got up the next morning and put Warriner’s check in the bank and drew some walking-around money while I was at it. We’d had a little snow over the weekend but most of it was gone now, with just a little gray residue left at the curbs. It was cold out, but there wasn’t much wind and it wasn’t a bad day for the middle of winter.

I walked over to Midtown North on West Fifty-fourth, hoping to catch Joe Durkin, but he wasn’t there. I left word for him to call me and walked on down to the main library at Forty-second and Fifth. I spent a couple of hours reading everything I could find about the murder of Amanda Warriner Thurman. While I was at it I looked for her and her husband in the New York Times Index over the past ten years. I read their wedding announcement, which had appeared four years ago September. She would already have come into her inheritance by then.

I had already learned when they were married from Warriner, but it never hurts to confirm things a client tells you. The announcement furnished me with other information Warriner hadn’t given me—the names of Thurman’s parents and others in the wedding party, the schools he’d attended, the jobs he’d held before he went with Five Borough Cable.

Nothing I turned up told me that he had or hadn’t murdered his wife, but I hadn’t figured to solve the case with two hours of library research.

I called Midtown North from a pay phone on the corner. Joe hadn’t come back. I had a Sabrett hot dog and a knish for lunch and walked over to the Swedish church on Forty-eighth, where there’s a twelve-thirty meeting on weekdays. The speaker was a commuter who lived with his family on Long Island and worked for one of the Big Six accounting firms. He’d been sober ten months and couldn’t get over how wonderful it was.

“I got your message,” Durkin said. “I tried you at your hotel but they said you were out.”

“I was on my way there now,” I said. “I thought I’d take a chance, see if I’d catch you in.”

“Well, today’s your lucky day, Matt. Have a seat.”

“A fellow came to see me yesterday,” I said. “Lyman Warriner.”

“The brother. I figured he’d call you. You gonna do something for him?”

“If I can,” I said. I had palmed a hundred-dollar bill and I tucked it between his fingers. “I appreciate the referral.”

We were alone in the office, so he felt free to unfold the bill and look at it. “It’s a good one,” I assured him. “I was there when they printed it.”

“Now I feel better,” he said. “No, what I was just thinking is I shouldn’t even take this from you. You want to know why? Because it’s not just a case of throwing a couple of bucks your way and keeping the citizen happy. I’m glad you took the guy on. I’d love to see you do him some good.”

“You think Thurman did his wife?”

“Do I think? I fucking know it.”

“How?”

He considered the question. “I don’t know,” he said. “Cop instinct. How’s that?”

“It sounds good to me. Between your cop instinct and Lyman’s feminine intuition, I figure Thurman’s lucky to be walking around free.”

“Have you met the guy, Matt?”

“No.”

“See if you don’t read him the same way I did. He’s one phony son of a bitch, I swear to God. I caught that case, I was the first person in there after the blues who responded to the 911 call. I saw him then, when he was still in shock and bleeding from a head wound and with his face red and raw from where he’d worked the tape off of his mouth. I saw him I don’t know how many times over the next couple of weeks. Matt, he never rang true. I just did not buy that he was sorry she was dead.”

“That wouldn’t necessarily mean he killed her.”

“That’s a point. I’ve known killers who were sorry their victim was dead and I suppose it works the other way around. And I’m not setting myself up as Joseph Durkin the Human Polygraph. I can’t always tell when somebody’s lying. But with him it’s easy. If his lips are moving, he’s feeding you a line of shit.”

“All by himself?”

He shook his head. “I don’t see how. The woman was raped fore and aft with signs of forced entry. Semen deposited vaginally was definitely not from the husband. Different blood type.”

“And in back?”

“No semen deposited anally. Maybe the guy in back was practicing safe sex.”

“Rape in the modern age,” I said.

“Well, it’s all those leaflets the Surgeon General mailed out, raising the level of public consciousness and all. Anyway, from the looks of it you got your two burglars just the way the husband told it.”

“Any other physical evidence besides semen?”

“Short and curlies. Seem to be two types, one that’s definitely not the husband’s, the other that’s a possible. The thing is, you can’t tell too much from pubic hair. You can tell both samples are from male Caucasians but that’s about all you can get. Plus it doesn’t prove anything if some of the hairs are Thurman’s, because they were married, for Christ’s sake, and it’s not unheard of to carry your husband’s pubic hair around in your bush for a day or two.”

I thought for a moment. I said, “In order for Thurman to have done it solo—”

“Couldn’t happen.”

“Sure it could. All he needed was some foreign semen and pubic hair.”

“How would he come by that? Blow a sailor and spit in a Glad bag?”

