by Ed McBain
“Okay. And I’m supposed to check on—?”
“If anybody bought it.”
“I mean, everywhere? There’re probably a lot of—”
“For now, just in Westbrook County. In the last couple of weeks. Bookstores. And that online place, the big one, Booksource dot com.”
“Hey, when I call, is it okay to play cop?”
Tal hesitated. But then he said, “Oh, hell, sure. You want, you can be a detective.”
“Yippee,” she said. “Detective Shellee Bingham.”
“And if they haven’t sold any, give them my name and tell them if they do, call us right away.”
“We need a warrant or anything?” Detective Shellee asked, thoughtful now.
Did they? he wondered.
“Hmm. I don’t know. Let’s just try it without and see what they say.”
Five minutes later Tal felt a shadow over him and he looked up to see Captain Ronald Dempsey’s six-foot-three form fill the doorway in his ubiquitous striped shirt, his sleeves ubiquitously rolled up.
The man’s round face smiled pleasantly. But Tal thought immediately: I’m busted.
“Captain.”
“Hey, Tal.” Dempsey leaned against the doorjamb, looking over the desktop. “Got a minute?”
“Sure do.”
Tal had known that the brass would find out about the 2124, of course, and he’d planned to talk to Dempsey about it soon; but he’d hoped to wait until his proof about the suspicious suicide was somewhat further developed.
“Heard about the twenty-one-twenty-four at the Whitleys’.”
“Sure.”
“What’s up with that?”
Tal explained about the two suicides, the common denominators.
Dempsey nodded. “Kind of a coincidence, sure. But you know, Tal, we don’t have a lot of resources for full investigations. Like, we’ve only got one dedicated homicide crime scene unit.”
“Didn’t know that.”
“And there was a shooting in Rolling Hills Estates last night. Two people shot up bad, one died. The unit was late running that scene ‘cause you had them in Hamilton.”
“I’m sorry about that, Captain.”
“It’s also expensive. Sending out CS.”
“Expensive? I didn’t think about that.”
“Thousands, I’m talking. Crime scene bills everything back to us. Every time they go out. Then there’re lab tests and autopsies and everything. The M.E. too. You know what an autopsy costs?”
“They bill us?” Tal asked.
“It’s just the more we save for the county the better we look, you know.”
“Right. I guess it would be expensive.”
“You bet.” No longer smiling, the captain adjusted his sleeves. “Other thing is, the way I found out: I heard from their daughter. Sandra Whitley. She was going to make funeral arrangements and then she hears about the M.E. autopsy. Phew . . . she’s pissed off. Threatening to sue. . . . I’m going to have to answer questions. So. Now, what exactly made you twenty-one-twenty-four the scene, Tal?”
He scanned the papers on his desk, uneasy, wondering where to start. “Well, a couple of things. They’d just bought—”
“Hold on there a minute,” the captain said, holding up a finger.
Dempsey leaned out the door and shouted, “LaTour! . . . Hey, LaTour?”
“What?” came the grumbling baritone.
“Come over here. I’m with Simms.”
Tal heard the big man make his way toward the Unreal Crimes side of the detective pen. The ruddy, goateed face appeared in the office. Ignoring Tal, he listened as the captain explained about the Whitleys’ suicide.
“Another one, huh?”
“Tal declared a twenty-one-twenty-four.”
The homicide cop nodded noncommitally. “Uh-huh. Why?”
The question was directed toward Dempsey, who turned toward Tal.
“Well, I was looking at the Bensons’ deaths and I pulled up the standard statistical profile on suicides in Westbrook County. Now, when you look at all the attributes—”
“Attributes?” LaTour asked, frowning, as if tasting sand.
“Right. The attributes of the Bensons’ death—and the Whitleys’ too now—they’re way out of the standard range. Their deaths are outliers.”
“Out-liars? The fuck’s that?”
