Hardy shook his head, still testing. ‘I don’t know what she told you, but she didn’t love Owen Nash.’ Or so Farris had said.
‘No. No, you’re wrong there. Why do you say that?’
‘Same as with Fowler. You don’t take money from someone you love, not for sex anyway.’
‘She didn’t take money from Nash, she never did.’
That stopped Hardy cold. ‘What?’
‘She never took money from him.’
‘What about the will?’
‘What about it? The will was a will. I think it started out as more of a gesture, but when Owen died… I mean, wouldn’t you pursue two million dollars?’
Hardy’s head was beginning to throb again. He reached for the cup of now cold coffee on the table next to him. Why had he always assumed that Owen was paying May Shinn? Had it been Ken Farris who’d told him that early on? Had Farris been lying?
‘No,’ Freeman was going on. ‘May did love Owen Nash. There’s no doubt about that. And I’ve come to believe he told her he loved her, too. He was wearing her ring when he was found. She was a lovable woman.’
Clearly true. Look what she’d done to Andy Fowler. May obviously had more substance than he’d given her credit for. But she certainly had deceived Andy Fowler, and he reminded Freeman of this.
Freeman nodded as if this were old news. ‘That was before Owen Nash. Before Nash she did whatever was expedient. She told me this. Certain clients, you can become like a confessor to them. Psychologist, devil’s advocate. A dependency develops.’
Hardy, remembering Celine, didn’t need a reminder of that.
‘In May’s case she and I actually became pretty close. We were doing a lot of work together.’ At Hardy’s glance, Freeman went on, ‘And no, we weren’t sleeping together. Anyway, something very real seems to have happened with May and Owen, who were both pretty cynical to begin with. They changed each other, for the better.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘May dropped her old lovers – Andy Fowler, for example. Could be she might have been able to scam Owen along like she’d done with men before, but she wanted to clear the slate.’
‘And Nash?’
‘I gather it was pretty much the same, except of course he had a wider circle and more responsibilities. It might have taken longer to put into effect – this decision to go public with their intended marriage, for example.’
Hardy remembered that Farris had said that Owen had ‘changed’ in the last months of his life. Was that the explanation?
‘You really think they were going to get married?’
‘I do, yes, and I’m not too easily conned.’
Hardy had never seriously considered that. And why, more than anything, was that? Because Ken Farris had told him May and Owen were definitely breaking up. It brought him up short, wondering what else he’d overlooked or ignored.
His good friend, and very competent investigator, Abe Glitsky, had supposedly checked the alibi of Ken Farris, but now the thought occurred that in this one area, Pullios may have been right. Abe might have been so burned by the false arrest of May that his heart wasn’t into pursuing the leads in this case as he otherwise might have. He had, after all, not followed up the unidentified fingerprint on the murder weapon – while Struler had done so. He hadn’t discovered the private eye, Emmet Turkel. Hardy found himself wondering if Abe had actually flown to Taos or only made a few phone calls.
Owen Nash’s death had left Ken Farris in sole charge of a $150 million empire, unencumbered now by a controlling eccentric. Might not that be worth killing for?
‘Something ring a bell?’ Freeman asked mildly.
‘Maybe.’
They heard footsteps and were both standing by the time Strout opened the door. ‘Y’all want to come in?’ he said.
The body lay covered on a gurney in the chilled room. Strout led the way and pulled back the sheet from over her face. It struck Hardy how young she had been. Her face, without makeup or expression, was one of a young girl, sleeping.
Freeman moved closer to the gurney, traced a finger along the line of May’s jaw, lifted the sheet further and looked down at her body, grimacing. Strout and Hardy backed away.
‘Where are her clothes?’ Hardy asked.
‘Bagged and gone. They’re checking for fabrics, hairs, stains, SOP. A waste of time.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there is no doubt this woman killed herself.’
Hardy felt the fatigue leave in a rush. The clock up over the freezers said it was past eleven, and suddenly his client had at least been proclaimed innocent of committing this murder – because, in fact, it wasn’t a murder.
Somehow he felt the case had turned. Fowler hadn’t killed May. It made no rational difference in this case about Nash, and yet it seemed to matter a great deal. In everything Andy Fowler had done, Hardy saw evidence of confusion, concern for his reputation, a misdirected vision that he could somehow plug eleven holes with ten fingers.
But what he didn’t see – suddenly and with clarity -was a murderer. Andy did impulsive things and then made up foolish stories to cover up how foolish he had been; he was a man out of his depth with his emotions.
What Andy had not done was plan the cold-blooded killing of another man. Somebody else had done that -someone cold, efficient and organized, with neither remorse nor emotion. In fact, the murderer of Owen Nash was close to the polar opposite of Andy Fowler.
Jeff Elliot knew that in the old days, six months ago, before he met Dorothy, he would have been waiting at the morgue until the results came in on the postmortem so he could have a chance to make the morning edition. But tonight he had written his piece, proofed and filed it and headed home.
Other stories around the Hall of Justice were getting attention now – one concerned a cat the D.A.s had bought to control the influx of mice that had started to show up in the building in the wake of the construction for the new jail. The cat had been named Arnold Mousenegger and had already gotten several graphs in the Chronicle, a ‘quote of the day’ from Chris Locke (‘Arnold is a budgetary godsend. We couldn’t afford to exterminate the whole building.’) and an appearance on Channel 5. Hot stuff.
And Owen Nash was still as dead as he’d ever been. Andy Fowler was in jail and wasn’t about to get out to kill anybody else tonight. The trial proceeded at its own pace.
Jeff’s work would keep until the morning.
Dorothy had been asleep but got up to greet him when he opened the door. She poured them both glasses of domestic white wine while, sitting on the bed, he took his clothes off. The telephone rang and without thinking he picked it up.
‘Jeff, this is Dismas Hardy and I’m doing you a favor.’
‘You still awake? Don’t you have a trial in the morning?’
‘Good lawyers never sleep, and I wanted you to be the first to know, on the record, that Strout has ruled May Shinn a suicide. Andy Fowler did not kill her. Nobody killed her. She killed herself.’
‘Department of redundancy department,’ Jeff said. ‘Suicide means she killed herself.’
Hardy thanked him sincerely for the lesson in grammar. Dorothy came over and placed the wineglass on the table next to the phone. She sat next to him and rubbed his shoulders.
‘Is this solid?’Jeff asked.
‘Horse’s mouth, the horse being Strout. I’m still at the morgue. I thought you’d like to know.’
Jeff hesitated a moment – it meant he wasn’t going to sleep for a few more hours. ‘I’ve already filed the first edition.’
‘Hey,’ Hardy said, ‘it’s not even midnight. Don’t you guys just stop the presses, rip out the front page?’
‘Maybe if Arnold Mousenegger had four confirmed kills in one day.’
Everybody knew about Arnold. ‘By the way,’ Hardy asked, ‘you still willing to dig a little if I can find a likely hole?’