'All right, for Christ's sake.'
'If you want to explore all the possibilities—'
'I said it was just off the wall. You watch what they do on Mission Impossible and you wonder how criminals are so stupid in real life. So what the hell, a crook can watch television too, and maybe he picks up an idea. But you heard him talking, and we can forget tape recorders, and that settles that.'
Actually, I hadn't heard Prager talking, but it was a lot simpler to say that I had. Heaney wanted to explore possibilities; all I wanted to do was get out of there.
'How do you fit into this, Matt? You working for him?'
I shook my head. 'Checking out some references.'
'Checking on Prager?'
'No. On somebody who used him for a reference, and my client wanted a fairly intensive check. I saw Prager last week and I was in the neighborhood so I dropped in to clear up a couple of points.'
'Who's the subject of the investigation?'
'What's the difference? Somebody who worked with him eight or ten years ago. Nothing to do with him knocking himself off.'
'You didn't really know him, then. Prager.'
'Met him twice. Once, come to think of it, since I didn't really get to see much of him today. And I talked briefly with him on the phone.'
'He in some kind of trouble?'
'Not any more. I can't tell you much, Jim. I didn't know the guy or much about his situation. He seemed depressed and agitated. As a matter of fact, he impressed me as thinking the world was after him. He was very suspicious the first time I saw him, as if I was part of a plot to harm him.'
'Paranoia.'
'Like that, yes.'
'Yeah, it all fits together. Business troubles and the feeling everything's closing in on you, and maybe he thought you were going to hassle him today, or maybe he reached a point, you know, he's had it up to here and he just can't stand to see one more person. So he takes the gun out of the drawer and there's a bullet in his brain before he has time to think it over. I wish to God they'd keep those handguns off the market. They truck 'em in by the ton out of the Carolinas. What do you bet that was an unregistered gun?'
'No bet.'
'He probably thought he was buying it for protection. Little rinky-dink Spanish gun, you could hit a mugger six times in the chest and not stop him, and all it's good for is blowing your brains out. Had a guy about a year ago, it wasn't even good for that. Decided to kill himself and only did half the job and he's a vegetable now. Now he oughta kill himself, the life he's got left to him, but he can't even move his hands.'
He lit another cigarette. 'You want to drop around tomorrow and dictate a statement?'
I told him I could do better than that. I used Shari's typewriter and knocked out a short statement with all the facts in the right places. He read it over and nodded. 'You know the form,' he said. 'Saves us all some time.'
I signed what I'd typed up, and he added it to the papers on his clipboard. He shuffled through them and said, 'His wife's where? Westchester. Thank Christ for that. I'll phone the cops up there and let them have the fun of telling her her husband's dead.'
I caught myself just in time to keep from volunteering the information that Prager had a daughter in Manhattan. It wasn't something I was likely to know. We shook hands, and he said he wished Finch would get back. 'The bastard scored again,' he said. 'He figured to. Just so he don't stick around for seconds. And he might. He really likes the spades.'
'I'm sure he'll tell you all about it.'
'He always does.'
Chapter 13
I went to a bar, but stayed only long enough to throw down two double shots, one right after the other.
There was a time factor involved. Bars remain open until four in the morning, but most churches close up shop by six or seven. I walked over to Lexington and found a church I couldn't remember having been to before. I didn't notice the name of it. Our Lady of Perpetual Bingo, probably.
They were having some sort of service, but I didn't pay any attention to it. I lit a few candles and stuffed a couple of dollars in the slot, then took a seat in the rear and silently repeated three names over and over. Jacob Jablon, Henry Prager, Estrellita Rivera, three names, three candles for three corpses.
During the worst times after I shot and killed Estrellita Rivera, I had been unable to keep my mind from going over and over what had happened that night. I kept trying to repeal time and change the ending, like an antic projectionist reversing the film and drawing the bullet back into the barrel of the gun. In the new version that I wanted to superimpose on reality, all my shots were on target. There were no ricochets, or if there were they spent themselves harmlessly, or Estrellita spent an extra minute picking out peppermints in the candy store and wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time, or—
There was a poem I'd had to read in high school, and it had nagged at me from somewhere in the back of my mind until one day I went to the library and ran it down. Four lines from Omar Khayyam: The moving finger writes, and having writ
Moves on. Nor all your piety and wit
