clinging to each other. A few stood or sat alone. Loren was one of them. He was still stunned and he knew no one there to talk to.
After a while he pulled out of shock and looked around the room at the other loners. An old man with a wispy white mustache, probably a widower on his way to visit grandchildren for Christmas. A thin dour man with a cleft chin who blinked continually behind steel-rimmed glasses as if the sun were shining in his eyes. In a folding chair in a corner of the auditorium he saw the woman in the tan hooded coat, her head bowed, eyes indrawn, hugging herself and trying not to shudder. He started to get out of his chair and move toward her.
Another woman flung back the swing doors of the auditorium and stood in the entranceway, a tall fortyish woman in a pantsuit, her hair worn long and straight and liberally streaked with gray. “Loren Mensing?” she called out. Her strong voice cut through the hubbub of helpless little conversations in the vast room. “Is there a Loren Mensing here?”
Loren raised his hand and the woman came over to him. “I’m Gene Holt,” she said. “Sergeant Holt, city police, Homicide. You’re wanted in the conference room.”
He followed her to a room down the hall with a long oak table in the center, flanked by chairs. The air was thick with smoke from cigarettes and a few pipes. He counted at least twenty men in the room—airport police, local police, several in plainclothes. The man at the head of the conference table stood up and beckoned. “Lou Belford,” he introduced himself. “Special Agent in charge of the F. B. I, office for the area. The locals just told me you’re a sort of detective yourself in an oddball way.”
“I used to be deputy legal adviser on police matters for the mayor’s office,” Loren said. “A part-time position. I teach law for a living.”
“And you’ve helped crack some weird cases, right?”
“I’ve helped a few times,” Loren conceded.
“Well, we’ve got a weird one here, Professor,” Belford grunted. “And you’re our star witness. Tell me what you saw.”
As Loren told his story Belford scrawled notes on a pad. “It all fits,” he said finally. “The guy tripped over your feet and hurt his knee. When he saw he couldn’t get out the front exit he headed for the side doors that lead to the underground parking ramps. If he hadn’t stumbled over you he could have made it out of the building. Bad luck for him.”
“You caught him then? Who was he. and why did he kill that man?”
“We didn’t catch him,” Belford said. “Cornered him in the gift shop. He saw he was trapped and ate his gun. One shot, right through the mouth. Dead on the spot.”
Loren clenched his teeth.
“He wasn’t carrying ID.” Belford went on, “but we made him a while ago. His name was Frank Wilt. Vietnam vet, unemployed for the last three years. He couldn’t hold a job, claimed his head and body were all screwed up from exposure to that Agent Orange stuff they used in the war. The VA couldn’t do a thing to help him.”
“The man he killed worked for the Veterans Administration?” Loren guessed.
“No, no.” Belford shook his head impatiently. “Wilt was obviously desperate for money. It looks as if he took a contract to waste somebody. We just learned he put twenty-five hundred dollars in a bank account Monday. That part of the case is easy. It’s the other end we need help with.”
“Other end? You mean the victim?” Loren’s mind sped to a conclusion from the one fact he knew for certain. “So that’s why the F. B. I. are involved! Murder in an airport isn’t a Federal crime, and neither is murder by a veteran. So there must be something special about the victim.” He leaned forward, elbows on the conference table. “Who was he?”
“The accountant who testified against Lo Scalzo and Pollin in New York last year,” Belford said. “John Graham. We gave him and his family new identities under the Witness Relocation Program. They’ve been living in the city for eighteen months. And now. Professor, we’ve got an exam for you. Question one: How did the mob find out who and where Graham was? Question two: Why did they hire a broken-down vet to waste him instead of sending in a professional hit man?”
Loren had a sudden memory of one of his own law-school professors who had delighted in posing impossible riddles in class. The recollection made him distinctly uncomfortable.
