by The Hearing
“And you became friends?”
“I don’t know about that. We did not go out.”
Amy wrinkled up her face, confusion all over it.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. “What’s the matter?”
“Only that I’ve heard differently. I wanted to talk to somebody who knew Elaine pretty well, and if that’s not you . . .” She made to get up.
He gripped her arm above the wrist. “We had coffee a few times,” he said. “But there wasn’t anything . . . between us.” Realizing what he’d done, he released his grip. “What do you want to know about Elaine for, anyway? She was not what she pretended to be.”
“And what was that?”
He hesitated, decided against answering.
“Muhammed,” she said. “You’ve heard she died last week, haven’t you?”
He nodded. “It was the will of Allah.”
“Well, yes, but it was maybe a little more than that. Somebody killed her.”
He sat up abruptly. “That was not me. They arrested that other man.”
“I know. No one is saying it was you. I’m not saying that.” She smiled again. “Please, Muhammed, we’re just talking, all right?”
“But what are we talking about?”
“We’re talking about who she was.” She leaned in closer to him. “We were thinking of some kind of a memorial, maybe a statue, something like that. It will be very nice, out in the lobby, as a tribute to her.”
“To Elaine?” Amy realized that Treya had chosen a perfect cover story for them. Clearly infuriated, Muhammed’s eyes were burning.
“Yes. Elaine. But you know, it’s political. We would not want to go to all that trouble and expense if there was some embarrassing . . . if she—”
“She was a whore. A liar and a whore. She believed in nothing.”
“Well, surely—”
He slammed the table. All around the room, other students looked up, startled out of their studies. Muhammed was oblivious to it. “She pretended to be coming to Islam. I would read from the Koran, and she would nod, pretending. ‘Yes,’ she would say, ‘that’s interesting. That’s good.’ But it was all false. She was white inside. She sold her body for their money, for her doctor’s money.” There was spittle on Muhammed’s lips. His breath came in ragged little gulps.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“She was here,” he rasped. “She was always here.”
“Here at the school?”
“Yes.”
“But I mean alone? Did you see her alone after she got engaged?”
“I told her she had to stop. It was all a lie. She was tormenting me.”
“Stop what? You mean call off her marriage?”
“No. Teaching here. Coming here.”
“That was tormenting you?”
He nodded. “Every time I saw her. I knew she was laughing at me that I had believed her. I told her she had to stop.”
“When was this?”
“This new semester. Just now.” He gripped her hand again, so hard that it hurt her. “You must not make this thing, this memorial. She was a whore. She was laughing at Allah and, of course—” The eyes. The eyes were crazy. He laughed. “That is what happened, you know. He put an end to that.”
***
“Abe? Are you all right?”
“I’m under house arrest. My boys.”
“Dismas said you were in bed.”
“That would be accurate, but the prescription wasn’t bed rest. The doctor just doesn’t want to see me out walking the streets, but he’d actually like me to move around a little here.”
“But today? Your heart . . . ?”
“Is pumping away even as we speak. I’m sorry I didn’t call you earlier myself. I just woke up.”
“That’s a long sleep. It’s almost eleven o’clock. Are you sure you’re okay? Something else didn’t happen, did it?”
“No, nothing happened.”
“Really?”
“Really. How are we doing on our work?”
“It’s moving along, but I’m not calling about that. I’m calling about you.”
“I’m fine. This is routine. Honest. A couple more days and I’m dancing.”
“But not ’til the doctor says so, okay?”
“My jailers will see to that.”
“But you yourself?”
“Me myself, too.”
“Would you promise me?”
“I promise.”
It seemed forever before she spoke again. “All right, then,” she said. “All right.”
Treya knew that Jonas Walsh took Friday afternoons off, so she had called him at home Thursday night to prevail upon him to let somebody from the firm come by the condo he and Elaine had shared in Tiburon and look at Elaine’s things the next day. She wasn’t demanding as a matter of law, but requesting as a favor, as a friend. Elaine might have left something lying around that might prove useful to their investigation.
