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being an insubordinate fucking hot dog,” Healy said.
    â€œWell, yeah,” I said. “That too.”
    The plump blond woman behind the counter poured more coffee into my mug. I didn’t need more. I didn’t want more. But there it was. I stirred in some sugar.
    â€œHard,” I said, “to fire off three rounds in a still-populated office building and nobody hears it.”
    â€œWe don’t yet know if anyone did,” Healy said. “We’ll start canvassing this morning.”
    â€œBut no one reported any gunshots,” I said.
    â€œNope.”
    â€œOn the other hand,” I said “people don’t report gunfire anyway.”
    â€œOnly in areas where they recognize it,” Healy said, “and half expect to hear it.”
    â€œPeople like these,” I said. “They hear bang bang and they don’t call for fear that it’ll turn out to be some guy with a power nailer fixing something in the third-floor men’s room, and they’ll look like an asshole.”
    â€œFor most of these folks,” Healy said, “it’s probably too late to worry about looking like an asshole.”
    â€œAh, Captain,” I said. “A life of crime-busting has made you cynical. What kind of gun?”
    â€œThey haven’t dug the slugs out yet. Looking at the holes I’d say a nine.”
    â€œSilencer?”
    â€œDon’t know yet,” Healy said. “Whoever did it had large balls. You and I both know silencers will cut down sound, but they won’t prevent it. Our shooter walks in, pops the guy, walks out. People in the hallways, people in the elevators.”
    â€œProbably took him, what, a minute?”
    â€œHe only needed balls for a little while,” he said. “But for that little while he needed a lot of them.”
    I was looking at our server behind the counter. She had on a cropped white tee shirt and constrictive jeans that hung low enough on her hips to display the blue butterfly tattooed at the base of her spine.
    â€œSo why were you tailing this guy?”
    I drank some coffee and didn’t say anything.
    â€œYou know,” Healy said, “and I know, that the reason you’re tailing him may suggest a motive for murder. Might point us somewhere.”
    I nodded.
    â€œYou know anything that will point us anywhere?”
    â€œDo I ever,” I said.
    Healy’s eggs arrived and he ate some.
    â€œHis wife,” I said, “hired me to get the goods on him for a divorce.”
    â€œDid you?”
    â€œYeah, he’s cheating on her, but I don’t have pictures.”
    â€œPictures,” Healy said.
    â€œYeah. She insists on pictures. In the act.”
    â€œJealous wife ain’t a bad motive,” Healy said.
    I didn’t tell him about Elmer O’Neill. Or the Eisens. I saw nothing useful to me for the moment to say anything about the guy Rowley hired to follow his wife. She was, after all, a client and I might as well protect her as far as I could. I could always tell it later. For the moment holding it back might give me a useful thing to trade someday. I had never gotten into serious trouble keeping my yap shut.
    â€œWhat we can be pretty sure of,” I said, “is whoever wanted him dead, wanted him dead pretty bad. Walk in and shoot him, no attempt to make it look like an accident, or a suicide. They wanted it done quick.”
    Healy bit the corner off a triangle of toast and chewed it slowly and swallowed.
    â€œOr they were so mad it didn’t matter to them,” Healy said.
    â€œThat narrows it down,” I said.
    Healy grinned at me.
    â€œYeah, it was either a crime of passion or it wasn’t,” he said.

12
    M arlene and I discussed her husband’s death, sitting on the side porch, sipping iced tea and looking at the uneventful sweep of her front lawn.
    â€œA person from the state police called me,” Marlene said. “A