it usually did, blather. Farrell sat with a guy that looked like him, and a woman and two small children. Brian’s mother and father sat across the aisle.
There were maybe eight other people in the church. I didn’t recognize any of them except Quirk, who stood in the back, his hands folded calmly in front of him, his face without expression. The church doors stood open and the gray rain came bleakly down on the black street. Susan held my hand.
After the service, Farrell came out of the church and introduced us to the guy that looked like him. It was his brother. The woman was his brother’s wife, and the kids were Farrell’s nephews.
“My mother and father wouldn’t come,” he said.
“How too bad for them,” Susan said.
Quirk came to stand beside us.
“Thank you for coming, Lieutenant,” Farrell said.
“Sure,” Quirk said.
Farrell moved on with his brother on one side and his sister-in-law on the other. His nephews, small and quiet, frightened by death, probably, each held a parental hand.
“Tough,” Quirk said. “You back from another visit to South Carolina?”
We were standing under an overhang out of the cold rain, which came grimly down.
“Yeah.”
“You got anything?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Quirk frowned.
“What the hell does that mean?” he said.
“Means I don’t know yet.”
Quirk looked at Susan. She smiled like Mona Lisa.
“Christ,” Quirk said to her. “You get better every time I see you.”
“Thank you, Martin,” she said. He looked back at me.
“Call me when you know,” he said, and turned his raincoat collar up and went down the steps to an unmarked police car and drove away. I turned up my collar too, and took Susan’s hand, and walked down the steps and away from the church in the rain, which was cold and hard and without respite.
chapter forty-four
THE MORNING WAS overcast, and hardlooking. I was in my office, thinking about Jefferson, and feeling like Hamlet, but older, when Farrell came in carrying two coffees in a white paper bag. He took them out, handed me one, and sat down.
“It bother you that Stratton was so interested in this case?” he said.
“He wants to be President,” I said.
“And all he was trying to cover up was adultery?”
I shrugged.
“The cover-up was more dangerous to him than what he was trying to cover up,” Farrell said.
“Guys like Stratton don’t think that way. They think about fixing, about putting a new spin on it, about reorganizing it so it comes out their way.”
“He stole most of the Tripps’ money,” Farrell said.
I sat back in my chair.
“Why do you know that and I don’t?” I said.
Farrell was carefully prying the plastic cap off his paper coffee cup, holding it away from him so it wouldn’t spill on him. He got the cover off and blew on the coffee gently for a moment, and then took a swallow. His face was still tight with grief, but there was also a hint of self-satisfaction.
“You been thinking about who killed the woman,” Farrell said. “I been thinking about other stuff like Stratton, like what the hell happened to all that money. Everybody says Mrs. Tripp spent it all, but on what? It’s hard to go through that kind of money at Bloomingdale’s.”
“So you chased Tripp’s expenditures,” I said.
“Yeah. Checks written by him, or her. They had a joint account. His didn’t show us anything unusual. He kept writing them even when there was no money. But you already knew that.”
“Mine bounced,” I said.
“There’s a clue,” Farrell said. He drank some more coffee. “Her checks were more interesting.”
“I didn’t see any of hers when I looked at his checkbook,” I said. “But she’d been dead awhile, probably hadn’t written any.”
“Good point,” Farrell said. “I went back about five years.”
“Tripp didn’t object?”
