"Broussard, John A - Kay Yoshinobu - Saturday Night Special" - читать интересную книгу автора (Broussard John A)

"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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