Crimson Smile / The Path of Jackals: A P.I. Tales Double Feature

By Michael Pool and Hunter Eden

Two thrilling detective novellas in one exciting volume!

In Michael Pool's Crimson Smile, private investigator Rick Malone has seen his share of marriages gone bad. When a wealthy Denver socialite stands accused of murdering her husband, Rick is called in to run an investigation into

• Language: English
• Publisher: P.I. Tales
• Release date: Feb 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087938790

Book preview

p.i. tales presents:

double feature VOLUME #1

CRIMSON SMILE

A RICK MALONE SHORT CASE

by Michael Pool

&

THE PATH OF JACKALS

A FENNEC SULEIMAN SHORT CASE

by Hunter Eden

Crimson Smile Copyright © 2021 by Michael Pool

The Path of Jackals Copyright © 2021 by Hunter Eden

P.I. Tales is a registered US Trademark.

All rights reserved. No part of this book or P.I. Tales may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

P.I. Tales

Denver, Colorado

www.pitales.com

Book and Cover design by P.I. Tales

Edited by Isa Reeb

First Edition: February 2021

ISBN: 978-1-7345495-2-2

CRIMSON SMILE

by Michael Pool

I’D JUST POLISHED OFF the last drink in a bottle of Kirkland Bourbon when I got the call I’d been expecting. I’d heard about Paul Thurston’s violent murder on the news, which had been a popular story around Denver for a few weeks.

Thurston’s wife, Becky, had been taken into custody at the scene, apparently covered in blood and inconsolable. No one denied that she’d killed her husband. She’d even directed detectives to the knife, still wet with blood and bits of her husband’s vital organs. I watched as her attorney, Charles LeMar, told the camera his client acted in self-defense, and that there was another side to the story not being covered in the media.

That single statement was the reason I’d been expecting the call. Because I do quite a lot of work for Charles LeMar, and we go back a long way. We have a professional relationship that has seen us through some sketchy stuff, and we have a bit of an understanding.

It would be my job to uncover that other side of the story, assuming it existed and could be proven. Or at least alluded to strongly. The sheer brutality had pundits in all corners of the city conjecturing on the monstrous nature of the crime.

Public opinion almost always swings whichever direction media spins it, and that is why jury selection is always so crucial in these kinds of high-profile cases. No matter how good the jury, you need a separate narrative to spin for them, which means you need a private investigator to work up the web.

Domestic violence, or more generally violence against women, was having its moment in the zeitgeist, and I figured LeMar to start beating that drum in due time. He had not publicly made the accusation yet, beyond calling the crime self-defense, but I knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t allow the media narrative to run for long before he started grandstanding. LeMar loves the camera, and he thinks it loves him back.

Money is not a problem, LeMar said to me on the call. He said it the way he said most things in our professional relationship, a way that meant more than the sum of its parts. LeMar made a habit of plausible deniability in his speech, like all good criminal attorneys. What he said and what he meant might overlap, but they seldom matched. You had to read between the lines to get to his real intentions.

In this case, he needed some other side to the story. ANY other side. He might look self-assured in front of a camera, but it was likely he had little of substance beyond accusations his client was concocting. LeMar is a man who likes to win, which does not always mean playing fair. Anytime an attorney says money is not a problem, it means money is most definitely a problem. There is no bigger problem in a murder defense than motive, and no greater motive for killing than cold, hard cash.

I knew what LeMar was really saying. That he suspected Becky had killed her husband for reasons that would not meet the legal standard of self-defense. And that the money she stood to gain, the same money which had her out on a one million dollar bond and was currently paying his $300 an hour fee, made an airtight motive for the average jury.

LeMar was hiring me to melt that motive down and replace it with a tale of victimhood and abuse. Men like LeMar make their living on technicalities and half explanations. They cannot function without some sort of tangible reasonable doubt.

I don’t normally drive after a bourbon drink, but something about this file intrigued me enough to climb behind the wheel and drive by the crime scene. The scene was an obnoxious contemporary mansion crammed up in the RiNo section of Five Points that they’d likely torn down two craftsman homes to build.

