Bad Business

11

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

"Good aim?" I said.

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

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

"Yep."

"Lotta people still in the building at that time."

"Yep."

"Widens the range of suspects," I said.

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

"So, basically, anyone could have shot him," I said.

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

"Security?" I said.

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

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

"You wouldn't," Healy said.

"But procedure is procedure," I said.

"Un-huh."

"Why I left the cops," I said.

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

"Well, yeah," I said. "That too."

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

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

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

"But no one reported any gunshots," I said.

"Nope."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Silencer?"

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

"Probably took him, what, a minute?"

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

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

"So why were you tailing this guy?"

I drank some coffee and didn't say anything.

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

I nodded.

"You know anything that will point us anywhere?"

"Do I ever," I said.

Healy's eggs arrived and he ate some.

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

"Did you?"

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

"Pictures," Healy said.

"Yeah. She insists on pictures. In the act."

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

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

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

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

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

"That narrows it down," I said.

Healy grinned at me.

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