Even lying in a hospital bed with tubes in her arms and up her nose, Helen Latimer was a beautiful woman.     Her golden brown hair, streaked on the sides with red and a few gray strands, was splayed out on the pillow.  She had an olive complexion; flawless and smooth; only a few traces of crows’ feet at the corners of her almond-shaped eyes betraying that she was in her mid-fifties.  The eyes were closed, but I knew from reading the file on her that her eyes were blue, a light blue like a summer sky.     Even under the hospital sheet that was tucked up to her chin, I could see that she had kept her girlish figure.  The rise and fall of the mounds of her breasts told me that.     The only flaw in an otherwise perfect woman was the red scar that ran from just behind her left eye, over her ear.  The hair in that area had been clipped to allow the wound to heal.  When she woke up, she was going to be really pissed that someone had mangled her beautiful hair, and she wouldn’t be too happy to have her almost perfect face marred by the pucker that would remain when the wound healed. I imagine, though, her plastic surgeon would be happy to remove it and restore her natural look – for a hefty fee.     “Such a shame,” The nurse in crisp whites had come in without my noticing.  “She is so beautiful. Why would anyone want to do that to her?”     That was what I had been hired to find out.  Someone had fired a .32 caliber pistol at her from only a few feet away according to the police report.  The bullet had entered her face beside her eye, encountered her skull and bouncing off the bone, it hadn’t exited, but traveled along, tearing away flesh and hair, exiting just behind her ear.  She had been in a coma since.  Hell, she was lucky to be alive.  If whoever shot her had aimed a fraction of an inch more to her right, I’d be looking at her on a slab in the morgue.  Now, that would have truly been a shame.     “People do the strangest things,” I said.  I noticed the nurse, a tall black woman with light brown hair and complexion to match, had a name tag over her ample left breast, a perfect match for the right; that said, “Brown.”  An apt name; even her eyes were brown.  “Has she regained consciousness at all?”     “No, not even a flicker.  She’s been like that since they brought her in.”     She was in a private ward at George Washington University Hospital, on Twenty-Third Street, near the metro station, and in the midst of the gargantuan complex that was the university.  Georgetown Hospital would have been closer to the expensive town house where she had lived, but for some reason the emergency ambulance service that picked her up preferred GW.     “What’s the prognosis?” I asked.     She regarded me with narrowed brown eyes.  “Are you family?”     I took out my identification and held it up for her to see.  “No,” I said.  “I’m a PI.  Her husband hired me to find out who did this to her.”     “Well, I’m sorry,” she said.  “I can only discuss a patient’s status with immediate family.  You’ll have to talk to Doctor Cho, her attending physician.  Say, didn’t I read that her husband was accused of doing it?”     He had, and was currently out on bail.  The cops hadn’t found the gun, but the bullet, after exiting Helen’s head, had lodged in the wall in front of which she’d been standing.  The bullet was fired from a .32 caliber pistol according to the ballistics report.  Wilfred Latimer, her husband, had a registered .32; one of the few in the District, and testimony to his political connections.  He said it had been removed from the desk in his study, and he didn’t know by whom or when, because he hadn’t touched it since purchasing it six months before.     Okay, I know, that’s a lame alibi, and I could understand the cops keying in on him.  Most homicides are committed by a relative or close friend.  When it’s a spouse who’s the victim, you usually have to look no further than the other spouse to find the perpetrator.     I had taken the case, though, because my friend and employer, Quincy Chang had vouched for the guy.  I’d trust Quincy with my life, and if he said the guy was straight, that was good enough for me.     “Yes,” I said, after a pause. “Of course, professional ethics prevent me from discussing the case with anyone who’s not directly connected.  You understand, right?”     The irony of payback wasn’t lost on her.  She smiled.  She had a beautiful smile.  I found myself liking her, and I don’t usually like people in the medical profession; when you encounter them, it usually means that you’re sick, and I’m never sick; at least, never sick enough to go to a doctor.  I was taught by my grandmother to take care of most minor ailments; there’s almost nothing that a bowl of hot chicken soup and a glass of sassafras tea won’t cure, she always said.  And, my grandmother was always right – at least, that’s what she always said.     “I was about to ask you if you think he’s innocent, but I guess you couldn’t tell me.  Doesn’t matter,” she said.  “I recognize your name.  Al Pennyback; the brown knight in shining armor who comes to the rescue of the downtrodden.  I read somewhere that you’ve never failed to solve a case.”     “I’ve been lucky,” I said.      And, thanks to Lucinda Garcia Mendez, a reporter for the Washington Post, and my unofficial biographer based on the number of articles she’d written about my cases, most of Washington knew me; or about me.  