I said, “I don’t know. There were three shots, all right.”
“The third shot went into a suitcase?”
“That’s right. Into the woman’s suitcase, right near the handle. For a while police couldn’t find the bullet. They were wondering about that third shot. Then they opened the suitcase and found where the bullet had gone through, leaving a neat little hole and embedding itself in the clothes.”
“It didn’t go all the way through the suitcase?”
“About half-way.”
“What’s in it for us, lover? What’s the angle?”
I said, “He carried forty thousand dollars’ worth of insurance, double indemnity, at that. He’d had it for less than a year. If he killed the woman and then himself, the insurance is void. If the man was shot first, then he was murdered and the insurance company would be nicked for eighty thousand dollars.”
“But the gun was in his hand,” Bertha said, her eyes greedy.
“It was when they found the bodies. Someone could have tampered with the evidence — not much, just eighty thousand dollars’ worth.”
“But the woman was shot in the back of the head,” Bertha said.