CHAPTER 7.

“I almost phoned when I got your pictures,” Leo said when he called the next morning. It was late enough that his voice shouldn’t have been muffled and scratchy.

“You were up at three in the morning?” I’d stayed up long after Jennifer Gale had left, studying every picture that showed the rope trailing behind the clown. Then I realized I could study them for decades and still not be able to learn what I needed to know. So I did what I do sometimes when a problem gets too thorny. I dumped it on Leo. I e-mailed him the pictures.

“Ma’s friends didn’t leave until after two,” he said now.

“Double-feature dirty movie night?”

“No. They were exercising.”

“No doubt healthier than dirty movies, but until two in the morning?”

He yawned. “The ladies didn’t arrive until nine. Then they had to have vodka. Then it took them an hour to make it down to the basement. Then they had to have more vodka-”

“Vodka? To do stretches, partial knee bends, the occasional pirouette?” I made a noise that sounded like a giggle, but then, I was short on sleep, too.

He yawned again. “Come over, and bring your tools.”

“For what this time?”

“Two of the poles fell down.”

“How energetic did they get?”

“It was the vodka, and Mrs. Roshiska’s CD of Polish folk tunes. Very spirited.”

“What about the questions I sent with the pictures?”

“Come over with your tools. We’ll tighten the poles so none of Ma’s friends will die, and I’ll show you what I learned.”

As he hung up, I thought I heard another yawn.

I put my toolbox in the Jeep and drove to Leo’s.


* * *

Leo’s basement had undergone more change. Curtain rods had been hung on the walls, and the floor, good enough as bare concrete for almost a century, had now been covered with red tiles flecked with specks of gold.

“All this for exercise?” I asked.

“Ma got the handyman in yesterday. She said she wants to soften up the place.”

“Nice television,” I said, pointing to the other big change in the basement. A new big-screen television, slightly smaller than the monster in the living room, sat on a long table at the end of the room.

“Ma decided they need instruction videos to exercise right.”

I stepped over the two poles that lay on the floor like trees felled by a tornado and looked up at the ceiling. “The bracket screws came right out of the wood joists?”

“A couple of Ma’s friends tip in well over two hundred and fifty.”

“I thought they were going to just lean against the poles, to steady themselves.”

“Apparently, vodka and Polish folk tunes really rev the metabolism.”

I wished I could laugh, but it wasn’t going to be that kind of morning. Not with what I feared he was going to tell me about the rope.

I reattached all the brackets, top and bottom, with stronger screws. It was only after I took a turn on each pole that he pronounced my work satisfactory.

“Ma’s having the handyman back today to give me a door,” he said, as we walked through the rough-framed entrance to his office.

“Considerate of her,” I said.

He yawned.

I dropped into the huge green overstuffed chair he kept in his office for visiting elephants. He pulled down a projection screen and keyed something into his computer. A picture of the clown falling appeared on the screen.

“You asked about the length of the rope.” He pointed a yellow pencil at the screen. “There were actually a dozen shots, taken from far enough away to be good for our purpose. I began by establishing the dimensions of everything in the background, the bricks, the windows, the mortar joints. From those known factors, I calculated how far your unfortunate Mr. Stitts was from the building as he was falling, so I could adjust for the depth of the field in the photograph.”

“You mean, how far the rope was from the background of bricks?”

“Yes. Every dimension in the picture has to be known. Once I had those, it was easy to calculate the approximate length of the rope.”

“And?” I asked.

“Forty-three feet, maximum.”

“You’re sure?”

“Give or take a foot, to allow for miscalculations of the slight curves of the rope as it trailed, but yes.”

“How about my other question?” I asked after a pause.

“The condition of the trailing end of the rope? I couldn’t see any frays, but I can’t tell if it had been dipped in something at a factory to prevent it from unraveling. You’ll have to inspect the rope itself for that.”

He hadn’t confirmed it all, but he’d confirmed enough.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, after I’d said nothing.

“A fifty-foot rope, wound and knotted around a thirty-inch door.”

“Subtract a little more than five feet for the loop, another two for a double knot? Leaves forty-three feet, exactly what I calculated.”

My mind jittered over the scenario. One second the rope was taut, securing the clown as he danced high at the edge of the roof. The next, it was falling behind him, cut away by someone hiding in the small rooftop hutch. Best of all, the unseen killer would have taken the evidence-the seven feet of rope that had been cut off-away with him.

Leo’s voice intruded from somewhere distant.

“It means a cut rope?” he was asking.

“It means murder,” I said.

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