I told him I'd invited my driver in to join us, and moments later there was a knock on the door and I opened it for Jason. I didn't know what the three of us were going to talk about, but that settled itself when Havemeyer determined that Jason was a student at Western Reserve.
That led to a conversation about the college's football team, which turned easily enough into a spirited discussion of Cleveland's pro team, the Browns, and their perfidious owner's decision to pack the franchise off to Baltimore.
'The nicest thing I can find to say about that man,' Havemeyer said, 'is that he's an utter son of a bitch.'
That led me almost inevitably to an analysis of the character and probable ancestry of Walter O'Malley, and gave rise to a more theoretical discussion of just what a team was, and the extent to which athletes belonged to it, or it to its fans. This would have been interesting enough all by itself, but circumstance gave it a special spin. The room was thick with two conversations, the one we were having and the one we were choosing not to have. The former was about sport and its illusions, the latter about homicide and its consequences.
Jason made a couple of phone calls to cancel his plans for the evening. I called Amtrak to book two Cleveland- to-New York seats on the Lake Shore Limited, then called Elaine in New York and got to hear my own voice on our answering machine; I left word that I'd be back in the city sometime the following afternoon. When I got back to the living room, Jason and Havemeyer were weighing prospects for dinner. Jason offered to go out for pizza, and Havemeyer said it was quicker and simpler to have it delivered. He made the phone call himself, and the kid from Domino's was there well within the statutory twenty-minute time limit. Havemeyer drank a bottle of Amstel Light with his pizza, while Jason and I had Cokes. I had the sense that Jason would have preferred a beer, and wondered what had kept him from taking one. Did he feel it was inappropriate to drink on duty? Or had his uncle described me as a sober alcoholic, leading him to assume it was bad form to drink in front of me?
* * *
After we'd eaten, Havemeyer remembered that he ought to pack for the trip. I went into the bedroom with him and leaned against the wall while he took his time selecting articles of clothing and arranging them in his suitcase. When he was done he closed it and hefted it and made a face. He said he'd been meaning to get one of those suitcases on wheels you saw everybody using these days, but he hadn't gotten around to it.
'But I don't suppose I'll be making many more trips,' he said.
I asked if the suitcase was heavy.
'It's not too bad,' he said. 'I've got more clothes in here than the last time I went, but I don't have the gun, and that was heavier than you'd think. That reminds me. What should I do about the gun?'
'You still have it?'
'I suppose that's foolish, isn't it? I was going to get rid of it. Drop it down a sewer, or heave it into the lake. But I kept it. I thought I might, oh, need it.'
'Where is it?'
'In the attic. Do you want me to get it? Or should I just leave it where it is?'
I considered the question. There was a time when the answer would have been obvious, but a lot of court decisions had changed the rules regarding admissibility of evidence. Would it be better to leave the gun where it was for the time being, so that it could be found in due course after a proper warrant had been obtained?
Probably, I decided, but I weighed that against the possibility that someone would break into the house and steal the gun in the meantime, and concluded it was better to have the weapon in my possession.
Even if some judge disallowed it, along with his taped confession and a few other things, it seemed to me there ought to be more than enough hard evidence to make a case against him.
He climbed up into the attic crawl space and came down holding the gun wrapped in a red-and-white- checkered cloth. The dish towel, I guess it must have been. He presented it to me like that, and I could smell the gun without unwrapping it. He hadn't cleaned it since firing it, and it still smelled of the gunshots that had killed Byron Leopold.
I went out to Jason's car and locked it in my suitcase.
* * *
We killed time playing hearts, and Havemeyer made another pot of tea, and Jason drove us to the station early, getting us there almost an hour before train time. I gave him some money, and he told me he thought he ought to be paying me for the experience. I told him not to be silly and he put the money in his pocket.
Havemeyer insisted on buying our train tickets, even as he had insisted on paying for the pizza. 'Two one-way tickets,' he announced.
'You won't be coming back to Cleveland. And neither will I.'
The train was crowded and we couldn't get two seats together. I took the conductor aside and told him I was a private detective escorting a material witness back to New York. He got a fellow to switch his seat, and I gave Havemeyer the window and sat down next to him.
We talked for an hour or so. He wanted to know what to expect, and I told him as much as I knew. I told him he would want an attorney, even if all he was going to do was cooperate with the police and plead guilty. He said there was a man in Cleveland he'd used in the past, but the man didn't take criminal cases, and anyway he was in Cleveland.
'But I suppose he could recommend someone,' he said. I said that was very likely true, and that I could recommend several New York lawyers.
He said he supposed he'd be spending the rest of his life in prison. I said that wasn't necessarily true, that he could very likely plead to a lesser charge than murder two, that a lawyer could argue that the strain of his wife's death constituted some sort of mitigating circumstances, and that his previously unblemished record (not even a traffic violation, aside from a couple of parking tickets) would certainly work to his advantage.
'You'll have to go to prison,' I said, 'but it'll probably be minimum-security, and the bulk of the other cons will be white-collar criminals, not child molesters and strong-arm thugs. I'm not saying you'll like it, but it won't be some hellhole out of The Shawshank Redemption.
