The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [35]
“Who wants to know?”
“Tommy Tillary.”
You never know what a woman will decide to tell a man or how a man will react to it. I didn’t want to find out, but I was better off learning over the phone than face-to-face. I nodded and took the phone from Dennis.
I said, “Matt Scudder, Tommy. I was sorry to hear about your wife.”
“Thanks, Matt, Jesus, it feels like it happened a year ago. It was what, a week?”
“At least they got the bastards.”
There was a pause. Then he said, “Jesus. You haven’t seen a paper, huh?”
“That’s where I read about it. Two Spanish kids.”
“You didn’t happen to see this afternoon’s Post.”
“No. Why, what happened? They turn out to be clean?”
“The two spics. Clean? Shit, they’re about as clean as the men’s room in the Times Square subway station. The cops hit their place and found stuff from my house everywhere they looked. Jewelry they had descriptions of, a stereo that I gave them the serial number, everything. Monogrammed shit. I mean, that’s how clean they were, for Christ’s sake.”
“So?”
“They admitted the burglary but not the murder.”
“That’s common, Tommy.”
“Lemme finish, huh? They admitted the burglary, but according to them it was a put-up job. According to them, I hired them to hit my place. They could keep whatever they got and I’d have everything out and arranged for them, and in return I got to clean up on the insurance by overreporting the loss.”
“What did the loss amount to?”
“Shit, I don’t know. There were twice as many things turned up in their apartment as I ever listed when I made out a report. There’s things I missed a few days after I filed the report and others I didn’t know were gone until the cops found them. You don’t notice everything right away, at least I didn’t, and on top of it, how could I think straight with Peg dead? You know?”
“It hardly sounds like an insurance setup.”
“No, of course it wasn’t. How the hell could it be? All I had was a standard homeowner’s policy. It covered maybe a third of what I lost. According to them, the place was empty when they hit it. Peg was out.”
“And?”
“And I set them up. They hit the place, they carted everything away, and I came home with Peg and stabbed her six, eight times, whatever it was, and left her there so it’d look like it happened in a burglary.”
“How could the burglars testify that you stabbed your wife?”
“They couldn’t. All they said was they didn’t and she wasn’t home when they were there, and that I hired them to do the burglary. The cops pieced the rest of it together.”
“What did they do, take you downtown?”
“No. They came over to the house, it was early, I don’t know what time. It was the first I knew that the spics were arrested, let alone that they were trying to do a job on me. They just wanted to talk, the cops, and at first I talked to them, and then I started to get the drift of what they were trying to put on to me. So I said I wasn’t saying anything more without my lawyer present, and I called him, and he left half his breakfast on the table and came over in a hurry, and he wouldn’t let me say a word.”
“And the cops didn’t take you in or book you?”
“No.”
“Did they buy your story?”
“No way. I didn’t really tell ‘em a story, because Kaplan wouldn’t let me say anything. They didn’t drag me in, because they don’t have a case yet, but Kaplan says they’re gonna be building one if they can. They told me not to leave town. You believe it? My wife’s dead, the Post headline says, ‘Quiz Husband in Burglary Murder,’ and what the hell do they think I’m gonna do? Am I going fishing for fucking trout in Montana? ‘Don’t leave town.’ You see this shit on television, you think nobody in real life talks this way. Maybe television’s where they get it from.”
I waited