He didn’t like it, but the question of what he was going to do with Elaine’s belongings was still unresolved. And Treya knew that after his apology in the R&J offices here last week, she had some leverage. He’d let them look.
She was right.
But that didn’t mean he had to be pleasant about it. Walsh shook hands perfunctorily with Curtis Rhodin, but made no effort to try to be friends. “This is a total waste of some very valuable time.”
Treya had briefed Rhodin about what to expect from Walsh. In any event, it was unlikely the greeting would have thrown Curtis, who was no wimp, off his stride. He exuded confidence and savoir vivre. At six-three, he towered over the other man. There was no sign of fat on his body, although he carried two hundred pounds to Walsh’s one-seventy. The charcoal Brioni suit had set him back nine hundred dollars but it fit him so perfectly that it might have been his day-to-day lounging attire. His face was long and slender, his eyes somber. If Modigliani had painted men, Rhodin could have been one of his subjects.
“If you’ve got somewhere else you need to be, Doctor, I’ll be fine here on my own.” They were in a large, bright living room with sparse, almost antiseptic modern furnishings and floor-to-ceiling windows. The condo was set on a hillside overlooking the yacht harbor. The sun was out brightly here twenty-five miles north of the city, and from where they stood in the living room, the panorama was breathtaking—the Marin headlands and Mount Tamalpais on the right, Angel Island and the graceful though largely unsung Richmond Bridge in front of them, a glittering white-capped bay under a robin’s egg sky. “This is beautiful,” Rhodin said. “I couldn’t get any work done if I lived here.”
“This isn’t where I work,” the doctor replied, “and I hope the view won’t be too distracting today. I don’t really understand all this continuing investigation into Elaine’s murder. They’ve got her killer in jail, for Christ’s sake. I’d like to see an end to it.”
Rhodin nodded understandingly and tried to sound prosecutorial. “We’re on the same page, then. But we need to make sure some surprise doesn’t come up during the trial. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for. If you’ve got other plans, that’s fine, but if not and you’d like to show me where to look, it might move the process along.”
Reluctantly, Walsh led him into the back of the condo, past the gourmet kitchen—a granite countertop with dishes piled on it, more dishes stacked in the sink, a strong odor of garbage. There was an office to his left down a short hallway—two desks, two computers, some file cabinets. The bedroom was a few steps farther along on the right and Walsh showed him in. He hadn’t made the bed and made no apology for it. “That’s her closet,” he said, pointing. “The near one is her dresser. I’ll be in the office.”
Left alone, Rhodin went to work. In spite of what he’d told Walsh, he had received a reasonably specific laundry list from Hardy and Glitsky the day before. Mostly, it was stuff he’d expect to find in the office—a Rolodex file, maybe, or old c
heckbooks and financial records, perhaps a diary. But there might be something elsewhere—it was worth looking everywhere.
Curtis Rhodin was a methodical man. He had known Elaine only slightly—she was older and a partner at Rand & Jackman and light-years from him on many levels—and it felt strange to be going through her things, but he knew what he was supposed to do, and he was going to do it.
She had a lot of dresses, thirty pairs of shoes. There was a smaller, built-in set of drawers in her closet containing sweaters, blouses, exercise clothes. At the bottom of the lowest one, under a pile of sweatshirts, he found a smallish, flat white box. Taking it out and opening it up, he recognized it for what it was—Elaine’s collection of meaningless memorabilia from her past.
Rhodin smiled to himself. He had a similar stash himself, although his was a cigar box in which he kept twenty or thirty stupid items he just couldn’t bring himself to discard—a jade rock he got diving off Big Sur, a guitar pick from a B. B. King concert he’d gone to in college, his first pocketknife, a diamond tie tack in case they ever came back in style, a signed Willie Mays rookie year baseball card. Junk. But priceless junk.
