Chapter 12
If Shari hadn't known my name, I might have left. Perhaps not; cop instincts die hard if they die at all, and I had spent too many years despising those reluctant witnesses who slipped off into the shadows to feel comfortable playing the role myself. Nor would it have sat well to duck out on a girl in her condition.
But the impulse was surely present. I looked at Henry Prager, his body slumped over his desk, his features contorted in death, and I knew that I was looking at a man I had killed. His finger had pulled the trigger, but I'd put the gun in his hand by playing my game a little too well.
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 —'
