'She's all broken up with this Piper's dying,' said Greensleeves, 'and it kind of surprises me you aren't grief-stricken about the late Mrs Hutchmeyer.'
'I am,' said Hutchmeyer, 'I just don't show my feelings is all.'
'So I noticed,' said Greensleeves. 'Well you'd better go comfort your alibi. We'll send out for some clothes.'
Hutchmeyer crossed to the bench in his blanket. 'I'm sorry...' he began but Sonia was on her feet.
'Sorry?' she shrieked, 'you murdered my darling Peter and now you say you're sorry?'
'Murdered him?' said Hutchmeyer. 'All I did was...'
Greensleeves left them to it and sent out for some clothes. 'We can forget this case,' he told the lieutenant, 'this is Federal stuff. Terrorists in Maine. I mean who the hell would believe it?'
'You don't think it was the Mafia then?'
'What's it matter who it was? We aren't going to get anywhere to solving it is all I know. The FBI can handle this case. I know when I'm out of my depth.'
In the end Hutchmeyer, dressed in a dark suit that didn't fit him properly, and the still inconsolable Sonia were driven to the airport and took the company plane to New York.
They landed to find that MacMordie had laid on the media. Hutchmeyer lumbered down the steps and made a statement.
'Gentlemen,' he said brokenly, 'this has been a double tragedy for me. I have lost the most wonderful, warm-hearted little wife a man ever had. Forty years of happy marriage lie...' He broke off to blow his nose. 'It's just terrible. I can't express the full depths of my feelings.'
'What about this Piper?' someone asked. Hutchmeyer drew on his reserves of deep feelings.
'Peter Piper was a young novelist of unsurpassed brilliance. His passing has been a great blow to the world of letters.' He paraded his handkerchief again and was prompted by MacMordie.
'Say something about his novel,' he whispered.
Hutchmeyer stopped sniffling and said something about Pause O Men for the Virgin published by Hutchmeyer Press price seven dollars ninety and available at all...Behind him Sonia wept audibly and had to be escorted to the waiting car. She was still weeping when they drove off.
'A terrible tragedy,' said Hutchmeyer, still under the influence of his own oratory, 'really terrible.'
He was interrupted by Sonia who was pummelling MacMordie.
'Murderer,' she screamed, 'it was all your fault. You told all those crazy terrorists he was in the KGB and the IRA and a homosexual and now look what's happened!'
'What the hell's going on?' yelled MacMordie, 'I didn't do...'
'The fucking cops up in Maine think it was the Symbionese Liberation Army or The Minutemen or someone,' said Hutchmeyer, 'so now we've got another problem.'
'I can see that,' said MacMordie as Sonia blacked his eye. Finally, refusing Hutchmeyer's offer of hospitality, she insisted on being driven to the Gramercy Park Hotel.
'Don't worry,' said Hutchmeyer as she got out, 'I'm going to see that Baby and Piper go to their Maker with all the trimmings. Flowers, a cortege, a bronze casket...'
'Two,' said MacMordie, 'I mean they wouldn't fit...'
Sonia turned on them. 'They're dead,' she screamed. 'Dead. Doesn't that mean anything to you? Haven't you any consciences? They were real people, real living people and now they're dead and all you can talk about is funerals and caskets and '
'Well we've got to recover the bodies first,' said MacMordie practically, 'I mean there's no use talking about caskets, we don't have no bodies.'
'Why don't you just shut your mouth?' Hutchmeyer told him, but Sonia had fled into the hotel.
