Текст книги "Beach Strip"

Автор книги: John Lawrence Reynolds

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

I took a final glance in the direction of the Thousand Islands and resumed walking, turning left before crossing the bridge and following the road that fishermen and boaters took to get to the shoreline of the bay. The road crossed a sandbank before dipping down to the water’s edge, and when I reached the bottom of the low grade I looked to my right to see Mel’s car parked as I had asked. Mel was watching me through the windshield, his face lit by the setting sun, red like molten slag. Behind and above him, I saw a man in the window of the lift bridge control room, silhouetted against the light. I raised my arm. He raised his.

Mel leaned to open the passenger door. I slid in, closed the door behind me and sat back, closing my eyes.

“You all right?”

I opened my eyes to see Mel studying me with that special expression of his, his brow furrowed and his smile wide and warm. He was wearing his blue jacket, with jeans as tight as a second skin. “No,” I said. “I need something from you.”

The smile faded. “What?” he asked.

“A hug, for a beginning. A really warm, solid squeeze.”

I reached toward him and half pulled him close, then leaned away. “Take your gun off. Do you know how uncomfortable it is to hug somebody who’s wearing a shoulder holster?”

“Okay,” he said, withdrawing the Glock from the holster and setting it on the dashboard, then reaching for me. I remained within his arms, feeling his breathing and hearing his heart, long enough for him to tilt my chin up and look at me, perhaps preparing to kiss me.

“I can’t, Mel,” I said.

“Can’t what? It’s too soon?” Meaning, I guess, too soon after Gabe’s death for us to become lovers again.

“Just let me sit up for a minute.”

He released me and I sat with my back against the passenger door, watching him in the dying light. Then I leaned forward. Instead of reaching for another embrace, I took the gun from the dashboard, held it in both hands and pressed my back against the passenger door again, aiming the Glock at Mel’s blue eyes, those beautiful blue eyes, which were already squinting in surprise.

“I swear,” I said in a voice that surprised me with its strength. “I swear, Mel, if you try to take this from me, I’ll blow your head off.”

“You’re crazy.” I understood why Mel said that. I didn’t feel entirely sane at the moment. Just very calm and determined.

“Probably. But it doesn’t matter. Because I’m going to sit here with your gun pointed at your head, and we’re going to talk about how you killed Gabe, you son of a bitch.”

27.

I had imagined all the things that Mel might say in this situation, and how I would respond. So his first reaction didn’t surprise me.

“You can’t fire it,” he said. “The safety lock’s on.”

“These guns don’t have safety locks, Mel. That’s why you cops like them. You don’t have to grope for the safety lock while the bad guy puts a bullet in you. When you pull the trigger, you release the safeties and the gun fires. No fumbling around. I pull this trigger and the bullet comes out. Simple as that. Right, Mel?”

“Gabe teach you that?” I hated the way he said it.

“No. Gabe hated guns. A little time on the Internet. That’s all it took.”

“Is that where you got this crazy story about me shooting Gabe?” He sat back as though trying to move out of range. He looked calm, except for a small twitch at the corner of one eye.

“It’s not a crazy story,” I said. “And it didn’t come from the Internet. It came from you and Hayashida and Walter Freeman and Mike Pilato—”

He forced himself to laugh. “Mike Pilato? You’re believing the biggest gangster in the city?”

“—and Glynnis Dalgetty—”

“Who?”

“—and Andrew Golden and two snooty women who got their Louis Vuitton purses mixed up. You killed him, Mel. You shot Gabe while he was waiting for me, naked on the blanket inside the bushes, and before that you shot Dougal Dalgetty, and later you killed Wayne Weaver Honeysett, trying to cover up everything with your story about drugs missing from the police locker and Gabe suspecting Walter, which was when I really started wondering about you. Gabe wouldn’t take home a two-dollar notepad, and you tell me he might have been taking drugs from a police locker? Walter knew it too, in the depths of his stupid soul. He knew Gabe was no thief, so he started believing I was. You killed Gabe, Mel. I know how you did it, and I have a good idea why you did it, and if I don’t put a bullet first in your balls and then in your brains before the cops get here, we’re going to go over all the details. Right here. Right now.”

“You’ve got officers coming?” Mel twisted to look around. “That’s good. Because when they see you with my weapon, they will either shoot you or arrest you, and probably both. And whatever story you come up with will be the product of a delusional woman who can’t believe her husband killed himself because his wife didn’t want to fuck him.”

