"Yes," Grace said.
"How did you know?"
Grace stole a sidelong glance at Suzanne Crenshaw, who was vigorously shaking her head. Grace looked back at me.
"Because I heard her on the phone. Virginia had fixed it, you see."
"Fixed it?"
"The phone. She made tapes so I could listen."
"In other words, she put a tap on the line?"
"Yes. I suppose that's what it's called."
"A legal tap?" I don't know why I even bothered to ask. As far as Grace Highsmith was concerned, I was a long way from being a virgin.
Suzanne Crenshaw was still shaking her head, but Grace Highsmith was not dissuaded. "I don't know what's illegal about it, Detective Beaumont. After all, it is my phone. It's in my name, and I write the check that pays the bill each month."
Great, I thought, another key piece of information gleaned from an illegal wiretap.
"So," I said, "you knew Latty planned to meet Don Wolf. Did you have any idea she was going to ask him to marry her?"
For the first time, Grace seemed indecisive. She hesitated. "I didn't know, but I was afraid she might. She's been reading all of Dorene's old romance novels, you see, the books Dorene couldn't take with her when she moved into smaller quarters. You know what they're like."
"No," I said, quite honestly. "I have no idea."
"They're the kind of story where no matter how awful the man seems to be at first glance-no matter how repulsive or obnoxious, or unreasonable-he always turns out to be all right in the end. True love triumphs. He and the heroine get married and live happily ever after and all that sort of thing. Very unrealistic, if you ask me."
"What does any of this have to do with Latty?"
"She's rebelling against her mother, you see," Grace answered. "Her mother is so impossibly unconventional-she never married, believes wholeheartedly in free sex, thinks marriage is the inevitable outcome of a patriarchal society, and all that other feminist nonsense. Naturally, Latty wants to do just the opposite-including wanting to marry the first man she became seriously involved with."
"She might have been rebelling against you, too, Miss Highsmith," I suggested.
"Heavens, no," Grace said immediately, underlining her objection with a definitive shake of her head. "Not against me certainly. I may not read all those books, but in my own way, I'm every bit as much of a hopeless romantic as Latty is or as her grandmother was. I'm sure I would have married and settled down myself, if I'd ever met just the right sort of man."
Not bloody likely, I thought. "Let's go back to New Year's Eve," I said, bringing the discussion back to the subject at hand.
"What about it?"
"Virginia Marks followed Latty to Myrtle Edwards Park?"
"No. Since we knew that's where they were meeting, I asked her to wait there for them."
"And what happened?"
"Don Wolf showed up first. When Latty got there, they walked off down by the water. A few minutes later, just after the fireworks started, Latty came running back alone. On the way to her car, she ran right past Virginia's. Virginia said she could see Latty was upset, that she was crying."
"And then what happened?"
"I had asked Virginia to speak to Don Wolf. She waited for a while for him to come back through the parking lot. When he didn't, she finally went to check, thinking he might have left the park somewhere north of where she was waiting. That's when she found the gun. It was right there just off the jogging path, near where Latty stood for a moment or two when she came back alone. Virginia picked up the gun, realized it had been fired, and assumed the worst."
"That Latty had shot him?"
Grace closed her eyes and nodded.
"What happened then?"
"She went back to her car, called me on her car phone, and asked me what I wanted her to do."
"Grace," Suzanne Crenshaw interjected urgently. "I really think…"
"Now, Suzanne," Grace Highsmith said, as stubborn in her own way as Latty Gibson was in hers. "Now that I've started, I'm going to finish. Damn the torpedoes, if you'll excuse the expression. As soon as Virginia told me what kind of gun it was, I knew it was ours-mine. At least I was afraid it was. I needed time to think, to decide what to do. I asked Virginia to hold on to the gun and to call me again as soon as she found out for sure whether or not Don Wolf was dead. She did just exactly what I asked. She was back there on the pier when the body was found the next morning."
"Miss Highsmith," I said, "willfully concealing evidence in a homicide investigation constitutes a felony."
"Oh, I know all that," she replied airily. "That's what I have you for, isn't it, Suzanne?"
The attorney nodded grimly but said nothing.
"Wait a minute," Tim Blaine said, opening his mouth for the first time in the course of the interview. "When Latty left, why didn't Virginia Marks follow her?"
It was a good observation-one I wished I had made myself.
"I already told you. Because Virginia's assignment that night was to talk to Don Wolf, to conclude my negotiations with him."
"Negotiations for what?"
"To present him with my offer."
"What offer?"
"A payoff," Grace Highsmith said. "Or maybe it's called a bribe. I'm not sure which is which. Whatever you want to call it, I was prepared to give the man money if he would promise to get out of Latty's life and stay there."
"How much money?" Tim Blaine asked.
"One hundred g's," Grace Highsmith said. "I believe that's how the tough guys always say it in the movies. I've never been quite sure why they use that term. What does the letter g have to do with a thousand dollars?"
By then, I was a grizzled veteran of Grace Highsmith's little surprises. Tim Blaine wasn't. When she said that, the stunned look on his face probably wasn't all that different from the look on mine the day before when she had dumped the. 32 auto out of her purse onto the linen tablecloth in Azalea's Fountain Court.
I could have told Grace that g refers to grand as in thousand, but I didn't feel like making any more contributions toward her growing criminal vocabulary.
"Back to Virginia Marks for a moment," I said. "Even after you knew Don Wolf was dead, Virginia kept working for you. Why was that?"
Grace shrugged. "By then, I assumed we needed to know everything we could about him in case Suzanne needed information on him to mount Latty's defense. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as though there was much to find out."
"That's what Virginia's trip to California was all about?"
Grace nodded.
"Did she learn anything important?"
"Not really. I only talked to her briefly on the telephone. She said she had learned a few things, but that she'd get back to me later on today with the details. I wasn't all that excited about it because it sounded to me as though it was mostly more of the same."
"The same what?"
"The same old nothing," Grace answered. "At least, nothing much. She never did have any luck tracing his background prior to his going to work for D.G.I. last June. She said it was almost like he was dropped onto this planet, fully grown and fully educated, at age thirty-two. Virginia thought maybe he might be part of the federal witness protection program."
The slight discrepancy was so small that it almost sailed right past me without my noticing. "Wait a minute," I said, "did you say last June?"
Grace nodded, "Yes."
"But I thought…" The people in the shop stayed quiet while I thumbed through my notebook, looking for the notes from my interview with Bill Whitten. And once I found them, I spent more time searching through and deciphering my hasty scribbles until I found the exact reference.
"Here it is. According to what Bill Whitten told me, Don Wolf went to work for D.G.I. in early October."
"No," Grace said. "You're wrong about that. I'm sure Virginia told me he started working for D.G.I. much earlier than that, way back last summer sometime. Virginia didn't say exactly, but it sounded as though it was a consulting job of some kind. I'm sure she would have addressed that issue in her report if she'd ever had a chance to deliver it. She usually faxed me a written copy a little in advance of our face-to-face. That gave me a chance to think about it beforehand and to make note of any questions."