The Suspect

by John Lescroart

  “The husband said she’s got Vicodin upstairs in their bedroom. He thinks it’s a suicide.”

  Faro pulled at his goatee. “She hit herself on the head?”

  “Maybe she fell first. Slipped on the wet wood.”

  Faro was still scratching at his beard, without comment, as the two uniforms came up the four steps and onto the deck. The older one—thirty pounds on the wrong side of healthy, with jowls and a walrus mustache—introduced himself as Captain Allen Marsten from Central Station on Vallejo. The other man was Jerry Jarrett. Marsten told Juhle that they had been the first ones to arrive after the 911 call. He was just getting off his graveyard shift when the call had come in. Did Juhle need anything else from him? If not, since now the scene was secure, he wouldn’t mind going home and getting some shut-eye, and he didn’t think Sergeant Jarrett would mind it either.

  “Anything either of you feel like I ought to know?” Juhle asked.

  Marsten looked at his partner, got a shrug, then worked his lips for a moment under his hanging mustache. “Nothing jumps out at me. He—the husband—left the front door open for us and we made it here in I’d say two, three minutes after the call came in. We come inside and he’s got her out of the tub and on the deck where she’s lying now, still trying to do CPR on her, although you could see a mile away it was too late for that.”

  “So he must have thought she’d only recently gone under?”

  “I don’t know about that. We took a pulse and called him off.”

  “And what’d he do?”

  “He just stopped, no fight in him. Breathing hard, you know. Then he stood up and tried to cover her up with that towel over there.”

  “What do you mean, ‘tried’?”

  “Well, it was too small for all of her. And, you can see, she’s a little bent up. He started low, then moved it up, then over her face, then back down. It was kind of pathetic, tell the truth. Then finally Jerry here walked him off and sat him down inside.”

  Sitting on the counter, still on the telephone, Stuart Gorman was crying silently, making no attempt to stem the flow of tears. His shoulders were hunched, one arm tucked under the other one. He barely whispered, saying, “I know” and “Yeah, baby, I don’t know,” and Juhle could watch no more. Instead he went back outside to the deck and stood in silence as they bagged the body and began to lift it and load it onto the gurney.

  Juhle didn’t want to watch that, either. Reflecting that there weren’t that many fun things to do at homicide scenes, he went back to the kitchen. He pulled around a chair and sat on it.

  The phone conversation continued a few more minutes before Gorman said, “Do you need me to come up there? You’re not. Where are you? You’ve only been up there two weeks and…? Okay, okay, you’re right, it doesn’t matter. Call me when you get close, and I’ll come get you.”

  He clicked the phone off and, as though it were a high explosive, placed it next to him on the counter. He closed his eyes and, for a long moment, didn’t move.

  Finally, Juhle spoke. “She going to be all right?”

  Gorman tried and largely failed to arrange his face into a controlled expression. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t have any idea.” He exhaled heavily. “I don’t believe this. This can’t be happening.”

  Juhle resisted his urge to leave the man to his miseries. If he had in fact killed his wife—and his obvious pain and possible remorse now did not in the slightest degree rule out that possibility—then this was the time to exploit his vulnerability. Juhle needed to get him talking again, so he asked, “What school does she go to?”

  “Reed. My alma mater. Although it turns out she’s down in Santa Cruz now. Don’t ask me why. But she’s enrolled at Reed.” He paused. “She’s smart and weird, like her dad, and the place worked pretty well for me.”

  “How were you weird?”

  A dry chuckle caught in Gorman’s throat. “How was I not weird? I just never fit in as a kid. I was big, gangly, ugly.” He pointed to the birthmark on his face. “This thing. I liked solitude. I wanted to write. That by itself is weird enough. When I think about it, that was probably half the problem with me and Caryn. She wanted someone normal, and I wasn’t him.”

  “Normal in what way?”

  “Motivated by money, for example. Guys my age, we’re supposed to be driven by money. It’s how we gauge our success in the world, right?” He shrugged. “I don’t really think too much about money and never have.”

