W.E.B Griffin - The Murderers

“I don’t know about Washington. He sees things, senses things, that the rest of us miss. But what I saw was first of all a guy who didn’t seem all that upset to be sitting around across a desk from his wife, who had just had her brains blown out. And there’s his business partner on the floor, with bullet holes in him, too. I didn’t hear one word about ‘poor whatsisname.’ Did you?”

“Marcuzzi, Anthony J.” Matt furnished, shaking his head, no.

“‘Poor Tony, he was more than a business partner. We were very close friends. I loved him,’” Milham said mockingly.

Matt chuckled.

“On the way to Hahnemann Hospital,” Milham went on, “I guess he thought about that: ‘Jesus, I should remember that I’m supposed to be sorry as hell about this!’ He started crying in the wagon. He wasn’t all that bad, either. I almost felt sorry for him.”

“Do you think he knows that you suspect him?”

“I don’t know,” Milham replied thoughtfully. “Probably about now, yeah, I think he’s realized we haven’t swallowed his bullshit. There’s always something you forget when you set up something like this. I don’t know what the hell he forgot, not yet, but he knows. I’d say right about now, he’s getting worried.”

“What I wondered about…” Matt said. “When I got hit, it hurt like hell. He didn’t seem to be hurting much.”

“I was not surprised when the bullet they took out of him at Hahnemann,” Wally said, and dug in his pocket and came out with a plastic bag, handed it to Matt, then continued, “turned out to be a. 32. Or that he had been shot only once. Whoever shot the wife and the partner made damned sure they were dead.”

Matt examined the bullet and handed the plastic envelope back.

“And I won’t be surprised, judging by the damage they caused, when we get the bullets in the bodies from the Medical Examiner, if they are not. 32s. At least. 38s, maybe even. 45s, which do more damage. If I were a suspicious person, which is what the City pays me to be, I would wonder about that. How come the survivor has one small wound in the leg, and…”

“Yeah,” Matt said thoughtfully.

“I think it’s about time we ask them to come in,” Wally said. “You want to stick around, stick around.”

Milham got out of the captain’s chair and went to the door and opened it.

“Would you please come in, Mr. Atchison?” he asked politely.

A moment later, Atchison, his arm around the shoulder of a short, portly, balding man, appeared in the interview-room door.

“Feeling a little better, Mr. Atchison?” Wally asked.

“How the fuck do you think I feel?” Atchison said.

Margolis looked coldly, but without much curiosity, at Matt.

“Howareya?” he said.

Matt noticed that despite the hour-it was reasonable to presume that when Milham called him, he had been in bed-Margolis was freshly shaven and his hair carefully arranged in a manner he apparently thought best concealed his deeply receded hairline. His trousers were mussed, however, and did not match his jacket, and his white shirt was not fresh. He was not wearing a tie.

Margolis led Atchison to the captain’s chair and eased him down into it.

Matt saw that Atchison was wearing a fresh shirt and other-if not fresh-trousers. There were no bloodstains on the ones he was wearing.

“I object to having my client have to sit in that goddamned chair like you think he’s guilty of something. He just suffered a gunshot wound, for Christ’s sake!” Margolis said.

“We really don’t have anything more comfortable, Mr. Atchison,” Wally said. “But I’ll ask Detective Payne to get another chair in here so you can rest your leg on it. Would that be satisfactory?”

“It wouldn’t hurt. Let’s get this over, for God’s sake,” Atchison said. “My leg is starting to throb.”

“We’ll get through this as quickly as we can,” Matt heard Wally say as he went in search of another chair. “We appreciate your coming in here, Mr. Atchison.”

Matt found a straight-back chair and carried it into the interview room. He arranged it in front of the captain’s chair, and with a groan, Atchison lifted his leg up and rested it on it.

Matt glanced at Atchison. Atchison was examining him carefully, and Matt remembered what Wally had just said about “I think he’s realized we haven’t swallowed his bullshit.”

When Matt looked at Milham, Milham, with a nod of his head, told him to stand against the wall, behind Atchison in the captain’s chair.

A slight, gray-haired woman, carrying a stenographer’s notebook in one hand and a metal folding chair in the other, came into the room.

“This is Mrs. Carnelli,” Milham said. “A police stenographer. She’ll record this interview. Unless, of course, Mr. Atchison, you have an objection to that?”

Atchison looked at Margolis.

“Let’s get on with it,” Margolis said.

“Thank you,” Milham said. He waited to see that Mrs. Carnelli was ready for him, and then spoke, slightly raising his voice. “This is an interview conducted in the Homicide Unit May 20, at 2:30 A.M. of Mr. Gerald N. Atchison, by Detective Wallace J. Milham, badge 626, concerning the willfully caused deaths of Mrs. Alicia Atchison and Mr. Anthony Marcuzzi. Present are Mr. Sidney Margolis, Mr. Atchison’s attorney, and Detective Payne…first name and badge number, Payne?”

“Matthew M. Payne, badge number 701,” Matt furnished.

“Mr. Atchison, I am Detective Milham of the Homicide Unit,” Milham began. “We are questioning you concerning the willful deaths of Mrs. Alicia Atchison and Mr. Anthony Marcuzzi.”

Mrs. Martha Washington was not surprised, when she woke up, that her husband was not in bed beside her. They had been married for more than a quarter century and she was as accustomed to finding herself alone in bed-even after a romantic interlude-as she was to the witticisms regarding her married name. She didn’t like either worth a damn, but since there was nothing she could do about it, there was no sense in feeling sorry for herself.

She was surprised, when she looked at her bedside clock, to see how early it was: twenty minutes past seven. She rarely woke that early. And then she had the explanation: the sound of a typewriter clattering in the living room. Her typewriter, an IBM Electric, brought home from the Washington Galleries, Inc., when IBM wouldn’t give her a decent trade-in when she’d bought new Selectrics.

“Damn him!” she said.

She pushed herself out of bed and, with a languorous, unintentionally somewhat erotic movement, pulled her nightgown over her head and tossed it onto the bed. Naked, showing a trim, firm figure that gave her, at forty-seven, nothing whatever to be unhappy about, she walked into the marble-walled bathroom and turned on the faucets in the glass-walled shower.

When she came out of the shower, she toweled her short hair vigorously in front of the partially steamed-over mirror. She had large dark eyes, a sharp, somewhat hooked nose, and smooth, light brown skin. After Matt had made the crack that she looked like the women in the Egyptian bas-reliefs in the collection of the Philadelphia Art Museum, she had begun to consider that there might actually be something to it, if the blood of an Egyptian queen-or at least an Egyptian courtesan; some of the women in those bas-reliefs looked as though they knew the way to a man’s heart wasn’t really through his stomach-might really flow in her veins.

She wrapped herself in a silk robe and went through the bedroom into the living room. Her red IBM Electric and a tiny tape recorder were on the plate-glass coffee table before the couch. Her husband, a thin earplug cord dangling from his ear, was sitting-somewhat uncomfortably, she thought-on the edge of the leather couch before it, his face showing deep concentration.