Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 9, September 2006

The River Market Murders by Kevin Prufer

By the time Detective Armand arrived it was raining hard. He stood under his umbrella watching it sluice down the dead old woman’s legs and drip from her feet into widening puddles. Her shoes had fallen off in the struggle and her purse was gone. Her finger was broken and lopsided, a wedding ring pulled halfway off and lodged against the knuckle. Postmortem, Armand thought. Some dumb punk had tried to rip it off, but her hands were too swollen and stiff. Not far away, behind the yellow tape, a group of kids gawked and laughed.

The news helicopters had arrived ahead of him and were circling low, their big spotlights sweeping back and forth over the cops, the crowd, and the vic. Armand knew that even now he was on live TV. The rotors made his head hurt.

“I need a little light,” he said to the uniform, whoever she was, a new kid. The uniform brought her big light closer and shone it so Armand could just make out the red burn marks mostly concealed beneath the rope around the old woman’s neck. With a pencil, he tried to move the rope a bit, but she was still garroted tight.

Armand’s head hurt. He’d been asleep in his car, dreaming, when Washington, his partner, called. In the dream, it was his wife calling, the cell phone lost in the woods and ringing continuously as he searched the fallen leaves. Soon she’d hang up and he’d never have a chance to speak to her again, would never hear her voice, and he ran from tree to tree, the phone constantly receding and ringing as the sun went down and the woods grew dark.

And then he woke, his mouth dry as chalk, rain drumming on the car and filling it with damp. He picked the phone from the cup holder, connected. Where was he?

“Armand?” Washington said. A park, he was in a park. Swope Park, he thought, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Armand?”

“Yeah,” Armand said.

“Where the hell are you? C.I.B. has been calling, I’ve been calling.”

“Where do you think? I was asleep. I’ve been working nights.”

“Asleep where?”

“In my bed. What time is it?”

“The hell you were,” Washington said. “I called your house.”

Armand was silent, watching the rain stream down the windows. His head hurt. It was definitely Swope Park, and he’d only meant to close his eyes for a minute. He’d been overtired and off duty, and since his wife died he hadn’t been sleeping well at home.

“It’s eight o’clock. You’re late. We got a stiff,” Washington said after a moment.

“What kind of a stiff?” His mouth tasted like fur, and he fumbled the key into the ignition.

“It’s our boy,” Washington said. “Corner of Oak and Fifth. He got an old lady this time.”

When he bent forward to get a better view, Armand noticed blood on her lip and front teeth. One tooth was chipped. A shiver went up and down his back, like he was being watched.

“Tell you what,” Armand told the uniform beside him. “When I say so, I want you to turn around and sweep that light across the crowd real slow.”

“What for?” the uniform asked.

Armand’s head hurt. “Don’t worry what for,” he told her. Washington was in the unmarked car, making notes. Above, the helicopters guttered low, their spotlights flashing. The coroner’s guys shifted uneasily under black umbrellas, waiting to wrap the stiff in plastic and load her up. “Just do it. Right now.”

The uniform shrugged, turned, and shone the light slowly across the faces of the people in the crowd. A couple of kids laughed and waved from under their umbrellas, an old lady covered her eyes, and a tall, thin man with red hair stood straighter, looking over the heads of the others, directly into the light. He smiled a little, as if he were on TV or something. The guy made Armand’s palms itch.

He waited a respectable moment, then walked over to Washington’s unmarked Caprice and rapped on the window. It slid down. “What?” Washington said, like he had a problem.

“We got one fly in the crowd.”

“Yeah?” Washington made another note. He was filling out forms.

“White guy, about forty. Tall. Red hair.”

“And?”

“Nice umbrella, wooden handle. Black blazer, good cut.”

Washington shrugged.

“And it’s a funny night to be out for a stroll, right here where the neighborhood turns bad. In the rain.”

“I get it. I’ll ID him.” He capped his pen.

“Take all their names. Not just his.”

