“She’s good. She’s sleeping. The fever’s completely gone, thank God. Me, I’m going to wait for my regular bedtime before I crash. Otherwise I’ll just wake up in the middle of the night and if I get on that rhythm, I’ll have insomnia for a week or maybe a year, which I’d rather avoid. So I thought I’d just kill a pleasant few hours up here, do the paperwork on my parking tickets . . .” His already gray complexion paled, his bleary eyes resting on her. “Maybe I can forget about my last few hours.”
“Theresa,” Beth said. She boosted herself onto his desk. “You went to the scene.”
He nodded. “I had to.” He drew in a breath through tightened lips, let it out in a rush. “Even if she did kill him. Lord.”
“You’re positive nobody pushed her?”
“I’m sure. There were, like, twenty witnesses, maybe more. She just was in the crowd and got to the curb and waited, full stop for a couple of seconds, then stepped off. Like she wasn’t even aware it was coming. Or didn’t care.”
“More that, I’m thinking.”
“It breaks my heart, I tell you. I’m getting too old for this. And what was she, thirty?”
“A little more, maybe. Too young to end her life.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something. If she didn’t kill Ash, I want to get my hands on the son of a bitch that did. Because he killed Theresa as sure as if he pushed her onto the tracks.”
Beth scratched at the top of the desk, and her cell phone rang. Plucking it from her belt, she checked the number, and told Ike, “I’ve got to take this.” Then, into the phone, “Tully, Homicide. Is this Damon?”
While she talked to the fourth guest from Ned’s party, Ike pushed himself back from the desk and crossed over to the windows overlooking Bryant Street. The afternoon was bright, and he stood, hands in his pockets, in the slanting rays of sunlight.
After a couple of minutes, Beth came up behind him. “That was the last of the Monday Night Football fans.”
“Who?”
“Ash was getting himself laid in his apartment a couple of hours before he was killed. I’ve got five kids in the apartment right above him who heard it like they were in the room.”
“Who was Ash with?”
“I’m guessing his landlady. Her name is Carol Lukins, but I can’t prove she was with him unless and until I get some DNA, and that isn’t going to happen quick, as you know, if ever.”
“And why, again, do we want to prove it was her with him? She’s just another one of his girlfriends, right?”
“Of course. But she was the last one. If anybody knows what Ash might have been going to do on Monday night, she’s probably the best bet. Maybe he got a phone call setting up some kind of meeting while he was with her. Maybe he just told her where he was going, or with whom. But currently, she is among our stable of liars—and remind me to tell you next about Eric Ash—but if it was Carol on Monday, there’s a decent chance she can tell us something we don’t know.”
“I’m reminding you now,” he said, turning out of the sun. “How did Eric Ash lie?”
“The alibi he carefully constructed with his mother is squishy. He told me he got back to his dorm after spending the night in the city.”
“In this city?”
“The very same. Having dinner with Mom. Says he got back to Berkeley around ten. But his roommate says he didn’t get in until one. No doubt about it, and it’s on tape if after talking with Eric the roommate decides to change his mind. Which would of course be another lie, but there’s almost too many of them to count anymore.”
“Makes me think we should make something up ourselves,” Ike said. “Create a different reality and put the fear of God into some of these people.”
“If only,” Beth said. “But alas . . .”
Suddenly Ike went still, looking over her shoulder.
She frowned, followed his gaze, saw nothing, came back to him. “What?”
“That’s it,” he said. “We need to start lying. Fight fire with fire.”
* * *
Beth called Carol Lukins from the squad room, wondering would she mind coming downtown to Homicide for a few minutes just to clarify some of the details in her statement in person. Yes, she did mind and no, they couldn’t come to her home, either. Carol wanted to know a little more what this was about, but Beth kept it vague, telling her they just had some follow-up queries about her tenant Peter Ash. Eventually, Carol agreed to see them if they could make it at the Starbucks a couple of blocks up on Fulton.
