New Hope for the Dead by Charles Willeford Page A

wrote it in his notebook before dialing.
    A childish, incredibly high voice answered. “Bouquetique. How may I help you?”
    “Mrs. Hickey, please.”
    “She’s designing in the back. May I help you?”
    “Just take a message. Tell her that Sergeant Moseley will be in to see her tomorrow.”
    “Sergeant Moseley?” the tiny voice chirped.
    “That’s right. You are open on Saturday, aren’t you?”
    “Oh, yes! Saturday’s our busiest day.”
    “Okay. I don’t know what time, but it’ll be some time tomorrow.”
    Hoke hung up the phone. The voice sounded like a little girl around six or seven years old, he thought. Why would Loretta Hickey employ a child to answer the telephone? Hoke went to join Bill and Ellita in the interrogation room.
    Bill and Ellita were sitting close together at Bill’s end of the table. Both were studying material from the same accordion file. Hoke lighted a Kool, but before he could sit down, Bill held up an eight-by-ten black-and-white glossy photograph.
    “Remember this guy, Hoke?”
    Hoke looked at the photo and grinned. It was a picture of an unsmiling middle-aged man—a head-and-shoulders shot—wearing an open-collared polo shirt.
    “Captain Midnight.”
    “That’s right,” Bill said. “Captain Morrow. I was telling Ellita about him. He was the pilot we called Captain Midnight. We must’ve talked to him a half-dozen times three years ago.”
    “He was clean.”
    “He wasn’t clean. He was eliminated as a suspect because we couldn’t prove anything. Anyway, I’d been looking at his file just before Ellita and I went over to have lunch at the Omni. Otherwise, I don’t think I’d have recognized him. The fucker was sitting on the bus bench at the southwest corner of Biscayne when we went in, and he was still sitting in the same place when we came back to get thecar. But if I hadn’t just been looking at his photo here, I wouldn’t’ve recognized him. He’s a bum now, Hoke. On a hunch, I sent Ellita over to talk to him because I figured he might recognize me. She asked him if he’d missed his bus, and he told her he was waiting for his wife.”
    “His wife’s dead,” Hoke said. “Her head was smashed in by a four-pound sledgehammer. He was our only suspect, Ellita, but we finally suspended the case.”
    “He did it, Hoke, I know he did,” Bill said.
    “We think he did it. We couldn’t ever prove it, Bill. He passed the polygraph without a tremor. I know the machine can be beat, but in his case, if he did kill her, the indications were that he didn’t know he’d killed her. After he passed the test, we had to drop it altogether.”
    “According to your notes,” Ellita said, “he didn’t have any reason to kill his wife. They’d only been married a year, and the neighbors claimed they were a happy couple. He didn’t need money—not as a pilot earning fifty thousand a year.”
    Hoke sat down and flipped through the papers in the file. “We should be reading the other cases. We can vote on this one later if you want, if you want to put it on your list. But right now we should follow my plan.”
    “Tell him, Ellita,” Henderson said.
    “He was very confused, Sergeant Moseley,” Ellita said. “I tried to talk to him, ask him a few more questions like ‘Are you sure your wife’s bus stops here?’ and he just repeated what he said the first time. Finally, he got angry. He said, ‘You aren’t my wife,’ and walked away.”
    “I signaled Ellita to go get the car,” Bill said, “and I tailed him. He lives over on Second Avenue, down from the old Sears store, in Grogan’s Halfway House, or what used to be the halfway house. It’s just a rooming house now. Grogan lost his license and his city funds when the bag lady starved to death on the front porch. Do you remember that, Hoke?”
    “Yeah. It was a legal problem. There was no law to coverit, although the paper wrote an editorial on the case. What happened, Ellita, was weird. There were about