Washington rolled his eyes, and Armand was sorry he’d said what he’d said. Washington was a good cop, a better cop than Armand.

The redhaired guy said he was Philip Beispiel, a real estate lawyer who lived and worked near the River Market, not far from the scene, just across the border between a rough part of downtown and that area of the city the developers were gentrifying. A good neighborhood, pricey new loft apartments, all that. “Nice fellow,” Washington said. “ID checks out. Said he was just out for a walk.”

“Great night for a walk. Someone’s gonna steal his umbrella,” Armand said.

Armand was driving now. “He wasn’t that far from home. Lives right around the corner practically.” They passed the old Palace Theatre, which was tumbling into ruins, then the Cigar Bar, where Armand saw Donnie Palazzo, his old friend, leaning against the newspaper box, talking to a mean-looking black guy in a white hat.

“Cruising for old ladies in ankle socks?”

Washington laughed, and then he was silent. “Beispiel doesn’t fit anyway,” he said after a moment. “Teabone says the perp’s a short guy, got insecurity issues.”

“Yeah?”

Washington laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “And Teabone’s always right.”

Teabone was a condescending shit with a master’s degree in criminal psych from UMKC. He had a team of clowns to run his leads for him. If he said the perp was a short guy with self-esteem problems, then odds were that Beispiel — a six foot plus, good-looking lawyer from River Market — was worth looking at. So they’d asked him to drop by the station when he had a chance.

The cell rang again, and this time it was Melichar from C.I.B. He had an ID on the vic. “Gertrude Farber,” he said. “She had a prescription for Xanax in her pocket. Made things easy. She lives on Central Ave., in Overland Park.”

“Not downtown,” Washington said.

Armand nodded. “Right down the road from my house,” he said. “The suburbs.”

Gertrude Farber was the fifth vic to turn up cold downtown in as many months. And on the surface she didn’t look that different from the others: white, nicely dressed, a nylon rope wrapped around her neck, tightened by means of what looked like a foot of wood sawed from the end of a broomstick. The killer worked at night, Armand figured, stalking his prey for some time before striking, strangling each quickly and efficiently, then posing them on park benches throughout the River Market area. Sometimes hours would go by before anyone noticed that the well-dressed young person on the bench hadn’t moved in a very long time.

Tomorrow, Armand knew, the KC Star would receive a typed note, something about a downtown that hadn’t given what it owed the killer, about payback, the old lady’s body another small payment on a large debt from a city that trod on its citizens, that built swanky lofts and filled the upscale streets with Starbucks, Dean & Delucas, that took from the powerless and gave to the rich. A man with a grudge. Long, rambling letters from a civic-minded psychopath whom Armand sympathized with. Except for the part about killing people.

The killer had made only one clear mistake so far. The second victim had gotten what Armand hoped was a piece of him under her right index fingernail, enough for a DNA profile. But with no one to match it to — they’d run it through the database and checked it against two or three suspects — it was worthless.

But this new murder bothered Armand for another reason. Gertrude Farber was from the suburbs, from Overland Park, his own neighborhood. Unlike the other vics — three women and a young man — she didn’t live in one of the swank new downtown warehouse apartments, and odds were she didn’t frequent the cozy little boutiques or overpriced antique shops near the River Market or in Westport. That was strange because Armand had assumed the killer had stalked his vics for some time, was checking out where they lived, where they shopped, making sure they were profiting from whatever it was he thought he’d lost.

Her husband — a chubby guy about sixty-five, name of Jerry — just shrugged and sniffled. The room was hot and he was sweating. “I don’t know,” he said. “She didn’t often go downtown, so I have no idea what she was doing there.” He sat back in a big worn easy chair and wiped his eyes. He’d only just found out an hour ago, so Armand was prepared to tread lightly.

“I’m sorry,” he said. The old man shrugged, like things couldn’t possibly get worse. “Were you aware of where she was today? Where she was going?”

The old man shook his head. “She went out, said she was meeting friends, left around two thirty, three o’clock.”

“Do you know which friends?” Washington asked.

