I said, "There's a few ways we could do it. We could say that you couldn't reach her all night and you got worried. You talked to me this afternoon and we came over here together. You had a key. You opened the door and we found her and called it in."
"All right."
"But the chain lock gets in the way. If you weren't here before, how did it get broken? If somebody else broke it, who was he and what was he doing here?"
"What if we say we broke it getting in?"
I shook my head. "That doesn't work. Suppose they come up with solid evidence that you were here last night. Then I'm caught swearing to a lie. I could lie for you to the extent of treating something you told me as confidential, but I'm not going to get nailed to a lie that cuts across the grain of the facts. No, I have to say the chain lock was broken when we got here."
"So it's been broken for weeks."
"Except the break's fresh. You can see where the screws came out of the wood. The one thing you don't want to do is get caught in that kind of a lie, where your story and the evidence wind up pointing in different directions. I'll tell you what I think you have to do."
"What's that?"
"Tell the truth. You came here, you kicked the door in, she was dead and you split. You drove around, tried to sort things out in your mind. And you wanted to reach me before you did anything, and I was hard to reach. Then you called me and we came here and called it in."
"That's the best way?"
"It looks like it to me."
"All because of that chain thing?"
"That's the most obvious loose end. But even without the chain lock you're better off telling the truth. Look, Chance, you didn't kill her. She killed herself."
"So?"
"If you didn't kill her, the best thing you can do is tell the truth. If you're guilty, the best thing to do is say nothing, not a word. Call a lawyer and keep your mouth shut. But anytime you're innocent, just tell the truth. It's easier, it's simpler, and it saves trying to remember what you said before. Because I'll tell you one thing. Crooks lie all the time and cops know it and they hate it. And once they get hold of a lie they pull on it until something comes loose. You're looking to lie to save yourself a hassle, and it might work, it's an obvious suicide, you might get by with it, but if it doesn't work you're going to get ten times the hassle you're trying to avoid."
He thought about it, then sighed. "They're gonna ask why I didn't call right away."
"Why didn't you?"
" 'Cause I didn't know what to do, man. I didn't know whether to shit or go blind."
"Tell them that."
"Yeah, I guess."
"What did you do after you got out of here?"
"Last night? Like you said, I drove around some. Drove around the park a few times. Drove over the George Washington Bridge, up the Palisades Parkway. Like a Sunday drive, only a little early." He shook his head at the memory. "Came back, drove over to see Mary Lou. Let myself in, didn't have to bust no chain lock. She was sleepin'. I got in bed with her, woke her up, stayed with her a little. Then I went on home."
"To your house?"
"To my house. I'm not gonna tell 'em about my house."
"No need to. You got a little sleep at Mary Lou's."
"I never sleep when someone else is around. I can't. But they don't have to know that."
"No."
"I was at my house for awhile. Then I came on into town, lookin' for you."
"What did you do at your house?"
"Slept some. A couple hours. I don't need a whole lot of sleep, but I got what I needed."
"Uh-huh."
"And I was just there, you know?" He walked over to the wall, took a staring mask from the nail where it hung. He started telling me about it, the tribe, their geographical location, the purpose of the mask. I didn't pay much attention. "Now I got fingerprints on it," he said. "Well, that's okay. You can tell 'em while we were waiting for them I took the mask off the wall and told you its history. I might as well tell the truth. Wouldn't want to get caught in some nasty old little white lie." He smiled at the last phrase. "Little black lie," he said. "Whyn't you make that call?"
Chapter 23
It wasn't half the hassle it might have been. I didn't know either of the cops who came out from the Twentieth, but it couldn't have gone much smoother if I had. We answered questions on the scene and went back to the station house on West Eighty-second to give our statements. The on-scene medical evidence all seemed to be consistent with what we'd reported. The cops were quick to point out that Chance should have called in as soon as he found the dead girl, but they didn't really jump on him for taking his time. Walking in on an unexpected corpse is a shock, even if you're a pimp and she's a whore, and this, after all, was New York, the city of the uninvolved, and what was remarkable was not that he'd called it in late but that he'd called it in at all.
I was at ease by the time we got to the station house. I'd only been anxious early on when it occurred to me that it might occur to them to frisk us. My coat was a small-time arsenal, still holding the gun and the two knives I'd taken from the kid in the alley. The knives were both illegal weapons. The gun was that and possibly more; God only knew what kind of a provenance it had. But we'd done nothing to rate a frisk, and, happily, we didn't get one.
* * *
"Whores'll kill themselves," Joe Durkin said. "It's something they do, and this one had a history. You saw the wrist scars? Those were a few years old, according to the report. What you might not know is she tried the pill route a little less than a year ago. A girlfriend took her over to St. Clare's to get her stomach pumped."
"There was something in the note. She hoped she had enough this time, something like that."
"Well, she got her wish."
We were at the Slate, a Tenth Avenue steak house that draws a lot of cops from John Jay College and Midtown North. I'd been back at my hotel, changing my clothes, finding places to stow the weapons and some of the money I'd been carrying, when he called to suggest I buy him a dinner. "I thought I'd hit you up for a meal now," he said, "before all your client's girls are dead and your expense account gets trimmed."
He had the mixed grill and drank a couple of Carlsbergs with it. I ordered the chopped sirloin and drank black coffee with my meal. We talked a little about Sunny's suicide but it didn't carry us very far. He said, "If it wasn't for the other one, the blonde, you wouldn't even think to look at it twice. All the medical evidence fits in with suicide. The bruises, that's easy. She was groggy, she didn't know what she was doing, she fell and bumped into things. Same reason she was on the floor instead of the bed. There was nothing special about the bruises. Her prints were where they belonged- the bottle, the glass, the pill bottles. The note matches other samples of her handwriting. If we buy your guy's story, she was even in a locked room when he found her. Locked from inside, the chain on. You figure that for the truth?"
"His whole story sounded true to me."
"So she killed herself. It even fits with the Dakkinen death two weeks ago. They were friends and she was depressed by what happened to her friend. You see any way it was anything but suicide?"
I shook my head. "It's the hardest kind of suicide to stage. What do you do, stuff the pills down her throat with a funnel? Make her take them at gunpoint?"
"You can dissolve the contents, let her take them without knowing it. But they found traces of the Seconal capsules in the stomach contents. So forget that. It's suicide."
I tried to remember the annual suicide rate in the city. I couldn't even come up with an educated guess, and Durkin was no help. I wondered what the rate was, and if it was on the rise like everything else.