Act of God

most engaging smile, but it was kind of hard to look at.

    Over the receiver of the pay phone outside the pharmacy, I heard, “Homicide, Cross.”
    “It’s Cuddy.”
    “What?”
    “Okay to talk to people other than my clients?”
    “Yeah.”
    I thought I heard her chewing. “Anything on the crime scene at Teagle’s that you can tell me?”
    “Time of death’s kind of a wide bracket. Saturday morning to Sunday, at least four or five hours before you found him.”
    “Prints?”
    “The place was lousy with them, especially on the musical stuff.”
    “How about the poker?”
    “Nothing readable, except for some of Teagle’s own.”
    “You doing eliminations on the guys in his band?”
    “Yeah, we already had them in.”
    “See them yourself?”
    “Yeah. Not what you’d call appetizing young men, except maybe the drummer, he let his hair grow past the scalp-line.”
    “You wouldn’t have a name and address on the one with the dreadlocks?”
    “The Chinese kid?”
    “I thought he might be Korean.”
    “Uh-unh. Chinese. Howard Ling. But the whole band’s got at least partial alibis. Sixty anxious patrons, pounding their beers on tables, waiting for Teagle to show for the set.”
    “I’d still like an address on this Ling.”
    “Hold on.”

    I tried Pearl Rivkind’s number, braced if her son Lawrence answered. But nobody did, and there was still no tape after ten rings. I hung up, thought about it, then decided to find their street.
    It was in a subdivision built maybe a decade before, enough time for the shrubs around the houses and the trees between the lots to look as though they belonged there. The houses were mostly split-levels, the Rivkinds’ chocolate-brown garrison the exception with brass lampposts staked at the ends of a driveway that led up a modest slope to a two-car garage. The grass had been cut, and a Mazda sports car sat on the macadam outside the closed garage doors, but there were also three separate bundles of translucent green plastic on the lawn near the front stoop. Each bundle was the size of a piece of split firewood.
    I left the Prelude at the end of the driveway and walked up to the car. The hood of the Mazda was in the shade. I felt the metal. Cool.
    Moving along the path to the stoop, I checked the little green bundles. Boston Globes, for the last three days. I had a sinking feeling as I reached the stoop itself.
    The bell produced a sequence of chimes inside, but nothing else. I knocked, waited, then knocked louder. Stepping down from the stoop into the shrubs, I shaded my hand at the glass in a front window. The repose of an empty house, something flickering from the rear of it like a fluorescent bulb about to go bad.
    I was halfway around to the back when a cruiser with a rack of bubble-lights on its roof pulled up in front of my car, slanting in to block it and the driveway at the same time. Smooth.
    The first cop out was a tall black male on the passenger’s side of the car, facing me. The driver, a shorter white female, stepped onto the pavement but kept her door and her options open.
    The male cop said, “Mind coming down to see us?”
    “No.”
    I walked down the path and the driveway. The male cop stayed on my side of the car, the female standing in the angle of her open door, hands where I couldn’t see them.
    When I was about ten feet from the male cop, he said, “Mind telling us what you’re doing?”
    “I have some ID, inside left jacket.”
    “Let’s see it.”
    “I also have a Chiefs Special over my right hip.”
    The black cop looked at me almost sleepily. “Nice of you to mention it.”
    I went into my coat pocket for the holder, then stepped cJose enough to hand it to him. Reading, he said over his shoulder to the partner, “John Francis Cuddy, P.I. from Boston. Want to call it in?”
    She said, “Right.”
    I said, “Can I have that back?”
    A sleepy smile. “When it checks out.”
    A minute later the partner said, “He’s licensed.”
    The male cop folded my identification and returned it to “What’s your business here?”
    I’m working for the woman who lives in that house.” And what would her name be?”
    “Rivkind.”
    “First name?”
    “Pearl.”
    “Husband and son’s name?”
    “Son’s Lawrence, husband’s Abraham, but he’s dead. Mrs. Rivkind is about five feet tall, with-“
    “You’re working for her, how come you’re visiting when she’s not here?”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    Over his shoulder