Scam

and tell ’em what I know. Not that I want to do that, but I happen to be a cop, and it happens to be my fuckin’ duty. And if I didn’t do that, they would have my fuckin’ shield. So I gotta tell everything you told me. Which, aside from being a royal pain in the ass, if it doesn’t jibe with everything you told them—and why should it?—like I’m taking notes on your fucking story, like it might be important, like I actually give a damn—well, then, there’s gonna be hell to pay. Now, who do you think is gonna be payin’ it, you or me?”
    “I know it’s a mess. You don’t have to rub it in.”
    “Oh, right. Like I’m to blame. Like I’m the one makin’ your life miserable.”
    “You wanna stop using me for a punching bag and take a look at the evidence here?”
    “What evidence? You got a six foot six stiff, what else you got?”
    “He was shot.”
    “So I hear.”
    “Once.”
    “Once is enough.”
    “In the heart.”
    “Figures. Probably couldn’t reach his head. You got anything else useful?”
    “He wasn’t shot in his own office. He was shot in some other guy’s.”
    “What other guy?”
    “One of the other vice-presidents.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “Oh.”
    “You know his name or don’t you?”
    “Give me a break. I’m bad with names.”
    “No shit.”
    “You shoot the questions at me that fast, of course I’m gonna blank. One of them’s Kevin Dunbar, and it wasn’t him. So it’s the other one. Whose name is …”
    “Christ.”
    “It’s not Greenberg, he’s the deceased chairman of the board.”
    “If I shot you now, it would be justifiable homicide.”
    “Oh yeah. Marty Rothstein. That’s the other vice-president. It was in his office.”
    “Ah. Major clue. This case is almost cracked.”
    “Hey, there’s a lot of leads. On account of the work I did.”
    “Give yourself a gold star. In everything you told me, there’s only one thing’s really key.”
    “What’s that?”
    “If it’s true, of course. If you didn’t find the body before and make the whole thing up.”
    “So help me. What did I say that’s key?”
    “You called his wife. Isn’t that what you said? You called him at home and his wife said he was working late.”
    “Yeah. So?”
    “Where’s home?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know.”
    “No, I don’t know. I have his phone number and his business address. I don’t have his home address. I mean, it’s not like I have a form that clients fill out. I don’t send out monthly statements.”
    “You don’t keep files?”
    “Most of my work is for Rosenberg and Stone. This wasn’t.”
    “So you don’t keep a file?”
    “Hey, MacAullif, screw the file. What’s so fucking important?”
    “The fact you called his wife. A guy gets killed, the wife is usually suspect number one. The ME puts the time of death around the time you made that call, the call becomes important as hell.”
    “Right.”
    “Depending on where the guy lives. Turns out he lives next door, she could have run over and killed him just fine.”
    “It’s a two one two number.”
    “Narrows it down. A lot more, now the Bronx is seven one eight. Still, Manhattan’s a pretty big place.”
    That was a relief. Not that Cranston Pritchert’s wife might be out of it—I never met the woman, someone killed him, and it might as well have been her. No, it was a relief MacAullif was talking about it. Discussing the crime like a crime, instead of a personal affront against him. If I could keep him focused in that direction, on an analytical examination of the evidence, I might just luck out. I might be able to get out of this thing with our friendship, such as it was, virtually intact.
    It was not my day. Because at that moment the elevator doors opened, and out walked Sergeant Belcher.
    Actually, I had my back to the elevator, so I didn’t see him.
    MacAullif did.
    His mouth fell open, his eyes narrowed, his face darkened.
    Under his breath he murmured, “Oh, shit.”

23.
    “H OW BAD IS IT?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    I wasn’t, either. It was much later that evening and I’d just gotten home.
    First, I’d been held in the office building lobby for what seemed like hours. Then I’d been dragged downtown. The good news was I hadn’t been booked. The bad news was I’d been fingerprinted. That, I was told, was just so the cops could tell which fingerprints at the crime scene happened to be mine. The implication was so they could eliminate