It was his pride, and he knew he carried it to extremes. This was why private investigators existed – to do legwork. But no one did legwork as well as he did. One time, when he’d just started out, he’d hired a private investigator to talk to all possible witnesses in a neighborhood where a woman had supposedly killed her husband. The woman, Bettina Allred, had contended she’d had a fight with her husband Kevin, all right – she’d even fired a shot into the wall. Terrified of herself and her own anger, she’d run from the apartment to go out to cool off. While she was gone, she said, someone had come in and shot her husband with his own gun. So the private investigator David hired had talked to everybody in the apartment and they’d all heard the fighting and she’d obviously done it. Except the P.I. hadn’t talked to Wayne, the thirteen-year-old son who hadn’t even been home during the relevant time. When Freeman doubled-checked as he always did, he decided to be thorough – as he always was – and found that Wayne had been hiding terrified in the closet and when Mommy had run out, he’d taken the gun and shot his daddy. He’d had enough of Daddy beating up on him and Mommy.
Since then, Freeman had done his own legwork. Though it was his precious time, he only charged his clients the $65 an hour he would have paid a private eye. It was, he thought, one of the best bargains in the business.
No one in May’s building had seen or heard her on Saturday. Now he was going up the other side of the street, ringing doorbells, talking to people.
‘You see the turreted apartment on the corner, up on the top over there? Anything at all? Shades going up, blinds being pulled? How about a shadow? Yes, well, it’s confidential, but it has to do with a murder investigation, Jesus, don’t tell my boss. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
The French deli across the street. The cleaners on the opposite corner. Nada, nada, nada. If May had been home, as she claimed, she had been invisible. Of course, he didn’t believe she’d been home, but as he’d told her, what he believed was irrelevant.
He was on the fourth and last floor of the building directly across the street from May’s. His feet hurt. He was considering rashing his billing rate for this work up to $75 an hour. He rang the bell and listened to it gong for a moment. No one answered. There was one other door down the hall, and it opened.
‘Mr Strauss isn’t in. Can I help you?’
Mrs Streletski was a well-dressed elderly woman and he gave her his spiel. She invited him in and forced him to drink a cup of horrible coffee. She was sorry she couldn’t really help him. She’d been out of her apartment for the last ten days – in fact, she’d just gotten back from visiting over in Rossmoor. She was considering moving into Rossmoor with Hal. They did so much there. It was an active place, even if you were a little elderly, no one treated you like you were old. There were lots of classes, movies, lectures. It was a fun place, a young place.
Mrs Streletski showed Freeman that you couldn’t see anything of May’s building from her window. He thanked her for the coffee and left his card so that Mr Strauss, who lived alone next door, could call him when he got in if he had the time.
‘He’s not home very often, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘He travels a lot. He’s always working. He got divorced last year and I think he’s very lonely. We’ve played Scrabble a few times and I tried to get him to go out with Hal and me, but I think he misses his wife and his boys.’
‘Well, if you could have him call me, he might have been home, remember something.’
She said she would. He thanked her and started walking down the steps, thinking that even when you didn’t get anything, this was probably worth more than $75, call it $100 an hour.
‘Two months before you even set a date for a preliminary hearing?’
Hardy was biting his tongue, held to the stricture not to leak anything about Elizabeth’s upcoming appointment with the grand jury. Ken Farris, in the interview room down by the evidence lockers, wasn’t happy, and Hardy wondered how far he could go to make him feel better. ‘We’re working on something.’ Lame, he knew.
‘Let’s hope so. And meanwhile she’s out walking around.’
‘That’s how it works.’ Farris shook his head.
Hardy thought he’d get away from it. ‘So how are things down in South City? Getting any better?’
Farris didn’t look better. There were bags under his eyes. His shoulders slumped. He sat kitty-corner to Hardy at a gray-topped metal table, his arms half-cupped – protectively – around the original of Owen’s will. May’s gun was also bagged on the table. The snake ring.
Farris shrugged. ‘The stocks went down, then back up. We’ve got contracts. People have work and life goes on.’ He looked back down at the piece of paper in front of him. ‘This, though, this is unbelievable. What was he doing?’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Owen. Two million dollars. Christ. Celine told me she talked to you.’
The man was jumping around, trying to find a foothold. Hardy still wasn’t comfortable talking about Celine. He’d been able to put her out of his mind, but if something came up that put her back in, she tended to stay. He didn’t really understand it. ‘When did you see her?’
‘Sunday. The cremation.’
The cremation. Farris – and Celine – they were both coming off that, too. They’d had a rocky week. ‘How’s she holding up?’
Farris seemed to be studying the will some more. ‘What? Oh, she’s pretty fragile right now. A little fixated on May. I talked her out of going to court for the arraignment.’
‘Good idea. What’s she say about May?’
‘She wonders why we waste all the time with arraignments and hearings and trials. And then there’ll be appeals. Somebody ought to go and just kill her. Celine says she’d do it herself.’
‘Try to talk her out of that, too, would you? It would be frowned on… You’re sure she did it, huh?’
That woke Farris up. ‘You’re not?
‘Whoa, I didn’t say that. We just can’t put her on the Eloise. It’s kind of a major detail.’
‘Well, I’ve got her on the Eloise. Celine told me Owen was meeting her on the Eloise.’
Hardy nodded. ‘She told me that, too.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, what? It’s hearsay. Inadmissible.’
‘Bullshit. She was on the boat.’
‘I didn’t say she wasn’t. We’re trying her for murder.’
‘Okay. Sorry.’ Farris looked down again, tapped the paper. ‘This is definitely Owen. Why didn’t he tell me about it?’
‘Maybe he thought it would never come up.’
‘How couldn’t it come up?’
‘If he didn’t die, how’s that? Maybe it was a goof, maybe he wrote the thing drunk. She might have dared him or something. The point is, it’s here, and it’s a damn good reason to kill somebody.’
‘Another one,’ Farris said.
‘What do you mean, another one?’
Farris frowned, as though surprised he’d been caught saying anything out loud. He rose from the chair, pushing the physical evidence back toward Hardy. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Figure of speech.’
24
Jeff Elliot went blind in Maury Carter’s office.
It had started, he guessed, on the night after he’d gone to the morgue. The tension of those moments, coupled with his first front-page article and the background stuff, had produced too much stress, and there had always been – and his doctors agreed – a correlation between stress and the onset of his attacks.