"Not so it amounts to anything," Tommy put in.
"I'm telling it the way the cops would tell it, all right? He owes some money around town, he's a couple of payments behind with the Buick. Meanwhile he's putting away this girl at the office, bouncing around the bars with her, sometimes not making it home altogether-"
"Hardly ever, Drew. I'd almost always make it home, an' if I couldn't grab a few hours in the sack I'd at least shower and change and have breakfast with Peg."
"What was breakfast? Dexamyl?"
"Sometimes. I had an office to go to, a job to do."
Kaplan sat on a corner of his desk, crossed his legs at the ankle. "That'll do for motive," he said. "What they don't bother to notice is a couple of things. One, he loved his wife, and how many husbands cheat? What is it they say? Ninety percent admit they cheat and ten percent lie about it? Two, he's got debts but he's not in a crunch. He's a guy makes good money over the year but he runs hot and cold, and for years he's been fat one month and strapped the next."
"You get used to it," Tommy said.
"Plus the numbers sound like a fortune, but they're not unusual figures. A half-million is substantial, but as Tommy said it won't net out to that much after taxes, and part of it consists of title to the house he's been occupying for years. A hundred fifty thousand dollars' insurance on a breadwinner isn't high by any means, and having the same coverage on the wife isn't uncommon, a lot of insurance agents try to write policies that way. They make it sound logically balanced, so you overlook the fact that you don't really need that kind of coverage on someone you don't depend upon for income." He spread his hands. "Anyway, the policies were taken out over ten years ago. This isn't something he went and set up last week."
He stood up, walked over to the window. Tommy had picked up the railway spike from the desk and was playing with it, slapping it against the palm of his hand, consciously or unconsciously matching the rhythm of the clock's pendulum.
Kaplan said, "One of the killers, Angel Herrera, except I suppose he pronounces it Ahn-hell, did some odd jobs at the Tillary house last March or April. Spring cleaning, he hauled stuff out of the basement and attic, did a little donkey work for hourly wages. According to Herrera, that's how Tommy knew to contact him to fake the burglary. According to common sense, that's how Herrera and his buddy Cruz knew the house and what was in it and how to gain access."
"How'd they do that?"
"Broke a small pane in the side door, reached in and unlocked it. Their story is Tommy left it open for them and must have broken the glass after. It's also their story that they left the place relatively neat."
"Looked like a cyclone hit it," Tommy said. "I had to go there. Made me sick to look at it."
"Their story is Tommy did that the same time he was murdering his wife. Except none of this works out if you take a good look at it. The times are all wrong. They went in around midnight, and the medical examiner places the time of death at between ten P.M. and four A.M. Now Tommy here never made it home from the office that evening. He worked past five, he met his friend for dinner, and he was with her in a variety of public places over the course of the evening." He looked over at his client. "We're lucky he's not much on discretion. His alibi'd be a whole lot thinner if he'd spent every minute in her apartment with the blinds drawn."
"I was discreet as far as Peg was concerned," Tommy said. "In Brooklyn I was a family man. What I did in the city never hurt her."
"After midnight his time's harder to account for," Kaplan went on. "The only substantiation for some of those hours is the girlfriend, because for a while they were in her apartment with the blinds drawn."
You didn't have to draw the blinds, I thought. Nobody could see in.
"Plus there was some time she couldn't account for."
"She fell asleep and I couldn't," Tommy said, "so I got dressed and went out for a couple of pops. But I wasn't gone that long, and she woke up when I got back. I had a helicopter, maybe I coulda got to Bay Ridge'n' back in that amount of time. Never do it in a Buick."
"The thing is," Kaplan said, "even supposing there was time, or discounting the girlfriend's alibi altogether and only accepting the times substantiated by unbiased witnesses, how could he possibly have done it? Say he sneaks home sometime after the Spanish kids have paid their visit and before four A.M., which was the latest the murder could have taken place. Where was she all this time? According to Cruz and Herrera, there was nobody home. Well, where did he find her to kill her? What did he do, haul her around in the trunk all night?"
"Let's say he killed her before they got there," I suggested.
"And I'm lookin' to hire this guy," Tommy said. "I got an instinct, you know what I mean?"
"Doesn't work," Kaplan said. "In the first place the times simply won't fit. He's alibied solid from before eight until past midnight, out in public with the girl. The M.E. says she was definitely alive at ten, that's the absolute earliest she could have been killed. Plus even forgetting the times it doesn't work. How could they go in, rob the whole house, and not see a dead woman in the bedroom? They were in that room, they were in possession of stolen articles from that room, I think they even found prints in there. Well, the police found the corpse of Margaret Tillary in that room, too, and it's the sort of thing they probably would have noticed."
"Maybe the body was covered up." I thought of Skip's big Mosler safe. "Locked in a closet they didn't look in."
He shook his head. "The cause of death was stabbing. There was a lot of blood and it was all over the place. The bed was soaked, the bedroom carpet." We both avoided looking at Tommy. "So she wasn't killed elsewhere," he concluded. "She was killed right there, and if it wasn't Herrera did it it was Cruz, and either way it wasn't Tommy."
I looked for a hole in it and couldn't find one. "Then I don't see what you need me for," I said. "The case against Tommy sounds pretty thin."
"So thin there isn't any case."
"Then-"