Near Miss

Chapter 41

Carly sat in her bus seat and watched the back of Billy Barnett’s head, but not too closely. She didn’t want to get caught doing that. The bus stopped, and she got off. Billy stayed with the bus and rode away.

She started up the street in the direction she had been told to walk and looked for a shop. It had been left to her to choose what kind. Krispy Kreme looked pretty good to her. It was busy, but not too busy.

Keeping her back to the street, she entered and waited for the woman ahead of her to conclude her business, which seemed to include feeding a large birthday party. Carly pressed the button in her brain that said, Calm, and she instantly was. She read the overhead menu a couple times, then stepped up when the woman left with her purchase.

“Yes, ma’am?” the woman behind the counter said.

“A dozen chocolate glazed and two dozen original glazed,” Carly replied.

Her order was filled, and a price mentioned. Carly handed her a fifty.

There was a flash of green being counted, and the jingle of change. Carly dropped the coins into the charity collection jar and stuffed the bills into her pocket. The handle of a shopping bag emblazoned with the product name was thrust at her, and she accepted it and turned toward the street.

As she reached the door and opened it, a Vespa motor scooter flashed past her, and a moment later, two crisp pops sounded. She turned right and began to walk unhurriedly up the crowded street, swinging her shopping bag.

Then there was a kind of collective gasp, and a small girl screamed. People fell away from a man lying facedown in the gutter. Carly stopped and stared at the inert form.

“Somebody call 911,” she said to no one in particular. People moved around the man like leaves in a stream around a rock, so she made the call herself, using a throwaway Billy had given her.

“911, what is your emergency.”

“It looks like a man got shot in the street,” Carly said. She gave the approximate address, but not her name. “He seems to have bullet holes in his head.” She hung up, put the phone away, and walked around the seeping form in the gutter.

Half a block behind her there was a low moan, repeated, from a police car, and a crowd began to encircle the man and stop. A police car nosed its way into the circle, and two cops got out. One of them was talking into a handheld radio.

“Man down in the street,” he said, then bent and examined the man. “What appears to be a pair of gunshots to the back of the head.” He felt the man’s neck. “Unresponsive. I can’t find a pulse.”

The other cop walked in Carly’s direction. “Lady, what did you see?”

“What you see now,” Carly replied. “That’s it.”

The cop looked for a more responsive customer, and an old lady accommodated him, talking rapidly.

Carly turned and walked away. She reached into the bag and pulled out a donut and took a big bite. Ahead of her, a woman got out of a cab, and Carly got in.

“The Strand Bookstore,” she said and gave the address on Broadway and East Twelfth Street.

Shortly, the cab stopped, Carly got out, leaving the Krispy Kremes behind, and Billy got in, giving the driver an uptown address. Carly walked into the huge bookstore and shopped around, choosing two biographies, Eleanor Roosevelt and Kate Lee. She paid in cash and left the store, having shed her raincoat, and with a new shopping bag.

Stone watched the TV intently and saw Carly go into the Strand, then lost her. Somebody got into her cab and drove away. There was nothing else to see.

Ten minutes later, there was a tap on the rear street entrance to Stone’s office, and he let in Billy Barnett, who was, somehow, dressed differently than when he had departed an hour ago.

“Did you see everything?” Billy asked.

“No,” Stone said honestly, “just a shot of Carly getting out of a cab at the Strand, and you getting in.”

“Then you missed all the action,” Billy said. He picked up a remote control and rewound the video, then played it in slow motion.

“I still missed most of it,” Stone said.

“Then so will the police,” Billy said, holding out a shopping bag. “Krispy Kreme?”

Stone looked into the bag and saw donuts, but didn’t take one. “I’m confused,” he said.

“And that’s a good thing,” Billy said.

Shortly, Carly entered the house and flopped down in a chair. “Got another Krispy Kreme?” she asked, and Billy offered her one. She chewed reflectively for a moment. “Well?” she asked nobody in particular.

Everybody stared at Carly.

“Well, what?” Stone asked.

“That’s the best question you could have asked,” Billy said. He played the recording again, then recordings of two television stations.

“I see nothing,” Stone said, “except the back of Carly’s head, once or twice.”

“And nobody’s looking for the back of Carly’s head,” Billy said.

“It’s all too obvious to believe,” Stone said.

“Correct.”

“And I did what Billy said,” Carly remarked. “I learned a lot.”

“What did you learn?”

She held up her Krispy Kreme. “I learned that nobody cares about a lady buying donuts. And that, if you just do what you would normally do in the circumstances, you’re not a suspect.”

“Well,” Stone said, “in many years of trying to solve homicides, I didn’t look for ordinary people doing what they did. I looked for obvious suspects, and usually, I found them.”

“That’s because the perpetrators were influenced by their own actions,” Billy said. “They were furtive because they knew they were guilty, or were going to be. If you’re going to commit a murder, state of mind is everything.”

“You didn’t explain that before,” Stone said.

“No, and that’s because an explanation would have altered your state of mind, and you would have been looking for missteps, instead of overlooking them.” Billy set the remote control down. “I have a plane to catch, but keep me updated on any developments, Stone. Let’s stay in close touch.” He nodded at Carly and headed for the door.

Dino sat and watched the videos of the murder from neighborhood security cameras. He thought he caught sight of Carly’s head once, but then he lost her. He saw two women carrying shopping bags from Krispy Kreme, but what the hell, it was right there on the corner, and that would have been entirely acceptable and actionless. Who cared who bought donuts? And he would expect that, if questioned, Carly would have had an ironclad alibi: she was buying donuts on a whim.

“Good luck with this one, guys,” he said to his team. “Question all the hit men on our list. Nobody’s going to miss Gromyko. You’ll come up dry.” Everybody filed from the squad room and went to work, while Dino returned to One Police Plaza, to issue a statement and return the phone calls of media people.

That night, he slept the sleep of the ignorant.