“ Third Avenue in the Sixties.”
“Nowhere near, then.”
“No. She’s a secretary; not the type to shoot a retired cop.”
“I’ll take your word.”
“When do you get the ME’s report?”
“He’s working on Arnie’s body now; he’ll call me here when he’s finished.”
“No witnesses, of course.”
“None. Like I said, it wouldn’t have made much noise, wouldn’t have attracted any attention unless somebody had been walking right by the alley at the very moment.”
“And nobody was?”
“Nope. Let’s have some dinner while we wait for the ME to call.” He signaled a waiter for a menu.
They ate in glum silence. It was a ritual with them; in the circumstances they were either supposed to talk about Arnie, or not at all. Stone tried to remember some anecdote or other about Arnie, but he couldn’t. “Funny,” he said after a while, “all I can remember about him in the squad room is he never took his overcoat off in winter. He’d sit there in his coat with the steam heat going and type arrest reports.”
“He had some good busts,” Dino said. “I never partnered with him, but I remember he had a reputation for being tenacious, for not giving up on a case, for going the extra mile in an investigation.”
“I knew that, I guess. That’s why, when he called me for work – this was three, four years ago – I gave it to him when I could. He was reliable, he had a good nose. That’s why I don’t think either of the people he was working on for me could have been involved. Arnie would have smelled something. Do you think this could connect to some old case of his?”
“What, fifteen years after he retired? I can’t buy that.”
The pay phone on the wall rang, and they both stopped eating and watched a waiter answer it. He waved Dino over.
The conversation lasted less than a minute, and Dino’s expression never changed. He came back and sat down.
“What’s the news?”
“Like I thought, two shots, small caliber – a twenty-five automatic.”
“Don’t see many of those anymore.”
“Yeah, these days every punk on the street has a Glock or something better. There was an abrasion on Arnie’s left knee, too, like he fell down, but no marks to show that somebody hit him first.”
“Where’d he take the bullets?”
“Left temple and back of the head.”
“An execution, then. Well, I suppose it could have been some junkie with some trash piece he’d copped in a burglary. He sees Arnie, an old guy, easy mark, and he’s desperate enough to pop him, even for just a few bucks.”
“He didn’t take your check,” Dino said.
“Where was it, in the wallet?”
Dino shook his head. “Left inside jacket pocket. The guy went for the cash, didn’t worry about the rest. Arnie was wearing a Rolex we chipped in for when he put in his papers.”
“I remember that,” Stone said. “I bought a piece of that watch. The guy didn’t take that?”
Dino shook his head. “This doesn’t look good for clearing.”
“Pull in your snitches, put the word out on the street. The twenty-five handgun is something, at least. Not a lot of them on the street, I’ll bet.”
“Oh, we’ll treat it as a cop killing, which means all the stops out,” Dino said. “I’m just not optimistic.”