I got to the office earlier than usual that Thursday morning. By seven-thirty I was making calls. This was the best time to reach the guys who you couldn’t get to during the day, before the hired help started tying up the phone lines.
Mr. Coffee was giving off his usual sputtering sound. I poured some coffee into a Styrofoam cup and drank it, steaming and black. Then I went back to my desk, took another sip, and slung my jacket over the back of the chair. One of the fluorescent bulbs in the outer office was dying and flickering on and off, but it was too early in the morning to replace it.
I hadn’t smoked in fifteen years but that first cup of coffee always brought back the urge. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.
It was about a quarter after eleven when I started to get hungry. I was about to head down to Grand Central to get a jelly donut to hold me till lunch when someone came into the outer office. No knock. No salutation. Talk about your good old-fashioned manners.
I swung the chair out and craned my neck around the door frame to see who it was. A couple of times there’d been clowns who wandered in where they didn’t belong, but they didn’t come back again after they were politely disinvited.
This time it was different. There were two men in moderately-priced suits, poly-wool blends with just a little too much poly. They were cops. I recognized both of them.
Gene Black was a man I could deal with. He was a worn-out cop with a new wife and a new baby and an old beer belly. We’d worked together on a case back in the not- quite-so-tranquil old days when I was in corporate security with ITT.
It was the other son of a bitch I couldn’t stomach. Forgash was his name.
Detective/Third Alfonse J. Forgash. He was a thin sour-faced man of about thirty with a mustache and slicked-back dark hair. His main problem was that he hadn’t learned that a policeman was a public servant.
They walked into my office without the courtesy of an invitation.
Forgash spoke first. “Where were you Tuesday night?”
“I was at the needlepoint show. Didn’t I see you there stitching a throw pillow?”
Forgash looked at Black. “We got a fucking stand-up comic here.” He squinted at me. “You’re in deep shit, Rogan. You’re in big trouble, is all.”
“That a fact?” I said. “Somebody steal your lollypop?”
A vein started to throb in his forehead. “Listen, wiseguy…” He started to say something but Black put a hand on his arm.
“We gotta ask you some questions, Ed,” Black said. “Bear with us, OK?”
I nodded.
“Where were you Tuesday night, Ed?” Black asked.
I tried to recall. I couldn’t think of anything out of the ordinary, so I said, “Home, I guess.”
“What were you doing?”
“Reading, probably,” I said. “Reading before I nodded off on the sofa. Nothing very exciting. What’s the furor all about?”
Forgash couldn’t hold it in. “Somebody whacked your ex-wife, Rogan. Blew her fucking brains out. We got a good idea you did it. Whadda ya think about that?”
I hoped he didn’t see my reaction. First, I couldn’t breathe. Then I felt like I was going to puke up my guts. My knees had that weak feeling you get before you go into combat. I looked down at the papers on my desk, papers arranged in neat piles that didn’t seem to matter very much any more.
“Christ,” was all I could manage.
“When was the last time you saw her?” Black asked.
When was it? I thought back. When the hell was it? At the lawyer’s office? Soft leather furniture and deep carpeting and a dozen brass nameplates on the door.
No. I didn’t see her there. Only her lawyer.
It was at her sister’s… for a birthday party. Bittersweet. Knowing we were going to split up. A glass of champagne for a farewell toast. A last slow kiss goodbye.
“Four years ago, Gene,” I said. “That was the last time. I hadn’t seen her or spoken to her till she called me Monday night.”
Forgash was busy thumbing through his little notebook. He had thin fingers that looked like they belonged to a seamstress. The way he moved those little hands made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. He was the kind of man whose fingers never stopped fidgeting.
“Why’d she call you?” Forgash asked.
“She wanted to hire me.”
“What for?” Forgash said.“I don’t know. I told her no.”
“Any idea who’d want to kill her?” Black asked. He looked slowly around the office. It was evident he wasn’t very impressed with what he saw. “What can you tell me, Ed?”
I studied his weary cop’s face with its deep lines and rheumy gray eyes. “What do you have on it, Gene?” I said.
He considered for a moment, glanced at Forgash, then back at me. “She was coked up when she got it,” he said finally.
I shook my head. “You got it all wrong, buddy. Alicia never took drugs. “
Black sighed. He shook his head the way you do with a kid who doesn’t get it. “She was coked, all right. That’s the way it was.” He stared at me. “How long were you two married?”
“Five years.”
“Guess you didn’t know her very well.” He tried to be helpful. “What guy ever does?”
Forgash stopped playing with his little notebook and waved a skinny finger at me. “We got it that a guy name of Wheelock was screwing your wife before you got divorced.”
I blinked. “Go to hell, Forgash,” I said. “What does that have to do with anything.”
“It’s an old grudge, Rogan. Old grudges fester, you know what I mean. They fester and then they boil over.”
I didn’t like his mixed metaphor. “Go to hell,” I said again.
“You better watch out, scumbag,” he shouted. “You better respect the law.”
“Fuck the law, my friend.” Once more and I was going to serrate his face.
Gene Black stepped into the breech. “This ain’t getting us nowhere.” He spread his hands and flattened them against the desk, like he was going to do push-ups.
“Tell me about her friends,” he said. “The people she hung out with, you know.”
“She had a lot of acquaintances. She liked to get out and around town. But she didn’t have any close friends, as far as I know.” I ticked off a list of people she used to associate with. “I don’t know who her friends are now. The way she was, she didn’t maintain relationships.”
“Who was her latest boyfriend?” Forgash asked, more tentatively this time. “Or was she still banging Wheelock?”
“How the hell should I know? Maybe she didn’t even have one.”
Didn’t have one? Not too likely. I couldn’t imagine her without a current stud. Was he the bastard who killed her?
“Can you give us some idea where she got that coke, Ed?”
“Damned if I know, Gene. She didn’t even drink when we were married. Claimed it was bad for her health. She only ate healthy foods, exercised regularly, strictly by the book, you know.”
Black nodded in acknowledgment. He was the type who took in information slowly, processed it thoroughly, and never forgot it. “Tell me about her,” he said. “What kind of person she was…what she did…”
I considered his question. What could I tell him? That she was elegant. It was the best word to describe her. There wasn’t anything cheap or second-rate about her. That she was loving. When she loved you, she gave everything she had without restraint until she couldn’t give you any more. There was no deception or artifice about her.
That wasn’t what they wanted to hear. There was nothing useful I could tell them now. I’d been out of the picture too long.
“Talk to her sister,” I said. “She can tell you more about Alicia than I can.”
“We will, Ed. Only she’s been out of town. She’s due back today.” Black’s eyes wandered over the top of my desk, inspecting the folders and stacks of paper.
“Was she close to her sister?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “They talked on the phone almost every day. No one was closer to her.”
I finished the last bitter dregs of my coffee and tossed the cup in the garbage.
Then I had a vision. Tall, thin, blond. Lying on the floor with unseeing eyes and mouth open.
“What did she look like, Gene?”
He glanced at his partner with a pained look, then back at me. “One slug through the back of the head. No struggle. Her apartment was ripped apart though.”
“Forced entry?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“What was the time of death?”
“That’s enough, Rogan,” the seamstress cut in. “We’re not here to answer your fucking questions. Now you tell me what kinda gun you carry.”
“Glock seventeen. But I don’t carry it all the time, my friend. It’s at home.”
He squinted at me. “Have no fear. We’ll check it out.”