Beyond Obsession by Richard; Hammer Page A

and maybe he did, too. The plan, she explained, was that he was finally going to see a doctor. There was just one thing, she said. She didn’t want Dennis angry at her and thinking she was trying to make trouble for him if somebody happened to read the note the wrong way. So, if they asked him about it, would they tell him that they had been in her bedroom with her, that when she sat down on her bed, they all heard paper crinkling and wanted to know what the sound was, so she was forced to reach between the sheets, take out the note and give it to them?
    Revoir agreed to pass on that explanation when he talked to Dennis Coleman. He decided not to press her at that moment on whether the note might really have another, more sinister meaning, though he was pretty sure the one she had given was made of whole cloth. Revoir was pretty sure he knew what the note was really about, and the fact that it had been left in Karin’s bed indicated to him that she might know a lot more than she was letting on.
    Revoir knew the law and knew the limits it placed on him. If he pushed too hard, alarm bells would go off, Jeff Sands would call a criminal lawyer and the possibility of any further cooperation from Karin would come to a sudden end.
    Revoir also suspected that Karin might have more to say. The way the note had been found, her open display of it, and her lack of resistance to the idea of turning it in led him to wonder if perhaps she was setting Dennis Coleman up to take a fall.
    The thing to do, then, was bring Dennis in, show him the note, tell him Karin’s tale of how it had been found, see what he had to say and look for inconsistencies.
    Dennis Coleman was a little late getting home from the Tallwoods Country Club that afternoon. He had stopped on the way to take care of an errand that he knew should have been done before, at least a day, if not two days, earlier. The stop had been at the Glastonbury town dump. The errand had been to toss a couple of bulging plastic garbage bags into the compactor.
    Soon after he reached his father’s house in South Glastonbury, the state cops showed up and asked him if he would accompany them to the command post to answer a few more questions. For three hours that afternoon and on into the evening, they went over the story he had told them two days before. And they found the inconsistencies.
    He had an explanation for the note, of course. The “deed” he was writing about meant that he was finally going to get a doctor’s appointment to see about his stomach troubles.
    As for the “plan,” he and Karin were always making plans for what they would do, how they would manage to be together. That’s what the note was all about. The plan “was our plan for the future,” he said. The thing about marrying the right way meant “She was romantic. She wanted a formal proposal, a formal ring, horse-drawn carriage, down on my knees, that kind of thing. Because the first time I proposed to her, I gave her a paper ring.”
    He had left the note between the sheets of her bed because it was something he did all the time. They were always writing notes and letters to each other, sometimes three or four in one day, and leaving them in the other’s room. This was just another of those notes. He had left this one between the sheets of her bed, which was where he often left notes, either on Sunday, August 2, or Monday, August 3, he couldn’t remember which because he was in and out of the apartment, feeding the cats and doing the other things Joyce and Karin had asked him to do while they were away. She had told him she would be home on Tuesday, and he was sure she would find it then.
    They let all that hang for the moment. They turned to the night of the murder. He had told them when first questioned that he was with his friend Frank Manganaro. But they had talked to Manganaro, and he had told them that yes, he had seen Dennis that night, but it had been