The old man shook his head. “I didn’t ask.” He seemed a little stunned. Armand remembered the day he learned of his own wife’s death, in a car crash on Highway 71, north of Kansas City. Then he blinked the memory away.

“Did she have any friends down around River Market?” he asked.

The old man thought about it. “She had a lot of friends,” he said at last, as if from a great distance. “I mean, she could’ve.”

“What I want you to do,” Armand said, “is sit down for a little while and make a list of any friends she might have been out with, anyone she might have gone to see downtown. Any stores she liked to shop at.”

The old man nodded, but his expression was one of someone who’s not quite hearing. “When you get a chance,” Armand said gently. “Soon.”

“Okay,” the old man said. “Would you like something to drink?”

Washington asked for a glass of water, and the old man disappeared for a moment into the kitchen.

Armand walked around the living room, trying to get a feel for the woman who’d lived here until just a few hours ago. She collected glass animals — there was a menagerie on a little shelf next to the fireplace. Armand picked one up, a glass owl, turned it over, put it back down. It was cracked. Beside them were family photos — what looked like a couple of kids, grandkids at the beach, a couple of Jerry and Gertrude Farber together, some black and whites of older relatives, probably long gone by now. In the back row, a couple of photos were upside down, and Armand righted them.

Then Jerry Farber returned, handing a glass of water to Washington. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, “I got something a little stronger for myself. I don’t usually—”

“It’s all right,” Armand said.

“She did have a few friends from the synagogue who lived downtown.”

Armand made a note in his book because he wasn’t sure what else to do with his hands. He hated this part of his job, the part where people cried. Especially good people. Jerry Farber reminded Armand of his own father. Washington shifted behind him. “Write the names down for us, okay?” The old man nodded. “Did she work?” he asked.

“At the public library.”

Armand wrote that down too.

“And you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m outta work, but it’s temporary.”

“Temporary how?” Washington asked, and Armand gave him a look.

“Until I find another job.” Jerry dabbed his eyes with a Kleenex.

“What line of business are you in?” Washington asked.

“Housepainter,” the old man said. “I’ve got a few good years in me.” He sighed. “But I’ve got to compete with a lot of big companies these days.”

Armand looked around the living room again. Chintz curtains, an old plaid sofa and matching loveseat, the rows of family photos. The house was modest, cheerful, and very neat. Armand liked it, despite the circumstances.

The killer had switched typewriters and was using a cheaper brand of paper than before, but otherwise the note checked out pretty well. The Star was making the most of it: an old woman, they suggested, probably a mistake. Since she was nicely dressed and walking around by River Market on a Monday night, the killer figured her for a local. “A tragedy,” they said. The anchors at The News at Eight agreed, shaking their well-coiffed heads. “A terrible tragedy, every way you look at it.” Then they replayed some of the footage they’d gotten from the helicopters earlier that week.

But something didn’t wash for Armand. He lay back on the sofa, the lights off so he wouldn’t have to look at the mess his living room had become. He was drinking bourbon, the TV on mute. First, the killer had botched the job in all kinds of ways, which wasn’t like him. He’d killed the wrong woman, and then he’d left thumb marks on her neck, mean little red bruises that grew clearer as the body cooled. Probably, she’d gotten out of her noose, and he had to use his hands.

Next — Armand was getting sleepy, the booze going to his head — he didn’t like this Beispiel character, the tall redheaded guy. Rich kid. He’d come by the station and was way too helpful, too easygoing, didn’t complain about being printed or having his fingernails scraped. Most people would complain, but Beispiel just smiled, like he knew they wouldn’t find anything.