I thought fleetingly of Lyman Warriner’s perception of Thurman as a closet case. “I suppose that’s as good a way as any,” I said. “I’m just running through what’s remotely possible and what isn’t. One way or another he obtained specimens of foreign semen and hair. He went to the party with his wife, came home—”

“Climbed three flights of stairs and told her to wait a minute while he forced entry to the Gottschalk apartment. ‘Look, honey, I learned this neat way to open doors without the key.’ ”

“The door was forced?”

“Jimmied.”

“That could have been done after.”

“After what?”

“After he’d killed her and before he called 911. Say he had a key to the Gottschalk place.”

“That’s not what the Gottschalks say.”

“He could have had one without them knowing about it.”

“They had a couple of locks on the door.”

“He could have had a couple of keys. ‘Hang on, honey, I promised Roy and Irma I’d water the plants.’ ”

“That’s not their names. Alfred Gottschalk, that’s the lawyer. I forget the wife’s name.”

“ ‘I promised Alfred and Whatsername I’d water the plants.’ ”

“At one in the morning?”

“What’s the difference? Maybe he says he wants to borrow a book from the Gottschalks, something he’s been wanting to read. Maybe they’re both a little giddy from the party and he tells her they’ll sneak into the Gottschalk apartment and screw in their bed.”

“ ‘It’ll be exciting, honey, like before we were married.’ ”

“That’s the idea. He gets her in there, he kills her, he makes it look like rape, he plants the physical evidence, the sperm and the pubic hairs. Did they find anything under her nails, anything to suggest she scratched anybody?”

“No, but he didn’t say anything about her fighting them off. And you had two of them, so one could hold her hands while the other made whoopee.”

“Let’s get back to the idea of him doing it all by himself. He kills her and fakes the rape. He sets the stage in the Gottschalk apartment, makes it look like the place was burglarized. Did you get the Gottschalks to come up and see what was missing?”

He nodded. “He came up, Alfred. He said his wife’s been ill, she’s supposed to avoid unnecessary travel. They keep a couple hundred dollars cash in the refrigerator for emergencies, and that was gone. There was some jewelry missing, heirloom stuff, cuff links and rings he’d inherited but doesn’t wear. Jewelry of hers, but he couldn’t describe it because he didn’t know what she’d taken to Florida and what was in the safe-deposit box. The good stuff was all in the bank or in Florida, so he didn’t expect the loss would amount to much, but he’d have to have Ruth make up a detailed list of what was missing. That’s the wife’s name, Ruth. I knew it would come to me.”

“What about furs?”

“She doesn’t own any. She’s an animal-rights activist. Not that she’d need a fur coat in the first place, spending six months and a day in Florida every year.”

“Six months and a day?”

“Minimum, so they qualify as Florida residents for tax purposes. There’s no state income tax in Florida.”

“I thought he was retired.”

“Well, he still has an income. From investments and so on.”

“Anyway, no furs,” I said. “Anything bulky? A stereo, a television set?”

“Nothing. There were two TVs, a big rear-projection set in the living room and a smaller model in the back bedroom. They unplugged the bedroom set and moved it into the living room but left it there. The way it reads, they were planning on taking the set and they either forgot it in the excitement or decided not to risk looking suspicious, not with a dead woman in the apartment.”

“Assuming they knew she was dead.”

“They beat her face in and wrapped her panty hose around her neck. They damn well knew she was in worse shape than before she ran into them.”

“So they took some cash and some jewelry.”

“That’s what it looks like. That’s all Gottschalk could come up with. Thing is, Matt, they turned the apartment upside down.”

“The lab crew?”

“No, the burglars. They gave it a very thorough toss and made a mess doing it. Every drawer dumped, books off the shelves, that kind of thing. Not like they were searching for a secret stash, no mattresses slashed or cushions cut open, but a very thorough job all the same. I would guess they were looking for cash, and not a couple hundred dollars in the butter-keeper compartment in the refrigerator.”

“What did Gottschalk say?”

“What could he say? ‘I had a hundred grand in unreported cash and the bastards found it.’ He said there wasn’t anything really valuable in the apartment, except for some artwork, and they never touched that. He had some framed prints, signed and numbered stuff, Matisse and Chagall and I forget what else, and he had a floater policy covering them. I think the value of all the art came to something like eighty grand. The thieves took some of the stuff off the wall, probably looking for a wall safe, but they didn’t steal any of it.”

“Say he did it himself,” I said.

“We’re back to that, huh? Go ahead.”

“The place is really ransacked, so it looks like a bona fide burglary, but all he has to stash is a wad of cash and a handful of jewelry. Did you search him?”

“Thurman?” He shook his head. “Man’s all beat up, hands tied behind his back, his wife’s lying there dead, how are you gonna strip search him, look up his asshole for somebody’s platinum cuff links? Anyway, your scenario, he could have stowed everything in his own apartment.”

“I was just going to say that.”

