Bad Business (5 page)

I
t was 5:30 in the morning. Healy and I were drinking coffee out of thick white mugs at the counter of a small diner on Route 20. I felt the way you feel when you've been up all night and drunk too much coffee. If I still smoked, I would have drunk too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes and felt worse. It wasn't much in the way of consolation. But one makes do.

“Good aim?” I said.

“Or good luck,” Healy said. “Any one of the three shots would have been enough. ME thinks he was dead three, four hours.”

“That would make it about six or seven in the evening.”

“Yep.”

“Lotta people still in the building at that time.”

“Yep.”

“Widens the range of suspects,” I said.

“Yep. Anybody coulda done it. Anybody still working. Anybody walked in during business hours, hung around afterwards.”

“So, basically, anyone could have shot him,” I said.

“We'll start by talking with everyone who worked after five,” Healy said.

“Security?” I said.

“Sign-in starts at five. There's a guard on the front desk and a roamer in the building. We're checking anybody signed in, make sure all the names match.”

“Why would you wait until after five and sign in,” I said, “when you could go in at five of five and not sign in.”

“You wouldn't,” Healy said.

“But procedure is procedure,” I said.

“Un-huh.”

“Why I left the cops,” I said.

“You left the cops because they canned your ass for being an insubordinate fucking hot dog,” Healy said.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “That too.”

The plump blond woman behind the counter poured more coffee into my mug. I didn't need more. I didn't want more. But there it was. I stirred in some sugar.

“Hard,” I said, “to fire off three rounds in a still-populated office building and nobody hears it.”

“We don't yet know if anyone did,” Healy said. “We'll start canvassing this morning.”

“But no one reported any gunshots,” I said.

“Nope.”

“On the other hand,” I said “people don't report gunfire anyway.”

“Only in areas where they recognize it,” Healy said, “and half expect to hear it.”

“People like these,” I said. “They hear bang bang and they don't call for fear that it'll turn out to be some guy with a power nailer fixing something in the third-floor men's room, and they'll look like an asshole.”

“For most of these folks,” Healy said, “it's probably too late to worry about looking like an asshole.”

“Ah, Captain,” I said. “A life of crime-busting has made you cynical. What kind of gun?”

“They haven't dug the slugs out yet. Looking at the holes I'd say a nine.”

“Silencer?”

“Don't know yet,” Healy said. “Whoever did it had large balls. You and I both know silencers will cut down sound, but they won't prevent it. Our shooter walks in, pops the guy, walks out. People in the hallways, people in the elevators.”

“Probably took him, what, a minute?”

“He only needed balls for a little while,” he said. “But for that little while he needed a lot of them.”

I was looking at our server behind the counter. She had on a cropped white tee shirt and constrictive jeans that hung low enough on her hips to display the blue butterfly tattooed at the base of her spine.

“So why were you tailing this guy?”

I drank some coffee and didn't say anything.

“You know,” Healy said, “and I know, that the reason you're tailing him may suggest a motive for murder. Might point us somewhere.”

I nodded.

“You know anything that will point us anywhere?”

“Do I ever,” I said.

Healy's eggs arrived and he ate some.

“His wife,” I said, “hired me to get the goods on him for a divorce.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah, he's cheating on her, but I don't have pictures.”

“Pictures,” Healy said.

“Yeah. She insists on pictures. In the act.”

“Jealous wife ain't a bad motive,” Healy said.

I didn't tell him about Elmer O'Neill. Or the Eisens. I saw nothing useful to me for the moment to say anything about the guy Rowley hired to follow his wife. She was, after all, a client and I might as well protect her as far as I could. I could always tell it later. For the moment holding it back might give me a useful thing to trade someday. I had never gotten into serious trouble keeping my yap shut.

“What we can be pretty sure of,” I said, “is whoever wanted him dead, wanted him dead pretty bad. Walk in and shoot him, no attempt to make it look like an accident, or a suicide. They wanted it done quick.”

Healy bit the corner off a triangle of toast and chewed it slowly and swallowed.

“Or they were so mad it didn't matter to them,” Healy said.

“That narrows it down,” I said.

Healy grinned at me.

“Yeah, it was either a crime of passion or it wasn't,” he said.

M
arlene and I discussed her husband's death, sitting on the side porch, sipping iced tea and looking at the uneventful sweep of her front lawn.

“A person from the state police called me,” Marlene said. “A captain.”

“Healy,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said. “Did you get the pictures of Trent cheating?”

“No.”

“I told you I wanted pictures.”

I nodded.

“Have you identified the woman?” Marlene said.

“Does it matter now?” I said.

“Of course it matters,” Marlene said. “I'm paying for this information.”

“Woman's name is Ellen Eisen.”

“My God,” she said, “that stupid little Jew.”

“Nicely said.”

“Oh, God. Don't get
PC
on me. She
is
a stupid little Jew.”

There didn't seem anywhere to take that, so I nodded and left it.

“Sorry things worked out the way they did,” I said.

“Don't worry about me. I'm strong. I can take it. I don't need any sympathy.”

“I'm sorry anyway,” I said.

“They'll think I did it,” Marlene said.

“They will?”

“Of course they will, they always suspect the wife.”

“In a homicide,” I said, “the cops routinely investigate everybody. They'll clear you.”

“My friends will think I did it. I know they will. They will love blaming me.”

“What are friends for?” I said.

She paid no attention.

“They'll think because of who I am, the police would be intimidated and not really investigate.”

The image of her intimidating Healy made me smile, but Marlene took no notice.

“I'll need you to prove I wasn't involved,” she said.

“I don't think you do,” I said. “On the reasonable assumption that you weren't, I should think the cops could do that on their own.”

