Free When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block Page A

and snorted. Then he said, "I figured you'd know. The cops came by early this morning, before I saw the story in the News, so I didn't even know about the arrest. Shit. Be easier if you already knew this."
    "I'm not following you, Tommy."
    "The two Latin lovers.Clean? Shit, the men's room in theTimes Square subway station, that's how clean they are. The cops hit their place and found stuff from my house everywhere they looked. Jewelry they had descriptions of, a stereo that I gave them the serial number, everything.Monogrammed shit. I mean that's how clean they were, for Christ's sake."
    "So?"
    "So they admitted the burglary but not the murder."
    "Crooks do that all the time, Tommy."
    "Lemmefinish, huh? They admitted the burglary, but according to them it wasn't really a burglary. I was giving them all that stuff."
    "And they just came to pick it up in the middle of the night."
    "Yeah, right.No, their story was they were supposed to make it look like a burglary so I could collect from my insurance. I could claim a loss on top of what they were actually taking, and that way everybody's to the good."
    "What did the actual loss amount to?"
    "Shit, I don't know. There were twice as many things turned up at their place as I ever listed when I made out a report.There's things I missed a few days after I filled out the report and other stuff I didn't know was gone until the cops found them. And they took things weren't covered. There was a fur of Peg's, we weregonna get a floater on it and we never did.And some of her jewelry, same story. I got a standard homeowner'spolicy, it didn't coveranywheres near everything they took. They got a set of sterling, it came down to us from her aunt,I swear I forgot we owned the stuff. And it wasn't covered, either."
    "It hardly sounds like an insurance setup."
    "No, of course not.How the hell could it be? Anyway, the important thing is according to them the house was empty when they hit it. Peg wasn't home."
    "And?"
    "And I set them up is their story. They hit the place, they carted everything away, and then I came home with Peg and stabbed her six, eight times, whatever it was, and left her there so it looked like it happened during a burglary."
    "How could the burglars testify that you stabbed your wife?"
    "They couldn't. All they said was they didn't and she wasn't home when they were there and I had it arranged with them to do the burglary. The cops pieced the rest of it together."
    "What did they do, arrest you?"
    "No. They came over to the hotel where I'm staying, it was early,I was just out of the shower. Now this was the first I knew that the spics were arrested, let alone that they were trying to do a job on me. They just wanted to talk, the cops, and at first I talked to them, and then I started to get the drift of what they were trying to put on me. So I said I wasn't saying anything more without my lawyerpresent, and I called him, and he left half his breakfast on the table and came over in a hurry, and he wouldn't let me say a word."
    "And they didn't take you in or book you?"
    "No."
    "But they didn't entirely buy your story either?"
    "No way.I didn't really tell 'ema story because Kaplan wouldn't let me say anything. They didn't drag me in because they don't have a case yet, but according to Kaplan they're going to be building one if they can. They told me not to leave town. You believe it? My wife's dead, the Post headline says 'Quiz Husband in Burglary Murder,' and what the hell do they think I'mgonna do? Am I going fishing for fucking trout inMontana? 'Don't leave town.' You see this shit on television, you think nobody in real life talks like that. Maybe television's where they get it from."
    I waited for him to tell me what he wanted from me. I didn't have long to wait.
    "Why I called," he said, "is Kaplan thinks we ought to hire a detective. He figures maybe these guys talked around the neighborhood, maybe they bragged to their friends, maybe there's a way to prove they did the