Elaine’s box wasn’t all that different really, considering she was a woman. There were several pins for various political campaigns—her mother’s, Chris Locke’s, Sharron Pratt’s. A man’s college ring. A garter. A .38 caliber bullet. A packet of business cards with a rubber band around them. Many coins from different foreign countries. He closed the box back up—this was coming back with him.
A framed picture of Elaine’s mother rested on top of her dresser next to the lamp. In the drawers, he found underwear, socks, foldables. Condoms. The top right drawer, however, contained nothing at all, and this straightened Rhodin up in surprise. He walked across to the office and asked Walsh if he could come in for a minute. Sighing, putting down his magazine, the doctor labored up and followed him. “Do you know what she kept in this drawer?” Curtis asked.
Walsh looked, shrugged. “I guess not much. Did you just take something out of it?”
“No, it was like this. Was it always like this?”
Another shrug. “I don’t know. I didn’t go through her drawers.”
“No, of course not,” Rhodin said, “but there was nothing at all in this one. That seems a little odd, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Walsh repeated. “I didn’t take anything out of it.”
“But it sure seemed like he might have.” He was back now at Freeman’s office, in the Solarium reporting to Treya and Amy. He’d eventually left Tiburon with a cardboard box now about a quarter filled with what he’d collected from the office and the rest of the house, including a copy of the Koran and, of course, the white memento box. On a whim, at the last moment, he’d also thrown in the framed photograph of Loretta Wager. But it was the empty drawer that had captured his interest. “Any of you guys have a completely empty dresser drawer?”
“Drawers don’t get empty,” Amy said. “They get full about ten minutes after you move in someplace. Then too full. It’s a law of nature. He must have cleaned it out.”
Treya disagreed. “He would never have done that and left it empty knowing we were coming to look through her things. He would have put something back in before we got there.”
Rhodin had his own suggestion. “Maybe he didn’t really imagine that it would make any impression? I mean, it was just an empty drawer. Doesn’t mean anything.”
“No.” Treya was sure of it. “If he emptied it, he would have remembered and it would have seemed significant.”
“Then she emptied it,” Amy said. “Elaine.”
They were all with their thoughts a moment. Treya finally spoke up. “If she was leaving him, if they’d had a fight and she walked out one night, she might have just taken a handful of underwear.”
“I’ve got another one,” Rhodin said. “In the bathroom, she had a couple of months’ worth of birth control pills, but in her dresser she had maybe a dozen condoms.”
Amy had an answer for that. “So she really didn’t want to get pregnant.”
“Or she wasn’t being faithful,” Rhodin said.
Treya looked at both of them. “Or she knew he wasn’t.”
“Dash Logan?”
The lawyer looked up from the newspaper he was reading, which happened to be the Democrat. Jupiter was beginning to hop in the long slide of a Friday afternoon, but he was sitting alone in his usual back booth, a bowl of pretzels on the table next to him, a half-full glass of beer growing warm at his elbow. The look on his face was welcoming, untroubled. “You got me.” He ran his eyes down the man who’d addressed him, extended his hand. “And you’d be Mr. Hardy, I presume. Dismas? Was that the name, Dismas?”
“Still is.” Hardy took the hand—a firm grip—and slid in across from him. “You are one tough man to get a hold of.”
Logan nodded sympathetically. “I hear that a lot. Sorry. I must be having some kind of midlife crisis or something. My motivation’s just gone in the toilet. I got your calls, though.”
“That’s nice. I was starting to think the phones weren’t working.”
“Didn’t I say you could always get me here?”
“Yes, you did.”
“Well, then.” He flashed a smile. It seemed genuine enough. Hardy didn’t have to remind himself, though, that the greatest con men oozed sincerity—it was their stock-in-trade. “Hey, listen, let me buy you a beer for your trouble. If it’s any consolation, I would have called you Monday, but I figure now, Friday afternoon, nobody’s in when you call them anyway. It’ll wait for the weekend, right?” He raised a hand, flagging the bartender. “Wally, a couple of cold ones, see voo play. What do you drink, Dismas?”
