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

He looked just the way he always looked, his coat neat and his tie straight, but his eyes when he turned toward me seemed almost as empty as his holster. Don’t speak, I reminded myself, but impulsively I reached for his hand. He looked startled. Then, with a long shuddering sigh, he leaned forward, pulling me toward him, burying his face in the blue serge of my shirt. Unexpectedly, I found my hands on his shoulders.

Dragging my hands away, Sergeant Collins caught him by the left shoulder and shoved him back into the chair. “Take off your gunbelt,” he ordered me curtly. “Put it in my office.”

“Right,” I said, seething inside. What did he expect, that Steve was going to grab my pistol and use it to escape? But then I glanced at Steve and realized that was exactly what Sergeant Collins expected, and Steve realized that even if I didn’t. So I walked out the door and into the small office next to it, took off my black basketweave belt, wrapped it around my still-holstered revolver, laid it on Sergeant Collins’s desk, and returned, to smile at Steve with one corner of my mouth. He lifted an eyebrow at me and tried to smile back, but he kept both hands on the table, quite still.

The tape recorder was running now. Sergeant Collins gave the date. “Offense, homicide,” he said. “Victim, Evelyn Hallett. Suspect, Stephen Hallett. Interviewer, Policewoman Lorene Taylor. Now, go ahead.” He shoved the rights waiver over to me. Apparently I was in charge of getting it signed. He hadn’t mentioned that before.

I looked over at Steve, wondering how I was supposed to handle this if I was also not supposed to say one word until after the rights waiver was signed, and then I slid it on over to Steve. He looked at it, looked at the tape recorder, and looked back at me.

This was assuming the proportions of surrealism. It was some kind of bloody awful, rotten joke. Steve and I together had read people their rights; we’d worked together on a lot of cases. In a town just big enough to have two or three federal agents, but not big enough for a regular field office, the federal agents rely on local police support. I hate this, I thought bitterly, and then reminded myself that Steve undoubtedly was hating it a lot more. So I made the little speech, winding up with the usual “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”

Stupid question. This guy had a law degree. “Yes, I do.” Very formal. Steve’s voice, the first time I’d heard it in seven months, oddly husky, but with his usual strength.

“Do you wish to give up the right to remain silent?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then sign right there, please.”

Sergeant Collins signed under Steve and then departed, closing the door very quietly. I wondered who he thought he was kidding. I’d already noticed that the “mirror” in this holding room was a window from Sergeant Collins’s office, and Steve certainly knew it, too. Anybody who didn’t realize Sergeant Collins was putting that window into use — well, that person hadn’t been in police work as long as I had.

But of course I had to pretend I didn’t know it, and so did Steve. “What happened?” I asked.

He closed his eyes, swallowed, reopened his eyes. “I killed Evelyn.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He paused, as if to think about it, and his voice sounded rambling as he began to reply. “I’m six foot three. She’s — she was — five foot two and ninety-five pounds... I don’t know why, Lorene. I shouldn’t have — I shouldn’t have needed to.”

“Did you need to?”

“I guess I must have.” The voice wondering as well as wandering. “I did, didn’t I? So I guess I must have needed to, or at least I thought then I did.”

I know how to question prisoners. You don’t show any impatience, you take as long as it takes, you ask questions right — but this wasn’t just any prisoner hauled in off the street, this was Steve. “Look, darn it,” I said, “I don’t know anything at all about this except they told me to come in here and take a statement from you, and Steve, you ought to have sense enough to know I’m confused enough as it is. Now, will you for cryin’ out loud tell me what happened?”

He jumped as if I’d awakened him from a half-sleep, and tears began to form in his eyes as if only his daze had kept them at bay. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I... look, I’m sorry, Lorene, I just — they’re out there at my house, the crime-scene people, and — Evelyn’s just lying there and they say they won’t move her for hours, and I never worked a killing for cryin’ out loud, but how they can just leave her — and they brought me up here and — and — they won’t even put a sheet over her, and I... I quit loving her a long time ago but I did love her once— It’s Evelyn, and she’s dead — like that — and they won’t even cover her up.”

“You’re not there to see it.”

“But I know.”