'Yes, sir.'
'Have the paper?'
'Right here.' She took out the arrest warrant and gave it to Vail, who put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
'Let's go rattle his cage,' Vail said.
They were at Sundance, a two-storey-high atrium covered with skylights to give the illusion of being outside when the weather was inclement or just too damn cold, as it was on this blustrey February day. The glass partitions covering the large plaza could be opened with the press of a button in the manager's office, weather permitting. It was a popular lunchtime place for downtown workers, serving the best hot dogs east of the Mississippi and mountainous salads for vegetarians. It was located behind one of the city's largest bookstores, and its old-fashioned wrought-iron tables were usually filled by noon with bookworms who bought novels or periodicals and read through lunch in the sunlit piazza.
'You really know how to entertain, Marty,' Paul Rainey said as he doctored two hot dogs with sauerkraut, relish, mustard, ketchup, and onions. He looked down at Parver. 'Does he always entertain this lavishly, Shana?'
'It's all I can afford on the assistant DA's salary,' Vail answered.
'Who're you kidding?' Rainey said. 'You made enough before you took that job to live on the tenderlion forever. I'll bet you've got the first dime you ever made. Hell, you don't own a car and you dress like a damn ragamuffin. Did you know the Lawyers Club was thinking of taking up a collection to buy you a new suit?'
'This
'Cotton and wool. Off the rack. Two hundred tops. You know how much this outfit cost me? Two thou. Barneys.'
Vail bit into his frankfurter and chewed in silence for a minute, then said casually, 'That's more than you're going to make off James Darby.'
Rainey looked up and rolled his eyes. 'Oh, hell, not even gonna wait until we finish this elabourate spread, are ya?' He sighed. 'Okay, Counsellors, what're we doing here?'
'You and I go back almost twenty years, right, Paul?'
'I've never counted.'
'I've seen it from both sides of the street.'
'Forget the endorsements and make your point,' Rainey said.
'Your boy Darby is guilty as sin.'
'Uh.-uh. You gonna take that to the grand jury? That Darby is guilty as sin? I don't think so. And that's all you've got. Look, I don't like him any more than you do, but that doesn't make him a wife killer. So he's a putz. Half the world is a putz.'
'Paul, I'm telling you this guy carefully planned and killed his wife in cold blood. And he did it for the two worst reasons: money and a stripper with a fancy ass and 40-D cup.'
'C'mon, Marty, you fried everybody who screws around on his wife they'd only be ten men left on the planet.'
'The jury'll be back in an hour on this one.'
'What's the matter, you can't wait for the trial?' Rainey said with a laugh. 'You want to try him here over lunch? Maybe we should call over a waiter to act as judge.'
'I'm here in the interest of justice and saving the taxpayers' money,' Vail said calmly.
'Of course you are.'
'Listen a minute. Where we stand in this investigation, we have Darby saying he came in the house, his wife popped three shots at him, he shot her with a shotgun, she knocked one in the ceiling, and he finished the job with the head shot. Isn't that Darby's story?'
'It's what happened.'
'Well, think about that for a minute. Three shots from a .38, a shotgun blast, another .38, another shotgun blast.'
Vail opened his briefcase and took out a small tape recorder. It contained an enhanced reproduction just of Stenner's replay of the shots as Mrs Shunderson said they occurred, with the shotgun blast first. He plugged a set of headphones into the machine and handed it to
