Manhattan Is My Beat

make a mistake like that. Felt bad for him, too, of course.”
    Rune exhaled in shock. “He was just … You killed him by mistake?”
    Haarte continued. “After Spinello testified in the St. Louis RICO cases in January, the U.S. Marshals moved him to New York. Witness protection. They gave him a new identity—Victor Symington—and put him in a place uptown but, well, you saw he was pretty paranoid. He didn’t stay where they’d set him up and got the apartment down in the Village. He moved into Apartment 2B. But then he heard there was a bigger apartment available on the third floor. So he moved upstairs. Your friend Kelly moved into Spinello’s place.”
    “The information we had from the people hiring us,” Emily said, “was that the hit lived in 2B.”
    “And, I mean, what can we say?” Haarte reflected. “I checked the directory down in the lobby, but it was so covered up with graffiti, I couldn’t read a fucking thing. Besides, Kelly and Spinello looked a lot alike.”
    “They didn’t look a
thing
alike!” Rune spat out.
    “Well, they did to me. Hey, accidents happen.”
    Rune asked, “Then you came back and tore up his place just for the fun of it?”
    Haarte looked insulted. “Of course not. We heard on the news that this Robert Kelly guy’d been killed. That wasn’t the hit’s new name. So we started to think we’d hit the wrong man. I mean,
you
interrupted me during the job. We didn’t have time to verify it. I checked out the place later and found a picture of Kelly with his sister, letters. They looked legit.”
    Rune remembered the torn picture. Haarte had probably lost his temper when he’d realized his mistake then ripped up the photo in anger.
    He continued. “Witness relocation doesn’t do
that
thorough a job, faking old family pictures. So I figured we’d fucked up. We had to make it right.”
    Make it
right?
Rune thought.
    “When you came to the store,” Rune said, “when you pretended to be that U.S. marshal, Dixon, you said you were part of the homicide team at Mr. Kelly’s apartment.”
    “Fuck, of
course
I wasn’t there.” Haarte laughed. “That’s the trick to lying. Make the person you’re lying to your partner in the lie. I suggested I was there and you just assumed I was.”
    Rune remembered Mr. Kelly’s apartment, looking through his books, finding the clipping, the heat and the stuffiness of the apartment. The horrible bloodstained chair. The torn photo.
    Rune closed her eyes. She left overwhelmed with hopelessness. Her big adventure—it was all because of a mistake. There was no stolen bank loot. Robert Kelly was just a bystander—a weird old man who happened to like a bad movie.
    “So, honey, we need to know,” Emily said impatiently, “who’d you tell about me?”
    “Nobody.”
    “Boyfriends? Girlfriends? You’ve had plenty of time to talk to people after you ran out of our little party at Spinello’s house in Brooklyn.”
    “You knew where Spinello was all along?” Rune asked. “And you were just using me?”
    “Of course,” Emily said, “I just had to lead you there, through the bank and the lawyer, so there’d be a trail the police could find. The cops’d see that you were tracking him down, then they’d find him and your body—we were going to make it look like he shot you after you shot him. They’d have their perp. End of investigation. The police’re like everybody else. They prefer the least work possible. Once they’ve found
a
killer they stop looking for anybody else. On to other cases. You know. So, come on: Who’d you tell?”
    “Why would I say anything to anybody?”
    “Oh, come on,” Haarte said. “You see somebody killed right in front of you and you don’t tell the police?”
    “How could I? My fingerprints were all over Spinello’s apartment. I
knew
I was a suspect. I figured out what you were doing.”
    “No, you didn’t,” Haarte said. “You’re not that smart.”
    Rune remained silent. At least one thing was good, Rune thought. They don’t know about Stephanie.
    Suddenly Haarte leapt up from the chair, grabbed Rune’s hair, and jerked her head back so far she couldn’t breathe. She was choking. His face was close to hers. “See, you think it’s better to live. No matter what I do to you. But it isn’t. The only way we could let you live—and we aren’t really inclined to kill you—but the only way we’d
let
you live is if we make it so that you can’t tell anybody about us. Pick