“Well, that too. But he and Sergeant Bracco are friends, you know.”
“Right. I’m aware of that. They were friends, but now he’s-” Hardy stopped before he said anything else, such as that given the presence of Jerry Glass around this case, Harlen Fisk was possibly the worst imaginable choice of a person to confront the police, and especially Schiff, about the legality or reasonableness of a search warrant in Maya’s house.
“He’ll be good with them, Mr. Hardy. Harlen’s good with everybody.”
“Okay, then, but even after he gets there, if it’s before me, can I ask you please not to say anything to the police until I get there? Can you promise me that?”
After she did, Hardy pushed the button to ring off the phone and went to straighten himself, but the crick in his neck asserted itself again and he sat back down with some care, twisting his head to find an angle that didn’t hurt.
“Are you all right?” Frannie coming through the dining room with two steaming cups in her hands.
“Except for the icepick in my neck.” Taking one of the cups. “You’re the best, you know that?”
“I’ve heard rumors. So why again were you sleeping down here?”
“I wasn’t sleeping upstairs and didn’t want to wake you up.”
“You can always wake me up.”
“That’s what they all say, but they don’t mean it.”
“I mean it, Dismas. You know that.”
“I know. I’m sorry, just kidding.” He sipped his coffee, and sighed. “But all kidding aside, this isn’t starting to look too good.”
“Maya Townshend?”
He went to nod but stopped himself before he got too far. “I need to get over there right now. They’ve got to have something new or they wouldn’t have moved like this.”
“You think it’s this guy Glass?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I should call Abe.”
“And what?”
“Finesse him to get some inside dope. Failing that, see if he can slow things down.” Realizing the absurdity of that possibility, he added, “Which he’s just plain not going to do, is he?”
“Not if they have something on her, which they must, right?”
“Right. I wish I knew what it was.” Grimacing, he reached over and put his cup down on the windowsill. “I’ve got to get moving.” He started up again, and again his hand went to his neck, but this time he fought through the pain, got to his feet. “One step at a time,” he said half to himself. “One step at a time.”
18
Arriving at the premises, Hardy convinced Bracco to let him sit with his clients in their kitchen in return for a vague promise that they might have something to say to the inspectors.
Maya set her mug of coffee down on the countertop. “Even if he did call me, that doesn’t mean I went and saw him afterwards, does it? I don’t even know where he lives. Lived.”
“So you couldn’t have gone there,” Hardy said. “You’re absolutely sure you didn’t go there, right?”
“Well, yes. Of course. I don’t see why there has to be a connection between him calling me and me going to see him. He just wanted to talk about Dylan and if anybody suspected him.”
“Because you all used to be friends,” Hardy said in a low voice.
The police had let them give the children to a neighbor-Harlen hadn’t made it there yet-to take to school. They were probably just as happy not to have the kids underfoot anyway. The three of them-Joel, Maya, and Hardy-sat around the island stove in the Townshends’ ultramodern, supergourmet kitchen. Every appliance, from the refrigerator and stove to the toaster and coffeemaker, was of brushed steel; every flat surface a green-tinged granite. Outside the wraparound back windows the storm swirled and eddied around them. The lights had already blinked twice as gusts of wind hammered at the glass.
Along with two other search-specialist cops Bracco and Schiff were somewhere back or up in the house behind them. Occasionally the disembodied voices from one or more of these people would carry in to the trio in the kitchen-thrumming undertones of a somehow undefined menace and conflict. The uniformed officer left at the door of the kitchen to watch them didn’t appear to be either interested or listening.
Nevertheless, they kept their voices low. “It made perfect sense to me, Dismas. Even if it doesn’t to you.” She motioned back toward the rest of the house. “Or to them.”
Hardy nodded. “Although you must admit,” he added, “that the timing doesn’t look too good. He calls you the day he’s killed.”
“I can’t help when he called me,” Maya said, “or what he wanted to talk about. And it wasn’t like I spent a lot of time talking to him. He was mostly afraid somebody, like those inspectors, might think he had something to do with Dylan, you know? And had I heard anything? He was worried.”
“I know. That’s what you said. And it looks like he had reason to be. Look,” Hardy said. “As long as you didn’t go there, and they can’t prove you did…”
“Come on. I told you. I was at church.”
“For two hours?” Joel asked.
“I didn’t time it, Joel. As long as it took. I don’t know.”
“It’s all right.” Hardy held up a hand. “If you were at church, that’s where you were. All I’m saying is if that’s the case, there’s nothing Schiff and Bracco can do. If you weren’t at Levon’s, you weren’t there. End of story.”
Maya stared hard at her husband. “That’s what I’m saying, Joel. And there’s no dispute about whether I was there, so the phone call doesn’t matter anyway.”
No doubt, Joel wanted to help his wife, but he obviously didn’t believe yet, as Hardy had come to, that Maya could possibly be going to jail, maybe in the very near term-possibly today.
When Hardy had arrived, he’d asked what had changed in their investigations that Bracco and Schiff needed to serve a search warrant on his client first thing in the morning. They had told him about the call from Levon’s cell phone to Maya’s home number. After a flustered minute she’d admitted not only to her past friendship with Levon and the connection between Dylan, Preslee, and herself, but that he had in fact called her yesterday, out of the blue. Before that she hadn’t heard from him in a couple of years.
The good news from Hardy’s perspective was that now he felt sure he understood in a general way what the blackmail had been about. The specifics might not ever be forthcoming, but given Levon and Dylan’s criminal conspiracies, and the fact of Maya’s close friendship-and perhaps more-with at least one of them, it was pretty clear that she’d gotten herself involved in some kind of illegal activity, that she’d made deals with each of them to keep herself off the radar.
The bad news, of course, was that her involvement on any level with two men murdered within the same week made her an extremely attractive candidate as a suspect in the killings.
Except that, according to her, she’d never been to Levon’s home. “Maya,” Hardy now said, “it might be helpful if you could write down as much as you can remember about the phone call. Just to give it added credibility.”
The police packed up and left, taking with them a lot of clothing, their computers, phone books, and financial records. Joel was on the phone in his office calling his place of business to see if perhaps the police had been there, and trying to decide how to reconstruct the financial records the cops had carted off. Hardy and Maya had just sat down in the kitchen when the doorbell rang, and Maya got up to answer it.
She came back in trailing her brother, who parked his bulk on a counter chair and sighed. “I don’t like this, Diz.”
“I can’t say I’m wild about it either, Harlen. But if she’s never been to Levon’s…”
“Yeah, but you can’t prove a negative.”
“True, but luckily, the burden of proof isn’t on us. It’s on Darrel and Debra.”