Practice to Deceive

after business hours, too late at night to reach anything but answering machines.
    “We even tried to help him find a lawyer,” Plumberg said.
    When Jim Huden couldn’t locate an attorney to come to the police station, he asked Plumberg, “What happens next?”
    “That’s up to you.”
    Huden mulled it over for a while, and then he asked if he could have a ride home.
    A Punta Gorda police officer provided that transportation.
    * * *
    T HERE WAS NO QUESTION that the Island County detectives felt they had the person who had either shot Russel Douglas or conspired with someone else to do so—but they couldn’t prove it.
    They had no gun. They had a single, battered bullet from Russ Douglas’s brain. They had no solid physical evidence or credible eyewitnesses. And, most puzzling of all, they had no motive. Apparently Huden and Douglas hadn’t even known each other!
    It was true that Jim Huden and Peggy Thomas had run through their money and were approaching their credit card limits, but killing Russ hardly seemed a feasible way to get money. He didn’t have much money—certainly not enough to kill for.
    All homicides have some motivation, however obscure, but this case was as baffling as anything they had run into before.
    Hurricane Charley was getting closer, but neither Mike Beech nor Mark Plumberg was anxious to leave Punta Gorda. They wanted to canvass Jim Huden’s neighbors and friends to see if they could learn anything more about him, something that might help them get an arrest warrant.
    The Hudens’ next-door neighbors on Yucca Street weren’t able to provide much information, nothing beyond finding them “nice people.” They had noticed that Jim was not living with Jean for several months in 2003.
    “I think he left right before Memorial Day last year,” the wife said. “And then he was back in January or February.”
    The detectives contacted a man named Roy Boehm, said to be a friend of Jim’s.
    “I know him, and I occasionally went flying with him—but we aren’t close,” Boehm said. “I think I know Jean, his wife, better.”
    Mutual friends said that Jim admired Boehm and wanted to emulate his bravery and toughness in some way.
    “You ever go shooting with him?” Plumberg asked.
    “No! I don’t know if he even owns a gun. I know he left Jean for a while and went back to Washington to visit his brother and a friend who lives there.”
    Asked about any other friends Huden might have, Boehm mentioned a local called “The Mayor.” He wasn’t really the mayor, but people called him that.
    “Jim liked to play golf—I think he used to work on a golf course. That’s about all I know about him.”
    The two Island County detectives next located the musicians who had played in Jim’s band, Buck Naked and the X-hibitionists.
    “We’ve started a new band we call Buck Naked II, and we play in a place called Tallulah’s in Sarasota,” one member told them.
    The man gave them the names of three other band members, including Bill Hill, but his answers were terse and he didn’t seem to want to discuss Huden. He did tell them, however, that Jim had told someone he might be leaving the area soon, and they wouldn’t see him again.
    Bill Hill couldn’t fathom why the Jim he knew would have killed anyone. On August 8, 2004, hearing that the Washington State detectives had talked to Jim and that they had drawn quite a bit of information from him, Hill provided Mike Beech and Mark Plumberg with a taped statement of what he had told them earlier on the phone.
    While Hill was doing that, another of the Buck Naked performers dropped in to his house.
    The drummer said that he’d known Jim since 1994 or ’95, but they hadn’t been very close since Jim came back from Las Vegas.
    “Lots of people are angry with him,” the drummer said. “About a week ago last Sunday, he announced he was leaving town and our band again!”
    “Does Jim have a gun?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t know about any firearm and I’ve been to his house many, many times.”
    It was beginning to look as if Jim Huden had already left town. When Beech and Plumberg knocked on Jean and Jim’s door, no one answered. A neighbor said he had seen Jean come home in her Corvette, but she left again in Jim’s red car.
    Jean’s brother, who had no particular love for Jim, said that he hadn’t seen Jim but that Jean had said she was getting out of town for the weekend, going to the beach to lie in the sun. She