“What about the quarters for the peep shows? The kids must like all those naked women.”
Gonzo’s face puckered into a frown. “You trying to hassle me, Leopold? The D.A.’s boys have been givin’ me enough trouble already about peep shows. It’s all legit here — candy, cigarettes, chewing gum. No peep shows.”
“I didn’t come about the machines, George. You heard what happened to Pete Garraty.”
“Yeah. Too bad. No life begins at forty for him, huh?”
Leopold held his temper in check and said quietly, “Bombings have always been your thing, George.”
“Who, me?”
“You.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Twenty years ago you spent three years in the pen for blowing up a cigar store that was making book in your territory.”
“That was a bum rap.”
“I dug out the records. You were making bombs in your basement. Pipe bombs, like the one that killed Pete Garraty.”
“Jeez, that was twenty years ago! I was a kid!”
“You were twenty-six years old.”
He licked his lips nervously. “I don’t know nothin’ about Garraty.”
“How about your boys? Any of them do it?”
“Hell, Garraty wasn’t botherin’ us.”
“Downtown, they think he was. They think you had a damn good motive for sneaking up to his house and cutting the window screen and slipping a bomb in with his birthday gifts.”
“I didn’t even know it was his birthday!”
“A lot of people were invited. The word could have gotten around.”
“Well, it didn’t!” He was angry, but on the defensive. He might have something to hide, Leopold decided.
“If Garraty indicted you on an obscenity rap, he could have shut down your entire operation.”
“Nobody gets convicted of obscenity nowadays.”
“Sometimes the supreme court thinks otherwise.”
Gonzo leaned forward across the desk. “Hell, Leopold — you know as well as I do that Garraty was trying to railroad me. An indictment right now, six months before the elections, would have looked damn good in the papers.”
“Pete Garraty wasn’t running for anything.”
“The hell he wasn’t! The word is he wanted the nomination for the state senate. And the primary’s coming up soon.”
Leopold had heard the rumors too, but had discounted them. One always heard political rumors about any successful lawyer. “If he was trying to railroad you, would you sit still for it, George? Or would you get him out of the way?”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.”
Leopold sighed and stood up. “I may want to see you again, George.”
“You know where to find me.”
Lieutenant Fletcher found Millie with her brother-in-law Steve, going over the funeral preparations. Her face was drawn, and though she seemed calm he knew it was only the result of the doctor’s tranquilizers. Even grief was a luxury these days.
“How are you feeling, Millie?” he asked.
“I’ll survive. How’s Carol’s arm?”
“Fine. No problem.”
Steve Garraty had never really looked that much like his brother, but now, seeing him in the kitchen with Millie, it might have been Pete — taller and slimmer — but still Pete. “I’m trying to get Millie to move in with us for a few days,” Steve said. “This house is no place for her.”
Fletcher glanced toward the closed livingroom door, imagining that he could still smell the odor of burning gunpowder. “It certainly isn’t! I’m surprised you even stayed in it last night.”
“The doctor gave me something to make me sleep, and that’s what I did,” Millie said. “But I suppose you’re both right. I should move out till after the funeral, and until the place gets fixed up. But Johnny, my son, will be home from college today for the funeral. Where will he stay?”
“We’ll fit him in,” Steve said. “Never fear.”
“I wanted to talk to both of you a bit,” Fletcher said, “if you’re up to it.”
Steve looked at Millie. “Go ahead.”
“Just the usual questions. Any enemies? Any recent threats on his life?”
Millie shook her head. “Nothing like that.”
“Did he talk much about his work? The cases he was prosecuting?”
“Not really.”
“Did anyone he sent to prison ever threaten to kill him when they got out?”
“Not that I know of. If they did, he never told me.”
“Did he ever mention a man named George Gonzo?”
“He might have. Gonzo’s name was in the papers sometimes.”
Fletcher hesitated before asking the next question. “You saw that cigar box, didn’t you, Millie? The captain says you spilled a drink on it and had to rewrap it.”
“Yes, I suppose I did. There couldn’t have been two cigar boxes, could there?”
“We didn’t find another one. Nor any cigars.”
“I didn’t look inside. I just took off the soiled paper and rewrapped it.”
“There was no card?”
“I didn’t see one.”
Steve Garraty interrupted at this point. “You’re certainly not implying that she could have had anything to do with this, are you, Lieutenant?”
“Of course not. I just ask questions.”
“I hope so! She’s no more involved than my wife Barbara. If a woman’s going to kill her husband, she doesn’t do it with a bomb at his fortieth birthday party!”
“No,” Fletcher agreed, feeling like a fool. The captain shouldn’t have put him up to this line of questioning. He plunged off on a quick tangent. “Is there any possibility Pete was... well, fooling around with another woman? Could it have been a jealous husband?”
Millie closed her eyes, as if she’d felt a sudden sharp pain. “There was no other woman. If there had been, Pete would have told me. We never had secrets from one another.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“What about the surprise party?”
She waved her arm. “That was a minor thing, a temporary thing.” Then she lowered her eyes. “You’re right — I couldn’t keep a thing from him. He overheard me ordering a birthday cake for thirty people and I had to tell him.”
Fletcher grunted. “He was a great actor. He really seemed surprised.”
“Pete was great in a lot of ways,” she said quietly.
After a moment’s silence Steve Garraty got to his feet. “Come on, Millie — I insist. Gather up what you’ll need and I’ll take you back to our place. You’ll be better off there.”
“All right,” she agreed finally. The will to resist seemed to have gone out of her.
Fletcher told them he wanted to examine the livingroom and bedroom some more, and he stayed on after they left. Watching Millie walk to Steve Garraty’s car with her overnight bag, he thought that he had never seen a woman quite so pathetic.
The livingroom was as he remembered it: scorched carpet, overturned chair, blistered walls. Half-finished cups of punch still stood on some of the tables.
Fletcher stood in the center of the room, looking around, wondering just why he had stayed behind. Was it Captain Leopold’s half-formed notion of Millie’s guilt? He went into her bedroom and found the window locked. Seeing it by daylight, with the bushes outside, gave him a new perspective. Whoever approached the window had to know exactly what he was doing.
He was about to leave the house when he decided, for no reason at all, to check the basement. He knew Pete Garraty had a room down there, a sort of workshop where he also kept a few guns he used for hunting. Fletcher was never much of a hunter, and he’d hated even having guns around the house ever since his son was accused of accidentally shooting a man. That case had been cleared up, but the memory of it lingered on.
There was a workbench in Garraty’s basement room, and a gun-rack where he kept a rifle and shotgun. Everything seemed neat and orderly. Then he noticed a tall fiberboard barrel obviously meant for rubbish. Peering inside, he saw several shotgun shells lying in the bottom.