He looked directly at me, and I saw the flash of anger that Gabe had told me about, so long ago, the one I had seen in small doses. Mel has the ability to think and act simultaneously. Gabe had said that. And: The only thing he’s gotta control is his temper.

He was speaking to me again.

“Right, Josie? Isn’t that right? A drunken man finds out his wife’s been screwing his partner, and when she doesn’t show up as promised, he loses it and turns the gun on himself. That’s what happened, right?”

I wanted to scream and shoot, not necessarily in that order. I spoke instead, in a calm voice that continued to surprise me, while Mel listened, too interested or perhaps too frightened to interrupt me. “No,” I said. “You shot Dougal Dalgetty because he started to squeeze you. He was turning the tables on you after you’d been squeezing him and Mike Pilato, threatening to arrest Dougal for drug dealing unless he and Pilato paid you off. How much did they pay you, Mel? Enough to buy that place by a lake and do what, Mel? Just lie around and spend the money you took from Pilato and Dalgetty and maybe some others? Or maybe take me or some other woman to that inn in New England? The Griswold Inn, right? Eugene Griswold, innkeeper. Two hundred years after Eugene died, he gives you a name for a drug dealer that never existed. You make him up as a big dealer, telling Gabe this Eugene Griswold is new in town and throwing his weight around, going up against Mike Pilato and killing one of Pilato’s dealers, Dougal Dalgetty. And when Gabe starts checking on his own, talking to people like Mike Pilato, trying to find Griswold, he realizes there is no Griswold or Grizz, and since you were the only person saying there was, you must be lying, which meant you were hiding something.”

Mel opened his mouth to speak, but I knew what he was going to say and interrupted him before he could say it.

“How much did Dalgetty and Pilato pay you before they decided they’d paid you enough, and if you didn’t knock it off they’d drop the word about you to Walter Freeman? Especially when you didn’t lift a finger to get the charges against Dalgetty dropped? How scared were you about that, Mel? Did you think Dalgetty would turn on you in court, saying he’d been paying you off? Or maybe they paid you in more than cash. Were they slipping you bags of dope, Mel? Cocaine? Heroin? What was it?”

Mel wouldn’t look at me as he spoke. “It was Gabe,” he said. “Check it out, Josie. It was Gabe’s gun that killed Dalgetty. Gabe. Not me.”

“It was you, Mel. And it was you who was under the lift bridge when Wayne Honeysett told me he had seen everything.”

He turned to face me. “That’s crazy.”

“Your cell phone records say so. The date, the time, the location …”

The sun had set, and the light inside the car and all around us was weighing down with the greyness of dusk, but I could still make out Mel’s expression and pallor. His expression was concern. His pallor was as grey as the dying light. “You don’t have my cell phone records,” he said in a voice that sounded like high noon in Death Valley.

“No,” I agreed. “Hayashida has them. Got them this morning. I called from Vancouver, asked him to check them out. He did, and confirmed what I suspected. The night Wayne Honeysett died, you were within a hundred yards of right here. You saw him, Mel. You saw him because you were trailing him, right? You were trailing him because you started checking the interviews with all the local perverts, like the good cop you pretended to be, because you realized he might have been in the garden shed the night you shot Gabe. You figured Honeysett was the peeper who hid in the garden shed, the poor sap who fell all over himself when he became infatuated with women like Glynnis Dalgetty, and me, I guess, and a bunch of other women he gave gifts to. He was too shy, too totally screwed up to give me the ring he made for his wife, so he gave it to Gabe and asked him to give it to me, and Gabe did, probably because he felt sorry for Honeysett and wanted me to wear it. What happened, Mel? Did Honeysett start talking about what he knew, what he saw, the night Gabe died? Is that why you had to kill him?”

Mel, still thinking about his cell phone records while staring through the windshield, muttered that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.

The silence made me uncomfortable, so I kept talking, waiting for what I knew I had to do, and it all spilled out of me in a torrent.

“Honeysett didn’t go to the police because he was afraid they would charge him with being a pervert again, and he probably would have gotten a jail term. What happened, Mel? Did you see him run from the shed after you shot Gabe? Or maybe as you were coming into our house, through the garden? Did you decide you had to kill him before he figured out what you had done, before somebody like Walter Freeman took the miserable little guy seriously? You must have been under the bridge when I scattered Gabe’s ashes. Is that where you were, Mel? Hiding under the bridge, waiting to talk to Honeysett? Did he know you’d be there? Were you going to shoot him like you shot Dalgetty and …” I had to swallow the lump in my throat. “Like you shot Gabe?”

