Foursome by Jeremiah Healy

player, the works. Chrome stools around an art deco dining room table that was a foot too high, the stools having seat slings and backrests in the same blue leather. The walls were festooned with modern art, cubes and slashes with no sense of pattern I could see. A set of bannistered stairs with a beige carpet runner went up to a second floor.
    “Can I see the bedroom?”
    Willis shrugged. “Mister, you can see the whole damned house.”
    She led me up the stairs, some more of the dark brown discoloration on the carpet runner. At the top, a corridor branched left and right, double doors in front of us.
    Willis opened the double doors inward, and I moved past her.
    The room was huge, a king-sized bed occupying barely a quarter of the floor space. A triple window provided a great view of the sheriff’s Blazer on the gravel below. The sheets, carpeting, and other furnishings, in yellow and orange, would have been loud in an artist’s loft in the SoHo section of New York.
    Behind me, Willis said, “Kind of hard on the eyes, eh?”
    “Kind of.” There were faint discoloration marks near a set of louvered doors. “This the closet?”
    “It is.”
    I opened the doors. Double poles of clothing, both men’s and women’s. About half and half, as far as I could tell.
    “We found the shoes your client was wearing back in that corner to your right.”
    I knelt down. You could just see a discoloration in the yellow carpeting on the bottom.
    “He buried the shoes under a couple of cartons, but one of the state troopers spotted the stain.”
    I went through the master bath, then the two guest rooms and baths on either side of the master suite. The house looked large from the outside, but it didn’t have a lot of living space on the inside. From the window in the southside guest room, I could see a small stone garage. “That where they kept the crossbow?”
    “So your client says.”
    “Can I see it?”
    “Crossbow’s back in my evidence locker. The garage, sure.”
    We went back downstairs, Willis leading me out toward the kitchen. “Sheriff, just a second.”
    She stopped and turned to me.
    I said, “This is about where Sandra Newberg was found?”
    “About. Ma Judson said when she came in on your client, he was holding his wife and rocking her, so we figure he moved the body some from its original position.”
    “You also figure he killed them first, went to the store, then came back and made enough noise to bring his neighbors.”
    “That’s about it.”
    “Then why did he change his shoes?”
    “What?”
    “Shea checks on his wife when he gets back, sitting with and rocking her body, he’s going to get blood all over his shoes. Why change them between ‘killing’ them and ‘finding’ them again?”
    Willis kept her face neutral. “Because he doesn’t want to get any blood in his fancy new four-wheel-drive. It’d wreck his carpeting and his story of just finding them here when he got back.”
    “But then why go up the stairs with them on? He’d leave tracks here that way. And why not ditch the shoes somewhere other than his closet? Hell, he’s got a forest for his backyard and a lake for his front.”
    She just looked at me. “You want to see the garage or not?”
    Outside, Willis said, “I’m going to radio in. Key’s just under the third eave there on the left.”
    She walked up to her vehicle as I went to the garage. It had two old wooden doors painted dark green that would have to be opened outward, one at a time. I found the key the way Willis had the one for the boathouse. Unlocking a door, I pulled it toward me far enough to let in light to see by. The contents were a land version of the boathouse. All-terrain vehicles, fancy mountain bikes, and so on. Under some gardening equipment, I found a target the size of a round cocktail tabletop with concentric rings of yellow, blue, and red around a black bull’s-eye. Above the target was a bare ten-penny nail where a crossbow and bolts might