“Have you traced the gun?”
“Purchased by one Brett Toland.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There’s more, Matthew.”
“Okay,” I said, and sighed.
“We took your client into custody around seven that morning. As permitted by Miranda, we...”
“Brought her here?”
“Yes.”
“Questioned her here?”
“Yes.”
“I’m assuming, since she was in custody...”
“Come on, Matthew.”
“Then she was made aware of her rights, correct?”
Bloom merely cocked a baleful eye at me.
“Okay, okay. I was just wondering why she didn’t call me right then. Put an end to it right then.”
“Said she didn’t need a lawyer, this was all ridiculous.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Even agreed to let us print her. Though I guess you know, under the Miranda guidelines we don’t need permission to take fingerprints. We asked solely as a courtesy.”
“And she said okay?”
“Said she was innocent.”
“She is.”
“They all are, Matthew. I have never met a guilty felon in my entire lifetime.”
“This one is innocent, Morrie.”
“Then why are her prints all over the murder weapon?”
I looked at him.
“Palm prints?” I said. “Fingerprints?”
“Both.”
“You still don’t have her at the scene. She left that boat at ten-thirty. She was home in bed by...”
“Not according to four eyewitnesses.”
“All eminently reliable. One of them is Toland’s loving wife, another one was on a moving boat in the dark, and the last two were drunk and going back to their boat to smoke pot.”
“You don’t know that, Matthew.”
“It’s what they told me yesterday.”
“I guess you can prove...”
“The point is,” I said, plunging ahead regardless, “Lainie Commins wasn’t even on that boat when the murder took place. She got there at ten, drank a nonalcoholic drink, listened to what Toland had to say, advised him that she’d talk it over with her lawyer, and left the boat at ten-thirty, without once budging from that cockpit.”
“Then what was her scarf doing downstairs?”
“What scarf?”
“A Gucci scarf. Tiny red anchors on a blue field.”
“Where’d you find...?”
“The master bedroom. Downstairs.”
“You don’t know it’s hers.”
“She identified it as hers.”
“I can’t believe...”
“That’s when we called in the state attorney, Matthew”
I was shaking my head.
“That’s when we charged her with first-degree murder.”
Still shaking my head.
“I’m sorry, Matthew,” he said. “But she did it.”
No, I was thinking.
“No,” I said.
But it looked a hell of a lot like yes.
“I didn’t kill him,” Lainie said.
“Lainie,” I said, “your fingerprints are on the gun.”
She was sitting in my chair behind my desk. I was pacing the floor of my office. My partner Frank was half-sitting, half-leaning on the corner of my desk, his hands in his pockets, his shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms. He was wearing suspenders today. He looked like Larry King interviewing a celebrity — except that Larry King had a fox face. Anyway, this was not a celebrity. Not yet, anyway. This was merely a woman who’d been indicted for murder in the first degree. With the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she kept twisting the Victorian seal ring on her right pinky. The digital clock on my desk read 4:03 P.M.
“How do you know they have fingerprints?” she asked.
“Folger has a forensics report.”
“That’s impossible. They’re lying to you.”
“They know I’ll be seeing the report.”
“Even so.”
“How’d your fingerprints get on that gun?”
“Oh. Yeah,” she said. “Right.”
Frank and I both looked at her.
“Now I remember touching it,” she said. “The gun. When I asked Brett if it was loaded. I sort of put my hand on it. Ran my hand over it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I’d never touched a gun in my life. I guess I wanted to see what it felt like.”
Frank raised his eyebrows.
“Lainie,” I said, “you told me you got to the boat at a little before ten, and left half an hour later.”
“That’s right. That’s exactly what I did.”
“Folger has the security guard seeing you go aboard at a few minutes past ten...”
“That’s exactly right...”
“...and he’s got another witness coming in on a sailboat at ten forty-five, and spotting you and Brett Toland drinking at the cockpit table.”
“No, he’s wrong about the time. I left the boat at ten-thirty.”
“Did you see that sailboat coming in?”
“Yes, but it was before I left the boat.”
“Were you still there at eleven?”
“No. I was home by eleven.”
“Folger has two witnesses who heard shots at eleven-forty.”
“I was already home by then.”
“Shots coming from the saloon. Three shots.”
“I didn’t go down to the saloon at all. Brett and I sat in the cockpit all the while I was there.”
“Then you couldn’t have been below, firing the shots they heard.”
“I couldn’t have been anywhere on the boat. Not at eleven-forty. I was home by eleven.”
“Your fingerprints were on the gun,” Frank reminded her.
“I told you how they got on the gun.”
“How’d your scarf get down there in the master cabin?” he asked.
Good old Frank. Straight New Yorker style. No bullshit.
“I told the police all about that,” Lainie said.
“How come you never mentioned it to me?” I asked.
“I told you that Brett asked everybody to take their shoes off.”
I saw the faint flicker of disapproval that flashed in Frank’s eyes. He knew, as I knew, but apparently Lainie did not know, that the word “everybody” was singular and that she should have said “his shoes” or “her shoes,” but certainly not “their shoes.” Or perhaps she knew the correct construction and was merely trying to avoid saying “his shoes” lest she fall into a sexist-pig trap. Besides, what did her shoes have to do with her scarf?
“You didn’t tell me he asked you to take off your shoes,” I said.
“I told you he asked everybody to take off their shoes.”
Again.
“Because of his precious teak decks,” Lainie said.
“You told me he asked a state senator’s wife to take off her shoes. “You didn’t mention anything about your shoes.”
“Well, I must have forgotten. He asked me to take them off.”
“How could you have forgotten something the police had already questioned you about?”
“Because I told them exactly what happened and I thought that was that. Brett asked me to take them off, and he carried them below when he went looking for the Perrier.
“The scarf, too?” Frank asked.
Lainie looked at him.
“He took my shoes and my scarf, yes,” she said.
“Why’d he take the scarf?” Frank asked.
“Because I didn’t need it. It was a warm night.”