Beth, pumped up by this proposal because it meant that Carol was probably hiding something from her husband, allowed as how that would be all right with them.
Ike drove, and twenty minutes later they were seated with their coffees around one of the small tables in the front window. Beth had rather ostentatiously brought out her tape recorder and it sat on the table between them.
The striking, white-haired woman exuded some of the same nervous energy that may have contributed to her fainting spell last time. They’d barely begun with her name and the case number and her earlier statement when she picked up her cup, blew on it, put it back down, turned it around on the table. “I’m . . .” she said, “I’m really not sure what you’re saying.”
“We’re talking about DNA.” Ike in his bad cop voice. “You’re generally familiar with DNA, aren’t you, Ms. Lukins?”
“Ike.” Beth reached out her hand and put it on his arm, easing him off. She came back to their witness. “Well, as I’m sure you remember, Carol, after you left Mr. Ash’s apartment the other day, I had the Crime Scene Unit come up and conduct a battery of tests. They were looking for fingerprints and DNA—that is, physical evidence of people who might have been in Mr. Ash’s apartment, particularly that night, since we believe he was killed later that night, so I think it’s obvious why we’d want to know everything we could about his last hours.”
“Obvious enough, but as I told you last time, I didn’t see Mr. Ash that night.” She looked anxiously at Beth, then at Ike. Lifting her cup again, she blew on it, sipped, and kept right on talking. “I didn’t even see Peter, Mr. Ash, that entire weekend. My husband and I were visiting his parents down in Gilroy—his dad’s had a stroke—and I didn’t get back until Monday morning. Besides, if you’re talking about DNA in his apartment—my DNA in particular—of course I’d expect you to find some traces of it.”
“How’s that?” Ike asked.
“We like to check up on all the tenants and how they’re treating the units. You know, students. They can wreck things in a hurry. So we’ve got a clause in our standard lease that allows us to come in and inspect any of the apartments once a month by appointment. Although we’re also really hands on in terms of things breaking down, so either Evan or I . . . we’re in most of the apartments at least once a month for some maintenance or another. So I’d expect you to find my DNA in Mr. Ash’s place, but also really almost anybody’s else’s, too.”
“How about the sheets?” Ike said. “Should we expect to find your DNA on the sheets?”
The question hung in the air.
With a flat, disgusted, baleful look at Carol, Ike leaned in close and then turned and said to Beth, “You want to tell her about Monday night?”
“No,” Carol reacted in a pleading tone. “I’ve already told you I wasn’t there Monday night. There’s no way you can . . .”
Beth held up a palm, stopping her. “Carol,” she said. “Your tenant upstairs, right above Mr. Ash in number five—Ned?—he had a bunch of guys over to watch the football game last Monday night. They all—all five of them—said that they heard unmistakable sounds of lovemaking in Mr. Ash’s apartment directly below them.”
Carol held Beth’s eyes for a long moment. She picked up her coffee and then put it down. “I don’t see what that has to do with me.”
Ike, bad cop all the way, let out a scornful little laugh.
Beth spoke in sympathetic tones. “As my partner just said, Carol, among the items removed from
the apartment for DNA testing were the sheets on Mr. Ash’s bed.”
“But how would you even know if it was mine? My DNA, I mean. Don’t you need to have something to check it against?”
“People are watching too much television,” Ike said.
“We did have something to check it against, Carol,” Beth said. “After you fainted, that glass of water you drank from?”
“That’s . . . shit. That is so sneaky. I can’t believe you did that. Coming across as all nice and friendly, too.”
Beth sat back in her chair, silent and unyielding. Finally, she got around to her own coffee. Ike, too, waited, content to let Carol stew in these bitter juices. The next time she reached for her cup, her hands were visibly shaking.
“Carol, talk to us,” Beth said.
With a last, helpless look at the two inspectors, she drew a shaky breath. “Evan cannot know,” she said. “I love Evan, but he has a temper, and he cannot know any part of this. He would kill me.”
