Kill Fee by Barbara Paul Page A

stay suspect until the day either he or Ansbacher keeled over for good. The Captain would never change his opinion of his lieutenant; he was like a bulldog who'd got a firm grip and wouldn't let go no matter what. Ansbacher even looked a little bit like a bulldog—heavy jowls, pug nose, small eyes.
    Albert Payson Terhune—
unbidden, the name floated into Murtaugh's mind. My god, he thought, all those dog stories. He'd read them as a boy, all of them, and hadn't thought about them for years. It must have been seeing Ansbacher as a bulldog that called Terhune to mind. Terhune had been a collie man; and while he acknowledged the strength of a bulldog's jaw in never letting go once the animal had a good grip, he had maintained the collie was the superior fighter. Because the collie was constantly on the move, biting here, nipping there, always looking for a better point of attack. He'd mentioned it several times, in different books. For some reason it had been important to Terhune to prove the collie was a better fighter than the bulldog.
    So, is there a moral in all this? Murtaugh wondered. Am I supposed to turn collie and keep nipping away at Ansbacher?
    "Ellie," he asked, "did you ever read Albert Payson Terhune when you were a kid?"
    But she was asleep.
    Ansbacher the Bulldog had gotten something else between his jaws and wouldn't let go: he was convinced Leon Walsh had hired someone to kill his partner. Or at least so he said; he could be pressuring Murtaugh into making an arrest that wouldn't stand up. Something for the file, booking a suspect on insufficient evidence, ammo to use against Murtaugh in his next bid for a captaincy. How did you defend yourself against something like that?
    Murtaugh was as sure as he could be that Leon Walsh had not arranged the murder of Jerry Sussman, but he could see the day he might have to arrest the editor just to protect himself against Ansbacher. Would I do it? Murtaugh wondered. Arrest a man I knew was innocent just to get out from under the heat? It wasn't as if Walsh would go to prison—he wouldn't even go to trial. He'd be out as soon as the D.A.'s office decided they didn't have a case.
    And Captain Ansbacher could make life hell for any subordinate who didn't toe the line. He'd done it before, and to Murtaugh—especially when Murtaugh had disagreed with him about a case. Ansbacher had forced him to close a few investigations before he was satisfied; he'd always wondered about those. But Ansbacher could do it. In time he could probably force him to arrest a totally innocent Leon Walsh.
    No.
    Damn it, enough was enough. What had he come to, lying there in the dark actually thinking about bringing charges of murder against a man he felt sure was innocent? Just because one narrow-minded, non-thinking, power-happy police captain had got it into his head that the editor of
Summit
magazine had hired a killer to do his dirty work for him.
    What have I come to?
Ellie was right; he needed to confront Ansbacher, or find some course of action to take instead of letting it fester and fester and fester. He needed to
do
something.
    He sighed. Easier said than done.
    While Murtaugh lay sleepless in his need to decide what to do, a different man in a mid-Manhattan high-rise was also trying to reach a decision.
    "It's just that I don't really trust opera singers, you see," he told the wall in a reasonable manner.
    The man liked to call himself Pluto—the whimsy of mixing the devil and Mickey Mouse's pet dog appealed to him. He was in his study; one wall was lined with corkboard. Affixed to the corkboard with push-pins were photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, a map. Dead center was an enlarged glossy of a man wearing the costume of the Duke of Mantua in
Rigoletto.
    "Italian tenors are the worst," the man who called himself Pluto said. "So temperamental."
    The Duke of Mantua seemed to wink at him. The singer in the photo was youngish, good-looking, not too much