Sephia nodded, took the gun and aimed with both hands, then fired three times in three seconds. He pulled the trigger again, then noticed the slide all the way back, the chamber exposed. No more ammo.
But Rez pulled a fresh clip from his jacket pocket and handed it over. Sephia ejected the old one, dropped it onto the floor, and jammed the new one up in place. The slide slapped forward, the first round in the chamber. He took aim again. The standing deer had at last begun to run and Mikhail was chasing them toward a grove of trees.
Sephia took his shot. Squeezed again, but this second time, there was another empty click. Misfire. The first cartridge had jammed, bent now, halfway outside the chamber. Sephia swore again, but the sullen look had left his face. The two partners were ecstatic with the noise and the mayhem.
The rest of the deer reached the grove and Mikhail pulled up steeply, then whirled back around. Rez leaned out the open door and looked down, smiling.
In the pasture, six deer lay still in the brown grass.
Cuneo rang Mrs. Silverman's doorbell.
Out here in the western half of the city, the wind had come up. Intermittent high clouds scudded overhead, permitting only a milky sunshine through them. Suddenly, Cuneo realized, from a sunny morning of great promise at his home in Alameda, it had become a depressing late-autumn afternoon.
Mrs. Silverman looked worn out, as though she hadn't slept well. Still in mourning, she wore a black skirt and matching sweater, a demure string of pearls. After he'd gotten seated at the dining room table and declined her offer of something to drink, he placed his tape recorder between them, delivered the standard test and preamble with his name and badge number, the date, and the identification of the witness. Then he asked Mrs. Silverman to tell him why she had contacted the police. She got to the crux of it immediately, with no prompting by Cuneo.
When she'd finished, for a long moment he couldn't think of a question. He sat back in the dining room chair and crossed one leg over the other. Finally, "But the ring was at Holiday's place, ma'am. I found it myself."
"I'm not denying it was there. I'm saying it wasn't taken the same night my husband was shot. It couldn't have been."
"And what does that mean to you?"
She settled back in her chair, a blackened figure in a dim room. "I don't know exactly. I was thinking it meant that Mr. Holiday couldn't have taken it, after all."
"Why not?"
"Well…"
"Maybe he saw the rings while he was there the first time and went back another day."
"But I locked the place up after I left, the night I started to do the inventory. I don't know how he could have gotten in."
"Maybe he had a key. Wasn't he a regular at these poker games?"
"Yes, but Sam didn't give those men keys to our shop. Sam wasn't stupid, Inspector."
"No, ma'am. No one's implying anything like that. But maybe he found an extra key somewhere in the shop when he was there the first time. Or even in the red pouch itself?"
Cuneo's suggestions seemed to upset her. "I didn't think of that. But I'm not sure Sam had many extras. Certainly he wouldn't have left any of them lying around."
"It would only have taken one." Cuneo came forward, put his arms on the table. "Mrs. Silverman, we appreciate your coming forward with this. This is a very difficult time, I'm sure, and you want to do all you can to help. If nothing else, you've given us something else to look for at Holiday's place. If there's a key to your shop we've missed there, we'll go back and find it, I promise."
The little speech didn't seem to help much, but Cuneo got the feeling that nothing would. Mrs. Silverman sighed deeply. "I just wanted to make sure that the wrong man didn't suffer for what Sam's killer had done."
"I wouldn't worry about that. We've got the right man. The money proves that without any question, wouldn't you say?"
"I suppose."
Unambiguous as it was to Cuneo, somehow Mrs. Silverman seemed doubtful. "You don't seem too convinced."
"No, I… it's just that I had a thought that it might have been-what's the word?-planted there."
"Planted? By who?"
"Someone who could have gotten into the shop."
"Which brings us back to the key, doesn't it?" he asked gently.
"Yes, I suppose it does. But then I think Wade Panos and his people might still have one, really are more likely to have one than this man Holiday, don't you think? From when they patrolled for us?"
Cuneo, suddenly, was all attention and focus. On the drive out, he had tried to dredge up from his memory all he could recall of Mrs. Silverman. Her name had stuck with him, and not just because she was a victim's spouse. He finally had remembered the name from Gerson's story about Abe Glitsky. Now when he heard the name Panos again, the connection came back to him. Glitsky's earlier use of Mrs. Silverman as a wedge to get back into homicide. Glitsky helping out some lawyers in their lawsuit against Panos. Beyond that, John Holiday out beating the streets for witnesses and plaintiffs in that same lawsuit.
Holiday and Glitsky. And by extension the lawyer, too. Hardy, the guy Blanca had told them about yesterday. All of them, co-conspirators.
And now Glitsky hitting a new low, using this grieving old woman to float the idea that the ring had been "planted," a word she hardly knew. Cuneo smiled and kept his tone as pleasant as he could. "Mrs. Silverman," he said, "I wouldn't torture myself with all these dark imaginings, if I were you. Are you still talking to Lieutenant Glitsky about this case?"
"Just last night," she said. "His father, Nat, was Sam's best friend. I called him when I remembered about the ring. He told me to get in touch with you."
I'll bet he did, Cuneo thought. After he'd coached you about your testimony. But to her, he simply nodded. "Well, that was smart of him. But if you ask him, he'll tell you the same thing. We're so used to TV and movies nowadays, we sometimes feel there's always got to be some unlikely twist, like somebody planting evidence. In the real world, most things are just what they look like." He came forward in his chair, lowered his voice to a near whisper. "If it eases your mind at all, whenever and however he got the ring, John Holiday probably wasn't the one who shot your husband. But he was there, doing the robbery, getting his poker money back, when Clint Terry lost his head and panicked and shot Sam. All the evidence supports that, ma'am. That's what we've got."
Pumped up with adrenaline, Cuneo walked up the dark driveway to the refurbished garage that Liz rented just off Silver Avenue. Around at the side door, he saw candlelight flickering on the walls through the window. He knocked once, lightly, and a bulb came on over the door. "Who is it?"
"Liz. It's Dan Cuneo."
"Dan who?"
But then another light came on in the window and the door opened. She stood there smiling at him. Barefoot, she wore a green terry cloth bathrobe. Her hair wasn't yet completely dry and framed her pretty face in a black halo of curls. She had a glass of wine in her hand. He became aware of the thump of a jazzy bass line, caught a heady whiff of a musky perfume and, unmistakably, marijuana. "Did you get to arrest him?" she asked.
An hour later, Cuneo was as relaxed as he could ever remember feeling.
The bed was a mattress on the floor and he lay naked flat on his back upon it, one arm thrown back over his head, the other around the shoulders of his new lover. The music she'd had on when he got there had ended and now the apartment was silent. More incredibly to him, his own head was silent. Liz had pulled up the blanket and now lay pressed up against him, her left hand resting flat against his belly, her leg thrown over both of his. The candle cast the room in an amber glow.