He stayed with the investigators well into the evening, helping Lieutenant Krauzer of Homicide and Sergeant Holt and the F. B. I. agents interrogate all the actual and possible witnesses. Shortly before midnight, bone-weary and almost numb with the cold, he excused himself, trudged out into the public area of the airport, retrieved his luggage, and grabbed a tasteless snack in the terminal coffee shop. He found his VW in the underground parking garage and drove through hard-packed snow back to his high-rise.
He was unlocking his apartment door when he heard footsteps behind him and whirled, then relaxed. It was the woman, the one in the tan hooded coat who had been standing in the line directly behind John Graham at the time of the murder. “Please let me in, Mr. Mensing,” she said. Her voice was soft but filled with desperation, her face taut with tension and fatigue. Loren was afraid she’d collapse at any moment. “Come on in,” he nodded. “You need a drink worse than I do.”
Ten minutes later they were sitting on the low-backed blue couch, facing the night panorama of the city studded with diamond lights, a pot of coffee, a bottle of brandy, and a plate of cheese and crackers on the cocktail table in front of them. Slowly the warmth, the drinks, and the presence of someone she could trust dissipated the tightness from the woman. Loren guessed that she was about thirty, and that not too long ago she had been lovely.
“Thank you,” she said. “I haven’t eaten since early this morning, I mean yesterday morning.”
“Let me make you a real meal.” Loren got up from the couch. “I don’t have much in the refrigerator but I think I could manage some scrambled eggs.”
“No.” She reached out with her hand to stop him. “Maybe later. I’d like to talk now if you don’t mind. You may want to kick me out when I’m through.” She gave a nervous high-pitched giggle, and Loren sat down again and held her hand, which still felt all but frozen.
“My name is Donna,” she began. “Donna Keever. That’s my maiden name. I’m married. No, I was married. My husband died just about a year ago. His name was Greene, Charles Greene.” Her eyes filled with tears. “It was a year ago last week,” she mumbled. “You must have read about it.”
Loren groped in the tangle of his memory. Yes. that was it, last year’s Christmas heartbreak story in the media. Charles Greene and his six-year-old daughter had been driving home from gift shopping, going west on U. S. 47, when a car traveling east on the same highway hit a rut. The eastbound lane at that point was slightly higher than the westbound because of the shape of a hill on which U. S. 47 was built. The eastbound auto had bounced up into the air, literally flown across the median, and landed nose first on top of Greene’s car. Then it had bounced off, flown over the roofs of other passing cars, and landed in the ditch at the side of the highway. Greene, his child, and the other driver, who turned out to be driving on an expired license and with his blood full of alcohol, all died instantly. “I remember.” Loren said softly.
“I was ill that day,” Donna Greene said, “or I’d have been shopping with Chuck and Cindy. That’s the only reason I’m still alive while my family’s dead. Isn’t life wonderful?”
“It was just chance,” Loren told her. “You can’t feel guilty about it and ruin the rest of your life.”
“No!” Her voice rose to the pitch of a scream. “It wasn’t chance. That accident didn’t just happen. Someone wanted to kill Chuck or Cindy or me. Or all of us!”
She broke then, and Loren held her while she sobbed. When she could talk again he asked her the obvious question. “Have you told the police what you think?”
“Not the police, not the lawyer who’s handling the wrongful death claim for me, not anyone. It was only last week that I knew. A burglar broke into my house a week ago Monday night, came into my bedroom. He was wearing a stocking mask and he—he put his hands on me. I screamed my head off and scared him away. The police said it was just a burglar, but I knew. That man was going to kill me! The police think I’m exaggerating, that I’m still crazy with grief because of the accident.”
“How about family? Friends? Have you told them of your suspicions?”
“My parents and Chuck’s are all dead. My older brother ran away from home about fifteen years ago. when I was fifteen and he was twenty, and no one’s heard from him since. I don’t work, I don’t have a boyfriend and I just couldn’t go to my women friends with something like this.”
“What made you come to me?” he asked gently.
