“I don’t see why not. I mean, he was going to do it anyway, wasn’t he? In your wildest dreams, was there some supercop who would magically appear and smite the gun from his hand?”
“Richard—”
“So, you called the cops, not to save this guy’s life, but just so you wouldn’t feel so guilty that you didn’t.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m a bad person.”
I set the package from the post office on his desk.
Richard eyed it suspiciously. “What is that?”
“Murder weapon. Weren’t we asked to produce it?”
Richard rolled his eyes. “Wonderful. Now you’ve got me concealing evidence.”
“You’re not concealing it. You’re bringing it into court. In response to a
subpoena duces tecum
. What could be more legal?”
Richard opened his mouth, closed it again. “Actually, you’re right. Well, that’s something. A negligence lawyer with a murder weapon. I wonder if there’s a precedent.”
“So, that takes care of that,” I said. “What about filing the false report?”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. I can beat that easily.”
“Because I didn’t actually do it?’
“No, because you actually did. It’s much easier to defend you from your actions. It’s the stupid shit you blunder into that’s a mess. What the hell were you doing following Tony Gallo?”
I told him my theory about Tony Gallo having a girlfriend, and MacAullif’s theory about how I going about it wrong.
“I see,” Richard said. “You thought that since it was MacAullif’s theory and not yours, it wasn’t necessarily bad.”
“Yeah, but it is. What the hell difference does it make who the hell Tony Gallo’s girlfriend is if it isn’t one of the principles?”
“Yeah, suppose you follow him around for two days and find out he’s seeing Susie Creamcheese from Wilton, Delaware?”
“Wilton Delaware?”
“It’s not going to prove a damn thing. Because it doesn’t have a thing to do with the murder. Either murder. Because your ideas are going so far afield. Tony Gallo was at the motel. A dead guy was at the motel.”
“You don’t think following Tony Gallo is a good idea?”
“I think following Tony Gallo is probably not conducive to your health.”
“So what should I do?”
“What should you do? Go to the movies. Take a walk in the park. Read a book. None of those things will screw up your life. Though, actually, you get a lot of bad ideas from books and movies. But do not, under any circumstances, tail any mafia dons.”
“You got a better idea?”
“I
gave
you a better idea. I told you to follow the widow.”
“I followed the widow.”
“And you stopped at the police station, so you still don’t know where she went. Which I pointed out to you, but did you listen? No. You decided to follow a mobster. And then blow the whistle on him for not whacking someone.”
“You want me to follow the widow?”
Richard rolled his eyes. “I have a multi-million-dollar law practice that is not dependent on pro bono criminal work. I’d like to keep you out of jail, but there are limits to what I can do. Go and sin no more.”
57
T
HE WIDOW SOUNDED HASSLED
. “H
ELLO
?”
“Hello, Mrs. Marston. It’s Stanley Hastings.”
“Who?”
Well, that was something. At least I wasn’t uppermost in her thoughts.
“The private eye. You hired me. To follow your husband. Then you thought I killed him. Then you thought I didn’t. I don’t know what you think now.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“Yeah, you do. I was getting close to finding out what your husband was up to. Don’t you want to know?”
“I don’t have to talk to you.”
“No, but you can listen.”
Apparently, she couldn’t. She hung up the phone.
Okay, best I could do without actually seeing her in person. And it was unlikely I’d get past the doorman this time. So the phone call was my best bet. It either worked or it didn’t. I’d spend the day watching her apartment and absolutely nothing would happen and that would be that.
The most likely thing was that the widow would report me to the police. That’s what she’d done the first time, that’s what she’d do now. Only this time the odds were greatly increased that she’d phone. I could almost hear the cops saying to her last time, ‘Oh, you didn’t have to come all the way,’ pressing business cards into her hands, telling her to call if that man annoyed her again. So, in all likelihood, she wasn’t going to move.
I was so convinced of it I almost missed her when she did.
Her car came out of the garage, headed toward Madison Avenue, as it had to, it being a one-way street.
