Guilt

'You've had this before?' Lou asked. It bothered him. This was San Francisco, a major restaurant town, and Lou featured his wife's cuisine as cutting edge, which, in fact, it was. Not particularly good, but nobody else made anything like it.

'Lou, they got this at the Round Table, just without the goat cheese.'

The Greek turned to Drysdale. 'He's putting me on.'

'It's possible,' Art agreed. 'But here's an idea. The chicken. Why don't you just serve it over rice – forget the pizza altogether. Call it Kung Pao Chicken?'

'But then it's Chinese food.' The idea clearly distressed Lou. 'Everybody makes Kung Pao Chicken. People come here to eat, they expect Lou the Greek's, something Greek, am I right? I let my wife take over completely and pretty soon I'm Lou's Dragon Moon, a Chinese place. I'm fighting for my ethnic identity here.'

Glitsky took a bite of the pizza. 'On second thought, leave the goat cheese, maybe sprinkle on some grape leaves.'

Lou straightened up, struck by some merit in Glitsky's suggestion. 'Kung Pao dolmas,' he said. 'You think?'

Drysdale nodded. 'Worth a try. Abe?'

Glitsky's attention had suddenly wavered. He was staring blankly out the window at the alley.

'Abe?' Drysdale repeated. 'You with us?'

'Yeah, sure.'

'I was telling Lou. King Pao dolmas? Good idea?'

Coming back from far away, Glitsky nodded. 'Yeah, good idea. Definitely.'

But the real purpose of the lunch.

'I'm just going to pretend to be a meddling, picky defense attorney here now for a couple of minutes,' Drysdale was saying. 'I can see you and Amanda want to run with this and my instinct tells me it's going to go high profile in about ten seconds, so I'd like to have answers for some questions that I predict will be asked by our ever-vigilant media, to say nothing of my boss.'

The pizza was done, the tray cleared away. Glitsky had his hands folded around a fresh steaming mug of green tea on the table in front of him. 'Okay, shoot.'

'All right. Dooher comes home from work, brings some champagne, into which he intends to put some chloral-hydrate, thereby to knock his wife out so that he can come back later and kill her. But when he gets home, she is already dead. This is the theory?'

'Right.' This was, of course, the nub of the problem. 'But he doesn't know she is dead. He's got his plan all worked out and he's moving fast, all nerves. He comes in, says thank God she's not awake, not moving, and he sticks her, rearranges the body to make it look like a struggle, gets back to the driving range before anybody notices he's gone.'

'But he was gone, Abe. He's been gone at least a half-hour. And nobody noticed? You talked to people there at the driving range, right? Anyway, forget that. Let's go back. You're saying he poisoned her with chloral-hydrate, is that it? How do we know she just didn't take the stuff? What if she was committing suicide?'

Glitsky spun his tea slowly. 'So your argument is that Dooher waits until his wife commits suicide and then comes in and stabs the body with a knife and makes it look like a burglary?' He shook his head. 'No, Art. The knife-wound is why it's not suicide. The drugs is why it's not a burglary. Besides, there wasn't enough chloral-hydrate to kill her.'

Drysdale spread his palms. 'I thought she was poisoned. Didn't you just say the chloral-hydrate…?'

'The chloral-hydrate is the drug Dooher gave her to knock her out, make her go to sleep. But what he didn't know was that she was evidently having a tough time with menopause and was already taking a drug called Nardil for depression. Also, just that day she had evidently dosed herself up with Benadryl. She had an allergy shot that morning. So she was already drugged to the gills. Then she drank the champagne. Add alcohol, mix and pour. The chloral-hydrate pushed her over. It did her in.'

'Okay.' Drysdale sighed. 'So what, exactly, does that leave us with? The stabbing is a crime, okay, but it's not Murder One. Hell, it's not Murder Anything to stab a dead body.'

'It is Murder One to poison somebody to death.'

Drysdale sat back in the booth, contemplating it.

A quiet edge crept into Glitsky's voice. He leaned in over the table. 'This works, Art, listen: Amanda's argument isn't going to be that he meant to kill her with chloral-hydrate, even though that was the result. He didn't intend to kill her until he stabbed her later, but he did intend to give her poison, and she died from that. And the beauty is that stabbing her is what proves it.'

'And, of course, we can prove that?'

'We know he stabbed her.'

'Not exactly my question.'

'Okay. This is what we've got. You tell me.' Glitsky outlined it all. It was Dooher's knife and contained only his fingerprints. He had left his house alarm system off and his next-door neighbor had seen him unscrewing his side-door light on the way out to the driving range. Another neighbor saw his car parked on the street around the corner from his house during the time he was supposedly hitting golf balls. Then there was wiping the blade on the victim's clothes, which Glitsky had never encountered before in all his years in Homicide – and now it had happened twice in cases implicating Mark Dooher, three times if you included Chas Brown's Vietnam story. Finally, there was the blood that had been contaminated with EDTA. 'And who else would have stabbed a dead woman and then faked a burglary?'

When Glitsky finished, Drysdale sat still for a moment. 'You've got an eyewitness for the car?'

Glitsky nodded. 'Emil Balian. Swears it was Dooher's car, swears it was that night, that time. Rock solid.'

Drysdale appeared satisfied. There's your case,' he said. 'Don't let that guy die.' A beat. 'But now, just for me, Abe, one more thing. You want to tell me why he did it?'

'Frank's always telling me we don't need motives. We just need evidence.'

'And Frank's right, Abe, he's right. But Chris Locke is going to be curious as to why a model citizen suddenly decides to kill his wife.'

'Don't forget Victor Trang.'

'Okay. Him, too, maybe – two of them for no apparent reason. Why did he do this?'

'Maybe Sheila and Trang were having an affair.' Glitsky held up a hand. 'Just kidding. The real answer is we don't know. Not yet.'

'Well, Chris Locke is going to ask, Abe, and I'd be a whole lot more comfortable if I had something to tell him.'

'Amanda's got two possible theories.'

'Which are?'

'This thing with Sheila's drinking. We've heard some talk – both from neighbors and from some of Dooher's partners, that she got silly when she was out in public. She might have pushed it too far, become an embarrassment.'

'I don't think so,' Drysdale said flatly.

'The other one is money.'

'Money is always good. What kind of money?'

'A million six. Insurance.'

'The wife had a million six? Now we're talking.'

'Well, they both had it.'

'The same amount on each other? Why?'

'I gather when Dooher reorganized his firm a couple of years ago, things got pretty lean. They were living on their savings, deferring his salary, the whole thing. Dooher thought he'd turn it around eventually, and he did, but if he died halfway through, Sheila was pretty exposed, so they started to buy some term on him just in case, and then she evidently wanted to protect him if she died in the middle of it.'

'So, bottom line, Dooher's getting it?'

'Yep.'

Drysdale stretched his neck, looked around the now near-empty bar. 'All right,' he said, slipping out of the booth. 'It could be tighter, but I think we've got enough. I'll tell Amanda that if we need it we're going to go with the insurance.'

Drysdale waited until the end of the day. He was going to be reporting to Chris Locke anyway on a host of other matters, and while he didn't for a moment dream that he'd simply slip this one through, he thought he would package it to appear within the realm of normal business.