He turned to look at me. For the first time, he appeared truly frightened, because he understood how much I knew.

I had more to say, not to impress Mel as much as to finally speak aloud all the things I had been telling myself for the past twelve hours.

“Did you panic, Mel? Did you lose it and shoot Honeysett in some kind of … of unthinking knee-jerk reaction? Or did you wait until the bridge went up, so the noise would hide the sound of the gunshot? Which was it, Mel? Never mind, I don’t care. Afterwards you lifted his body and set his head, with the bullet from your gun in it, on the bridge support and held it there while the bridge came down on it. Jesus, Mel, don’t you have nightmares about that? What kind of sound does a man’s skull make when a bridge comes down on it and crushes it like an eggshell and squeezes the brains into jelly? Sure works to hide a bullet, though, doesn’t it? Sorry, a projectile. The pro-jec-tile becomes just another piece of junk off the bridge supports, like a flattened penny, and who the hell would look for that among crushed brains, right, Mel?”

He looked away and down, one hand squeezing the bridge of his nose.

“What’s that, Mel? I couldn’t hear you. Say it louder. I’m really interested in what you have to say.”

He raised his head to look through the windshield again. “I said you have no proof. And it was Gabe’s gun that shot Dalgetty and Gabe’s gun that he used to kill himself.” He turned to look at me. “Because he discovered you had been screwing his partner.”

Which might have been enough for me to shoot him there and then. But I didn’t. I was too damn proud of myself to miss the chance to show him how clever I was. And how stupid I had been.

“I don’t know if he knew that.” I wanted to close my eyes, to lower my arms, and to think about Gabe, but I couldn’t. Not yet. “But he knew you shot Dougal Dalgetty.”

There’s something else, Gabe had said when he called, wanting to make love on the blanket, and I said, I know, and Gabe asked me how I could know. He meant how could I know about Mel shaking down Dalgetty and Pilato and making up the story about Eugene Griswold, because that’s what he wanted to tell me, that he believed Mel had killed Dalgetty.

“And Mike Pilato figured it out as well. That you shot Dougal. When I told him the forensics matched. The bullet that killed Dalgetty and the one that killed Gabe. They matched. Pilato knew Gabe hadn’t shot Dalgetty, and now he knew you had. He suspected you all along, because you were the one shaking him and Dalgetty down. It fell into place with the forensics report, first with Pilato, then with me. So you take your choice, Mel. You get me sitting here, or you get Mike Pilato looking for your ass, ready to punish you for shooting his good buddy Dougal.”

Mel actually smiled. “Mike Pilato doesn’t scare me,” he said.

“He’d better. And what were you doing at our house that night, anyway, Mel? Did you learn that Gabe knew who killed Dalgetty, and why? Were you looking for me? Never mind. Gabe went into the bushes, wrapped in a blanket, you followed him, maybe you talked to him while he was there on the blanket, trying to get him to go along with you, and Gabe wouldn’t. He wouldn’t cover for you, and he wouldn’t have been on his knees when you shot him either. Not for you, not for anybody. I think he was getting up off the blanket, ready to kick your ass, and that’s when you lost it and shot him with your gun—”

“It was Gabe’s gun.” Mel sounded tired, resigned. “Forensics says so. Hayashida signed the form. The paraffin test was positive—”

“No, no, no, no, no, Mel. You were so ‘upset’ about Gabe’s death, so intent on ‘investigating what really happened,’ that you insisted on filling out the forensics forms yourself. You were the one who read the serial number of Gabe’s gun aloud to Hayashida, who entered it on the form before the gun was fired. Except it wasn’t Gabe’s gun you fired into the water tank to get …” I couldn’t resist saying it the same way again. “… the pro-jec-tile for the forensics lab. It was your gun. A Glock G22 identical to Gabe’s, identical to the one carried by everybody else in the department. Boy, I hope they got a volume discount for all those ass-ugly guns. And you sure as hell deserve a medal for thinking fast in a tight situation, like Gabe said you could. You shoot Gabe, drop the gun in the right place, get the hell out from inside those bushes before anybody on the beach can see you, and walk through the garden and into our house, where you get Gabe’s gun out of the kitchen. Then you put it together, slip it in your holster and leave by the front door, maybe already thinking about how you can convince Hayashida or whoever that your gun is really Gabe’s until you get a chance to switch them again. Brilliant.”

