Matt Creed had finished his regular beat shift after the preliminary interview he'd had with the inspectors at Silverman's, and now he appeared again in the doorway, this time carrying a cardboard tray of paper coffee cups he'd picked up at an all-night place on Market. He paused at the sight of his boss. "Mr. Panos," he said. "Is everything all right?"
"I'd say not."
"No. I know. That's not how I meant it."
"That's all right, Creed. That coffee up for grabs?"
Creed looked down at his hands. "Yes, sir."
A couple of minutes later, the last of the crime scene people were just gone and Panos, Creed and Russell had gathered at the door to the office, in which Cuneo was now rummaging through the drawers in Silverman's desk, bagging in Ziploc as possible evidence whatever struck his fancy. He had stopped humming, though now at regular intervals he slurped his hot coffee through the hole in the top of the plastic lid, loud and annoying as a kid's last sip of milkshake through a straw.
Suddenly he looked up, the sight of other humans a mild shock. But he recovered, slurped, spoke to Panos. "You said he wasn't your client anymore?"
"No. But he'd been for a long time." Panos boosted himself onto Silverman's desk and blew at his own brew. "I had to raise my rates last summer and he couldn't hack them anymore. But ask Mr. Creed here, we still kept a lookout."
Creed nodded. "Every pass."
Cuneo moved and his folding chair creaked. "Every pass what?"
"Every pass I'd shine a light in."
"No charge," Panos put in. "Just watching out."
"But he-Silverman-wasn't paying you anymore?"
"Right."
"So then"-Cuneo came forward, his elbows on his knees-"why are you here again?"
The question perplexed and perhaps annoyed Panos. He threw his black eyes over and up to Lincoln Russell, who stood with his arms crossed against the doorsill. But Russell just shrugged.
"The incident occurred on Mr. Creed's shift, so he was obviously involved, and he was one of my men. Plus, as I say, I knew Sam, the deceased."
"But this place isn't technically in your beat? Thirty-two, isn't it?" Cuneo sucked again at his coffee.
Panos straightened up his torso and crossed his arms. "Yeah, it's Thirty-two. So what?"
Cuneo sat back in his chair. "So since the deceased is your friend and ex-client, you might know something more about this shop than your average joe off the street, isn't that right? And if you do, what do you think might have happened here?"
Panos grunted. "Let me ask you one. Did either of you or any of the crime scene people find a red leather pouch here? Maybe on Sam?"
"What leather pouch?"
Panos held his hands about eight inches apart. "About this big. Real old, maroon maybe more than red."
Cuneo glanced up and over at Russell, who shook his head. Cuneo spoke. "No pouch. What about it?"
"No pouch makes it open and shut. What this was about, I mean."
Russell spoke from the doorsill. "And what is that?"
"We're listening," Cuneo said.
Panos shifted his weight on the desk. "All right," he said. "First you should know that Thursdays was when Sam took his deposit to the bank."
"Every Thursday?" Russell asked.
Panos nodded. "Clockwork. Everybody who knew him knew that. I used to walk with him myself over to the B of A. He put the cash in this pouch. It's not here now."
"So," Cuneo butted in, "he was going to the bank tonight, and somebody who knew him decided to take the pouch?"
"Three guys," Creed corrected. "One of 'em pretty big."
"Okay, three." Cuneo hummed a long, unwavering note. "Must have been a lot of money, they were going to split it three ways."
"Might have been," Panos said. "I wouldn't know."
Cuneo indicated the surroundings. "This little place did that well?"
Panos shrugged. "Wednesday nights they played poker here."
The two inspectors shared a glance. "Who did?" Russell asked.
"Bunch of guys. It was a regular game for a lot of years. Sam took out ten bucks a hand for himself, except when he played blackjack, when he was the house."
Russell whistled softly. "Every hand?"
Panos nodded. "That was the ante. Per guy. Per hand. Ten bucks."
A silence settled while they did the math. Cuneo hummed another long note. "Big game," he said, pointing. "That's the table then."
"Right."
"We're going to need the players," Russell said. "Did he keep a list?"
"I doubt it," Panos replied. "Knowing Sam, he kept them in his head. But I might be able to find out, and you can take it from there."
"We'd appreciate that." Cuneo was making some notes on his pocket pad. "So they came in masked…"
"They weren't masked," Creed said. "Not when they came out."
"They were when they came in," Cuneo said. "Because Silverman knew them. They knew him and the setup here." He pointed to the hidden video up above. "They knew about that, for example."
Panos stopped him. "How do you know about the masks?"
Cuneo reached into his pocket and pulled out a gallon Ziploc bag into which he'd placed the one ski mask that had fallen to the floor.
"Sons of bitches," Panos said.
"Who? "Cuneo asked.
Panos's jaw was tight, his heavy brow drawn in. "It'd be a better guess once we know who was at the game."
"All right," Cuneo said, "but this is a homicide investigation. What you'll do is give us a list of players at the game and we'll work from that."
Panos nodded. "All right, but I'd appreciate it if you'd keep me in the loop. Whoever killed Sam, any way I can help you, count me in."
3
For several years after the death of his first wife Flo, Glitsky had a live-in housekeeper-a woman born in Jalisco, Mexico, with the German name of Rita Schultz. She had slept in the living room of his duplex behind a shoji screen and had come, in her own way, to be almost one of the family. After the marriage, when Treya and her then sixteen-year-old daughter Raney had come to live with Glitsky and his sixteen-year-old son Orel, Rita wasn't needed anymore and Glitsky, regretfully, had had to let her go.
Now and for the past eight months since Treya had gone back to work at the DA's office, Rita, no longer living in, was again at the Glitskys' five days a week, taking care of the baby. Two months ago, the big kids had both gone off to college-Orel to his dad's alma mater of San Jose State, and Raney all the way across the country to Johns Hopkins, where she'd gotten a full academic scholarship and planned to major in pre-med. The baby Rachel moved out of Abe and Treya's bedroom and into Raney's old room behind the kitchen.
Over the summer, he and Treya had actually fixed up the place a bit. They tore out the old, battle-worn gray berber wall-to-wall carpet in the living room and discovered the original blond hardwood underneath. Over one weekend, they stripped the seventies wallpaper and repainted the walls a soft Tuscan yellow. Then with the fresh new look, they got motivated to go out and buy a modern brown leather couch and matching love seat, some colorful throw rugs, Mission-style coffee and end tables. They put plantation shutters over the front windows.
It wasn't a large place by any means, and Glitsky had lived in it for more than twenty years, but with all the recent changes, he would sometimes come out into the new living room holding Rachel in the dimly lit predawn and wonder where he was. He knew it wasn't just the room. In reality, everything seemed different. The whole world since the terrorist attacks, the new reality perhaps more psychic than physical, but all the more real for that. All his boys now moved out, his old job gone, a new marriage with a young woman, and for the past fourteen months, their baby girl.