Free Ground Money by Rex Burns Page B

brought a slight smile to Wager’s cheek.
    “I’ll be damned.”
    Wager looked up at Max, who was reading through the thick packet of an autopsy report.
    “You know what Sam Walking Tall died of?”
    “Three and a half inches of steel,” said Wager.
    “That wasn’t the immediate cause of death.”
    “What was?”
    “He drowned.”
    “He what?”
    “The beer. The guy drowned in beer. Molly White Horse poured the beer over him and it went through the hole in his chest into his lungs. He drowned.”
    Wager pushed back against the creak of his desk chair. “What the hell? We don’t have a murder charge on Robert Smith?”
    “He didn’t murder him. Assault One, maybe. But the public defender’s office will probably go for Assault Two as a misdemeanor—the bartender said Sam and Robert had been picking at each other all night, so they’ll try to show provocation.”
    For which the maximum sentence could be two years and a five-thousand-dollar fine. But Robert wouldn’t get that much. With time off for good behavior, he might serve six months in county jail. Moreover, the search for him would lose its intensity with other law enforcement agencies—you kept your eyes open for a murderer, but there were so many assault suspects that it became a matter of luck to catch one. And there was something else: “So now we have to pop Molly for killing him?”
    “We can suggest a finding of accidental death.”
    “Sure we can. A guy gets stabbed in the chest, dies outside a bar in front of witnesses, and the DA calls it an accident. I can see what Gargan and some of those other assholes will put in the paper. There goes the policy of improving press relations.” Wager’s guess was that the prosecutor would charge Molly with negligent homicide, which was also a class one misdemeanor; but she could end up serving more time than Robert Smith, who had started all this crap.
    “Well, the medical fact is that he drowned—old Robert got lucky and Molly didn’t. Sam didn’t have much luck either, come to think of it.” Max yawned again. “But it’s up to the DA to sort out now.” He scribbled a note and clipped it to the file. “It looks like we just solved another homicide, partner, and Assault just got another case.”
    Wager should not have been surprised—he’d seen a lot of strange things happen in the continuing attempts to place the flow and chaos of human passions into the rigid boxes of legal definition and punishment. Criminally negligent homicide—the section that would apply to Molly—was defined by the Criminal Code simply as “conduct amounting to criminal negligence,” and that gave the DA a lot of room to act. But it, too, was a box; it excluded Molly’s drunken love for Sam, her intention to wake him up rather than drown the poor bastard, her total ignorance that she had been the one to kill him. All of that could be heard as mitigation for sentencing, but it didn’t fit into the box of guilty or not guilty. She had done it, and they had her statement—which would have to be taken again after reading her the Miranda Warning—and the DA’s policy was to lay the heaviest charge on perpetrators. “I guess we have to pick her up.”
    Max nodded and glanced at his watch. “Let’s wait awhile—she’s probably not hitting the bars yet. Besides, she might as well have one more good drunk before we haul her in.”
    “Yep.” Law and justice were two different things. Sometimes they worked out together, and a lot of times they didn’t. Wager was a servant of the law—justice was supposed to be found in the courts. He had to remember that. Sighing, he finished filling in an inquiry out of San Diego about any unsolved murders using barbed wire for bondage. Wager had inherited an old case that fit the m.o., and he forwarded copies of pertinent documents and requested San Diego to send what they had. The next slip of paper was a telephone message received at 8:05 a.m.: Please call Tom Sanchez.