I waited for a reaction. There was none, except for a slight glistening on his brow. He was beginning to sweat. Good.

“Oh, and you shook his hand too, didn’t you, Mel?”

He looked at me. I had surprised him again.

“You grabbed his hand, his right hand, with your own. Just a quick grab and release. Shaking hands goodbye, Mel, while Gabe lay dying? No, transferring some of the gunshot residue from your hand to his. Just enough, Mel, for the paraffin test to find some. Just a trace, that’s all you needed. Where’d you pick that up, Mel? At the police academy? Or from that case in Baltimore, where a suspect and his lawyer proved the residue on the suspect’s palm came from shaking hands with the real killer? Nobody thought of doing a paraffin test on your hand, did they? Or even to check the gun for fingerprints. Why should they? Everybody believed Gabe had shot himself with his own weapon. Why waste time on fingerprint tests? Boy, you were good, Mel. Really good. You almost got away clean, except that Wayne Weaver Honeysett was in the garden shed, waiting for me to come home so he could watch me undress in our bedroom—maybe I’d be near the window, where he could see me. He heard the shot and watched you instead. Watched you go into the house and get Gabe’s gun. Poor Wayne. Jerking off among rusty rakes and a bag of topsoil.”

I leaned forward, trying to look Mel in the eye.

“You also grabbed our notepad from the kitchen counter as you were leaving. What was in the notebook, Mel? Was there something in there about you and Dalgetty, maybe? Is that why you took it with you, why I couldn’t find it? Or maybe he just wrote that he loved me. Is that what Gabe wrote on it?”

“Yeah, that’s what he said.” Mel sat up straight, his back against the seat. “Something like that.”

“What did it say, Mel?”

“Go to hell.”

“You know what I think? I think there was something about you in it that didn’t add up with Gabe. Something my friend Dewey saw him writing a day earlier. Is that what it was?”

“Fuck you.”

“Not anymore, Mel. Not you, not ever.”

He looked over and actually smiled. “None of this matters. Either you shoot me now, which you can’t, or you just get the hell out of here while you can.”

“Or Walter Freeman and some other cops show up and take over.” The flashing red and blue lights appeared on the bridge. Bubble gum lights, Gabe used to call them.

Mel twisted in his seat to look at the cruisers on the bridge, the officers spilling out and heading along the canal toward us. “They’ll shoot you when they see you with the gun,” he said.

“Or I’ll shoot you first,” I said, and I took aim and pulled the trigger.

28.

Walter Freeman wouldn’t look at me. He had avoided looking at me for the last hour while I sat in an interrogation room with him and Harold Hayashida and a female police officer who managed to look like a Playboy model with her blonde hair, blue uniform, black leather belt, gold badge, and silver bullets. What makes such a good-looking young woman become a cop, I wondered. Maybe good-looking young male cops.

Hayashida broke my thoughts by asking, for the third time, if I wanted a coffee. For the third time I told him no. He was sitting at a desk set at a right angle to me, flipping through pages in a red cardboard file. Walter had come and gone several times, conferring, I assumed, with whoever was behind the one-way mirror.

The mirror worked at blocking the view of the people watching me, but after a knock at the door took Walter out of the room, it couldn’t block the sound of his enraged voice.

A minute later the door opened again, but instead of Walter Freeman, a tall man in his forties entered, dressed and groomed as though he had stepped out of a Brooks Brothers catalogue. I had never seen a better-fitted pinstripe suit or a better-coordinated Oxford shirt and striped tie. His Afro-styled salt-and-pepper hair was the result of genes, not a hairstylist, and his tortoiseshell glasses were so out of fashion they were avant-garde.

He nodded at me, set a leather briefcase on a side table, and walked toward Hayashida with his hand extended. “J. Michael Robinson,” he said in a voice deep enough to deliver a good imitation of Barry White. “I have been appointed legal counsel for Mrs. Marshall, and I am requesting that this interrogation be suspended while I ascertain the charges against her and advise her of her rights. I am also insisting that I be present during any future interrogations.”

Hayashida ignored Robinson’s handshake. Instead, he shrugged, closed his file, and stood up. “Sure,” he said. “You want to talk to her here?”

“Absolutely not.” Robinson turned to me with his rejected handshake. I accepted it. “I insist on a counsellor’s room and full privacy.” He smiled at me as he spoke.

Standing in the open doorway, Walter Freeman’s face was as blank as an empty plate.

