Free A Ticket to the Boneyard by Lawrence Block Page B

moment. “No,” he said. “I guess you didn’t.”
    “They don’t record calls into the individual precincts in New York, or at least they didn’t when I was on the job. And they only started taping the 911 calls when it turned out that the operators were incompetent and kept screwing up. I’m not trying to play City Mouse, Country Mouse with you, Lieutenant. I don’t think we’d have looked any harder at this case than you people did. As a matter of fact, the biggest difference between the way you’ve handled it and the way they’d have done it in New York is that you’ve been very decent and cooperative with me. If a cop or ex-cop from out of town came to New York with the same story, he’d get a lot of doors shut in his face.”
    He didn’t say anything just then. Back in the living room he said, “I can see where it might not be a bad idea to tape incoming calls. Shouldn’t be all that costly to set up, either. What would it do for us in this instance? You’re thinking voiceprint, but for that you’d need a recording of Sturdevant’s voice for comparison purposes.”
    “Did he have an answering machine? He might have taped a message.”
    “I don’t think so. Those machines aren’t all that popular around here. Of course there might be some record of his voice somewhere. Home video, that sort of thing. I don’t know if something like that would work for voiceprint comparison, though I don’t see why not.”
    “If you had the call taped,” I said, “you could find out one thing easily enough. You could find out if it was Motley.”
    “Well, you could at that,” he said. “I never even thought of that, but when you’ve got an actual suspect it makes a difference, doesn’t it? If you had a call taped and the voiceprint matched your Mr. Motley, you’d pretty much have him hanged, wouldn’t you?”
    “Not until we get a new governor.”
    “Oh, that’s right. Your man keeps vetoing the death-penalty bills, doesn’t he? But in a manner of speaking, you’d have your killer cold.” He shook his head. “Speaking of voiceprints, you can probably guess we didn’t do any dusting for fingerprints.”
    “Why should you? It looked open-and-shut.”
    “We do a lot of things routinely when there’s not much point to them. Shame we didn’t do that.”
    “I’ve a feeling Motley didn’t leave any fingerprints.”
    “Still, it would be nice to know. I could get a crew in here now, but there’ve been so many people through here by this time I don’t think we’d have much luck. Besides, it’d mean reopening the case, and I have to say you haven’t given me cause to do that.” He hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked at me. “You honestly think he did it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can you point to any kind of corroborating evidence? A clipping in the mail and a New York postmark, that may be enough to get you thinking, but it doesn’t do a lot to change how the case looks from here.”
    I thought about that one while we left the house. Havlicek drew the door shut and snapped the padlock. It was cooler now, and the birch trees cast long shadows across the lawn. I asked when the killings had taken place. Wednesday night, he said.
    “So it’s been a week.”
    “Will be in a matter of hours. The call came in around midnight. I could give you the time to the minute, if it matters, because as I said we keep a log.”
    “I just wondered about the date,” I said. “There was no indication on the clipping. I suppose the story would have run in Thursday night’s paper.”
    “That’s right, and there were follow-up stories the next day or two, but they won’t tell you anything. Nothing else came to light, so there wasn’t much for them to write about. Just that people were surprised, no indication he was under that kind of stress. The usual things you get from friends and neighbors.”
    “What kind of a workup did your medical examiner do?”
    “The chief of pathology over at the hospital