Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006

Green Fish Blues by John H. Dirckx

The shadow of the Venetian blinds, etched by the sun on the wall of the breakfast nook, faded out and sharpened again as clouds tumbled across the sky on this breezy June morning. Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn yawned over the headlines in the morning paper while half-listening to the chugging and burbling of the electric percolator, the clicking and clatter made by birds rummaging in the roof gutters for food and nest-building materials, and the creaking of the east side of the house warming up.

The giggle of his digital phone in the bedroom summoned him to the cool, dark side.

“Cy, it’s Laporte. You’re not on the road yet, are you?” Lieutenant Gavin Laporte, third watch commander. “On your way in, touch base with Dollinger and Krasnoy at the corner of Jardine and Pace. They’ve got a citizen down.”

“Drowning?”

“Shooting. Elderly female. Apparently robbed.”

“ID?”

“Ida Claire Blanford. Single, aged seventy-four. Retired schoolteacher. Shot down within a few yards of her house. An evidence tech will be at the scene by the time you get there.”

The corner of Jardine and Pace wasn’t exactly on Auburn’s way to headquarters. The two streets met at a right angle and ended, at the south bank of the river, in an older residential district that was gradually degenerating into a slum. It had once been a flourishing urban neighborhood, but its development had been arrested by the natural barrier of the river, and property values had begun to decline as many of the houses slowly disintegrated in the hands of absentee landlords.

Between the river and the point where Jardine and Pace dead-ended into each other there was a broad grassy levee planted with oaks, which were just now coming into leaf. Auburn saw a cruiser and an evidence van parked on the street, and festoons of yellow tape at the crest of the levee, fringed by the inevitable crowd of onlookers. Climbing up himself, he found Patrolmen Fritz Dollinger and Terry Krasnoy down near the water conferring with Kestrel, the evidence technician from headquarters.

Ancient sycamores grew along the water’s edge, some of them leaning far out and ready to topple because their massive roots had been undermined by the scour of the current when the river was high. But it hadn’t rained for more than a week now, and the river had dwindled to a sluggish stream barely an eighth of a mile wide, leaving broad, slimy mud flats along both banks.

The body of the victim lay, on a sloping stretch of bank well out from solid ground, under a blue plastic sheet weighted at the corners against the breeze with stones. A black leather handbag rested on top of the sheet. Auburn noticed a rowboat equipped with a trawling motor moored to a tangle of wild shrubbery a few yards downstream. On the far bank of the river he could see a few spectators clustered on balconies and at upper windows.

Patrolman Krasnoy gave him a quasi-military salute. “Good morning, Sergeant,” he said. “We didn’t know if they were sending you or the Coast Guard.”

“Are you sure this isn’t a drowning?”

“We didn’t do an autopsy yet,” said Dollinger, “but her clothes are dry. Except for right around the hole in her chest. Take a look.”

Kestrel, the evidence man, registered acute distress. “Afraid I’ll have to veto that for now,” he said. “You can’t get near the body without making more tracks in the mud, and I haven’t shot any pictures yet.”

“I can wait,” said Auburn. “What do we know?”

“A fisherman in a boat spotted the body an hour or so ago,” said Dollinger. “He’s around somewhere. He already filled out a 201, but we asked him to hang loose till you talked to him. When he saw the body, he tied up, climbed the levee, and called Public Safety from a bar and grill up there. The guy who runs the bar came across for a look at the body and recognized her as the woman who lives in that house right there.”

He pointed to a huge, old white frame house, not a hundred yards away. Its long narrow back yard extended all the way to the riverbank, from which it was separated by a stone wall. The property was well maintained, and beds of spring flowers in the side yards relieved the severity of the house’s boxy architecture.

A black iron fence enclosed the entire lot except for the driveway. An old-fashioned mailbox was mounted on the fence next to the gate at the sidewalk in front of the house. Even at this distance Auburn could read the name Blanford stenciled on it.

“Anybody home over there?”

“Nobody came to the door,” said Krasnoy. “The man from the bar, Casteven, says she lived alone.”

Auburn glanced at the handbag lying on the plastic sheet. “Any confirmation of her ID?”

“Couple credit cards in the name of Ida Blanford. No cash in the handbag, just a bunch of keys and some personal stuff. DMV says she didn’t have a current driver’s license because of substandard vision.”

Kestrel, having taken several photographs for orientation, passed the handbag to Auburn and removed the sheet from the body. A murmur of ghoulish satisfaction went up from the growing crowd.

The dead woman lay spread-eagled on her back, with her head about a foot and a half from the water. Her eyes were half open, her refined features set in a sallow mask, her bobbed white hair disheveled. She wore no jewelry. Her floral print blouse clearly showed a blood-ringed hole just left of center in the chest. There were smears of mud on her light blue slacks but none on the soles of her shoes.

While Kestrel went on taking pictures, Auburn examined the contents of the handbag — a hairbrush, a handkerchief, a ring of nine keys, a pair of thick trifocals in a crushproof case, a package of chewing gum. A compact billfold contained two credit cards, a Social Security card, and a senior citizen’s discount card, but no money and no further identification.

“Rigor is pretty well advanced,” Kestrel said, now squatting beside the body. “It would have been cool down here by the water last night, but even so, I’d say she must have been dead since midnight.”

“Somebody should have heard a shot,” said Auburn.

“The guy at the bar and grill didn’t,” said Dollinger. “He lives upstairs over there. We didn’t ask anybody else yet, but that’s right up top on our agenda.”

“One wonders,” said Krasnoy, “why they didn’t just throw her and her bag in the river.”

“They may have tried, and missed the water in the dark,” said Dollinger. To Auburn, he added, “They must have tossed her from up here on the grass. Terry and I made those footprints when we covered her up, and they’re the only ones near the body.”

“Any bloodstains or other traces around here on the grass, or over on the sidewalk?”

“No blood that we could see,” said Krasnoy, “and no shell. Here comes our ancient mariner,” he added under his breath.

Auburn turned to see a stocky middle-aged man stepping with pompous self-assurance over the yellow tape and descending the bank. With his floppy-brimmed hat adorned with fishing flies and his sunburnt nose, he looked like something straight out of a beer commercial on TV. When he got closer, Auburn sensed that he had indeed just had a beer, if not two, at the establishment across the street.

His name was Fred Shannoy; he was on a two week vacation from his job with an advertising agency. “I’m not what you’d call a serious fisherman,” Shannoy assured him. “Anything I catch I throw back. I figure it’s going to be full of lead or mercury or radioactive wastes anyway... Hey, I don’t even like fish.”

Auburn obliged him with the expected chuckle. “Do you own the boat, Mr. Shannoy?”

“Rented. I showed the papers to the officers here.”

“Where did you cast off this morning?”

“The landing at the park up in Stillwell, around seven. Told them that too. I was just drifting with the current, looking for a shady spot to tie up, when I saw this old gal lying here on the bank. Kind of like a sunbather, you know? Except she was in the shade and she had all her clothes on. And then when I got close enough, I saw she was... uh... well, you know. Not with us any more.”

Just the sort of circumlocution, thought Auburn, that one might expect from an advertising man.

