no body you had no case, there was a reason why after Jimmy Hoffa disappeared without a trace, nobody has ever been successfully charged.
The next day, Blade called Tabler to ask him to check with counties near Fresno to see if they had found any unidentified bodies that might fit the description. Blade didn’t want to talk further over the phone, and he told Tabler that Carrasco had come through and he would explain when he got back.
It was a long plane ride back to California, but the detectives didn’t talk much about the crime. Carrasco had said that the motive had been to remove a woman who talked too much about floating forged money orders. What she didn’t know was where the money orders had come from. If the motive for killing Mary Sue Kitts was to cover up a burglary, there had to be proof that there was a burglary and that it involved stolen money orders. Blade and Lean didn’t even know when or where such a burglary might have taken place. It was simple: no burglary, no apparent motive. Without a motive attributable to him or some physical evidence, all Allen had to say was “Why would I do that?” There wouldn’t be any good answer other than you thought he “had done that.”
Assuming they could prove a burglary, they had another problem. They couldn’t prove Mary Sue Kitts was even dead or that she had ever been involved with Allen. The most obvious thing they knew was that Clarence Allen wasn’t going to help them prove anything. They didn’t even know the names of the people who had been involved with Allen, with the exception of Eugene Furrow. Somebody was going to have to talk—somebody who had been there. Blade and Lean had been partners long enough that by the time they got off the plane, each of them knew what the other was thinking. What they knew was that no district attorney would waste their time writing NCF, no charges filed, across their request for a complaint; he would just use a stamp instead of wasting the ink in his pen.
First things first. They had to be able to convince their captain, Bud Lauter, and, more importantly, their sergeant, Art Tabler, that there was something here that would take them somewhere at the end. Even serious cases have to be prioritized. You can give cases so much time and then you have to move on, because there is always another body, there is always another case.
Both detectives wanted this case. They wanted to close the book hard on Clarence Ray Allen, but from the beginning they knew they had to approach every step carefully and build their case slowly. They had to put a case together before they started to make arrests and interrogate suspects.
When you sit down to interrogate a person for any crime, but especially for murder, there are unwritten rules as to what can be a very intricate dance. Very seldom do people crack just because they are sitting in front of you. You have to measure them and you have to bring them in slowly. To do that, you have to know the facts, because when suspects lie—and they almost always lie—you have to know it. A good interrogator gets into the head of the person in front of him. It’s a matter of knowing when to push forward and when to pull back. Unfortunately, right now, Blade and Lean had nothing that would shake anybody.
After sifting through their options, Lean asked his more seasoned partner, “So, Blade, what do we tell Tabler? We both know that this case is going to take hundreds of hours and we may end up nowhere.”
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