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confirmed the lieutenant. He nodded again and the attendant replaced the drawer, then left silently on rubber soles. “He turned up at City Airport at two-thirty, folded into the trunk of a blue ’78 Nova. The license number you know. Ever hear the word stupid? A whole parking lot to choose from, and they dump it in the president’s private slot. He called airport security; they noticed the blood and called us. The M.E. figures he left us about ten hours ago. That puts it pretty close to when you saw what you saw on Woodward.”
    “Told you so.”
    He scowled, an expression that gave his face a decidedly African cast. “That’s what I like about you, Walker. You never rub it in.”
    “What are we pissing around for?” snarled Proust. “Take him in and let’s grill him.”
    “Mr. Walker is an eyewitness, Inspector, not a suspect. He came down here of his own free will.”
    “All right, it’s your case and I won’t interfere. But this son of a bitch knows more than he’s spilling.”
    “I haven’t spilled anything yet,” I said.
    “That’s what I’m talking about!”
    “Let’s go down to headquarters, Amos.” That was strictly for Proust. John never called me by my first name, not even when his father and mine ran a garage on McNichols and we played together as kids.
    It was a brief, freezing walk from the morgue to police headquarters on Beaubien. I spent the next hour in a bare interrogation room in the C.I.D., repeating my story under questioning for the benefit of a squeaking tape recorder and a stenographer with nice legs but not much else, and when it was over we all knew exactly as much as Alderdyce and I had eleven hours earlier. I looked through mugs until my eyes got bleary, with results even less satisfactory. Then someone broke out the Identikit and together we came up with fair likenesses of the Hager Twins, which is about as close as you can expect from a department that’s too cheap to hire an artist. When Proust left to have copies made, followed by the stenographer—make what you want out of that, I personally don’t think he had it in him—I sat back in the scoop chair they’d given me and tapped a Winston, my third in that flyblown cell, against the back of my hand. The lieutenant watched me hungrily.
    “Still off the weed, John?”
    He nodded. “Eighteen days now. It’s a bitch.” In his pastel blue shirt sleeves now, he fished out a pen he had clipped to a plastic holder inside his shirt pocket, and rolled it back and forth between his dusty pink palms. I’d lost track of how many times he’d done that since we’d come in. “Off the record, Walker, what kind of guy was this Kramer?”
    I started to touch off the cigarette, then thought better of it and blew out the match, letting the coffin nail droop unlit. There was no sense in torturing the guy. “Off the record, on the record, I can’t tell you because I don’t know,” I said. “A Pfc doesn’t get too close to his company commander, even in combat. He struck me as kind of prissy. Fatigues always pressed and spotless whenever we were near water and an iron, clean-shaven, necktie tucked inside his shirt. He wanted us to look the same, ignored it when we didn’t go along. Kind of a junior league Georgie Patton, only without the blood or the guts. I don’t think he was a coward. Timid, maybe. Overcautious, they call it in Washington. Near Hue we lost more men than we should have because he made up his mind to take a hill too late. The company was threatening a general strike when someone got wise and he was yanked back to a desk job in the States. This is hearsay, but someone told me he got to be captain by snitching on the guy that was there ahead of him. You can take that for whatever it’s worth. But it would fit in with my opinion of his character. Yeah, and he was a nut on taking home movies. Picked up some nice equipment in Saigon for next to nothing.”
    “Real officer material. No wonder we lost over