Page 35 of Red Snow
“It’s not. Alright, how about this guy?” Marcus shows Gabriel the second picture just as I sit down.
“His name’s Jeffrey Chapman,” Gabriel says, squinting to see the grainy photo. “I remember his name because he just recently started coming in and he always uses his credit card. He’s usually alone. Real quiet.”
I reach for my phone and start to type in the next name, but Tom replies to me before I can finish the text. I turn to Marcus.
“Hey, Richard Perry has been arrested for assault, partner,” I tell him. “Tom sent his info and his address. We need to go see this guy.”
“Alright, hold on,” he says, moving on to the last picture. “What about this guy? What’s his name?”
“I don’t know this one. I can’t recognize his face, and I don’t remember him ordering anything. He’s not one of the regulars.”
“You sure about that, Gabriel?” Marcus snips, glaring at the tall bartender.
“I’m sure. I recognize the other two, but not that one. I swear.”
“Alright. If we find out otherwise, we’ll be back,” Marcus tells him as he stands up and the two of us walk out of the bar.
“Were you at Chilkoot Charlie’s this past Thursday night?” Marcus asks Dick Perry, who’s sitting in a recliner in his home only four blocks away from where Brenda Cox’s body was found at the school.
“Yeah, I was,” he admits, sipping a glass of water. He’s wearing thick glasses and looks like he just finished shaving before we came and knocked on his door, and he also has a confidence to him I can’t help but notice. He isn’t nervous about two detectives showing up on his doorstep at all. We’ll see what that means.
“Great,” Marcus replies, happy that Dick didn’t start off by lying to us. “And do you recognize this woman?” Marcus hands Dick a picture, and it only takes a second for the guy to recognize the woman.
“That’s Brenda,” he says, handing the picture back to Marcus.
“Yes it is,” Marcus continues. “Her name is Brenda Cox, and she was murdered this past Thursday night. Are you aware of that?”
“I saw it on the news, but that ain’t got nothing to do with me.”
“I didn’t say it did. I just wanted to know if you knew anything about her, or perhaps you could tell us what the two of you talked about that night.”
Dick lets out a small chuckle. “We didn’t talk about anything. Brenda hit on me the way she always does, and I turned her down the way I always do. She’s been trying to hook up with me for a while now. Me, and every other guy who doesn’t already have a girl hanging off his arm in the bar.”
Marcus and I look at each other.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Marcus asks.
“She was a whore,” Dick says, like it’s not an insult to Brenda. “She tried to hook up with lots of guys. It didn’t matter if you said no once before, if she saw you the next week, she’d ask again. If you turned her down, she’d just move on to another guy. When I saw that she’d been killed, my first thought was that it could’ve been a hundred different guys.”
“I see,” Marcus says, jotting the wordWhoreon his notepad. I can’t help but chuckle at that one. “So you’re saying she was a promiscuous woman?”
“That’s a nice way of putting it, but yeah.”
“Did you see her talking to anybody else that night?”
“I saw her talking to a few other guys, but it was nothing new. I didn’t pay it any mind.”
“Did you see anything suspicious that night? Like, Brenda having an argument with anyone, or anything like that?”
“Nope. I go to the bar to get a break from life and have a few drinks. I don’t go to spend my night watching Brenda Cox move from guy to guy, or to see if she’s arguing with anyone.” Dick Perry sips his water and adjusts his glasses on his nose like this isn’t weird to him at all. He has no problem answering Marcus’s questions, and without Marcus saying anything else, I already know he isn’t the one who killed Brenda.
“Okay, and where did you go after you left the bar that night?” Marcus finally asks. He leans in and looks Dick right in the eyes.
“I came back here, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask my wife and my neighbor,” Dick says assuredly. “I didn’t stay at the bar long because I got a call from my neighbor that he was lighting up his fire pit and having a few drinks. So, I came home and my wife and I went and hung out with Logan and his wife. We were outside until about midnight. I’m sure plenty of the neighbors saw the four of us sitting around the fire out there.”
Marcus jots down the information in his notepad, knowing that Dick Perry will not end up on our list of suspects. There’s no point in mentioning the fact that he was arrested for assault a couple of years back, because it’s irrelevant and he has a solid alibi for the night Brenda was killed. We stand up and shake hands with Dick as we start to walk out.
“Okay, well thanks very much for your time, Mr. Perry,” Marcus says. “We appreciate it, and if we have any more questions, we’ll let you know, but I think we’re good.”
