“Gardener working next door heard a coupla shots, called it in,” LaTour grumbled. “Some blind rookie from Greeley PD responded.”
“Blind?”
“Had to be. Looked at the scene and thought they’d been murdered. Why don’t the local boys stick to traffic?”
Like everyone else in the department Tal had been curious about the twin deaths. Greeley was an exclusive enclave in Westbrook and — Tal had looked it up — had never been the scene of a double murder. He wondered if the fact that the incident was a double suicide would bring the event slightly back toward the statistical norm.
Tal straightened the spreadsheet and his note pad, set his pencil in its holder, then walked over to the Real Crimes portion of the room. He stepped through LaTour’s doorway.
“So, suicide?” Tal asked.
The hulking homicide detective, sporting a goatee and weighing nearly twice what Tal did, said, “Yeah. It was so fucking obvious to me…But we got the Crime Scene boys in to make sure. They found GSR on—”
“Global—?” Tal interrupted.
“GSR. Gunshot residue. On both their hands. She shot herself first then he did.”
“How do you know?”
LaTour looked at Tal with a surprised blink. “He was lying on top of her.”
“Oh. Sure.”
LaTour continued. “There was a note, too. And the gardener said they were acting like teenagers — drunk on their asses, staggering around.”
“Staggering.”
“Old folks. Geezers, he said. Acting like kids.”
Tal nodded. “Say, I was wondering — you happen to do a questionnaire?”
“Questionnaire?” he asked. “Oh, your questionnaire. Right. You know, Tal, it was just a suicide.”
Tal nodded. “Still, I’d like to get that data.”
“Data plural,” LaTour said, pointing a finger at him and flashing a big, phony grin. Tal had once sent around a memo that included the sentence “The data were very helpful.” When another cop corrected him Tal had said, “Oh, data’s plural; datum’s singular.” The ensuing ragging taught him a pointed lesson about correcting fellow cops’ grammar.
“Right,” Tal said wearily. “Plural. It’d—”
LaTour’s phone rang and he grabbed it. “’Lo?…I don’t know, couple days we’ll have the location…Naw, I’ll go in with SWAT. I wanta piece of him personal…”
Tal looked around the office. A Harley poster. Another, of a rearing grizzly—“Bear” was LaTour’s nickname. A couple of flyblown certificates from continuing education courses. No other decorations. The desk, credenza and chairs were filled with an irritating mass of papers, dirty coffee cups, magazines, boxes of ammunition, bullet-riddled targets, depositions, crime lab reports, a scabby billy club. The big detective continued into the phone, “When?…Yeah, I’ll let you know.” He slammed the phone down and glanced back at Tal. “Anyway. I didn’t think you’d want it, being a suicide. The questionnaire, you know. Not like a murder.”
“Well, it’d still be pretty helpful.”
LaTour was wearing what he usually did, a black leather jacket cut like a sports coat and blue jeans. He patted the many pockets involved in the outfit. “Shit, Tal. Think I lost it. The questionnaire, I mean. Sorry. You have another one?” He grabbed the phone, made another call.
“I’ll get you one,” Tal said. He returned to his office, picked up a questionnaire from a neat pile on his credenza and returned to LaTour. The cop was still on the phone, speaking in muted but gruff tones. He glanced up and nodded at Tal, who set the sheet on his desk.
LaTour mouthed, Thank you.
Tal waited a moment and asked, “Who else was there?”
“What?” LaTour frowned, irritated at being interrupted. He clapped his hand over the mouthpiece.
“Who else was at the scene?”
“Where the Bensons offed themselves? Fuck, I don’t know. Fire and Rescue. That Greeley PD kid.” A look of concentration that Tal didn’t believe. “A few other guys. Can’t remember.” The detective returned to his conversation.
Tal walked back to his office, certain that the questionnaire was presently being slam-dunked into LaTour’s wastebasket.
He called the Fire and Rescue Department but couldn’t track down anybody who’d responded to the suicide. He gave up for the time being and continued working on the spreadsheet.
After a half hour he paused and stretched. His eyes slipped from the spreadsheet to the pile of blank questionnaires. A Xeroxed note was stapled neatly to each one, asking the responding or case officer to fill it out in full and explaining how helpful the information would be. He’d agonized over writing that letter (numbers came easy to Talbot Simms, words hard). Still, he knew the officers didn’t take the questionnaire seriously. They joked about it. They joked about him, too, calling him “Einstein” or “Mr. Wizard” behind his back.
1. Please state nature of incident:
He found himself agitated, then angry, tapping his mechanical pencil on the spreadsheet like a drumstick. Anything not filled out properly rankled Talbot Simms; that was his nature. But an unanswered questionnaire was particularly irritating. The information the forms harvested was important. The art and science of statistics not only compiles existing information but is used to make vital decisions and predict trends. Maybe a questionnaire in this case would reveal some fact, some datum, that would help the county better understand elderly suicides and save lives.
4. Please indicate the sex, approximate age, and apparent nationality and/or race of each victim:
The empty lines on the questions were like an itch — aggravated by hotshot LaTour’s condescending attitude.
“Hey there, boss.” Shellee, Tal’s firecracker of a secretary, stepped into his office. “Finally got the Templeton files. Sent ’em by mule train from Albany’s my guess.” With massive blond ringlets and the feistiness of a truck-stop waitress compressed into a five-foot, hundred-pound frame, Shellee looked as if she’d sling out words with a twangy Alabaman accent but her intonation was pure Hahvahd Square Bostonian.
“Thanks.” He took the dozen folders she handed off, examined the numbers on the front of each and rearranged them in ascending order on the credenza behind his desk.
“Called the SEC again and they promise, promise, promise they’ll have us the — Hey, you leaving early?” She was frowning, looking at her watch, as Tal stood, straightened his tie and pulled on the thin, navy-blue raincoat he wore to and from the office.
“Have an errand.”
A frown of curiosity filled her round face, which was deceptively girlish (Tal knew she had a twenty-one-year-old daughter and a husband who’d just retired from the phone company). “Sure. You do? Didn’t see anything on your calendar.”
The surprise was understandable. Tal had meetings out of the office once or twice a month at the most. He was virtually always at his desk, except when he went out for lunch, which he did at twelve thirty every day, joining two or three friends from a local university at the Corner Tap Room up the street.
“Just came up.”
“Be back?” Shellee asked.
He paused. “You know, I’m not really sure.” He headed for the elevator.
The white-columned colonial on Meadowridge had to be worth six, seven million. Tal pulled his Honda Accord into the circular drive, behind a black sedan, which he hoped belonged to a Greeley PD officer, somebody who might have the information he needed. Tal took the questionnaire and two pens from his briefcase, made sure the tips were retracted then slipped them into his shirt pocket. He walked up the flagstone path to the house, the door to which was unlocked. He stepped inside and identified himself to a man in jeans and work shirt, carrying a clipboard. It was his car in the drive, he explained. He was here to meet the Bensons’ lawyer about liquidating their estate and knew nothing about the Bensons or their death.