“So I pulled in and tied up downstream there and came ashore.” He glanced briefly at his muddy shoes. “The place across the street, The Green Fish, wasn’t open for business yet, but there was a truck there delivering meat, so I went in and called you guys. That... that’s a bullet hole, isn’t it?”

“That’s what it looks like. Are you familiar with this area?”

“No, sir. Never been here before, either by land or by sea.”

“Did you see anybody here on the bank besides the dead woman?”

“No. Not on this side of the river, anyway. I saw a few joggers and pedestrians over on the downtown side.”

Auburn was making a final check of Shannoy’s written statement when Nick Stamaty from the coroner’s office arrived. Dark and heavily built, Stamaty dressed like a college president, moved with the grace of a sumo wrestler, and radiated the sincerity of a Sunday-school teacher.

“Straighten your ties, guys,” he said, before even looking at the remains of Ida Blanford. “The camcorders are coming.”

Auburn stepped up to the brow of the levee and peered down into the street. “It’s Channel Four,” he reported to the others. “They usually behave pretty well.”

After sending Shannoy off to resume his fishing, Auburn filled Stamaty in on the details thus far known. Stamaty unslung his camera case and checked the position of the sun. “Let me get some pictures. Then we’ll see if one of those keys gets us in the house.”

While waiting for Stamaty to finish his work around the body, Auburn walked west along the top of the levee, away from where the TV crew were setting up, and surveyed the scene from a distance. A quarter of a mile downstream stood a massive steel-truss railroad bridge, no longer in use.

The broad, shallow river had never supported much traffic, but since the rebuilding of the dam at Tippettsville in the 1960’s to prevent spring flooding, it amounted to little more than a stream. A hulking wharf and warehouse, part wood and part brick, stood at the water’s edge just this side of the railroad bridge. A row of cars parked outside the warehouse indicated that it was still being put to some use.

Stamaty was adding the final touches to a sketch on a clipboard when he caught up with Auburn. His left little finger was hooked through Ida Blanford’s big ring of keys. “Looks like point-blank range to me, Cy,” he said.

The crumbling sidewalk in front of the house had been marked long ago for repairs with red spray paint and then apparently forgotten. The mailbox was empty. The hinges on the gate needed oil. But the tree-shaded lawn was neatly trimmed and free of weeds. They waited a full minute after Auburn manipulated the knocker on the front door before starting to try keys in the lock.

The house was dark, quiet, and cool. Not a trace of disorder or a speck of dust spoiled the old-fashioned but opulent decor, as if Ida Blanford had known, the last time she left, that she would never return. Auburn recalled that she’d been a schoolteacher. From the entry hall they passed into a parlor that looked like a principal’s office, a kitchen like a high school physics lab, and a dining room as bare as the refectory of a convent. Every light they turned on in the parlor blazed with maximum wattage. A reading glass rested on the desk, another next to the chair in the front window.

Further exploration revealed a pantry, another parlor, and an enclosed back porch facing the river. The rear parlor was somewhat more habitable than the front one, with shelves of old books, family photographs in silver frames, more bright lights, and more magnifying glasses. Every window on the ground floor was closed and latched. Deadbolts were shot on side and back doors.

There was no computer in the house, no answering machine attached to any of the antiquated dial phones, not even a television set. Of the bedrooms upstairs, Ida Blanford had used only the front one. In the other rooms they found stored furniture, locked trunks, cardboard cartons secured with heavy cord. The heirs, if any, were going to have a circus digging through the spoils and apportioning them.

The basement was nearly empty, probably because of the damp that reigned there. Another of the keys on the ring got them into the detached garage. There was no car — just a broken porch swing, several dozen red clay flowerpots, a formidable array of gardening implements, several pieces of furniture that belonged in a landfill, and a bicycle that belonged in the Smithsonian.

Returning to the back parlor for a more focused search, they found an address book containing the address and phone number of a Dale Blanford in East Atlas, about seventy-five miles away. Auburn used his cell phone to call East Atlas.

“Dale Blanford.” A man in his thirties, his voice crisp and assertive.

“This is Detective Sergeant Auburn calling, sir. About a Miss Ida Blanford. I believe she’s a relative of yours?”

“She’s my aunt.” Still crisp, now expectant and slightly challenging.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, sir. Miss Blanford was found dead this morning near her home.”

“Found dead? What happened to her?”

“At first glance it looks to us like she was shot in the course of a robbery.”

The man at the other end of the line muttered something that might have been profanity. “Was this a break-in?”

“No, sir. There’s no evidence of that. We’re inside her house now. We found it locked and we don’t see any evidence of damage or theft. Her body was found on the riverbank just east of here.”

“You can understand this comes as kind of a shock. I’m trying to get myself together.”

“Are there other relatives besides yourself?”

“No. Well, my sister, but she lives in California. What do I need to do?”

“As soon as our investigation here at the scene is finished, your aunt’s body will be removed to the mortuary. The coroner will want you to go there and make a formal identification. I’m going to turn you over to Mr. Stamaty from the coroner’s office if you’ll hold the line just a moment.”

Stamaty expressed sympathy in businesslike tones, gave Blanford information and directions, and handed the phone back to Auburn.

“This is Auburn again. I’d like to talk to you eventually so we can work up a profile on your aunt for our report and possibly get some ideas on what happened to her. I’ll give you a number that will reach me no matter where I am, and I’d appreciate it if you’d call me when you get to town.”

“Okay, but, like I told the other gentleman, it may be sometime this afternoon before I can get away.”

After Auburn hung up, Stamaty explained that Blanford was building a deck somewhere in the wilds of Carney County. “Says he can’t leave until he’s sure his guys are far enough along to finish up without him.”

They locked the house and returned to the riverbank. Kestrel had already left the scene and the body was once again draped in blue plastic. The crowd of spectators was getting bored and thinning out. The TV crew idled patiently in the shade. After touching base with Dollinger and Krasnoy, Auburn crossed the street to the bar and grill on the corner of Jardine and Pace.

The Green Fish looked as if it might have started out as a neighborhood restaurant and sunk slightly in status in order to keep its owner out of the red. The front window bore the image, in cracked and fading paint, of a spirited bass writhing at the end of a line amid churning foam. Lettering, somewhat less faded, offered BEER, LIQUOR, AND FOOD. The door facing Jardine St. was marked FAMILY ENTRANCE. Auburn went in.

The place was a little busier than might have been expected at nine thirty in the morning. Three men, each in his own world, were downing eye-openers at the bar, which ran back along the left side, opposite the windows facing out on Pace Street. A stainless steel lunch counter, reminiscent of an old-fashioned diner, was set at a right angle to the bar. Behind it a stocky man in a white apron and chef’s cap wielded skillets and spatulas with skill and dispatch.

At the counter and at booths and square tables in the front part of the building, seven people were having breakfast. A couple of tinny speakers in the ceiling gave forth the current output of a local rhythm-and-blues station. In the narrow spaces among the tables, a solitary waitress was juggling plates and cups. Most of the customers, even the ones at the counter, seemed to be watching the crowd across the street through the plate glass window with the picture of the green fish. Nobody, not even the waitress, paid much attention to Auburn.

