Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

I left a message for Lipensky about the witness, then returned to my office. I already knew Eric drove a silver SUV. Now a database told me Colin Baker, Martha Terrell’s son, owned a blue Honda. I had other information pointing me in Colin’s direction.

He opened the door of the Oakland apartment he shared with his girlfriend looking slightly disheveled, feet bare below his faded jeans and stained T-shirt. He ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair and squinted at the business card I’d handed him while I explained I was working for the insurance company.

He stuck the card into his pocket. “My mother didn’t kill Claude. Or herself. The court’s going to have to split everything four ways.”

“May I come in? I have some questions.”

“Sure.” He waved me into the living room and shut the door. “I don’t know what I can tell you. I was at work that day.”

“No, you weren’t.”

He took a step back, his expression going from stunned to frightened.

“I checked, Colin. You called and told the supervisor at the law firm where you were temping that you were sick. She didn’t check with the temp agency because she assumed you’d called them. You didn’t. Edie Walker at the temp agency covered for you. Your girlfriend — the same Edie Walker whose name is on the lease of this apartment. You weren’t at work. You weren’t home, either. One of your neighbors saw you leave the apartment that morning. Where were you that day?”

He looked panicky. “It’s not what you think.”

“What I think might very well be what the cops think when they find out you lied. Time to come clean.”

“I couldn’t get out of bed that morning. I just couldn’t face another day at that temp job. I told Edie I wasn’t feeling well. Later, when we found out Mom and Claude were dead, she thought it looked bad and she told that cop I’d been at work.”

“Where were you?”

He stared down at his feet. “At the movies.”

“All day?”

“Yeah, all day. The theater at Jack London Square starts showing movies in the morning. There was this flick I wanted to see. I sat through it twice. I wound up staying there the whole day, going from theater to theater. You’re not supposed to do that, but I sneaked in and out. I’d go to the john, then I’d buy popcorn and Milk Duds. I dump the Milk Duds in the popcorn and the candy gets all warm and gooey.” I stared at him and he stopped prattling.

“Have you still got the ticket stub?”

“Hell, I don’t think so. Who saves ticket stubs?”

“They have a way of roosting in pockets and wallets. You’d better start looking. And hope someone at the theater can back up your story.”

Colin checked his wallet and the jacket he’d been wearing that day but came up with lint and a couple of paper strips from fortune cookies. Not much of an alibi. We went out to his car. The blue Honda’s floorboards were filled with fast-food wrappers, empty bottles and cans, and other debris. He dug around in this mess and came up with a receipt from a restaurant at Jack London Square. “I had a pizza afterwards.”

“After all that popcorn?” I examined the receipt. The date and time printed on the slip were blurred. “This tells me nothing.”

“It’s the truth.” He sounded scared.

“All right. I’ll check it out.”

I went down to the multiplex in Jack London Square. A manager told me hundreds of people cycled through the place on any given day. How could they be expected to remember one guy? And if he’d been found jumping from theater to theater in the course of an afternoon, they’d have escorted him to the exit.

“I remember him.” It was a young woman behind the re-freshment counter.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “A guy in his late twenties, blond, blue eyes. Spent the afternoon watching movies and eating a lot of Milk Duds dumped in his popcorn.”

“That’s why I remember him,” she said. “I’d never seen anyone do that to buttered popcorn before, and I said so. He told me it made the candy warm and gooey.”

“Sounds like my guy,” I said. “Was he here most of the day?”

She nodded. “I noticed him after the first show let out. He went into the john, came out, bought some more popcorn and candy, and went back into the theater. Same thing after the next show. I saw him several times and joked with him about putting candy in his popcorn.”

“If you knew he was jumping theaters, you should have reported him,” the manager huffed. “The guy was here all afternoon and only bought one movie ticket.”

“Lighten up,” she argued. “He spent five times that on popcorn, candy, and sodas.”

So Colin’s story, strange as it was, checked out. My teeth hurt when I thought about melting Milk Duds in hot, buttered popcorn.

I went over the alibis in my head. Colin at the movies. Pamela teaching school. Ralph at a job interview. Erin in a meeting. Lisa having lunch with friends. That left Eric, supposedly at work, with no transportation because he’d left his car to be serviced. He’d taken BART and the bus to work. Many car dealerships had shuttles to BART, I recalled. Maybe a driver would remember him. Maybe one of his coworkers had seen him.