Tal explained. In -tatistics an outlier was an event significantly different from a group of similar events. He gave a concrete example. “Say you’re analyzing five murderers. Three perps killed a single victim each, one of them killed two victims, and the final man was a serial killer who’d murdered twenty people. To draw any meaningful conclusions from that, you need to treat the last one as an outlier and analyze him separately. Otherwise, your analysis’ll be mathematically correct but misleading. Running the numbers, the mean—the average—number of victims killed by each suspect is five. But that exaggerates the homicidal nature of the first four men and underplays the last one. See what I mean?”
The frown on LaTour’s face suggested he didn’t. But he said, “So you’re saying these two suicides’re different from most of the others in Westbrook.”
“Significantly different. Fewer than six percent of the population kill themselves when they’re facing a possibly terminal illness. That number drops to two point six percent when the victim has medical insurance and down to point nine when the net worth of the victim is over one million dollars. It drops even further when the victims are married and are in the relatively young category of sixty-five to seventy-five, like these folks. And love-pact deaths are only two percent of suicides nationwide and ninety-one percent of those involve victims under the age of twenty-one. . . . Now, what do you think the odds are that two heart patients would take their own lives, and their wives’, in the space of two days?”
“I don’t really know, Tal,” LaTour said, clearly uninterested. “What else you got? Suspicious, I mean.”
“Okay, the Whitleys’d just bought a car earlier that day. Rare, antique MG. Why do that if you’re going to kill yourself?”
LaTour offered, “They needed a murder weapon. Didn’t want a gun. Probably there was something about the MG that meant something to them. From when they were younger, you know. They wanted to go out that way.”
“Makes sense,” Dempsey said, tugging at a sleeve.
“There’s more,” Tal said and explained about the gloves, the fiber, the smudges on the note. And the recent visitor’s tire prints. “Somebody else was there around the time they killed themselves. Or just after.”
LaTour said, “Lemme take a look.”
Tal pushed the reports toward him. The big cop examined everything closely. Then shook his head. “I just don’t see it,” he said to the captain. “No evidence of a break-in or struggle . . . The note?” He shrugged. “Looks authentic. I mean, Documents’ll tell us for sure but look—” he held up the Whitleys’ checkbook ledger and the suicide note, side by side. The script was virtually identical. “Smudges from gloves on paper? We see that on every piece of paper we find at a scene. Hell, half the pieces of paper here have smudges on them that look like smeared FRs—”
“FRs?”
“Friction ridges,” LaTour muttered. “Fingerprints. Smudges—from the manufacturer, stockers, browsing customers.”
“The fiber?” He leaned forward and lifted a tiny white strand off Tal’s suit jacket. “This’s the same type the Crime Scene found. Cotton worsted. See it all the time. The fibers at the Whitleys’ could’ve come from anywhere. It might’ve come from you.” Shuffling sloppily through the files with his massive paws. “Okay, the gloves and the tread marks? Those’re Playtex kitchen gloves; I recognize the ridges. No perps ever use them because the wear patterns can be traced. . . .” He held up the checkbook ledger again. “Lookit the check the wife wrote today. To Esmerelda Constanzo ‘For cleaning services.’ The housekeeper was in yesterday, cleaned the house wearing the gloves—maybe she even straight
ened up the stack of paper they used later for the suicide note, left the smudges then. The tread marks? That’s about the size of a small import. Just the sort that a cleaning woman’d be driving. They were hers. Bet you any money.”
Though he didn’t like the man’s message, Tal was impressed at the way his mind worked. He’d made all those deductions—extremely logical deductions—based on a three-minute examination of the data.
“Got a case needs lookin’ at,” LaTour grumbled and tossed the report onto Tal’s desk. He clomped back to his office.
Breaking the silence that followed, Dempsey said, “Hey, I know you don’t get out into the field much. Must get frustrating to sit in the office all day long, not doing . . . you know . . .”
Real police work? Tal wondered if that’s what the captain was hesitating to say.
“More active stuff” turned out to be the captain’s euphemism. “You probably feel sometimes like you don’t fit in.”
