“Well… please don’t all of you look at me. I get really, really, really nervous if everybody looks at me.”
Nobody said anything. No one looked away. Mary licked her lips and looked at Larson again and then at Rita. Rita nodded encouragingly. I had known Rita a long time. I knew she wanted to jump up, take Mary by the neck, and shake her like a dust mop, but to the unpracticed eye Rita’s nod looked supportive and kind.
“Well, I really… Nathan wasn’t as rich as everybody thinks he was,” Mary said.
She looked around at us. None of us spoke.
“Some kind of trouble at the bank, I think,” Mary said. “And he would always tell me even if things got bad, I’d be all right because he had so much life insurance.”
“How much?” Russo said.
“Ten million dollars.”
“A lot,” Russo said.
“And when I came in and found him.”
“Found him?”
“Dead. Really, all I could think about was that insurance companies won’t pay off on suicide.”
“Suicide?” Quirk said.
“Yes. I thought, my God, I won’t get a dime.”
“Why did you think it was suicide,” Quirk said.
“Well, I mean, really, there he was, the gun was right beside his hand.”
“Gun?”
“Yes. That gun you were talking about, the forty-something or other. The one I gave to Roy.”
“You found your husband dead?” Russo said. “With a gun by his side and you took the gun and gave it to Roy Levesque?”
“Yes.”
“And you wanted him to get rid of it?” Quirk said.
“Yes. I didn’t want the insurance company to know. I needed the money.”
Everyone in the room was quiet.
“How long had he held the policy?” Russo said.
“He said he had it since he was a small boy.”
“You check the policy?” Russo said.
“Oh, no. I really, really don’t read things like that. They’re really…”
Russo nodded and looked at Rita as he spoke to Mary.
“Most policies have an exclusion period, generally two years,” Russo said. “After that they pay off on suicide like any other death.”
Mary stared at him as if he were speaking in tongues. “I needed the money,” she said.
I saw Rita sneak a long breath of air. “Okay?” she said to Quirk.
Quirk looked at me. “You got anything to offer?” he said.
“What kind of trouble was going on at the bank?” I said.
“Oh, I really don’t know anything about that kind of thing,” Mary said. “He brought Mr. Conroy in to help fix it.”
I nodded. “You don’t know where Conroy is now, do you?”
“At the bank, I guess.”
“Just while we’re all here,” I said, “could I clean up one other little confusion? How’d you meet your husband, Mrs. Smith?”
She smiled at Larson Graff.
“Larson introduced us,” she said.
“So he knew your husband prior to your marriage?”
“Excuse me?”
“Graff and your husband knew each other before you married your husband,” I said.
“Oh, yes, of course.”
I looked at Graff and waited. He was looking alertly at the tabletop. Nobody else spoke.
“That so?” I said to Larson.
“I don’t, I guess…” He frowned at the table. “I don’t really recall.”
“You told me that you met him because he called you on behalf of his wife,” I said.
