= Saturday Night Special
  A Kay Yoshinobu Mystery
  by John A. Broussard


Three years of the new smoking regulations really hadn't had much impact on the ambience of the local police station's interrogation room. The previous twenty or more years had so saturated the walls and grubby furnishings with the stale odor of tens of thousands of cigarettes, smoked by bored attorneys, nervous clients and intimidating police, that even a complete remodeling would never remove the reek. Kay Yoshinobu sighed, consoled herself with the thought that she had already intended to wash her hair that night, and decided to concentrate on getting a coherent story out of Collin Taylor.

Collin wasn't the worst looking client she had ever worked for, but he wasn't the kind who would make the best impression on a jury, either. "And God knows he's going to have to impress the hell out of them if he's ever going to walk the streets of Hawaii again," Kay thought, putting her briefcase on the table opposite the orange-clad figure.

Collin was muscular, his tattooed arms showing under the short sleeves of the orange jump-suit; blond, with a close-cropped head of hair; and with a surly expression covering a face that had encountered more than one fist in its thirty or so years of existence. In other words, he looked exactly like what he was -- an ex-con.

Kay took out a fresh legal pad. "Start at the beginning," she said, and was surprised to find her new client verbal, even voluble and, most surprising, actually sounding truthful.

"This guy was out on the firing range at Denny's Shoot-Out, right next to me. Piss-poor shot. So I started to give him some pointers. We got to talking and afterwards went off to the Prince Kuhio for a round of beer. That's when he started asking me if I knew anyone who might do a little favor for him -- something more than just mowing his lawn. He hemmed and hawed for a while. Talked around the subject. Then finally got around to explaining what he wanted. What he was willing to pay kinda opened my eyes."

"How much was it?" The flow was so effusive, Kay decided that the interruption wouldn't stem it appreciably.

"Five thousand before, five thousand after. All I had to do was to show up at his house at eleven-thirty Saturday night, with a ski mask and a gun. He told me there was plenty of bushes for cover. He was going to come home with his wife about then. As soon as he opened the door, I was to hold them up, make them go in, lift the wife's pearl necklace and then take off."

"Insurance?"

"Yeah. He said his wife was the moneybags in the family and tight-fisted as all hell besides. He'd hocked her pearls and she was wearing fakes without knowing it. He figured she'd find out about it damn soon, since she wore them regularly, and someone who knows better might tip her off anytime. Besides, he needed the insurance money. So all I had to do was to take the fakes and get rid of them."

"That was it?"

"Yeah. It sounded like one hell of an easy way to pick up ten grand. I shoulda known there was a kicker."

"Before you get to that, how did he say he was going to pay you the rest of the money?"

"Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. To make it all look real, I was supposed to take his wallet, which would have the rest of the pay-off in it. And his watch. That was a great-looking piece. Worth plenty, I'll bet."

"And things went wrong."

Collin grinned. "Wrong for me. A hell of a lot wronger for him. We'd hardly gotten through the door when he pulled out an automatic. He caught me completely by surprise. Damned if he didn't aim it right at my head. If it hadn't jammed, I wouldn't a had a chance. Even he couldn't have missed. That's when I plugged him. By then, all hell was breaking loose. The old gal was screaming her head off. Blue lights were flashing. It was almost as though the cops were waiting for me. I didn't argue. Hell! There wasn't any point in trying to escape. I just threw my gun on the floor and waited for them to cuff me."

"So you think it was a set-up from the beginning."

"No question, and I was the patsy. He wanted to get rid of the old lady. He was going to bump me off and then do the same for her. The cops would have hardly questioned him. His story was going to be that he'd just been fighting off a burglar when the gun went off and killed his wife. The next shot just somehow happens to catch me between the eyes. Something like that."

"But he shot at you with his own gun."

"Aw, c'mon! Check it out. For sure, it's a Saturday night special and can't be traced to him. He'd have ditched my gun before the cops arrived, or just shoved it into my pocket. The cops woulda thought nothin' about an ex-con carrying two automatics. And, do you think they'd a had any doubts about what happened -- a dead wife, a dead burglar wearing a ski mask, and a husband in shock?" Collin guffawed.

Kay had been rapidly re-evaluating her client during the interrogation. He was obviously more intelligent than she'd anticipated, certainly much more articulate. He had just about convinced her, and could perhaps convince a jury. But then, even if true, his story couldn't help much. She would argue self-defense, but self-defense in the midst of perpetrating an armed felony was not the most attractive argument. Twenty years instead of forty or more -- maybe.

Back in her office she was leaning back in her chair chewing over the interview, her arms behind her head, eyes fixed on the ceiling, when her professional and personal partner, Sid Chu, wandered in.

"Ready to have him plead?" he asked, flopping down in one of the leather office chairs.

