“Ain’t you guys ever gonna finish with your scraping and measuring?” he complained. “Yesterday and again today — this is the second Sunday in a row you guys been stomping around up here with your tapes and things. A person’s got a right to sleep, ain’t he? Ain’t I got a right to sleep Sunday mornings?”
Whittaker, who was examining the baseboard under the broken windows, ignored the wino, but Albindi asked, “The second Sunday? We weren’t here last Sunday.”
“Same difference,” the little man said belligerently. “You’re all on the city payroll, ain’t you? Fat lot any of you care about a person’s rights. Where’s a person gonna find another flop this good? You think the city cares?”
“What’s the city got to do with it?” asked Whittaker.
“Nothing!” the bum cried triumphantly, and sat down on the floor beside Whittaker. “That’s exactly what I told him. I said, ‘What right’s the city got wrecking a person’s life?’ ”
It took them twenty patient minutes to get a coherent picture. The aggrieved bum (“Call me Charlie”), had been awakened early last Sunday by someone kicking debris around in the room overhead. Worse, whoever it was hadn’t closed the door properly and it banged every time the wind gusted. As the condemned building’s steadiest tenant, Charlie had staggered upstairs to lay down some house rules and found a building inspector taking notes on the condition of the place. He’d told Charlie that the whole block was to be tom down as part of the city’s urban renewal program.
Before Charlie could start grumbling about his rights again, they asked him how he knew the man was a building inspector.
“ ’Cause he said so. And he was measuring things and writing ’em down like all you guys do.”
Whittaker lifted his eyebrows, Albindi nodded, and they invited Charlie to headquarters. His objections dwindled abruptly when they hinted that the city often rewarded helpful citizens.
Downtown, Whittaker settled Charlie in front of a selection of mug shots while Albindi went off to make a few phone calls. When he returned, his face wore a look of satisfaction. “Good news, Charlie! That firetrap of yours won’t be bulldozed any time soon.” To Whittaker, he added, “No building inspector’s been in the place since it was condemned three years ago. It has to be our sniper getting the layout. Any luck with those pictures?”
“Just what you’d expect,” Whittaker said sourly. “He narrowed the first fifty I showed him down to twenty-five. No two alike.”
“What about this one, Charlie?” Albindi asked, shoving a newspaper photograph under the old man’s rheumy eyes.
“That’s him! That’s the guy!” Charlie exclaimed, using both shaky hands to hold the picture steady. “Those others sorta mixed me up, but this is him, I promise you!”
Abruptly, Whittaker stood up, fished a bill from his wallet and hustled Charlie from the room with the city’s thanks for his commendable citizenship.
“Forget it,” Whittaker said when Albindi started to protest. “So he just identified Watson as his phony inspector. Terrific! You weren’t here when he was almost as positive about two dozen others. Can’t you just see our Charlie on a witness stand? A first-year law student could laugh him out of court.
“Granted, he might be cleaned up and dried out and made into a half-credible witness, but so what? Even if the jury believed him, what difference would it make, since Mrs. Watson wasn’t killed last Sunday? In case you’ve forgotten, Al, she was shot Friday night while riding with her husband, and three much more reliable witnesses than Charlie will swear to it. You’re acting like a green rookie who can’t see the woods for the trees.”
“But what if Charlie’s right and Watson was up there last Sunday?” Albindi argued. “Somebody was. Charlie’s not bright enough to make up a story like that for no reason. That means the murder was planned in advance, and who’s the only one in sight with a motive?”
“Mr. Watson,” Whittaker said patiently. “But you’re the one who said politics made a poor reason for divorce. What makes it a better reason for murder?”
“Losing his daughter,” Albindi said, remembering the way Watson had looked at her.
“Yeah, well...” said Whittaker, who had no children, as he picked up his overcoat. “You’ve still got to show me how he managed it without leaving any evidence behind. Me, I’m going to spend the rest of my day off at home.”
Albindi reached for his own overcoat and left with Whittaker.
Although he tried to put the case out of his thoughts and spent the rest of the day acting like a husband and father, his mind kept toying with the problem, and he went to sleep that night with fantastic diagrams of electrically-detonated, self-destructing rifles running through his head.
It was still cold and rainy the next day. There were going to be a hell of a lot of May flowers if it didn’t let up soon, Albindi reflected, as he stopped in at the police lab.
Jarrell, the technician on duty, hooted when Albindi asked if Watson could possibly have shot his wife while driving. “See the way the window’s smashed from the outside in?” he asked, leading Albindi out to the Watson car. “Everything lines up with the angle at which the bullet entered her head: twenty feet up, fifty feet away. Sorry, Al, there’s no way he could have done it.”
Discouraged, Albindi took the elevator and entered their office behind Whittaker. His resolve to forget about the Watson case until after he’d caught up on some of his other work was canceled by a knock on their open door. They looked up to see the familiar face of Gerald Hartford, claims investigator for a large insurance company.
“Heard you two had the Watson case,” Hartford said, “and I just wanted to check it out with you — make sure everything’s kosher.”
“Any reason why it shouldn’t be?”
“Not really,” Hartford said cheerfully. “Just that we never lost a policyholder to a sniper before and, of course, double indemnity does bring it up to a nice round figure.”
“How round?” Albindi asked softly, while his partner groaned.
“Sixty thousand,” Hartford said, quirking a brow at Whittaker.
“Ignore him,” Albindi said. “He refuses to believe in the impossible. I know inflation’s hit everything, but isn’t thirty thousand a lot to carry on a housewife?”
“Not really. Not when you consider that there’s a minor child, and what a housekeeper costs these days.”
“But the girl’s fifteen. She wouldn’t need a nursemaid now.”
“Make him happy,” Whittaker said. “Tell him Watson took out the insurance policy last week.”
“No,” Hartford said slowly. “The original policy was issued twelve years ago as part of a family-coverage plan, but for the more usual five thousand. Last month, Watson reviewed his policies and upped them alclass="underline" an extra five thousand on the daughter, fifteen on himself—”
“And twenty-five on his wife!” Albindi interrupted happily. “The other two were camouflage.”
“It has to be,” he repeated to Whittaker when Hartford had left. “I bet if we check, we’ll find that Watson decided to ‘review his policies’ the day after that party when she insulted his boss and lost him a promotion.”
“Coincidence,” Whittaker said, but without conviction. “Besides, why would he need extra money? We’ve turned up no signs of heavy debts or expensive tastes.”
“Everyone needs money, Jake. What if he were counting on that promotion to put Ellen into a private school away from public school contamination? Sixty thousand pays a lot of tuition.”
“Okay, I’ll grant you motive; I’ll admit he’s familiar with an M-1; hell, I’ll even believe Charlie saw him in the building last Sunday. But you still have to—”