Kovac pulled his badge out of his coat pocket and showed it to her. “This is already police business, ma’am. Go back into your apartment and lock the door.”
The woman disappeared.
Kovac turned back to David Moore.
“Why didn’t you tell me a man joined your little party at the bar last night?”
Moore looked away, looked confused, shrugged, spread his hands. Only the first thing was significant.
“I-I don’t know,” he stammered. “I didn’t know the guy. Why would I mention it?”
“Because you don’t leave things out when you talk to the cops, Einstein. It tends to make us suspicious when we find out after the fact. Who was he?”
“Ivors knew him. He’s-uh-in the business. He’s a-a director of photography. He stopped by. We talked about my project.”
“What’s his name?”
“Don something. I don’t remember his last name.”
“He drops by to talk about your project. Maybe ’cause he’s interested in doing whatever he does for you, right? And you don’t remember him. He didn’t give you a business card?”
“It was a casual conversation. Ivors wanted me to meet him. That’s all.”
“So why did Ivors and your little Bird friend not say something about him to me either?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t think it was important. He was only there for a few minutes.”
“I’m supposed to swallow this load of horseshit?” Kovac asked.
“I don’t care what you believe.”
“That’s a very poor attitude you’ve got, Sport. You damn well ought to care what I think. Because I have the power to take your putrid little life apart turd by turd and poke at every slimy thing crawling under your lies.
“And now I’m gonna go upstairs and talk to the little chickadee without you being there. Did you all get your lies lined up beak to tail earlier today? ’Cause I’ll be a lying son of a bitch and tell her that you talked and told me all about your plan, so she might as well too. And Edmund Ivors won’t be there to put words in her mouth this time.”
Moore ’s cell phone rang, tucked somewhere in a pocket.
“Why don’t you answer that, Dave?” Kovac suggested. “That’s probably her right now, wanting to know where the hell you are.”
Moore didn’t move.
Kovac pushed past him, took the stairs back up to the third floor, and knocked on the door of apartment 309.
Ginnie Bird opened the door immediately, her face falling as she was greeted with the unpleasant surprise of Kovac.
“Can I come in?” he asked even as he stepped inside the apartment and past her.
Moore came in behind him. “You don’t have to talk to him, Ginnie. Not without a lawyer.”
Kovac arched a brow. “Ms. Bird isn’t under arrest. Why would she want a lawyer present?”
Ginnie Bird looked like a deer in the headlights. Dumb as a sack of hair, this girl. Her assets lay elsewhere-in plain sight. Deep purple silk and lace were artfully arranged over her unnaturally round breasts and slender frame in the form of a camisole and a thong. She wore a sheer purple robe over the ensemble for her version of modesty. It barely came to the top of her thighs. She balanced on a pair of silver stilettos. All ready to offer comfort and white-hot sex to poor beleaguered David Moore.
Kovac looked around what he could see of the apartment. Hardwood on the hall floor, white carpet flowing through a dining/living room to a small gas fireplace with a granite surround. Contemporary furnishings-chrome, glass, leather.
“Nice digs,” Kovac said. “But we’re a long way from Hudson, Wisconsin. You must be very good at what you do to have a place on this side of the river and the other, Ms. Bird.”
“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.