Li sat on the third row of bleachers, watching the game, then nodded when he saw Mackey and Parker come in. He patted the cushioned bench beside him, and they came over, Parker to take a seat at Li’s right, Mackey choosing a place on the second row, just to their left, where he could sit sideways and look up at them both.
Li nodded to Parker and said, “Before we begin, just let me make the situation clear. I assume you did not come here trailing police—”
“No,” Parker said.
“No, of course not. But to consider the possibility, however remote, if in fact we are interrupted by an official presence, I will explain that we were meeting to work on the details of your turning yourself in, and you will say the same.”
“Naturally,” Parker said.
“Good.” Li turned to Mackey. “Now, to your friend. The police seem unable to learn her true identity.”
“They never will,” Mackey said.
“I begin to believe you’re right. She was paying for her hotel room with a credit card under the Brenda Fawcett name. They have now learned from the credit card company that the bills are sent to an accountant in Long Island, who pays with money taken from the account of a client of theirs named Robert Morrison. They have not physically seen Morrison in some years, but send him statements to a maildrop in New York City. They manage a few money market accounts for Morrison, and he occasionally sends them more money— How, if I may ask? The police don’t know, or at least didn’t tell me.”
“Money orders,” Mackey said. “Every once in a while, top up the tanks with some money orders.”
“So Ms. Fawcett is not their customer, nor can they directly reach Morrison, who pays her bills.”
Mackey said, “Does she give them a story?”
“The police here?” Li smiled, almost in a proprietary way, as though it were a story he’d made up himself. “She says,” he told them, “she is fleeing an abusive husband. Court orders didn’t help, police protection didn’t help — a little dig there, of which they are not unaware — she is in fear of her life, she will never give anybody at all her correct name for fear this man will find her.” Li shrugged. “The police don’t exactly believe her,” he said, “but it isn’t a story they can do anything about.”
“Brenda’s good,” Mackey said. “She can do all the emotions: outrage, fear, just a little sex.”
Parker said, “The point is, to get her out.”
“Clean, if we can,” Mackey added.
“When it comes down to that,” Li told them, “as I’ve been pointing out to the ADA assigned to this case, a young woman with little experience and, if I may say so, no feel for the job, there is no crime here. When picked up this morning, at the hotel, Ms. Fawcett had clearly not spent the night crawling through walls and tunnels. Nothing to connect her to the Armory or to Freedman Jewels was found on her person nor in her hotel room—”
“Suite,” Mackey said.
“I beg your pardon,” Li said, and laughed. Mackey was right; he liked to laugh. “Her suite,” he corrected himself. “Nothing in that fine suite to suggest its sole occupant was a common burglar. They have on their hands a suspicious situation, in that Ms. Fawcett will not reveal her true identity, nor have they been able to find her true identity on their own. Other than that, they have the testimony of Darlene Johnson-Ross—”
“The dance studio woman,” Mackey interjected.
“Yes.” Li nodded. “The source of all Ms. Fawcett’s problems, if it comes to that. She is the one who informed the police that Ms. Fawcett has been operating in this city under a false name and background, and she is the one who claims to have seen Ms. Fawcett in a parked car a block from the Armory late last night.”
Mackey said, “Took a picture?”
Li shook his head. “Drove by, alone, in a moving automobile, in the middle of the night. Saw, for an instant, not near any streetlight, a blonde at the wheel of an unmoving car. While, of course, she has been obsessing about a blonde she has seen at her dance studio. On the stand, I’d demolish that identification in three minutes.”
Mackey said, “We don’t want to go on the stand.”
“Oh, I know,” Li assured him. “We should be getting bail, we really should, since there’s so little to tie Ms. Fawcett to the crime, except for the problem of identity. Still, I could make a strong case in front of a judge, and the police know it, and don’t want to lose control of Ms. Fawcett until they find out who she is.”
“Which is never,” Mackey said.
“In the interim,” Li said, “they’ve put up Ms. Johnson-Ross to file a complaint against Ms. Fawcett for false statements on a credit application.”
Mackey said, “What credit application? Brenda paid cash.”
“Exactly.” Li spread his hands. “It’s merely a plot to stall things, delay the release. A false statement on a credit application is a misdemeanor, but the form Ms. Fawcett filled out at the dance studio was not a credit application, since she was paying cash. It’s simply a maneuver to keep her in their grasp.”
Mackey said, “And this Johnson-Ross goes along with it?”
“She will, in the morning,” Li told him. “They weren’t quite ready today, and I was raising a number of objections, including the possibility that Ms. Johnson-Ross might find herself facing a severe lawsuit from Ms. Fawcett once this is all over, which led Ms. Johnson-Ross to say she’d need to consult her own lawyer before agreeing to make out the complaint, so that step has now been scheduled for ten tomorrow morning.”
Mackey and Parker looked at each other. Catching the look, Li said, calmly, “Let me point out, the very worst thing that could happen to Ms. Fawcett’s chances to successfully put this episode behind her would be for some unfortunate accident to occur before ten tomorrow morning to Ms. Johnson-Ross. The police don’t believe in coincidence.”
Mackey said, “So what do you do next?”
“Argue, dispute, disrupt,” Li told him. “I will do my best to quash Ms. Johnson-Ross’s complaint, I will do my best to have bail set, but, from the way it looks at this point, I’m afraid Ms. Fawcett will be facing at least one more night of detention.”
“You’ll do what you can,” Mackey said.
Li shrugged. “Of course.” From inside his jacket he drew a long white envelope printed with his firm’s return address. “My retainer,” he murmured.
Parker took the envelope and put it away. He said, “She’ll send you an extra two K. You can give it to Brenda or one of us.”
Li nodded. “I understand. Walking-around money.”
“Moving-around money,” Parker said.
3
At the beer distributor’s, Williams had drawn maps of the Fifth Street station, exterior and interior, all four floors, the streets of that neighborhood. “I don’t say it’s complete,” he warned them. “It’s what I remember.”
They stood at the conference table, looking at the half dozen rough pencil drawings on the backs of old order forms. Parker and Mackey hadn’t had much to say to each other in the cab back to this neighborhood, nor the three-block walk through deepening dusk from where they’d left the cab, but now Parker said, “It’s breaking out again.”
“I know,” Williams said. “All we do is break outa things. And now break this woman Brenda out.”
Mackey said, “I don’t want to do it that way.”
Williams looked at him. “What other way is there? They got her in there. She’s locked down.”
“I don’t know what the other way is,” Mackey said.
“She’s never been fingerprinted before. She’s got no record, no history with the law If we go in there and break her out, now she’s got a history and now they’ve got her prints and now she can’t live her life the same way she always did. There’s got to be another way.”