He stepped to the counter and caught the cook’s eye. “Excuse me, sir. Police officer.” He showed identification.

“Scotty Casteven. Chief cook and flycatcher.”

“Are you the proprietor?”

“That too.”

“I understand you identified the body of Miss Ida Blanford across the way this morning?”

“I don’t know about the Ida part.” Casteven, tending an order of hash browns and a couple of waffles, wasn’t looking Auburn’s way. Everybody else in the place was. “I never heard her first name before. We always called her Miss Ramford — you know, like Ramrod. That’s what my wife called her because she walked so stiff.”

“But you definitely recognized her?”

“As the old gal that lived in the white house across the street, sure. I’ve seen her out there a thousand times, getting the mail out of the box, working in the garden, raking leaves, walking to the bus.” He broke off to shout some cryptic message to the waitress.

“Would your wife know anything more about her?”

“Maria died three years ago. Heart.” His expression clouded and he turned back to the grill.

“Sorry. What time did you close last night?”

“We close at eleven sharp except Friday and Saturday.”

“I understand you live here on the premises. Were you home last evening?”

“Yes, sir. I already told those two cops over on the bank that I didn’t hear any shots last night, no yelling, no commotion, nothing.”

The waitress kept circulating among the tables, refilling cups and glasses, removing dirty dishes, taking further orders. Two people left their table and stepped to the cash register where the lunch counter and the bar intersected. Casteven put down his tools, wiped his hands on his apron, and took their money.

In the circumstances there was obviously no question of a private interview. Auburn decided to turn that to his advantage. Raising his voice slightly, he addressed the whole bunch. “If anybody here has any information about the woman who was killed across the street last night or about what happened to her, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know. If you don’t want to talk to me here, you can call Public Safety any time day or night and ask for Sergeant Auburn.”

In compliance with the mysterious laws that govern crowd behavior, nobody was looking at him now.

The couple who had just left had vacated the table in the window. On a whim, Auburn sat down there himself. The heat and humidity were building up outside, and from here he had a view of Ida Blanford’s house and the adjacent riverbank, except for the site where the body lay.

Eventually the waitress stopped beside his table. “Did you want to order something, Officer?”

Her name tag said “Darla.” She was fighting a losing battle with the calendar over the issue of turning thirty. She was lean, hungry, and overdecorated, the kind of woman Auburn’s father described as “a shark in mascara.”

“Just coffee, thanks.”

“Cream and sugar?” she asked over her shoulder, already halfway to the serving stand in the corner where two coffeepots steamed gently on hot plates.

“No, thanks.”

Auburn sipped his coffee slowly and meditatively, dividing his attention between the shrinking crowd outside and the customers of the The Green Fish. The bar and grill may not have been the heart of the neighborhood, but it probably reflected the rhythm and flavor of local life as accurately as anyplace else.

Customers left, others came in. They all seemed to know what was going on across the street. And from the way the newcomers looked at him, Auburn sensed that they also knew, as if by telepathy, that he wasn’t an ordinary patron but a detective engaged in the investigation. From time to time one of them lingered by his table, ostensibly peering across the street through the plate glass window with the picture of the fish on it, but also taking the opportunity to give him the once-over at close quarters.

Most of them were obviously regulars, but Auburn suspected that a couple of the bar patrons had hiked the six blocks from the Greyhound bus station on Guinan Boulevard for quick nips during layovers. The regulars, nearly all of them men, didn’t look a prosperous lot. There were the usual neighborhood retirees, a few younger people possibly out of work for one reason or another, a couple of unclassifiables.

Scotty and Darla worked smoothly together, communicating in the quaint jargon of the hash slinger and taking turns serving drinks at the bar, collecting payments at the cash register, and feeding dirty dishes to the huge automatic dishwasher in the corner. The radio droned and twanged on, at times barely audible above the clatter of dishes and the mutter of voices.

Because the two streets out front dead-ended into each other, there was virtually no traffic. The only cars and trucks that ever moved into Auburn’s field of vision seemed to belong to patrons of The Green Fish. Over on the levee, he could see Dollinger and Krasnoy giving brief and no doubt suitably vague answers to the television reporter. Kestrel was going over the sidewalk inch by inch like a man who has lost a contact lens in the snow. Ida Blanford’s house stood solemn and empty, the front parlor ablaze with sunlight streaming in an east window.

Eventually Darla came back with more coffee.

“Do you live here in the neighborhood?”

“I used to live in the apartment upstairs.” She rested the coffeepot on the table, leaned closer, and lowered her voice. “After Scotty’s wife died he moved out of their place on Eversole, kicked me out, and moved in here himself. I’ve got an apartment now at the other end of the Randolph Street Bridge.”

“Are you here every day?”

“Six days. We’re closed Sundays. I work till eight, when the dining room closes.”

“Has there been any kind of trouble in the neighborhood recently?”

“Like what kind of trouble?”

“Break-ins, vandalism, gangs, drugs...?”

“Highmore’s Grocery right over on the other corner closed up about three months ago. They said it was because they didn’t have enough business, but Scotty and I think it’s because they had two holdups in a row around Christmas time.” She picked up the coffeepot.

“Did you know Ms. Blanford?” Auburn asked her.

She put the coffeepot down again. “Not to talk to. I saw her outside almost every day. She used to drive a big old Lincoln to go shopping and to go to church on Sundays, but we heard she totaled it and lost her driver’s license because they said she was legally blind. Since Highmore’s closed, you’d see her coming back from the bus stop with shopping bags maybe a couple days a week.”

“Have you noticed anything unusual going on over at her place in the past few days?”

“No. Sometimes a younger man stops in the afternoon, usually on weekends. Sometimes he comes in a truck and other times he brings his family in a car — wife and two little boys. But I haven’t seen them over there in the last month or two. I always figured they were family.”

“Could I get your name, miss?”

She glanced down to make sure her name tag was showing. “Darlece Fontaine.” She spelled both names.

Contrary to his usual procedure, Auburn didn’t ask for an exact address and he didn’t start a file card until she had gone away to serve other customers, and then he made only the sketchiest of notes.

A ten-year-old boy put his head in through the family entrance and called “Paper!” A man on one of the barstools asked if he had the world soccer scores.

Across the way, Dollinger and Krasnoy took off in their cruiser, probably on a call. A few minutes later an ancient hearse stopped in the street outside with a screech of brakes, and two mortuary attendants disappeared over the brow of the levee with a body bag and a folding stretcher. After a lengthy interval they reappeared, loaded the remains of Ida Blanford into the hearse, and drove off with a squeal of rubber.

The TV crew, having captured that bit of history on tape, went their way. Some time later Stamaty and Kestrel left the scene also. At the house next to Ida Blanford’s, a woman in a housecoat was shaking a dustmop into the breeze while her dog ran sniffing around the front yard. A pale, frail man with a cane was promenading slowly up and down the sidewalk in the late morning sun. Auburn sat on behind the grimy window with the painted green fish.

