It only took fifteen.
At precisely seven minutes past two that afternoon, Allen Maguire came back from lunch and stepped into the building on Edgerley, only to see two young men step from behind the staircase with pistols in their hands. He turned to run, but he was too late. One of them yelled,“Inocente! Inocente!” and then both of them opened fire. Maguire was dead twenty times over when they stepped over his bleeding body, giggling, and ran out of the building into the rain.
THE MAN WHO STOPPED at the 87th Precinct’s muster desk at two-thirty that afternoon said he wanted to talk to the detectives investigating the Wilkins case. Sergeant Murchison took his name, called upstairs, told Kling who was here, and then asked the man to go up to the detective division on the second floor, he’d see the signs.
The man introduced himself as David Wilkins.
“Peter was my brother,” he said.
Thirty-four, thirty-five years old, Kling guessed. Brown eyes, reddish hair, reddish mustache. Slender and fit-looking; Kling supposed he exercised regularly. He was sporting a tan, in fact. Had he just come back from a vacation in the sun someplace?
“The reason I’m here,” Wilkins said, “is I went to Surrogate’s Court this morning to see what it said in my brother’s will, and they told me a will hadn’t been filed.”
“Yes?” Kling said.
“I feel certain there’s a will.”
“Yes?”
“So why hasn’t it been filed yet?”
“Well, it sometimes takes a while to get papers to court,” Kling said. “Two, three months sometimes. It’s still early to be…”
“I think I’m in that will,” Wilkins said. “I think that’s why it hasn’t been filed yet.”
“What makes you think you’re in it?”
“Little things my brother said. Hints. We were very close.”
Kling wanted to ask him if he’d known his brother was a closet graffiti writer. Those twenty-two cans of paint in the closet still bothered him. Debra Wilkins as surprised to see them as the detectives were. No idea her husband was hoarding paint for his nocturnal forays.
“I think Debra knows I’m in the will, and is trying to hide it from me,” Wilkins said.
“Have you asked her if you’re in it?”
“We don’t speak to each other.”
“Oh.”
Kling was suddenly interested. Detectives liked nothing better than family disputes. Family disputes provided motives. But an unfiled will? a hidden will? That was the stuff of paperback mysteries. In police work there were no mysteries. There were only crimes and the motives for those crimes.
“Haven’t spoken to each other since the wedding,” Wilkins said. “That was three years ago. She threw a glass of champagne in my face.”
“Why’d she do that, Mr. Wilkins?”
Seeming only mildly interested, but this was a family dispute and he was listening intently.
“I called her a whore.”
Kling all ears now. This was turning into a Southern Gothic.
“Why’d you do that, Mr. Wilkins?”
“Because she is one,” he said, and shrugged.
“You don’t mean that literally,” Kling said, prodding.
“No, but you know what I mean.”
“No, what do you mean?”
“A cock tease,” Wilkins said.
Good thing you didn’t call her that , Kling thought. She’d have broken the whole bottle of champagne over your head.
“Ever mention this to your brother?” he asked.
“Of course not,” Wilkins said. “I figured he made his bed, let him lie in it.”
But now he’s dead, Kling thought.
“And you think she’s hiding the will from you, is that it?”
“I’m sure she’s hiding it. What I want is for you to go in her house with a search warrant…”
“Well, we can’t do that, Mr. Wilkins.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think a judge would grant one. Not to go in and search for a will. Not without some reason to believe it would constitute evidence in a crime.”
“If she’s keeping money from me, it is a crime.”
“Well, we don’t know if there is a will, you see, or if you’re in it, if there is one. And if there is, how do you know it’s in her house? Have you ever seen this will?”
“No, but…”
“So how can I ask for a court order to search for a will that may not exist? The judge would throw me out.”
“So she just gets away with it, huh? Hiding the will from me?”
“Well…what you can do…I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t want to advise you. But if you went to see a lawyer…”
“Lawyers!”Wilkins said.
“…I’m sure he could write a letter to your sister-in-law…”
“Thatbitch!”
“…asking her if there is a will, and if so, when does she plan to petition the court for probate. Then if she doesn’t answer in a reasonable amount of time, he can take it from there.”
“Take it where from there?”
“Go to court for you, I guess.”
“What you’re saying is it’s going to cost me money to get whatever money my brother left me.”
Ifhe left you any, Kling thought.
“What I’m saying,” Kling said, “is that this isn’t a police matter.”
But maybe it was.
THIS WAS THE old City.
The ocean-battered seawall still stood where the Dutch had built it centuries ago, the massive cannons atop it seeming even now to control the approach from the Atlantic though their barrels had long ago been filled with cement. If you looked out over the wall at the very tip of the island, you could watch the Dix and the Harb churning with crosscurrents where the two rivers met. The wind howled in fiercely here, ripping through streets that had once accommodated horse-drawn carts but that were now too narrow to allow the passage of more than a single automobile. Where once there had been two-story wooden taverns, a precious few of which still survived, there were now concrete buildings soaring high into the sky, infested redundantly with lawyers and financiers. The firm of Osborne, Wilkins, Promontori and Colbert was in one of those buildings.
“I love the view from up here,” Parker said. “This part of the city.”
They were strolling down the hallway toward a huge floor-to-ceiling window through which they could see towering skyscrapers succumbing to dusk. It was close to five o’clock. They hadn’t called ahead, and Kling was wondering now if they should have. But Parker had told him he liked to surprise people. Parker thought he was full of surprises. Maybe he was. His surprise for today was that he hadn’t shaved. Kling wondered if it was wise to go into a fancy lawyer’s office without either an appointment or a shave.
The receptionist asked them who they were.
Parker flashed the tin and told her they wanted to talk to Mr. Colbert, please, if he could spare them a minute. Neither of them particularly liked lawyers. Aside from district attorneys, their entire experience with lawyers was with defense lawyers, many of whom had once been D.A.’s, all of whom were determined to impeach them as witnesses and cast them as brutes, racists, and perjurers. But Peter Wilkins had been a lawyer, and he was dead. And this morning his brother had raised the question of a will that might or might not exist, in which he might or might not have been named as a beneficiary. So they were here to talk to yet another lawyer, who happened to have been Peter Wilkins’s partner, and who now came out of his office to greet them personally.