“Who’s Gene Kelly?” I whispered.
With a devious smile, Cozy whispered, “You don’t know your old movies-or your dancers. That’s a Fred Astaire wannabe, not a Gene Kelly.” He shushed me before I had a chance to respond and preceded me down the hall. He stood in the doorway where the Fred Astaire impersonator had disappeared, and seemed to puff himself up like a prizefighter at weigh-in. I could barely see around him.
After a five-second wait, Cozy barked, “What the hell are you doing in here?”
I started at the sound.
Mitchell Crest, the chief trial deputy of the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office, started too. He came running from an adjacent bathroom, tripped over the base of a wooden valet, and fell on his face in the center of what appeared to be the master bedroom.
Cozy leaned against the doorframe and with supreme casualness said, “Oh, hello, Mitch, how are you doing? You’re a little early, aren’t you? I thought you said eleven-forty-five. And it didn’t cross my mind for a single second that it would be you snooping around in dead people’s bedrooms. Shame, shame on you.”
“Maitlin,” Crest said as he tried to lift himself up from the floor with some dignity, “if I didn’t get to beat you in court occasionally, I swear I’d have to kill you just to retain my mental health.”
“Careful, I have a witness with me, Mitch.”
I poked my head around Cozy and said, “Hello, Mitchell. It’s me.”
“Hi, Alan. Cozy, I could take out a billboard with a death threat against you and it wouldn’t make any difference. There isn’t a jury in the county that would consider your murder by a prosecutor anything other than justifiable homicide. So why are we here today? Why on earth am I doing you this courtesy? What do you want to see?”
“You’re taking requests? I think ‘Singing in the Rain’ would be a nice encore. Or, if you insist on staying with the Beatles, how about ‘I Am the Walrus’? Tough melody, though, for a dancer. Alan?”
Cozy was having more fun than Mitch was. I didn’t think playing along any longer was going to accomplish much. “Whatever you have to show us, Mitch. I would just like to see what you and the police think happened here.”
“Fine. This…is, um, the master bedroom. As you are well aware, the homicide took place downstairs, in what might be called the basement in a lesser house. Here, I prefer to think of it as the lower level. Follow me.”
We did, Cozy last. He seemed to linger upstairs as long as propriety would allow. A series of two wide, open staircases led from the second floor down to the bright lowest level where I had first joined Sam to consider the demise of Dead Ed Robilio.
I took in details that had escaped my consciousness after the initial visit. A long wall of French doors faced east. The main room was set up as a home theater, complete with a wet bar, a dozen rocker seats, and a carnival-style popcorn popper. I couldn’t imagine inviting ten people over to watch a video. Maybe it was just me.
Someone, either Ed or his wife, had a fondness for contemporary acrylics. Huge canvases covered two big walls. A Remington sculpture sat on top of a bird’s-eye maple table that I imagined contained the video projector for the home theater.
Mitch said, “This way.”
A short hall led to a closed door that led to the room where I’d seen Dead Ed in the bag on the floor. Mitch opened the door to the room and stepped aside, so we could precede him in.
He said, “This is where she shot him.”
The room was more barren than I recalled.
“Where’s the furniture?”
“Evidence. You want to see pictures of how it looked, I’m happy to arrange that. We have lots of pictures. Lots and lots of pictures.”
My memory said that the furniture had been mostly heavy walnut pieces chosen from some decorator’s vision of the home office for the macho man.
I heard Cozy’s breathing change. With every advocate’s bone in his huge body, his impulse was to defend his client against this prosecutor’s claim that Merritt had shot someone down here. But now wasn’t the time. Cozy would get an opportunity to argue Merritt’s innocence with Mitchell Crest in court soon enough.
Too soon, actually.
“Story is this: Victim’s wife came home from a weekend at some Navaho spiritual cleansing thing in Taos and found him. Bloody, bloody scene, truly messy, one of the worst. I feel sorry for her, what she walked in on. Two shots had been fired resulting in two wounds, one to the upper abdomen, second one some minutes later to the head-specifically the face-right next to the nose. Coroner thinks the second one was the fatal shot, although the victim eventually would have bled out from the chest wound. As you both know,” Mitchell paused for effect, “no weapon was found at this location.” Mitchell allowed himself a half-smile, knowing that it was I who had inadvertently led the police to the murder weapon.
“Bloody footprints that tentatively match the type of shoe later discovered under your client’s bed, Cozy, leave the scene, go out through that theater room there, and then finally out those garden-level doors, around the side of the house, and…gone. Dogs had the scent for quite a ways, then lost it just east of Broadway, about six blocks from what turns out to be your patient’s house, Alan. That is, coincidentally, the same place we recovered the murder weapon. Based on environmental and scene circumstances, coroner estimates that the victim died sometime between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, so he had been dead awhile when his wife got here on Monday, which was a few minutes before noon. Her alibi is solid, by the way, we talked to her spiritual guru in Taos. We found the wife’s bloody footprints all over the lower level of the house, too. After she found the deceased, she ran around out there like a chicken with its head cut off. She used the phone in the wet bar to call 911.”
All around the room I spied evidence of a meticulous once-over by the crime scene investigation team. Chemicals for raising fingerprints coated everything that could reveal a latent image. Sections of the wool Berber carpet had been cut out and removed. I knew that every last square centimeter of the surface had been dusted and vacuumed and photographed and videotaped. I wondered what trace evidence had been removed by the CSIs in their sweep.
“Prints?”
“In this room, the victim’s-Dr. Robilio’s-the suspect’s-Merritt Strait’s-the wife’s, and the housekeeper’s. That’s it. Your patient’s and the wife’s latents are nicely fossilized in Dr. Robilio’s blood, by the way. Out there-” he pointed toward the family room “-there are lots of latents that aren’t yet identified. The housekeeping is not as good as you would like.”
Cozy asked, “No unknowns in the office? Not even one?”
Mitchell grinned. “A few strays. That’s to be expected. We’re ruling out family and business associates.”
“Entry was how, Mitchell? How are you imagining that a fifteen-year-old got in to do this?”
“No forced entry. Maybe she came in the same doors she left by, maybe he let her in, I mean, wouldn’t you let her in if she came to your door? A cute kid in a basketball uniform? But we don’t have that pinned down yet. Neither the victim nor the suspect is doing much talking to us right now.”
“And the weapon?”
“His.”
“How did she find his gun?”
“I don’t know, counselor. Have you thought of asking her?”
Cozy ignored him. “What were you doing upstairs, Mitch? In the master bedroom? Did you find some evidence up there that I should know about?”