Armand blinked, sleepy. Finally — where was he going with this? When he closed his eyes, it wasn’t Beispiel he saw, or the dead woman with the broken tooth, but Jerry Farber, poor guy, sitting on his plaid sofa, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. Jerry Farber saying, “I don’t know. Maybe she had friends downtown; she had lots of friends,” while Washington and Armand nodded and made useless notes. And then Armand was thinking about his own wife, how he last saw her walking out the door to the car, carrying her suitcase through the snow and hoisting it into the back. They had quarreled. Then she drove and drove — Armand was almost asleep now, and in his dream he imagined her driving — north of Kansas City along Highway 71, through the blinding snow, north toward Maryville and Iowa, when her car turned wrong on the ice, skidded, flipped over. The smile of glass on the pavement mixed with the ice, the wheels that kept spinning, the sound of the radio, and now Armand was fast asleep, fast asleep and dreaming of his wife’s last moments, the half full glass of bourbon tipped and fallen to the floor.

“You got to cheer yourself up,” Washington said in the car the next day. “You got to get out some. Rorkisha and I are grilling this weekend. You want me to call her up, ask her to pick up an extra steak?”

Armand shook his head. He was still troubled by his dream, a dream that mixed his own loss with Jerry Farber’s, a dream in which Jerry Farber figured somehow, but how? He’d forgotten the details. Guilt dreams. A year later and he still felt guilty about his wife, who was leaving him when she died. “I’m good,” he said to Washington, who just laughed and told him, “Like hell you are.”

Earlier, before lunch, they’d spent some time with Philip Beispiel, whom Washington didn’t like for the murders.

“C’mon,” Armand had said before they led him in. “There’s something wrong with this guy. I can feel it. He’s too nice to us. And he’s a real estate lawyer.”

Washington laughed, and then Beispiel was at the door, grinning, shaking hands. “How can I help you?” he’d said. He was drinking something from a plastic bottle, something called Glaçeau Vitamin Water, one of those fortified waters the yuppies drink.

“Little of this, little of that,” Armand said. “First of all, seems you’ve had a few scrapes I wonder if you could tell us about.”

Beispiel looked blank.

“By ‘scrapes,’” Washington said, “the man means ‘run-ins with the law.’”

Beispiel seemed startled. “Oh,” he said, “you mean years ago?”

“That’s right.”

“When I was a kid?” He took another sip of his fortified water.

“Keep talking,” Washington said.

“Oh, well, that was nothing.” But it wasn’t nothing, not to Armand. The guy had a juvie prior for arson — he’d set fire to a piano in his high school theater — and later a young woman at the Washington University law school had taken out a restraining order, though she’d dropped it a month later. And when Armand asked him about those he was evasive, always smiling, too confident. Young damn yuppie, Armand thought. He hated his type.

But Beispiel just sat there, smiling, like he was everyone’s best friend. “What were you doing at the crime scene?” Armand asked.

“I saw it on TV, live. Thought I’d take a look.” Armand remembered the helicopters.

“You’re a real estate lawyer? In what area?”

The guy laughed. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “It’s gonna look bad: I work with the Downtown Preservation Society.”

Armand nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re right. That doesn’t look good.”

“I’m not hiding anything,” Beispiel said. “Look, fellas, I care about the city, and I’m hardly the only one.”

Washington laughed.

But Armand had to admit the guy had a point. There were a lot of angry people in Kansas City, people who hated the monolithic KC Convention Center that sprawled for blocks of downtown, who despised the slick new addition to the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum. Plenty who objected to Starbucks and Barnes & Noble and the corporate ooze that infected the Plaza. Hell, Armand was one of them.

“I think we should take him to the lab,” Armand told Washington after Beispiel left. “This guy’s not right.”

“Take him to the lab?”

“I want a PCR test. See if it matches.”

“Oh, c’mon,” Washington said. “That shit’s expensive. They’re not going to let you work up a DNA profile because he set a couple of fires when he was a kid and he ticks you off.”

“He was at the scene,” Armand said. “He’s a real estate lawyer. And there’s something hinky about him. He thinks he’s playing us. And I got the sample right here too.” He pointed to the trashcan, into which Beispiel had lobbed the Glaçeau bottle before he left.

“Yeah, well, you put in the request then. And deal with it if they laugh you out of town.”

