“Thin and theory,” Schatz said. “No DA is going to even go to a grand jury with what you’ve got, Fortune.”
“He won’t have to,” I said.
They said nothing. They weren’t exactly convinced. Neither was I, really, but what I had was all I was going to get as far as evidence was concerned. I hoped it would be enough. I was pretty certain it would be, but it had been a long, hard case and you never know for sure.
“It’s funny,” I said. “Castro had a perfect plan without a flaw, but he made a mistake. Roth and Susan Roth didn’t make a single mistake, but their plan had one flaw — the alibi. They had to have an alibi.” I shook my head. “Because their plan had a flaw, and Castro made a small mistake, they’re going over.”
How do you explain one small mistake? Castro’s plan was literally foolproof — if he made no mistakes. What made that one careless moment? I was inside his mind and I didn’t know. The waiting? The anxiety to get it done after all those weeks, months? Maybe it was, in the end, only fate, the roll of the dice, working on three lives that last Thursday...
The boy stood behind the soda fountain counter.
“Dead? Mr. Castro’s dead?”
“Murdered,” I said. “It was in all the newspapers.”
“I don’t read the papers. I’m studying to be an architect. I liked Mr. Castro.”
“Two weeks ago Thursday,” I said.
The boy blinked at me, frowned. “Two weeks? Thursday? Gee, maybe that’s why I couldn’t find him, you know? I mean, it was two weeks ago, sure. Thursday.”
“Find him?” I said. “Two weeks ago?”
“He forgot the razor he bought,” the boy explained. “We had some loud kids, you know, and he had to wait to pay for his cherry soda and the razor. He walked out fast, forgot to take the package. He was gone maybe three, four minutes when I saw it. The package, I mean. I told the boss, and he let me go after Mr. Castro with the razor. I mean — the boss, he liked Mr. Castro too. So the boss took over on the fountain and I went out and tried to catch up with Mr. Castro.”
“You went after him two weeks ago Thursday?”
“I knew which way he always walked ’cause he talked to me a lot about going to visit this building of some guy named Roth about three blocks up. I figured he’d probably stop there and I could catch him. Only, when I got there, no one was around.”
“You went to Roth’s building five minutes after Castro left your store, but you didn’t see anyone?”
“Not when I got there, and I never did see Mr. Castro. But when I was leaving I saw this big guy come out of the building and get into a car. It wasn’t Mr. Castro, and there was only a woman in the car, so I walked back to the store.”
“You saw a big man? Could you identify him?”
The boy shook his head. “It was dark. The car was only there a minute. The woman got out to hold the door open for the guy to get in fast. Then they drove off real quick.”
Damn! “That was all you saw? You’re sure?”
He nodded. “Except the big guy had a gray suit, and the woman had a green dress and real dark hair kind of long, and the car was a blue Mercedes four-door.”
I stared. “You saw all that in the dark?”
“Sure,” the boy said. “When the woman got out of the car I looked close ’cause it might have been Mr. Castro, see? She walked around in front of the headlights and I saw she was a woman. I mean, I saw the guy’s suit and the woman and the color of the car because I was looking hard for Mr. Castro.”
Stood in the dark of that empty street, near that deserted building site, and looked closely at two people for only a few seconds. Because he wanted to give a package to a man who had forgotten it in his store. A man who had been nice to him. A man he had gotten to like. So he looked hard, hoping one of the people was Mr. Castro, but the man was too big and had on a gray suit, and the other was a woman in a green dress, and the car was a dark-blue Mercedes, and...
In the office Pearce looked at his drawn shades as if he were seeing the city invisible on the other side. Schatz looked at the door as if he wished he were on the other side going away.
“Castro didn’t need a razor,” I said. “So when he was delayed that night, he hurried a little and forgot the package.”
“It’s not much, Dan,” Pearce said.
“The boy can’t really identify either of them,” Schatz said. “He didn’t get the license number of the car, and you got any idea how many dark-blue Mercedes there are in the city?”
“It’s enough,” I said. “The woman walked in her own headlight beams. A slim, dark-haired woman in a green dress, and that fits Susan Roth and what she was wearing according to ten witnesses at the Junior League. The man fits Roth and what he was wearing. Susan Roth’s car is a dark-blue Mercedes.”
Pearce shook his head. “I don’t know, Dan.”
“With what I dug up on all their actions, their motives, my reconstruction of what happened, it’ll probably convince a jury.”
“Probably?” Pearce said.
“You want to tell the DA about probably, Fortune?” Schatz said.
I said, “Probably is all we’ll need.”
And the interoffice telephone rang. Pearce answered.
“She’s here,” the captain said.
The door opened and Susan Roth, formerly Susan Castro, stepped into the room. She stood tall and poised, a fine-looking woman. Still young and close to beautiful. Her cool eyes took in each of us in turn.
“Sit down, Mrs. Roth,” Captain Pearce said.
“Am I under arrest, Captain?”
“No,” Pearce said, “not yet. But Mr. Fortune there has a story we think you should hear.”
Her eyes turned to look at me. She looked at my empty sleeve and my old tweed sport jacket and cords. Her lips curled faintly. She did not think much of me, but she sat down, waited, her foot swinging lightly in its two-hundred-dollar pump.
I told my story. From my first hunch about Castro and his murder plan, through what I had pieced together about Roth and her plan, to Castro’s mistake and the soda fountain boy, and her walking through the beams of the headlights. She showed no reaction until the soda fountain boy. At her careless walk through the headlights she blinked. At Roth coming out of the building site in his gray suit, her foot stopped swinging.
“Castro’s company hired me to investigate his murder, Mrs. Roth. They’ll do everything they can to convict you and your husband. They’ve seen my report, they’ve already hired the best lawyers to work with the DA. Since you didn’t kill Castro yourself, the captain there can offer you a deal to turn state witness. Accessory, five-to-ten years. With good behavior, parole in as little as three years. Maybe less. If you stand up in court with Roth, you could get life without parole.”
Her face showed nothing. I was going on my judgment, on everything I had learned, sensed, in the killer’s mind of Susan Roth. With both Castro and Roth out of the way, her sons would be rich boys. She would know how to get her share. In prison for life, what good would the money do her? What I had guessed, uncovered, pieced together might not convince a jury. She might get off. On the other hand, she might not. Say a fifty-fifty chance, maybe a little worse. I figured those odds would be enough for Susan Roth.
“Charge me first” — her voice had no emotion — “then I’ll tell you how Norman killed poor Maxwell.”
It wasn’t what should have happened, but it was something. The murder had been mostly her idea, she should have taken the big fall. It’s an imperfect world; you get what you can.
The case had been all a matter of getting inside their killer minds. Norman Roth would never make the deal, turn her in. Susan Roth, once Susan Castro, would and did. She was a practical woman.