Read The Lemur for Free Online Page B

pencil freshly sharpened. On the wall were two framed photographs, of the president, and the late Pope John Paul II.
    “Take a seat, Mr. Glass,” the policeman said. “Thanks for coming in.”
    A heavy-haunched woman with black roots showing in her butterblond hair entered without knocking and laid a sheaf of papers on the desk. “Think us two thirsty fellows could get a cup of coffee, Rhoda?” Captain Ambrose asked.
    The woman glared at him. “Machine is busted,” she said. “Walensky punched it again.” She went out, and the glass panel in the door rattled behind her.
    “How did you get my number?” Glass asked.
    The policeman reached for the papers Rhoda had brought and held them upright and tapped them on the desk to align their edges. “It was in the call log on Riley’s cell phone,” he said. “When did you speak to him?”
    “This morning. At ten forty-seven.”
    The captain lifted an eyebrow.
    “I happened to be looking at the clock.”
    “Ah. Right. That every witness should be so accurate.”
    Witness. The word sent something like a small electric charge along Glass’s spine. It seemed to him that everything in the headachey, noise-assaulted, vertiginous six months he had lived in New York had been leading to just this moment, when he would be sitting here in this policeman’s office, dry mouthed and faintly nauseous, with a tingle in his backbone and his veins fizzing. What was happening was at once ordinary and outlandish, inevitable and contingent, as in a dream. “What happened?” he asked. “I mean, how did you … ?”
    The captain was leaning forward at the desk with his long, narrow dark hands clasped before him, which intensified the sainted look. “His girlfriend called us. She’d been out of town, came back and found the body, still warm.” Glass had not reckoned on Dylan Riley having a girlfriend. What kind of girl could she possibly be? The captain went on: “We’re not getting much out of her at the moment, naturally. She didn’t do it. We checked: she was in a Boeing somewhere over Pennsylvania when it happened. She says stuff was taken, two, maybe three computers.”
    “Then there must have been more than one person.”
    “Oh?”
    “To be able to carry so much.”
    A faintly pitying light came into the policeman’s eye. “Computers are compact and light these days, Mr. Glass. That’s why they’re called laptops.” He uncoiled himself from his chair, pushing down on the desk with the steepled fingers of one hand. He really was a very tall man. “Listen, I’ve got to get that cup of coffee. You want to come? There’s a place across the street.”
    They moved in chill sunlight through the late-afternoon crowds. The captain loped along at a forward stoop, his arms slightly bowed and his head turned a little to the side, like an Indian scout, one of his ancestors, perhaps, leaning down intently to listen for the sound of the cavalry’s distant hoofbeats. They were in the coffee shop before Glass thought of lighting up. A cigarette would have calmed him, but not much.
    The place was crowded and while they were waiting for a table the policeman, jingling coins in a pocket of his trousers, talked in relaxed tones about the circumstances of Dylan Riley’s death. Other customers, also waiting, stood within earshot, but paid no heed; apparently murder was a conversational commonplace, in the environs of Police Headquarters. “A very smooth job,” the captain said. “Small-caliber bullet through the left eye. A Beretta, we think, maybe. Then the place was neatened up, with the victim on his bed and all, ready for the meat wagon. He was shot at his desk, though.”
    “How do you know that?”
    Again the captain flashed that mild, pitying look. “Stains on the chair,” he said. “Like the medical textbooks tell us: no death without defecation. ”
    A gum-chewing waitress in a gingham apron showed them to a table in a corner; the tabletop was sticky to the touch.