Washington and Armand spent the next few days running other leads, checking Gertrude Farber’s friends, the girl at Wash U (who didn’t want to talk), going through the murder books, waiting for the lab reports on Beispiel’s DNA and the latest note to the KC Star. It was suddenly summer, and in truth, a couple of days after Armand forced the DNA order through Melichar, he began to regret it. Washington was right; he didn’t like the guy because he was a yuppie clown. The case was getting to him, and he hadn’t slept well at all since Gertrude Farber died.

He’d been dreaming of his wife, always the same guilty dream: the snow coming down so beautifully over the road, sticking to the windshield, making little white cones of the glare from her headlights. And then — what was it? A truck? An animal? — she swerved and swerved, the car skidding sideways then, suddenly, rolling over and over until it came to a rest in the field.

And Washington could tell his partner was in a bad way — that was clear enough — and Armand appreciated the invitations for dinner, though what he really wanted after work was to drink. Drink and stay far away from TV or the newspaper, where the local hacks complained about the inefficiency of the police. The chief was getting antsy too, and in the last year Armand hadn’t been dealing too well with pressure.

A couple oftimes he’d seen Jerry Farber in the street — he lived only a few blocks away, and he’d waved, but Jerry hadn’t seen him. And once — this was a week after the murder — he ran into him at Player’s, a bar Armand sometimes stopped at after work. Jerry was deep into what looked like his second scotch.

“How you holding up?” Armand asked him, too suddenly, because Jerry whirled around as if startled, then smiled.

“You know,” he said after a moment. Armand could feel him sizing him up, wondering about any progress on the case. “Bad days,” he said at last.

“Yeah,” Armand said. It was definitely not protocol to drink with the family of a vic, but Armand liked the old man, and no one would see him here. He slid into the seat next to him. “Well, it doesn’t get easier, does it?”

The old man nodded and sipped his drink. Armand didn’t want him to start crying — what would he do if the old man started crying? — but he knew the guy probably needed company. He looked like hell, his shirt disheveled and stained, a pair of shorts exposing thick, white legs. Unhealthy. He hadn’t shaved and there was a bandage around his elbow. “Burned myself,” the old man said. “Gert always did the cooking.” He sighed and Armand bought him another drink. “You know?” the old man said, “it’s like being in a long, long tunnel, and I don’t think I’ll ever reach the end of it.”

Armand nodded.

“I walk and walk, and I’m not even sure the thing ends.”

Because he didn’t know what to say, Armand sipped his drink. Then: “We’re gonna catch who did this, you know. We’re gonna catch him.”

The old man sighed, drank. “Let’s talk about something else. How long have you been on the force?”

The bartender came by with his rag and wiped the bar.

“Thirty-one, thirty-two years. Long time.”

“Seen it all?” Farber asked him.

“Sometimes I still get surprises.”

Farber nodded. “My son wanted to join the force, big dreams. Went to CMSU to study criminal justice. Never finished.”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” Armand said. “It’s hard work, you almost never make people happy.”

The old man smiled at that. “Well, my kid’s doing great anyway. Has a good job, good wife. You married?”

Armand took another sip, then ordered a new drink. “I was,” he said.

It felt good to tell someone about Carol, even if it was more or less a stranger. Refreshing. He hadn’t really talked about her with anyone since she died. And eventually the conversation drifted away from their lost wives to simpler things, the Royals, politics, the bartender joining in after the bar emptied out.

And the next day he woke up strangely refreshed. He hadn’t dreamt about Carol or the wreck. He didn’t have a hangover, which was strange. Washington swung by in the Caprice and picked Armand up. “I’ve got news,” Washington said, “you smart fuck.” He was smiling.

“Yeah?”

“They’re holding Beispiel down at the station right now. Melichar and Greenleaf picked him up this morning.”

“Beispiel? What?” He’d been thinking Beispiel was a bullshit lead.

“The lab says he’s a match for the DNA of the second vic.” Washington laughed. “I gotta say, whatever you saw in the guy—”

Armand laughed too.

