“Ginnie is a casting director-” Moore started.
Kovac turned on him. “You’re interfering with a police investigation, asshole. You can sit down and shut up, or I can put you in the hall facedown on the floor, hog-tied.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Moore said.
“Hey, you’re the one who decided I’m crazy. You don’t know what I might do. And you really don’t want to find out the hard way, do you?”
Moore held up his hands and took a couple of steps backward into the dining room area to pace.
Kovac turned back to Ginnie Bird. “Ms. Bird, you were at the Marquette Hotel last night, having drinks with your boyfriend here, Edmund Ivors, and a third man who dropped by. Who was that man?”
Her eyes darted to Moore. Kovac moved into her line of sight.
“Don… something,” she said. “It was loud in the bar. I couldn’t catch his last name.”
“What was he doing there?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention.”
She shifted to the left, trying to make eye contact with Moore again.
“What’s the matter, Ms. Bird?” Kovac asked. “Can’t remember your lines?”
“There’s nothing to remember,” she said. “I don’t know anything that might help you.”
“You don’t know about the payoff? The twenty-five thousand dollars?”
He had told David Moore he would bluff a confession out of her, but Kovac knew in truth he had to tread lightly. It didn’t take a very clever defense attorney to get tossed anything a client had said without first being Mirandized. A good lawyer could get a confession tossed even after the client’s rights had been read to them. They would argue the police had violated the client’s rights by denying them counsel, even though one of the first items mentioned in Miranda was the right to an attorney. Or they would argue that their client hadn’t been of a clear mind, or some other lawyer bullshit.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ginnie Bird said.
Her eyes were a little glassy. The end of her nose was red. Kovac glanced around the room, hoping against hope to see drug paraphernalia out in plain sight. Then he could have taken her in, questioned her at the station, put a little scare in her. But he didn’t see anything.
“You don’t know anything about your boyfriend here paying someone to get rid of his wife?”
“David would never do that,” she said adamantly. “Never. Why can’t you just leave us alone? All we want is to be happy.”
“Yeah,” Kovac said. “The problem with that is Mrs. Moore. And somebody tried to eliminate that problem last night. If you know who that somebody was, and you don’t tell me, you become an accessory after the fact. If you knew about what was going to happen before it happened, that’s conspiracy. Either way, you go to jail.”
“I can’t tell you anything, because there’s nothing to tell,” she said. “David is going to divorce her. He told her tonight.”
“Did he?” Kovac said, looking at Moore. “That’s an interesting spin.”
“I think you should leave now, Detective,” Ginnie Bird said. “I know my rights.”
As explained to her by the lawyer the escort agency had sent to bail her out, back when she got paid per sex act, Kovac thought. What an idiot David Moore was, throwing away a woman like Carey, and a beautiful daughter, for this chick.
He turned to Moore, shaking his head. “Man, you have to be one of the all-time fools.”
Moore said nothing.
“I’ll see you around,” Kovac said, ambling toward the door. “And next time I’ll come with warrants. And just let me give you fair warning, Mr. Moore. If I find one shred of solid direct evidence that links you to your wife’s attack, I will unleash hell on you.”
Back on the street, Kovac walked down to the unmarked car assigned to tail David Moore and told the officers to call him if Moore so much as came out of the building to fart.
Back in his own car, he settled behind the wheel and just sat there, willing his blood pressure to calm down. He wanted to take David Moore apart. He wanted the guy to be guilty. He wanted someone to cough up the real name of Don Something, the alleged director of photography, so he could put the guy under a spotlight and get him to sweat out his connection to Moore.
That was what he wanted. The problem with that was that he wasn’t supposed to want anything. A good detective didn’t draw conclusions until he had all the facts. Getting too close to a crime-or to the victim of a crime-was a stop on the way to madness. Or to the civilian review board. If anyone had seen him knock David Moore back into that elevator, Moore would have had a corroborating witness for his brutality charge.
Still… it had sure as hell felt good to do it.
As Kovac savored the moment, his cell phone started to bleat.
“Kovac.”
“Liska.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t sound so happy to hear from me. I’ll get the wrong idea,” Liska said sarcastically. “Who were you expecting to call you? The Queen of Sheba? Catherine Zeta-Jones? Oxsana the Amazing Contortionist?”
“Is there a reason I’m talking to you?” Kovac asked, cranky because he had actually let himself think the call might be from Carey. And if Liska had known that, she would have given him no end of shit. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Yeah,” she said. “You need to book it over to HCMC.”
“Why?”
“Because Kenny Scott had a visit today from your friend Stan Dempsey.”
34
KARL KNEW HE couldn’t stay in the park all night. He had been there for a long time as it was, though no one had paid him any mind. But the city didn’t allow overnight parking in the lot.
He had spent the afternoon wandering from park bench to park bench. The day had been so pretty, people had stayed in the park to have cookouts, to watch the sun set, to squeak out every drop of good weather. The smell of meat grilling had made Karl’s stomach growl. But now the warm day had given way to a chilly evening that was nipping right through his brown cashmere poncho and sneaking up under his skirt. It was time to move to a warmer hiding spot.
He stared across the street at Carey Moore’s house. One set of windows upstairs and one set downstairs glowed with lamplight.
In the afternoon, Karl had spotted her briefly as a black Mercedes sedan had rolled out of the garage. She was in the passenger’s seat. A police officer was driving. A small head of unruly dark hair had bounced up and down in the backseat. Carey Moore’s child.
Karl closed his eyes and imagined her heavy with child. A beautiful sight. A Madonna. His angel. He wondered what she might be doing right at that very moment.
At one point earlier in the evening, a man got out of a sedan parked behind the police cruiser, went to the driver’s side of the car, and said something to the officers inside, then walked up into the yard and stood near the lighted downstairs windows. Another cop. Plainclothes.
Time had stretched by and nothing happened.
As he contemplated this peculiar turn of events, the Moores ’ garage door rose and the same black sedan rolled out with only the driver inside. A man, he reckoned, by the size of him. The husband, he supposed. He drove away fast, like maybe he was mad about something. Another sedan had slid away from the curb to follow him. The plainclothes cop had followed moments later.
The important thing to Karl was that the husband was gone.
Soon it would be time for him to speak to Carey Moore. To thank her for her kindness to him. To explain to her his feelings for her and how much she meant to him. In his whole life hardly anyone had ever taken his side in anything. She had risked her life to take his side in this trial.
He imagined kneeling at her feet, pouring his heart out to her. He imagined her expressing her understanding to him. In his imagination she was lit from behind with a golden light, and she stood with her arms opened, looking just like a statue of the Virgin Mary his mother had kept on her dresser. It was a beautiful dream.