“It just started raining. Didn’t you notice?”
“I got sucked into this, in more ways than one.” He gestured toward the computer.
She came into the room, frowning at the screen. “What was he just saying about you?”
“Nothing good.”
“He sounded complimentary.”
“Compliments are not always good things to get. Everything depends on the source.”
“Who was talking?”
“The loose-cannon lawyer Hardwick got for Kay Spalter.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I don’t like hearing my name advertised on TV, especially not by an egomaniac and not in that tone.”
Madeleine looked concerned. “Do you think he’s putting you in danger?”
What he was thinking, but didn’t say for fear of alarming her, was that the playing field had a precarious tilt when a murderer had your ID before you had his. He shrugged. “I don’t like publicity. I don’t like case scenarios being blabbed to the media. I don’t like wild exaggerations. And I especially don’t like loudmouthed, self-promoting lawyers.”
There was another aspect of his reaction that he didn’t mention: an underlying sense of excitement. Although his negative comments were all true, he had to admit, if only to himself, that a loose cannon like Bincher had a way of shaking things up, of provoking revealing responses from interested parties.
“You’re sure that’s all that’s bothering you?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
She gave him a long, worried, You didn’t really answer my question look.
Gurney had decided to wait until morning to call Hardwick about Bincher’s over-the-top media performance.
Now, at 8:30 a.m., he decided to wait a little longer—at least until he had his coffee. Madeleine was already at the breakfast table. He brought his cup over and sat across from her. As soon as he did, the landline phone rang. He bounced back up and went into the den to answer it.
“Gurney here.” It was his old NYPD way of identifying himself—which he thought he’d gotten over.
The hoarse, low, almost sleepy voice on the other end wasn’t familiar.
“Hello, Mr. Gurney. My name is Adonis Angelidis.” The speaker paused, as if expecting some word of recognition. When Gurney offered none, he went on. “I understand you’re working with a man named Bincher. Is that true?”
Now he had Gurney’s full attention, electrically charged by his recollection of what Kay Spalter told him about the man known as “Donny Angel.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Why do I ask? Because of that TV program he was on. Bincher mentioned your name with great prominence. You’re aware of this, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’re an investigator, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a famous guy, right?”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“That’s pretty funny. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’ I like that. Very modest man.”
“What do you want, Mr. Angelidis?”
“I don’t want nothing. I believe I can help you with things you need to know.”
“What sort of things?”
“Things that should be discussed face-to-face. I could save you a lot of trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“All the trouble in the world. And time. I could save you time. A lot of time. Time is very valuable. We only got so much of it. You know what I mean?”
“Okay, Mr. Angelidis. I need to know what this is about.”
“About? It’s about your big case. When I listened to Bincher on the TV, I said to myself, ‘This is bullshit, they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.’ Some of the shit he said, it’s gonna waste your time, make you crazy. So I want to do you a favor, set you straight.”
“Set me straight about what?”
“About who killed Carl Spalter. You want to know that, right?”
Chapter 25. Fat Gus
Gurney made his planned call to Hardwick, leaving out any assault on Bincher’s personal style. After all, he was going to have a meeting with Donny Angel at two o’clock that afternoon in a Long Falls restaurant—a meeting that could change everything—and it had obviously been motivated by Bincher’s performance.
After listening to Gurney’s summary of the phone call from Angel, Hardwick asked without much enthusiasm if he wanted some backup or if he wanted to be wired—just in case things in the restaurant started going south.
Gurney turned down both offers. “He’ll assume the possibility of backup, and the assumption is as good as the reality. As for the wire, he’ll assume that too and take whatever precautions he needs to.”
“You get any sense of what his game is?”
“Only that he’s upset by the direction he thinks we’re taking and he wants to head it off.”
Hardwick cleared his throat. “An obvious concern would be Lex’s suggestion that Carl might have been whacked because of a falling-out with someone in the mob.”
“Speaking of which, his shotgun approach to the case seems a hell of a lot broader than your ‘focus, focus, focus’ advice to me.”
“Fuck you, Sherlock. You’re purposely not getting the point. The point is, he’s bringing up scenarios that Klemper should have explored but failed to. Everything Lex said goes to the point of a dishonest, incompetent, prejudiced investigation. That’s it. That’s the point of the appeal. He’s not saying that you should start digging into all the crap he’s mentioning—only that Klemper didn’t.”
“Okay, Jack. New subject. Your friend in BCI—Esti Moreno? Can she get a look at the autopsy report on Mary Spalter?”
Hardwick hesitated. “What do you expect it to say?”
“It’ll say the cause of death was consistent with an accidental fall, but I’ll bet that the description of bone and tissue damage is also consistent with the blunt force trauma you’d expect if someone grabbed her by the hair and bashed her head against the edge of the bathtub.”
“Which won’t prove that it wasn’t just a hard fall. So what then?”
“Then I’ll just keep following the string.”
After ending the call to Hardwick, Gurney checked the time and saw that he had a couple of free hours before he’d have to leave for Long Falls. Feeling he should take some action on the chicken coop project, he put on a pair of rubber gardening boots and went out the side door to the area that he’d started measuring the previous day.
He was surprised to find Madeleine already there, holding the metal tape measure. She had one end of it hooked over the low retaining wall of the asparagus bed and was slowly backing up toward the apple tree. When she was nearly there, the end came loose and the tape went skittering along the ground, rewinding itself into the case in her hand.
“Damn!” she said. “Third time that’s happened.”
Gurney walked over, picked up the end, and pulled it back to the bed wall. “Is this where you want it?” he asked.
She nodded, looking relieved. “Thank you.”
For the next hour and a half he assisted with measurements for the coop and the run, helped hammer in corner stakes, squared the diagonals, and only once in the course of this work did he question one of Madeleine’s decisions. It was when she laid out the position of the run in a way that would result in a large forsythia bush being inside the fence instead of outside. He thought it was a mistake to let a bush take up so much of the fenced space. But she said that the chickens would like having a bush in their run because although they loved being outside, they were also fond of shade and shelter. It made them feel secure.