He nodded.
“Because before Nika… Well, you know my mom died when I was ten-that’s ten years ago, can you believe it?-and Daddy and I were always, after that, like best friends. I mean, I came to work here when he was building up the business and we did everything together, and it was like we were a team. And it wasn’t like he didn’t have girlfriends. That was cool. I mean, I wasn’t, we weren’t weird, you know. But Nika was different.”
He leaned forward. “Different how?”
“Just so, I don’t know, overpowering. And I don’t get it. Have you ever seen her or my dad?”
“I guess they were at the funeral but I didn’t know who they were.”
“Well, come look at this.”
She led the way back into her father’s office, with its big desk. And there was the picture, bigger than it needed to be in its silver frame. “Here, there’s my dad with Nika. I don’t think she’s that pretty.”
For as long as she could stand it, she glared at her new stepmother, probably only five years older than she was, though of course Nika would never say. It was, she admitted, a good picture but not a good likeness. It made her look more beautiful. And she wasn’t beautiful, not in real life.
She could tell the man only saw the outside, couldn’t tell from the picture how ugly she was underneath. He said: “I wouldn’t call her pretty at all.”
He was standing very close, right beside her. He smelled like a clean man-some hints of after-shave, maybe a pipe. But no sweat or gasoline like most of the guys she saw.
“They don’t really belong together,” she said. She realized she was still without shoes. Turning, facing the man, she raised her chin for a minute, then hitched herself onto her father’s desk. “What’s your name again?”
“Dismas. Diz for short.”
“I’m a little diz for dizzy,” she said, giggling.
“Probably better to be sitting down, then.” Unexpectedly, he reached out and touched her face, a light touch that tingled all over her. “Are you all right? Would you like some water?”
Without waiting for an answer he was gone, back quickly with her coffee cup filled with water from the fountain. It was like he knew his way around already.
She was ready for him to put his arms around her and do anything he liked at all, but instead he went to the couch and sat on the end of it. She sipped at the cup.
“So when Nika and your dad got married, things changed?”
She looked down. “He was like a different person. Just didn’t have time for me or anybody, or even the business, anymore. All he wanted to do was spend time”-a shot at Nika’s face-“with her.”
“And you think that’s been the problem with the business? I thought Ed was trying to get it back on track?”
“Oh, Eddie. Eddie was great. I didn’t mean to say he wasn’t good. At the job, I mean. Fair, and, you know, a really nice guy. No hassles, you know?” She sipped again at the water. “I can’t believe what they say, that he killed himself.”
Hardy let that go for now. “But there have been problems with the business, and they happened when Ed was managing, right?”
“Well, yes but no. It would’ve happened with anybody. It was all stuff about La Hora and El Dia.”
“You said that before. What does that mean?”
“You know El Dia, don’t you?”
He shook his head.
“Well, it’s another paper, you know, like La Hora, that wanted us to distribute it. La Hora was our biggest client but then they dropped us, took it all back in-house.” She looked around her father’s office. “And by then it was too late to get El Dia. They’d set themselves up with other distributors. Old Cruz really screwed us.” She shook her head, swinging her legs in frustration.
“Is that why it’s so deserted around here?”
Now was her chance. “That, just the slow business, and Ed’s funeral being today. There’s nobody here at all except us. Nobody’s been in at all.” Flirty eye move, shrug the breasts out. “And it’s late. I don’t expect anybody to come the rest of the day. I could even lock up now and it wouldn’t matter.”
He stood up, and she slid off the desk with a little bounce. “Well, you’ve been very helpful, Linda. Thanks.”
Another handshake. Again cool, dry, firm. She held it an extra couple of seconds, looked into his gray eyes. “We could get a drink maybe. There’s a lot we can talk about. Or just stay here,” she repeated.
A little peck on the cheek. “Thanks. I’d like that,” he said, “but I’m working now and I’ve got another appointment. Maybe a rain check, okay?”
“Sure, that’s cool.”
Out now to her desk. “Wait just a second,” she said.