I left the room, guided by the lawyer’s hand at the small of my back. Three doors down the hall, past some knots of uniformed cops watching me and whispering among themselves, we entered a room about the size of a walk-in closet, with two chairs and a lamp table. Robinson closed the door behind us and set the briefcase on the table.

“Who the hell are you?” I said.

“I’m your lawyer.”

“I didn’t ask for one. I don’t need one and I can’t afford one.”

He took a deep breath and let it out noisily while staring at the ceiling. Okay, he was exasperated. I got the message. “You didn’t ask for one, correct,” he said. “You tell me to leave and I will. But before you do, understand that you need a lawyer desperately. It doesn’t matter if you can afford one or not. You either get me or you get somebody listed with legal aid who is probably sitting in a bar on James Street right now.”

“It matters to me. Whether I can afford a lawyer or not.”

“But not to Mr. Pilato.”

“He sent you here?”

“He says he owes you.”

“Then he can fix my car, the one his guys smashed with a sledgehammer. I don’t need a lawyer.”

He withdrew a sheet of paper from his briefcase and began reading from it. “It appears you are facing a charge of obstruction of police, theft of police property, possession of a firearm, resisting arrest and …” He moved the paper aside to look at me. “… attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, which carries a penalty of up to twenty years in prison.”

“That’s garbage.”

He dropped the paper on the desk. “Of course it is. It’s also legitimate. Do you want to spend twenty years in prison?”

“What do you think?”

He smiled and leaned back in the chair. “I think,” he said, “that you have set a new record for embarrassing a major metropolitan police force in this country, and they are so upset with you that they are ignoring, for the moment, the reality that they have a rogue cop in custody facing a triple murder charge.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER we gathered in Walter Freeman’s office. Walter sat behind a desk as big as my dining-room table. Two uniformed officers stood behind him, their feet apart, their hands behind their backs, as approachable as bookends. Hayashida, Robinson, the blonde policewoman, and two guys from internal affairs, wearing cheap suits and faces that desperately needed shaving, flanked me in chairs arranged in a semicircle. An overweight guy Walter introduced as a Crown attorney stood to one side, like a referee.

Walter wouldn’t look at me. His head down, he read aloud in a flat voice from a sheet of paper on the desk in front of him. “We will withdraw the charge of obstructing police on the basis of Mrs. Marshall’s telephone call earlier today to Sergeant Hayashida, who confirms that she offered information she legitimately believed would assist us in our investigation.”

“It sure as hell did, Walter,” I said. Robinson nudged me to be quiet.

“We will suspend the charges of theft of police property and illegal possession of a firearm subject to evaluation of the projectile fired by your client, the aforesaid Mrs. Marshall, this evening—”

“The one you recovered from the sandbank, right?”

Walter’s eyes flicked from the paper to me for a heartbeat, then back to the paper again. “Subject to evaluation of the projectile fired by your client this evening by the provincial forensics laboratory. We are also suspending the charge of attempted murder of a police officer pending the same forensics report and, as requested, will issue a document to the administrator of Trafalgar Towers confirming that our suspicions of possible fraud committed by Mrs. Marshall have no basis in fact.”

“I am requesting that all criminal charges be dropped as of now,” Robinson said, “on the basis that the alleged acts were conducted by Mrs. Marshall as a means of obtaining an exhibit that the forensics laboratory could use to confirm that the weapon was used in three unsolved homicides—”

Walter couldn’t take it anymore. “Citizens are not permitted, are never permitted, to seize possession of a law officer’s weapon and fire it in the direction of a member of the police force,” he partially shouted, partially spat—I could see the spittle flying like water from a lawn sprinkler—”no matter what her motives might have been!”

Things turned into a verbal food fight after that. I screamed that no cop was likely to compare rifling marks on a bullet from Mel’s gun with the ones that had killed Gabe and Dougal Dalgetty unless I gave him good reason to, and I had. Robinson quoted some statute supporting a citizen’s arrest, Walter told me to keep my damn mouth shut and ordered Robinson to stick to the facts, Hayashida asked somebody to close the door and turn off the digital recorder, and Robinson said he would consider requesting a judicial inquiry into the operations of the police force. The two bookend cops looked at each other with confusion, especially when Walter Freeman lost it and stood up, crumpled the sheet of paper he had been reading from into a ball, and threw it at J. Michael Robinson, striking him squarely in the tortoiseshells.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was midnight, I was running on distilled adrenaline, Mel Holiday was being interrogated in a room down the hall, and the chief of detectives had just hurled an oversized spitball at my lawyer, who had been hired by the most notorious gangster in the city. What wasn’t there to laugh at?

