‘Yes, I read the file. Girl was found murdered in New Orleans, wasn’t she?’ He half smiled. ‘You got a bonus, so I heard, a big one.’
‘Yes, I did. Not that I think it’s any business of yours, but it’s what I used to open up my office.’
‘Did Sharkey get a cut of your bonus?’
‘No, he did not. It was split between myself and my partners.’
Burton drained his glass, and held the blue goblet loosely in his hands. ‘You working for Cindy Nathan?’ he asked casually.
‘Yes.’
‘You mentioned a number of things to Detective Sharkey — some tapes, telephone and video...’
Lorraine stood up. ‘Yes, I did, but he said you knew about them, or the investigating officers did.’
‘Then he lied. It was the first we’d heard of them. You want to tell me about them?’
Lorraine was getting edgy. Burton had got up and was wandering around the room. It unnerved her, as if he was mentally sizing up both her and her apartment. ‘It seems Nathan recorded all incoming calls, and had video monitors set up all over the house.’
‘So what did you glean from these tapes?’ he asked, bending to look at a photograph of her father in police uniform.
‘That Nathan was both vain and paranoid,’ Lorraine replied. ‘Most of the tapes were of him making beauty appointments. None that I had the opportunity to listen to were of much interest, and some were destroyed.’ She had his full attention now. ‘Someone broke into my office and poured acid over them.’
‘Did you tell Sharkey this?’
‘No.’
‘And the videos?’
‘Well, they’re a little different. They are explicit recordings of Nathan’s sexual exploits with his last two wives.’
Burton folded his arms. ‘Is that why you wanted to see Sharkey? Trade off these videos?’
‘No, though I offered them. A good defence attorney will also use them — Cindy took a lot of abuse.’
‘Enough to make her kill him?’
‘No, not necessarily. I know the evidence against her is pretty incriminating — maybe too incriminating — but I don’t think she did it.’
‘You mean she could have been set up?’
‘Possibly.’
He sat on the arm of the sofa. ‘By whom?’
‘I don’t know, it’s just a theory.’
‘And you are obviously being paid a good retainer to find out?’
‘Again, I don’t think that’s any of your business. I’m doing my job, that’s all.’
‘Apart from the tapes and the videos, do you have anything that would cast suspicion on someone else?’
It was Lorraine’s turn to pace the apartment. Should she tell him about her suspicions of Kendall Nathan, the parked jeep? She played for time, tidying a stack of magazines on the coffee table.
‘You had a problem with your car?’ he said. ‘Sharkey told me.’
She straightened. ‘Yes, brake cable had been cut, sliced in two.’
‘But you didn’t report it?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think someone was warning you off?’
‘I’d say it might have been a bit more than a warning — if I’d been going at any speed and had to stop I might have been killed.’ She swung round to face him. ‘And this unofficial visit is beginning to get to me. Do you think I’m withholding evidence or something? Why would I? Christ, I’m hired to get my client off a murder rap. Surely anything I come up with I’d feed back to—’
‘I’d like to see the tapes.’
‘Fine, send someone round to my office and you can have them.’
‘What else have you got?’
She glared at him, and he looked back at her with laser-like intensity.
‘You don’t believe Cindy Nathan killed her husband. Is it just a gut feeling, or do you have other evidence that might implicate someone else?’
Lorraine thought for a moment, then said, ‘Okay, there was a jeep parked across from the Nathans’ house, unidentified so far, seen by the housekeeper. He was sure it didn’t belong to anyone in the neighbourhood, two-tone Mitsubishi, driven away shortly after the shooting. Kendall Nathan owns a jeep that matches that description. Kendall Nathan was also one of only two people who knew that the tapes which were destroyed at my office were in there.’ Burton remained impassive. ‘Cindy Nathan thinks she heard possibly two shots — the first she presumed was a car backfiring, so she didn’t pay any attention to it, and the second made her get up and walk round to the pool area. That’s when she found her husband.’
‘He was shot only once.’
‘Yes, but...’ Lorraine decided against saying anything about the bullet she had found. ‘There was also a phone call,’ she went on. ‘Someone called me right after Nathan was shot, said she was Cindy Nathan, but Cindy subsequently said it wasn’t her. Now that I’ve met her, I don’t think the voice was hers either. It could have been Kendall’s but she denied it.’
‘But Kendall Nathan doesn’t have much of a motive, right? She gets half an art gallery, but Cindy’s the one who stood to inherit the house and the stock and everything.’
Burton had surprised Lorraine — division heads didn’t usually spend much time poring over reports and, in her experience, few had been sufficiently involved with an individual case to discuss motive. But, then, she had never had an unofficial home visit from anyone that high up either.
‘Maybe the motive isn’t financial,’ she said. Burton gave her that penetrating look again. ‘Nathan’s finances, as far as I can gather, are not as healthy as one would expect — Cindy Nathan is not coming into a fortune. I’d say she might even find herself in debt after she’s paid off all Nathan’s creditors, so I’m in two minds about money being in the picture at all.’
Burton hesitated before replying. ‘Maybe you’re right, but even if it’s not money, Cindy Nathan is still in the frame. You’ve said he abused her — maybe she’d taken enough. She’d threatened publicly to kill him and, according to the reports I’ve read, she was pretty confused when she was arrested, not saying categorically that she didn’t kill him, but that she didn’t think she did, that she couldn’t have. Then she said, “Could I?”’
Lorraine sat down on the sofa. ‘Yeah, I know, but she found the body. She was presumably in a state of shock.’
‘Perhaps you don’t know the results of the medical examination, after she was brought into the station?’
‘She was pregnant. Yes, I do know, and she lost the child — in fact she’s only just been released from hospital.’
‘I wasn’t referring to her pregnancy. Cindy Nathan is or was a cocaine addict. According to the report, your client was high as a kite on the morning of the shooting.’ He looked at his watch, then extended his hand. ‘Thank you very much for seeing me, Mrs Page.’
She shook his outstretched hand, trying not to show her astonishment that Cindy Nathan had been doped up when she had first spoken to her.
‘I’ll have someone collect the tape footage from you first thing in the morning,’ he said coolly.
She walked beside him to the front door. He stood head and shoulders above her, and she was close enough to smell his aftershave, fresh, lemony, discreet. He took her by surprise again when he opened the screen door and said softly, ‘You don’t look anything like your photograph.’
She looked up into his face. ‘My photograph?’
‘Mug-shot. I read up on you, Mrs Page.’
‘Did you?’ she said coldly.
He held open the screen door with the toe of his shoe. ‘But, then, that sort of photograph is never very flattering, is it?’
‘No, and it was a long time ago.’
He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I congratulate you. It takes a lot of personal courage to beat alcoholism — beat the demons, so to speak.’ Lorraine made no reply. He had read the reports of her drunkenness and her arrest for vagrancy, no doubt he even knew she had prostituted herself, but she felt sickened above all that he knew what she had done — knew why she had been cold-shouldered out of the force. It made her flush.