“Would he have killed Peter Ash?” Ike asked. “Do either of you own a gun?”
“No.”
“No to which question?” Beth asked. “Would he have killed Peter, or do either of you own a gun?”
“Neither.”
Ike came at her again. “But you said if he found out about you and Peter, he’d kill you.”
“That was just a figure of speech. More likely, it would kill him. We love each other.”
“So you say,” Beth replied. “But then there was you and Peter.”
She shrugged. “Sometimes, you know, living it day to day . . .” She hesitated. “It gets a little boring. Peter was just . . . it wasn’t serious. Maybe I shouldn’t have . . .” Shaking her head, she looked at Beth. “You really can’t tell him,” she said. “Please.”
“Do you know where Evan was that night?” Ike asked.
“Evan doesn’t know,” Carol insisted, ignoring the question. “If he knew, I wouldn’t be sitting here looking like this.”
“What do you mean?” Beth asked. “Like what?”
“I mean, come on, you know. This is pure proof that Evan didn’t kill Peter. Evan didn’t have a clue about Peter and me.”
“How do you know that?” Ike asked.
“ ’Cause look at me! No cuts, no bruises. He doesn’t know.”
“Okay, then,” Ike said. “Back to where Evan was that night, Monday. Do you know?”
“He was still at his parents’ in Gilroy. He thought his dad might not make it, though now it looks like he will. Anyway, Evan didn’t feel he should come back up here yet, but I had to.”
“Why?” Ike asked. Then, surmising. “Peter?”
She shrugged dismissively. “I don’t expect people to understand,” she said. “But we didn’t get too many opportunities.”
Beth and Ike exchanged a look. “All right,” Beth said. “How about Monday night?”
“What do you mean?”
Ike was losing his patience and his temper. “She means you went to all these efforts, Carol, leaving your husband down in Gilroy with his dying father so you could get up here to get together with Peter Ash. And then it’s over in an hour or two and then what?”
“What do you mean, ‘then what’?”
“I mean, he just kicks you out and you’re okay with that?”
“He didn’t kick me out. We were done. I went home, took a bath, talked to Evan for an hour. Then I did some business on my computer . . . spreadsheets on the units. You can check that out. There’ll be a record of it someplace, that I was online and when.”
All right, enough, Beth was thinking. Carol Lukins was a hell of a morally challenged human being, but Beth did not believe she was the killer she was hunting. Other than the enjoyment of making her squirm, there was no point in grilling her further on that score. The real issue, the reason they’d gone through this exercise in the first place, was still unexplored. “Carol,” she said, “here’s the big question: Did Peter mention anything to you on Monday night about what he was doing later on, if he was planning to see somebody, or just go out, or what?”
“He was going out.”
“Did he say with who?”
“No. Some friend of his.”
“Did you get a name?” Ike asked.
“No. Why would I need a name?”
Beth didn’t answer her. Instead, “By any chance, did he set up this meeting while you were with him?”
“You mean in his apartment? No. He wasn’t, like, taking calls.”
“Do you remember if his phone even rang?”
“I don’t think so. In fact, I’d say definitely not.”
“Good,” Beth said. “We like definitely.”
“So this friend he mentioned,” Ike said. “Would you mind trying to recall exactly what Peter said when he told you about his plans for after you left him that night?”
“It wasn’t like it was a big discussion. I’m not sure I even remember much about it.”
“We’d really like you to try, Carol,” Beth said. “How did the topic even come up?”
Carol met Beth’s gaze, then nodded and closed her eyes. “Okay,” she said. “All right.” Her expression went a bit sour. “We were lying there. After, you know. Both of us feeling good, I’d say. Maybe half dozing, and I told Peter that Evan wasn’t coming back that night, not ’til the morning.” She stopped, opened her eyes. “Telling him if he wanted I could stay over.”
“And he said?” Beth prompted her.
“His exact words?”
“Close as you can, please.”
