A short laugh. “That too.”
“Well, that’s fine. You may know that. But the police just can’t know anything, or prove anything, about anybody on that list. Even if everybody else owned up and said they were his customers, that still wouldn’t prove that you were. And, by the way, if you’re worried that the paper might print it, forget it. They’d get sued from here to Italy. It won’t happen.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m convinced.”
“Good. I mean, bottom line is we just don’t do it anymore. Easy enough, right?”
“It should be,” Chiurco said.
“Well, there you go. Done deal.”
Wyatt Hunt looked briefly out onto Grant Street through the one window across from Tamara in the reception area, then turned back to his employees. “I will entertain even the smallest crumb of an idea.”
“Do we have a hint,” Chiurco asked, “of what we’re looking for? Or some kind of timeline?”
“Hardy thinks when she was in college, so ten to fourteen years ago. In the city here. Something she was embarrassed by, or worse. Obviously, he thinks, something she could still get in trouble for if word gets out.”
“Well,” said Tamara, who had taken her share of criminology classes as well, “the statute of limitations would have run out on almost anything she did back then, except if she killed somebody. What did Vogler do that got him in prison? Could she have been involved in that?”
Hunt pointed a finger at his secretary. “There you go. There’s someplace to start. If she was any part of that, and Vogler took the fall for it… how well did you know him, Craig? Did he ever talk about that?”
“Not to me. I barely knew him at all, except through the coffee shop. Maybe we could get our hands on that list and ask some of those people what they know?”
“I wouldn’t bank much on that. Besides, I’m thinking what Tam suggests is probably going to be more productive. See if he had an accomplice or two and go talk to them.”
“Hardy should just ask her,” Chiurco said. “Whatever she tells him, it’s privileged, right? Nobody else would have to know. I don’t see the problem.”
“Well, one problem, Craig, not to sound mercenary, is if he asks her and she tells him, there goes our fee. But the other thing is that she’s evidently cut a deal with her husband-his name’s Joel-that she’s not going to be seeing Diz except with him there with them too. So what’s that leave?”
Tamara raised her hand like a good student and spoke right out. “She doesn’t want Joel to find out.”
“Ten points.” Hunt nodded. “That’s my guess too. Which of course means it might not be a criminal thing at all. Just some behavior she’d rather he never knew about.”
“She had an abortion,” Tamara said.
Again, Hunt nodded. “Not impossible. Especially being a good Catholic and all like she is, like they are.”
“Wait a minute.” Chiurco swung his body around and sat up. “She pays Vogler ninety thousand dollars a year just so he won’t tell her husband that she had an abortion? And Vogler’s the only one who knows? I don’t think that flies.”
“I don’t know, Craig. Stranger things have happened. Maybe Vogler was the father.” Hunt pushed himself off the window ledge. “But why don’t we see what we can find out about this prison time he did, who he might have been hanging with, see if it leads us back to Maya in any way?”
“I’ll take that,” Chiurco said.
“Fine. Meanwhile, I’ll dig around and see if I can talk to somebody who remembers her from school. I talked to Diz about this yesterday and he’s a little worried, beyond everything else we’ve talked about, that if Vogler was blackmailing her, she might know something dangerous that she doesn’t know she knows. So there’s a bit of urgency.”
Chiurco was on his feet. “I’m all over it,” he said.
At a little before noon, with a full blustery fall day building up around them, Bracco and Schiff were back out in the Haight-Ashbury, this time talking to an elderly woman named Lori Bradford. They were all sitting around a small wooden table with a lace tablecloth in a nook off her kitchen. She lived on the second floor of an apartment building looking out over Ashbury, several structures up and across the street from the alley where Dylan Vogler had died.
She’d of course seen the police and the crowd last Saturday and since then had read about the murder, following the story rather closely in the newspaper. Over the last couple of days she had been trying to decide if it would be worthwhile to call somebody about a possible discrepancy that she’d noticed, and finally thought that, yes, it would be, and here they all were.
“Are you sure about this?” Schiff asked her.
“Yes. Absolutely. There were two shots, not just one.” Mrs. Bradford, in her late sixties, had dressed for her appointment with these inspectors in a pair of purple slacks over sensible black shoes, and a black turtleneck. “I thought at the time I heard them that I should have called nine one one, but then there wasn’t any more noise, and no screaming or anything like that, so I just assumed it must have been a backfire or cherry bombs or something. If it was a real emergency, someone else would have called nine one one anyway, I thought. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get involved. People always say that, I know, that they don’t want to get involved, but I don’t have a problem with that. But I think I just convinced myself that it was probably nothing. I looked out the window there-you see how you’ve got a clear view of the first twenty or thirty feet of the alley anyway-and didn’t see anything moving. Or on the street either. And then I didn’t want to send a false alarm, which would have been worse than not calling at all. Wouldn’t it? Anyway…,” she said. And trailed off.
“Well, it’s good you called at whatever time, ma’am,” Bracco said. “But we haven’t heard anybody else talking about more than one shot.” Bracco’s face reflected his frustration with San Francisco’s laissez faire reality. This wasn’t Hunters Point, exactly, in terms of gunshots per minute, but Bracco thought it wasn’t such a high crime area that a couple of gunshots would be a completely normal event. And yet, apparently, no one among the citizenry had seen fit to rally to report them. If it wasn’t napalm, he figured, nobody paid attention.
Mrs. Bradford looked from one inspector to the other, as though soliciting their forgiveness. “Nobody else called nine one one, then?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Oh, then I really should have, shouldn’t I?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that, Mrs. Bradford,” Schiff said. “The point is that you called now and we’re here. Inspector Bracco and I will check with dispatch and see if anybody called to report these shots or make a noise complaint on Saturday morning. Maybe they didn’t think it was an emergency, and then it wouldn’t have come to us through dispatch.”
Bracco leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Could you tell us a little more about these shots, ma’am? How far apart were they spaced, for example?”
Mrs. Bradford sat back and stared off into nothing for a second or two. “I’d say about a minute. A fairly long time, anyway. They weren’t right away, one after the other. I was awake, I remember, but still in bed, when I heard the first one, and I kind of lay there wondering what that was for a while, and if I’d really heard it. You know? The way you are when you’re half awake. And then I decided I’d really heard something and got up to see if I could see what it had been and I was just in the hallway there when the second one went off.”
“And what did you do then?” Schiff asked.
“Well.” Mrs. Bradford’s face grew animated at the recollection. “Well, then, I of course got to the window as fast as I could and looked down at the street here, and I could see the alley, too, but I didn’t know that’s where the shots must have come from. I couldn’t tell anything, really. Anyway, but then when I didn’t see anybody moving and hear anything else down below there, that’s when I decided it was probably nothing and not to call nine one one.”