“They’re holding him for us at the station. Room A. A for ‘Armand’. He’s your collar, after all.”

Armand laughed. It would be something for Jerry Farber to know it.

“There’s more,” Washington said. “On a hunch, I called a friend down at city hall. Ten years ago, Beispiel lodges a couple of formal protests about a property his dad owned—”

“—River Market?” Armand said.

“River Market. Wanted some old warehouse protected, said it was a landmark. City seized it, paid him fair market value, tore it down. Built the steamboat museum on top of it.”

“The Royal Shoe warehouse?”

“Eminent domain.”

“What did they pay him?”

Washington laughed. “Well, it was a while ago. And the place was an empty shell.”

Armand nodded. It would be worth a bundle now, after gentrification. After the yuppies moved in. It had probably been gnawing at him for years.

The figure waiting for Armand in room A didn’t look anything like the Philip Beispiel Armand had seen standing among the onlookers at the last crime scene. He was dressed for work — a nice blue suit, wingtip shoes — but his eyes were empty, his hair ruffled. He had a bruise on his head, the kind a perp acquires getting into a squad car against his will. He looked like he wasn’t going to be talking. But he hadn’t yet lawyered up either. That was good news.

“Whaddya say?” Armand said. “Howya doing?” Washington was standing by the door, his arms crossed. Somewhere, a tape was recording.

Beispiel lifted his head a bit, looked at Armand, then back down at the table.

Armand pulled up a chair so it squeaked against the floor. He always made it squeak; it unsettled the perps. “You gonna talk to us?”

Beispiel looked up at Armand and attempted a sort of boyish grin. It didn’t come off.

“You been read your rights?” Beispiel said nothing. Armand looked at Washington.

“Yeah,” Washington said. “He’s been advised. Melichar read ’em.”

“Okay, then.”

Beispiel was silent.

“Look,” Armand said. “We know about the Royal Shoe warehouse. That was your father’s?”

Beispiel leaned back in his chair and watched Armand silently. Almost sadly.

“But I want to talk about the murders.”

Beispiel said nothing.

Washington shifted behind Armand.

“You want to talk about it?”

Beispiel sighed and moved in his chair. He looked at his fingers. Armand turned to Washington. “He doesn’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“Yeah,” Washington said. “You’d think at least he’d talk about the old lady.”

Armand nodded.

“At least,” Washington said, “since she wasn’t bothering nobody. Now, the other four? Maybe they bothered you. But the old lady?” He addressed Beispiel directly now. “I mean, that was your screwup. The old lady didn’t live in some yuppie loft apartment. She had nothing to do with all this. She was innocent.”

Beispiel looked up angrily. Something connected there.

“Yeah,” Armand said to Washington. “He’s gotta feel bad about that.” Then, to Beispiel, “She was just a nice old lady and now she’s dead. And her husband—” Armand thought about the old man, about Jerry, how at the end of the evening, at the thought of going back home to an empty house, he’d suddenly looked like he was going to cry. “You sick fuck,” he said.

Beispiel looked angry now. “I didn’t kill the old woman,” he said. “That wasn’t me. I saw that on TV. I just came down to see.”

Washington laughed. “He don’t want credit for the one he screwed up,” he said.

Beispiel just stared at them, red-faced. “I’m innocent,” he said weakly.

That night, Armand dreamt about the car wreck again. He watched the car flip over and over again, saw it come to a rest finally in the snow. In his dream, the radio was playing a song from his youth, Frankie Avalon, a sappy song. And as if he were flying above it, Armand could see the whole landscape, the first couple of cars whizzing past, unaware, then a car stopping, a young couple scrambling from the front seats, running through the snow to the wreck. And later, an ambulance pulling up, lifting Carol so gently and carefully from the collapsed car onto a stretcher. Then, like in the movies, Armand zoomed in on her face, which should have been peaceful, but it wasn’t, her mouth open as if in amazement, the black of her mouth, her white teeth. Her front tooth was chipped. Like the old woman’s, her tooth was chipped and bloody, and suddenly, in the dream, his wife and the dead old woman were one. The setting had changed, Jerry Farber was standing beside him, weeping. His arm was bandaged. When he looked up, his eyes were cold and dry—

He woke gasping for breath. What had happened? He remembered the tooth and it seemed important to him. He closed his eyes in the dark and recreated the dream image. There was a little blood on it, her blood. He turned on the light.