"What can he plead? He's wearing a ski mask, he's just killed a man in his own home, he's caught gun-handed by the police, and all he has to offer is what the prosecutor will stand up there and call a cock-and-bull story."

"So he pleads guilty. Period."

"He's not about to do that." Kay quickly repeated Collin's version of the killing.

Sid thought it over. "That story may not be so far-fetched. I've heard of at least one husband trying to pull off that kind of stunt."

Kay nodded. "And the more I think about it, the more inclined I am to believe that Collin is telling the truth. I'm going to start checking his story, beginning at Denny's Shoot-Out."

Sid exhaled loudly. "Here we go again. There's nothing you like to do more than investigating. Why did you ever bother to get a law degree?"

Kay laughed. "Investigating is a nice break from shuffling paper. Want to come along?"

"No thanks. I've got too much paper to shuffle."

Denny -- if the emaciated male cleaning and oiling a revolver was actually Denny -- appreciated the attractive Kay's presence, but insisted he could be of little help. He'd seen the previous night's TV news and admitted to remembering Collin. And he also knew the victim, but he had no memory of ever having seen them together. He couldn't even remember the last time either had been in, and certainly had never heard that his late customer had been looking for someone to do a job for him.

Collin, it turned out, was an irregular customer. On the other hand, the dead man had been a regular one. "They've been coming here since we opened up, about two years ago. At least once a month."

"They?"

"Sure. Him and his wife, usually. They're the best kind of customers. If one of them's in the mood, that usually brings both of them in. She was the eager one, by the way. Knew her guns. Wasn't afraid of them, the way most women are. Damn good shot, too. Not like him."

This bit of news started Kay on a whole new train of speculation, which she slowly and reluctantly had to admit to herself was absurd. Could Collin have been hired by the wife? Could she have been the one who promised the golden fleece? Ridiculous! Collin had nothing to gain by concealing that and a lot to gain by revealing it. The law took a much dimmer view of the one who hired the killer than of the hired killer, himself.

As it was, the wife's testimony both supported and incriminated Collin on everything that occurred in the front hallway of their home. The husband had drawn his gun, aimed it at Collin, squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. That was when Collin shot him.

Kay couldn't see how the wife could have been the instigator. Yet there was still the inescapable fact that the husband was dead and the wife was still alive. Kay smiled to herself, amused at what the wife as suspect would do to Sid's view of Kay's actions. He would be even more exasperated now that new avenues of investigation had opened up.

Kay couldn't let go of the notion, and she began to come up with endless questions. Was the wife really the one with the money? Did she own a gun? And why had the police shown up so quickly? The next step was the police report, and then background checks on both the husband and the wife.

"So what has Sherlock uncovered so far?" Sid asked, when she'd returned to the office.

"Lots and lots of stuff, Dr. Watson, some of it pertinent, much of it impertinent. The police arrived when they did because the old geezer next door is the kind of nosey busybody every neighborhood should have. He saw Collin prowling around, so he called 911. The police took about ten minutes to get there, just in time to hear the shot. That's when they stormed up the front steps and into the house to find a dead husband, a wife in shock and a burglar with his gun on the floor and his hands in the air. And our old buddy, the nosey neighbor, pays off in other ways."

Sid raised his eyebrows.

"He says that the husband was two-timing his wife, who incidentally was ten years older than her husband and was the one with the money -- and she'd earned every bit of it herself in the travel agency she owned and ran for thirty years. Anyhow, the neighbor says that once, when the wife was off someplace for a week or so, the husband entertained a young chick who stayed over the whole time."

"Ah, a woman scorned."

"Right. But we don't know that she knew she was scorned. Denny, over at the gun club, says they seemed to get along at least as well as most couples."

"Anything else?"

"Uh-huh. The necklace was real. Not that that makes much difference one way or the other, since the husband could still have lied to Collin about that. In fact, if he was setting up Collin, then it makes sense that he would tell him the pearls were fakes. Collin might have gotten suspicious if the husband had offered to let him steal real ones."

Kay paused for a moment. "Also, the necklace being real does kind of fit with the notion that she's a shrewd old gal. Someone who's not about to be fooled by fake pearls the way the husband supposedly described her."

"So all this makes him really desperate to get rid of her since he couldn't hock the pearls, and he wants to -- maybe needs to -- get his hands on money."

"Exactly. He has a couple of motives -- money, a girlfriend, and if it looked like the wife was catching on to his philandering, he had a lot to gain by killing her. And Collin's guess about the husband's gun was right. It's unregistered. The police would never have connected it to the husband if the scenario had worked out the way Collin thinks the husband had it planned. All that's a lot of support for Collin's story."

"Enough for a jury?"

Kay looked glum. "Nowhere near enough."

"So what's next?"

"I really have no idea. I suppose I could check out the evidence the police have: the guns, the contents of Collin's pockets when he was booked, and I guess the contents of the victim's pockets, if they haven't turned them over to the widow yet. Not that I expect any of that to prove much."

