“Do you think he knows that you suspect him?”
“I don’t know,” Milham replied thoughtfully. “Probably about now, yeah, I think he’s realized we haven’t swallowed his bullshit. There’s always something you forget when you set up something like this. I don’t know what the hell he forgot, not yet, but he knows. I’d say right about now, he’s getting worried.”
“What I wondered about…” Matt said. “When I got hit, it hurt like hell. He didn’t seem to be hurting much.”
“I was not surprised when the bullet they took out of him at Hahnemann,” Wally said, and dug in his pocket and came out with a plastic bag, handed it to Matt, then continued, “turned out to be a .32. Or that he had been shot only once. Whoever shot the wife and the partner made damned sure they were dead.”
Matt examined the bullet and handed the plastic envelope back.
“And I won’t be surprised, judging by the damage they caused, when we get the bullets in the bodies from the Medical Examiner, if they are not .32s. At least .38s, maybe even .45s, which do more damage. If I were a suspicious person, which is what the City pays me to be, I would wonder about that. How come the survivor has one small wound in the leg, and…”
“Yeah,” Matt said thoughtfully.
“I think it’s about time we ask them to come in,” Wally said. “You want to stick around, stick around.”
Milham got out of the captain’s chair and went to the door and opened it.
“Would you please come in, Mr. Atchis
on?” he asked politely.
A moment later, Atchison, his arm around the shoulder of a short, portly, balding man, appeared in the interview-room door.
“Feeling a little better, Mr. Atchison?” Wally asked.
“How the fuck do you think I feel?” Atchison said.
Margolis looked coldly, but without much curiosity, at Matt.
“Howareya?” he said.
Matt noticed that despite the hour—it was reasonable to presume that when Milham called him, he had been in bed—Margolis was freshly shaven and his hair carefully arranged in a manner he apparently thought best concealed his deeply receded hairline. His trousers were mussed, however, and did not match his jacket, and his white shirt was not fresh. He was not wearing a tie.
Margolis led Atchison to the captain’s chair and eased him down into it.
Matt saw that Atchison was wearing a fresh shirt and other—if not fresh—trousers. There were no bloodstains on the ones he was wearing.
“I object to having my client have to sit in that goddamned chair like you think he’s guilty of something. He just suffered a gunshot wound, for Christ’s sake!” Margolis said.
“We really don’t have anything more comfortable, Mr. Atchison,” Wally said. “But I’ll ask Detective Payne to get another chair in here so you can rest your leg on it. Would that be satisfactory?”
“It wouldn’t hurt. Let’s get this over, for God’s sake,” Atchison said. “My leg is starting to throb.”
“We’ll get through this as quickly as we can,” Matt heard Wally say as he went in search of another chair. “We appreciate your coming in here, Mr. Atchison.”
Matt found a straight-back chair and carried it into the interview room. He arranged it in front of the captain’s chair, and with a groan, Atchison lifted his leg up and rested it on it.
Matt glanced at Atchison. Atchison was examining him carefully, and Matt remembered what Wally had just said about “I think he’s realized we haven’t swallowed his bullshit.”
When Matt looked at Milham, Milham, with a nod of his head, told him to stand against the wall, behind Atchison in the captain’s chair.
A slight, gray-haired woman, carrying a stenographer’s notebook in one hand and a metal folding chair in the other, came into the room.
“This is Mrs. Carnelli,” Milham said. “A police stenographer. She’ll record this interview. Unless, of course, Mr. Atchison, you have an objection to that?”
Atchison looked at Margolis.
“Let’s get on with it,” Margolis said.