The Crown attorney walked behind Walter’s desk, placed a hand on Walter’s shoulder, turned him and his swivel chair around, and began speaking to him in a low voice while Robinson made notes in a binder pulled from his briefcase. Hayashida buried his face in his hands. I couldn’t tell if he was crying or laughing.

Robinson leaned over and whispered to me while making his notes. “The Crown is telling Walter to free you on your own recognizance, with charges pending,” he said. “When they confirm the forensics that prove Sergeant Holiday’s gun killed your husband and Honeysett, all charges will be dropped.”

I asked him how he knew that.

He closed the binder and slipped his Montblanc into his jacket pocket. “It’s been previously discussed,” he said, “between me and the Crown. Freeman is just learning about it now.”

Let’s have a cheer for our legal system, I thought.

“HOW CLOSE DID YOU COME to shooting Holiday in the head when you fired the gun?” Robinson asked. He was driving me back to the beach strip. His car was expensive, quiet, dark, warm, and smelled of Italian leather. I could marry a car like that.

“I don’t know. I aimed for the open window. Missed him by maybe three or four inches.”

“Clever of you to fire the bullet into the sand, to preserve the rifling marks.”

“I’d rather have buried it in his head.”

“Why not let the police do the test, once you explained it to them?”

“Who would believe me? Who would even listen to me? Who would ask for Mel’s gun to do forensics on it on the basis that I, Gabe’s crazy widow, was claiming that Mel Holiday had murdered three men, including my husband? I was sure I’d worked things out. How Mel had switched guns after shooting Gabe, substituting his own for Gabe’s, and when they were getting the bullet for the forensics lab, how he told Hayashida the serial number of Gabe’s gun, then in Mel’s holster, rather than reading him the serial number of the gun in evidence. And how Hayashida trusted Mel enough to record it without inspecting it himself. Then Mel switched guns again, putting his own gun back in his holster and filing Gabe’s in an evidence locker. Someday, somebody might have tested both guns, compared the results with Gabe’s and Dalgetty’s autopsy reports, and realized what Mel had pulled off, but it wasn’t likely. And nobody was ever going to get anything from what was left of Honeysett’s head.”

“Walter Freeman said he suspected all along that the metal they found in Honeysett’s remains had been a bullet.”

“Walter Freeman would say he suspected the sun would come up in the morning if it made him look good. How could he stand it?”

“Freeman? Stand what?”

“Not him. Mel Holiday. How could he stand holding Honeysett’s body like that, waiting for the bridge to come down on his head?”

“You’d be surprised what some people can do in desperate straits.” We were approaching my house. “Besides, he was a homicide detective for how many years?”

“Ten. Maybe more.”

“Would you care to guess how many mangled bodies he encountered in ten years? How many autopsies he attended? Holding a body until the skull is crushed wouldn’t be a picnic for anybody, but if it were necessary, a guy like him could do it. You can get used to anything, Mrs. Marshall.”

I could get used to being in the company of a man like Robinson very late at night, every night, but when he stopped outside my door, I simply thanked him, stumbled inside, and climbed the stairs to my bed. The peeper in the garden shed was long gone. Mel Holiday was locked up, probably for life. I had a high-powered lawyer retained by an influential gangster to defend me. When Tina heard the news, she might actually admit that I have more intelligence than a string of barbed wire.

I hadn’t slept so well in weeks.

MOTHER, OF COURSE, WAS SURPRISED to see me the next morning. She had finished her breakfast and was sitting at her window, watching the strollers on the boardwalk and along the canal. I startled her when I entered, and I hugged her longer and more firmly than normal, which made her reach for her chalk and blackboard and write, Why are you here so early? Is something wrong?

I assured her that nothing was wrong, and told her that the police had solved Gabe’s murder. It was another police officer, I said. In fact, it had been Gabe’s partner.

Mother’s hand, gripping the chalk, flew across the blackboard like a drunken insect, writing, Mel Holiday?

“Yes,” I said. “How did you know? Has it been on the news?” Walter Freeman had told Robinson that nothing would be revealed until the forensic examination of the bullets from Mel’s and Gabe’s guns was completed and charges laid.

She wrote, He was here. Then she added, You slept with him, didn’t you?

I sat on the edge of the bed. I think it is a wonderful thing for a daughter to be surprised and impressed by her mother, no matter what their ages. At the moment, I just wished it were some other daughter. “When was he here?” I asked.