Detective Valenti picked me up at eight and took me in for more questioning. I would have preferred to drive myself, but my car had been impounded as evidence. Valenti’s attitude toward me had softened considerably overnight. I thought someone must have gotten to him, filled him in. And I thought that someone was Hector.
Mike had been told by his lieutenant to stay away, so in loco amantis, Hector was there. During all of the questioning he worked at his desk no more than six feet away from us.
Valenti and I made sketches, went over the crime scene photographs, talked about the minutiae. He asked a lot of questions about my “relationship” with Roddy O’Leary that I found irksome. Overall, it wasn’t bad.
We had our heads together over a city map while I retraced the route I had taken from Parker Center, when I heard a door open and then a familiar voice. I got up and went across the big bullpen, following the voice. Hector followed close behind me.
A detective in shirt-sleeves was carrying two cups of coffee into a small interrogation room that was tucked into a dogleg in a back comer. He handed one of the cups to Jennifer Miller.
“Good morning, counselor,” I said, leaning against the door-frame.
Jennifer wasn’t particularly happy to see me, but she didn’t duck, either. She was wearing one of her perky suits and her hair and makeup were freshly done. That is, she hadn’t spent the night in jail.
“How are you this morning?” she asked.
“I haven’t decided.”
Hector put a gentle hand on my arm and drew me back. “Valenti needs you,” he said, making a lot of eye contact. Trusting Hector, I acceded. On my way out, I said to Jennifer, “Let’s do lunch.”
“Not today,” she said, sitting with the posture of the victor waiting for his laurel wreath. “Remember? I have a habeas hearing scheduled at two.”
Before the door closed again, Hector was inside with Jennifer.
I went back to Valenti with a white rage rising. “What is she doing here?”
“Same as you,” Valenti said. “She’s your witness.”
“Only by miscalculation. She tried to get me killed. Why wasn’t she held?”
He was shaking his head while I ranted, waiting for me to wind down. “I’ll tell it to you as she told it to us. She asked you to pick her up at Parker Center, take her to an address on Hudson Street in the city. When you stopped at the address to let her out, a man approached the car and opened the driver’s side door. You raised a weapon and shot him. Mrs. Miller did not know you were armed, she did not see his weapon. The name of the victim was familiar to her only because she has followed election coverage. Mrs. Miller says she has no memory of ever meeting Roddy O’Leary.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair, as in, end of story.
I cleared my throat and leaned nearer to him. “A couple of things. Why did she want to go to Hudson Street if she lives in San Pedro? And, what was she going to do with the chloroform in her purse?”
“What do you think?”
“I think she lured me to a dark area, planned to gas me so I wouldn’t make a fuss when her colleague blew me away.”
He was shaking his head again. “She didn’t want to go home to an empty house, so she directed you to her parents’ place. And, there’s nothing illegal about carrying chloroform in that quantity-bug collectors do it all the time. She says her son has a sick hamster. She was going to euthanize it.”
“You checked this out?”
“Mom and Dad have her graduation picture on the piano. The kid has a hamster, but whether it’s sick or not…” He shrugged. “And another thing. She says you had previously mentioned to her that an employee of the victim, election staffer named George Schwartz, had been stalking you. She said you had taken pictures of him on several occasions to document the fact. She said you even had him arrested once.”
Jennifer was good. Her vulnerability crap just kept sucking me right in.
Valenti was studying me with a devilish light in his eyes, a crooked smile growing from the tough-cop sneer. “How long you known Flint?”
“A while.”
“I worked a couple cases with him here and there. He’s a good guy. Great sense of humor.”
I didn’t say anything. Everyone has a Mike story, it was Valenti’s turn to tell one. They’re funny stories, but I wasn’t in the mood to be jollied.
Valenti was grinning wide now. “Outside of me, he’s probably the best detective in the city. You know why? Because he can read a person like the label on a pack of weenies. You can’t hide any of your shit from Flint, ‘cause you’ve got everything he needs to know right there on your wrapper. It’s a gift. Sometimes it takes the rest of us a little while to catch up to him. You know what he always says? ‘Who you gonna believe?’”
“I know, ‘Me, or your own lying eyes?’ So, who are you going to believe?”
Still studying me carefully, he said, “It’s a gift, the way Mike can read a person.”
I reminded him I needed my car, so he made some calls and got it released. He drove me over to the crime lab garage just east of the civic center and waited to make sure there were no glitches.
Because I was in the building, I paid a visit to my old friend Sharon Yamasaki, a senior investigator with the coroner’s office. I wanted to know what progress had been made identifying the body found in the remains of Kelsey’s trailer, anything that had been discovered about the fire itself.
Sharon seemed genuinely happy to see me. Most of her work involves moving official documents from one side of her desk to the other, so I offered her a potentially interesting diversion. She put aside her heavy case load to go hunting for me. I was in her office, halfway through a cup of coffee, when she came in with a couple of files.
“Everything is preliminary,” she said. “There’s no positive I.D. yet, but there is a profile. The deceased was male, early to late fifties, probably Caucasian, five feet nine to six feet tall, slender build. So far, there are no inconsistencies with the dental records of Detective Jerry Kelsey. Considering the condition of the remains, we may get no closer than that.”
It wasn’t really news, but I felt a jolt of something akin to pain. What made me sad was the notion that there probably was no one close enough to Kelsey to arrange a proper funeral.
Sharon sorted through a stack of forms. “The medical examiner was looking for some indication of state of mind, weighing the possibility of suicide over murder. The arson people put that notion aside.
“The prelim arson report indicates the fire’s point of origin was directly under the living room portion of Kelsey’s trailer. One end of an ordinary garden hose was placed into the gasoline storage tank situated in the yard, the other end of the hose was placed under the trailer, a distance of fifty-three feet. A lit votive candle was placed under the trailer a few feet from the end of the hose. Once the arsonist had begun the siphon effect of the gasoline at the tank end, he had the time it took for the gas to run through the hose and reach the candle at the other end to get the hell away. Then, to use the technical language, kaboom.”
Elegant, yet simple. Anyone who had seen the layout of that equipment yard could have planned it.
I rose. “Thank you.”
Sharon got up with me, walked with me toward the elevators. “I understand we have another acquaintance of yours in residence at the morgue.”
“Word gets around,” I said.
“It does when the brass takes special interest.” She held the elevator door open. “The D.A. was on the horn first thing this morning. Wants a twenty-four hour lid put on public statements coming from the crime lab. Idiot forgets we’re civil service. I personally know three people who called the Times to make sure they knew exactly what he wanted a lid put on.”