I fell all over myself sprinting inconspicuously for my car. If you’ve never sprinted inconspicuously, it’s a knack. I reached Madison Avenue before she did, which of course meant that she had a wonderful opportunity to look through the windshield and see a crazy man running down the street. I hoped she wouldn’t do that. I hoped she had other things on her mind. Of course, I’d just called her. I was the one prodding her. If she had any sense at all, she’d be looking out for me. Then again, as Richard, Alice, MacAullif, and nine out of ten doctors were sure to point out, she had to be nuts to hire me in the first place.
She went up Madison Avenue, through the park, and onto the West Side Highway.
If we were going back to the police station, it was going to freak me out. Although it would allow me to vindicate myself with Richard and do what I’d failed to do the first time: stake out the police station and see where she went when she left. And, sure enough, there she was, getting onto the George Washington Bridge.
I was a few cars back. I had to be a few cars back. Otherwise, I might as well have had my car painted shocking pink with the words DETECTIVE ON DUTY in orange, Day-Glo letters on the side.
From what I could see, the widow was taking no notice of her surroundings. She was, like last time, driving with a sense of purpose, full-speed ahead, within the limits of rush-hour traffic, but as far as I could tell, without a glance in the rear-view mirror. No, this woman knew where she was going and was determined to get there.
Why? What the hell was she doing? Didn’t the cops give their cards? They couldn’t be happy to see her again. This was getting to be a bad habit. She was becoming the widow who cried wolf. The cops would be getting less and less likely to listen. True, that one time her husband was dead, but she hadn’t reported it.
At least as far as I knew she hadn’t reported it. That started an interesting train of thought. She gets me out there with her dead husband and reports it.
Only that didn’t happen. The motel manager reported it. Well, he claimed he didn’t, but he was probably lying. Just like he was lying about the victim letting me in.
The motel manager. Another of the witnesses against me. They were adding up, the witnesses against me. There was Jersey Girl, who could attest to my impersonating an officer and appropriating a murder weapon.
I shuddered. That was the problem with thinking about this case. Every train of thought led to the fact that I was dorked.
Okay, lady. Enough idle speculation. Let’s go to the police station.
We didn’t. She breezed right on by the Ft. Lee exit.
My pulse quickened. We were heading for the New Jersey Turnpike. The widow was going to see Tony Gallo.
Wrong again. Instead of staying on Route 95, she took the exit for Route 4.
My mouth fell open.
The motel?
Could she be going to the motel?
That made no sense at all. Meeting her lover at the crime scene? I mean, Tony Gallo had to have brass balls, meeting the widow at the very motel where he killed her husband. Was it possible? A guy like that, maybe it gave him an added kick. But even so. The mind boggled.
She wasn’t going to the motel. Disappointing, on the one hand, but bringing some semblance of sanity to the venture on the other.
So where was she going? Ikea? Yes, it’s a shame Phil’s dead, but now I can rid of that atrocious oak desk and get a nice breakfront. What a depressing thought. Tailing the widow on a shopping spree.
We didn’t go to Ikea. The widow turned north on Route 17, offering other shopping opportunities too numerous to mention. I was quite familiar with the road. When Tommie was young, I used to take him to Sportsworld, let him play video games. Somehow I doubted if that was where we were heading.
We weren’t.
The widow drove three miles north and turned into a motel.
58
S
O
. T
HINGS HAD COME FULL
circle. Here I was, once again, staking out a motel. True, it wasn’t the same motel, but you can’t have everything.
The Double Pines Motel was fancier than the Route 4 Motel, but then anything would be. For one thing, it had more units. A lot more units. It was two stories high, and rather than having the office by the road with a dozen rooms stretching back in an L, it had a circular drive up to a central lobby, from which wings of units spread out in both directions parallel to the road.
The widow pulled into the circular drive, got out, and went into the lobby. She was back in minutes, hopped in her car, drove around, and parked in front of a unit.
I hoped hers was on the first floor. I don’t know why I hoped that. It wasn’t like I’d be looking in the window, or popping in the front door with a camera shouting, “Surprise!” Still, having her on the second story would, at least in my head, make the job harder. Of course, in my head, having her in a motel room made the job harder.
