'Good point,' Susan said, and picked up her cup of cold coffee and drank it just as if it were hot.
I was in Susan's kitchen cleaning up breakfast when the phone rang. It was Quirk.
'Washburn's confessed,' he said.
'Not surprising,' I said.
'He confessed to being the Red Rose killer,' Quirk said.
I didn't say anything for a minute.
'Yeah,' Quirk said, 'me too.'
'It's bullshit,' I said.
'I think he did his wife,' Quirk said. 'I don't believe the rest.'
'What's the chain of command think?'
'Chain of command is so happy to have an arrest, they'd buy Daisy Duck for it if they had a confession,' Quirk said.
'What about the guy that left the rose with Susan?' I said.
'Nobody cares about him, they don't want to hear about him,' Quirk said.
'You're sticking close?'
'For the moment,' I said. 'Hawk's coming by around ten.'
'When he gets there, come over to my office,' Quirk said.
I put the dishes in the dishwasher and wiped off the counter and sat to read the Globe. They didn't have it yet. But they would. The TV people would get it first probably, but everyone would have it soon and another ring would be added to the circus.
Hawk strolled in at 9:59. He was always on time. In fact he always did everything he said he'd do. He was carrying a gym bag.
'Cops got a confession,' I said.
Hawk put the gym bag on the counter in the kitchen.
'Quirk like it?' Hawk said.
'No,' I said.
'Tell him about the guy ran away from you the other night?'
'Yeah.'
'How Susan going to deal with it?'
'She's got a thirty-two in the desk drawer and you or me sitting around up here.'
'No names?'
'No.'
Hawk nodded. He opened his gym bag and took out some audio tapes, a paperback copy of Common Ground, and a copy of Ring magazine. He put the tapes in a neat pile beside Susan's stereo, put Common Ground on the coffee table next to the couch, took his gun out of the shoulder holster and placed it beside Common Ground, and settled back on the couch with Ring.
'You going to see Quirk?' he said.
'Yeah. You know where everything is?'
'Un huh.'
It was one of those deceptive days in April when it seems like spring and the wind is a velvet conceit on the lingering reality of winter. I parked on Berkeley Street by a sign that said POLICE VEHICLES ONLY and went up to Quirk's office. Belson was there.
'Washburn has it all about right,' Quirk said when I sat down. 'The rope's a little different. Always before it was cotton. This time it's that plastic stuff you have to melt the ends when you cut it. But the tape's the same, the way she's tied is the same. She was shot the same way. But there's no semen.'
'Same gun?'
'No. Same caliber, but not the same gun.'
'It was all in the papers,' Belson said. 'I checked, everything tape, way the rope was wound, caliber gun, how she was shot, all of it. Anyone could know.'
'You do the questioning?' I said to Quirk.
'Me and Frank and twenty others. It's hard to conduct a good interrogation in a case like this.'
I nodded. 'Everybody that outranks you has to get in on it and maybe claim he broke the case.'
'Place was like a fucking cake sale,' Belson said. 'The fucking commissioner was there, a guy from the mayor's office.'