  “And this bothered your wife?”

  Gorman smiled, but there wasn’t any humor in it. “Are you kidding me? What greater failing can a man have than not to be the primary wage earner in his family?”

  “You weren’t that?”

  Another shrug. “I make more than decent enough money, I think. Eighty or a hundred grand a year, give or take. I’m a writer, so there’s good years and bad years. But eighty grand to me is a fortune. It’s not like I don’t publish, like I’m not putting out good work. It just doesn’t pay enough to suit Caryn.”

  “She wanted you to make more?”

  He shook his head impatiently. “It wasn’t so much that. With her income, we certainly didn’t need any more money. She made enough for most third-world countries.”

  Juhle cast a quick glance around—the eight-burner stove, the Sub-Zero refrigerators, the shining copper pots and pans, all the gadgets on display on the counters, the other creature comforts he’d noticed everywhere. To say nothing of the size and location of the house itself—probably four to six million dollars in real estate and furnishings alone. “So she felt she was carrying you financially, was that it? Did she resent that?”

  Gorman paused. “I don’t know what she felt anymore, Inspector. I didn’t think she was anywhere near asking me for a divorce until Friday, but then she did. I mean, after Kym left for school, we both knew there’d be…adjustments. But here it’s only been a couple of weeks and that’s it. It’s all over, like we never had anything together, like everything we’d ever done was just a fucking stupid charade.” He stopped abruptly, then started again more calmly. “She was just waiting for Kym to go. After that, there wasn’t any reason for us to stay together.”

  “No discussion?”

  “More like an announcement. ‘My life with you is over. Do whatever you want. You’re nothing to me.’”

  “That bother you?”

  “No. I fucking loved it. What do you think? Did it bother me? Give me a break, Inspector.”

  “Taking that as a yes, then.”

  Gorman’s eyes narrowed. He visibly reined himself in. “You don’t know how hard I tried to keep it together. And she wasn’t easy, let me tell you. She was never easy the last few years. You know what that’s been like? And then hearing that you’re a nonentity, that her world is just so much more important than yours, more financially rewarding, more everything. How’s that make me feel? Like a piece of shit. Like a worthless piece of shit.”

  Something was going on behind Juhle in the living room, and suddenly Gorman straightened all the way up. “Hey! Wait a minute! What are you doing?” Boosting himself up from the counter, he was across the kitchen before Juhle could even stand. In the middle of the living room, the medical examiner’s assistants with the gurney and its body bag had stopped at the interruption. “What are you doing?” Gorman demanded again.

  Juhle stepped in front of him. “They’re taking the body downtown, sir. The medical examiner is going to need to do an autopsy, then…”

  “You mean he’s going to cut her up?”

  “To determine the exact cause of death, yes.”

  “But…” Gorman turned from Juhle to the men pushing the gurney, then back to the inspector, a low-wattage panic now evident in his eyes. “Why do you have to do that? I told you she had pills upstairs. If she’d been drinking and then got in the hot tub…”

  “That’s one way it might have happened,” Juhle said, “yes.”

  “Well, what else?”

&nbs
p; “She might have slipped getting into the tub. There’s a good-sized bump on her head.”

  This news seemed to confuse Gorman, but he shook his reaction off. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is she’s dead! If she killed herself or it was an accident, what difference does it make?” He brought a hand back to his face, rubbed at the birthmark. “Jesus Christ, this is unbelievable. She’s just now dead. It’s only been a few hours. Don’t you understand that? You don’t have to cut her up. It won’t make any difference.”

  Juhle wondered if Gorman could in fact be so clueless, or if this was some kind of an act. Every schoolchild knew that homicide victims got autopsied. Juhle had been playing his role as understanding cop comforting a victim’s relative up until now, but this was the time to bring some reality into the discussion. “Mr. Gorman,” he said, “surely you realize it makes a difference if somebody killed her.”

  Gorman opened his mouth and started to say something, then decided not to. His shoulders sagged, he shook his head from side to side. “God help us,” he said.