It wasn’t the standard way to conduct a homicide investigation. He should have been leafing through Ida Blanford’s private papers in search of suspicious associations, requesting a background probe on her and her nephew from Records, canvassing the neighborhood to learn if anyone had heard a shot, checking on recent holdups, muggings, and similar crimes in the district — in particular, the two holdups at the grocery across the street. Instead, he sat here soaking up the atmosphere of the bar and grill — the smell of cooking varied by an occasional whiff of liquor, the babel of voices, the jangling of music.

At a few minutes before eleven he went to the men’s room and called headquarters on his cell phone. His immediate superior, Lieutenant Savage, had received a radio report from Dollinger and Krasnoy, who had questioned neighbors up and down the block without finding anyone who had heard a shot the night before or observed anything unusual in the vicinity of Ida Blanford’s house. Savage had ordered a background probe on the victim and was talking to Fire and Rescue about having the river dragged for the weapon.

“I don’t know if you remember it,” he said, “but they found the gun that killed Stan Karlowski on the bottom of the river about a quarter of a mile from where you are right now.”

“I remember. It looks like the killer tried to toss her body in the river. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tossed the gun in too.”

Auburn indicated somewhat vaguely that he’d be at the scene for a while yet. He didn’t mention that he was hanging out in a bar and grill.

On his way back to his table in the window he was intercepted by Scotty Casteven, who was sipping a soft drink in the back corner of the bar during a lull in activity. Auburn wondered if Casteven had just overheard his half of the phone conversation.

“What does it look like, Officer?” he asked. “A stickup, or just some psychopath?”

“We’re still checking. There wasn’t any cash in her purse. You saw the bullet hole.”

A glass-fronted cabinet next to the side entrance was crammed with every imaginable kind of green fish — figurines in china, wood, plaster, and plastic, coffee mugs, bottle openers, key-chain guards, a small pillow, a large light bulb, a electrified singing rubber bass mounted on a plaque.

Casteven shook his head and looked at the floor, which needed a good scrubbing. “It’s pretty scary, you know? Your neighbor getting blown away right across the street.

“We had some pretty rough stuff going on when we lived in the Drysdale District, but that was just break-ins — kids with crowbars. Did they ever catch those guys that held up the grocery here last winter? Highmore swore it was the same guys both times.”

“That case is still open,” said Auburn, winging it. “Have you ever had any trouble like that here?”

“Not yet.” Casteven rapped on the bar for luck.

“Do you own the building?”

“Oh no. Lease.”

“Your business seems to be good.”

“Don’t you believe it. My business is rotten. I can’t compete with the fast food places across the river, or the bars over there that cater to the neurosurgeons and the stockbrokers from downtown.” He finished his drink and filed away the empty can under the bar. After a glance toward the dining room, he assumed a more confidential air. “When my wife died, I lost my bartender and cashier. And I have to pay Darla a lot more than she’d get downtown because the old soaks and deadbeats that hang out in this place would rather blow their Social Security checks on booze and cigarettes and lottery tickets than leave tips.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Auburn. “Is it just the two of you all the time here?”

“My brother-in-law Greg takes over the bar a little after three, when he gets off his other job, and he stays till eleven. We shut down the kitchen at eight, and that’s when Darla and I knock off. We’re closed Sundays.”

Darla sang out, “One country up and a side of Murphy, no dash.” Casteven cinched his apron tighter around his ample middle and went back to the grill.

In spite of the proprietor’s grim report, the place seemed to be filling up for the lunch hour. A group of six East Indians dressed as workmen came in together and took adjoining tables. An elderly man, his features blurred by age like the face on a well-worn coin, sat down at the table next to Auburn’s. Obviously a regular, he put on a pair of reading glasses and studied a morning paper he’d brought with him instead of the menu. His hands were bony and gnarled like those of a retired plumber, the nail of the left thumb permanently cloven.

Darla appeared at Auburn’s side. “You working up an appetite for lunch? Our special on Thursdays is Cajun-style chicken giblets and rice.”

Auburn already knew that from the slate over the lunch counter. At the very mention of the word “Cajun,” his stomach performed the preliminary steps of a war dance. He chose Salisbury steak, which, although sometimes scarcely worth the effort of chewing, is hard for even a novice chef to ruin.

Time passed. Auburn was so absorbed in his watch on the empty house across the street and his attention to the pulse of life around him that he didn’t even realize that he’d gone through his soup, salad, and main course until Darla swept away his empty plates. “How we doing here? How about some dessert? The peach cobbler’s fresh today.”

“Just some more coffee, thanks.” Glancing yet again across the street, he saw a pickup truck pulling into Ida Blanford’s driveway and canceled the order. He paid his check at the cash register and left all his change from a ten and a five on the table, partly because of what Casteven had said about tips and partly because he expected to spend more time later at The Green Fish.

By the time Auburn got across the street, the driver of the truck, a lanky man in his late thirties, had mounted the bank and was staring down at the spot where Ida Blanford’s body had been found.

“Mr. Blanford?” Auburn showed identification.

“Yes, sir.” Wearing a housepainter’s cap with the visor turned backwards, sunglasses with small round lenses, and time-tattered camouflage fatigues, Blanford looked like an alien in a low-budget sci-fi flick made in the 1960’s. Underneath these trimmings he had a crew cut and a square, matter-of-fact face.

“We talked on the phone earlier.”

“I was going to call you from the house.”

“Have you been downtown to the mortuary?”

“Oh, yes.” Blanford shook his head as if to dispel the grim recollection. “That’s where they found her, huh? I can remember standing down there throwing rocks in the river when I was about a year and a half old, and Aunt Ida yelling at me to get out of the mud.” He stared unseeingly out over the water through the midday haze.

“Do you know if she’d had any kind of trouble lately with neighbors, vandals...?”

“If she did, she didn’t tell me about it. What I can’t understand is what she was doing outside here after dark.”

“She may not have been outside when she was killed. Would she have been likely to let anybody in the house that she didn’t know?”

“Not unless they forced their way in. Caution was her middle name.” He turned to face the house. “Look at those lightning rods. And I’m sure you saw the smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors all over the inside.”

He took out a ring of keys, the same bunch Auburn had found in the dead woman’s purse, which Stamaty had evidently handed over to him. “I better check inside and make sure everything’s okay. She kept a lot of money upstairs. Whoever shot her could have made a real haul if they used these keys instead of just cleaning the cash out of her purse.”

They climbed down from the levee to the sidewalk. “This was prime real estate when my grandfather built the house in the twenties,” Blanford said. “And there wasn’t any saloon across the street back then, either.”

“Did your aunt ever have any trouble with the people over at The Green Fish?”

“I wouldn’t say trouble. Mostly she acted like the place wasn’t even there. She used to complain about the noise around closing time, especially on Saturday nights. And the lines waiting for green beer at six o’clock in the morning on St. Patrick’s Day.”

They went through the gate with the squeaky hinges and up the walk. “When was the last time you saw your aunt alive?”

“We had dinner here a week ago Sunday — my wife and I and our two kids.”

“You said you and your sister are the only living relatives?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you’re probably the only heirs?”

“I guess so.” The thought didn’t seem to distress him unduly.

