And this was the block that had produced two eyewitnesses for the time of the murder and more of the FedEx delivery truck? Hardy thought Terrell must be one persuasive interrogator.
Inside, after another minute, the barking stopped.
The house was white. The foyer was of white Italian marble with pink striations. Soft furnishings were modern and white, tables and racks were black cast-iron. Everything sat on light champagne wall-to-wall carpeting. On the walls Hardy recognized one of the Mapplethorpe's that had caused the stir, along with a print of Goya's Mother Eating Her Child. Up close, he studied a couple of other prints or originals that he wouldn't have hung in a locked darkroom, much less in the living room of a home with a child.
On his yellow pad he made a note to make sure David Freeman kept the media out of here. He had to assume the stuff reflected Larry's tastes, not hers.
Downstairs everything was spotless, antiseptic. The kitchen – a black-and-white checkerboard tile and black-and-white fixtures – looked as though it had never been used. Copper pots gleamed from their hanging cast-iron rack over the island stove.
The silence hung heavily – Hardy found himself walking on the balls of his feet as he moved through the other downstairs rooms. The dining room with its black lacquer table and six chairs. A library with mostly medical books. No novels, a lot of history and biography. There was a tiny sitting room with a fireplace and a loveseat with a magazine stand end-table. But there were no magazines. A guest bedroom. Hardy pulled down the quilt on the bed, there was no sheet under it.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Jennifer had been living here? There was no sign of life. He jotted another note to ask her if she had stayed somewhere else during the past months. And if so, where?
A month after he and Frannie had moved in together he had bought her one of those little tiles at the Ghirardelli Art Fair that read: A Clean House Is A Sign of A Wasted Life. That tile hung proudly in their kitchen. He didn't need to think he needed to search for where Jennifer kept hers.
Upstairs was more of the same. To the left was what must have been Matt's bedroom, the bed now made, toys neatly arranged. The evening sun was going down, bathing the room in an orange glow. Off this was a full bath, sea-horse stencils on the wall – minimal as it was, so far it was the only sign of any comfort in the house.
Hardy passed the stairway again, stopping to look down at the living and dining rooms below him. White. Black. Mirrors and metal and a growing dusk. Whatever else he had to do, he wanted to be done and out of here in a hurry.
The master bedroom was a surprise. The yellow police tape was still there, no longer in place across the door but lying on the rug. He stepped over it and walked to the middle of the room.
After the police department's technicians had finished with their forensics and the cleaners had repaired the damage, Hardy was suddenly certain that Jennifer had not set foot in this room. There were folded sheets and blankets on the bed's bare mattress, towels on the cabinet by the bathroom door, balls of dust in the corners.
He didn't know if he imagined the remains of the bloodstains – it was getting darker so he flipped on the overhead light. It went out with a pop. There were other lights on night tables on either side of the recessed headboard to the bed, and quickly – jumpy – he got to one of them and hit the button. That was better. He walked around the bed and turned on the second one. Leaning down, he checked the white rug, running his hand over what might have been a stain. As part of him had known, nothing came up, yet it strangely relieved him.
Hardy stood, more steady than he'd been. Turning on the adjoining bathroom's light, he looked in. Again, no sign that anyone had been in there since it had been cleaned. Turning off the lights by the bed, he stopped at the hallway door for at last glance into the shadowy room where the murders had occurred.
At the end of the hallway there was another door, the last room on the left. The overhead light, which stayed on this time, revealed an impersonal study with credenza, files, a short bookshelf filled with medical and business periodicals. The centerpiece of the room was a neatly organized black tabletop desk with a new leather-bound green blotter. Hardy sat at it.
Evidently no one had been in here either. The dust was thick on the tabletop. Hardy wondered if the police had inventoried this room, realizing there may have been no need to. Jennifer, he remembered, had provided the damning inventory, "forgetting" that the gun was missing.
(And, of course, if she hadn't ever gone back into that bedroom, she might have been able to assume it hadn't been missing. This could be vital. He had to ask her, and he scribbled some more.)
Sitting, the sun all but gone now through the louvered window over the desk, Hardy tried to imagine what living here must have been like. The degree of control and discipline everywhere palpable was, he thought, the kind of environment that could have produced internal, and external, paroxysms, convulsions. There just wasn't any place for release, even a gradual release. When emotions got too tightly wound here, they wouldn't unwind, they'd explode.
He had jotted his last notes on his yellow pad on the desk blotter, and as he stared at the rim of the ocean he realized he'd been picking at the blotter with his left hand. In the upper left corner, under the triangle of leather, a scrap of paper protruded. He pulled it out.
It was a piece of lined paper from a pocket-sized spiral notebook. The side was frayed where it had been torn off, which seemed a little out of character for Larry Witt – those irregularities in the edge, Hardy was beginning to suppose, should have been intolerable to him. He would have cut them off with the precise little scissors on his Swiss Army knife.
He smiled scornfully at his imagination. There was something more immediate at hand – on the paper was the date "December 23" and the single word "No!!!" which, in addition to the three exclamation points, was underlined twice and circled. And under that was a telephone number with a 213 area code – downtown Los Angeles.
Hardy dialed the number.
"Law offices."
Naturally, he thought. He identified himself and asked to speak to the office manager. His watch read five-fifty on a Thursday night, but law firms never slept – there was no hesitation. The receptionist said that Ms. Klein would be right with him.
It wasn't immediate but soon enough. Either Ms. Klein had had an extremely bad day or she was someone Hardy wouldn't want to party with. "I'm sorry," she was saying, "the message wasn't very clear. You are?"
Hardy explained again – that he was representing a client in the Bay Area and among the papers in her house had been a document on which he'd found the phone number he'd called. He wondered what the connection might be. The firm was? He figured that he could play her game as well as anyone.
"Crane amp; Crane. And your client is?"
"Jennifer Witt."
Ms. Klein paused. "Well, the name isn't familiar to me." A tired laugh: "But that doesn't mean anything."
"How about the name Larry Witt? He was her husband. Maybe one of your attorneys would know? Your managing partner? Could I…"
Abruptly, her voice seemed to break. "No. No, you can't!" Another pause, so long that Hardy thought she might have hung up.
"Ms. Klein?"
"Oh, oh, I'm sorry, you'll have to excuse me, please, I'm just to myself. This past week… I shouldn't even be saying this…"
"Is everything all right?"
"No, Mr… Hardy, is it? No, everything is not all right."