Practice to Deceive

impounded.
    After they left, Peggy immediately called Jean Huden. She said she was shocked when the detectives showed her a picture of a gun.
    “I was thrown for a loop,” she said. “My car was impounded. I have to find Jim and see what in the hell is going on.”
    Peggy Sue told detectives the next day that the only possible phone contact with Jim Huden would be at the house he shared with his wife, Jean, in Punta Gorda.
    “I called Jean and told her what had happened—and asked if she knew anything about it. She put Jim on the phone. That was a first, ’cause I never talked to him.”
    “Yesterday,” Shawn Warwick cut in, “you kept mentioning that you had been talking to Jean—but you didn’t mention talking to Jim.”
    “I hadn’t talked to him when you were here yesterday,” she explained. “I didn’t think he’d been home since Detective Plumberg was down there. But Jean was with him yesterday so I got to talk to him. He got on the phone and asked how I was doing. I said, ‘How do you think I’m doing? My car’s been taken—what’s going on?’ And he just said, ‘I’m sorry, I love you. I never meant for you to be involved in this—but I did it. I did it when I went for cigarettes.’
    “I said, ‘It can’t be!’ And he said, ‘Just know I love you, and you’re never gonna see me or hear from me again.’ That was it. He hung up.”
    Peggy Sue said that she was hysterical, shocked at what Jim confessed to her—so she had called Gerald Werksman, her attorney, who advised her to call the Island County Sheriff’s investigators.
    Gerald Werksman validated what his client said, and that he had urged her to call the sheriff’s office.
    “This was the first time she ever called with tears [in her voice]. And I was naturally most interested in not only did he say he did it— when did he say he did it? She told me when he went out for smokes.”
    Mike Beech finally asked Peggy an obvious question: “The first thing that struck me last night—and again this morning—is nowhere in here do you go, ‘Why? Why did you kill him? Why did you do this?’ That’s a pretty normal human response, I would think.”
    “If you would have seen my demeanor yesterday, I couldn’t even hardly function,” Peggy explained.
    “Before your phone call with Jim yesterday—or after?”
    “No, when I got the phone call.”
    “You mean when you made the phone call,” Shawn Warwick corrected.
    “Yeah, I mean when I got to talk to him [Jim]. I mean, I called up very frank and ended up with the phone being hung up on me, and I’m left in hysterics.”
    “Well, what do you think—about why he might have done it—killed Douglas?” Warwick pressed.
    “I don’t know anyone who would do that,” Peggy said.
    Peggy’s attorney reminded her that she had told him about Jim’s growing up in an abusive household. And that Bill Hill had told Werksman that Jim believed Russ was abusing Brenna.
    Peggy Sue denied that she had ever told Werksman anything like that.
    It seemed that they were mapping out a scenario right there in front of the detectives—one that would totally absolve Peggy and point fingers at Jim as the shooter.
    Gerald Werksman’s explanation for the “why” of Douglas’s inexplicable murder grew more convoluted.
    “Now we start speculating,” he said. “And this whole thing is speculation.”
    “Mmm-hmm,” Mike Beech mumbled, not giving away his own opinion.
    “But I came away from where—either I read or what you said, as now you’ve switched, at first, you—” Werksman fumbled. “I was told that the motivation for this was insurance. I don’t know where I heard that, but now I’m sayin’ to myself, now, because motivation seems to, you know, be an obvious question, maybe in his own sick way, Jim was avenging the abuse he—that he may have heard from Brenna that she was getting or her kids were getting from Russ.
    “Okay. And from what I’ve heard about Huden, he’s wacky enough to—to somehow, in his own mind, thought he was a…an avenging source or something, that as, as far-fetched as that may seem.”
    “Well, everything in the past two years has been far-fetched,” Peggy cut in.
    “Well, regardless of his motive, would he and Brenna—would Jim and Brenna have had a chance to have a discussion?” Shawn Warwick asked.
    “I don’t think so,” Peggy said.
    “Do you know that Brenna is driving a new SUV?” Warwick asked.
    “No.”
    Peggy Sue said