The Whole Megillah Read Online Free Page B

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    â€˜We’ve been living apart for more than a year. Do I have to go into that?’ Here she threw me a helpless glance, as though I was suddenly an adjudicator of what was fair police practice. Was she some sort of masochist trying to get me to play ‘good cop’ to Pepper’s ‘bad’?
    â€˜It would help the investigation, Mrs. Moore. I’m sure that Mr. Cooperman would excuse himself for a few minutes.’ I knew it was too good to last. I got up and backed my way through the study and out the French doors into the garden. My place was taken by a broad-hipped policewoman in uniform who’d just come into the house. Pepper gave her a grin of welcome.
    Outside in the back yard I could almost hear Moore standing at my elbow, showing me where the robbery had occurred. I looked again at the door I’d just come through. The newly repaired glass panel was shattered again. It was as though the thief who had taken the megillah had come back in order to kill Moore and had repeated his steps exactly. I turned around again and sat on the steps. I reached into my pocket for my cigarettes and brought out the inadequate substitutes. I peeled the paper from a cough candy and put it in my mouth.
    In the flower bed to the left of the steps, something caught the light. As I moved my head again, it flashed in the sunlight. I got down on all fours and looked among the fading black-eyed Susans. What I found were broken pieces of window glass. There were four fairly big fragments. I kept my fingerprints away from them, but I got as close as I could without looking like I was hunting for worms. The glass shards were all spotted from the recent rains. What were they doing there? Had Moore thrown them there when he fixed the window after the first break-in? Had the workmen who fixed the glass? Hardly likely, I thought.
    My mind spun on, like old tires on fresh snow, without much movement. To take the pressure off my head, I began nosing around the garbage cans. The cops will go through these before they’re finished with the scene of the crime, but it didn’t look as though they’d played about with them yet. I was squeamish about garbage, but it told you so much about people.
    I held my nose with one hand and unfastened a wire tag with the other. I was glad to be outside. Here were signs of normal middle-class living: egg shells, orange peels, burned toast fragments and coffee grounds. Under this were grapefruit peels, showing empty pink interiors, and a package of plastic-wrapped green beans that had gone brown before they could be used. Moore didn’t seem to like leftovers; I found a chicken carcass with a meal still clinging to one half, and some roast potatoes. Under this mess, I found a white plastic bag. Inside was what at first I thought was movie film, but it was half-inch magnetic tape, such as you find in VCR cassettes. I found four spindles, two with most of the tape still wound around them. The rest of it floated in cramped loops, like squashed noodles or carpenter’s shavings. I thought of removing the tape, but I have few mechanical skills and no electronic ones, so I decorated the outside of the garbage can with a few knotted strands and left it for the police to stumble across and declare as evidence.
    I didn’t know what it might be evidence of. Sexy movies? Blackmail? Who knows? I took another cough candy to suck on the meaning of that for a few minutes.
    Before I got very far, Sergeant Pepper was opening the door and pushing it into the small of my back. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t see you sitting there.’ I got up and he joined me in the back yard.
    â€˜I’m the one who should apologize,’ I said, without meaning it. ‘I didn’t mean to come between you and your witness.’ He squinted into the sun as though he was a western sheriff.
    â€˜What did you make of her?’ I asked him, as he moved to a white