She jotted her name and number on her notepad and tore off the sheet. “In case you remember something you wanted to ask.”
Then he was gone. She watched him walk across the empty lot through waves of late-afternoon heat. When he got in his car he turned back to look at the door and she waved a hand at him, but he probably couldn’t see her through the reflection.
Anyway, he didn’t wave back.
She turned the knob, locking the door, padded back to her desk and, sitting down, reached into her purse for the pack of Virginia Slims.
Linda was right, Hardy was thinking. I wouldn’t call Nika pretty. It would be like calling the Grand Canyon pretty, or Michelangelo’s David. Of course, he remembered her from the funeral, the way she kept staring at him. At least now he had a name to go with it-Nika Polk.
Where had she come from, he wondered, and what was it about sad-looking, basset-eared Sam Polk that had snagged her?
He closed his eyes, trying to visualize her again. She was tall, taller than her husband, perhaps five-eight, jet black hair over a classically hard Mediterranean face. A stunning face. Half-parted lips that she kept licking.
The only reason Hardy had caught Frannie when she’d started to faint was that Nika had been standing just behind her, and he had kept tearing his eyes away, forcing himself to look elsewhere. Frannie had been in his line of vision. It had been luck.
She had worn a simple woolen black cotton suit, severely cut, that nevertheless hadn’t diminished the thrust of her breasts above a waist Hardy thought he could encircle with both hands.
He shook his head. No, Linda, he thought, Nika ain’t that pretty at all.
He started the engine up. He wanted to go back and talk to Cruz, and besides, it would be cooler moving.
So Sam Polk had married Nika about six months ago. He looked to be around fifty-five. She was mid-twenties, maybe a little more. Got to be money, Hardy thought, at least to some extent. And after they’d gotten married, Polk had started having troubles with his business. It wasn’t that far a leap to assume that those troubles had led to problems at home.
But what was he thinking? There had been no hint of any trouble between Sam and Nika. What had made him think that?
And then he remembered her eyes fixing on him at the cemetery. He’d seen eyes like that before-the flirting hadn’t been playful, it was dead serious. The eyes of Nika Polk weren’t those of a happily married woman.
Had she ever looked at Eddie Cochran that way?
Chapter Eleven
JOHN STROUT made his personal policy very clear in the first month of his tenure as San Francisco ’s coroner. The responsibility of that position, according to U.S. Government Code 27491, is to determine the “cause, circumstances and manner of death” of individuals dying within a particular jurisdiction. And under “manner of death,” there are only four possibilities: natural causes, accident, suicide, or death at the hands of another.
In the course of doing that job, however, other elements, many of them political, have an opportunity to come into play. Strout, a tall, soft-spoken gentleman originally from Atlanta, wasn’t about to let anybody or anything affect his judgment on causes of death, and so he decided early on to send a message to those who would prefer a quick and sloppy verd
ict over a slow and correct one.
The victim in the case had been the cousin of the mayor and- not the greatest coincidence in the world, given the size of the city-brother-in-law to one of the supervisors. Strout came in to work that morning and found the morgue overrun with media people as well as with members of both the mayor’s and supervisor’s staffs.
Strout glanced at the body before going to his office, where he was hounded to issue some statement. He figured it was as good a time as any to get the word out.
A reporter for the Chronicle finally asked him point-blank, and rather insultingly, if he planned to make any decision at all in the foreseeable future. Strout had stood up to his full height behind his desk. “Seeing as this victim was stabbed twice and shot five times”-he said in his most syrupy drawl-“I’m very close, and you can print this, very close…”-he paused and smiled at the assemblage-“very close indeed to rulin’ out suicide.”
Strout wasn’t about to hurry and be wrong. After eleven years as coroner, it was gospel that once Strout gave a verdict, you could take it to the bank.
