Free St. Patrick's Day Murder by Lee Harris

Officer McVeigh’s,” I began.
    “Ah, Scotty. My God, what a shame, what a shame. You his sister?”
    “A friend. I drove in his new car before he died.”
    “The BMW. I sold it to him. Nice piece of machinery, huh? Purrs like a cat. You looking for something like that yourself?”
    “Not just yet. I wanted to ask you something about Scotty’s car. His wife’s going through his papers and they’re kind of a mess. She needs to know what he paid for it.”
    “Nothin’.”
    “What?”
    “It was a trade-in. He gave me his old car, I gave him the BMW.”
    “But his old car wasn’t worth anything like what that car’s worth.” I had no idea what his last car had been, but it certainly hadn’t been a luxury car.
    “For Scotty McVeigh it was even-steven. I couldn’t take money from him. The man made my life livable. You know what it is to have a small business in this city? It’s like hell. You spend twelve hours a day filling out forms. Then they send it all back and say do it over again. He worked it out for me. He pulled a couple of strings, made a few calls, smoothed the road, you know? It was worth one used BMW. On a trade-in.”
    “Could I see the paperwork on the car?” I asked.
    “Hey, lady, what is this? You the IRS or something?”
    “I’m Jean McVeigh’s friend. She was under the impression Scotty paid a couple of thousand dollars for the car.”
    “So let her think it.”
    “She’d like to know the truth.”
    “The truth I told you the first time around. From now on it’s fairy tales. What do you want I should say? Two thousand? Fine. Officer McVeigh paid two grand for the car. Plus the trade-in.”
    “What did he trade?” I asked, giving up on the cash.
    “A little Buick, good condition. I sold it already. It’s not on the lot.”
    “Thank you,” I said. I opened the door. “How much did you say he paid you?”
    He gave me a big smile. “Two thousand, dollars cash. You wanna try for three?”
    I didn’t.
    My map of Brooklyn was in the car, and when I sat down I looked up the street where Gavin Moore had lived. It was some distance away, but since I was already in Brooklyn and it was still early, I drove over. The house was a one-family, on a street that had an old apartment house in the middle and one- and two-family houses on either side. In New York, the older, prewar buildings are often distinguished by their lack of style and anything approaching beauty. The front of an apartment house is contiguous with the sidewalk, every square inch of property used for the building. There is no shrubbery along the front, often no setback for the entrance. On many streets, buildings line up like a fortress, the side of one touching the side of another. While it was certainly an economical usé of space, I have often wondered whether the designers and builders cared about anything else like the value of greenery, of space not covered with concrete.
    The Moore house was several down from the large, red six-story building. It had a big
M
on the door and a small station wagon in the narrow driveway. I pulled in behind the car and went to the front door.
    The door was opened by a nice-looking woman who was not much older than I. She was on the tall side and was wearing a running suit in a pretty shade of rose. I introduced myself and told her I was a friend of Scotty’s. She invited me in.
    “Everybody’s looking for a connection,” she said when we’d sat down in the living room. “This is the fourth unsolved killing in less than four years.”
    “What do you think?” I asked.
    “I think there’s nothing there. They knew each other, you know.”
    “I know.”
    “Not well, but they were in the same precinct for about a year. Then Gavin got transferred into this team and they probably never saw each other again. The work they did, it was completely different. You don’t think this Hansen guy killed McVeigh?”
    “No.”
    “They’ve been pretty quiet about a motive,” Mrs. Moore