Was it her blood?

He had a few phone calls to make.

That afternoon, Washington stopped by the house in the Caprice again. “The news,” he said, “is Beispiel’s copping to the whole thing.”

Armand sat silently beside him. “To all five?”

“All five,” Washington said, smacking the steering wheel to the music, George Clinton, something like that. “He’s gonna talk about all five. Hopes a little cooperation will get him some leniency with the courts. He doesn’t want the DP.”

Armand thought about it. “You know, Jerry Farber’s gonna be a rich man, don’t you? He had a big policy on the old lady.”

Washington smiled. “Good,” he said. “The old man deserves it. Creep killed his wife.” He was nodding his head to the music.

“I suppose so.”

“What’s with you?” Washington said. “We’ve cleared a big case! The biggest! We get to work, there’ll be champagne. Did you see Chief on TV this morning?”

“Missed it,” Armand said.

And then he knew exactly how the case would play out. Beispiel might as well cop to all five. Four or five vics, it didn’t matter. If he kept it simple, cooperated, he might just get life. If he didn’t... They wanted him to plead to five, he’d plead to five. Who cares?

Armand thought about Jerry Farber, the bandaged arm, the insurance policy he’d called about that morning, the upside down pictures and cracked glass owl that now, weeks later, looked like a struggle put hastily aright in an otherwise spotless house. It was, none of it, proof. And only Armand had noticed. He’d made no notes, taken no photos, hadn’t told Washington. The bite mark beneath the bandage was probably almost healed by now.

They were pulling onto 350 now, past Unity Temple, past Berbiglia Liquors and I-435. When he closed his eyes, Armand could see how the game had played out for Jerry Farber. He’d strangled his wife. For the money? Sure, for the money. And what did it matter? He’d wrapped something around her neck, a rope or a tie, and pulled it tight. But she was stronger than he thought and they tussled, knocking over a few pictures, the glass owl. She bit him on the elbow. Or he elbowed her in the mouth, breaking her tooth in his skin. Armand looked out the window.

And then he’d loaded her into the car — somewhere, her shoes had fallen off — driven her down to the River Market and posed her there, on a quiet bench, the way Beispiel had done the others. It would look like a screwup, but it was no mistake.

Armand sighed. He’d liked the old man too much. They were passing the Nelson Gallery, the Kemper, approaching the Plaza, then right again down Broadway.

When they’d arrived at his house, Jerry Farber’d probably only had time to clean the place up hastily. He’d put the pictures upside down, replaced the owl with the other animals. Armand remembered he’d been sweating. What else had he missed? He hadn’t been looking.

And later the old man had written the letter to the Star — he had to write it, but he couldn’t match the typewriter or the paper.

Washington had taken them the long way, and now they were approaching Thirteenth Street, the enormous, concrete convention center, the hotels, the Criminal Investigation Bureau.

And a lucky coincidence all around that the media showed up so quickly to cover the murder. Of course, Beispiel, who killed in his own neighborhood, would want to come out and see who was imitating his handiwork. Of course he would. And it was his undoing.

Armand sighed. It was best for everyone — the chief, Beispiel, Armand, Washington — that no one brought Jerry Farber into it. The case looked clean the way it was, and the Department badly needed the press. He smacked the dashboard with his palm.

He was going to confront Farber, he was going to try to put him away. But he already knew he’d lose. The game was rigged now. “Sometimes,” he told Washington, “sometimes this job works out to bullshit.”

But Washington had no idea what he was talking about. He just sang along to his CD as they drove the last few blocks to their heroes’ welcome.