The house wasn’t hard to find, located a block off busy Larimer Street, across from a public housing project and next to several multi-tenant buildings that housed obscenely overpriced condos. The price became even more obscene when you considered the homeless encampments that often lined the streets in front of them.

The victim’s house had three Black Lives Matter signs in the yard, which felt a bit like overcompensation. An onlooker would have to wonder if black lives had mattered less when the Thurstons bought up multiple homes in The Harlem of the West and tore them down to build their ode to the excesses of capitalism. Or maybe that’s just me, always wanting actions and statements to match up, seeing how seldom they ever do.

I shook off the thought and reminded myself that a man was dead, and my job was to determine if he’d done something to earn that death from a legal standpoint.

His killer had enough money to get some measure of justice either way. It bothers me, the interplay between finances and justice. Probably not as much as it bothers the underfunded when justice comes looking for them.

I got out and walked the residence’s perimeter, separated by a brick wall that looked to have been constructed from the bricks of the torn-down houses that once stood there. It had urine-yellow crime scene tape around it, meaning I could only walk the sidewalks on the south and east sides of the residence unless I wanted to risk contaminating the crime scene before I’d been given permission to enter.

The house had an overplayed architectural vibe, angular and metallic, with a large statue in front of it made of steel ribbons that formed the rough shape of a ballerina. I pulled myself up onto the wall to look over into the backyard, since the crime scene tape didn’t extend down that side of the house. The yard took up half a city block, had an infinity pool and a half basketball court with the fancy clear backboards like they use in the NBA. What looked to be a guest house was in the back corner of the lot. I made a note to check and see if they had anyone staying in that guest house.

Then I drove back to the interstate, headed south on I-25 and then west on Sixth Avenue, took the Sheridan exit south to Harvey Park, where my little mid-century modern slice of suburbia exists. It’s a small house, 1500 square feet total, with floor-to-ceiling windows across the front and wonderful angular windows that hug the eaves of my bedroom and home office. I grew up in this house with my late grandma Shirley. Her lifelong best friend, now my best friend, Vera, lived across the street. Her house was a simpler single-story ranch style built in the same period.

I parked in the driveway and headed across the street to check on Vera, but she was already snoring in her bedroom. I locked the previously unlocked door and went home to bed, intending to stop by LeMar’s office first thing in the morning to pick up the discovery packet. Nothing about that pre-investigation indicated the chaos that would come, but then again, that’s the nature of chaos, sudden acceleration.

***

In the morning, I hand-ground a few tablespoons of solar-roasted coffee and brewed it through an AeroPress into a travel mug. Then I shaved and got dressed in my usual uniform of blue jeans and a button-neck thermal shirt with the sleeves pulled up to the elbows. I headed to LeMar’s office over in Cherry Creek around 7:45, knowing he often got in around 8:00.

After a brief interlude with his secretary, Sherry, LeMar came huffing into the third-floor office with sweat on his collar and slight stains on his big, round torso.

Jesus, the goddamn elevator is down again, he said.

I nodded my hello and said, Maybe it should stay broken. You look like the stairs tried to mug you.

LeMar waved me off with his hand. None of that nonsense today, Malone. He motioned me to follow into his office. I’m in no mood, my stress levels are through the roof with the goddamn media sniffing our asses.

I get it, I said. Now, how can I help?

LeMar huffed his way around his desk and took a seat in the high-back leather chair tucked behind it. 

Whole damn world wants justice, right or wrong. Now the media is neck-deep in this. Becky’s about to have her own #metoo movement. These reporters are like sharks, time to give them something to sink their teeth into.

Tell me what you’ve got, I said, and don’t do anything too rash yet. You know what an unpredictable power media can be.

He nodded at that, but a fool could see the advice had slipped him. It’s the violence of the whole thing that has me worried, he said. "It’s one thing to kill an abusive son of a bitch in self-defense, it’s quite another