Now Carl Griffin and Vince Giometti sat in the air-conditioned visitors’ room at the San Francisco morgue. It was not a decorator’s paradise. The long yellow couch was too low, the commercial prints on the walls were ugly and hung too high. The only living plant by the one window to the right of the couch was no greener or prettier than the three plastic floral arrangements that graced, respectively, the center table (too short for the couch), the blue plastic end table, and the pitted mahogany sideboard.
Griffin and Giometti sat on either end of the couch. Between them, in an almost-new cardboard briefcase, was the file on the Cochran case. Giometti, a new father, had just finished saying something that made Griffin explode.
“Do I gotta hear this right after lunch? You think this is interesting? You believe anybody cares what your baby’s bowel movements look like, whether it’s hard or soft or runny or whether the goddamn corn gets digested on its way through?” Griffin jumped up, unable to sit still. “Christ!”
“If you had a kid, you’d know how important it was.”
“Why do you think I never had a kid? You think that was just dumb luck? You may not believe this, but I thought about it at one time, and you know what decided it for me?” He went down on one knee in front of his rookie partner. “I asked myself this question: I said, ‘Think about the reality of babyhood, and what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?’ ”
Giometti started to answer, but Griffin put up a hand.
“No, let me finish. The first thing that came to my mind was shit. Rivers of it every day for like a couple of years. Then I asked myself another question: Is there anything I like about shit? I mean, its smell, texture, various colors? Do I look at it the way Eskimos look at snow, with nuances and a hundred different names? No, shit is shit. And I am not interested in any of it- your kid’s, my own, any of it, okay?” He stood up. “So from today on can we do without the daily bm moment, please?”
He turned away and walked over to the window, breathing hard. He rubbed a leaf of the plant between thumb and forefinger.
“It’s a natural function, Carl,” Giometti said. “You shouldn’t be so uptight about it.”
Griffin thought he’d leave a thumbprint on the leaf, he squeezed it so hard.
He heard the door open. Strout was shaking Vince’s hand, coming over to him. It wasn’t exactly how he’d wanted it. He would have preferred to be calm and dispassionate, and now, if he knew Strout at all and he did, his mood might affect Strout’s decision. Well, if he played it right, maybe it could work to his advantage.
“So, boys,” Strout said after he’d sat in a straight-back chair he’d pulled up to the too-short table, “what have you got here?”
Giometti opened the briefcase and took out the file. Griffin thought it would be wiser, also good experience for the kid, to let his partner talk until he’d calmed down, and he loitered again over by the window, hands in pockets.
“Well, sir, the deceased was having troubles at work. In fact, the job was about to come to an end.”
“Any medical corroboration of depression?”
“No, sir, not formal.”
“Informal?”
“The family, not his wife, but his family family.”
Griffin saw Strout’s face stretch slowly. “You mean the one he grew up with? We call that the nuclear family, officer.”
It went right by Giometti. “Yeah, well,” he said, “the nuclear family said he’d been on edge the last couple of weeks.”
Strout turned to Griffin. “Serious?”
“Couple of arguments with his father. Like that.”
“Did they say over what?”
Giometti took it again. “Something, he thought, about his work.”
Griffin: “We checked it out. The place is going bust. He was the manager.”
Strout was inclined to be skeptical. “He cared enough about it to kill himself?”
Griffin finally sat down. “It’s possible, sir. Guy was an over-achiever his whole life, was planning on going to business school down at Stanford this fall. Could’ve ruined his image of himself, running a company going down the tubes.”
Strout nodded, silent. “All right,” he said, “marital?”
“Okay, even good,” Giometti said.
Griffin added, “The wife spent the night of his death talking to his mother. Two-hour conversation. Phone records verify it.”
“Worried about him?”
“This and that, but generally that’s my conclusion,” Griffin said.
“Any mental history at all?”
Giometti shook his head. Griffin said, “How ’bout you, sir? You find something?”
Strout leaned forward, putting his weight on his elbows, his elbows on his knees. Griffin noticed that the man’s eyebrows were so bushy they tangled in his lashes when he opened his eyes wide.