She took a unit on the first floor, cementing my opinion that it couldn’t matter less if she did. I was also firmly convinced that, since I’d lucked out on the ground floor unit, something else would go wrong.
Nothing did. At least, not right away. The widow unlocked the door and went in, closing it behind her.
And there I was, once again, a private eye caught in a shaggy dog story, staking out a motel room, waiting to see who showed up. Only the first time, I had no idea a murder was involved. And the first time I had a client. And the first time I was getting paid.
There was one other difference.
The first time I had a Gatorade bottle.
I prayed it wouldn’t matter. There was no reason why it should. No one checks into a motel room three hours ahead of their lover. If a lover was three hours late, the relationship wasn’t going to last long. That was not the type of white-hot romance that would lead to the elimination of a spouse. No, the way I saw it, she called Tony Gallo the minute she hung up on me. And even if she called him at home, which wasn’t likely, that would be a no-no considering the fangs on his wife, but even if she did, that would be an hour drive at best. No one drives slowly to a motel room assignation. One could expect a foot on the gas.
Except for rush-hour traffic. Good God, what if Tony got caught in rush-hour traffic? He could call the motel, ring her room, say he’d be late. And there he’d be, stuck in traffic, while I peed in my pants. Well, that would kind of put a damper on my denouement.
Stop it, I told myself. It’s a long shot he’s home in the first place. In all probability he’s out scaring some poor son of a bitch to death with his freshly dug grave. He’d be along to get his rocks off and reassure the widow that no one was going to get them for murder if she just kept her head. Yeah, he’d be right there.
Only, if he were terrorizing another Manhattan businessman, he wouldn’t bring him along. He’d have to take him back to New York.
No, he wouldn’t. He’d have his chauffeur drop him at the motel and drive the guy back. And then go hang out in a nearby shopping mall waiting for the phone call to come pick him up.
Yeah, that’s how it would work. And that’s how it must have worked with Vinnie Carbone. Which would have been just fine, because Tony Gallo wasn’t boffing Vinnie Carbone’s girlfriend, he was boffing the widow.
I took a breath. At long last, things were beginning to make sense.
Except how does the gun wind up with Jersey Girl?
Tony Gallo kills his chauffeur—bummer, now he has to drive himself, wonder if he ever learned—and now he’s stuck with a murder weapon. So he lays it on Jersey Girl, who he must be boffing too, because otherwise how would he get so close? And why would his wife be freaking out? Though she could easily have made the same mistake as I, figuring Jersey Girl for the role that was rightfully the widow’s.
It didn’t matter. As far as I was concerned, I’d figured the motel murder out, in terms of who and why. At any moment, Tony Gallo’s black sedan would drive up to the motel and everything would suddenly be clear.
Only it didn’t. Nothing happened. Nothing at all.
Jesus Christ. How was this possible? No one checks into a New Jersey motel to be alone. But the widow did, and here I was, déjà vu, it
was
my first stakeout all over again.
Did the unit have a connecting door?
Was the widow dead?
No. There were no cars in front of the adjoining units.
But had there been when I drove in?
No. I was watching the unit, I would have noticed any comings and goings.
Or would I? I’d have noticed anybody
arriving
. But would I have noticed anybody
leaving?
From another unit, why would I? A car driving up could be pay dirt. A car driving away wouldn’t mean anything. Would I have seen it?
Or what if Tony’s driver dropped him off!
What if he was in there right now!
Was that possible?
No, it wasn’t. I’d called the widow, stirred her up. She’d have called Tony. It would have taken him longer to get there than her.
Unless he was in the neighborhood. I knew he did business in the neighborhood, so if he was tooling around with his driver he could have had the guy drop him off.
No, not likely. For something like this he’d probably drive himself.
I glanced around the parking lot. At the far end of the lot, parked away from the motel, was a black sedan. Was it Tony’s car? I strained my eyes, checked the license. It was a Jersey plate, but I didn’t recognize the number. I’d never checked the number when I was tailing Tony, because I’d already ID’d him. I’d seen it, but hadn’t paid attention. Was it the same one? I didn’t think so. But that didn’t mean anything. That was the chauffeur’s car. He probably had another car he drove himself.