He’s probably home humping his calculator. . . .
“We’ve all felt that way sometimes. Honest. But being out in the field’s not what it’s cracked up to be. Not like TV, you know. And you’re the best at what you do, Tal. Statistician. Man, that’s a hard job. An important job. Let’s face it—” Lowering his voice. “—guys like Greg wouldn’t know a number if it jumped out and bit ’em on the ass. You’ve got a real special talent.”
Tal weathered the condescension with a faint smile, which obscured the anger beneath his flushed face. The speech was clearly out of a personnel management training manual. Dempsey had just plugged in “statistician” for “traffic detail” or “receptionist.”
“Okay, now, don’t you have some numbers to crunch? We’ve got that midyear assignment meeting coming up and nobody can put together a report like you, my friend.”
Monday evening’s drive to the Whitleys’ house took considerably longer than his Headless Horseman race night before, since he drove the way he usually did: within the speed limit and perfectly centered in his lane (and with the belt firmly clasped this time).
Noting with a grimace how completely he’d destroyed the shrubs last night, Tal parked in front of the door and ducked under the crime scene tape. He stepped inside, smelling again the sweet, poignant scent of the woodsmoke from the couple’s last cocktail hour.
Inside their house, he pulled on latex gloves he’d bought at a drugstore on the way here (thinking only when he got to the checkout lane: Damn, they probably have hundreds of these back in the Detective pen). Then he began working his way though the house, picking up anything that Crime Scene had missed that might shed some light on the mystery of the Whitleys’ deaths.
Greg LaTour’s bluntness and Captain Dempsey’s pep talk, in other words, had no effect on him. All intellectually honest mathematicians welcome the disproving of their theorems as much as the proving. But the more LaTour had laid out the evidence that the 2124 was wrong, the more Tal’s resolve grew to get to the bottom of the deaths.
There was an odd perfect number out there, and there was something unusual about the deaths of the Bensons and the Whitleys; Tal was determined to write the proof.
Address books, Day Timers, receipts, letters, stacks of papers, piles of business cards for lawyers, repairmen, restaurants, investment advisors, accountants. He felt a chill as he read one for some new age organization, the Lotus Research Foundation for Alternative Treatment, tucked in with all the practical and mundane cards—evidence of the desperation of rational people frightened by impending death.
A snap of floorboard, a faint clunk. A metallic sound. It startled him and he felt uneasy—vulnerable. He’d parked in the front of the house; whoever’d arrived would know he was here. The police tape and crime scene notice were clear about forbidding entry; he doubted that the visitor was a cop.
And, alarmed, he realized that a corollary of his theorem that the Whitleys had been murdered was, of course, that there had to be a murderer.
He reached for his hip and realized, to his dismay, that he’d left his pistol in his desk at the office. The only suspects Tal had ever met face to face were benign accountants or investment bankers and even then the confrontation was usually in court. He never carried the gun—about the only regulation he ever broke. Palms sweating, Tal looked around for something he could use to protect himself. He was in the bedroom, surrounded by books, clothes, furniture. Nothing he could use as a weapon.
He looked out the window.
A twenty-foot drop to the flagstone patio.
Was he too proud to hide under the bed?
Footsteps sounded closer, walking up the stairs. The carpet muted them but the old floorboards creaked as the intruder got closer.
No, he decided, he wasn’t too proud for the bed. But that didn’t seem to be the wisest choice. Escape was better.
Out the window.
Tal opened it, swung the leaded-glass panes outward. No grass below; just a flagstone deck dotted with booby traps of patio furniture.
He heard the metallic click of a gun. The steps grew closer, making directly for the bedroom.
Okay, jump. He glanced down. Aim for the padded lawn divan. You’ll sprain your ankle but you won’t get shot.
He put his hand on the windowsill, was about to boost himself over when a voice filled the room, a woman’s voice. “Who the hell’re you?”
