Standing in the cold, he deliberated. He would need to have the car towed, but that could wait. He could call a cab, but that would take time. It was twelve blocks to the
Gray Streets
office. He would walk.
Gloves from the car, one last look around, he set off eastward. He walked in the street, avoided the shadows of the sidewalk. A brisk pace warmed him.
Houses with lighted windows. Gutters full of leaves. Traffic picked up as he got closer to downtown. He moved onto the sidewalk.
Near Main Street he heard sirens. Ahead, a police car crept through an intersection, red and blue lights flashing. Another followed a few seconds later.
Loogan reached Main and turned north. Flashing lights in the distance, two blocks away. Northbound traffic crawled. People milled in front of restaurants. A man in a long knitted scarf played saxophone, the instrument case open at his feet, a few dollar bills in the bottom. A border collie nearby, its leash tied to a fire hydrant. The collie and the man with the saxophone were the only ones not looking north.
Some of the restaurant people drifted toward the flashing lights. Loogan started to jog. The two police cars he had seen were latecomers. There were three others on the street. Cops at the intersections, directing traffic.
The flashing lights surrounded a building on the corner. The building that housed the offices of
Gray Streets.
A barrier of sawhorses held back the crowd. Loogan insinuated himself among the people. A woman with a cell phone at her ear. A balding man with rimless eyeglasses. The woman with the cell phone broke her connection and dialed a new number. “You’re not going to believe where I am,” she said.
Loogan pressed through to the barrier. Beyond it, there was a tree growing out of an opening in the sidewalk. A wrought-iron bench beside the tree. A man’s shoe had found its way underneath the bench.
Trailing off from one end of the bench: a line of uniformed cops. Four of them, hats off, hands behind their backs. Stone-faced. Between the cops and the building, a blanket had been spread on the sidewalk. The cops stood facing the crowd, as motionless as sentries, but their presence could do nothing to conceal the shape beneath the blanket.
Loogan thought he should ask them the name of the man beneath the blanket. He was sure they wouldn’t answer. It was a formality in any case. He knew the answer. Looking up, he could see that every window in the face of the building was closed—every window except for one on the sixth floor.
Chapter 7
ELIZABETH WAISHKEY NODDED TO THE OFFICER IN THE HALLWAY AND went on through. The outer office of
Gray Streets
was unoccupied. The air was cool.
The door of Tom Kristoll’s office stood open. Carter Shan was inside taking photographs. Elizabeth paused for a moment in the doorway—a tall woman with raven hair. Her clothes were unassuming: tan overcoat, gray blazer and slacks, pale blue blouse. Her only adornment was a necklace of glass beads.
Carter Shan turned and aimed the camera at her. He didn’t press the button.
“Pushed,” she said to him.
“You’re dreaming, Lizzie,” he said.
Elizabeth stepped into the room. “You think he jumped, I suppose. That’s why you’re taking pictures.”
“I’m covering the bases.”
“The pictures’ll come in handy,” she said. “We’ll need all the evidence we can muster, when we put him on trial for killing himself.”
She crossed to the open window and looked down. A small crowd lingered on the street below. The medical examiner was kneeling beside the body. The blanket had been cast aside.
“Whose bright idea was the blanket?” Elizabeth asked.
“It wasn’t one of our people,” said Shan. “The woman who called it in, she covered him with a blanket from her car. She had her kids with her.”
Elizabeth nodded and silently watched the scene below.
Shan put the digital camera in the pocket of his coat. “All right, Lizzie,” he said. “Don’t be so inscrutable. Why do you think he didn’t jump?”
She walked away from the window. “Maybe it’s just a feeling.”
“I know better than that.”
“The west wind brings me tidings.”
“Fine. Keep it to yourself.”
She surveyed the room, from the bookshelves to the desk to the rack by the door that held a long coat and a black fedora.
She said, “Have you ever thought about killing yourself, Carter? Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Just imagine you
have
thought about killing yourself, and you’re here in your office and you decide today’s the day. You look around, and you don’t have a gun handy, or a rope, but there’s the window. Would you jump through it?”
“Why not?”