Hardy made an apologetic gesture. “I’ve got to stick with water. I see a client at five.”
“And they wouldn’t want their lawyer to have a drink in the afternoon? I hear you. Wally? Just one. And some of that stuff fish fuck in.” A grin back at Hardy. “You know, I’ll tell you, that’s why I stopped working out of my office.”
“Why’s that, Dash?”
“Why? ’Cause when clients come to an office, they see the trappings, you know? You’ve got the secretary and the law library and the phones and all that shit—which is just what it is, shit—and they get so they expect the rest of the package that goes with it. Hey, thanks, Wally. Here’s looking at you, Dismas.” He held up his new glass of beer and touched Hardy’s glass. “So anyway, I’m not that guy. Used to try to be, but it didn’t work. So people would come in with these expectations and I’d dash ’em. They wanted a different kind of lawyer and God knows there’s enough of ’em. But if they want me—and a lot of folks do—they can come down and meet me here and they know what they’re getting. No frills, maybe, but no bullshit either. And most of ’em, end of the day, they go away happy. So”—his limpid blue eyes fixed Hardy over the rim of his beer glass—“I’m assuming you’ve reconsidered on settling with McNeil?”
“Actually, not.” Hardy sat back and enjoyed Dash’s reaction, the quick snap in the mellow facade—a blink of an eye—then the impressive return to how he’d been. “I’m here on another matter entirely. Do you know a kid named Cullen Alsop?”
Logan appeared to think about it. “Some cop—Banks, I think his name was—was asking about him in here the day before yesterday. OD, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. Looks like.”
“So this boy Alsop,” Logan asked, “was he your client?”
“No,” Hardy said. “My client’s Cole Burgess.” If the name registered, Logan didn’t show it. “Elaine Wager?”
His face fell. “Oh, Elaine.” Logan had sympathy down pat. He clucked. “Such a shame about her.”
“It was,” Hardy agreed. “Though I’d understood the two of you had had some problems.”
“No, noth—” The smile. “You don’t mean that special master thing? That was nothing to do with Elaine.”
“Really? I heard she might have tak
en it that way.”
He shook his head back and forth. “No. That was all for the benefit of the cops. They call me down here . . .”
“The police do?”
“No, no. My office.”
“I thought you didn’t have an office.”
“Hey, what am I, stupid? No, I keep an office. I just don’t use it much. So anyway, I’m down here having a couple of brewskis, my girl calls all in a panic. The cops are there, they got a warrant, they’re doing a search. Well, I go a little ballistic and who’s gonna blame me?”
Hardy lifted his shoulders ambiguously.
“So I’m smack in the middle of something in the female line here and I’ve got to run uptown, rush hour. Time I get there, I’m not feeling my most cooperative. Now Patsy, my girl, she makes a nice presence at the door—you know what I’m saying?—but she’s a little weak on the business side, filing stuff, like that. So I say to the search party, ‘Fine. You’re showing me this kind of respect, you’re treating me like I’m vermin, you can go find the shit yourselves.’ ” He wore his apologetic look again, his voice back to calm and reasonable. “So that’s all it was with Elaine. She got in the middle of it, that was all. ’Nother couple of weeks, I would have gotten back to her and told her I was sorry. If she hadn’t gotten herself shot.”
The recitation seemed to tire him out. His expression went strangely blank, then he recovered, grabbed a pretzel, picked up his beer glass and drank. “But how’d we get on Elaine? You were asking about the OD.”
“Cullen.”
“Right, Cullen, okay. And the guy who killed Elaine. Your client.”
“Cole Burgess. Cullen snitched him out. He was the source of the murder weapon.”
“And I’m supposed to know these guys? How do you get to that?”
“I don’t, really. I went by the Hall today to see if I could get my hands on some early discovery on Cullen since Cole’s prelim is next week. Cullen had a matchbook from here on him.”