Tal turned fast, observing a slim blonde in her mid or late thirties, eyes narrow. She was smoking a cigarette and putting a gold lighter back into her purse—the metallic sound he’d assumed was a gun. There was something familiar—and troubling—about her and he realized that, yes, he’d seen her face—in the snapshots on the walls. “You’re their daughter.”
“Who are you?” she repeated in a gravelly voice.
“You shouldn’t be in here. It’s a crime scene.”
“You’re a cop? Let me see some ID.” She glanced at his latex-gloved hand on the window, undoubtedly wondering what he’d been about to do.
He offered her the badge and identification card.
She glanced at them carefully. “You’re the one who did it?”
“What?”
“You had them taken to the morgue? Had them goddamn butchered?”
“I had some questions about their deaths. I followed procedures.”
More or less.
“So you were the one. Detective Talbot Simms.” She’d memorized his name from the brief look at his ID. “I’ll want to be sure you’re personally named in the suit.”
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Tal repeated. “The scene hasn’t been released yet.”
He remembered this from a cop show on TV.
“Fuck your scene.”
A different response than on the TV show.
“Let me see some ID,” Tal said stepping forward, feeling more confident now.
The staring match began.
He added cheerfully, “I’m happy to call some officers to take you downtown.” This—from another show—was a bit inaccurate; the Westbrook Sheriff’s Department wasn’t downtown at all. It was in a strip mall next to a large Stop ‘N’ Shop grocery.
She reluctantly showed him her driver’s license. Sandra Kaye Whitley, thirty-six. He recognized the address, a very exclusive part of the county.
“What was so fucking mysterious about their deaths? They killed themselves.”
Tal observed something interesting about her. Yes, she was angry. But she wasn’t sad.
“We can’t talk about an open case.”
“What case?” Sandra snapped. “You keep saying that.”
“Well, it was a murder, you know.”
Her hand paused then continued carrying her cigarette to her lips. She asked coolly, “Murder?”
Tal said, “Your father turned the car ignition on. Technically he murdered your mother.”
“That’s bullshit.”
Probably it was. But he sidestepped the issue. “Had they ever had a history of depression?”
“But his illness wasn’t terminal, was it?”
“Not exactly. But he was going to die. And he wanted to do it with dignity.”
Tal felt he was losing this contest; she kept him on the defensive. He tried to think more like Greg LaTour. “What exactly’re you doing here?”
“It’s my family’s house,” she snapped. “My house. I grew up here. I wanted to see it. They were my parents, you know.”
He nodded. “Of course. . . . I’m sorry for your loss. I just want tomake sure that everything’s what it seems to be. Just doing my job.”
She shrugged and stubbed the cigarette out in a heavy crystal ashtray on the dresser. She noticed, sitting next to it, a picture of her with her parents. For a long moment she stared at it then looked away, hiding tears from him. She wiped her face then turned back. “I’m an attorney, you know. I’m going to have one of my litigation partners look at this situation through a microscope, Detective.”
“That’s fine, Ms. Whitley,” Tal said. “Can I ask what you put in your purse earlier?”
She blinked. “Purse?”
“When you were downstairs.”
A hesitation. “It’s nothing important.”
“This is a crime scene. You can’t take anything. That’s a felony. Which I’m sure you knew. Being an attorney, as you say.”
Was it a felony? he wondered.
At least Sandra didn’t seem to know it wasn’t.
“You can give it to me now and I’ll forget about the incident. Or we can take that trip downtown.”
She held his eye for a moment, slicing him into tiny pieces, as she debated. Then she opened her purse. She handed him a small stack of mail. “It was in the mailbox to be picked up. But with that yellow tape all over the place the mailman couldn’t come by. I was just going to mail it.”
“I’ll take it.”
She held the envelopes out to him with a hand that seemed to be quivering slightly. He took them in his gloved hands.
In fact, he’d had no idea that she’d put anything in her purse; he’d had a flash of intuition. Talbot Simms suddenly felt a rush of excitement; statisticians never bluff.