by Ed McBain
Gross. And here they were, totally ancient. Sixties, probably. It was like seeing his own parents making out. Christ. . .
They stood up and walked to a metal table on the edge of the patio and piled dishes from their lunch on a tray, still laughing, still talking. With the old guy carrying the tray, they both headed into the kitchen, the gardener wondering if he’d drop it, he was weaving so much. But, no, they made it inside all right and shut the door.
The man flicked the butt into the grass and turned back to examine the boxwood hedge.
A bird trilled nearby, a pretty whistle. The gardener knew a lot about plants but not so much about wildlife and he wasn’t sure what kind of bird this was.
But there was no mistaking the sound that cut through the air a few seconds later and made the gardener freeze where he stood, between a crimson azalea and a purple. The gunshot, coming from inside the Bensons’ house, was quite distinctive. Only a moment later he heard a second shot.
The gardener stared at the huge Tudor house for three heartbeats, then, as the bird resumed its song, he dropped the hedge trimmer and sprinted back to his truck where he’d left his cell phone.
The county of Westbrook, New York, is a large trapezoid of suburbs elegant and suburbs mean, parks, corporate headquarters and light industry—a place where the majority of residents earn their keep by commuting into Manhattan, some miles to the south.
Last year this generally benign-looking county of nearly 900,000 had been the site of 31 murders, 107 rapes, 1,423 robberies, 1,575 aggravated assaults, 4,360 burglaries, 16,955 larcenies, and 4,130 automobile thefts, resulting in a crime rate of 3,223.3 per 100,000 population, or 3.22 percent for these so-called “index crimes,” a standardized list of offenses used nationwide by statisticians to compare one community to another, and each community to its own past. This year Westbrook County was faring poorly compared with last. Its year-to-date index crime rate was already hovering near 4.5 percent and the temper-inflaming months of summer were still to come.
These facts—and thousands of others about the pulse of the county—were readily available to whoever might want them, thanks largely to a slim young man, eyes as dark as his neatly cut and combed hair, who was presently sitting in a small office on the third floor of the Westbrook County Sheriff’s Department, the Detective Division. On his door were two signs. One said, DET. TALBOT SIMMS. The other read, FINANCIAL CRIMES/STATISTICAL SERVICES.
The Detective Division was a large open space, surrounded by a U of offices. Tal and the support services were on one ascending stroke of the letter, dubbed the “Unreal Crimes Department” by everybody on the other arm (yes, the “Real Crimes Department,” though the latter was officially labeled Major Crimes and Tactical Services).
This April morning Tal Simms sat in his immaculate office, studying one of the few items spoiling the smooth landscape of his desktop: a spreadsheet—evidence in a stock scam perpetrated in Manhattan. The Justice Department and the SEC were jointly running the case but there was a small local angle that required Tal’s attention.
Absently adjusting his burgundy-and-black striped tie, Tal jotted some notes in his minuscule, precise handwriting as he observed a few inconsistencies in the numbers on the spreadsheet. Hmm, he was thinking, a .588 that should’ve been a .743. Small but extremely incriminating. He’d have to—
His hand jerked suddenly as a deep voice boomed outside his door, “It was a goddamn suicide. Waste of time.”
Erasing the errant pencil tail from the margins of the spreadsheet, Tal saw the bulky form of the head of Homicide—Detective Greg LaTour—stride through the middle of the pen, past secretaries and communications techs, and push into his own office, directly across from Tal’s. With a loud clunk the detective dropped a backpack on his desk.
“What?” somebody called. “The Bensons?”
“Yeah, that was them,” LaTour called. “On Meadowridge in Greeley.”
“Came in as a homicide.”
“Well, it fucking wasn’t.”
Technically, it was a homicide—all non-accidental deaths were, even suicides, reflected Tal Simms, whose life was devoted to making the finest of distinctions. But to correct the temperamental Greg LaTour you had to either be a good friend or have a good reason and Tal fell into none of these categories.
“Gardener working next door heard a coupla shots, called it in,” LaTour grumbled. “Some blind rookie from Greeley P.D. 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 notepad, 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. Her first, then him.”
“How do you know?”
LaTour looked at Tal with a well, duh 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 sport 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 P.D. 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 hot-shot 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 blonde 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 calender.”
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 P.D. 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, other than what he’d heard about the suicides.
He stepped outside, leaving Tal alone in the house.