“You still work for me,” she said. “I want to be cleared.”

“Where were you last night,” I said, “between, say, six and ten.”

“I went to the movies.”

“Where?”

“At that new big theater complex near the new Ritz.”

“What did you see?”

“
Chicago.
And I don't like being questioned this way.”

“The easiest way to be cleared is to have an alibi,” I said.

“Well, I was at the movies. I often go into Boston alone to the movies.”

“You didn't see anyone you knew?”

“No.”

“You have the ticket stub?”

“No, of course not, why would I save a ticket stub?”

I was quiet.

“It's like you think I did do it,” she said.

“You have very little chance of getting at the truth,” I said, “if you know in advance what the truth ought to be.”

“Oh, don't lecture me,” she said. “Go do your job.”

“Marlene,” I said. “I think I'm going to have to file you under Life's Too Short.”

“Excuse me?”

“I quit again.”

She stared at me.

“You can't quit,” she said.

“Sure I can.”

I stood up.

“I'll send my bill to Randy,” I said.

She began to cry. I started for the door. She cried harder.

“Please,” she said.

I got to the door.

“Please,” she said again.

I looked back. She was bent way over in her chair as if her stomach hurt. Her face was buried in her hands.

“Please don't leave,” she said. “Please don't leave me like this.”

She had me. I put my hand on the doorknob but I knew I wasn't going to turn it. I took in some air. She blubbered.

“Okay,” I said.

“What?”

“Okay,” I said.

I turned away from the door and went back and sat down. I was 0 for 2, quitting.

D
r. Silverman and I looked at the Gainsborough exhibit all morning at the Museum of Fine Arts. Then we went for lunch in the museum restaurant. Susan had salad. I had fruit and cheese. We shared a bottle of pinot grigio.

“I doubt that she was faking the hysterics,” Susan said to me. “It is not easy to do.”

“You ever do it?”

“No.”

“Even when I propose sex?”

“Those are real hysterics,” Susan said.

I ate a seedless grape.

“Funny thing,” I said. “She didn't get hysterical over her husband's death.”

“They were estranged, after all,” Susan said.

“First thing she wanted to know was if he was cheating, and did I get pictures.”

Susan took a bite from a leaf of Boston lettuce.

“Was he?” she said.

“Yes, I had him in a hotel room for several hours with a woman.”

“You told her.”

“Yeah. That's what she hired me for.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Pictures?” Susan said.

“No. I probably was never going to get the pictures she wanted.”

“Because?”

“Because she wanted them
en flagrante.
”

“And you found it repellent to get such pictures.”

“I did.”

“And why did she want such pictures?” Susan said.

Susan had forgotten her salad.

“Said she wanted rock solid proof when she went into divorce court,” I said.

Susan nodded slowly. She was in her focused mode. In her focused mode she could set things on fire.

“Divorces are often granted without such evidence,” she said.

“Usually,” I said.

Susan sipped her wine, and was silent. She would often stop like that, in the middle of a discussion, when she had come across something interesting. I knew she was thinking about it. I waited.

“It's a way to be part of it,” Susan said.

“Part of . . . ?”

“The partner of someone who is having an adulterous affair is excluded. Seeing pictures, having
information, is a way of not being excluded, of becoming, so to speak, a part of the action.”

“Knowledge is power?” I said.

“Knowledge is participation,” Susan said. “A way not to be left out. And, probably, a sort of revenge.”

“Because it would humiliate him to be caught on camera?”

“His every secret revealed,” Susan said.

“You think that's why she hired me?”

“Things are never one thing,” Susan said. “There are always several truths.”

“So,” I said. “She wanted to clean his clock in the divorce. She wanted revenge. And she what . . . something else?”

“Well,” Susan said. “She would be a third participant in a covert sexual liaison.”

“So she'd get sexual pleasure.”

“Yep.”

“Voyeurism?”

“Well, sure, I suppose. If you define voyeurism as getting pleasure out of observing sex.”

“That would cover a pretty good segment of the population,” I said.

“I seem to recall somebody peeking in the mirrors on a hotel room wall once?”

“Voyeurism,” I said.

“Which is why, Mirror Boy, putting a name to behavior doesn't always add much information.”

“Will this be on the midterm?” I said.

She smiled.

“God,” she said, “I do lecture, don't I.”

“And beautifully,” I said.

“Is she a suspect?” Susan said.

“Marlene? In her husband's murder? No more than the husband's girlfriend, or the husband's girlfriend's husband, or the wife of the guy Marlene was seeing if she was seeing anybody, or the guy Marlene was seeing if she was seeing anybody.”

“Wow!”

“A serial gang bang,” I said. “Maybe.”

“So hiring you to clear her name seems a little premature.”

“It's not the cops,” I said. “It's her friends.”

“How lovely,” Susan said.

“You think in fact it's really the continuing quest for, ah, voyeuristic information?”

“Yes.”

“Even though he's dead?”

“Yes,” Susan said. “He won't escape her that easily.”

“What do you think about her own affair?”

“If there really was one, I'd guess it was a case of revenge fuck.”

“That a Freudian expression?” I said.

“Actually,” Susan said. “I believe I learned it from you.”

“Glad you've been paying attention,” I said.

“And, of course you have agreed to continue.”

“Well, the pay is good, and she did cry—you know how I hate crying—and I'm sort of curious about who killed her husband while I was outside watching.”

Susan smiled.

“What?” I said.

“Even if the pay were bad and she didn't cry,” Susan said.

“You think I'd do it just because I'm curious?”

“Without question,” Susan said.

“You shrinks think you know everything,” I said.

“Am I right?” Susan said.

“Yes.”