Once inside the house, Blanford took off his cap and slid his sunglasses up to the top of his head. He cast a wary and perhaps now a proprietorial eye here and there as they moved through the immaculately kept rooms. At the foot of the front stairs he got out the keys again. “I haven’t been allowed upstairs since I was about six,” he said, “but I remember exactly where she kept her money.”

He led Auburn to Ida Blanford’s bedroom and on into a windowless alcove fitted out as a dressing room. Here, concealed by a wall hanging, was a squat antique safe with the manufacturer’s name splashed across the front in fancy script. Without hesitation, Blanford selected a key and opened the safe. Except for a few papers, which didn’t include a will, the safe was empty.

“There ought to be a lot of cash here,” he said, moderately agitated. “She inherited a couple million from my grandfather — he owned a brass foundry, Kingmark Castings. And she used to lend money to people starting up in business — young doctors, lawyers... she even staked me when I started up my construction business.”

“Seems like a tough racket for an elderly lady to be in.”

“You didn’t know my aunt Ida. She could stir her tea with one hand and whip a tiger with the other. You get like that after teaching seventh and eighth grades in an inner-city school for about forty years. She’d still be at it if her eyes hadn’t gone out on her. Glaucoma and a bunch of other stuff.”

“Where did she conduct her business with these people she lent money to?”

“Right down in the front room. Always late in the evening. She tried to keep it hush-hush. I told her a thousand times she could get higher interest with better security if she just put that cash in the savings and loan. But she said the savings and loan people already had too much of her money. My wife thinks lending money at low interest was just her way of helping people who were in a bind but wouldn’t take charity.”

“But surely these loans weren’t cash transactions?”

“Oh yes they were. And she kept the cash right in here, along with the IOUs. Anyway, she did when I was a kid, and Aunt Ida was one of those people who never change anything from one year to the next except their clothes. My Dad used to say she could never bring herself to do anything for the first time.”

“Would she have had jewelry in here?”

“She never wore any. Teachers weren’t allowed to wear jewelry when she started out, and she never changed that either.”

“Okay. Let’s not touch anything else here. I need to get an evidence technician back on the scene. Your aunt was evidently killed inside the house and then dumped on the riverbank to make it look like a street killing. Who besides you would have had access to the house or would have known about the safe? A boyfriend?”

Blanford grunted. “If she had a boyfriend, that would be the biggest revolution since bottled beer.”

They found the name of Ida Blanford’s lawyer in her address book downstairs. Blanford arranged by phone to meet the lawyer immediately and took off, leaving the keys with Auburn. After reporting the latest developments to Lieutenant Savage, Auburn went back to The Green Fish.

By now the place was getting to be a bit too familiar. The heavy smell of grease and fried onions, the cracked sugar bowl at the cash register where patrons could drop pennies they received in change, the squeaky place in the floor on the way to the restrooms. Scotty was busy behind the bar, where nobody was paying attention to the talk show on the large-screen TV. Darla was apparently taking a break in a back room. The dining room was practically deserted. Auburn sat at the same table in the window and resumed his watch on the street.

Darla eventually reappeared, plied him with more coffee, and asked if he was making any progress with the case. When Kestrel, the evidence technician, arrived back at the scene to go over the house, Auburn went across the street just long enough to give him the keys and confer with him briefly.

A little before three o’clock, a fresh flurry of activity on the levee told him that something was happening down by the water. A motley gang of neighborhood children, probably bored to death after only a week or so of summer vacation, had been drawn to the scene of action as surely as flies to spilled ice cream. Auburn crossed the street again.

There wasn’t enough open water within the city limits to justify a standing team of river investigators under the Department of Public Safety, much less the purchase and maintenance of the necessary equipment. But Fire and Rescue had both the equipment and trained underwater investigators. Three men, two of them in diving gear, were working in a small motor launch just opposite the point where Ida Blanford’s body had been found. By the time Auburn reached the top of the levee, the kids were already down at the edge of the water. “You gonna use radar?”

“You mean sonar,” said one of the men from Fire and Rescue. “I think we can manage without it. The river isn’t that deep here. Your favorite hoop star could walk across the bottom without getting his wig wet.”

Auburn waved to the men in the boat and watched while they staked out the area under investigation, laid down pattern lines of yellow polypropylene rope, and began methodically exploring the river bottom by touch and with magnetic grapnels. Since they weren’t under his orders and obviously knew exactly what they were doing, he soon went back to his table at The Green Fish.

He now had the dining room almost entirely to himself, but the bar trade was picking up as people got off work. In the business district north of the river, the posh bars would be having happy hour for people wearing silk shirts and handmade shoes. Here in The Green Fish, the men and women hunched over their drinks at the bar were palpably blue collar workers and practitioners of the manual trades. Pace Street was parked solid, mostly with panel trucks and pickups. A big Allied Bell truck with an overhead hydraulic platform stood near the corner.

Since there was nothing to see across the street, Auburn, with yet another cup of coffee before him, turned his attention to the people around him. The atmosphere seemed to have undergone a subtle change. A man who was a stranger to Auburn, a tall curly-haired blond, was tending bar. That would be Scotty Casteven’s brother-in-law Greg. He had a diamond in each earlobe, but he wore no rings.

Casteven was busy at the dishwasher and Darla was helping at the bar and the cash register. It was obvious that relations between the two men were strained. When they communicated at all, it was in monosyllables, and their tone was stuffy, if not positively hostile. On the other hand, the chemistry between Darla and the new bartender, Greg, evidently went far beyond that of mere co-workers.

Were there hidden alliances here, ancient enmities, smoldering resentments? Or did the electricity in the air stem from the murder of Ida Blanford? A fatal drama had been played out within a stone’s throw of the bar and grill. The impression was growing on Auburn that somebody here knew more than they were telling about the murder across the street — that the solution to the whole thing might lie right here if only he could penetrate beneath the surface.

He became so absorbed in that puzzle that, even when he saw Kestrel and the divers holding a lengthy conference on the levee, he didn’t go outside. But that was partly because the TV crew from Channel 4 had just arrived back on the scene.

Hours passed. The radio station started repeating R&B records that Auburn had sat through that morning. Evidently the dining room did little business in the evening hours. At five fifteen, the only patrons having dinner were two women with bulging shopping bags stowed under their table. In one of the two booths on the windowless side of the dining room, two college kids with his-and-hers spiked hair were lingering over soft drinks and wearing out their welcome. Auburn ordered Salisbury steak again.

He felt so isolated in his nook in the window that, when his cell phone rang, he answered right there instead of seeking more privacy.

“Where in the world are you, Cy?” asked Lieutenant Savage.

“Still at the scene of the Blanford homicide, tying up a few loose ends.”

“Well, you must be well camouflaged. Even Kestrel of the hundred eyes couldn’t find you. Have you talked to Dollinger and Krasnoy?”

“Not since this morning.”

“Then you’re about three days behind. Kestrel found fresh bloodstains on the basement floor in the victim’s house. And the divers from Fire and Rescue struck gold.”

Auburn lowered his voice slightly. “They found the weapon?”

