lot of money too.”
“What if it was somebody else killed him, Chet?”
“That what you really think?”
“I might think that.”
Chet stirred more cream into his coffee, took a careful sip and then a large swallow. He looked down at the coffee rather than at’ Wade “Let’s think on that. You and I, we get the idea that maybe Joe Jones killed Bern. We dig into it. That is, if we can spare the time to do the digging. Lot of police work around these days. Incidentally, we just got turned down on the additional bodies and equipment we need three years in a row it is. Limits on overtime, too. Okay, we can make a pretty good case against this Joe Jones. Of course he’ll know all about the two men dead in Bern’s fancy automobile. Sup pose we make a case so strong the grand jury will indict and the prosecution will go ahead with it. This Joe Jones hires himself a lawyer. Now when it goes to the jury they are going to be told all about reasonable doubt. If they think it is a reasonable possibility those two fellows killed Bern and took his forty-thousand-dollar car, then they are going to have to let Joe Jones go.” He raised his head and looked at Wade, his eyes wise and tired and full of a subdued irony. “All along the line a lot of men are going to think about Joe Jones and what kind of a case we’ve got against him and what the chances are, and any one of those men can up and say the hell with it, we can’t make it stick. So when we get a chance to wrap it up, old friend, we wrap it up tight. Follow?”
“Yes.”
“Some wouldn’t. They get hung up on truth and beauty and justice and a lot of clever patient tireless police work. Police work is mostly going around cleaning up as many messes as you can. And if you ever get ahead of the day-to-day messes, there’s always some open cases you can go back and take another look at. Most of those cases still open would look a lot better than this Joe Jones case. And either way, the widow gets the insurance.”
“So you don’t think they did it?”
“You’re getting to sound like our old classmate, Brud Barnes. Got to go. Thanks for the coffee.”
The condemnation proceedings took place in the District Court as scheduled at ten o’clock on Thursday morning, September eleventh. The government’s case was presented by two young attorneys from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the district, Frederick Sanders and Oliver Dawkins.
They had been assigned to the condemnation proceedings three weeks prior to the date set for the case.
The appraiser called by the government to testify stated that the highest and best use for the land on Bernard Island was as government park and recreation land, and he gave his appraisal figure as seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars.