“Nothing?”
“They’ve done investigations on everybody who was there that night. They looked for anything odd at all: old gigs as witnesses or jurors, drug problems, gambling problems, debts, boundary disputes. They worked on the restaurant owner, rival establishments, distributors of liquor, food, and linen. Nothing.”
Prescott said, “I still think Cushner’s the victim.”
“Oh, he’s the victim,” Millikan agreed. “Got to be.”
Prescott stirred in his seat. “I appreciate your coming to tell me that the cops have eliminated a few things. Anything helps.”
Millikan said, “You could wait for them. They’ll find out who hired this guy. They may not be able to prove it, but they’ll figure it out.”
“Probably,” said Prescott. “Someday.”
“I’m doing my best to help them. The minute we get it, I’ll tell you.” Millikan looked as though he were trying to make himself understood in a foreign language. “You don’t have to do it this way.”
Prescott said, “If you do find out, I’ll have a choice, won’t I?”
The waitress stopped at their table, picked up Millikan’s glass, and set a napkin in front of Prescott. “Another?” she asked, and Millikan nodded. “And what can I get you, sir?”
“Nothing, thanks,” said Prescott. He was staring at Millikan. “I’ve got to do some driving tonight.”
As she disappeared, Prescott leaned forward. “Do me a favor. Go home. This isn’t what you do.”
Millikan pushed the envelope across the table. “I brought you this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s why I came. The lieutenant sent me everything: copies of every report you don’t already have, copies of all thirteen autopsies, every word the cops wrote down. It’s all in there. I didn’t want to mail it to some hotel and find out you’d already checked out.”
Prescott pulled it across the table onto his lap, but he didn’t open it. He looked into Millikan’s tired, rheumy eyes.
“Thank you.” He opened his folded newspaper and pushed a single stiff sheet of paper to Millikan.
Millikan turned it over and looked at the glossy surface of the photograph. In the dim light of the bar, he couldn’t see the picture as clearly as he wanted to; his eyes hungrily traced the outlines. He could see this was a young man with dark hair, small, regular features, a thin nose and lips. The features that were unusual were the eyes. They made him want to hurry to the lobby and hold the picture under the light. They were cold, but they were not the dead, distant eyes of certain killers he had met in his work over the years. They were bright with an inner life that absolutely contradicted the expression of the lips, the unlined, untroubled forehead. It was a frightening picture. Millikan raised his eyes to meet Prescott’s.
“That’s all I have to give you in return just now,” said Prescott. “If you see anybody that looks even a little bit like that, run like hell.”
“Have you given this to the police?”
“No, but they’ve got nothing to worry about. He hasn’t seen them on television. He has seen you.”
Millikan watched Prescott step away from the table and disappear into the lobby.
It was two A.M. Prescott had read the police reports from the night of the shooting, the notes from the interviews and inquiries they had made about each of the victims. Then he had scanned the autopsy reports to see if there was anything about any of the bodies that would change his impression of what had happened in Louisville. There were surprises. They all concerned the young couple who had been killed together near the front of the restaurant.
The man’s corpse had been lying on top of the woman’s, the man obviously attempting to shield her from the shooting with his own body. The first story had been that the killer had stood over them and fired two times into the man’s back, so that the bullets passed through him into her. But the autopsy on the man said he had one shot through the back, one through the back of the head. The woman had been shot three times—the two rounds that had passed through the man first, and once through her right side, just under the arm.
The police had interviewed members of both victims’ families, a few friends, and the people who had worked with them. Nobody had been aware that this man and this woman had ever met each other. They had been in a small, intimate restaurant together for a late dinner, and when trouble had started, the woman had not cowered in a corner somewhere, and the man had neither fought nor run. He had thrown himself over her to keep her from being . . . Prescott stopped. Maybe she had already been hit.
He worked his way back through the police interviews. The man, Gary Finch, was unmarried, age twenty- eight. He worked as an auto mechanic for the Ford dealership down the street from the restaurant. He had showered, dressed in a coat and tie, and gone there for a late supper after work about twice a week.
Prescott looked at the papers on the woman to verify his first impression. She was Donna Halsey, age thirty- four. She was a stockbroker in the Louisville office of Dennison-Armistead. Prescott had a suspicion that began to grow as he scanned the interviews with people who knew her. It wasn’t what they said that interested him—none of them seemed to know anything—but who they were. Her boss was a vice president. Her brother was a senior partner in a law firm that the local cops seemed to think was a big deal. Her friends, male and female, were all professional people of some kind—a pediatrician, an officer in a bank. She didn’t seem to know anybody who wasn’t about as well connected as you could be in a place like Louisville without owning a whole lot of land with horses on it.
Prescott went back to the interviews about the car mechanic. His friends all seemed to be guys who watched games with him, went fishing, went bowling. The cops had even gone to his high school and talked to a teacher and a guidance counselor.
Everybody used the word “nice.” They talked about his sense of fun or his good nature. There were a couple of people who used the word “decent,” as though to set him apart from somebody who was indecent. Everybody said he worked hard, but nobody said he was especially bright. He had no rap sheet with the local cops. Prescott turned to the autopsy again. He looked at the angles of the two shots, at the pictures of the entry and exit wounds. The coroner had agreed with Millikan and Prescott: he had been lying on the woman, and gotten shot at close range from above.
The exit wound in the face was so bad that a picture that had been taken while he was alive had been added to the file, so that the coroner could tell what he had looked like before. Prescott studied it for a moment, and his suspicion hardened. Prescott had been holding on to the possibility that the upper-class, educated, wealthy professional woman had taken her car in to the dealership to be fixed, seen this nice, manly young guy with a strong jaw, piercing eyes, and whatever else she liked. She would have said to herself, “Aw, what the hell,” and gotten together with him, if only for a one-nighter. That would have explained why none of her friends had been aware of him. But Gary Finch was a nice guy, a steady guy, a funny guy, and at least once in his life, a brave guy. He was not a good-looking guy. He had a small, weak jaw that accentuated his double chin, a nose that had been broken a couple of times, and small, close-set eyes.
Prescott looked at Donna Halsey’s photograph. She looked better in her autopsy photograph than most of the women he had seen alive on the streets in Louisville. She was slim, very blond, with hair tied back in a tight, shining ponytail. The suit she had been wearing would have looked good in Manhattan. He glanced at the coroner’s shots of the corpse: unusually good body.
Prescott quickly set out all the photographs of the crime scene, and his suspicion was confirmed. The table of the first victim, Robert Cushner, had one plate of food on it, almost eaten; one set of silverware; two place mats. He looked closely at the other pictures, trying to determine what was on the tables near the bodies. The pair of men had just about finished eating. Their table was still full of plates and silverware. The table above Donna and Gary’s bodies was a small one with two settings: one for a person sitting on the bench along the wall, and one for a person in a chair facing him. The others all seemed to match Prescott’s expectations. It had been late. A whole section of the restaurant had already been unofficially closed down, with the tablecloths and settings taken up for the night. That was probably what the waiter killed in the kitchen had been doing. There was only one waiter still on duty serving customers, and the late people had been seated in a small area so he could reach them easily.
Prescott looked at the spot near the entrance where the manager, who had served as maitre d’, had fallen, and two customers had stepped over him to be shot trying to tug open the padlocked door. There was a table set for one. Prescott went back to the picture of Donna and Gary. There was a napkin on the floor beside Donna’s hand. He patiently went back through the pictures, searching. In ten minutes, he knew.
