'It's way above me,' he said. 'Way above me.'
'How far,' I said.
'Don't know.'
Miller stood up suddenly. He held himself steady with one hand on the back of the chair.
'Don't feel so good,' he said. 'I'm going.'
He turned and walked to my door with a little wobble in his walk and opened the door and went out without closing it. I didn't try to stop him. Instead I sat and thought about the interesting fact that the more I learned, the less I knew. Then I got up and went to the sink and let the cold water run over the knuckles of my left hand for a while.
Chapter 32
MARTIN QUIRK CALLED me at ten minutes of seven while I was shaving in the shower. I got out with lather on my face and caught it on the third ring before my machine picked up.
'I'm on the sixth level of the parking garage in Quincy Market,' Quirk said. 'I think you should come down.'
'Can I finish shaving?' I said.
'Sure,' Quirk said. 'We'll be here all day.'
Fresh showered, clean shaven, and smelling manfully of some sort of cologne Susan had given me on my birthday, I arrived at the Quincy Market garage in the middle of a traffic jam. A motorcycle cop was trying to steer traffic away from the garage and since a lot of people who drove in from the suburbs didn't know anywhere to go but Quincy Market, there was a high level of frustration, as people turned into Clinton Street and were waved off by the cop.
When it was my turn, I rolled down my window and said, 'Lieutenant Quirk.'
The cop nodded and gestured me into the parking garage.
'Park along the right wall there,' he said. 'Don't pay any attention to the signs.'
He pointed emphatically at a Chevrolet sedan and gestured it down Clinton Street.
'And Quirk's a captain now,' he said.
'Captain Quirk?'
The motorcycle cop grinned. 'Captain Quirk,' he said.
I parked where he told me and ignored the No Parking signs like he said and walked back to the elevator and went up to the sixth floor. Since Quirk was the homicide commander, and there were cop cars and cops all over the building, I pretty well knew what I'd find on the sixth floor. What I didn't know was who.
When I got off the elevator I could see the yellow crime scene tape stretched across the far northwest corner of the garage, and a group of cops, mostly in plainclothes, doing what cops mostly do at crime scenes, which is to stand around. There were only a few cars scattered around the floor. Quirk was standing with his back to me wearing a Harris tweed top coat with the collar up. He had his hands in the pockets of the coat and he was looking down at something on the floor of the garage.
The parking garage walls were only about chest high and the wind, funneled through the open construction, was sharp. I put up my own collar. As I approached the group, one of the plainclothes cops said, 'Hey.'
Quirk looked up and saw me and said, 'Let him through,' and I walked past the other cops and stood beside him. And looked down. It was a dead man, and his name was Tommy Miller.
'Know him?' Quirk said.
'Yeah. State cop named Tommy Miller.'
'He had your address on a piece of paper in his pocket,' Quirk said. 'You know why?'
'Yeah, but it's a long story.'
'Okay, we'll get to it. He'd been punched around before he was shot. You know anything about that?'
'Yeah. It was me did the punching.'
'How about the shooting?'
'Nope. Where'd he get it?'
Quirk settled onto his haunches and turned Miller's head to the left. There was a small puffy hole behind his ear.
'One shot?' I said.
'Yep, no exit wound. Slug must have rattled around in there for a while.'
'Twenty-two?'
'Be my guess. We're looking for a shell casing.'
'Might have been a revolver,' I said.
'Un huh.'
'Might have cleaned up his brass,' I said.
'Un huh.'
