Stranahan said, “I think you both ought to know: Somebody wants to kill me.”
Garcia’s eyebrows shot up and he rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Who is it, chico? Please, make my job easier.”
“I think it’s a doctor. His name is Rudy Graveline. Write this down, Luis, please.”
“And why would this doctor want you dead?”
“I’m not sure, Al.”
“But you want me to roust him on a hunch.”
“No, I just want his name in a file somewhere. I want you to know who he is, just in case.”
Garcia turned to Luis Cordova. “Don’t you love the fucking sound of that? Just in case. Luis, I think this is where we’re supposed to give Mr. Stranahan a lecture about taking the law into his own hands.”
Luissaid, “Don’t takethelaw intoyourown hands, Mick.”
“Thank you, Luis.”
Al Garcia flicked a stubby thumb through his black mustache. “Just for the record, you didn’t invite the lovely Chloe Simpkins Stranahan out here for a romantic reconciliation over fresh fish and wine?”
“No,” Stranahan said. Fish and wine-that fucking Garcia must have scoped out the dirty dinner dishes.
“And the two of you didn’t go for a boat ride?”
“No, Al.”
“And you didn’t get in a sloppy drunken fight?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t hook her to the anchor and drop her overboard?”
“Nope.”
“Lu is, you get all that?”
Luis Cordova nodded as he jotted in the notebook. Shorthand, too; Stranahan was impressed.
Garcia got up and went knocking around the house, making Stranahan very nervous. When the detective finally stopped prowling, he stood directly under the stuffed blue marlin. “Mick, I don’t have to tell you there’s some guys in Homicide think you aced old Judge Goomer without provocation.”
“I know that, Al. There’s some guys in Homicide used to be in business with Judge Goomer.”
“And I know that. Point is, they’ll be looking at this Chloe thing real hard. Harder than normal.”
Stranahan said, “There’s no chance it was an accident?”
“No,” Luis Cordova interjected. “No chance.”
“So,” said Al Garcia, “you see the position I’m in. Until we get another suspect, you’re it. The good news is, we’ve got no physical evidence connecting you. The bad news is, we’ve got Chloe’s manicurist.”
Stranahan groaned. “Jesus, let’s hear it.”
Garcia ambled to a window, stuck his arm out and tapped cigar ash into the water.
“Chloe had her toenails done yesterday morning,” the detective said. “Told the girl she was coming out here to clean your clock.”
“Lovely,” said Mick Stranahan.
There was a small rap on the door and Tina came in, fiddling with the strap on the top piece of her swimsuit. Al Garcia beamed like he’d just won the lottery; a dreary day suddenly had been brightened.
Stranahan stood up. “Tina, I want you to meet Sergeant Garcia and Officer Cordova. They’re here on police business. Al, Luis, I’d like you to meet my alibi.”
“How do you do,” said Luis Cordova, shaking Tina’s hand in a commendably official way.
Garcia gave Stranahan another sideways look. “I love it,” said the detective. “I absolutely love this job.”
Christina Marks heard about the death of Chloe Simpkins Stranahan on the six o’clock news. The only thing she could think was that Mick had done it to pay Chloe back for siccing the TV crew on him. It was painful to believe, but the only other possibility was too far-fetched-that Chloe’s murder was a coincidence of timing and had nothing to do with Mick or Victoria Barletta. This Christina Marks could not accept; she had to plan for the worst.
If Mick was the killer, that would be a problem.
If Chloe had blabbed about getting five hundred in tipster money from the Reynaldo Flemm show, that would be a problem too. The police would want to know everything, then the papers would get hold of it and the Barletta story would blow up prematurely.
Then there was the substantial problem of Reynaldo himself; Christina cold just hear him hyping the hell out of Chloe’s murder in the intro: “The story you are about to see is so explosive that a confidential informant who provided us with key information was brutally murdered only days later… “ Brutally murdered was one of Reynaldo’s favorite on-camera redundancies. Once Christina had drolly asked Reynaldo if he’d ever heard of anyone being gently murdered, but he missed the point.
Sometimes, when he got particularly excited about a story, Reynaldo Flemm would actually try to write out the script himself, with comic results. The murder of Stranahan’s ex-wife was just the sort of bombshell to inspire Reynaldo’s muse, so Christina decided on a preemptive attack. She was reaching across the bed for the telephone when it rang.
It was Maggie Gonzalez, calling collect from somewhere in Manhattan.
“Miss Marks, I got a little problem.”
Christina said: “We’ve been looking all over for you. What happened to your trip to Miami?”
“I went, I came back,” Maggie said. “I told you, there’s a problem down there.”
“So what’ve you been doing the last few weeks,” Christina said, “besides spending our money?” Christina had just about had it with this ditz; she was beginning to think Mick was right, the girl was ripping them off.
Maggie said, “Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. I was scared. Scared out of my mind.”
“We thought you might be dead.”
“No,” said Maggie, barely audible. A long pause suggested that she was fretting over the grim possibility.
“Don’t you even want to know how the story is going?” Christina asked warily.
“That’s the problem,” Maggie replied. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“Oh?”
Then, almost as an afterthought, Maggie asked, “Who’ve you interviewed so far?”
“Nobody,” Christina said. “We’ve got a lot of legwork to do first.”
“I can’t believe you haven’t interviewed anybody!”
Maggie was trolling for something, Christina could tell. “We’re taking it slow,” Christina said. “This is a sensitive piece.”
“No joke,” Maggie said. “Real sensitive.”
Christina held the phone in the crook of her shoulder and dug a legal pad and felt-tip pen from her shoulder bag on the bed table.
Maggie went on: “This whole thing could get me killed, and I think that’s worth more than five thousand dollars.”
“But that was our agreement,” Christina said, scribbling along with the conversation.
“That was before I started getting threatening calls on my machine,” said Maggie Gonzalez.
“From who?”
“I don’t know who,” Maggie lied. “It sounded like Dr. Graveline.”
“What kind of threats? What did they say?”
“Threat threats,” Maggie said impatiently. “Enough to scare me shitless, okay? You guys tricked me into believing this was safe.”
“We did nothing of the sort.”
“Yeah, well, five thousand dollars isn’t going to cut it anymore. By the time this is finished, I’ll probably have to pack up and move out of Miami. You got any idea what that’ll cost?”
Christina Marks said, “What’s the bottom line here, Maggie?”
“The bottom line is, I talked to 20/20.”
Perfect, Christina thought. The perfect ending to a perfect day.
“I met with an executive producer,” Maggie said.
“Lucky you,” said Christina Marks. “How much did they offer?”
“Ten.”
“Ten thousand?”
“Right,” Maggie said. “Plus a month in Mexico after the program airs… you know, to let things cool off.”
“Y ou thought of this all by yourself, or did you get an agent?”
“A what?”
“An agent. Every eyewitness to a murder ought to have his own booking agent, don’t you think?”
Maggie sounded confused. “Ten seemed like a good number,” she said. “Could be better, of course.”
Christina Marks was dying to find out how much Maggie Gonzalez had told the producer at 20/20, but instead of asking she said: “Ten sounds like a winner, Maggie. Besides, I don’t think we’re interested in the story anymore.”