“Still with your scenario, he gets into the Gottschalk place with a key, two keys, whatever it takes, he does his wife, he fakes the rape scene, he steals the cash and the jewelry and takes them upstairs, rolls them up in a pair of socks and stashes them in his sock drawer. Then he comes back downstairs and uses a pry bar on the door, makes it look like forced entry. Then I suppose he goes back upstairs and stashes the pry bar, because we didn’t find it in the Gottschalk place.”

“Did you search Thurman’s apartment?”

“That we did,” he said. “With his permission. I told him there was a good possibility the burglars had started in his place and worked their way down, which I knew they hadn’t because there was no sign of forced entry at the Thurman apartment. Of course they could have got in from the fire escape, but the hell with what they could have done, because nobody had been in there. But I searched it just the same, looking for anything that might have been lifted from downstairs.”

“And you didn’t find anything.”

“Not a thing, but I don’t know what that proves. I didn’t have a chance to fine-comb the place. And he could have added the Gottschalks’ jewelry to his and his wife’s jewelry boxes and I wouldn’t have known the difference, because I didn’t know what I was looking for. And the cash, a couple hundred dollars in cash, he could have stuck that in his fucking wallet.”

“I thought the burglars took his wallet.”

“Yeah, right. His watch and his wallet. They left it on the first floor on their way out of the building, just dropped it at the foot of the stairs. Stripped the cash but left the credit cards.”

“He could have run down himself and left it there.”

“Or stood at the stairs and dropped it over the railing. Saved himself running up and down.”

“And the jewelry they supposedly took from his wife—”

“He could have put right back in her jewelry box. And his Rolex, well, who knows? Maybe he wasn’t wearing it in the first place. Maybe he rolled it up in a sock.”

I said, “Then what? He beats himself up, ties his hands behind his back, tapes his mouth—”

“I think if I was doing it I might tape my mouth before I tied my hands behind my back.”

“You’re a better planner than I am, Joe. How was he tied? Did you see him when he was still tied up?”

“No, dammit,” he said, “and that’s the one thing that never stops bothering me. I wanted to chew the hell out of the two uniforms who cut him loose, but what could you expect them to do? Here’s a guy, respectable-looking man, nicely dressed, he’s all tied up and hysterical on the floor and his wife’s lying there dead, and how are you gonna tell him he has to stay that way until a detective gets to the scene? Of course they cut him loose. I’d have done the same thing in their position, and so would you.”

“Sure.”

“But I fucking well wish they hadn’t. I wish I’d had a look at him first. Still sticking with your scenario, that he pulled it all off on his own, your question is could he have tied himself up. Right?”

“Right.”

“His legs were tied. It’s not hard to do that yourself. His hands were tied behind his back, and you would think that would be impossible, but it’s not, not necessarily.” He opened a drawer, rooted around, and came up with a 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 yourselves, walk on in and go up three flights and bust into the fourth-floor apartment. Not to worry, there’s nobody home, there won’t be anybody home upstairs either. Make yourselves at home, dump the drawers, throw the books on the floor, and help yourselves to all the cash and jewelry you can find. Just so you’re ready to go at twelve-thirty or one, whatever time we get home from the party.”

“And they walk home because he doesn’t want to get there too early.”

“Maybe, or maybe they just walk home because it’s a nice night. Who knows? They get to the Gottschalks’ floor and she says, ‘Oh, look, Ruth and Alfred’s door is open,’ and he shoves her through it and they grab her and knock her out and fuck her and kill her. Then he says, ‘Hey, asshole, you don’t want to walk down the street middle of the night carrying a television set, you can buy ten TVs with what I’m paying you for this.’ So they leave the set, but they take the twine and tape and pry bar because maybe they can be traced. No, that’s bullshit, how do you trace drugstore and hardware store shit like that?”

“They take the stuff because that way we’ll know he couldn’t have done it himself, because how could the twine and tape walk out of there under their own power?”

“Right, okay. But first before they take anything out of there they knock him around a little, and they do some fairly impressive superficial damage, you’ll see photos we took of him in the file. Then they tie him up and tape him up, his mouth, and maybe they rip it halfway off for him so he’ll be able to make the call when it’s time.”

“Or maybe they’ve got him tied loosely enough that he can get a hand free and do what he has to do and then slip it back under the twine.”

“I was coming to that. Jesus, don’t I wish those blues had been a little slower to cut him loose.”

I said, “Anyway, they clear out and he waits as long as he can and then calls 911.”

“Right. I don’t see any holes in that.”

“No.”

“I mean, show me some other way it makes sense that he’s alive. They just killed her, she’s lying there dead, so why would they tie him up when it’s so much easier to kill him?”

“They already tied him up and taped his mouth before they did her.”

“Oh, right, that’s his story. Even so, why leave him alive? He can ID the both of them all day long, and they’re already going to hang for doing her—”

“Not in this state.”

