“Then I will stop recording. If we come to an agreement and I do my part and you two don’t pay, then I’ll go to the local DA or PD or whatever, and say, ‘Hey, they approached me about this thing. I didn’t report it at the time, because, oh hell officer, who would’ve actually believed it, but now that he’s dead in that dreadful way—whatever it turns out to have been—I had to come forward. I had the phone on by accident and it was even recorded. You’ll go down, I’ll be fine. In prison when they have you strip down you also bend over, spread your cheeks, and they do a cavity search. It’s up to you. You do it or you don’t, but it’s the only way this works.”

She shrugged out of her jacket and began to unbutton her blouse. “The art of the deal,” she said.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

NOW WHAT?

“It’d be a hell of a note if somebody was being murdered during all this comedy we’re having.”

COFFIN ED JOHNSON THE HEAT’S ON, CHESTER HIMES

I GOT MOST OF WHAT I wanted.

I was keeping the $10,000 I’d taken. I was getting another $20,000 up front. With $170,000 when it was done. Most importantly, I had the taped conversation as my insurance policy.

She wanted it done in two weeks. I wanted to know why the rush. She gave me quite reasonable answers but not necessarily the whole truth. Or any of the truth. I explained that I wasn’t going to walk up and shoot the guy. Killing a rich white man was the only thing in America that would attract more attention than killing a young white woman. To make it worse, those Hudson Valley counties, Ulster, Greene, Dutchess, Columbia, Putnam, even Orange and Westchester, were practically No Murder zones. Each of them had between five and zero—zero—killings per year. All of them had lots of cops. Town police, county sheriffs, and state police. The first might be bumpkins, the second concerned with serving papers and running jails, but the staties had the BCI, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, with all the resources, experience, and expertise of a truly large force.

Liz said, like we were happily cooperative colleagues, “That’s why I wanted to work with you in spite of getting off to a bad start. You’ve been around. You understand these things.”

I said, “You don’t want it to look like murder. Certainly, Madelaine shouldn’t. The spouse is the number one suspect. We all know that. Plus, they’re in the middle of a divorce…”

“No one’s filed…”

“In a cop’s mind, that’s a technicality. They’ve said it to each other. They’ve said it to lawyers.”

“We’ll have her back off. It will look like she’s seeking peace and reconciliation.”