'You look absolutely… wonderful.'
'Thanks. How come we've never slept together? You've chased every other woman in town.'
'I only chase… no, that's not right.'
'What?'
'I was gonna say I only chase women who don't scare me,' Lucas said. 'But they all wind up scaring me.'
'I heard you were dating Little Miss Titsy, the cop, but you broke up.'
'That would be Sgt. Sherrill?'
'What happened? She have a bigger gun?'
'Carmel, Carmel…' Lucas held the door for her. Carmel stepped through, and saw Hale Allen at the far end of the room, leaning against a green filing cabinet, deep in conversation with Marcy Sherrill. Marcy was standing a couple of inches too close to him, and was looking up into his eyes with rapt attention.
'Uh-oh,' Carmel said.
'By the way,' Lucas said, in a tone low enough that Carmel had to turn to catch what he said. 'I'm told your client is dumber'n a barrel of hair.'
'But, God, he's gorgeous,' she said. She ostentatiously bit her lower lip, sighed, and started toward Allen and Sherrill. Moving like a leopard, Lucas thought.
They needed to cover some old ground, Lucas told Allen, because he was new to the case. He hoped it wouldn't be inconvenient. 'I understand your wife has been released by the county…'
'Yes, finally,' Allen said.
'That took way too long,' Carmel added. 'I don't understand why they had to do twenty different kinds of chemistry when the woman's been shot seven times in the brain.'
'Routine,' Lucas said.
'Bullshit routine,' Carmel said, now in attorney mode. 'You should give a little thought to what it does to the grieving survivors. You're revictimizing the victims.'
'All right, all right,' Lucas said. 'This will only take a couple of minutes.'
'Where's the other guy? Black?' Carmel asked.
'Doing something else,' Lucas said. He looked at Allen. 'Tell me about your relationship with your wife…'
'Ah, Jesus,' Carmel said.
Ten minutes later, Lucas leaned toward Allen and asked, 'How well did you know
Rolando D' Aquila?'
Allen looked puzzled. 'Rolando who?'
'D'Aquila. Also known as Rolo, I understand.'
'I don't know anybody by that name,' Allen said.
'Never bought a little toot from him?' Lucas asked.
'No, I never.' He shook his head. 'Toot?'
When Lucas mentioned D'Aquila's name, Carmel slipped back a step, and ran the numbers. They'd found the body, obviously. If they looked up D'Aquila's history – and they would get around to that, if they hadn't already – they'd find her name. They might wonder why she hadn't mentioned it.
'Why are you interested in this Rolando D'Aquila?' she asked Lucas.
'He was murdered last night,' Lucas said. 'He was killed the same way Mrs. Allen was – the method was identical.' He looked back at Allen: 'So you never represented him, or one of his friends, either in a criminal court or in a civil legal matter?'
'No, no, not that I remember. I've represented thousands of people in real estate closings, so maybe, but I don't remember any Rolando…'
'Get off his case,' Carmel snapped. 'He's never represented Rolando D'Aquila in anything.'
'How do you know?' Lucas asked.
'Because Rolo only had one attorney.' Everybody was looking at her now, and she nodded. 'Me.'
After the interview with Allen, as they got coffee from the coffee machine,
Lucas said, 'You were strangely quiet. That always makes me a nervous.'
'I was gonna be the good cop, if you were gonna be the bad,' Sherrill said.
'I agree; he is very good-looking,' Lucas said.
Sherrill laughed and then said, 'He's got these really amazing brown eyes.
They're like perfect little puppy eyes.'
'He's about as bright as a perfect little puppy, too,'
'Lucas said. 'And he's sleeping with his secretary.'
'A secretary, not his secretary. Besides, he had a cold marriage, as I understand it,' Sherrill said. 'And I think his intelligence might lie in other areas than…'
'Than what?'
'Than like in, uh, being smart.'
Lucas choked on the coffee and said, 'Goddamnit, you almost made hot coffee go up my nose.'
'Good,' Sherrill said.
Chapter Seven
When Carmel got back to her apartment, Rinker was lying on the couch, a pillow behind her head, reading the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation. 'Did you know that the French nudie bar is called the foh-LEE-bair-ZHAIR?'
Carmel shrugged: 'Yeah, I guess.'
'See, that's what people get when they study French,' Rinker said, tossing the book on an end table. 'They learn how to pronounce neat stuff. I had to take
Spanish for my BA, but there's nothing neat in the pronunciation. Like in French
– I always thought it was foh-LEE beer-zhair-AY.
'I don't know, I took Spanish, too,' Carmel said.
Rinker sat up, dropped her feet to the floor and asked, 'What happened with the cops?'
'They asked Hale about Rolo. They found his body this morning – some junkie dropped by, looking for coke.'
'Did you tell them that you'd represented Rolo?' Rinker asked.
For a split second, a lie hovered on Carmel's tongue. She rejected it and said,
'Yeah, I pretty much had to. They would've found out.'
'All right. So now they can tie you to Rolo, but they can't tie you to the crime, because nobody knows that you're… involved with Hale. Not even Hale knows it. Have I got that right?'
'That's right.' She wandered to a window and looked out over the city; it was a hot day, and a thin haze hung over the Midway area to the east. 'If it weren't for that fuckin' tape, we'd be in the clear. I'm thinking maybe we should have strangled Rolo, instead of shooting him – then then there wouldn't be any tie.
That was a mistake.'
'Didn't think of it,' Rinker said. 'The gun was just the natural thing to do, since we had it right there.'
'Yeah, well, they're waiting for an analysis of the slugs. They can tell whether the bullets that killed Barbara Allen and the ones that killed Rolo came from the same batch of lead.'
'All right… gonna have to get rid of the guns pretty soon. Or buy a new batch of shells.'
'Did you come up with any ideas about the tape?' Carmel asked.
'Yes, I have,' Rinker said. She stood up, walked to a corner table, and picked up Rolo's address book. 'For one thing, do you remember when he said he gave the tape to somebody named Mary?'
'Yeah – but there aren't any names in the book, only…'
'Initials,' Rinker said. 'But I had a little time, so I started going through it. There are four sets of initials starting with M. So I walked down to your library, and looked in the cross-reference directories… and then I found out he was using a stupid little code on his phone numbers. He put the last number at the beginning. Like he'd have a number, say, that was 123 dash 4567 and he'd write it down as 712 dash 3456.'
Carmel was impressed. 'How'd you figure that out?'
'Because some of the prefixes didn't exist, and the ones that did were all over the place. One was for a dog-grooming service. I mean, why would he even bother to write it in his book? So anyway, the assholes I used to work for did some jail time, and they told me how guys would use these simple codes. So I juggled numbers until I found one that gave me all good prefixes. And then, everything else worked out -all the codes were residential, and two of the names that began with M were women. Or probably women. One was Martha Koch, but the other was just initial M – M. Blanca. Where's there's just an initial, it usually means a woman living alone. Younger woman.'
'Mary?
'No, it's something else – I called, and a woman answered, and I asked for Mary
Blanca and she said I had the wrong number. She had a little accent, maybe Mex.
But I was thinking about how scared Rolo was, and how he came up with the name
Mary. I bet when you asked him for the name, and you said, Quick, I bet her name popped into his head, and it almost got out, but he switched at the last minute.