set of cuffs. 'Put your hands out, Matt.' He fastened the cuffs around my wrists. 'Now,' he said, 'bend forward and get one leg at a time through there. Sit on the edge of the desk. Go ahead, you can do it.'
'Jesus.'
'You see this on television all the time, a guy's cuffed, hands behind his back, and he sort of jumps through the circle of his own arms and he's still cuffed but his hands are in front of him. Okay, now stand up and work your hands up behind your back.'
'I don't think this is going to work.'
'Well, it would help if you were a little skinnier. Thurman's got maybe a thirty-inch waist and no ass at all.'
'Has he got long arms? It'd be easier if my arms were a few inches longer.'
'I didn't check his sleeve length. That'd be a good place for you to start your investigation, now that I think of it. Go to all the Chinese laundries in the neighborhood, see if you can find out his shirt size.'
'Open the cuffs, will you?'
'Gee, I don't know,' he said. 'I kind of like the effect, the way you're sort of grabbing your own ass, can't stand up straight and can't sit down. I hate to interfere.'
'Come on.'
'I was sure I had a key somewhere. Hey, no problem, we can just ankle on down to the front desk, somebody must have a key. Oh, all right.' He produced a key, unlocked the handcuffs. I straightened up. My shoulder was sore, and I had pulled a muscle slightly in one thigh. 'I don't know,' he said. 'They make it look a lot easier on television.'
'No kidding.'
'The thing is,' he said, 'without seeing how he was tied, I don't know what kind of a job they did of immobilizing him, or if it was something he could have done himself. I'm gonna drop your scenario and assume that there were burglars and they tied him up. You know what bothers me?'
'What?'
'He was still tied when the cops got there. He rolled off the bed, he knocked a table over, he made a telephone call-'
'With a pipe tool clamped firmly between his teeth.'
'Yeah, right. He did all that, and he even worked the tape most of the way off his mouth, which I guess you could do.'
'I would think so.'
'You want me to get a roll of tape and we'll see if you can do it? Just a little joke, Matt. You know what your problem is? You got no sense of humor.'
'I was wondering what my problem was.'
'Well, now you know. Seriously, he does all the other stuff but he doesn't work his hands loose. Now sometimes you can't unless you're Houdini. If you've got no mobility and there's no give in the bonds, there's not much you can do. But he was able to move around, and how good a job could these guys have done on him, given that they were pretty amateurish when it came to burglary? I wish I'd seen how he was tied, because my hunch is that he probably could have worked his way free, but that he chose not to try. And why would he make that choice?'
'Because he wanted to be tied up when the cops got there.'
'Exactly, because that alibied him for the murder. If he gets loose we can say he could have killed her, he wasn't really tied up in the first place. But now, the way things stand, what we can say is he stayed tied up because he wanted to be found that way. It doesn't prove anything because if you look at it that way he's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't, but as far as his motivation-'
'I know what you mean.'
'So I wish I'd seen him before they cut him loose.'
'So do I. How was he tied?'
'I just said-'
'I mean what did they use? Cord, clothesline, what?'
'Oh, right. They used a kind of household twine, pretty strong stuff, like you'd use to wrap a package. Or to tie up your girlfriend, if you happened to be into that kind of thing. Did they bring it with them? I don't know. The Gottschalks had a drawer in the kitchen with pliers and screwdrivers and the usual odds and ends of household hardware. The old man couldn't say whether they might have had a ball of twine in there or not. Who remembers that sort of thing, especially when you're seventy-eight years old and you live half the year in one place and the rest of the time somewhere else? The burglars dumped that drawer, so if there was twine in it they would have seen it.'
'What about the tape?'
'Ordinary adhesive tape, white, kind you'd find in your medicine chest.'
'Not in mine,' I said. 'In mine you'd find a bottle of Rexall aspirin and a thing of dental floss.'
'Well, the kind you'd find in your medicine chest if you happened to live like a human being. Gottschalk said he thought they had adhesive tape, and there wasn't any in the bathroom. They didn't leave the roll behind, or the twine either.'
'I wonder why not.'
'I don't know. String savers, I guess. They took the pry bar, too. If I just left a woman dead in an apartment, I don't think I'd want to walk down the street carrying burglar's tools, but if they were geniuses-'
'They'd be in some other line of work.'
'Right. Why take the stuff? If Thurman was in on it, and if he was the one who bought the stuff, maybe they were afraid it could be traced. If they used what they found in the apartment… I don't know, Matt, the whole thing's so fucking speculative, you know?'
'I know. You bat around the whys and what ifs, though, and sometimes something shakes loose.'
'Which is why we're batting them around.'
'Did he describe the burglars?'
'Oh, sure. A little hazy on the details, but consistent from one interrogation to another. He didn't contradict himself enough to amount to anything. The descriptions are in the files, you'll see them for yourself. What they were, they were two big white guys about the same age as Thurman and his wife. They both had mustaches, and the bigger one had his hair long in the back, the way some of them wear it, with like a little tail growing down there?'
'I know how you mean.'
'A really classy style, marks you right away as a member of the upper crust. Like the spades with those high flattops, looks like they got a fez stuck on their heads, like they trim it with hedge clippers. Class all the way. What was I saying?'
'The two burglars.'
'Yeah, right. He went through the books of mug shots, very cooperative, very eager, but he didn't spot them. I sat him down with a police artist. I think you know him. Ray Galindez?'
'Sure.'
'He's good, but his sketches always come out looking Hispanic to me. There's copies in the file. I think one of the papers ran them.'
'I must have missed it.'
'I think it was Newsday. We got a couple calls and wasted a little time checking them out. Nothing. You know what I think?'
'What?'
'I don't think he did it all by himself.'
'No, neither do I.'
'I mean you can't positively rule it out, because he could have found a way to tie himself up, and he could have managed to lose the pry bar and the tape and the twine. But I don't think that's what happened. I think he had help.'
'I think you're right.'
'He makes arrangements with a couple of skells, says here's a key to the front door, make it easy on