Kay's knowledge of guns was minimal, but the storeroom sergeant was helpful. The husband's gun was an M52 automatic. An import. Fancier and far more deadly than the usual Saturday night special. "If it had gone off at that distance it would have taken that crook's head clean off at the neck," was the information offered by the sergeant. Collin's gun was a .22, favored in the crime world for its effectiveness at close range, its relative quietness and its small, handy size.

The clothes told her little more, except that it was an inexpensive suit, obviously from the rack of a local department store -- somewhat surprising for the husband of a rich wife.

The pockets had contained a set of keys, a handkerchief, a wallet and no change.

The wallets' contents were more revealing. Collin's had the expected. The Sergeant confirmed that it had contained twenty-two dollars at the time of the arrest. It had held a false ID, a credit card in the same name, along with most of the usual miscellany to be found in a man's wallet. Kay reminded herself to ask Collin what he'd done with the initial five thousand dollars. Stashed away in some safe place, she guessed, or perhaps spent already.

Again, the Sergeant confirmed the amount in the husband's wallet. Fifty-one dollars. The absence of Collin's expected final payment didn't surprise her. The total lack of credit cards did. "She kept him on a really short leash," Kay mused, picking up the watch.

Even to her inexperienced eye, this was an expensive timepiece. The name of an outrageously costly international brand wasn't the only indication of its value. It was quite obviously a custom job, oversized, with every imaginable option, probably including the tides on Jupiter. The Sergeant answered her unasked question. "I'll bet that thing ran to five figures."

The watch seemed added confirmation of Collin's story. After all, what assurance did the husband have that the newfound acquaintance wouldn't just walk away with the initial five thousand? That expensive timepiece could have virtually assured the agreed completion of the deal, Kay decided. And the husband would surely have been aware that Collin was eyeing it when they were plotting away in the Prince Kuhio. Fake pearls are worth something, a wallet containing five grand even more, and this superb bit of jewelry would have made the risk seem very worthwhile.

A mystery remained, however. Why would a wealthy wife, who obviously didn't squander her wealth on her young partner, give him such a fantastic timepiece? Kay was convinced that she had given him the watch and couldn't help but wonder why. For lack of any other options, she decided to follow this slender lead, after filing a note to the prosecuting attorney to hold the victim's belongings.

"Oh, for God's sake!" Sid made no effort to hide his exasperation. "Instead of going off to Oahu to talk to some high-class watchmaker, you should be flooding the court with motions for your client. A smokescreen is all he has going for him, and here you're wasting your time on a wild goose chase."

Kay grinned as she stuffed papers into her briefcase. "I'll do the motions on the flight over. That's what laptops are for."

The watchmaker quickly disabused her of her original notion about a fancy watch-manufacturing establishment. The shop had disabused her of it even more. A cubbyhole in one of the high rise office buildings neighboring Chinatown, the company obviously was not into mass production.

The only occupant of the office/workshop didn't bother to remove the jeweler's loupe from his eyeglasses, as he viewed his visitor with a mixture of surprise and impatience. Kay's identification as an attorney seemed to mollify him. In a few moments he had relaxed and seemed willing to share information about the watch industry, of which he was obviously enamoured and well informed.

"As you can see," he said, "we're not set up to do any manufacturing here. We're strictly customizers. Someone wants a watch engraved or a different kind of case, we'll do it. We can set stones, too, though we'd usually farm that out. Our specialty is the inner workings. We had someone in here just the other day -- businessman who spends one week here and then the next in New York on a regular basis. He has a beautiful Seiko and wanted it modified to show both times. That's the kind of work we do, and do well, I might add."

It took only the sketchiest of descriptions to make the watchmaker's eyes light up with recognition.

"Sure. I put that together for a woman from one of the neighbor islands. Elima, I believe. Beautiful, beautiful watches. Both of them."

"Both of them?" Kay's astonishment was impossible to hide.

The watchmaker probably never noticed, so engrossed was he in his own description.

"Beautiful, beautiful. For a man's watch, that is. She said she wanted one for her husband and the other for herself. But I couldn't really see her with one on her wrist. She had on one of those dime-sized Patek Philippes that was probably worth more than the two she was ordering put together. Nope. I just couldn't picture her wearing either of those oversize watches. But she wanted them to be absolutely identical, so who was I to argue? And she had the wildest ideas about the insides."

Kay didn't have to prompt for further descriptions.

"She wanted an oversize case, with enough room for a picture inside and with an easy-to-remove back. She said she was going to put her husband's picture inside hers and her picture inside his. I thought that was kind of sweet, even if it was pretty crazy. They must have been big pictures, too, because she made me leave space enough inside to park a truck. In this business you get the damnedest requests.

