The only good Lawyer

there?”
    “Sure.”
    As Murphy moved ahead of me, a lot of traffic whizzed by in both directions. Above the noise, I said, “Busy road.”
    “This time of day, maybe.”
    “But not at night?”
    “Gets kind of lonesome, account of folks don’t want to take the chance of breaking down, middle of nowhere. We figure that’s why your boy Spaeth picked this spot.”
    “Only how did the killer; Spaeth or otherwise, know to pick it?”
    “Meaning how could he be sure Gant would come along here?”
    “That’s what I mean.”
    Murphy drew even with the taped tree and turned his head, back the way we’d come. “This parkway, maybe a mile beyond where we turned on it, gets pretty commercial. Auto parts, discount houses, restaurants. We know Gant and some woman had a late dinner at this place called ‘Viet Mam.’ ”
    “Viet Mam?”
    “Right, two M’s.” Murphy swung his head back to the direction we’d been going. “Four, five miles up there, you’ve got Gant’s condo building.”
    “ ‘Four; five miles’?”
    Murphy almost smiled. “I clocked it at four-point-six on the odometer.”
    “And this parkway’s a good route between the restaurant and Gant’s place?”
    “Most direct, anyway.”
    I thought about it. “I still don’t see how the killer knows Gant will be coming by here.”
    “Well, we don’t believe Spaeth staked out one restaurant out of a thousand, hoping Gant and this woman would eat there. But all your boy would have to do is be following Gant, watching for a chance to do him, and then figure after dinner, the man’ll be coming back this way to go home.”
    “Or take the woman back to her place.”
    Murphy kicked at a stone. “We don’t know whether they came to the restaurant together or in separate cars.”
    “You don’t.”
    “Uh-unh. The parking lot’s on the side of the restaurant building, no windows. All the Viet Mam people could tell us is that Gant and the woman walked in together and walked out together”
    “How about a cab?”
    “Checked with the companies. No pick-ups or drop-offs near the restaurant that we couldn’t eliminate.”
    I shelved the car issue for a while. Looking down at the shoulder, I could see a patch of stones and grass that seemed almost bleached. “What caused this?”
    “Gasoline.”
    “From the BMW’s tank?”
    “Right.” Murphy pointed across the road to the other slope of the valley. “Ballistics figures it was a rifle of some kind. Bullet went through the left rear tire, ricocheted up, and punctured the gas tank.”
    “But without exploding it.”
    A real smile this time. “Cuddy, you watch too much TV.”
    I looked back over at the hillside where the shooter supposedly had been. “Any kind of make on the bullet or rifle?”
    “No. Slug was too deformed by the things it hit. But from the composition of the metal, we know it wasn’t the same as the ones found in Gant.”
    “Meaning two different guns.”
    “Right. A rifle and a revolver. M.E. dug two readable rounds out of Gant’s soft tissue, and Ballistics matched them to Spaeth’s Taurus Model 85 revolver.”
    “To the revolver found at the scene.”
    “With your boy’s prints on the shell casings still in the cylinder. And he admits to owning a Taurus 85.”
    I didn’t have a good answer to that one, other than Spaeth’s believing somebody stole the weapon from his room at Dufresne’s boarding-house. “Lieutenant, you have anything on the woman with Gant that night?”
    “No. Owner of Viet Mam says he never noticed her face. And the waitress there doesn’t have great English, says just that the woman was blond and attractive, wore tinted glasses and drank chardonnay.”
    “Enough wine so she wouldn’t be able to drive?”
    Murphy looked at me. “Waitress said the bottle was empty, but she’s not sure who drank how much.”
    “The lab do Woodrow Gant’s blood alcohol level?”
    “Point-oh-three.”
    “Pretty low.”
    “He was a biggish man, Cuddy.”
    Okay. “Let’s go back to the woman. Height, weight?”
    “Medium everything, according to the owner.”
    I looked down the road in the direction of the restaurant, then across, into the trees. “Lieutenant, can I work something through with you?”
    “I’m listening.”
    “Either Gant and the woman that night were in separate cars or the same car, which would have been Gant’s BMW.”
    “Go on.”
    “But either way, the killer has to take some time setting up across the road. And that