“They found the weapon and more, nicely preserved in a waterproof plastic bag. Are you ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Okay, first we’ve got an old Colt .38. Recently fired, one chamber empty. No ballistics match yet, but that’s the caliber of the slug they took out of Blanford’s chest. Not registered with any local agency. Next we’ve got a pair of leather work gloves. The right one shows what looks like powder burns. Chemistry tests are in progress. Both gloves have bloodstains, the same type as the victim.”

“What about latent prints?”

“Kestrel’s still waving his magic wand over the stuff, but no fingerprints so far. But there’s something almost as good — a wadded-up strip of adhesive tape with the name Johnston printed on it in indelible marker. And on the sticky side there’s another name, also in black marker but in reverse, like it was picked up from whatever the tape was stuck on. That name is Rakovy.” He spelled it.

“Now here’s the kicker, Cy. Rakovy was the maiden name of Maria Casteven, the late wife of your witness at The Green Fish tavern across the street from Blanford’s house. The only Rakovy listed in the current city directory is a Gregory J., who works for Allied Bell as a lineman and troubleshooter.”

As Auburn furtively twisted sideways in his seat for a glimpse of the man behind the bar, his heart skipped a beat. At least, he felt something like a blow from a child’s fist in the middle of his breastbone. Before speaking again, he covered his mouth with his hand, as if he thought Greg Rakovy — who wasn’t even looking his way — could read lips.

“I’m pretty sure I have the subject in view as we speak.”

“You are? Where in this world are you calling from, Cy? It sounds like a shopping mall.”

“I’m at The Green Fish.”

“And you think Rakovy is there?”

“Pretty sure,” Auburn said again.

“Well, can he hear you? What are you doing, playing poker with him?”

Even though the sight of people talking on cell phones in public places had become so commonplace that the few patrons around him were ignoring him completely, Auburn saw fit to mumble through a heavily veiled account of his current position and the grounds on which he believed that the number one suspect in the murder of Ida Blanford was the second-shift barman at The Green Fish.

“Okay, Cy,” said Savage at length. “I’m trusting you to play this one by ear.” Auburn waited until Rakovy was at the back end of the bar running a batch of glasses through the steamer before he approached him and showed identification.

“Mr. Rakovy?”

“Help you?”

“I wonder if you’d mind answering a few questions?”

The bartender stared at him with dead-fish eyes in a deadpan face. “What about?”

“I’m sure you know we had a shooting death across the street last night. Were you here at work last evening?”

“Till eleven.”

“Is there somewhere we could talk privately?”

“Not right now. Unless you want to get me lynched.” Patrons at that end of the bar were watching and listening as well as they could over the hubbub of voices and the relentless din of the TV. Two of them were clamoring for refills.

“I imagine Scotty would take over for you for a few minutes.”

Rakovy bridled, now frankly hostile. “So who died and left you in charge?”

Remarks like that usually got Auburn’s blood flowing, and sometimes prompted him to retaliate in kind. But, conscious of the increasingly attentive audience, he was determined to do things exactly right.

“This is a homicide investigation, sir,” he said. “You were on or near the scene around the time of the shooting. That makes you a material witness.” Auburn kept his voice quiet and steady, almost amiable — but not quite. “If you don’t want to talk here, we can go downtown to headquarters — that’s up to you. But I’m not going to go away, so you might as well get it over with.”

By this time Casteven had appeared to see what the commotion was all about. He took over behind the bar while Auburn and Rakovy adjourned to a stuffy back room where full and empty beer kegs were stacked beside a walk-in freezer.

Auburn first verified that he was talking to Gregory J. Rakovy and recorded his address and phone number. Rakovy worked full-time for the telephone company and (for the past eight months) part-time at The Green Fish. He had left immediately after locking up at eleven P.M. the night before and had gone straight home to his apartment and to bed, since he had to get up at five thirty to go to his other job. He lived alone. He hadn’t heard or seen anything unusual across the street at Ida Blanford’s house, and he denied being acquainted with her.

“Have you ever been inside her house? Ever talked to her? Out on the street, on the phone? Ever have any contact with her by mail?” Rakovy gave unqualified negative answers to all these questions. Auburn avoided saying anything that might tip him off to the fact that the gun and other articles had been recovered from the river bottom.

Had Ida Blanford ever been inside The Green Fish? Did Rakovy know Ida’s nephew Dale? Had anybody at The Green Fish had any association with either of the Blanfords? No, no, no. By now Rakovy’s face was set in a disdainful smirk. The oppressive heat from the freezer condenser and the sour fumes from the empty kegs were making Auburn sick.

On his way to his car he took a long look at Rakovy’s truck. Because he didn’t yet have probable cause for search and seizure, he confined his attention to inspecting it from the sidewalk. Then he climbed the levee for another view of the spot where Ida Blanford’s body had been found. Although it was still broad daylight, the shadows were gathering under the sycamores and lights were coming on in the apartment buildings across the river. A cool evening breeze rippled the water and carried a vague threat of rain.

Auburn didn’t sleep very well that night, probably because of all the coffee he’d put down at The Green Fish. But he was at his desk before eight thirty the next morning, shuffling through background probes on Ida Blanford and the people he’d talked to yesterday. The deceased had a distinguished history as an elementary school teacher and later, when her vision began to fail, as a volunteer tutor in a literacy program. And she had indeed been a woman of vast wealth. But her moneylending activities had never come to the attention either of law enforcement authorities or of the other agencies and services that participated in the surveillance system.

Her nephew Dale’s construction company was operating in the black and had a favorable rating with the Better Business Bureau. Fred Shannoy, the playboy fisherman, and Darlece Fontaine, the waitress at The Green Fish, had so far kept on the right side of the law. Melvin J. Casteven was deeply in debt to two credit card companies and a local savings and loan. Gregory J. Rakovy had a long history of frequent job changes and had incurred several fines for minor infractions of traffic laws.

Stamaty had sent Auburn a preliminary autopsy report from the coroner’s office across the street in the courthouse. A single .38-caliber slug, fired almost at point-blank range, had penetrated Ida Blanford’s right ventricle and vena cava, producing a massive and rapidly lethal internal hemorrhage. Routine tests had shown powder burns on both her hands, probably sustained as she struggled with the killer. Anyway she hadn’t shot herself through the heart and then tucked the gun in a plastic bag and tossed it into the river. The bullet and the gun had already been delivered by police courier to the regional ballistics lab.

No member of the public had come forth to report any unusual activity around Ida Blanford’s house on Wednesday night.

Auburn went up to Kestrel’s lab under the skylights to view the rest of the evidence for himself. Kestrel took a red plastic box marked “Biological Hazard” out of a locked cabinet, and after donning a pair of rubber gloves, he laid out its contents in a neat row on a sheet of clean paper. The resealable plastic food bag in which the other articles had been found was made of heavy-duty opaque polyethylene with a metallic sheen; it was jumbo-sized, big enough to hold a ham or a whole turkey.

The strip of white adhesive tape with “Johnston” lettered on one surface and the negative of “Rakovy” on the sticky side had been stretched out flat and mounted on a sheet of clear plastic. The blood on the leather work gloves had turned the color of chocolate syrup. The gloves were generic, worn, and untraceable. According to Kestrel, intensive examinations for trace evidence had turned up only the usual nonspecific particulate and microscopic garbage.