Inhaling, exhaling, Carol waited another second or two, then closed her eyes again and went on in a disappointed tone. “He said, ‘That is a truly sweet offer that I wish I’d have known about sooner. But this close buddy of mine texted me today and evidently he’s got this serious problem he wants to talk about and I already promised him we could meet up, have a drink or two and maybe a cigar.’ And I told him, ‘Well, after the cigar, never mind.’ ” She opened her eyes. “And we had a little laugh about it. That was all it was, I’m pretty sure. I don’t think he mentioned it again.”
* * *
They were in the car, but Ike hadn’t even started the engine when he broke the silence they’d maintained since leaving the coffee shop. “A close friend who smokes cigars,” he said.
“I heard that,” Beth said. “Which leaves his son Eric out of the equation, doesn’t it?”
“It would seem to,” Ike said. “Unless Eric met him even later. Possible, I guess, but not really something I’d bet on. In any event, I don’t see Peter Ash referring to his son as a close buddy of his, do you?”
“Not in the normal course of conversation, no. In fact, never in a million years. He would have just called him his son.”
“Agreed. And in the meantime, diabolical though it might seem, you notice that at no time did we actually tell the unfortunate Ms. Lukins—the tape bears it out—that we had any DNA results whatsoever, although that seemed to be the conclusion she jumped to on her own.”
“I did notice that. And diabolical is the word.”
Ike pulled out into traffic and shot his partner a wicked smile. “Legitimate interrogation technique. I figure if everybody else we’re talking to can lie to us, and they sure do, we are completely within bounds leveling the field by inadvertently creating a false impression with total avoidance of actual mendacity and still be on the side of the angels.”
“I wasn’t going to put it exactly like that. But I get your point.” She paused. “So what do you think?”
“What do I think about what?”
“The close friend who smokes cigars.”
“What do you want me to think?” Ike asked. “I think that’s a damn good lead, if in fact he came and picked Peter up at his place, and especially thinking now it wasn’t Theresa and it probably wasn’t Eric, and we’re ruling out the happy Lukins couple, too.”
“Right. So let me raise you one,” she said. “What if I sai
d we’ve narrowed it down to a close friend of Peter’s who likes cigars and who also owns a boat?”
“Are you kidding me? I’d like it a lot. If we had anybody like that.”
“I just realized that I haven’t told you anything yet about a guy named Geoff Cooke, have I? Used to be an assistant DA? Now he’s corporate.”
“I don’t think so. Has he shown up around this case? Who is he?”
“Nobody much. Just a close friend of Peter’s who likes cigars and owns a boat that he berths down in the marina.”
Ike shot her a disbelieving look. “This is a real person?”
“Real as a blood clot, Ike. Considered himself Peter’s best friend.”
“And how again did we meet him?”
“He stopped by the office a couple of days ago wanting to know how he could help us. In the crush of other events, he didn’t strike me as important. I must have forgotten to mention him to you, for which I offer my profound apology. But I’m mentioning him now.”
“He came up to visit you?”
“Us, really. You weren’t there that day on that tired old ‘my daughter’s got meningitis’ excuse. But did he come up to visit me? Yes.”
“Checking up on us, see what we had, stay a step ahead.”
“Maybe. More like ‘probably’ now, I’m thinking.”
“You know what this sounds like?” Ike asked.
“What’s that?”
“It sounds like I’m not going to catch up on much sleep tonight after all, am I?”
“Not very likely,” Beth replied.
28
SEVERAL RANDOM EVENTS CONSPIRED TO frustrate the efforts of Beth and Ike in their progress on the Peter Ash investigation.
In the first place, the relative hiatus on murders that the city had been enjoying for the past six weeks or so suddenly came to an end on this Saturday night. At about the same time that the interview with Carol Lukins was concluding, Len Faro and his Crime Scene Unit rolled out on an apparent gang-related drive-by shooting in Hunters Point. They had not yet arrived on that scene when a domestic violence call in the Mission had turned deadly, the victim a Hispanic middle-aged woman with multiple stab wounds.
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