“Are you stalking her?”
“No. I wouldn’t do something like that?”
“No, of course not. You’d just kill her.”
“What!?”
“Was she the devil too?”
He hung his head. “No. I thought she was an angel.”
I shared a look with JD.
“Where’d you meet her?”
He hesitated. “We never really met. I saw her at a coffee shop. I thought she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.” He was totally smitten. “I followed her home. I went to that coffee shop every day at the same time, hoping to see her again. I figured out her name. They write it on the cup and call it out. It wasn’t hard to find her last name. I looked her up on the socials, then found her number.”
“You stalked her.”
“No. I… I just… I wanted to get to know her. I was just waiting for the right time. I kept calling her to introduce myself and ask her out, but I always chickened out when she answered.” He hung his head again in shame and disappointment.
"You own a gun?"
Luther shook his head again.
"You mind if we take a look around your boat?”
17
JD and I walked back to the parking lot after turning Luther’s place upside down. You’d have to be a fool to keep a murder weapon lying around. Luther may have been a little odd, but he was no dummy. We didn’t find a pistol on his boat. Lots of places to hide one, though, and it could have been sitting at the bottom of the marina.
“You think that guy snapped and killed them both?” JD asked.
“He’s the most likely suspect we’ve got so far.”
“Maybe he thought Evelyn was in cahoots with the devil. That guy is certifiable, alright.”
Despite my growing interest in Luther as a suspect, JD and I hit the clubs on Oyster Avenue that evening, looking for Clarence. Denise had searched the system for his aliases “Little C, ‘Lil C” and came up with nothing. Apparently, Clarence didn’t have a prior, which was miraculous in his line of work.
Bumper didn't really get happening ‘till around 11:00 PM. We showed up at midnight looking for the dirtbag. Little C wasn't ahard guy to find in a crowd. At 7’1”, with the body of an offensive lineman, he took up quite a bit of space.
Techno music pumped through massive speakers, and bodies bounced in rhythm to the beat on the dance floor. The club was full of leggy beauties in skimpy cocktail dresses and spike-heels shoes. It was the kind of place where the beat never stopped pumping. More than half the crowd was usually on some type of illicit substance. You could see it in their eyes, pupils black as coal. Clubs like this always had a few dealers handing out tabs of ecstasy, which was usually just cheap methamphetamine masquerading as the party drug. Half these kids didn’t know what they were taking and didn't care.
The big man leaned against the wall by a massive speaker, nodding his head in rhythm to the beat.
We watched him for a moment.
People came up to him, exchanged a few words, shook hands, then moved on. The exchange was slick. Little C had a good racket, doing hundreds of deals throughout the course of the night. Nobody was going to give him any grief.
Clarence did not match the appearance of the shooter. He wasn’t our guy. But he could have had someone do it for him.
“How do you want to handle this?” JD muttered.
I shrugged and just walked up to the big fellow. “I need two tabs of Molly.”
Clarence looked me up and down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Either he had made us for cops, or he didn’t sell to strangers.
