“Happy to. It’s comin’ outa your budget, Detective,” the man said cheerfully. “Be about ten, fifteen minutes.”
“Thanks.”
As he waited for the results on the gun, Tal opened his briefcase and noticed the three letters Sandra Whitley had in her purse at her parents’ house. Putting on a pair of latex gloves once again, he ripped open the three envelopes and examined the contents.
The first one contained a bill from their lawyer for four hours of legal work, performed that month. The project, the bill summarized, was for “estate planning services.”
Did he mean redoing the will? Was this another common denominator? Metzer had said that the Bensons had just redone theirs.
The second letter was an insurance form destined for the Cardiac Support Center at Westbrook Hospital, where Sam had been a patient.
Nothing unusual here.
But then he opened the third letter.
He sat back in his chair, looking at the ceiling then down at the letter once more.
Debating.
Then deciding that he didn’t have any choice. When you’re writing a mathematical proof you go anywhere the numbers take you. Tal rose and walked across the office, to the Real Crimes side of the pen. He leaned into an open door and knocked on the jamb. Greg LaTour was sitting back in his chair, boots up. He was reading a document. “Fucking liar,” he muttered and put a large check mark next to one of the paragraphs. Looking up, he cocked an eyebrow.
Humping his calculator...
Tal tried to be pleasant. “Greg. You got a minute?”
“Just.”
“I want to talk to you about the case.”
“Case?” The man frowned. “Which case?”
“The Whitleys.”
“Who?”
“The suicides.”
“From Sunday? Yeah, okay. Drew a blank. I don’t think of suicides as cases.” LaTour’s meaty hand grabbed another piece of paper. He looked down at it.
“You said that the cleaning lady’d probably been there? She’d left the glove prints? And the tire treads.”
It didn’t seem that he remembered at first. Then he nodded. “And?”
“Look.” He showed LaTour the third letter he’d found at the Whitleys. It was a note to Esmerelda Constanzo, the Whitleys’ cleaning lady, thanking her for her years of help and saying they wouldn’t be needing her services any longer. They’d enclosed the check that LaTour had spotted in the register.
“They’d put the check in the mail,” Tal pointed out. “That means she wasn’t there the day they died. Somebody else wore the gloves. And I got to thinking about it? Why would a cleaning lady wear kitchen gloves to clean the rest of the house? Doesn’t make sense.”
LaTour shrugged. His eyes dipped to the document on his desk and then returned once more to the letter Tal held.
The statistician added, “And that means the car wasn’t hers either. The tread marks. Somebody else was there around the time they died.”
“Well, Tal—”
“Couple other things,” he said quickly. “Both the Whitleys had high amounts of a prescription drug in their bloodstream. Some kind of narcotic. Luminux. But there were no prescription bottles for it in their house. And their lawyer’d just done some estate work for them. Maybe revising their wills.”
“You gonna kill yourself, you gonna revise your will. That ain’t very suspicious.”
“But then I met the daughter.”
“Their daughter?”
“She broke into the house, looking for something. She’d pocketed the mail but she might’ve been looking for something else. Maybe she got scared when she heard we didn’t buy the suicide—”
“You. Not we.”
Tal continued, “And she wanted to get rid of any evidence about the Luminux. I didn’t search her. I didn’t think about it at the time.”
“What’s this with the drugs? They didn’t OD.”
“Well, maybe she got them doped up, had them change their will and talked them into killing themselves.”
“Yeah, right,” LaTour muttered. “That’s outa some bad movie.”
Tal shrugged. “When I mentioned murder she freaked out.”
“Murder? Why’d you mention murder?” He scratched his huge belly, looking for the moment just like his nickname.
“I meant murder-suicide. The husband turning the engine on.”
LaTour gave a grunt — Tal hadn’t realized that you could make a sound like that condescending.
“And, you know, she had this attitude.”
“Well, now, Tal, you did send her parents to the county morgue. You know what they do to you there, don’tcha? Knives and saws. That’s gotta piss the kid off a little, you know.”
“Yes, she was pissed. But mostly, I think, ‘cause I was there, checking out what’d happened. And you know what she didn’t seem upset about?”
“What’s that?”
“Her parents. Them dying. She seemed to be crying. But I couldn’t tell. It could’ve been an act.”
“She was in shock. Skirts get that way.”
Tal persisted, “Then I checked on the first couple. The Bensons? They were cremated right after they died and their estate liquidated in a day or two.”
“Liquidated?” LaTour lifted an eyebrow and finally delivered a comment that was neither condescending nor sarcastic. “And cremated that fast, hm? Seems odd, yeah. I’ll give you that.”
“And the Bensons’ lawyer told me something else. They were atheists, both of them. But their suicide note said they’d be together forever or something like that. Atheists aren’t going to say that. I’m thinking maybe they might’ve been drugged too. With that Luminux.”
“What does their doctor?—”
“No, he didn’t prescribed it. But maybe somebody slipped it to them. Their suicide note was unsteady too, sloppy, just like the Whitleys’.”
“What’s the story on their doctor?”
“I haven’t got that far yet.”
“Maybe, maybe, maybe.” LaTour squinted. “But that gardener we talked to at the Benson place? He said they’d been boozing it up. You did the blood work on the Whitleys. They been drinking?”
“Not too much... Oh, one other thing. I called their cell phone company and checked the phone records — the Whitleys’. They received a call from a pay phone forty minutes before they died. Two minutes long. Just enough time to see if they’re home and say you’re going to stop by. And who calls from pay phones anymore? Everybody’s got cells, right?”
Reluctantly LaTour agreed with this.
“Look at it, Greg: Two couples, both rich, live five miles from each other. Both of ’em in the country club set. Both husbands have heart disease. Two murder-suicides a few days apart. What do you think about that?”
In a weary voice LaTour asked, “Outliers, right?”
“Exactly.
“You’re thinking the bitch—”
“Who?” Tal asked.
“The daughter.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m not gonna quote you in the press, Tal.”
“Okay,” he conceded, “she’s a bitch.”
“You’re thinking she’s got access to her folks, there’s money involved. She’s doing something funky with the will or insurance.”
“It’s a theorem.”
“A what?” LaTour screwed up his face.
“It’s a hunch is what I’m saying.”
“Hunch. Okay. But you brought up the Bensons. The Whitley daughter isn’t going to off them now, is she? I mean, why would she?”
Tal shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s the Bensons’ goddaughter and she was in their will too. Or maybe her father was going into some deal with Benson that’d tie up all the estate money so the daughter’d lose out and she had to kill them both.”