I met Lucy when I worked a case in the neighborhood near my office in Southwest DC, and we’d been friends since.  When I solved a hundred-year-old murder case for a story she was doing, she adopted me as her favorite subject.     I’m Al Pennyback, owner of A.E. Pennyback, Private Enquiries; a euphemistic name for a PI agency.  I have an office in Northwest DC, just off Fourth Street near Fort Lesley J. McNair Army Base and the Washington Ship Channel.  It’s on the second floor of a building that looks like a cheap motel, but the rent’ reasonable, and it’s quiet.  We’re surrounded by condominiums that are considerably more expensive, as the area gentrifies and uproots the long-time residents, mostly poor black people who have lived there for generations.  Mine is a two person outfit, the other being Heather Bunche, a short, blonde, anal retentive ball of fire who keeps my books, answers the phone, and offers wise cracking advice on my personal life.  Next to Buster Mayweather, the DC cop who I met when my wife, Sarah and son, Ethan, were killed by a truck driver running a stop sign over ten years ago, Heather is my best friend.  I hired her right out of secretarial school and have never regretted it.       The agency was therapy for me after my family was wiped out and I retired from the army, and Heather, despite being fifteen years younger than me, is a substitute grandmother.       I’m looking at fifty, and even though I’m fit, with just less than two hundred pounds on my six-foot frame, I have to watch the spread in the middle.  I like to cook, and I eat everything I cook; and I’m not averse to the occasional beer or two; especially when I’m hanging out with Buster.  I work out regularly, though, and jog at least three times a week, so the love handles are still manageable – just.      “According to the stories in the Post, you are more than lucky,” she said.  “You don’t even carry a gun like the detectives on TV.”     “Don’t like guns,” I said.  “They hurt people.”     “Yeah, but I read that you sometimes hurt people with your hands and feet.”     I have black belts in a couple of Oriental martial arts, and at close quarters can hold my own against anyone with a gun or knife.  “Only the ones who deserve to be hurt,” I said.     “Well, whoever did this deserves to be hurt, and hurt bad.”     The look on her face told me she wouldn’t mind ignoring whatever oath nurses take to do no harm, and doing a little hurt herself.     I asked her if it was okay if I dropped in from time to time to check on her patient; just in case she woke up and I could ask her who shot her.  Of course, I knew DC Metro had made the same request and would probably not like my horning in, but I’d just let my friend Buster Mayweather, a homicide detective on the force, run interference for me.     She asked for my card, and said she’d call me personally if Helen woke up.  Now, that kind of service, I like, even if I’m not too fond of hospitals.
        2.* * *     I met Wilfred Latimer at his two-story brownstone home in Georgetown, in a wooded area west of Georgetown University, the day before.     Latimer was about my height, and slender, but had that pasty-faced look of someone who spent most of his time indoors sitting behind a desk, or in a dimly-lit cocktail lounge.  He had a narrow face and an aquiline nose, and gave you the impression he was looking down it at you, even if in fact he had to look up.  Blue eyes and the dour look of his thin lips gave an icy appearance that added to the imperious image.    He worked as a lobbyist for the defense industry; Quincy had not said which particular companies, just that he was the relief pitcher for those times when the companies own specifically hired lobbyists couldn’t get the job done.  He apparently had connections on Capitol Hill through his late father who had served fourteen terms as a Congressman from Pennsylvania before dropping dead of a heart attack when Latimer was a senior in college.     He and Helen had met at Georgetown, where he was studying political science and diplomacy, and she was getting a degree in classical literature.  That was more than thirty years ago, and Washington society was not as progressive as it is today.  A white boy from Pennsylvania dating a black girl from the District, even one who could almost pass for white under certain lights, was looked at strangely; and the fact that both her parents were doctors didn’t impress the bigots back then.  The two of them ignored the stares and rude comments, and two years later, when Helen graduated, they were married in a quiet ceremony by a tolerant Justice of the Peace, with only her parents and two classmates as witnesses.  They had two kids; a son named Donovan after Wilfred Latimer’s father, and a daughter born three years later, named Penelope, for Helen’s mother.     Quincy had set up the meeting.  He’d assured me that Latimer was a good guy, and that he was innocent.  I trust Quincy, so I took the case.  I expected that someone who made the money Latimer made to have servants, but he answered the door himself.    Despite his cold appearing demeanor, that impressed me.     “You must be Mr. Pennyback,” he said.  “Do come in.”  The warm voice didn’t go with the icy expression.     