As he walked through the entry foyer and into the spacious first floor a feeling of disquiet came over him. It wasn’t the queasy sense that somebody’d just died here; it was that the house was such an unlikely setting for death. He looked over the yellow-and-pink floral upholstery, the boldly colorful abstracts on the walls, the gold-edged china and prismatic glasses awaiting parties, the collection of crystal animals, the Moroccan pottery, shelves of well-thumbed books, framed snapshots on the walls and mantle. Two pairs of well-worn slippers—a man’s size and a woman’s—sat poignantly together by the back door. Tal imagined the couple taking turns to be the first to rise, make coffee and brave the dewy cold to collect The New York Times or the Westbrook Ledger.
The word that came to him was “home.” The idea of the owners here shooting themselves was not only disconcerting, it was downright eerie.
Tal noticed a sheet of paper weighted down by a crystal vase and blinked in surprise as he read it.
To our friends:
We’re making this decison with great contenment in hearts, joyous in the knowldge that we’ll be together forever.
Both Sy and Don Benson had signed it. He stared at the words for a moment then wandered to the den, which was cordoned off with crime scene tape. He stopped cold, gasping faintly.
Blood.
On the couch, on the carpet, on the wall.
He could clearly see where the couple had been when they’d died; the blood explained the whole scenario to him. Brown, opaque, dull. He found himself breathing shallowly, as if the stains were giving off toxic fumes.
Tal stepped back into the living room and decided to fill out as much of the questionnaire as he could. Sitting on a couch he clicked a pen point out and picked up a book from the coffee table to use as a writing surface. He read the title: Making the Final Journey: The Complete Guide to Suicide and Euthanasia.
Okay . . . I don’t think so. He replaced the book and made a less troubling lap desk from a pile of magazines. He filled out some of the details, then he paused, aware of the front door opening. Footsteps sounded on the foyer tile and a moment later a stocky man in an expensive suit walked into the den. He frowned.
“Sheriff’s Department,” Tal said and showed his ID, which the man looked at carefully.
“I’m their lawyer. George Metzer,” he said slowly, visibly shaken. “Oh, this is terrible. Just terrible. I got a call from somebody in your department. My secretary did, I mean. . . . You want to see some ID?”
Tal realized that a Real Cop would have asked for it right up front. “Please.”
He looked over the driver’s license and nodded, then gazed past the man’s pudgy hand and looked again into the den. The blood stains were like brown laminate on cheap furniture.
“Was there a note?” the lawyer asked, putting his wallet away.
Tal walked into the dining room. He nodded toward the note.
Together forever . . .
The lawyer looked it over, shook his head again. He glanced into the den and blinked, seeing the blood. Turned away.
Tal showed Metzer the questionnaire. “Can I ask you a few questions? For our statistics department? It’s anonymous. We don’t use names.”
“Sure, I guess.”
Tal began querying the man about the couple. He was surprised to learn they were only in their mid sixties, he’d assumed LaTour’s assessment had been wrong and the Bensons were older.
“Any children?”
“No. No close relatives at all. A few cousins they never see. . . . Never saw, I mean. They had a lot of friends, though. They’ll be devastated.”
He got some more information, and f
inally felt he had nearly enough to process the data, but one more question needed an answer.
9. Apparent motives for the incident:
“You have any idea why they’d do this?” Tal asked.
“I know exactly,” Metzer said. “Don was ill.”
Tal glanced down at the note again and noticed that the writing was unsteady and a few of the words were misspelled. LaTour’d said something about them drinking but Tal remembered seeing a wicker basket full of medicine bottles sitting on the island in the kitchen. He mentioned this then asked, “Did one of them have some kind of palsy? Nerve disease?”
The lawyer said, “No, it was heart problems. Bad ones.”
In space number nine Tal wrote: Illness. Then he asked, “And his wife?”
“No, Sy was in good health. But they were very devoted to each other. Totally in love. She must’ve decided she didn’t want to go on without him.”
“Was it terminal?”
“Not the way he described it to me,” the lawyer said. “But he could’ve been bedridden for the rest of his life. I doubt Don could’ve handled that. He was so active, you know.”
Tal signed the questionnaire, folded and slipped it into his pocket.
The round man gave a sigh. “I should’ve guessed something was up. They came to my office a couple of weeks ago and made a few changes to the will and they gave me instructions for their memorial service. I thought it was just because Don was going to have the surgery, you know, thinking about what would happen if . . . But I should’ve read between the lines. They were planning it then, I’ll bet.”
He gave a sad laugh. “You know what they wanted for their memorial service? See, they weren’t religious so they wanted to be cremated then have their friends throw a big party at their country club and scatter their ashes on the green at the eighteenth hole.” He grew somber again. “It never occurred to me they had something like this in mind. They seemed so happy, you know? . . . Crazy fucked-up life sometimes, huh? Anyway, I’ve got to meet with this guy outside. Here’s my card. Call me, you got any other questions, Detective.”