Nine Fingers Read Online Free Page A

statement is taken by an officer. We’ll need names and addresses, so get your ID’s out.
     Might as well stay calm. Looks like it’s all over but the paperwork.”
    I get the patrons settled, set the troops in motion. It’s a routine, a process, a dance we all know how to do. We settle into
     the rhythm of it.
    I check the vic. He is dead. Whoever did this is either one good shot or one lucky bastard—one in the middle of the back of
     the head, from ten feet away, in the middle of a driving snowstorm, through a thick plate glass window—that is some good shooting.
     This is someone who put in some effort. There is no collateral damage—everyone else is fine. This is no crime of passion,
     no sudden impulse. This looks professional.
    One of the plainclothes guys is going through the vic’s clothes and fishes out a wallet. He holds it up like a twenty-pound
     fish he caught with five-pound line. “Driver’s license for…” he holds it up…“one Roger Tremblay—Los Angeles address.
     Baggage stub from O’Hare, Flight 631 arriving from L.A. at five P.M. Lucky he was able to land before the storm hit.”
    Irony. Black humor. It’s a cop thing. We’re supposed to be jaded.
    “Business card,” he says. holding up an ivory-colored rectangle, “Firm of Shields, Manfreddi, and Goldfarb, the Practice of
     Law” he adds. “He doesn’t look like the Goldfarb.”
    “Or the Manfreddi, either,” another chimes in.
    “One less of them—it’s tragic,” he says.
    “One less what?”
    “One less lawyer.”
    Another detective is going through the coat, draped on the back of the bar stool where the vic had sat:“Card key for the Marriott,
     downtown. Taxi receipt—Checker number four-nine-three-nine, from the Marriott to here, eight bucks, plus a good tip. Cash—maybe
     a hundred. Pack of Tic Tacs—peppermint. Picture of what looks like the wife and kids. Ad cut out from the Reader for this place. Drinking…” He picks up a half-empty glass and sniffs it, rolling it around in his gloved hands…
     “Scotch, rocks. J&B? Cutty?”
    I remember precisely how each smells—the distinctive medicinal aroma of the J&B, the oily tones of the Cutty Sark. I taste
     them in my mind as he says their names.
    I turn and walk over to the band. There are three of them sitting on the front edge of the bandstand, a big furry bear of
     a guy, a tiny Asian female, and a sweaty Irish American male. The trumpet player, a tall African American male about thirty-two,
     is standing right in front of the window, his horn at the ready, snowflakes beginning to coat his short Afro. There is another
     guy off to the side of the bandstand, by some equipment over there, a wiry guy with dark hair and a beard. We take down names
     and addresses first. Then it is all the same questions, questions so standard I can recite them by heart.
    Their answers come across all snotty. Maybe they all watch too many cop shows on the TV. Maybe it’s what they call a distancing
     mechanism, a defensive thing. Then one of them chuckles. I can go with the black humor, trust me, but we are standing here
     and there is blood on the floor, and that deserves some respect. I give him a look. He shuts up.
    We go around and around and finally, the trumpet player jumps in, bypassing the other detectives and talking straight to me.
     Is it this obvious, that I am the one?
    “Officer, we’re all going to tell you the same thing. The man walked in here a few minutes before nine o’clock, as we were
     about to start the first set. He seemed to be a professional man of some sort, conservatively dressed. He had one drink at
     the bar, and sipped it very slowly. He listened to the first set very attentively. At nine forty-five, during the break, he
     came up and asked if he could sit in on piano, just one or two tunes. He said he used to play when he was in school in New
     York. He mentioned a couple of people in the business, not top rank but recognizable, and said that