I thought for a moment. We were north of Sixtieth Street, so that put us in the Twentieth Precinct and out of Durkin’s bailiwick. They’d close it as a suicide unless the medical evidence didn’t match, in which case his earlier visit would come to light later on.

I said, “There’s a few ways we could do it. We could say that you couldn’t reach her all night and you got worried. You talked to me this afternoon and we came over here together. You had a key. You opened the door and we found her and called it in.”

“All right.”

“But the chain lock gets in the way. If you weren’t here before, how did it get broken? If somebody else broke it, who was he and what was he doing here?”

“What if we say we broke it getting in?”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t work. Suppose they come up with solid evidence that you were here last night. Then I’m caught swearing to a lie. I could lie for you to the extent of treating something you told me as confidential, but I’m not going to get nailed to a lie that cuts across the grain of the facts. No, I have to say the chain lock was broken when we got here.”

“So it’s been broken for weeks.”

“Except the break’s fresh. You can see where the screws came out of the wood. The one thing you don’t want to do is get caught in that kind of a lie, where your story and the evidence wind up pointing in different directions. I’ll tell you what I think you have to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Tell the truth. You came here, you kicked the door in, she was dead and you split. You drove around, tried to sort things out in your mind. And you wanted to reach me before you did anything, and I was hard to reach. Then you called me and we came here and called it in.”

“That’s the best way?”

“It looks like it to me.”

“All because of that chain thing?”

“That’s the most obvious loose end. But even without the chain lock you’re better off telling the truth. Look, Chance, you didn’t kill her. She killed herself.”

“So?”