Bob the farmer had shot him. That was all Marty could think of. He looked around. Bob and Ellie were nowhere to be seen. People had stopped streaming past the shop and were standing staring at him. He felt light- headed. And breathing was even more of an effort.
He sat down cross-legged on the sidewalk in front of his watch display.
Marty was recovering from his shock enough to be terrified.
A doctor visiting from Toronto with a woman not his wife was walking past and saw what was happening.
He hurried to help Marty but it was too late.
Time had stopped for Marty.
2
A spring shower that was almost mist was falling the next evening when Assistant Chief Lou Melbourne wrestled his bulk out of a cab in front of Vincent Repetto’s residence on Bank Street in the Village.
Repetto, who’d gone to a living room window to see if it was still raining, noticed Melbourne crossing the street. The two men were about the same age-midfifties-but almost exact opposites. Melbourne was short and very much overweight, balding, with a pug face and clothes that were always a size too small. He had on a blue jacket that didn’t look water resistant, and he walked fast for an obese man and with an economy of motion.
Repetto was several inches over six feet, lean and with long arms and big hands. The progeny of a Dutch mother and an Italian father, he still had most of his dark hair, but it was fast turning a gunmetal gray. His eyebrows, graying but not as fast, were permanently arched in a way that gave him an expression of alert and aggressive curiosity.
Melbourne, crossing the street diagonally, saw him watching through the decorative iron bars on the window and raised a hand in a wave. Repetto nodded to him, then left the window to open the door. Two months ago, Melbourne had presented Repetto with an engraved silver platter at one of his many retirement parties. Repetto appreciated it. A man couldn’t have too many silver platters.
“Lou, you should have an umbrella,” Repetto said, as Melbourne took the concrete steps to the stoop, then hesitated.
“They bring bad luck.”
“Like making it rain?”
Melbourne grinned. “Like making it rain harder because you have an umbrella.” After wiping the soles of his shoes on the doormat, he shook hands with Repetto. “How you been in your brief retirement, Vin?”
“I haven’t quite figured that out yet.” Repetto used the handshake to pull Melbourne in out of the rain, then waited while Melbourne worked out of his jacket. Repetto draped the jacket on the antique brass coatrack and ushered Melbourne into the living room.
Repetto and his wife, Lora, lived in a narrow redbrick house that had been built over a hundred years ago. Lora, who was an interior decorator, had chosen almost all the decor and furnishings. The upper floor was her office and sometime storeroom. Living quarters were downstairs.
The living room, where Repetto invited Melbourne to sit on a soft Queen Anne sofa, was furnished eclectically, mixing traditional with Victorian and Early American. On the wall behind the sofa stood a tall nineteenth-century walnut secretary. A Sheraton library table with stacks of books was along another wall, a Cape Cod window seat nearby where Lora sometimes sat sipping tea and looking out at Bank Street. The house was on a quiet, brick-paved block in the West Village, a desirable piece of real estate.
Repetto had married into money. Lora’s mother and father had died young in a boating accident and left her well off. She wasn’t your usual cop’s wife, but then Repetto wasn’t your usual cop. He’d risen through the ranks by virtue of his own hard work and ingenuity. When he retired after catching a stray bullet in the lung during a hostage situation that went sour, then being kicked up to captain, he was considered the shrewdest-and toughest-homicide detective in the NYPD. His specialty was serial killers.
When Melbourne was seated, Repetto asked him if he wanted a drink. “Some good eighteen-year-old scotch?”
Melbourne smiled and shook his head no. “I’m on duty, sort of.”
Still smiling, Melbourne glanced around. “I don’t see any ashtrays. And I don’t smell tobacco. I guess for health reasons you gave up those Cuban cigars you used to smoke. The bad lung and all.”
“The lung’s pretty much healed. I still get winded too easy, though.”
“But still no cigars.”
“I allow myself one every few days. The doctors said it’s okay as long as I don’t inhale.”
“Sure they did.”
“Other than that, I don’t smoke. For Lora.”
“She make you lighten up?”
Repetto didn’t bother to answer.
“So it’s true what they say about life after you retire and you’re home with the wife.”
“What do they say?”
“She takes over the company.”
“Yeah, that’s true. She’s been a cop’s wife over twenty years, Lou. If she doesn’t want me to smell up the house with cigar smoke, I won’t. She deserves to be spoiled.”
“She doesn’t want you dying of lung cancer.”
“That, too.”
Melbourne focused his flesh-padded gray eyes on Repetto. “How’d you and Lora manage it, staying married all this time, you doing the kinda work we do?”
Repetto had to give it some thought. “I don’t know for sure. Maybe somewhere along the line we learned how to stay out of each other’s way.”
“That’s an unsatisfactory answer,” Melbourne said with a touch of bitterness. Twice-divorced Melbourne.
“Lora’s at a meeting with a client,” Repetto said. “You wanna come back to my den and we can smoke some cigars?”
Melbourne cocked his head to the side. “You won’t get in any trouble?”
Repetto laughed and stood up. “I haven’t had a smoke in two days. Haul your ass outta that sofa and come with me.” He didn’t tell Melbourne the den was the only place he smoked in the house, and he had to make sure there was plenty of ventilation.
Repetto’s den was large, carpeted in deep red with thick red drapes, a quiet room, considering it was at street level. There were commendations on the walls, a mounted trout Repetto had caught in Vermont, and several signed and framed publicity photos of Broadway stars.
Repetto walked over to his desk and opened a small mahogany humidor near the green-shaded lamp. He gave Melbourne a Venezuelan cigar and a cutter, then chose a domestic brand for himself. Before lighting the cigar, he went over and opened a window, letting in some dampness and cool night air. Within a few seconds he could feel cross ventilation from the already cracked window on the adjacent wall stir the hairs on his bare forearms.
When he returned to sit in his black leather desk chair, Melbourne had already seated himself in one of the upholstered chairs angled toward the desk and lighted his cigar.
Repetto settled down behind his oversize cherry-wood desk. “You mentioned you were on duty.”