"No question about it, that was one strange woman. Since she didn't have a photo, she borrowed our phone book to look up a studio nearby. Actually, I could see she checked the electronics pages. Darned if I can figure out how she was going to find a photo studio in an electronics store. Yeah, that was one strange woman. But then she was just as happy as a clam when she came back to pick up the watches. Paid cash. Can't ask for better than that."

For the first time Kay began to see a workable defense for her client.

Sid got a thumbs-up sign as she stepped off the return plane. Long before they'd arrived back at the office, she had regaled him with her discoveries.

"After the watch shop, it wasn't too difficult to run down the electronics company that took over after the watchmaker. Only one Honolulu firm specializes in micro-electronics. She brought in one of the watches, and they tucked away a nifty little recording device in it. 'State of the art.' That's what the salesman called it. I think he was hoping to sell me a duplicate. I about choked at the price, but the description he gave of the gadget would have turned James Bond green with envy."

"Jeezus!" Sid exclaimed. "She bugged him with his own watch. Then she switches watches and listens to the previous day's happenings at her leisure while he's off somewhere else."

Kay nodded. "I suppose she could have had two recording devices made, but she probably assumed one was all she needed to catch him at his philandering."

"And she got more than she bargained for, namely a fascinating conversation at the Prince Kuhio."

Kay was bubbling. "Right. That Saturday evening must have been a delight for both of them. He expected to kill her. She expected him to be killed."

"But the gun. Her husband's gun. She couldn't have known it would jam."

"Oh yes she did, because she jammed it. I checked with a gun shop. It's a piece of cake if you know what you're doing, and we've already been told what an expert she was with guns."

"Wait a minute. There's a big loophole here. We're assuming she was pretty smart, but it doesn't sound like smarts to me to be counting on an armed burglar to stop at killing just her husband. If I'd been her, I would have been thinking Collin might very well decide to get rid of the only witness to the killing."

"I thought of that. I toyed with a lot of ideas. Some of them pretty silly, like her wearing a bullet-proof vest. Then an even more serious problem occurred to me. Suppose he'd shown up with an unloaded gun. My guess is that anyone but a hardened criminal like Collin would have waved an empty pistol at the couple. It would have served the purpose, after all. And she had no way of knowing that Collin was the kind who would have felt uncomfortable carrying a gun without bullets in it.

"So I started off by assuming she's smart and she's prepared for all contingencies. The universal solution is for her to do pretty much what her husband was planning -- end up with two bodies -- her husband's and Collin's. But she really won't be able to claim she was wrestling with the burglar or anything like that, so she has to be more innovative."

"Yes? What's the answer?"

"The answer is that she has two guns in her purse, one registered and one not. She waits for her husband's gun to jam and for Collin to shoot him, then she shoots Collin with the registered gun. If Collin doesn't shoot the husband, for whatever reason, she does the same thing. She shoots him with the registered gun, but then she turns and kills her husband with the unregistered one. Since he had no way of anticipating what she was planning, he would be caught completely off guard. So she knew she'd have plenty of time to switch guns and finish him off.

"From then on the scenario is exactly what her husband envisioned, she presses that gun into Collin's hand and puts Collin's gun into his pocket. Presto! A dead husband, a dead burglar and sympathetic police. Their early arrival on the scene saved Collin's life, but she'd already gotten rid of a husband who had planned on getting rid of her.

"The really beautiful part from her viewpoint was that there was absolutely no way of connecting her to Collin. She never met him, never plotted with him, had had no contact with him, whatsoever. And when he survived, there was no possible way he could implicate her because he had no way of knowing she had set him up."

Sid didn't try to hide his admiration of Kay's deductions, but then he turned gloomy. "That's all well and good, but we don't have a shred of proof. And without that, none of this will do anything for your client."

"There's the testimony of the watchmaker and the electronics company, which should be enough to prompt the prosecutor into getting a search warrant. If that conversation in the Prince Kuhio was actually recorded, that would go a long way toward a decent plea bargain for Collin. I can't imagine, even though she's rolling in dough, that she'll throw away the watch with the recorder in it. It's much too handy. Maybe she'll need it for another husband some day. In fact, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the police find the registered gun and the unregistered one stashed away somewhere in her house. Maybe she figures she'll need those for some future husband, too."

Sid's gloom seemed to deepen. "It's hard to believe there are women like that in the world."


JOHN A. BROUSSARD was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1924 and received his AB from Harvard and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He taught at the college level for twenty years. John has recently sold about a hundred short stories; in addition, his first two books, MANA and DEATH OF THE TIN MAN'S WIFE (which features series character Kay Yoshinobu and is slated for eBook release from HandHeldCrime/Coffee Cup Press), appeared in 2001. John also reviews for Bibliophile and I Love a Mystery; his website may be found at http://www.fictionwritings.com/.

Copyright (c) 2001 John A. Broussard


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