Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

And to really top things off, Allen and I wound up divorced after all and he’d gone off somewhere else, leaving me stuck here with this Mickey Mouse job and no way at all to go home and no use anyway, they’d filled my slot by now.

And Steve... well, if he hadn’t been married, it would have been very nice to know Steve was here, because let’s face it, he’s an interesting guy, but he was most thoroughly married and the FBI frowns on its agents playing around.

So I went on sorting parking tickets, and never mind the tears in my eyes. Policemen can cry in uniform if they want to. Policewomen can’t.

“Lorene?”

“Sir?” I answered mechanically, before looking up at Sergeant Collins. Detective sergeant, not uniform sergeant.

“Do you know Stephen Hallett?”

“Yes, sir, why?” Was there some reason why I shouldn’t?

“What do you know about him?” Collins sat down companionably on the corner of the table, but his posture was anything but relaxed.

“What do you mean, what do I know? I know a lot of stuff.”

“Tell me some of it.”

“Well, he’s a super-good investigator, one of the best I ever met from the FBI. I mean — oh, you know, most of them don’t really—”

“Investigate. I know. Go on.”

“He’s a nice guy. By that I mean when he’s tired and cross he makes sure whoever’s around knows he’s cross because he’s tired, not because somebody did something. But he doesn’t get cross much.”

“What about his personal life?”

I shrugged. “He’s married. So was I, then.”

“What kind of marriage?”

“Why on earth do you want to know that?”

“Because two hours ago he called 911 and said, ‘You better send somebody out here. I think I just killed my wife.’ And we did, and he had. Now, what kind of marriage?”

Numbly, I bent over to pick up the ticket book I seemed unaccountably to have dropped on the floor. “Okay,” I said, with, I suppose, some vague hope that telling the truth would help him, “okay, okay — kind of marriage. They — I don’t know, Steve isn’t the sort of person to go around crying on people’s shoulders, but I had the feeling it — just wasn’t working, not as a marriage anyway. The only time he said anything to me, we were talking one day and he’d just lost one in court that he should have won, and I said he must have had a lousy jury. And he said he wished Evelyn would say that, but she’d probably just say he was stupid, so he wouldn’t tell her about it at all. And one day — the guys were talking. We had a series-type rapist, and you know how guys talk, and they’d forgotten I was there. Steve said the rapist was getting more than he was. So I said since he was married he ought to be able to solve that problem, and he sort of grinned, but his eyes looked — funny.”

Sergeant Collins looked at the table, and then he got off it and quit trying to pretend we were buddies. “You like him?” he asked, standing straight beside me.

“I like him.”

“Even if he did kill his wife?”

“I don’t know that he killed his wife.”

“He says he did.”

“I still don’t know that he did. Why did you come tell me this anyway? I’m no detective, not here, not now.”

“Because,” Sergeant Collins said, “he says he’ll sign a rights waiver and tell what happened if he can tell you, and only if. Will you get a statement from him?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll tape-record it. Be sure you understand that. Just because he’s your friend doesn’t mean—”

“Look,” I flared at him, “I’m not going to cover up for him and he knows it and he wouldn’t ask me to. And if you feel that way, you’d better sit in on it.”

“Not necessary,” Collins said. “But what I’m afraid of is — he’s smart. You know that. And I’m afraid he’ll on purpose blurt out something as soon as you go in, because he knows you, and then turn around later and claim he wasn’t advised of his rights. So I told him, and I’m telling you, that if either of you says one damn word to the other, even if it’s just hello, before I get that tape recorder turned on, you go right back out the door. And I want the rights waiver signed before I leave the room.”

“You should have already got it signed,” I pointed out not very politely.

Collins sighed, deliberately audibly. “We got one at the scene. But I don’t want him to be able to claim later he was too shocky to know what he was signing. So we get another one signed now.”

“Right,” I said, wondering why he was sounding so belligerent to me. I hadn’t done anything, after all... But then I stopped wondering and followed him into the little interrogation room that looked just exactly like the one at home. Steve was sitting in that straight chair that’s always reserved for suspects, the chair that’s not quite uncomfortable, but certainly not quite comfortable either.