He beckoned me to follow him, and led the way to a room off the main living room; a large room with a fireplace, a complete wet bar, a large ornate desk in one corner, and a sofa and two stuffed chairs near the fireplace.  We sat opposite each other on the chairs.  He offered me brandy, which I declined.  Alcohol at ten in the morning is never a good idea.     “Thanks, but no thanks,” I said.  “If you don’t mind, let’s just get down to business.  Quincy says you didn’t shoot your wife; is that true?”     He looked me in the eye, those blue eyes like two laser drills.  “Mr. Pennyback, I love my wife; have loved no one else for thirty two years.  I’d cut off my own hand first before I would do harm to her.”     His gaze was steady, his voice soft but firm.  None of the indicators of deception like darting of eyes around, or small, nervous movements of the hands.  He was either telling the truth or he was the best actor on the planet.  I went with, he’s telling the truth; no one’s that good.     “Okay, good enough,” I said.  “So, tell me everything you know about the incident.”     He shrugged.  “There’s little I can tell you,” he said.  “I was downstairs in the basement.  I’m a model train enthusiast and have a setup down there.  I sometimes spend hours down there working on it.  It helps relieve the stress of my job.  Anyway, I thought there was no one in the house, other than Helen and me.  It’s pretty closed off down there, and I never even heard the shot.  The first I became aware that anything had happened was when the police slammed the basement door open and cuffed me.”     It hadn’t, I’m sure, happened exactly like that.  They would have identified themselves, asked who he was; and then, cuffed him.  But, I guess if you’d been minding your own business and suddenly a bunch of armed, yelling cops stormed into the room, your memory would edit out the quiet parts as well.     “Who else has access to the house, other than you and your wife?”     Well, there’s Donovan and Penelope, our kids,” he said.  “They have their own apartments, but come over from time to time, and, there’s the cleaning service that comes in once a week.  Helen and I value our privacy, and neither of us likes having servants around.  Of course, that wasn’t their day to come.”     I made a mental note to check on the cleaning service, and on the whereabouts of their kids.     “You didn’t hear the shot, yet the police came.  How were they informed?”     “I found out later, after the shock of being hauled to jail wore off, that a neighbor had heard the shot and called them.  She’s an elderly lady who lives across the street and one house down.  A lonely, but nosy old lady who watches everything that goes on in the neighborhood.”     People in this part of Washington take a different view of neighborliness, I thought.  In the Southwest neighborhood where I have my office, when they hear shots, they turn up the volume on their TV sets and try to ignore them. In rural Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live in a slightly reconditioned farm house just off River Road west of Potomac, my neighbors are too far away to hear anything less than an artillery barrage.     “Can you show me where it happened?” I asked.     “Yes,” he said.  “Come with me.”  He took me out into the living room, a space larger than my living room and kitchen combined, filled with furniture that you don’t see in your local furniture store; French period pieces, and a few American colonial pieces, tastefully positioned, and making the room look like one of those exhibits at the Smithsonian.  A large; and I mean large, grand piano dominated the center of the room.  A fireplace at one end had gold framed photos of Latimer and his family in various poses; in ski gear on some snow-covered slope, on a yacht that looked as big as the Queen Mary, and lounging around the house.     There was a scar on the wall to the left of the fireplace, about five feet off the floor.     “Where was your wife when she was shot?”     “Standing near the fireplace, I’m told,” he said.  “That mark on the wall is from where the bullet came out of her.”      That meant the bullet had exited her head on more or less a straight line, which, even with it bouncing off her skull, meant it probably entered her at about that level as well.  In the photos, she looked to be just a bit shorter than her husband.  It’s hard to tell, though, with head shots.  Bullets bouncing off bone can take some strange trajectories.     “She was only shot once?”     “Yes,” he said.  “And, the police say it was at close range, probably no more than three or four feet away.  There were no signs of struggle, which led them to believe she was shot by someone she knew and trusted, and led them straight to me, as I was the only other person in the house at the time.”     That’s precisely the conclusion to which I would have jumped under the circumstances, and what I would have thought if not for Quincy vouching for him.  He didn’t act like a guilty person, but I had to keep reminding myself that there are the rare people who can be guilty as sin while maintaining the demeanor of choir boys.     “Have you been to visit her in the hospital?” I asked.     “I’ve wanted to go,” he said.  “But, my lawyer advised against it right away.  I think, though, his advice be damned, I’m going soon.”