St. Patrick's Day Murder by Lee Harris Read Free Book Online

Did it look like trouble?”
    “Ten or fifteen witnesses to a fight that got physical.”
    “Come on, you see it every day.”
    “But this time the guy getting pushed around ended up dead. You say anything while you were slugging him that’ll kill you in court?”
    “I don’t remember. Maybe.”
    Jack got up and walked to one of the windows. It was atabout eye level and probably offered an enchanting view of the driveway and the basement windows of the house on the other side of it. “All right, here’s what we’re going to do. Chris is going to look into Scotty’s homicide and see if she can turn anything up. I’ll give her whatever she needs.”
    “Forget it, buddy. This is no job for an amateur.”
    “Hansen, you are under arrest for Murder One, the killing of a police officer, a family man that you got in a fight with over money a couple of days before he got shot. You’ve got a dozen cops who’ll take the stand and swear you threatened to kill him. Just who do you think is going to clear you?”
    “They got no case, Jack. The whole thing’s gonna fall apart.”
    “Listen to me. Chris and I have some ideas. We’re all tired now so we’ll come back in the morning to talk to you. Eight o’clock. We’ll all be able to think a little better.”
    “Don’t bottier.”
    “Come on, Chris.”
    I got up and rebuttoned my coat, which I hadn’t taken off.
    “When did you leave Petra’s apartment last Sunday night?”
    “Never looked. We did the dishes, rolled around for a while. I got dressed and came home.”
    “Why’d you come home?”
    “I always come home.”
    “You see her last night?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Why’d you come back here?”
    Ray gave us a small smile. “It may surprise you,” he said, “but I like sleeping alone. OK?”
    “OK with me, buddy.”
    Jack opened the door, we went up a few steps, opened the outside door, and stepped out onto the driveway.
    My thoughts were such a jumble I couldn’t sort them out. Whether Ray had been generous or stupid to lend the money to Scotty I could not pass judgment on. But to have talked to him about it in a locker room, to have, by his own admission, pushed Scotty around, filled me with disgust. And to have done it in front of other people, people in Scotty’s precinctwho could be counted on to side with Scotty and probably dislike Ray in the bargain, only made it worse.
    We drove home without saying much, but when we were upstairs, Jack said, “Let’s talk.”
    “Go on.”
    “I know what you heard upset you. I know how you feel about violence. What Ray described happens all the time. A couple of guys have a beef, they talk about it in the locker room or a car or the men’s room, and it escalates. There’s an undercurrent of violence in a cop’s life and sometimes it just explodes. I’m sure Ray was sore as hell when he went over to ask for the money, but he wasn’t planning to kill for it. You saw them on St. Patrick’s Day. They were buddies.”
    “Did you ever lend Scotty money?”
    “Nothing bigger than a five or a ten, and after the first time, I never expected to get it back. He paid me back sometimes. He probably thought he paid me back all the time. That’s the way Scotty was.”
    It didn’t make me feel any better about Ray.

5
    I didn’t sleep well. Little about last night’s visit with Ray had made me feel better about launching this investigation. The little was that he was so casual about the charge, so certain that it wouldn’t hold up in court. Did that mean he was confident of his innocence—or sure that no other evidence against him would turn up? And while I hadn’t expected him to welcome my entry into the case with open arms, I had not been reassured by his response.
    I slept till Jack’s alarm woke me, although I usually wake up earlier on my own accord. Jack put breakfast together, using coffee his sister, the caterer, had given him to try. The smell got me going more than the alarm had, and by the time