  THREE

  AFTER GETTING UP AT DAWN AND hiking out from Tamarack Lake, Gina Roake drove to her Pleasant Street condominium on Nob Hill in under four hours. By noon, she had unpacked and stowed her gear, showered, and changed into her work clothes—a light mauve business suit and black low heels.

  As she came out the doors onto the sidewalk in front of her building, Gina discovered that, somewhat to her surprise, she wasn’t inclined to go straight to her office. True, that had been her intention since last night, but now that the moment had arrived, something about it didn’t feel quite right. She knew that she could go in and report to her partners that she was ready to get back in harness. At that announcement, right away they would probably be able to throw her some work on cases they were handling, get her back up to speed, give her some billable hours.

  But Gina knew that those hours rightly belonged to the nineteen long-suffering and hardworking associates within the firm, each one of whom was expected to amass twenty-two hundred billable hours in the course of a year, a daunting and unending struggle for young attorneys that demanded fifty weeks of eight-billable-hour days. Lunches didn’t count; administrative hours didn’t count; prep time and research often didn’t count; and certainly schmoozing by the water cooler didn’t count. Hours were limited and finite, and it wasn’t uncommon for an associate to put in twelve hours on the clock in order to bill eight of them. As a partner, Gina was under no illusion that her legitimate role was to garner clients for the firm, and they in turn would provide the billable hours of work that she would then dole out to her associates.

  She was ready to go back to work all right, but damned if she was going to be a drain on the firm’s resources. She needed to reestablish her contacts in the city and attract her own clients to the firm—to do otherwise would not only be unfair to her associates, it would put her in a subservient position vis-à-vis her partners, and she wasn’t going to let that happen.

  By the time she got to the corner, she’d made up her mind and when the cab pulled over to pick her up, she slid into the backseat and said, “Hall of Justice, please. Seventh and Bryant.”

  In terms of longevity in the city, Lou the Greek’s wasn’t exactly Tadich’s or Fior d’Italia, or even Original Joe’s or the Swan Oyster Depot. Nevertheless, with forty-plus years in its same location across the street from the Hall of Justice, it had its full complement of tradition, albeit in a slightly less savory vein than those other famous eateries.

  The whole “eatery” designation was something of a misnomer. Certainly, anyone drawing up a business plan for the place in today’s world would be hard-pressed to attract investors with a menu that included only one item per day—the Special—and very few appetizers besides the occasional edamame or dried wasabi-coated peas.

  Forget about lunch standards everywhere else, such as chicken wings or hamburgers or fried calamari or garlic fries or, God forbid, salads or other raw green stuff—the regulars at Lou’s referred to martini olives as the vegetable course. Instead, Lou’s wife, Chui, sought on a daily basis to meld the disparate culinary cultures of her own China and her husband’s Greece with original and, it must be admitted, creative dishes such as Sweet and Sour Dolmas, or Pita Stuffed Kung Pao Chicken, or mysteries such as the famous Yeanling Clay Bowl. Whatever a yeanling was.

  Often edible, but just as often not, the food was not why people gathered at Lou’s. Like so many other restaurants, Lou’s location was the key to its success. If you had business with the criminal justice system in San Francisco, Lou’s was where you ate. It didn’t matter that it was stuck down in the basement of a bail-bond building, that it always smelled a little funky, was darkly lit and ill-ventilated. It wasn’t fifty yards from the front door of the Hall of Justice, so juries on their lunch breaks, cops, reporters, lawyers and their clients, witnesses, snitches, families of victims, and visitors to the jail—a vast, often unwashed and unruly, certainly boisterous clientele—filled the place from the first legal drink at 6:00 a.m. until last call at 1:30 a.m.

  Now Gina Roake, fresh from her cab ride, walked down the six steps from the street and waded into the surging tide of humanity on the other side of Lou’s black-painted glass double-doors. The crowd did not intimidate her. This was her milieu. Smiling, jostling, pushing her way inside, she cleared the immediate crush and across the room saw her firm’s chief investigator, Wyatt Hunt, sharing a four-person booth with another man. In ten seconds, she was standing over them. “If I joined you, would I be interrupting important business?” she asked.

