A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

Sharon’s yellow Oldsmobile, but as far as Barclift knew, she had had no plans to sell it. Longnecker continued his recollections. He insisted that he had become friends with Sharon, and that he had gone to her apartment “about fifteen times.” He even drew a crude sketch of the floor plan to prove his story, pointedly omitting the bedroom where Sharon had died.
    That didn’t prove anything. Barclift knew that Buddy had been in the apartment. He had had plenty of time to memorize the floor plan during the day he spent there.
    “I helped her correct school papers,” Buddy said. “And she gave me beer and wine.”
    Sharon Mason didn’t drink, and first-graders didn’t do papers that required correcting. Paul Barclift fought to keep his incredulity from showing.
    “Hey,” Buddy said. “We weren’t romantically involved or anything—”
    “Really.”
    Buddy said he knew nothing about Sharon Mason’s murder, only what he had heard on the radio. “I went there, all right, to make those two phone calls. But I left before she came home. I didn’t even know she died until I heard the news the next day.”
    “She let you go into her apartment to make calls, did she?” Barclift asked. “And you just met her because her car was for sale? Nobody else told us her car was for sale.”
    Buddy Longnecker studied the wall behind Barclift, blinking rapidly. “Well, really I met her when I was hitchhiking. She picked me up.”
    Paul Barclift knew what Sharon’s lifestyle had been like. She would no more have picked up a hitchhiker than she would have gone big-game hunting. The kid was lying.
    “We smoked some pot together in her car,” Buddy said.
    Barclift wasn’t as confrontational as K. C. Jones had been, but he quietly pointed out to Buddy that he could not have known Sharon Mason to be saying such things about her. “You’re not even close to describing the kind of woman she was. I don’t think you knew her at all.”
    “Yes, I did. I knew her really good,” Buddy insisted.
    At length, Buddy Longnecker changed his story once more, although he insisted that he had been an invited guest in Sharon’s apartment. He admitted that he had been responsible for her death, but that it had all been a terrible accident. “I had these ‘Numchucks’ [Nunchaku Sticks], and I was playfully showing her how they worked.”
    Barclift knew that the sticks were deadly weapons. They were developed in the South Sea islands centuries ago. Nunchaku Sticks were made of extremely hard wood, connected by a rope or thong. Their inventors used them to thresh grain, but they doubled as lethal weapons. If one stick was held in the hand, and the other whirled, it could split a brick—or a skull—like an eggshell. Remembering the way Sharon Mason’s head had been struck, her teeth shattered, made Barclift wince.
    Buddy had been taught to use Numchucks by his friend, Al Wilkes. “See, Sharon found me waiting when she came home from work, and she invited me in,” he said. “And she and I were smoking dope and drinking brewskis and she asked me how they worked.”
    Barclift asked Buddy why no one in the apartment house had seen him hanging around her front door, and he said he didn’t know.
    “Did you write anything in her apartment?” the detective asked quickly. Buddy Longnecker paused for a moment before he answered.
    “I wrote on her mirror.”
    That was it. That was something that no one but Sharon Mason’s killer could have known. “What did you write?” Barclift asked.
    “I wrote, ‘You didn’t keep the deal.’ See, she was pretty loose and she wanted to know what would happen if a person hit certain places [with the sticks]. The
deal
was that I would show her if she didn’t get hostile. We started running around and she went in the bedroom and fell, and blood started coming out of her mouth.”
    “What did she hit when she fell?”
    “She knocked the radio off the dresser.”
    There had been no radio in Sharon Mason’s bedroom. “Did you take the radio?” Barclift asked.
    “I broke it up, and threw it away in the garbage cans at Al’s . . .I didn’t mean to do it.”
    He was talking now about killing Sharon Mason, but he continued in his version of their deadly encounter. He insisted that she had been playing with the Numchucks and he’d been trying to teach her how to use them when she accidentally hit herself in the mouth.
    Buddy Longnecker veered off into a self-serving description of Sharon’s