“I hear you found bloodstains in the basement.”

“Back near the furnace. Nothing much to see except a spot where the dust had been wiped up, but it gave chemical traces of blood, same type as the victim. So did this.” He opened a folder and showed Auburn a sheet of paper that had been tightly wadded and then partly smoothed out again. Besides bloodstains, it bore traces of grit and dust. “Found this in the crawl space under the back porch. He must have used it to wipe the blood off the floor.”

Auburn examined the paper. One side was blank. On the other was printed, under the logo of a firm called Arco-Net Security Limited, a standard work contract to install an electronic security system. None of the blanks had been filled in, and the paper appeared to be a photocopy of an original document.

“I didn’t see any loose papers in that basement,” said Auburn. “This must be something the killer had with him. Has anybody checked on this company?”

“Not yet. I’m still putting my report together.”

“How can I get a photocopy of this form?”

“I’ll put it in a transparent sleeve.”

Doing his own Web search, Auburn found that Arco-Net was still in business but had dropped its local franchisee three years ago. Probably the murderer had used the blank contract form to gain admittance to Ida Blanford’s house on the pretext of giving a sales pitch or preparing an estimate for an electronic security system.

Premeditated murder seemed unlikely. According to her nephew, Ida was a gutsy character. She might have put up a fight, forcing the robber to use a weapon he’d brought along merely as a threat. But once he got hold of her keys, he went straight to the safe and cleaned it out without even bothering to search for loot elsewhere in the big house. Maybe he was somebody who owed Ida Blanford money. In that case, by removing his IOU along with a bundle of cash, he’d reduced the risk that he’d be counted among the suspects.

Dale Blanford presumably wasn’t the killer, since his aunt would have recognized him in spite of her visual impairment, and the ruse about the security system would have been unnecessary. Yet Dale knew about both her safe and her weakness for security devices. And he admitted that she’d lent him money; he didn’t say he’d ever paid it back.

None of the neighbors had reported seeing any visitors or unusual activity at the house. That could mean the killer had arrived after dark. If he parked down the street and went to the back door, nobody on the street or at The Green Fish would have seen him entering the house. He evidently had something with him that had been marked with Rakovy’s name, probably a toolbox in which to carry away the loot, but that didn’t prove he was Rakovy.

Auburn found eighty-one Johnstons in the metropolitan telephone directory. He decided to assume, for the time being, that the alternative name on the tape had been chosen at random. After spending some time in Records consulting a collection of old city directories, he made a call to Pittsburgh and another to the local office of Allied Bell. That second call led to a personal visit to the phone company, which he made on foot.

The day was cloudy and breezy, cooler than yesterday. The air smelled like rain. After leaving the Allied Bell offices, Auburn returned to headquarters just long enough to prepare an application for search and arrest warrants and the necessary affidavits, and then took them across the street to the courthouse.

By eleven thirty he was back at The Green Fish, where he found the table in the window vacant just as if it had been reserved for him. Nothing much had changed. Scotty and Darla were still chanting their enigmatic antiphons and responses above the mutter of voices and the squawk of the radio speakers. The special today was codfish Creole, but the place smelled exactly the way it had yesterday.

The Blanford homicide had been a featured item on the TV news and in the morning papers. Some of the regulars obviously recognized Auburn and did double takes on seeing him back again at the same table. Yesterday he’d been a stranger, an anomaly in this milieu. By now he was becoming absorbed into it, was almost a regular himself. When a juvenile diner accidentally tipped a full glass of water onto the floor, Auburn was on the spot, helping with the mop from behind the serving counter before Darla got there.

“We’re going to have to put you on the payroll, Officer,” she said. “You going to try the codfish today? This time yesterday it was still swimming around in Chesapeake Bay.”

“I think I’ll stick with the Salisbury steak.”

“You want that with soup and salad again?”

“Just coffee today, please.”

There was nothing much to see across the street. Ida Blanford’s Victorian revival house stood as it had for decades, stodgy and aloof. Only a strand of yellow tape caught in a hedge showed that anything unusual had happened there lately. And inside The Green Fish, life went on according to the usual routine as well.

The group of East Indians came in for lunch again, followed shortly by the retiree with the smashed thumb. They sat at the same tables as yesterday, ate the same food. Then the crowd in the dining area gradually thinned out again, so that by half past two Auburn almost had the place to himself. At a few minutes before three, Patrolman Fritz Dollinger entered in plainclothes and took one of the stools at the lunch counter.

Things were already picking up at the bar when Greg Rakovy came in from the back room, tying on a short black apron. He cast a quick eye over the dining room and seemingly made a point of not noticing Auburn.

When Auburn took his check to the cash register, Scotty Casteven interrupted the daily chore of cleaning the grill to take care of him. Auburn waited until he had his change to make the pinch. “Melvin Casteven,” he said, so quietly that only Dollinger and Casteven himself could hear him, “I have a warrant for your arrest on a charge of first-degree murder. There may be other charges as well. You have the right to remain silent...”

Casteven didn’t try to bluff, he didn’t bluster, he just caved in. By the time Auburn finished reciting the familiar formula, his knees had turned to jelly and his face was the color of barley soup. Dollinger stepped into the gap in the counter, prepared to hold him up if necessary. Casteven was stout, but Dollinger was stouter.

“Hey, Darla,” said Casteven, his voice hoarse and shaky, “I need to go downtown with these men. Close the dining room. And call Kriegel’s before four fifteen and cancel that meat order.” He didn’t say anything to Rakovy.

After they left the bar and grill, Auburn looked back to see Darla staring in bewilderment through the window with the picture of the big fish while she mechanically pocketed the tip he’d left and wiped the table with a cloth.

“First we’re going upstairs to look around your place,” Auburn told Casteven. He waited to serve the search warrant until Casteven had unlocked the door to the stairs leading to the apartment over The Green Fish. The apartment was a dump, the typical living quarters of a widower who worked about sixty hours a week. Only the kitchen was more or less presentable, probably because Casteven ate all his meals down in the restaurant. They didn’t find Ida Blanford’s money.

“Okay,” said Auburn, “now let’s go back downstairs and see what’s in your freezer that you didn’t want the meat man from Kriegel’s to find tomorrow morning.”

“Hold on a minute,” said Casteven. “You can’t go poking around in there without a food-handler’s card from the Board of Health.”

“We’re going to risk it. I worked at a deli when I was in high school. I know all about freezers. And freezer bags.”

Buried under cuts of beef and pork they found a bag just like the one the divers had brought up from the river, only this one was stuffed with money. Dollinger spent the entire time it took them to get downtown counting it. There was over thirty thousand dollars, mostly in large bills. Dale Blanford would no doubt be pleased to learn that his aunt’s outstanding promissory notes were there too.

When they arrived at headquarters, they took Casteven directly to an interrogation room, euphemistically styled “Conference A,” on the second floor. At the risk of throwing the central air-conditioning out of adjustment, Auburn opened one of the big frosted glass windows, as he often did at this time of year. Dollinger stood at attention just inside the door like a sentry, even though his main function there was to serve as an official witness.

