Free The Borzoi Killings by Paul Batista

the newspapers away from her children, who read English fluently. The radio and television were turned off. Every time they asked about Juan, Mariana said that he had returned to Mexico. They, too, she said, would soon be in Mexico. It was home. Their grandmother lived there. It was always warm, she said, you never needed any winter clothes. Life would be better there.
    The old Buick station wagon stopped in the driveway of Celia’s house. Clutching an oversize leather bag, Mariana and her children climbed into the third row of seats because the first two rows were crowded with Mexican men who were also on their way to New York. Wide-eyed, the children stared at Main Street in Bridgehampton, where some of their young friends lived, as they passed through the beautiful village.
    The windows of the car were tinted so darkly they were almost black. They drove cautiously west toward the city, never above the speed limit and never below it. The driver wanted to avoid the attention of state police cruisers.

11.
    “Mrs. Richardson, I need you to help us more.”
    Detective Halsey stood on the other side of the marble counter in the middle of the kitchen. Two other men, who she remembered were Dick Cerullo and Dave Cohen and who she thought of as Larry and Curly, the Stooges who followed Moe, the leader, stood behind him. Twelve hours earlier, during their solo, late-night visit to the crime scene, Cerullo and Cohen had taken the stacks of hundred dollar bills—they called them “Benjamins”—from the crawl space in the attic to their car.
    Joan Richardson was impatient. It was now three days after her husband’s death. She was about to leave for New York for the funeral service at St. Bart’s, with its ornate dome that gave the whole church the look of a mosque. Six hundred invited guests were expected, among them Alan Greenspan, three former Secretaries of the Treasury, Warren Buffett and George Soros. At night she had stayed in East Hampton in the sprawling Hunting Inn during the three days in which other people made the funeral arrangements because Bo Halsey had asked her to stay. She’d become shaken, irritated, and distracted by his frequent although brief visits to ask her questions.
    “I don’t know how else I can help you. I gave you Juan’s name and helped you find him. I’m not a detective, and I’ve had a very, very hard time.”
    Halsey said abruptly, “We would have found him soon enough, Mrs. Richardson. People knew he worked here and that he had a big old Schwinn bike. People knew he rode around on it. And we found the tire tracks from his bike in the sand near the hedgerow. There aren’t many old-style bikes like that out here. Single-speed, push-down pedal brakes. And a woman who was out on the beach came forward right away to tell us that she’d seen a tall, good-looking Mexican pushing an old bicycle near the dunes the day your husband died. A movie star, she said. Most Mexicans out here don’t look like a movie star. So it wasn’t really that hard to figure out who he was.”
    “All right,” Joan responded, waving her right hand dismissively. When she was tense, a barely visible pattern of veins rose to the surface of her skin near her temples. “So I wasn’t any help. I thought I was helping. I didn’t need to bother, I guess, when I drove out to his house with you.”
    Ignoring her haughty tone, Bo Halsey gazed at her for five seconds. “Let’s talk again about your day in New York on Tuesday.”
    “Again?”
    “Your shopping day.”
    “Yes, my shopping day. I’m sure Mrs. Halsey has shopping days, too.”
    “There is no Mrs. Halsey.”
    He looked into her eyes, that extraordinary blue, as if by silence he could elicit more from her. He knew that Joan Richardson had lied to him earlier and was still lying. Cerullo and Cohen had gone to the city and, accompanied by three NYPD detectives, asked the doormen at her Fifth Avenue building how often they had seen her that day. The