“And you were golfing today?”

“Yesterday and today. Spent the night in Connecticut, in a motel near the Rolling Acres course. It’s a terrific course, got these big lakes and tricky greens. You gotta watch for the water and sand on damn near every hole. Three of my golfing buddies were with me.”

“All the time?”

“I don’t need a damned alibi!”

“I’m sorry, but you do.”

“Then I have one—them. We were on the course together, had our meals together.”

“Separate motel rooms?”

“No. There were only three rooms available. I doubled up with Alan Jones. Glad I did now.”

“This Jones would know if you slipped out at night?”

“And what? Drove or took a train into the city, killed my wife, then returned to bed at the Drowsy Ace motel?”

“Doesn’t sound likely,” Beam admitted with a smile.

“Way I snore, anyway, ask Alan Jones and he’ll tell you I was there all night. Poor bastard probably didn’t get a straight hour’s sleep. Upset his game, too.”

“At this point you’re not really a suspect,” Beam assured Floyd.

“Bullshit. Husband’s always a suspect. Should be.”

“Would be,” Beam said honestly. “But I’m sure your alibi will check out. And lucky for you, the times don’t work out. Of course, you could always have hired someone to kill your wife.” No smile with the words.

Floyd practically levitated with indignation, then he looked almost amused, so improbable was the notion. “Not my style, or my desire.”

Beam believed him.

“I wouldn’t even know how to get in touch with a hit man.”

“Or hit woman. I asked about whether your wife might be having an extramarital affair. What about you, Mr. Baker?”

Floyd glared at him with a kind of hopeless rage. Beam, so nice for a while, had turned on him. “You’re a cop I could learn to dislike.”

“That’d be okay, if it would help me find your wife’s killer.”

Floyd’s features danced with his inner conflict.

Bull’s eye, Beam thought. “Time for the curtain to drop and all secrets to be revealed,” he told Floyd.

“Poetic.”

“Because it rings true. This is a homicide investigation, Mr. Baker. It’s all going to be known in the end. That’s my solemn pledge to you.”

“Pledge?”

“Uh-huh.”

Floyd let out a long breath. “A couple of times when we were on golf outings, there were some women. Two of them. We paid for it.”

“Happen this time in Connecticut?”

“No! Hasn’t happened for over a year. And none if meant anything, not to us, or to the women. Hell they were just…”

“Prostitutes.”

“I guess you’d have to say that. We showed our gratitude with gifts or cash.”

Beam, during his years in the NYPD, had become something of a human polygraph. He felt sure Floyd was telling the truth. He also was sure the man had loved and trusted his wife and was genuinely grief stricken. Add what would also doubtless turn out to be a tight alibi, and Floyd was pretty much out of the picture as a suspect.

“It appears your wife was dressing up when she was killed, putting on her lipstick, in fact.”

“She had a responsible job. She couldn’t go to work like some of these women do these days, no makeup, stringy hair. She was in sales, for Chrissakes!”

“Just one more question, Mr. Baker. Did your wife ever serve on a jury in New York?”

Floyd leaned far back as if to stare at the ceiling, but his eyes were closed.

“She sure did.”

“The Adele Janson case,” Beam told Nell and Looper, when they were seated in his Lincoln parked at the curb in front of a fire hydrant. He had his NYPD placard on the dash so no one would bother the car.

“About four years ago?” Nell said. “The woman who poisoned her husband with antifreeze?”

“Right,” Beam said. “She got off because her expert witness convinced the jury there was a natural disease that showed the same symptoms as ethylene glycol poisoning.”

“I remember now. The defendant had motive and opportunity, not to mention what was left in a gallon jug of antifreeze, but her lawyer maintained hubby just sickened and died.”

“And two years later she was convicted of poisoning her daughter,” Looper said. “After the trial, she confessed to both murders.”

Beam lowered the power window on his side to cool down the big black car; the gleaming dark finish was starting to soak up more sun than it reflected. “Beverly Baker was foreperson on the first jury, the one that turned Janson loose after she’d done her husband.”

“Which made the late Beverly a prime target for our guy,” Nell said. “This one was his work without a doubt.”

“So what have we got besides mutual certainty?” Beam said. “I mean, beyond the red letter J?”

Nell and Looper tried. They’d gotten nothing of significance from the Bakers’ neighbors, or from the doorman. It wasn’t the kind of building where security was tight, so it was no shock that a killer might have come and gone without being noticed. No one heard anything remotely like a gunshot, so a silencer was probably used to shoot Beverly Baker. No one had a word other than kind to say about the deceased: She was outgoing and friendly and a generous tipper. She gave neighbors discounts on lamps. The way she obviously enjoyed life, it was a shame—it was a crime—she was dead. It seemed the only notable thing about her was that she’d been foreperson on the Janson murder trial jury, though it had been long enough ago that none of the neighbors had mentioned it.

“What did they say about her husband?” Beam asked.

“Floyd?” Nell said. “He’s just a guy. Got in an argument with the doorman about a month ago, when one of his golf clubs was missing after he’d left his bag in the lobby. But he found the club later and apologized. Other’n that, no problems with anybody in the building. But it was Bev, as they called her, who everyone really liked.”

“And who somebody didn’t,” Beam said.

“We got the thirty-two caliber slug to help tie it in with the other murders,” Looper said.

“If it is a thirty-two,” Nell said.

“And no shell casing,” Looper pointed out. “This shooter walked away from a clean crime scene—typical of our guy.”

Beam stared out the windshield of the parked car for a moment, then said, “Looper, you talk to Floyd again, then drive the unmarked up to Connecticut and check out his alibi. Nell and I are gonna go to the lamp emporium or whatever, where Bev worked, and talk to her boss and coworkers.”

Looper opened the Lincoln’s right rear door and started to get out, then paused. “Anything I should know about Floyd?”

“He didn’t murder his wife, but he’s got a guilty conscience. You work him right, he’ll tell you the truth.”

Beam watched Looper walk away; he appeared to be absently feeling his pockets for cigarettes.

“He’ll suck a cigarette before he goes back upstairs to talk with hubby,” Nell said. “It’s that way every day. He needs it to calm down.”

“That’s his business,” Beam said, “as long as it doesn’t kill him before something else does.”

Or before this investigation’s finished, Nell thought.

When the jittery Looper was out of sight, Beam opened the driver’s side door and started to climb out from behind the steering wheel. The intensifying morning heat lowered itself like a weight onto his back.

“I thought we were going to the lamp emporium,” Nell said.

Beam leaned farther down and looked across the car at her. “We are, but let’s walk. That was how Beverly Baker usually went back and forth to work. Let’s follow in her footsteps. Maybe, sometime or other, they took her past her killer.”

After leaving Beverly Baker’s building, Justice had strolled a few sunny blocks, then taken the Eighty-sixth Street entrance into the park. It was such a beautiful morning that people he didn’t know nodded to him and said hello. He returned their friendliness with his own. The latex gloves he’d used to be sure he wouldn’t leave fingerprints in Beverly Baker’s apartment were neatly folded in his pocket, turned inside out just in case some of her blood might have gotten on them. Blood particles could be so minute the human eye wouldn’t spot them, but a police laboratory might. He knew the police had tricks that were almost magic.