“Yo,” Marino muttered sardonically. “Sounds like half the drones I work with.”
Wesley shrugged. “Maybe I’m shooting blanks, Pete. I haven’t sorted through it yet. He could be some loser still living at home with his mother, could have priors, been in and out of institutions, prisons. Hell, he could work downtown in a big securities firm and have no criminal or psychiatric history at all. It seems he usually called Beryl at night. The one call we know about that he made during the day was on a Saturday. She worked out of her home, was there most of the time. He called when it was convenient for him versus when he was likely to find her in. I’m leaning toward thinking he has a regular nine to five job and is off on the weekends.”
“Unless he was calling her while he was at work,” Marino said.
“There’s always that possibility,” Wesley conceded.
“What about his age?” I asked. “You don’t think it’s possible he might be older than you just proposed?”
“It would be unusual,” Wesley said. “But anything’s possible.”
Sipping my coffee, which was cool by now, I got around to telling them what Mark had told me about Beryl’s contract conflicts and her enigmatic relationship with Gary Harper. When I was finished, Wesley and Marino were staring curiously at me. For one thing, this Chicago lawyer’s impromptu visit late at night did sound a little odd. For another, I had thrown them a curve. The thought probably had not occurred to Marino or Wesley and, before last night, certainly not to me, that there actually might be a motive in Beryl’s slaying. The most common motive in sexual homicides is no motive at all. The perpetrators do it because they enjoy it and because the opportunity is there.
“A buddy of mine’s a cop in Williamsburg,” Marino commented. “Tells me Harper’s a real squirrel, a hermit. Drives around in an old Rolls-Royce and never talks to nobody. Lives in this big mansion on the river, never has nobody in, nothing. And the guy’s old, Doc.”
“Not so old,” I disagreed. “In his mid-fifties. But yes, he’s reclusive. I think he lives with his sister.”
“It’s a long shot,” Wesley said, and he looked very tense. “But see how far you can run with it, Pete.
If nothing else, maybe Harper would have a few guesses about this ‘M’ Beryl was writing.
Obviously, it was someone she knew well, a friend, a lover. Someone out there has got to know who it is. We find that out, we’re getting somewhere.”
Marino didn’t like it. “I know what I’ve heard,” he said.
“Harper ain’t going to talk with me and I don’t got probable cause to force him into it. I also don’t think he’s the guy who whacked Beryl even if he did have motive, maybe. Seems to me he would have done it and been done with it. Why draw it out for nine, ten months? And she’d recognize his voice if it was him calling.”
“Harper could have hired somebody,” Wesley said.
“Right. And we would have found her a week later with a nice clean gunshot wound in the back of her head,” Marino answered. “Most hit men don’t stalk their victims, call ’em up, use a blade, rape
’em.”
“Most of them don’t,” Wesley agreed. “But we can’t be sure rape occurred, either. There was no seminal fluid.”
He glanced at me, and I nodded a confirmation. “The guy may be dysfunctional. Then again, the crime could be staged, her body positioned to looked like a sexual assault when it really wasn’t. It all depends on who was hired, if this is the case, and what the plan was. For example, if Beryl turned up shot while she was in the middle of a dispute with Harper, the cops put him first on the list. But if her murder looks like the work of a sexual sadist, a psychopath, Harper doesn’t enter anybody’s mind.”
Marino was staring off at the bookcase, his meaty face flushed. Slowly turning uneasy eyes on me, he said, “What else you know about this book she was writing?”