I’m back down the hall. Lenore is still canvassing the living room, stepping carefully to avoid the evidence.
“I didn’t know she had a kid.”
“Little girl,” she says.
“Where is she?”
“Being baby-sat,” she says. “Grandparents.”
“How do you know?”
“Saw a note in the kitchen.”
She’s been nosing around while I’ve been down the hall.
“Fine. Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Back out the way we came,” she tells me. “Check to make sure we didn’t touch anything.”
As I start to go back suddenly I am without light. Lenore has gone the other way, toward the dining room and the kitchen beyond.
“Where are you going?”
“Meet you at the door,” she says.
Arguing with Lenore is fruitless. I figure anything that will get us to the front door and back to the car in a hurry is fine by me. I retrace my steps. This takes me all of three seconds. When I get to the kitchen I see Lenore, who has barely made it through the door at the opposite end. She is studying a large calendar hanging on the wall just inside the door, her back to me.
“Let’s go.” My voice jogs her from some reverie. In a moment such as this it is like Lenore to be checking the victim’s social calendar.
She does a delicate dance over the yogurt, avoiding the blitz of papers, and puts her hankied hand on the back of the chair that is blocking the way. She slides this gently out of the way and then repositions it as accurately as she can. With this, I’m to the door and out, Lenore right behind me. She closes it and we hoof it to the street and my car on the other side. Once inside, I waste no time putting two blocks behind us, before I utter a word.
“If any of the neighbors saw us I just hope to hell they have a good clock,” I tell her. Two people skulking about in the apartment of a murder victim while her body lies in an alley surrounded by the cops.
Then the question that is gnawing at my mind: “What the hell was that all about?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean going to her apartment like that?”
“Tony had a suspicion she might have been killed where she lived,” she says.
“Then Tony should have checked,” I tell her.
“They were searching records to see where she lived when he called me on the cellular. DMV showed an old address,” she says.
“How did you know where she lived?”
“It was in the file the day I interviewed her in the office.” Mind like a steel trap.
“And you didn’t tell them?”
“I don’t work for those people anymore.” As she says this she smiles, and we both laugh, just a little, a cathartic release.
She speculates a little about the manner of death, evidence of a struggle, whether Hall died as a result of a fall against the table or some other trauma.
“Why would anybody move the body?” I say.
“Who can say?”
If she was killed in her own apartment, and the evidence of death is left there, what purpose is served by moving her? It would seem that there is more risk involved than advantage.
“And why wasn’t the door locked?”
“Some people are trusting,” says Lenore.
“A woman living alone?”
She gives me a look that is filled with concession.
“I’ll do you one better,” she says.
“What’s that?”
“Why would she be meeting a man she was about to testify against in a criminal case?”
I give her a look, all question marks.
“On her calendar,” says Lenore, “there’s a note. She had a scheduled appointment, to meet Acosta at four o’clock this afternoon.”
CHAPTER 6
“Piece of cake,” he says.
This afternoon Tony Arguillo is pumped up with confidence, the kind that comes after the fact, when all bullets have been dodged, and the fates leave you feeling as if you are immortal.
Arguillo took his walk before the firing squad of the grand jury this morning, and to hear him tell it, all their guns jammed. For myself, I am in the dark. Lawyers are not permitted to accompany their clients behind the closed doors of the grand jury room.
I had demanded to know whether Tony was a subject of the probe and was told that at this stage, knowing what they know, he is not. What we have received is a form of qualified immunity. They cannot use Tony’s testimony to charge him. However, anything else from other witnesses is fair game.
Today Tony plants himself on the couch in my office, both feet up, hands coupled behind the back of his head. The posture of the relaxed victor.
He strikes me as one of those people who has striven at all cost through childhood to be cool, a little too hard at times. He has developed a bearing that now makes him come off more like a weasel than a wolf. In his own mind I am certain he sees himself lean and mean, bad in the way only good cops are, spitting cool invective in the face of eviclass="underline" Dirty Tony.
“No harm, no foul.” He actually grimaces when he says this.
“Our boy didn’t know which way to go, or what to ask,” he says. He’s talking about Coleman Kline, who questioned him.
“Like a walk through the park,” says Tony. “A slam dunk.” If there are any more canned descriptions of victory that quickly come to mind, Tony would come up with them. This from a man who raised pimples of sweat like acne for more than a month, through three continuances, courtesy of Acosta’s fall from grace.
He tells me that he does not have a high opinion of Coleman Kline’s abilities before a jury. I will wait for another, more objective assessment.
“All thumbs. Like a bull in a china shop.” These are the mixed metaphors he uses to describe the man.
“That’s fine, so long as you told the truth,” I tell him.
The prisons of this country are littered with the bodies of men, mostly good-time Charlies, people for whom any serious crime was the farthest thought. They now do the brickyard walk for a stretch of years because they obstructed justice or committed perjury for a friend. I wonder how far Tony would go to protect Lano and his flock.
“He never got beyond the basics, never mentioned the books,” he tells me. He’s talking about Kline and the union’s books of record, which have now mysteriously disappeared. Poof! Magic. Gus Lano’s answer to everything.
“They can’t get your ass if they don’t ask the right questions,” he tells me.
The fact that in this statement is something of an admission, that his posterior might in fact be gotten with the right questions, does not seem to bother my client. He starts to tell me more about this triumph, but I cut him off. I want facts, the particulars that they asked him, as I wait at my desk with pen perched over pad.
“We can wait to declare victory until after the transcript comes,” I tell him. “If we’re lucky it never will.”
This may take weeks or months. Grand jury transcripts are usually sealed, kept from the public and witnesses until charges are brought. If we are lucky they will bury the matter, decide that there is insufficient evidence to indict any parties and no transcript will be produced.
“Sure,” he says. I have rained on his parade and Tony’s enthusiasm suddenly goes dormant. He starts giving me bits and pieces of information. “There were a lot of irrelevant questions,” he says.
I press him again on whether he told the truth.
“You worry too much,” he says. My pursuit on this issue seems to offend him. I cannot tell whether this is because I am questioning his honor, or that he merely finds the truth a nettlesome inconvenience.
“Scout’s honor.” He raises two fingers in a somewhat twisted gesture, which makes me wonder if they were crossed when he was in the box.
It has been nearly a week since that grisly discovery of Hall’s body, and there has been little from the authorities as to leads. Lenore and I combed the papers, every set piece of type for days, fearful that they might have sniffed out our scent at the apartment that night, a neighbor walking a dog, some insomniac taking a leak only to capture our visage through a crack in a bathroom window. But it is true what they say; God protects the dim-witted. Our foolish escapade seems to have gone unnoticed.