I had not asked to have his life intertwined with mine, nor had I sought to be a factor in his death. Now his corpse confronted me; one hand was stretched across the desk, as if pointing at me.
He had bribed his daughter’s way out of an unintentional homicide. The bribery had laid him open to blackmail, which had provoked another homicide, this one intentional. And that first murder had only sunk the barb deeper — he was still being blackmailed, and he could always be tagged for Spinner’s murder.
And so he had tried to murder again, and had failed. And I turned up in his office the next day, and so he told his secretary he wanted five minutes, but he’d taken only two or three of them.
He’d had the gun at hand. Perhaps he’d checked it earlier in the day to make sure it was loaded. And perhaps, while I waited in the outer office, he entertained thoughts of greeting me with a bullet.
But it is one thing to run a man down on a dark street at night or to knock a man unconscious and throw him in the river. And it is something else again to shoot a man in your own office with your secretary a few yards away. Perhaps he had measured out these considerations in his mind. Perhaps he had already resolved on suicide. I couldn’t ask him now, and what did it matter? Suicide protected his daughter, while murder would have exposed everything. Suicide got him off a treadmill that turned faster than his legs could travel.
I had some of these thoughts as I stood there regarding his corpse, others in the hours that followed. I don’t know how long I looked at him while Shari sobbed against my shoulder. Not all that long, I suppose. Then reflexes took over, and I steered the girl back to the outer office and made her sit on the couch. I picked up her phone and dialed 911.
The crew that caught it was from the Seventeenth Precinct over on East Fifty-first. The two detectives were Jim Heaney and a younger man named Finch — I didn’t catch his first name. I had known Jim enough to nod to, and that made it a little easier, but even with total strangers I didn’t look to be in for much trouble. Everything added up to suicide to begin with, and the girl and I could both confirm that Prager was all alone when the gun went off.
The lab boys went through the motions all the same, although their hearts weren’t in it. They took a lot of pictures and made a lot of chalk marks, wrapped and bagged the gun, and finally zipped Prager into a body bag and got him out of there. Heaney and Finch took Shari’s statement first so that she could go home and collapse on her own time. All they really wanted was for her to plug the standard gaps so that the coroner’s inquest could return a verdict of suicide, so they fed her questions and confirmed that her boss had been depressed and edgy lately, that he had been evidently worried about business, that his moods had been abnormal and out of character, and, on the mechanical side, that she had seen him a few minutes before the shot sounded, that she and I had been sitting in the outer office at the time, and that we had entered simultaneously to find him dead in his chair.
Heaney told her that was fine. Someone would be around for a formal statement in the morning, and in the meantime Detective Finch would see her home. She said that wasn’t necessary, she’d get a cab, but Finch insisted.
Heaney watched the two of them leave. “You bet Finch’ll take her home,” he said. “That’s quite an ass on that little lady.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“You’re getting old. Finch noticed. He likes the black ones, especially built like that. Myself, I don’t fool around, but I got to admit I get a kick out of working with Finch. If he gets half the ass he tells me about, he’s gonna fuck himself to death. Tell you the truth, I don’t think he makes any of it up, either. The broads go for him.” He lit a cigarette and offered the pack to me. I passed. He said, “That girl now, Shari, I’ll give you odds he nails her.”
“Not today he won’t. She’s pretty shaky.”
“Hell, that’s the best time. I don’t know what the hell it is, but that’s when they want it the most. Go tell a woman her husband got killed, like breaking the news, now would you make a pass at a time like that? Whatever she looks like, would you do it? Neither would I. You should hear the stories that son of a bitch tells. Couple of months ago we had this ironworker falls off a girder, Finch has to break the news to the wife. He tells her, she cracks up, he gives her a hug to comfort her, pets her a little, and the next thing he knows she’s got his zipper down and she’s blowing him.”
“That’s if you take Finch’s word for it.”
“Well, if half what he says is true, and I think he’s straight about it. I mean, he tells me when he strikes out, too.”
I didn’t much want to have this conversation, but neither did I want to make my feelings obvious, so we went through a few more stories of Finch’s love life and then wasted a few minutes reviewing mutual friends. This might have taken longer had we known each other better. Finally he picked up his clipboard and concentrated on Prager. We went through the automatic questions, and I confirmed what Shari had told him.
Then he said, “Just for the record, any chance he could’ve been dead before you got here?” When I looked blank, he spelled it out. “This is off the wall, but just for the record. Suppose she killed him, don’t ask me how or why, and then she waits for you or somebody else to come in, and then she fakes talking to him, and she’s sitting with you, and she triggers a gun, I don’t know, a thread or something, and then the two of you discover the body together and she’s covered.”
“You better cut out all that television, Jim. It’s affecting your brain.”
“Well, it could happen that way.”
“Sure. I heard him talking to her when she went inside. Of course, she could have set up a tape recorder—”
“All right, for Christ’s sake.”
“If you want to explore all the possibilities—”
“I said it was just off the wall. You watch what they do on Mission Impossible and you wonder how criminals are so stupid in real life. So what the hell, a crook can watch television too, and maybe he picks up an idea. But you heard him talking, and we can forget tape recorders, and that settles that.”
Actually, I hadn’t heard Prager talking, but it was a lot simpler to say that I had. Heaney wanted to explore possibilities; all I wanted to do was get out of there.
“How do you fit into this, Matt? You working for him?”
I shook my head. “Checking out some references.”
“Checking on Prager?”
“No. On somebody who used him for a reference, and my client wanted a fairly intensive check. I saw Prager last week and I was in the neighborhood so I dropped in to clear up a couple of points.”
“Who’s the subject of the investigation?”
“What’s the difference? Somebody who worked with him eight or ten years ago. Nothing to do with him knocking himself off.”
“You didn’t really know him, then. Prager.”
“Met him twice. Once, come to think of it, since I didn’t really get to see much of him today. And I talked briefly with him on the phone.”
“He in some kind of trouble?”
“Not any more. I can’t tell you much, Jim. I didn’t know the guy or much about his situation. He seemed depressed and agitated. As a matter of fact, he impressed me as thinking the world was after him. He was very suspicious the first time I saw him, as if I was part of a plot to harm him.”
“Paranoia.”
“Like that, yes.”
“Yeah, it all fits together. Business troubles and the feeling everything’s closing in on you, and maybe he thought you were going to hassle him today, or maybe he reached a point, you know, he’s had it up to here and he just can’t stand to see one more person. So he takes the gun out of the drawer and there’s a bullet in his brain before he has time to think it over. I wish to God they’d keep those handguns off the market. They truck ’em in by the ton out of the Carolinas. What do you bet that was an unregistered gun?”