“That’s the spirit,” said Elizabeth. “Why not? But it’s not an ideal window for jumping. You throw up the sash, and the opening is—what?—two feet square? You can fit through, but it’s going to be awkward. How do you go about it?”
Shan studied the window. “I don’t know. Headfirst or feetfirst—I suppose it wouldn’t matter much. I’d want to get it over with.”
“Would you?”
He looked thoughtful. “No, you’re right. I’d want to put it off a little. Get used to the idea.” He bent to open the deep drawer of the desk. There were two tumblers and a bottle inside. “I’d want a drink,” he said.
Elizabeth touched the glass beads at her neck. “Yes. You’re a man who’s fond enough of Scotch to keep a bottle in your desk—you’re going to want a taste.”
“Maybe he took a hit from the bottle, and put it back when he was done.”
“Maybe he did. Eakins’ll be able to tell us.” Lillian Eakins was the medical examiner. “So you’ve had your drink, or not, and the window’s still beckoning. You didn’t answer me. How do you go through?”
“Not headfirst,” Shan said. “It’s too scary that way. You’d want to go feetfirst. You’d sit on the windowsill with your legs dangling out and then sort of lean back and slide through—No, that’s too awkward. What you’d really want to do is climb out onto the ledge and stand there for a minute to get your bearings. But there’s no ledge out there.”
“No,” Elizabeth said.
“If he wanted to jump, he wouldn’t have jumped out this window. He’d want a place where he could stand.”
“Yes.”
“He would’ve gone to the roof,” Shan said. “But maybe he couldn’t. Maybe there’s no way to get up to the roof. You’re smiling. That’s your inscrutable smile. You’ve been up there.”
“The stairs at the north end of the building go all the way up,” Elizabeth said. “There’s a door with a lock, but the lock is broken. People go up there and smoke. There’s a low wall. You could stand on it and work up your nerve. If you wanted to jump, that’s where you’d go.”
“Suppose that’s where he went,” said Shan. “He decides he’s going to jump, opens this window, sees that it’s no good. He leaves the window open and goes up to the roof.”
“And jumps from a spot that happens to be directly above this window.”
“Why not?” Shan said.
“You haven’t been up there. The wall at the front of the building comes to a peak. It’s part of the design. The wall at the rear of the building is level—much better for jumping.”
Elizabeth paused, shaking her head. “He didn’t go from the roof. He went through this window. But if I’m right, he was pushed. Killed first, or rendered unconscious. You’d have a rough time getting him through if he was awake and resisting. You’d hit him on the head and hope that the damage from the fall would conceal it. With any luck, it would pass for a suicide.”
The two of them stood quietly. Street sounds came up through the open window. The cool air turned colder. Shan said, “Who is he?”
Elizabeth looked up. She had been staring at the tumblers in the drawer. “You know as much as I do. He’s the publisher of a magazine.”
“Not Kristoll. The man who killed him. Assuming it’s a man, because a woman would have a harder time wrestling him through the window. You’ve got the M.O. worked out; I thought you might have a suspect in mind too.”
“No,” she said. “I haven’t got that far.”
“I might be able to tell you something about him. I think he’s a fan of Shakespeare.” Shan pointed to a book on the desk. “That’s
The Collected Works.
It’s open to the final scene of
Hamlet
—the one where everybody dies. Before you got here, I assumed Kristoll was reading it before he jumped. But if he was murdered, the killer might have put it there, open to that page.”
Elizabeth leaned over the book. “Did you get a picture of this?”
“I got half a dozen.”
“And this pen was here. You haven’t moved it.”
“Give me some credit, Lizzie.”
“The way it’s placed—it’s underneath a particular line.”
Shan nodded. “I saw that. It’s something Horatio says. ‘I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.’ I read the thing in high school. I suppose I ought to know what that means.”
Elizabeth stood back and smoothed away the strands of raven hair that had fallen into her eyes. “We’re supposed to think it’s a suicide note.”
Chief Owen McCaleb of the Ann Arbor police was wiry and handsome and fifty-four years old. He had a bag of golf clubs in a corner of his office, but no one in the department had ever seen him on a golf course. Everyone had seen him jogging. He was the sort of jogger who always kept moving. At a crosswalk, waiting for a light to change, he would jog in place. Even indoors, he was never quite still. Sometimes, talking to subordinates, he would bounce on the balls of his feet.
