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“No,” Natali said quickly.
“I just got here, Mike.”
“Is there anything to the story that the Widow Kellog is—how do I phrase this delicately?—personally involved with Wally Milham?”
“I don’t know how to answer that delicately,” Natali said.
“Mike?”
“I heard that gossip for the first time about fifteen minutes ago,” Weisbach said. “I don’t know if it’s true or not.”
His eye fell on something in the open cabinet behind Natali’s head.
“What’s that?” he asked, and pushed by Natali for a closer look.
“It’s a tape recorder. With a gadget that turns it on whenever the phone is used,” Weisbach said. “Has that been dusted for prints, Lou?”
“Yes, sir.”
Weisbach pulled the recorder out of the cabinet and saw that there was no cassette inside.
“Anything on the tape?” he asked.
“There was no tape in it when D’Amata found it,” Natali said. “And no tape anywhere around it. There was an empty box for tapes, but no tapes.”
“That’s strange,” Weisbach thought out loud. “The thing is turned on.” He held it up to show the red On light. “Did the lab guys turn it on?”
“D’Amata said you can’t turn it off, it’s wired to the light socket.”
“Strange,” Weisbach said.
“Yeah,” Mickey O’Hara agreed. “Very strange.”
A uniformed officer came into the kitchen.
“Lieutenant, the Captain said that Detective Milham is on his way to the Roundhouse.”
“Thank you,” Natali said.
“I want to sit in on the interview,” Weisbach said.
“You’re going to question Milham?” Mickey O’Hara asked.
“Yes, sir,” Natali said, not quite succeeding in concealing his displeasure.
“Routinely, Mick,” Weisbach said. “If there’s anything, I’ll call you. All right?”
O’Hara thought that over for a second.
“You have an honest face, Mike, and I am a trusting soul. OK. And in the meantime, I will write that at this point the police have no idea who shot Kellog.”
“We don’t,” Weisbach said.
THREE
Detective Wallace J. Milham, a dapper thirty-five-year-old, who was five feet eleven inches tall, weighed 160 pounds, and adorned his upper lip with a carefully manicured pencil-line mustache, reached over the waist-high wooden barrier to the Homicide Unit’s office and tripped the lock of the door with his fingers.
He turned to the left and walked toward the office of Captain Henry C. Quaire, the Homicide commander. When he had come out of the First Philadelphia Building, Police Radio had been calling him. When he answered the call, the message had been to see Captain Quaire as soon as possible.Quaire wasn’t in his office. But Lieutenant Louis Natali was, and when he saw Milham, waved at him to come in.
