When we’d sat, he said, “Who killed my wife?”
Milo said, “You know about it.”
“A police detective supposedly calls me from L.A.? I check him out.”
“Supposedly.”
“I get all sorts of bogus calls. Obviously, yours wasn’t. I learned you handle homicides. Add to that Meagin not answering my calls and it wasn’t hard to figure out.”
“Ah,” said Milo. “Sorry about your loss.”
“Thanks,” said March. “Though I’m sure you say that to everyone. So what happened?”
“Your wife was shot to death either late Saturday night or early Sunday morning.”
“Where?”
“At a man’s house. He was killed, as well.”
Doug March blinked. Swept hair away from the hidden eye and looked at the faux fire. “A man. May I ask who?”
“His name was Giovanni Aggiunta.”
March shook his head. “Means nothing to me.” Studying the flames had swept his eyes past me. Now they swept back and focused on Milo. Someone used to dealing with bosses, no time for underlings.
Which was fine. More opportunity for me to study him.
His eyes were dry, his narrow, pale face, inert. The only trace of anxiety, rapid clenching and unclenching of pale, delicate hands.
“A man,” he said. “Were the circumstances what I assume they were?”
“What do you assume, sir?”
“A liaison,” said Doug March. “Where does this guy live?”
“Not far from here,” said Milo. “Maybe a mile and a half north.”
“Bel Air.”
“Yes, sir.”
“A mile and a half. Well within Meagin’s running ability. She’d started running at night. I didn’t suspect anything but looks like I should have. Why change her routine all of a sudden? Why run at night when she had all day to do it?”
“When did the routine change, sir?” said Milo.
Doug March said, “You don’t need to call me sir. No one in my company does that, it’s stuffy.”
“What would you prefer?”
“You don’t need to call me anything. I’m sure some people need that kind of thing — shallow acclaim. I don’t.”
March’s pouty lips twisted in what might’ve been intended as a smile. “Alternatively,” he said, “we could go with Your Majesty.”
He waved a hand awkwardly. “Sorry, that was snotty, don’t mean to be a jerk. This is horrible for me, I’m just working at keeping afloat.”
Or taking charge of the situation? Meanwhile, Milo’s question had gone unanswered.
He repeated it.
March said, “When did she change? I really can’t be sure because I’m gone so often.”
The fingers of March’s right hand began tapping those of the left. “The earliest I’m aware of would be... I guess around two months ago. Pretty close to that. I’d been in Texas looking at properties, came back at night and found her gone. The ladies said she went running. When she showed up, she was in her running outfit and pretty sweaty.”
He sat up hard, blinked hard and frowned before sinking back into the embrace of the chair.
Sudden insight into the real source of his wife’s perspiration?
Milo said, “Two months ago.”
“Approximately. If you wait, I can fetch my phone and look up my schedule — no, I don’t really need to do that, I can figure it out, let me think... after Austin came Tulsa... then Nashville... then Memphis, I settled on Memphis and that was... nine weeks ago. That’s as close as I can get without checking.”
I said, “After that Meagin continued to run at night.”
March kept his eyes on Milo. “I never questioned her about it, just told her to watch for cars. There didn’t seem to be a reason to question her. In retrospect this probably sounds crazily naive but I trusted Meagin. We’ve been married for a year and a half and there’d never been a rough spot.”
Sad smile. “She always seemed happy to see me. That time, too. Sweaty but happy.”
His lips trembled and turned inward. The hyperactive hands had stilled. As if his body could handle just so much reaction.
“This is so... I can’t find an adjective. We had breakfast three days ago and now — the gone-ness of it all. It’s... and now I find out she was betraying me? How old was this Italian?”
Milo’s brows arched. “Twenty-nine.”
“That’s crazy,” said Doug March.
Milo said, “How so?”
“Exactly my age. In the past, she’d always gone for older men. When we met she joked about cradle-robbing. Joked about having me dye my hair gray. Told me I was tolerable because I had an old soul.”
He blinked. “Did this Italian have an old soul?”
“No idea, Doug.”
“Older men,” said March. “Or so she claimed.”
“You doubt it?”
“I doubt everything, now.”
He sprang up and hurried out of the room. Hooked right at the base of the staircase. Seeking a restroom? Taking the route that had led Adelita to the kitchen? Or continuing into the bowels of a massive service wing?
A house big enough to disappear in. But March returned at a near-trot moments later, carrying his phone in one hand, an open bottle of beer in the other.
Bud Light. Discount airline. Man of the people? Or striving to pretend?
Back in the chair, he downed half the bottle. “I need at least this level of alcohol to smooth out the edges. When you leave, I’m going to continue until I’m drowsy enough to sleep, but right now I want to be coherent.”
He lofted the phone. “Checked my travel schedule and I was pretty close. Sixty-one days ago is when I returned and found out she’d taken a night run. But I can’t tell you she never did it before. As I said, I’m gone so often.”
“Looking at properties.”
“You know about that.”
Milo smiled. “Checking goes two ways.”
Doug March thought about that. “Okay, I’ll buy that. Yes, that’s what I do. Size up opportunities and exploit the best ones. Large, well-run residential projects in areas primed for growth. I put my own money in for part of the purchase, finance the rest by taking on limited partners. I also handle management and charge for that. Ideally, I hold on to the properties no longer than three years and, having improved them, sell at a profit.”
Long speech in his native language. It calmed him.
Milo said, “How often are you gone?”
“Once again,” said March, “I’d have to check but my best guess would be two hundred and forty-four days out of the year. That’s two-thirds of three sixty-five.”
“Did Meagin ever travel with you?”
“I made several trips to Florida. Meagin wanted to go so she came along on... two of them. She brought her bikini and enjoyed the sun. One time she came to Austin when I examined possibilities on Lake Travis. That’s it.”
“The two of you were apart quite a bit.”
Doug March’s eyes slitted. “Are you saying I should have expected her to cheat?”
“No, sir—”
“Meagin never indicated she felt neglected. Just the opposite, between her exercise and her art and her friends, she kept busy. So why would I have expected anything?”
“No reason,” said Milo.
“You’re saying absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder?” said Doug March.
“Sorry if this seems intrusive but we’re just trying to collect info—”
“Obviously you’re right. About our absences. But how was I to know? Every time I came home she was happy to see me. Made that clear.”
Pink blotches rose on March’s waxy skin. “Our physical life was excellent. I don’t understand any of this.”
We said nothing.
“She was happy to see me every single time,” he said. “Sixty-one days ago, as well. The only difference was she wasn’t there to greet me.”