He smiled at my shock. I managed to regain composure.
'Two years. But I was an assistant for two years before that. To a man named Roscoe Dollworth. He was with the Department. Did you know him?'
'Dolly? Oh hell yes. He was some kind of a cop before the sauce got to him. He still alive?'
'He's retired and living in Florida.'
'I think we better order,' he said. 'We can talk while we're eating. I've got maybe an hour before the loot starts getting antsy. I know exactly what I want. Roast beef on the bone, very rare. Yorkshire pudding. Whatever vegetable they're pushing. And a salad. And a mug of ale.'
I had a steak-and-kidney pie, salad, and ale.
'About this Kipper thing,' Stilton said abruptly. 'You say your interest is in the insurance?'
'The claim,' I said, nodding. 'We have to justify the claim with the company that insured him.'
'What company is that?'
'Uh, Metropolitan Life,' I said.
'That's odd,' he said. 'About a week after Kipper died, I got a visit from a claim adjuster from Prudential. He said they had insured Kipper.'
He looked at me steadily. I think I was blushing. I know I couldn't meet his stare. I may have hung my head.
'You don't mind if I call you Josh, do you?' Stilton asked gently.
'No, I don't mind.'
'You can call me Perce,' he offered. 'You see, Josh, two years in this business, or even four years, aren't enough to learn how to be a really good liar. The first rule is only lie when you have to. And when you do lie, keep it as close to the truth as you can and keep it simple. Don't try to scam it up. If you do, you're sure to get in trouble. When I asked you if your interest was the insurance, you should have said yes and let it go at that. I probably would have swallowed it. It's logical that lawyers handling the estate would be interested in a dead man's insurance. But then you started fumbling around with justifying the claim, and I knew you were jiving me.'
'And I didn't even know the name of the company,' I said sadly.
He put his head back and laughed, so loudly that the other diners turned to look.
'Oh, Josh,' he said. 'I don't know what company insured Kipper either. No claim adjuster ever visited me. I just said Prudential to catch your reaction. When you collapsed, I knew you were running a game on me.'
Our food was served, and we didn't speak until the waiter left the table.
'Then you won't tell me about the Kipper case?' I said.
'Why the hell not?' he said, astonished. 'I'm willing to co-operate. It's all a matter of public record. That boss of yours, the guy with the fish, could probably even get a look at the file if he pushed hard enough. How's the steak-and-kidney pie?'
'Delicious,' I said. 'I'm really enjoying it. Is your roast beef rare enough?'
'If it was any rarer, it would still be breathing. All right, now let me tell you about the Kipper thing. I went over the file before I left the office, just to refresh my memory.
Here's what happened. . '
As he spoke, and ate steadily, I glanced up frequently from my own plate to look at him.
I guessed him to be in his early fifties. He was about six feet tall, with narrow shoulders and hips. Very willowy. He was dressed with great care and polish, in a double-breasted blue pinstripe that closed at the lower button with a graceful sweep of a wide lapel. His shirt was a snowy white broadcloth with a short, button-down collar. He wore a polka-dot bowtie with butterfly wings. He had a gold watch on one wrist and a gold chain identification bracelet on the other. If he was wearing a gun — and I presumed he was — it certainly didn't show.
His colour was hard to distinguish in the dim light, but I judged it to be a dark brown with a reddish tinge, not quite cordovan but almost. His hair was jet black and and lay flat on his skull in closely cropped waves. His hands were long, fingernails manicured.
His eyes were set deep and wide apart. His nose was somewhat splayed, and his thick lips turned outward. High cheekbones, like an Indian. He had a massive jaw, almost square, and a surprisingly thick, corded neck. Small ears were flat to his head.
I would not call him a handsome man, but his features were pleasant enough. He looked amused, assured, and competent. When he was pondering, or trying to find the right word or phrase, he had the habit of putting his tongue inside his cheek, bulging it.
I think I was most impressed by the cool elegance of the man, totally unlike what I envisioned a New York police detective would be. He really looked like a business executive or a confident salesman. I thought this might be an image he projected deliberately, as an aid in his work.
'Let's start with the time sequence,' he began. 'This happened on January 24th, a Wednesday. The first call went to 911, and was logged in at 3.06. That's p.m., the afternoon. A squad car was dispatched from the One-Nine Precinct and arrived at the premises at 3.14. Not bad, huh?
Two cops in the squad. They took a look at what had happened and called their precinct. This was at 3.21.
Everyone was doing their jobs. We don't fuck up all the time, you know. The squeal came to the Homicide Zone where I work at 3.29. It didn't sound like a homicide, but these things have to be checked out. I arrived at the scene at 3.43. I was with my partner, Detective Lou Emandola.
We no sooner got in the place when the loot called and pulled Lou away. Some nut was holding hostages in a supermarket over on First Avenue, and they were calling out the troops.
'So Lou took off and I was left alone. I mean I was the only homicide guy there. There were plenty of cops, the ambulance guys, the Medical Examiner, the lab truck technicians, a photographer, and so forth. A real mob scene. I questioned the witnesses then, but they were so spooked I didn't get much out of them, so I left. I went back again that evening, and I went twice more. Also, I talked to neighbours, the ME who did the PM, your Mr Tabatchnick, Kipper's doctor, and Kipper's sons. After all this, it looked like an open-and-shut suicide, and that's how we closed it out. Any questions so far?'
'Who made the first call to 911?' I asked.
'I'm getting to that,' Stilton said. 'I've hardly started yet.'
He paused, drained his tankard of ale, and looked at me. I called the waiter and ordered two more. The detective continued:
'Here's the story. . First of all, you've got to understand the scene of the crime, although there was no crime, unless you want to call a suicide a crime. Anyway, that townhouse is a palace. Huge? You wouldn't believe. You could sleep half of East Harlem in there. It's six floors high and it's got a double-basement, plus an elevator. I never did get around to counting all the rooms. Thirty at least, I'd guess, and most of them empty. I mean they were furnished, but no one lived in them. A terrible waste of space.
It runs halfway back the depth of the building. The rear half is an open terrace. The room up front is used for parties. It has a big-screen TV, bar, hi-fi equipment, movie projector, and so forth. The rear terrace has plants, and trees, and outdoor furniture. Sol Kipper took his dive from that terrace. It has a wall around it thirty-eight inches high — I measured it — but that wouldn't be hard to climb over, even for an old guy like Kipper.'
He paused again to take a swallow of his new ale. I used the interruption to dig into my dinner. I had been so engrossed in his story, not wanting to miss anything, that I had neglected to eat. He had finished most of his beef and was now whittling scraps off the rib, handling his knife with the dexterity of a surgeon.
'The nearer the bone,' he said, 'the sweeter the meat. All right, here's what I found out: At 2.30 p.m. on that Wednesday, there were five people in the townhouse. Sol Kipper, his wife, Tippi — she's a looker, that one — and the three servants. Sol and Tippi were in their bedroom, the master bedroom on the fifth floor. The servants were on the ground floor, in and around the kitchen. Tippi was expecting a guest, a Protestant minister named Knurr. He was a frequent visitor, and he was usually served a drink or two and some little sandwiches. The servants were setting up for him.