LITMIR.BIZ

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company. We sell many kinds of insurance. Including business and indemnity policies.”

      She waited for him to continue.

      “We have an indemnity policy with Gordian House. If your suit against them—yours and Marston and Morse—is successful, we will have to reimburse Gordian House for their damages. The damages they will have paid. Do you see?”

      “Then you’re—” Angela Simmons lowered her coffee cup onto its saucer with a clatter. “Are you here—you’re on their side? On Gordian’s side? Mr. Lindsey, I probably shouldn’t be talking to you. At least not without my lawyer present. I think maybe you’d better leave. Right now.”

      Lindsey slid his pen back into his pocket and closed his notebook. “I’m not on anybody’s side, Mrs. Simmons.” So much for Angela and Hobart. “I’m just trying to understand the case.”

      Mrs. Simmons stood, called Millicent, clicked a leash onto her collar, and walked to the door with Lindsey.

      “Millicent needs to go out.”

      At the bottom of the steps she stopped to let the dog sniff a bush. Apparently someone else had been there and left a message. Angela Simmons laid her free hand on top of the brick pillar.

      “It was right there,” she said.

      Lindsey said, “What do you mean?”

      “Where Gordon hit his head.”

      Lindsey waited.

      “It was raining. We were in bed. Millicent started howling and woke us up.”

      Apparently she had changed her mind about talking to Lindsey. A minute ago she’d regarded him as the enemy. Now she was telling him the story of her husband’s death.

      “Gordon always locked the car. Not just at night. Even during the day, any time he wasn’t driving, he always locked the car.”

      She let out a deep breath.

      “But he’d been working late at the library. He’d just finished a book. He hadn’t even turned it in to his editor at Marston and Morse. He was starting research on the next book, that was why he had the laptop at the library. He came home with an armload of books and it was dark out and it was raining hard and he couldn’t handle everything at once. He brought the books into the house. He was so tired. He’d worked all day shuffling papers for the government and spent hours doing research at the library. He stayed until they closed. Once he was in the house he forgot all about his laptop. I made him a hot bowl of soup and a slice of toast. He was too tired to eat anything else. And then we went to bed.”

      Millicent was tugging at her leash but Angela Simmons was reliving a night a year in the past.

      “When Millicent heard something—she must have heard something—she woke us and I said, ‘Gordon, it’s a burglar.’ He put on his slippers and went downstairs but there was nobody there. I kept Millicent with me, I was afraid, I was holding her in bed. I heard the door, Gordon went outside. Then I heard his voice but I couldn’t make out what he said. Then I heard the car door open and Gordon’s voice again and then the car door slammed shut and I put Millicent’s leash on her and we ran downstairs and ran outside. Gordon was lying on the ground.”

      She gestured to the sharply pointed corner of the brick pillar. “That was where it happened. I ran back in the house and called nine-one-one and the police came and an ambulance came. Gordon’s nose was broken and it was bleeding and there was blood on the bricks here, too. I thought it was just his face, I thought he would recover, but they said that he’d smashed the back of his head on the corner of the bricks. He had bone splinters in his brain.”

      She stopped. She was out of breath. Millicent had got tired of waiting for her walk and done her business on the lawn.

      Lindsey said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Simmons.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

      “They took him to the hospital, they tried to save him, but it was no use. He had splinters in his brain.”

      She blinked as if she’d fallen into the past for a moment, and then bounced back to the present.

      “It must have been some homeless person. Probably some homeless man, maybe a woman, you can never tell nowadays.” Angela Simmons reached into her pocket and pulled out a plastic bag and a couple of paper towels. She cleaned up after Millicent, walked to a gray trash container and dropped the bag inside. She came back and resumed. She’d caught her breath.

      “It must have been some homeless person,” she repeated. “It was raining and he must have been trying every car door he came to, looking for a place to sleep. At least that’s what the police thought. That’s what they told me. Gordon always locked the car but it was cold and raining and he was so tired, he forgot. Just that once, he forgot. The homeless man saw Gordon’s laptop and he thought he could steal it and maybe sell it the next day. But Millicent heard him and Gordon went to investigate.”

      Lindsey stood, listening. He could make his notes later. When an interviewee gets on a roll you just listened and remembered.

      “The police thought that Gordon pulled open the car door to send the man away, and he smacked him in the face with the laptop. It must have been a man, a woman wouldn’t do that, do you think? I think it must have been a man. He smashed him in the face with the laptop and knocked him back against the pillar. That’s why his nose was broken and why he had bone splinters in his brain. That’s why he’s dead.”

      “The killer was never found?” Lindsey asked. “I would think—well, weren’t there fingerprints in the car that could lead to the killer?”

      Angela Simmons shook her head. No.

      “But if the person was in the car—did he wipe off his fingerprints?”

      “The police don’t think so. They checked out the car. They found plenty of prints. Gordon’s, mine, some friends that we gave a ride to the airport a week or so before. Everything was normal. But nothing that helped very much. I mean—nothing that helped at all, in fact. Nothing that helped at all.”

      Lindsey started to take his leave but she put her fingers on his wrist and detained him for another minute.

      “They found an organ donor card in his wallet. I never knew about that. He wanted to donate his organs, and they took them at the hospital. Harvested them. That’s what they call it, you know. They harvested his organs, and his heart is beating in another person’s chest right this very minute. And somebody has his liver. And his spleen, and his pancreas. Even his eyeballs. They weren’t damaged when he was hit. They use everything today, nothing goes to waste.”

      Lindsey said, “Like the Shmoo.”

      Mrs. Simmons tilted her head and gave him a curious look. “Like the what?”

      Lindsey said, “Nothing. Nobody remembers the Shmoo.”

      CHAPTER THREE

      The Berkeley Police Department had got its new headquarters building at last. After the creaky old structure on McKinley Avenue, the nearby replacement looked modern and efficient from the outside. From the inside it resembled a medieval dungeon. Well, progress was progress.

      Lindsey had phoned ahead and he was met by a uniformed sergeant who could have passed for a shaving lotion model. If there were such things any more. Blond, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, and wearing a uniform that must have been custom-fitted. He looked like a private eye from a Richard Prather paperback, suddenly drafted into the official police force.

      “Olaf Strombeck,” the shaving lotion model introduced himself. They shook hands, exchanged business cards, and proceeded to Strombeck’s office, Lindsey now wearing a visitor’s badge on his jacket pocket. You would have thought they were a couple of Japanese businessmen meeting to cut a billion dollar deal for some futuristic electronic gadget, not an insurance man and a detective sitting down to discuss a murder.

      Strombeck had pulled a file and laid it on his

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