“I find a healthy young man,” Strout began, “with a good marriage. Good family. No history of mental illness. He’s got powder burns on his left hand and a hole in the half of his head that’s left.”
Giometti spoke up. “Oh, the gun was fired twice, you know.”
“The gun was fired twice. So what? Only one slug went in.” Strout’s lashes kissed his brows, looking at Griffin.
“Happens a lot,” Griffin said. “And while we’re at it, the gun was unregistered.”
Strout nodded. “Of course.”
Giometti butted in. “While we’re at things, nobody seems to want to talk about the note.”
“The fuckin’ note…” Griffin said.
“It was a note,” Giometti insisted.
“It was a piece of crumpled paper,” Griffin answered, not wanting to get drawn into anything in front of Strout.
But it was too late. “Are you telling me we have a suicide note, officer?” Strout rolled his eyes up, up, out of his head. “Are we wasting our time here?”
“It’s not exactly the Rosetta Stone of suicide notes,” Griffin said.
“It’s a note next to a body lying by a gun, though…”
“Not even that.” Griffin told him about finding it in the car, what it said, or, more particularly, didn’t say.
Strout chewed on it a moment, then nodded, deciding, going on to something else. “Might he have been gay?”
That was always a question in the city, Griffin knew. “No sign of it,” he said, glad to put the note behind them.
“No, there wasn’t,” Strout agreed. “Anyway, that’s what I find. Let’s be frank, gentlemen. Have you found anything points to a homicide here?”
Griffin and Giometti exchanged glances. “What we found,” Giometti said, “doesn’t point either way. We got a dead kid alone in a shitty place at night. A couple of random weirdnesses, like two shots,” he glanced at his partner, “maybe, maybe a note. Maybe he just got depressed, I don’t know. Maybe we need more time.”
“Everybody needs more time,”
Strout said.
“On the other hand,” Griffin said, “it wasn’t a random parking lot-Cochran did deliver there. People knew who he was, but we’ve checked into that and there’s nothing evident.”
Strout cracked his knuckles. “But we do have a note, don’t we?” He sighed. “In the absence of any hard evidence to the contrary, I’m inclined to lean toward a suicide, then. But I’m a little reluctant. It’s not very tight, is it?”
Giometti spoke up. “You know if we go with suicide, the widow gets no insurance.”
“Insurance isn’t my problem,” Strout snapped. “Carl, you got something, give it to me, would you?”
Griffin thought about the chances of himself becoming lieutenant. He knew he could continue to conduct the best investigation in the history of the department and it wouldn’t mean beans. On the other hand, if Glitsky fucked up…
Face facts, he told himself. Strout was right. There was no hard evidence that the boy had been murdered. If there was, and if they busted tail for a week or a month, chances are that he and Vince would find something. If it was there. But the two of them so far had been thorough, if not inspired. Maybe somebody wanted him especially, Carl Griffin, to hump his ass for a month and come up empty. Okay, then, he thought. They want inspiration, they can hold the carrot out.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I’m a little worried about the lack of motive. Nobody we talked to had a bad word to say, much less wanted to kill him.”
Strout rose to it. “All right, then, let’s go with suicide/equivocal, see if something turns up.”
Back in their car, Giometti seemed sullen.
“What’s eating you?” Griffin asked, knowing full well what it was.
“This guy didn’t kill himself.”
“He didn’t, huh?”
“You know he didn’t.”
Griffin slammed the dashboard. “Don’t tell me what I know, Vince. I been at this a long time.” He was feeling Giometti’s look on him. He took a breath. Giometti hit the ignition. “Turn off the car,” he said, leaning his head back against the seat, closing his eyes. “I’ll tell you something, Vince. I honestly don’t know. I’m an evidence cop. You give me something to go on, and I’m on it like white on rice. But what do we got here? We’ve interviewed the wife-suspect number one if you go by the stats. She was home all night talking to the guy’s mother. Who else? Cruz, the guy who owns the lot and building? He’s with his boyfriend. Okay, maybe not, but we couldn’t break him-either of them- could we?”
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