  “Not at all,” Hunt said. “We haven’t even ordered yet.”

  “You’re sure you wouldn’t mind sharing half your bench with an old woman?”

  Hunt leaned forward and back, looking around behind her. “No problem,” he said. “Where is she?” But, grinning up at her, he slid in to give her room, then pointed across the table. “You know Devin Juhle, I believe. Homicide.”

  “Sure. How are you, Inspector?”

  “Better now that it’s not just me and Wyatt. He’s decent company for about fifteen minutes, then usually starts to babble.”

  “It’s when I start using longer words,” Hunt explained. “Devin gets confused.”

  “He uses them in the wrong context. He needs to take a course or something. I tell him it’s no good using big words if you don’t know what they mean.”

  “Teleological,” Hunt said.

  “A perfect example.” Juhle turned to Gina. “As you can see,” he said, “you’re not interrupting.” Then to Hunt. “And no way is that a real word.”

  “Teleological.” Hunt held out a hand across the table. “How much?”

  “Lunch.”

  “You’re on.”

  “Spell it for the record.”

  Hunt strung out the letters, then said, “Gina? Word or no word?”

  She made a reluctant grimace across at Juhle. “I think it’s a word, Inspector. Sorry.”

  “It is a word,” Hunt said. “It means ‘relating to design in nature.’ Like a teleological argument. Man started to walk upright because he got out of the trees and started hanging out in tall grass, where he had to stand to see over it. Which got him—us, I mean, the human race—to walking.”

  “Imagine that,” Juhle said. “I never would have guessed.” Across the table, Juhle sotto voce’d to Gina: “We’re getting into the babble phase I told you about.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were all having the Special—pot stickers stuffed with taramosalata—which was not particularly, by unanimous opinion, Chui’s greatest triumph. But by now they weren’t paying any attention to the food anyway.

  “…just a feeling in my gut,” Juhle was saying, “but anytime you’ve got a murdered spouse and a mega-million-dollar estate, you’ve got to think maybe the husband, huh?”

  Gina said, “Do you have anything on him?”

  Juhle shook his head. “It’s too soon. We don’t even know
time of death yet. But if there was foul play, and the bump on the head looks an awful lot like there was, then it was either him or somebody else she knew pretty damn well.”

  “Why do you say that?” Hunt asked.

  “She was naked,” Juhle said. “She’s not having wine and getting naked with whoever he might have hired to get rid of her, I don’t care how cute he was.”

  “Does this guy have a lawyer?” Gina asked.

  Juhle started to pop a pot sticker, then thought better of it and put it back on his plate. He shook his head. “Again, too early.”

  “It’s never too early.”

  “We don’t even have a murder yet, much less charged him with it.”

  “But you talked to him this morning? And you let him tell you all this stuff?”

  “I didn’t twist his arm.”

  “And about money, and being resentful of his wife, and spending all last weekend just thinking about how much he hated her? Somehow I think that if a lawyer had been with him, he would have toned things down a notch or two.”

  Juhle pulled down the sides of his mouth, erasing the smile that had started there. “He might have, at that. But fortunately, no offense, he didn’t think to call one.”

  Hunt spoke up. “In his heart, Devin already thinks he’s guilty.”

  “I’m getting that impression,” Gina said.

  “Not true,” Devin said. “I’m in wait mode, that’s all.”

  “Are you going to talk to him again?” Gina asked.

  “Probably later today, if he’s where he should be.”

  “As opposed to…?”

  “His house.” Juhle was matter-of-fact. “Hey, I went upstairs with him so he could get some fresh clothes. But no way he spends any more time at his house until we’re through with the place.”

  “So where’s he staying?”

  “The Travelodge down on Lombard. It’s close enough.”

  “And you’re going down to see him there?”

  “That’s my plan.”

  “And he still won’t have a lawyer?”