“Cotton? This is Steve,” Carella said.
“Yes, this is Room 1612,” Hawes answered.
“What?”
“This is Mr. Hawes speaking,” he said.
Carella paused for a moment. Hawes could almost feel a mental shrug on the line. Then Carella said, “Okay, this is Room 1612, and this Mr. Hawes speaking. Now, what’s the gag?”
“Yes, I did order breakfast,” Hawes said. “Not ten minutes ago.”
“What?” Carella asked. “Listen, Cotton—”
“I’ll repeat the order if you like,” Hawes said, “but I don’t see why…All right, all right. I ordered juice, coffee, and toast. Yes, that was all.”
“Is this Cotton Hawes?” Carella asked, completely bewildered.
“Yes.”
“Well, what—?”
Hawes covered the mouthpiece. “They want to send up the breakfast I ordered,” he said. “Is it all right?”
“No,” Ruther said.
“Let them,” Murphy suggested. “We don’t want them to think anything strange is going on up here.”
“He’s right, Frank,” Miller said.
“All right, tell them to send it up. No tricks.”
Hawes uncovered the mouthpiece. “Hello?” he said.
“Cotton,” Carella said patiently, “I just got in to the office. I had a stop to make first, so I just got in. Meyer left a message on my desk. He said to call you at the Parker Hotel and—”
“Come right up,” Hawes said.
“Huh?”
“Bring it right up. The room is 1612.”
“Cotton, have you—?”
“I’ll be waiting,” Hawes said, and he hung up.
“What did he say?” Ruther asked.
“He said they’d send it right up.”
“How soon?”
Quickly Hawes calculated how long it would take a car with its siren blasting to get to the hotel from the squad. “No more than fifteen minutes,” he said, and then immediately wished he had made it a half hour. Suppose Carella had not understood him?
“I only expected one of you,” Hawes said. He had quickly reasoned that he was safe until after the alleged bellhop arrived with his alleged breakfast. But if the bellhop did not arrive, how long would these men wait? The thing to do was to keep them talking. When a man is talking, he is not conscious of the time.
“We should have figured that,” Ruther said. “The ‘come alone’ in your wires was very puzzling. If you knew about Kettering, you should have known there were three of us. Why, then, the ‘come alone’ line? We assumed you meant the three of us alone, no cops. We assumed wrong, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” Hawes said.
“Do you know about Kettering?”
“I know his car is at the bottom of the lake at Kukabonga, and I figure he’s buried in the woods someplace. What else is there to know?”
“There’s a lot more to know,” Miller said.
“Why’d you kill him?” Hawes asked.
“It was an—” Miller started, and Ruther turned to him sharply.
“Shut up, Joaquim!” he warned.
“What difference does it make?” Miller asked. “Are you forgetting why we came here?”
“He’s right, Frank,” Murphy said. “What difference does it make?” The old man looked ludicrous with one gun in his hand and another tucked into his waistband. He looked somewhat like the senile marshal of a cleaned-out once-tough Western town.
“Why’d you kill Kettering?” Hawes repeated.
Miller looked to Ruther for permission. Ruther nodded.
“It was an accident,” Miller said. “He was shot accidentally.”
“Who shot him?”
“We don’t know,” Miller said. “The three of us were hunting together. We spotted what we thought was a fox, and we all fired simultaneously. The fox turned out to be Kettering. We heard him scream. He was dead when we got to him. We didn’t know whose bullet had hit him.”
“It wasn’t mine,” Murphy said flatly.
“You don’t know that, John,” Ruther said.
“I do know it. I was shooting a .300 Savage, and you were both using twenty-twos. If my shot had hit him, it would have torn a—”
“You don’t know, John,” Ruther repeated.
“I do know, damnit. Kettering was killed by one of those twenty-twos.”
“Why didn’t you say so at the time?”
“I couldn’t think straight. You know that. None of us could.”
“What happened?” Hawes asked.
“We were in the middle of the woods with a dead man,” Miller said. His upper lip was beaded with perspiration now. Caught in the grip of total recall, his words came haltingly, with difficulty. “The woods were still; there wasn’t a sound. We were hardly breathing. Do you remember, Frank? Do you remember how quiet the woods went after Kettering’s scream?”
“Yes,” Ruther said. “Yes.”
“We stood around the body, the three of us, in those silent woods.”
And all at once, Hawes was there with them, standing over a man one of them had shot, standing over a dead man, with the woods gone suddenly still, as still as the man at their feet. And he realized, too, that the men were back there in the Adirondacks, playing out a scene they had lived, playing it with fresh emotion, as if it were happening to them for the first time.
“We didn’t know what to do,” Miller said.
“I wanted to report it to the authorities,” Murphy said.
“But how could we do that?” Ruther asked. “He was dead! Goddamnit, you knew he was dead.”
“But it was an accident.”
“What difference does that make? How many men get hanged because of accidents?”
“We should have reported it.”
“We couldn’t!” Miller said. “Suppose they didn’t believe us? Suppose they thought we shot him purposely?”
“They’d have believed us.”
“And even if they did,” Ruther said, “what would a scandal have done to my business?”
“And my job,” Miller said.
“Our pictures would have been in every tabloid. And there’d always be the doubt, and the knowledge that one of us had killed a man. How could we have lived with that?”
“We should have reported it,” Murphy insisted.
“We did the right thing,” Miller said. “No one had seen us. There was no one to know.”
“It wasn’t murder. We should have—”
“He was dead, damnit, dead! Did you want policemen and reporters barging in on your life? Did you want a living hell? Did you want everything you’d worked for ruined because of a goddamn senseless accident? If the man was dead, how were we harming him further? We knew he was single, we knew his only family was a sister he didn’t get along with. What else was there to do? Ruin our own lives because of a dead man? Take a chance that the law would be lenient? We did the right thing. We did the only thing. It was the only way.”