“Please make yourself comfortable, sir,” Auburn told Casteven. He was always scrupulously polite to persons under arrest. It looked like the prisoner was planning to stand mute. They didn’t need a confession to make the charges stick, but Auburn hoped to get some more details before he turned the case over to the prosecutor’s office. He’d already given Casteven the statutory warnings, but he gave them again.

“I’m going to remind you that you’re entitled to have a lawyer here before you say anything. But once you have legal representation, the city will have it too, in the form of an assistant prosecutor. And then those two lawyers will take over the case and decide your future between them.”

Casteven sat with his bulky frame huddled on the edge of his chair like a little boy caught stealing apples. His dominant emotion seemed to be shame rather than fear. But clearly he was skeptical that Auburn had any other motive than the desire to see him convicted and sentenced. And Auburn knew that nothing he could do or say would convince this man of his genuine compassion, or persuade him that he enjoyed this part of his job about as much as Casteven enjoyed scraping burnt grease off the grill.

“I’m going to put my cards on the table,” he said. “Most of them anyway. I’m sure you know that the divers brought up the gun and the gloves from the river where you threw them.”

Casteven looked as if he were going to make a last-minute effort to deny everything, but something about Auburn’s businesslike tone apparently told him it wouldn’t work.

“You don’t need to say a thing if you don’t want to,” Auburn assured him again. “Let me tell you what I think happened. Your business has been going down for years, along with all the other businesses in the neighborhood. And things only got worse when your wife died and you had to decide between struggling along without her and hiring some backup help. Getting your brother-in-law to work for you took off some of the workload, but it also cut your net income even further.”

A gentle breeze from the direction of the river stirred forms on the table and cobwebs in the corners. They could hear the piping of dozens of birds in the trees around the courthouse half a block away.

“From your apartment you had a view of Ida Blandford’s house across the street. You saw people visiting her in the evening — couples, individuals — and these obviously weren’t social visits. Probably you could see her talking to them in her front parlor. Maybe you even saw her go upstairs and take her keys out of her purse and unlock her safe—”

The look on Casteven’s face provided full confirmation of Auburn’s surmise.

“Day after day you watched that going on, and day after day you tried to figure out how to get your hands on that money. You saw that she was concerned about security, so you decided to pretend to represent a company that installs electronic burglar alarm systems.” Casteven’s eyes opened wider and he seemed to be having trouble breathing.

“You figured if she couldn’t see well enough to drive, she probably wouldn’t recognize you as the guy from the bar and grill across the street, especially since she avoided your place like a leper colony. Probably you thought if you could once get inside her house you could jam a window latch or figure out some other way to fix it so you could slip in from the back some Sunday morning while she was at church.

“According to the phone company’s records, you called her last Friday evening, and again on Monday. And Wednesday night you turned up at her place, didn’t you, by appointment? Greg Rakovy’s truck was parked on Jardine last night for hours, and it’s parked there again today. After dark it would have been easy to climb up in the back and borrow his toolbox.”

Casteven shook his head and spoke for the first time since they’d entered the room. “Hard hat. And a pair of gloves.”

Dollinger sat down and started taking notes.

“Okay, his hard hat. And you put a piece of tape over his name and wrote a fake name on it. And you put on his gloves so you wouldn’t leave fingerprints anywhere, and took along an old revolver just in case—”

“I never owned a gun in my life,” said Casteven. “And I never fired one in my life, either. It was her gun. Something I said or did when I was down in the basement must have tipped her off. Anyway she went upstairs for a minute and when she came back she was pointing this big old cannon right in my face. I freaked out because she was blind as a bat and her hands were shaking. I tried to take the gun away from her and she shot herself. That’s what happened, and even if you bring a hundred prosecutors in here, it was still an accident.”

“No, sir. A homicide that occurs during the commission of a felony offense is automatically first-degree murder. That’s how the law reads, and that’s how your arrest warrant reads. This happened around — what, eight or nine o’clock Wednesday evening?”

Evidently alarmed by what Auburn had just said, Casteven clammed up again.

“You found her purse, got her keys, and opened the safe. You probably waited until Rakovy closed up for the night before you went across to the bar and grill and got a big, resealable plastic freezer bag to stow the cash in. And later that night you moved the body and the purse to the riverbank. Your idea was obviously to conceal the fact that you, the killer, had ever been in the house.”

At the word “killer,” Casteven clamped his lips still more tightly shut.

“But then you decided to put the gun and the gloves in another freezer bag and throw them in the river. Why?”

Casteven shrugged and his eyebrows went up, but he said nothing.

“After all, the gun couldn’t be traced to you. And you could have burned the gloves. Why throw them in the river and go to the additional trouble of sealing them up together in a waterproof bag? I’ll tell you why. When you peeled the tape off Rakovy’s hard hat you saw that his name had come off on the sticky side, and you decided to frame him for the murder you hadn’t planned to commit.

“You and he obviously don’t get along. Maybe you think you’re paying him more than he’s worth, and maybe you resent the fact that he hits it off a lot better with Darla than you do. Or maybe you just could never stand the guy. But at some point between the death of Ida Blanford and the moment when you tossed that bag in the river, you decided to make it look like Greg was the killer.

“There weren’t any fingerprints on the stuff in that bag. How do you handle adhesive tape without leaving some partials somewhere? How do you take off a pair of gloves and stuff them in a plastic bag without leaving any prints on the bag?”

“I guess you might wear another pair of gloves,” said Casteven, “which you don’t have to get rid of because they don’t have blood on them.”

“But if you didn’t expect the bag to be found, why worry about fingerprints at all?”

“Wouldn’t I have been taking a pretty long chance that they’d even look for the gun in the river, let alone bring it up?”

“Not really. When Fire and Rescue dredged up that gun from the Karlowski shooting a couple of years ago, the papers made a big deal about how there are sandbars lying crosswise in the riverbed that catch debris and keep it from washing downstream until there’s been a lot of rain. It looks to me like evidence of a frameup, but it’ll be up to the prosecutor to formulate the charges.

“Although the cash we found in your freezer is evidence that you robbed Ida Blanford, I want to remind you that the charge on which you were arrested was first-degree murder. And the evidence I showed the judge to back up my application for that warrant was the scrap of paper you used to wipe up the blood from the basement floor.

“That paper was a photocopy you made of the contract for the security system you had installed seven years ago at your old house at 808 Eversole. It was just a stage prop, and you figured it would be good enough to fool a woman who was legally blind. Before you made the copy, you whited out the information that had been written in the blanks and the signatures, but you missed the serial number — it’s in red ink on the original document. When I called the home office of the security company in Pittsburgh, they identified you immediately as the person to whom that contract had been issued.”

By the time Auburn and Dollinger had booked Casteven, dispatched him to the cells, placed the stolen cash under lock and key in the evidence room, and finished up most of the paperwork, it was almost seven P.M. They headed for the canteen in the basement at double time.

The entrees of the day — or what was left of them after hours of torment in a steam table — were Cajun-style shrimp delight and Salisbury steak.