“But Hunt’s going to be here to make his statement any minute.” Juhle was at his desk in the homicide detail, a wide-open room filled with desks on the fifth floor of the Hall of Justice. “We’re going to want to talk to him about that and find out what else he knows or knew about Neshek. I’d bet you he’s also going to know about those CityTalk numbers-”
But Russo cut him off. “I don’t even want to talk about Wyatt Hunt.”
“Sarah, come on. It was late. What were we going to accomplish by taking him downtown?”
“We were going to accomplish the mandate of our job. We were going to accomplish what we’re supposed to do to somebody who discovers a body in any kind of a compromising manner. How about that?”
Juhle shook his head. “He didn’t kill Nancy Neshek.”
“No? How do you know that? How do you know he didn’t contaminate the crime scene? How do you know what he did before you got there?”
“Look, Sarah, Hunt isn’t going anywhere. If his statement’s squirrelly in any way, we haul his ass back here and grill him till he’s well-done. But that’s not going to happen. He was up at her place because she’d called with a question about the reward and… well, we’ve been through all this.”
“Yes, we have. And for the record, it still fries my ass. I don’t care what time it was. We should have hauled Hunt down here. And if Marcel”-this was Marcel Lanier, head of homicide-“if Marcel gets wind of this and goes ballistic, I’m laying the whole goddamned thing off on you as my senior partner who made the final decision. And meanwhile, just so I’m not tempted to lock up Hunt on general principles if he shows up here when he’s supposed to, I’m going to stroll on out of here and take a look at the guts of that limo right now. You and your pal can play patty-cake in the interview room and I’ll catch the rerun on the tape later.”
Sighing, Juhle got up from his chair. “You were way more fun when you were younger, you know that?”
“Not really,” she said. “People just think I must have been.” And she turned on her heel.
When Hunt got to homicide to make his statement, Juhle was waiting for him. After wrestling with the decision, Hunt decided that his job was to pass relevant or potentially relevant evidence along to Devin and Sarah. So he included an account of Alicia Thorpe’s completely unverifiable and somewhat provocative alibi for Monday night.
Hunt finished with Juhle, then grabbed both his sport coat and a tan overcoat against the still-gusting and cold north wind that he could hear whipping up the street. When he got back into his office, he waited for Tamara to finish her call and hang up, and asked about her progress with his potential pool of part-timers.
“We’re in luck. And more than that, you might be happy to hear that the downturn in business over the last six months might not all have been fallout from Craig.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, my first call was to Willard White”-another local private investigator firm-“and Gloria said I could have her whole staff for a few days if we could put ’em to work. Beats her having to lay them off, she said.”
“Really? How many people she talking about?”
“Up to five.”
Clearly, the number surprised and pleased Hunt. After Mickey had gone out again this morning for his interviews, Wyatt had spent some time with Tamara going over the notes he’d taken yesterday on the work he’d acquired. He’d estimated that load at close to two hundred hours. Five stand-ins would bridge the gap nicely. And from what it sounded like, they and perhaps even their bosses might all be available to fill in on standby if he kept hustling future work. “Why don’t you see if you can get all five of them down here later today, and maybe even Gloria and Will themselves, say two or two-thirty, and call me on my cell and let me know?”
Tamara snapped him a salute. “Will do, mon capitaine. Oh, and we also did get one more reasonably intelligent-sounding reward call, finally, from Hang-up Lady, real name Linda Colores. She was walking home from work-she’s one of the floor people at the Pottery Barn on Chestnut-and she heard a man and a woman having an argument on one of the streets down by the Palace. She thinks this was last Tuesday night, but she’s not sure exactly.”
“Did she get anything they actually said?”
“I didn’t ask her that. I didn’t want to step on your toes. But I got her vitals if you want to go out and talk to her, although she works all afternoon starting at one. Or I could ask her to come in here in the next hour or so and I could talk to her.”
Hunt, standing in front of her desk, shook his head in admiration. “Has anybody recently told you how fantastic you are?”
Tamara blushed and looked down briefly, then back up. “Thank you. It’s good to be back working. I didn’t know if I could do it anymore. Or do anything, really.”
“I wasn’t worried about that. In fact, it never crossed my mind.” He came forward and put his palms down on the desk across from her. “You can do anything you put your mind to, Tam. You know that, don’t you?”
She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I used to. But then I kind of got convinced I was fooling myself.”
He was standing looking down at her, but she couldn’t seem to commit herself to raising her eyes. “Hey.”
When he reached across, touched her chin, and gently lifted it, she looked up and gave him a half-broken smile. “You know,” she said.
He shook his head. “You weren’t fooling yourself, Tamara. You were amazing. You are still amazing, okay?” Waiting, still touching her chin, he held her gaze on him. “Okay?”
And at last something gave way in her and she nodded. “Okay.”
He pulled his hand away from her chin and straightened up. “That’s settled, then. Once and for all.”
She saluted again. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Once and for all.”
“You want to talk to this Linda Colores?”
“I could.”
“Okay,” Hunt said. “Go for it.”
Nearly the size of a football field, the Green Room at the San Francisco War Memorial was on the second floor of the stately marble building next to the Opera House on Van Ness Avenue. Floors and pillars in the vast room were of marble. The ceiling was at least twenty feet high and the featured colors were gas chamber green trimmed with gold. The room was earthquake rated for 1,300 people, though it easily could hold many more than that. For Como’s memorial, city employees were on hand at both sets of doors to turn mourners away and prevent the room from getting overfilled.
Hunt got there early enough to get in without any problem and he looked around to see an oversized photograph of a smiling Dominic Como hung from the wall behind the podium. Hunt had already walked by one of the long tables piled high with brochures of the Sunset Youth Project, the Battalion Special Corps, and pledge cards for the reward fund. The large portable screen up against the front wall indicated that the service was also going to include a video or a slide show.
Hunt was beginning to wonder what he had hoped to accomplish by coming here today at all. Not only was this going to be a difficult, if not impossible venue in which to hold even the most cursory of interviews, he did not yet know many of the players by sight. The only people he had actually met in connection with Dominic Como were his wife, Ellen, and Len Turner.
Now Ellen was surrounded by a mob of well-wishers and fellow mourners-perhaps some of them family members, but also a large host of mostly African-American men, women, and teenagers who Hunt assumed were Como’s associates, fellow workers, and many of the beneficiaries of his charitable work over four decades.