He jumped when someone walked into his office. “Hey, Boss.” Shellee blinked. “Thought you were gone.”
“Just wanted to finish up a few things here.”
“I’ve got that stuff you wanted.”
He glanced at it. The title was, “Supplemental reports. SEC case 04-5432.”
“Thanks,” he said absently, staring at his printouts.
“Sure.” She eyed him carefully. “You need anything else?”
“No, go on home... ‘Night.” When she turned away, though, he glanced at the computer screen once more and said, “Wait, Shell. You ever work in Crime Scene?”
“Never did. Bill watches that TV show. It’s icky.”
“You know what I’d have to do to get Crime Scene to look over the house?”
“House?”
“Where the suicide happened. The Benson house in Greeley.”
“The—”
“Suicides. I want Crime Scene to check it out. All they did was test for gunshot residue and take some pictures. I want a complete search. But I don’t know what to do.”
“Something funny about it?”
He explained, “Just looked up a few things. The incident profile was out of range. I think something weird was going on there.”
“I’ll make a call. Ingrid’s still down there, I think.”
She returned to her desk and Tal rocked back in his chair.
The low April sun shot bars of ruddy light into his office, hitting the large, blank wall and leaving a geometric pattern on the white paint. The image put in mind the blood on the walls and couch and carpet of the Bensons’ house. He pictured too the shaky lettering of their note.
Together forever...
Shellee appeared in the doorway. “Sorry, Boss. They said it’s too late to twenty-one-twenty-four it.”
“To?—”
“That’s what they said. They said you need to declare a twenty-one-twenty-four to get Crime Scene in. But you can’t do it now.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Something about it being too contaminated now. You have to do it right away or get some special order from the sheriff himself. Anyway, that’s what they told me, Boss.”
Even though Shellee worked for three other detectives Tal was the only one who received this title — a true endearment, coming from her. She was formal, or chill, with the other cops in direct proportion to the number of times they asked her to fetch coffee or snuck peeks at her ample breasts.
Outside, a voice from the Real Crimes side of the room called out, “Hey, Bear, you get your questionnaire done?” A chortle followed.
Greg LaTour called back, “Naw, I’m taking mine home. Had front-row Knicks tickets but I figured, fuck, it’d be more fun to fill out paperwork all night.”
More laughter.
Shellee’s face hardened into a furious mask. She started to turn but Tal motioned her to stop.
“Hey, guys, tone it down.” The voice was Captain Dempsey’s. “He’ll hear you.”
“Naw,” LaTour called, “Einstein left already. He’s probably home humping his calculator. Who’s up for Sal’s?”
“I’m for that, Bear.”
“Let’s do it...”
Laughter and receding footsteps.
Shellee muttered, “It just frosts me when they talk like that. They’re like kids in the schoolyard.”
True, they were, Tal thought. Math whizzes know a lot about bullies on playgrounds.
But he said, “It’s okay.”
“No, Boss, it’s not okay.”
“They live in a different world,” Tal said. “I understand.”
“Understand how people can be cruel like that? Well, I surely don’t.”
“You know that thirty-four percent of homicide detectives suffer from depression? Sixty-four percent get divorced. Twenty-eight percent are substance abusers.”
“You’re using those numbers to excuse ‘em, Boss. Don’t do it. Don’t let ’em get away with it.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and started down the hall, calling “Have a nice weekend, Boss. See you Monday.”
“And,” Tal continued, “six point three percent kill themselves before retirement.” Though he doubted she could hear.
The residents of Hamilton, New York, were educated, pleasant, reserved and active in politics and the arts. In business too; they’d chosen to live here because the enclave was the closest exclusive Westbrook community to Manhattan. Industrious bankers and lawyers could be at their desks easily by eight o’clock in the morning.
The cul-de-sac of Montgomery Way, one of the nicest streets in Hamilton, was in fact home to two bankers and one lawyer, as well as one retired couple. These older residents, at number 205, had lived in their house for twenty-four years. It was a six thousand-square-foot stone Tudor with leaded-glass windows and a shale roof, surrounded by five acres of clever landscaping.
Samuel Ellicott Whitley had attended law school while his wife worked in the advertising department of Gimbel’s, the department store near the harrowing intersection of Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and Thirty-Fourth Street. He’d finished school in ’57 and joined Brown, Lathrop & Soames on Broad Street. The week after he was named partner, Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter, and after a brief hiatus, resumed classes at Columbia’s graduate business school. She later took a job at one of the country’s largest cosmetics companies and rose to be a senior vice president.
But the lives of law and business were behind the Whitleys now and they’d moved into the life of retirement as gracefully and comfortably as she stepped into her Dior gowns and he into his Tripler’s tux.
Tonight, a cool, beautiful April Sunday, Elizabeth hung up the phone after a conversation with her daughter, Sandra, and piled the dinner dishes in the sink. She poured herself another vodka and tonic. She stepped outside onto the back patio, looking out over the azure dusk crowning the hemlocks and pine. She stretched and sipped her drink, feeling tipsy and completely content.
She wondered what Sam was up to. Just after they’d finished dinner he’d said that he’d had to pick up something. Normally she would have gone with him. She worried because of his illness. Afraid not only that his undependable heart would give out but that he might faint at the wheel or drive off the road because of the medication. But he’d insisted that she stay home; he was only going a few miles.
Taking a long sip of her drink, she cocked her head, hearing an automobile engine and the hiss of tires on the asphalt. She looked toward the driveway. But she couldn’t see anything. Was it Sam? The car, though, had not come up the main drive but had turned off the road at the service entrance and eased through the side yard, out of sight of the house. She squinted but with the foliage and the dim light of dusk she couldn’t see who it was.
Logic told her she should be concerned. But Elizabeth was comfortable sitting here with her glass in hand, under a deep blue evening sky. Feeling the touch of cashmere on her skin, happy, warm... No, life was perfect. What could there possibly be to worry about?
Three nights of the week — or as Tal would sometimes phrase it, 42.8751 percent of his evenings — he’d go out. Maybe on a date, maybe to have drinks and dinner with friends, maybe to his regular poker game (the others in the quintet enjoyed his company, though they’d learned it could be disastrous to play with a man who could remember cards photographically and calculate the odds of drawing to a full house like a computer).
The remaining 57.1249 percent of his nights he’d stay home and lose himself in the world of mathematics.