He was doing it now, as Elizabeth Waishkey and Carter Shan filled him in on the scene at Kristoll’s office. Shan had gotten to the part about
Hamlet.
“So in the play, Hamlet’s dying,” he said.
“I know that much,” said McCaleb.
“His uncle, the king, has plotted to have him killed. The king has Laertes challenge Hamlet to a duel. He gives Laertes a sword with a poisoned tip. But if the sword doesn’t do it, the king has a backup plan—he’ll offer Hamlet a cup of poisoned wine.”
“The details aren’t that important,” Elizabeth said.
Shan continued. “So Laertes stabs Hamlet with the poisoned sword. But Hamlet stabs Laertes too. And Hamlet’s mother drinks the wine, not knowing it’s poisoned. Then Hamlet stabs the king—”
“The details aren’t important,” Elizabeth said again. “The point is Hamlet’s dying. He asks Horatio—”
“Horatio’s his friend,” Shan explained.
“He wants Horatio to tell his story,” Elizabeth said. “But Horatio reaches for the poisoned cup. And that’s when he says, ‘I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.’ ”
“He’s not literally a Roman, he’s a Dane,” Shan said. “Hamlet’s a Dane too. They’re all Danes.”
“It’s his way of saying he wants to kill himself,” said Elizabeth. “It’s a matter of loyalty. When a Roman nobleman was killed, his followers sometimes committed suicide. It was a point of honor. Horatio feels the same kind of loyalty to Hamlet.”
Owen McCaleb nodded. “So he kills himself?”
“He tries to. Hamlet stops him. But that’s the meaning of the line. It’s Horatio’s way of declaring his intention to kill himself.”
“So the open book is supposed to be a suicide note,” McCaleb said, pacing the office. “But you don’t think Kristoll killed himself. So what we have is a murder made to look like a suicide. And a murderer who quotes Shakespeare.”
McCaleb reached the doorway and turned back. “And the victim is a man who published a literary magazine. A man who, we have to assume, knew plenty of people capable of quoting Shakespeare. A man who lived in Ann Arbor—a city where, if you order a mocha latte, it gets handed to you by someone who’s read
Hamlet.
” He stopped suddenly. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Eakins has the body?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said.
“We’ll see what the autopsy tells us,” said McCaleb. “In the meantime, Kristoll’s office stays sealed. And no one talks to the press. I’ve already heard from a reporter at the
News.
She wanted to know if there was a note. Let’s keep the Shakespeare theory to ourselves.”
At home, Elizabeth shed her coat and her gun and her cell phone. She boiled water and fixed a cup of herbal tea. She took it into the living room, where the television was on low. Her daughter, Sarah, lay asleep on the couch—a lanky girl of fifteen with sleek black hair like her mother’s. She slept like a girl in a painting, on her side with her hands palm-to-palm beneath her cheek.
Elizabeth set her cup on an end table and switched off the television. She reached for a quilt to cover her daughter, but just then the girl stirred.
“You should be in bed,” said Elizabeth.
“I was waiting up for you.”
Elizabeth took a seat at the end of the couch, and Sarah turned onto her back and laid her legs across her mother’s lap.
“I was watching the news,” the girl said. “They had a story about a guy who fell out a window. Is that why you’re late?”
“That’s why.”
“He fell six floors. It must have been gross.”
“You should be in bed.”
“They were cagey about it. They wouldn’t come out and say he jumped.”
“They don’t know. There weren’t any witnesses.”
A pause. Elizabeth tasted her tea.
“Defenestration,” Sarah said. “That’s what you call it when somebody gets thrown out a window.”
“It’s not for sure he was thrown.”
“But he could have been. Do you think he was?”
“I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to talk to the press.”
“I promise.”
“It’s possible Tom Kristoll was defenestrated.”
“Do you have suspects?”
“It’s too soon to say.”
“What about his wife? Does he have a wife?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“I saw her tonight, very briefly,” Elizabeth said. “She came in to identify the body.”