“Don’t remind me, will you? Point is they’re already down for Murder Two for doing her, they don’t make it any worse for themselves by doing him while they’re at it. They got the pry bar, all they gotta do is hit him a lick upside the head, as our little brown brothers would say.”

“Maybe they did.”

“Did what?”

“Hit him hard enough so that they thought he was dead. Remember, they just killed her, and maybe they didn’t plan on it, so—”

“You mean if he’s telling the truth.”

“Right, playing devil’s advocate for a minute. They killed her unintentionally—”

“Just happened to get her panty hose accidentally wrapped around her throat—”

“—and they don’t exactly panic, but they’re in a hurry, they hit him a shot and he’s unconscious and they think he’s probably dead, that hard a shot with a steel bar ought to kill a man, and all they want to do is get the fuck out, they don’t want to take his pulse, see if he’s got enough breath left to fog a mirror.”

“Shit.”

“You see what I mean.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I see what you mean. That’s why it’s an open file. The evidence is inconclusive and the facts we’ve got’ll support any theory you want.” He stood up. “I want some coffee,” he said. “Can I get you some?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

* * *

“I don’t know why the coffee’s so bad,” he said. “I really don’t. We used to have this machine, you know, coin-operated, and you can never get a halfway decent cup of coffee out of one of them. But we chipped in and bought one of these electric drip pots, and we use premium coffee, and it comes out tasting like this. I think there must be some law of nature, you’re in a station house, the coffee has to taste like shit.”

It didn’t taste that bad to me. He said, “If we ever clear this one, you know how it’ll happen.”

“A snitch.”

“A snitch hears something and passes it on, or one of the geniuses steps on his cock and we pick him up for something heavy, and he tries to do himself some good by ratting out his partner. And Thurman, assuming we’re right and it was his game.”

“Or even if it wasn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

I said, “ ‘She was alive and kicking when we left there, man. We put the pork to her but I swear she liked that part of it, an’ we sure didn’t wrap no stockings around her neck. Musta been her husband, decided to get hisself an instant divorce.’ ”

“Jesus, that’s just how they’d say it.”

“I know. That’s what they’d say if Thurman was a hundred percent innocent. ‘Wasn’t me killed her, she was alive when I left.’ And it could even be true.”

“Huh?”

“Say it was a crime of opportunity. The Thurmans come home, walk in on a robbery in progress. The skells rob them and beat him up and rape her because they’re animals, so why not act like it? Then they leave, and Thurman gets a hand free, and his wife’s unconscious and he thinks she’s dead—”

“But she’s not dead, but it gives him an idea—”

“—and her panty hose is right there on the bed next to her, and next thing you know it’s around her neck and this time she really is dead.”

He thought about it. “Sure,” he said. “Could be. The medical examiner set the time of death at around one o’clock, which squares with Thurman’s story, but if he did her right after they left and then stalled a while, the time he was supposed to be unconscious and then struggling to free himself, well, that would all fit.”

“Right.”

“And nobody could implicate him. They could say she was alive when they left, but that’s something they’d say anyway.” He finished his coffee and threw the Styrofoam cup at the wastebasket. “Fuck this,” he said. “You can go around and around. I think he did it. Whether he planned it or it fell in his lap, I think he did it. All that money.”

“She inherited better than half a million, according to the brother.”

He nodded. “Plus the insurance.”

“He didn’t say anything about insurance.”

“It’s possible nobody told him. They took out policies payable to each other shortly after they were married. Hundred-thousand-dollar straight life, double indemnity for accidental death.”

“Well, that sweetens it a little,” I said. “Raises the ante by two hundred kay.”

He shook his head.

“Am I figuring wrong?”

“Uh-huh. She got pregnant in September. Soon as they found out, he got in touch with his insurance agent and raised the amount of their coverage. A baby coming, increased responsibilities. Makes sense, right?”

“What did he raise it to?”

“A million on his own life. After all, he’s the breadwinner, his income’s gonna be tough to replace. Still, her role’s important, so he boosted her coverage to a half mil.”

“So her death—”

“Meant an even million in insurance, because they still had the double-indemnity clause, plus all of her property that he’ll inherit. Round it off, call it a total of a million and a half.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah, right. He’s got means and motive and opportunity, and he’s a heartless little fuck if I ever saw one, and I couldn’t find a shred of evidence to show that he’s guilty of a single fucking thing.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then looked up at me. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Do you use the dental floss?”

“Huh?”

“Aspirin and dental floss, you said that’s all you’ve got in your medicine chest. Do you ever use it?”

“Oh,” I said. “When I remember. My dentist nagged me into buying it.”

“Same here, but I never use it.”

“Neither do I, really. The good news is we’ll never run out.”

“That’s it,” he said. “We got a fucking lifetime supply.”