Hamilton told them he’d never heard of anyone named Margaret Shanks.
He told them he’d never heard of her husband Rubin Shanks, either.
“She just picked your name out of a hat, huh?” Hawes asked.
“I don’t know what she did. All I know is I never heard of her,” Hamilton said.
He seemed supremely confident that whatever they were after, they weren’t going to get it from him. And even if they did get it, it wouldn’t do them any good. They had advised him of his rights and asked him if he wanted a lawyer present while they questioned him. He’d waived his right to counsel, and now sat smoking a cigarette at the long table in the room, glancing every now and again at the one-way mirror on the wall, as if to tell them he knew what the thing was, and didn’t give a damn if anybody was behind it watching him. At the moment, nobody was behind it. They planned to call in Margaret Shanks later, bring her face-to-face with the man she’d paid to get rid of her husband. They also planned to confront Hamilton with Rubin himself, see if the old man would recognize him as the person who’d driven him from Fox Hill to the Silver Harb playground. All in good time. Meanwhile, they went about it the way they always did.
You ask a man the same questions enough times, he’ll finally run out of the pat answers he’s prepared and start telling you things he didn’t plan to tell you.
“Have you always done security work?” Meyer asked.
“Depends what you mean by security work.”
Hawes wanted to smack him right in the mouth.
“Square-shield work,” he said. “You know what security work is.”
“I was also a prison guard. Is that security work?” Hamilton said.
Which explained why he thought he could beat the system here. Having once been in the criminal justice business himself, more or less. Having rubbed elbows, so to speak, with all sorts of slimy bastards like himself, who’d got caught and locked up only because they were dumb. He was smarter than any of the cons he’d known, smarter too than these two jerks questioning him here, or so he thought, and which he was now trying to prove. Mr. Cool here. Grinning and smoking his cigarette. Hawes wanted to ram the cigarette down his throat.
“Which prison?” he asked.
“Castleview. Upstate.”
“How long have you been working at the shelter?”
“Year and a half now.”
“Hear about the blankets being stolen there?”
“No. Were some blankets stolen?”
“Lots of blankets,” Meyer said. “Twenty-six so far this year.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Some of those blankets have been popping up around town.”
“I don’t know anything about that, either.”
“One of them in the Whitcomb Avenue railroad station.”
“I don’t know where that is.”
“Harb Valley line,” Hawes said.
“Still don’t know it.”
“Runs all the way upstate to Castleview. You said you worked there, didn’t you?”
“Yep.
“But you never heard of the Harb Valley line?”
“Sure, I have. I just don’t know the Whitcomb Avenue station.”
“Then you couldn’t have driven this little old lady there, right?”
“Right.”
“Picked her up, wherever, wrapped her in a blanket stolen from the shelter…”
“I don’t know anything about her or about the stolen blankets, either.”
“How about someone named Charlie?”
“I know a lot of people named Charlie.”
“This particular Charlie gave us a pretty good description of someone who looks exactly like you.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Really,” Meyer said. “Forty, forty-five years old, five-ten, brown eyes and dark hair. Sounds a lot like you, doesn’t it?”
“Charlie who , would this be?”
“You tell us.”
“I told you. I know dozens of Charlies.”
“Said you were wearing jeans and a brown leather jacket. Same as you’re wearing now,” Hawes said.
“Must be thousands of men in this city wearing the same thing right this minute.”
“What are your hours at the shelter?” Hawes asked.
“They vary.”
“How?”
“We work rotating shifts.”
“Eight-hour shifts?”
“Yes.”
“Three shifts a day?”
“Eight to four, four to midnight, midnight to eight,” Hamilton said, and nodded.
“Just like us,” Meyer said.
“Gee,” Hamilton said.
Hawes wanted to kick him in the balls.
“Five on, two off?” he asked.
“Five on, two off, yes.”
“Which days are you off?”
“Thursdays and Fridays.”
“So you’re off today.”
“I’m off today. Which is why you found me playing the horses.”
“Were you working the midnight shift on the night of March thirty-first?”
He knew Hamilton had been working that night because that was the night he’d spent there.
“I don’t remember,” Hamilton said.
“You don’t remember ? That was only three nights ago.”
“Then I guess I was working the midnight shift, yeah.”
“How about March twenty-fourth? You weren’t working the midnight shift that night, were you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, if you were working graveyard this past week, then the week before it would’ve been the four to midnight, isn’t that right?”
“If you say so,” Hamilton said.
“Well, let’s look at it,” Meyer said, and opened his notebook to the calendar page, and took the cap off his ballpoint pen “You were off yesterday and you’re off today…that’s the second and third of April.”
Hamilton said nothing.
“And you were working the midnight shift the five previous days, so that would’ve been from March twenty-eighth to April first.”
“If you say so,” Hamilton said again.
“Yes, I say so,” Meyer said. “Then you had two days off before that—the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, a Thursday and Friday…”
Hamilton stifled a yawn.
“And you’d have worked the four-to-midnight on the five days before that .”
“Uh-huh.”
Bored to tears.
“The twenty-second to the twenty-sixth,” Meyer said.
Hamilton sighed.
“So you couldn’t have been working the midnight shift on the twenty-fourth, could you?”
“No.”
“You’d have got off work at midnight, in fact, and then you’d have been free to roam the night, hmm?” Meyer said, and smiled pleasantly.
Hamilton looked at him.
“So do you remember where you went after work on the morning of March twenty-fourth?” he asked.
“Home to bed, I’m sure.”
“You were relieved at midnight and you went straight home to bed, is that it?”
“That’s what I usually do.”
“But is it what you did that particular morning?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure.”
“Positive.”
“You didn’t by chance drive to the Whitcomb Avenue station, did you?”