“Frederick Sagel?” Meyer asked.
“Yes?”
“All right to come in a minute?” Kling said.
“What for?” Sagel asked.
In the apartment behind him, they could see a woman — presumably the one who’d answered their knock at the door, and presumably Sagel’s wife — wearing a robe and turning the dial on a television set that had the volume down very low. She had curlers in her hair. That’s why Meyer figured she was Sagel’s wife and not his girlfriend.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Kling said, “if that’s all right with you.”
“What about?” Sagel said. He was standing in the doorway, looking either like a fire hydrant or an outraged Englishman defending the entrance to his sacrosanct castle.
“About where you were last night,” Meyer said.
“What?” Sagel said.
“We’d all be a lot more comfortable if we could come in,” Kling said.
“Well... I guess so,” Sagel said, and stepped aside.
The moment the detectives were in the apartment, Sagel’s wife turned on her heel, went through a door opening off the living room, and closed the door behind her. Modesty, Meyer thought.
“Well... uh... why don’t you sit down?” Sagel said.
The detectives sat side by side on a sofa facing the television screen. On the screen, two people were negotiating a drug deal. Kling guessed one of them was an undercover narc. On television, if you saw any two people exchanging money for cocaine, one of them had to be an undercover narc. He wondered suddenly if Eileen had been serious about asking for transfer to the Narcotics Squad. He also wondered what she was doing right this minute. What he’d planned for tonight, what he’d planned to ask her to do when he phoned her—
“...you park it at a garage on South Columbia?” Meyer was saying. “Between Garden and Jefferson — closer to Jefferson, actually?”
“Yeah, sure,” Sagel said, looking puzzled.
“That’s where you parked your car last night?” Meyer said. “A Chevy Citation with the license plate — what’s the number, Bert?”
Kling looked at his notebook.
“38L4721,” he said.
“That’s the number... I guess,” Sagel said. “I mean, who the hell can remember his license plate number? That sounds like it, though. I guess.”
“And you parked your car at this garage at eight o’clock, is that right?” Meyer said.
“Around eight, yes.”
“Where’d you go after you parked the car, Mr. Sagel?”
“To my office.”
“You went to your office at eight o’clock at night?” Kling asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Why’d you do that?” Meyer asked.
“’Cause I forgot my work.”
“Your work?”
“I’m an accountant. I left my work at the office — by accident. The stuff I was supposed to work on last night. I do a lot of work at home. We have a computer at the office, but I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t trust it. So what I usually do is I take the printouts home and I check them against my own figures, the figures I made by hand, you know what I mean? That way, I’m sure.”
“So... as I understand this,” Meyer said, “you parked the car at eight o’clock...”
“That’s right.”
“And went up to your office to get the work you’d left behind...”
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Sagel, did you go back to the garage at ten o’clock? To reclaim your car?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mr. Sagel, why did it take you two hours to pick up your work?”
“It didn’t. I stopped for a drink. There’s a restaurant near my building, the building where my office is, and it’s got a nice bar. So I stopped in there for a drink before I went to get the car.”
“What restaurant was that?” Kling asked.
“A place called Marino’s,” Sagel said.
“You were in Marino’s last night?” Meyer asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“How long were you there?”
“I musta got there around eight-fifteen, and I guess I stayed an hour or so. Had a few drinks, you know? Sitting at the bar. Bullshitting with the bartender. You know how it is when you’re sitting at a bar.”
“What time did you leave Marino’s, Mr. Sagel?”
“I told you. Nine-fifteen, nine-thirty, in there.”
“And you got to the garage at ten.”
“Yeah, about ten o’clock, it must’ve been.”
“What took you so long to get to the garage?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was walking around, looking in the store windows. I walked up to Jefferson and looked in the store windows. It was such a nice night, you know.”
“When you were at the garage picking up your car...”
“Yeah?”
“Did you happen to notice a girl wearing a red dress?”
“No, I didn’t see any girl in a red dress.”
“Tall girl in a red dress. Five-eight or-nine...”
“Five-eight ain’t tall,” Sagel said. “I’m five-eight, and that ain’t tall.”
“Black hair and blue eyes?”
“No, I didn’t see nobody like that at the garage.”
“Or in the restaurant. Did you happen to see her in the restaurant?”
“I didn’t look in the restaurant. I told you, I was sitting at the bar.”
“Mr. Sagel,” Meyer said, “do you know anyone named Darcy Welles?”
“Oh, I get it,” Sagel said.
“What do you get, Mr. Sagel?”
“That’s what this is about. Okay, I get it. The girl somebody hung from a lamppost last night, okay, I get it.”
“How do you know about that?” Meyer said.
“Are you kidding? It’s in all the papers. Also, it was on television tonight, just now as a matter of fact, the Eleven O’Clock News. I was in my pajamas watching the news when you guys knocked on the door. It was all about this Darcy Welles girl hanging from a lamppost like the other two. You got to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to know about those girls hanging from lampposts. Helen!” he shouted suddenly. “Come in here a minute, will you? This is rich, you guys thinking I had something to do with it.”
They did not, in fact, think he had anything to do with it.
There is a ring to the truth, and it shatters the night like a hammer striking a gong.
But they listened nonetheless while Helen Sagel told them that her husband had left the apartment at about twenty after seven last night, just after they’d finished dinner, because he’d forgotten his work at the office and he wanted to do some checking of the figures on the computer printouts, and he’d got back at about ten-thirty, a quarter to eleven, something like that, and he smelled as if he’d had a few drinks. He had worked on his figures until midnight and then he’d come to bed where she was already asleep, but he woke her up when he turned on the light.
“Okay?” Helen said. “Is that it? Can I go back to bed now?”
“Yes, ma’am, thank you,” Meyer said.
“Knocking on people’s doors in the middle of the night,” Helen muttered and left the living room again.
“Sorry about this,” Meyer said to Sagel. “But we have to check these things out, you know.”
“Oh, sure,” Sagel said. “I hope you catch him.”
“We’re trying, sir, thank you,” Meyer said.
“May I ask you a question?” Sagel said.
“Certainly.”
“Is that a wig you’re wearing?”
“Well... yes, it is,” Meyer said.
“I’ve been thinking of getting one,” Sagel said. “Not like that one, I mean a good one. A wig nobody can tell you’re wearing, you know what I mean?”