"Good idea," Westwood said. "I'm sure they have a crack homicide department."
"Goddammit, Jay! I've been covering your ass for six years! You haven't had to do anything harder than run down some high-school shitheads making obscene phone calls. Now, what, you wanna play macho cop again, all of a sudden?"
"I don't want to play anything, Jimmy."
"Then what do you want?"
"You ever have a homicide in East End?" Westwood asked.
"Not since I been here. We had one vehicular manslaughter."
"I know how to get started. I know what questions to ask. So let me ask them. Hopefully, it won't be that complicated. Most homicides aren't. There'll be a boyfriend or someone she fired or a crazy ex-husband. I can handle that."
"And if it is complicated?"
When Westwood didn't answer, Leggett said, "If it is? Can you handle that?"
"I don't have a fucking clue." Westwood let loose with a quick laugh. It didn't have a hell of a lot of humor to it. "If you want a guess, however, I'd say the answer is no, I can't."
Leggett didn't say anything for a while. Then: "Is there anything anyone else can do?"
Westwood snorted. "Like who? Gary and What's-his-name?"
"It's Brian, for chrissake."
"No, Jimmy. There's nothing Gary or Brian can do."
"We have other people."
"We have three other people. And they make Gary look like Serpico."
"They're gonna ask questions, you know. They're gonna want to know why you're all of a sudden turning into Supercop."
"Let 'em ask."
"What do I tell them?"
"The same thing you tell anybody who ever asks about a homicide investigation: not a damn thing." The first thing he did after leaving the chief's office was go to the computer on his desk in the station. He opened up a file, labeled it susanna morgan, and began typing in information. His brain was working logically and objectively. It all felt surprisingly natural.
He typed:
Roof-Blond guy-pale skin.
Well dressed. Casual.
Victim (Susanna) shocked to see man on roof.
He wanted info-she gave it to him. Name of person? Place? Thing? Code?
Info wanted: "Afro" or "Amfer"????
"Walrus"????
Broken glass, staged accident. He's clever. But not as clever as he thinks.
Dark-color car. Probably stolen or rented.
He saved his notes on a disk, stuck the disk in his desk drawer, told Gary to check and see if there were any reports of a dark, non-sports car stolen over the previous two days within forty miles of town. When Gary looked blankly at him, Justin said, "You're a cop. Use some cop stuff to figure it out."
And the next thing he knew, he was headed over to the East End Journal office because that was the logical starting point. You could start with family, boyfriend, or office. Susanna's family was back in Ohio, which was where the body had been shipped for burial. She didn't seem to have a current boyfriend. The office was four blocks from the police station. It was an easy call.
The atmosphere in the Journal office was solemn and subdued. Not surprising, Westwood decided, since everyone who worked there was in mourning.
"What was she working on?" Harlan Corning repeated Westwood's question. He leaned back in his chair doing, Justin thought, his best Perry White impersonation. "She was in the middle of a lot of things, as always."
"Can you be a little more specific?"
"I just don't see the relevance, that's all. I don't think Susanna was killed-if she was really killed-because she panned Steven Spielberg's new movie."
"Is that the last thing she wrote?"
"Is Spielberg a suspect now?" When Westwood didn't answer, the newspaper editor just said, "No. The last thing she wrote was an obituary. A horrible coincidence, isn't it."
"What was the obit?"
"One of the local old-timers passed away. Bill Miller, used to be an actor. Susanna was quite attached to him. She did volunteer work at the Home."
"The old-age home on the bay?"
"Yup. The old boy died on Tuesday or Wednesday and she did the obit."
"Anything special about it?"
"Yeah. She screwed up." Westwood raised an eyebrow and the editor said, "She was too close to Miller and it turns out he was a gasbag. He exaggerated about his career and she printed it as if it were the gospel. It happens. We ain't the New York Times, you know what I mean? But we got a crazy phone call from some guy, a movie nut, who caught the mistakes. Demanded a retraction. I sent Susie back to do some fact checking. That's what she was doing, I think, when she got sick the other day."
"Sick?"
"Yeah. She went out to lunch, didn't come back. She called in sick. That was the day she…you know…"
"Do you know where she called from?"
"No. It wasn't her apartment, though. Probably somewhere in town. I could hear street noise. Cars. She must've been on her cell phone."
"How crazy was the phone call, Mr. Corning? The one about the mistakes in the obit."
"From the movie nut? You don't think-"
"I can't imagine killing someone because she got her facts wrong in an obituary. But I'd like to talk to him anyway, if you have his number."
"I gave it to Sue, but I've still got it somewhere. That was her punishment-she had to call the guy when she found out what was what."
"Did she?"
"I don't know if she found out, and I don't know if she called him. I never got the opportunity to ask her," he said sadly.
Harlan Corning rooted around in his desk, shuffled through a stack of yellow Post-its. While he was looking, Justin said, "I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't put anything in the paper about this."
The editor looked up, surprised. "About what?"
"The fact that we think Ms. Morgan's death might not have been an accident."
"I have a responsibility-" Corning began.
"I know you do. But so do I. If I'm right."
"So if you are right, you want whoever did it to keep thinking he's home free."
Justin nodded. Corning went back to rooting through his desk until he found what he was looking for. "Here it is. Wally Crabbe." He held up a scrap of yellow paper with a name, address, and phone number on it. "He lives mid-Island, about an hour from here. The town's called Middleview." The editor wrote down the information for Westwood. "You know," Corning said slowly, "I also have a responsibility to report the facts. You don't know if your theory is fact, do you, Detective?"
"No I don't," Justin said.
"And Susanna was a good friend. I have a responsibility to her, too-don't you think?"
"Yes I do." "Then it would be irresponsible of me to say anything. At least for now."
"Thank you," Justin said.
"But you will let me know one way or the other, won't you? When you have the facts, I mean."
"You'll be the first, Mr. Corning. I promise."
Harlan Corning handed Justin the piece of paper with the scribbled information. As they shook hands, he said, "Good luck with this guy, Detective. You're in for quite a treat."
6
Wallace P. Crabbe was irate.
This was nothing unusual, because Wallace P. Crabbe was almost always irate. But he always kept his anger deep inside him. Always. On the surface-at work dealing with incompetent co-workers, on dinner dates with women whom he found unattractive and uninteresting, at meetings with authors whose manuscripts he copyedited, catching the most minute grammatical and factual errors-he was civil and polite, hardworking and trouble free. He was never the life of the party. About that he had no illusions. On the other hand, he was always invited to the party because he was appreciative of good food, could talk about the latest novel, was a very good listener, and almost always had a benign smile on his soft and pleasant-looking face.
That was the surface.
Inside, he hated smiling while he was bombarded with a constant stream of drivel. He hated all the novels he read and all the food he forced himself to eat at obnoxiously trendy restaurants. He hated almost everything and everyone. Inside, Wallace P. Crabbe was a roiling storm. Had been since he was twelve years old and Tony DeMarco knocked his schoolbooks out of his hands into a big patch of mud, then shoved him into the same mud patch and left, laughing, with his arm around the beautiful and bewitching eleven-year-old Abigail Winters. Wallace had been just about to ask Abigail, who had the most appealing ponytail, to go out to the movies with him. Instead, she went to the movies with Tony DeMarco, and that was when Wallace decided that life was basically unfair and that he was one of the unlucky majority who were going to get screwed over and over again by that very unfairness. But he saw no advantage to griping about it. The more he complained, the greater the chance, he figured, of being shoved into ever deeper and ever dirtier patches of mud.