The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

“Keeping my hand in. How are you, Captain?”

The old friends shook hands warmly.

“How are you making out?”

“Better than your boys did in October.”

Honest Mike Coligney bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The husband everybody said was chasing Mr. Medick claims he wasn’t.”

“What do you expect him to say? A man died. He didn’t want to get charged with manslaughter.”

“He also says he wasn’t cuckolded.”

“That’s not what he said last October.”

“He thought he’d been cuckolded at the time, but now he says he was set up. Some ‘friend’ sent him a letter: ‘Dear sir, I thought you should know that your wife is running around on you.’”

“Do you believe him?”

“His wife swore she never cheated on him.”

“Do you believe her?”

“She swore it on her deathbed.”

“What deathbed? She couldn’t be older than thirty-five.”

“TB. Gone in March.”

Mike Coligney crossed himself. “Mother Mary . . . So what was Medick doing on her fire escape?”

“He got a letter, too. Supposedly from the lady.”

“I remember the letter. Along the line of ‘Come up the fire escape, I’ll let you in my back window.’”

“She swore she never wrote it,” said Van Dorn. “Same deathbed.”

“Who did?”

“Whoever threw Mr. Medick off the fire escape.”

“Except for one thing,” said Coligney. “Detective Division matched that letter to a typewriter in the lady’s office where she worked.”

“There are two ways of looking at the typewriter,” said Joseph Van Dorn. “Either she lied on her deathbed . . . or the person who threw Mr. Medick off the fire escape typed the letter on that typewriter.”

Coligney knew that and changed the subject. “Medick was supposed to be afraid of heights. Where’d he get the nerve to climb four stories of fire escapes?”

Joseph Van Dorn rubbed his red whiskers, took off his hat, and ran a big hand over his bald scalp. He blinked, and his deep-set Celtic eyes grew dark with melancholy. “According to the lady’s poor devil of a husband, she was a woman worth taking chances for.”

“So Medick knew her.”

“

Hoped to know her better,” said Van Dorn, “encouraged by a letter written by someone who knew his weakness for other men’s wives.”

“How come no witness ever saw that ‘someone’?”