Like Love

SUICIDE? OR HOMICIDE?

It was obviously a lovers' pact, a sad but simple double suicide: the note, the naked bodies on the bed, empty booze bottles, shut windows, and gas pouring out of the kitchen stove. Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes should have wrapped it up nice and neat---suicide. Case Closed.

Yet somehow everything was a little too neat, and Steve, Cotton, and the boys of the 87th Precinct took one last look around---just routine, of course. Their routine check turned up three possible suspects: the deceased girl's mother, with an insurance policy on her daughter...the bereft husband, whose wife died in another man's arms...and the dead man's brother, who kept protesting that it was a clear-cut case of murder. But how, Steve And Cotton wondered, do you catch a cold-blooded killer and make him confess, when you can't prove the victims were actually murdered...?

This is #16 in An 87th Precinct Mystery.