“Craig was never a suspect.”
“No. That’s true. We both know what Craig was, though, don’t we? An actual murderer, too smart to get himself suspected. And he had everybody fooled. Even me.”
Tamara flared. “Even you? I like to think that if there’s an even there in that equation, it’s even me.”
“All right. I’ll give you that. But that’s not the point either. The point is Mickey and whether he’s being blinded to the truth about somebody he obviously cares about. And if he is, what I’m going to do about it.”
“And are you sure you know that truth?”
“No. Not ultimately. But I do know some truths, or probable truths, and I just learned what might be another couple of ’em. You want to hear them?”
Still pushed back away from her desk, Tamara, her mouth a grim line, folded her arms. “Go ahead.”
“All right. Let’s start with her relationship with Como. She admits they were close. In fact, real close. Mrs. Como says it was more than that-Dominic was in love with her. He admitted it. And even if he didn’t, they got themselves caught doing it in the office.”
“No, they didn’t.”
“Mrs. Como says they did. Lorraine Hess says they did. We call this corroboration. Besides which, I don’t think a guy like Dominic Como gets in love with somebody if something physical isn’t going on. You buy that?”
“I’m listening.”
“All right. We know we’ve got a tire iron, probably from the limo, as the murder weapon. We know Alicia could have gotten to that anytime she wanted. Next, we find out from your witness just today-Hang-up Lady-that two people, a man and a woman, are having a violent fight at about the same time and in the same place where Dominic got hit. Good? Good. So then this morning an hour ago I’m talking to Al Carter and I’m not even asking him any questions about Ms. Thorpe and he volunteers information that exactly corroborates Mrs. Como’s story that Dominic fired her on that Tuesday, the day he got killed. We didn’t know that this morning when we all were talking. We just had Ellen’s word for it. But now with Carter’s-”
“What did she say? Alicia. When Juhle talked to her.”
“What do you think? She denied it.”
“And you think that was a lie?”
“I think that Al Carter and Ellen Como both didn’t independently make up the same story, let’s put it that way. They’re not exactly bosom pals, you know? There’s no indication that they’ve ever even talked to each other.”
Tamara merely shrugged. “What else?”
“Well, since you ask, Devin’s latest, from underneath the limo’s backseat, there’s the whole semen-on-her-scarf thing. And it is her scarf.” Hunt straightened his back, eased himself off the desk and over to the window, letting the gravity of this last revelation work its way into Tamara’s worldview. At the window, he turned around. “I’m not making that last part up, Tam. It’s her scarf. She admitted it. It was stuffed into the limo’s backseat.”
Tamara uncrossed her arms. Her hands went to her belly, which she squeezed a couple of times.
“I don’t mean for this to give you a stomachache, Tam. But I don’t want you and Mick thinking you’ve got to stick up for her because you’ve all become friendly since this investigation started. And also, let’s remember last Monday night. She’s sleeping in her car a quarter mile from Nancy Neshek’s.” He came back over to the desk. “I’m not saying she did it. Not yet. Although Dev and Sarah are getting pretty close to thinking so. But I am saying we’d be foolish-any of us-to just ignore these facts.”
Now Tamara’s hands had settled onto her lap. Her eyes stared before her without focus. “Does Mickey know all this?”
Hunt shook his head. “Not what I’ve found in the past hour or so. Carter and Devin’s information. I tried to call him but his phone’s off. He’s probably still down at Sanctuary House. I left him a message, but just to call. I thought I’d tell him like I’ve told you, in person. See how he takes it.”
Tamara blew out heavily. “So what about all the money stuff? Didn’t you talk to all those people at the memorial too? Do they all have alibis for Monday?”
The clenched muscles in Hunt’s face started to relax. He just barely allowed the corners of his mouth to turn up. “Well, that’s the other reason I’m not a hundred percent with Devin and Sarah about Ms. Thorpe yet. I haven’t eliminated too many other people either. But I’ll tell you one thing-this Len Turner’s a piece of work.”
“Did you talk to him again?”
“Oh, yes. Definitely.”
“Did you ask him about Monday night?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
“Well?”
“Well, I asked and he didn’t answer. Not him and not nobody else neither.”
“Why not?”
“Because he clean cut me off.”
“And how about Ellen?”
“How about her?”
“Wyatt? Monday night?”
Hunt met her eyes, shook his head in disappointment. “No.”
“No what?”
“No. Never talked to her. Never even thought of it.”
Tamara pulled herself back up close to her desk. “Do you want me to call her and make an appointment? Maybe if that’s the only thing you’re supposed to do, you’ll remember.”
“Maybe,” Hunt said. “But I don’t know if I’d bet on it.”
Len Turner sat in a leather chair in his other spacious office, the one that housed his law practice on California Street. He was smoking a Cuban cigar and drinking Hennessey VSOP cognac from a cut crystal glass.
Turner didn’t like the storm of bad publicity about the COO money, but he’d weathered worse. The plain fact of the matter, as he would explain to Jeff Elliot as soon as he could arrange an interview with the columnist, was that sometimes you didn’t see tangible results for specific projects because there was just never enough money, period. And as in every other business, you had to advertise, market, put on shows to educate and generate enthusiasm for the cause, hire consultants and public relations experts, pay decent salaries to your executives so that you’d get quality people. This wasn’t just the nonprofit world; it was the big wide world.
The biggest problem with the CityTalk column was that it conveyed the impression that because the COO program’s specific objectives hadn’t been met, Turner had mismanaged these funds. And this, in his honest opinion, was not the case. The simple fact was that the $4.7 million in private foundation money-really a pittance-that supported the COO over the past couple of years needed to be about double that, or maybe triple, if it was going to address the real needs of real people who lived in the impoverished areas of the city.
This was because nothing got done for free in San Francisco. It was a pay-to-play environment, and had been for all of Turner’s lengthy career.
If you wanted to renovate a dump of a house in the Mission and turn it into a marketable or even usable property, first you had to buy it from the slum landlord who hadn’t put in an improvement, including paint, since 1962. That landlord, of course, got a substantial write-off for the monetary loss entailed in “donating” his property to your charity. Then you needed your plans, and then your redone plans, approved by the Housing Department for a sizable fee each time through. Often, if not always, you’d need a zoning variance by the Board of Supervisors, which tended to be exquisitely sensitive to even the most remote and spurious objection to the project, brought to them by one concerned constituent or another.
A residential unit for drug rehabilitation, for example, because it was used in conjunction with the courts, was considered a public building and as such was subject to the strict enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, so you often needed internal elevators, wheelchair access, and restricted handicapped parking spaces. All buildings in San Francisco, of course, now had to be retrofitted for earthquakes. Asbestos had to be removed.