THREE WISHES

THREE WISHES Part 1

Being in prison made me uncomfortable.

However, whenever a well-respected law firm sends me a certified check for ten thousand dollars for ten minutes of my time to talk to a prisoner, and I'm in the area anyway, I usually agree to meet.

My nickname isn't "Corsair" because I turn down free money after all.

I say "usually agree to meet", but this meeting marked the first time this has ever happened to me. Besides, I figured meeting someone in a prison visitor area, with thick glass between me and the convict would be safe enough. After all, the prisoners, staff and visitors are highly screened. I highly doubted a weapon could be introduced to our encounter.

Case in point. I left mine in my car.

What could go wrong?

As I waited for the guards to bring the prisoner out, the one who had his lawyers send the invitation and the check to me, I thought about the research I quickly conducted on the man's name in preparation for the meeting. An unusual meeting. An arraigned encounter with a man I'd hadn't heard of before. A man currently behind bars. A man I'd been paid a thousand dollars a minute to meet.

Jon Blackshire.

Mister Jon Blackshire, an influential businessman, apparently had instructed his lawyers to contact me in a last-minute, desperate plea to clear his name and release him from prison. Somehow, they thought I could help. I'm sure I couldn't, but ten grand is ten grand.

According to the news reports I found online, a little over thirteen months ago, Jon Blackshire and his much younger wife, Allison Blackshire, were at home having dinner. No one knew what occurred, but several hours later, the police picked up Mister Blackshire, completely disorientated, walking around their ritzy, upscale neighborhood in a daze. According to the police report, when they found him, Jon Blackshire's hands and arms were covered in blood. Upon checking the Blackshire residence, the authorities found copious amounts of blood spattered over the entire dining room. Although the police couldn't find the body of Allison Blackshire, or a murder weapon, all the tests confirmed the blood in the home, and on the hands and arms of her husband, belonged to Allison.

The police arrested Jon Blackshire and the District Attorney subsequently prosecuted him for the presumed murder of his recently married wife.

At the trial, apart from extensive testimony related to how Jon and his beautiful, young wife were married only for appearance's sake, several expert witnesses testified about the sheer amount of blood recovered from the Blackshire home. All the experts agreed the amount of blood loss would render a human, in this case, Jon Blackshire's wife, Allison Blackshire, dead within minutes if not seconds.

The key evidence which sealed Jon's fate however, according to the court reporters, related to how Jon Blackshire had taken out dozens of multi-million-dollar life insurance policies on his wife the morning of her death.

The highly publicized trial ended in a murder conviction with a sentence of life in prison for Mister Blackshire.

All the other news stories I could find revolved around Jon's bizarre prison statements. During the initial police interview and trial, Mister Blackshire never spoke a word, except of course to his lawyers in confidence. However, after being incarcerated but before receiving his life sentence, Jon Blackshire was quoted several times by other prisoners mumbling something about how he was "innocent" and how he'd been "tricked" and how the "evil one" killed his wife.

The media and the prosecution chalked these rantings up to a bid to avoid the death sentence and possibly enter an insanity plea.

As the corrections officers sat Mister Jon Blackshire across from me and before I picked up the receiver to talk to him, I checked the time on my lucky dive watch.

As I'd been paid to do, I planned to give the murderer ten minutes of my time and not a second more.