They didn't ask who I was to be giving orders. I guess they assumed I was a cop and that I probably ranked them pretty well. The plainclothes guy I'd been talking to raised his eyebrows at me.
'Prints?'
I nodded. 'I want to know who he is, and he wasn't carrying any I.D.'
'You bothered to look?'
'I bothered to look.'
'Not supposed to, you know.'
'Yes, I know. But I wanted to know who would take the trouble to kill me.'
'Just a mugger, no?'
I shook my head. 'He was following me around the other day. And he was waiting for me tonight, and he called me by name. Your average mugger doesn't research his victims all that carefully.'
'Well, they're printing him, so we'll see what we come up with. Why would anybody want to kill you?'
I let the question go by. I said, 'I don't know if he's local or not. I'm sure somebody'll have a sheet on him, but he may never have taken a fall in New York.'
'Well, we'll take a look and see what we got. I don't think he's a virgin, do you?'
'Not likely.'
'Washington'll have him if we don't. Want to come over to the station?
Probably a few of the boys you know from the old days.'
'Sure,' I said. 'Gagliardi still making the coffee?'
His face clouded. 'He died,' he said. 'Just about two years ago. Heart attack, he was just sitting at his desk and he bought it.'
'I never heard. That's a shame.'
'Yeah, he was all right. Made good coffee, too.'
Chapter 16
My preliminary statement was sketchy. The man who took it, a detective named Birnbaum, noticed as much. I'd simply said that I had been assaulted by a person unknown to me at a specific place and time, that my assailant had been armed with a knife, that I had been unarmed, and that I had taken defensive measures which had involved throwing my assailant in such a way that, though I had not so intended, the ensuing fall had resulted in his death.
'This punk knew you by name,' Birnbaum said. 'That's what you said before.'
'Right.'
'That's not in here.' He had a receding hairline, and he paused to rub where the hair had previously been. 'You also told Lacey he'd been following you around past couple of days.'
'I noticed him once I'm sure of, and I think I saw him a few other times.'
'Uh-huh. And you want to hang around while we trace the prints and try to figure out who he was.'
'Right.'
'You didn't wait to see if we turned up any I.D. on him. Which means you probably looked and saw he wasn't carrying anything.'
'Maybe it was just a hunch,' I suggested. 'Man goes out to murder somebody, he doesn't carry identification around. Just an assumption on my part.'
He raised his eyebrows for a minute, then shrugged. 'We can let it go at that, Matt. Lot of times I check out an apartment when nobody's home, and wouldn't you know it that they got careless and left the door open, because of course I wouldn't think of letting myself in with a loid.'
'Because that would be breaking-and-entering.'
'And we wouldn't want that, would we?' He grinned, then picked up my statement again. 'There's things you know about this bird that you don't want to tell. Right?'
'No. There's things I don't know.'
'I don't get it.'
I took one of his cigarettes from the pack on the desk. If I wasn't careful I'd get the habit again. I spent some time lighting up, getting the words in the right order.
I said, 'You're going to be able to clear a case off the books, I think. A homicide.'
'Give me a name.'
'Not yet.'
'Look, Matt—'
I drew on the cigarette. I said, 'Let me do it my way for a little while. I'll fill in part of it for you, but nothing goes on paper for the time being. You've got enough already to wrap what happened tonight as justifiable homicide,
