Hardy explained for the thousandth time that Dismas had been the name of the good thief on Calvary. He did not mention that he was also the patron saint of murderers. "Only thing I can figure, my folks wanted to punish me for some reason. When I think they could have named me Bill, or Jack…"
Terrell's face cracked. "Yeah, I know, anything but Sue." Trying his coffee again, he finally put his spoon down. "This stuff's awesome," he said. "People drink this every day?"
"Every day."
"Awesome." He motioned to Hardy's briefcase. "So'd you check out Ned?" Hardy nodded. He'd gone over the coroner's exhumation report on Edward (Ned) Hollis last night after they'd put the kids down, further endearing him to his wife, who after a day with no adult company had more or less expected him to share the evening with her.
The smile and the aw-shucks manner weren't entirely convincing. This was one smart cop. He could be as friendly as you please, but he wasn’t going to be sandbagged by any smarty-pants defense attorney, even if he happened to be a friend of Abe Glitsky.
But Hardy merely nodded again. There was no battle to be won here. "I'm trying to get a handle on Ned, I suppose. Jennifer doesn't seem to have much to say about him. They found the atropine?"
Terrell pointed a finger at the briefcase. "That what it says?"
'Yeah, but so what?"
It was the first time Hardy had surprised him. "What do you mean, so what?"
"They find a concentration of atropine on the front of the right thigh? Which indicates it might have been injected?"
"Right."
"All right, we'll grant that, but what's to say Jennifer injected him?"
Terrell tried the coffee again, ignoring its awesomeness. "He didn't shoot himself up. Atropine doesn't make you high."
"Okay, but again, so what? Maybe he was trying to kill himself. Maybe he succeeded. What I'm asking is if there's anything I'm missing here, because I don't see why this got charged as a murder."
Terrell was visibly holding himself back. His face was becoming flushed. "This got charged as a murder 'cause it was a murder. Your Jennifer aced him for the seventy-five grand."
Hardy tried to keep it loose. "I'm not saying she didn't. I'm just wondering what proof… if you've got any proof that she was the one who gave Ned the shot? I mean, how do you even know she was in the room?"
"She was in the room. She got him tanked up on booze and coke 'til he passed out, then she bonked him with the needle. Now he's dead, the coroner finds lethal coca-ethylene and forgets about scanning for whatever else might have killed him, like the atropine." He stabbed a finger on the table. "That's what happened, Mr. Hardy. You can bet on it."
Getting back to "Mr. Hardy" wasn't a good sign, and it wasn't Hardy's intention to alienate the inspector. "I'm not saying it didn't. The DA bought it – they charged it. But it seems to me they had to have more."
On the defense now, but softening slightly, Terrell the new homicide cop was anxious to show he'd done it right. "There was more, they did get more. I got 'em Harlan Poole, didn't I?"
"Her lover, the dentist? How'd you get to him?"
"I saw his name in a couple of statements Jennifer made in Ned's file. So I went and talked to him." Eager to explain his technique, Terrell leaned forward across the table. "The thing about this police work is sometimes, you know, you got to have some intuition. I mean, sometimes you just know what went down, right? So you go on that, tweak things a little, and you get somewhere."
"And you tweaked Poole?"
Terrell obviously enjoyed the memory. "Wasn't much of a tweak. The guy's successful, maybe forty-something, wife and three kids. I told him if he cooperated, told us what he knew, we'd try to keep a low profile on him. Guy cracked like a nut."
"And said what?"
"Said he missed the atropine one day after Jennifer had been in the office for a little late night nookie. Evidently they did it in or on – that guy and his wife don't do it much that way anymore. Anyway, he didn't put it together until hubby Ned turned up dead, and then he figured Jennifer had done it and it scared the piss out of him, so gradually, he says, he dumped her."
"Because he thought she'd killed Ned?"
"Yeah, because she killed Ned."
Hardy sat back. To grab some time, he lifted his cup and knocked back the dregs, making a face. There was a crucial something missing here. "Let me get this straight," he said. "When Ned turned up dead, Poole concluded that Jennifer had killed him, is that right?"
Terrell nodded.
"Well, isn't that a bit of a leap? I mean, he must have had some kind of hit this was on her mind – something? Right?"
"Sure. She'd talked about it."
"Talked about killing Ned?" Hardy shook his head. "If Poole got scared off afterward, why didn't he see it coming and dump her before?"
Terrell was engaged now, thinking it through, elbows on the table. "I guess he didn't see it coming. She didn't talk about it as a plan or anything. I think afterward he just put it together."
"But why? Why would it even enter his mind?"
"Because she'd talked about leaving him, about wouldn't it be wonderful if he died, the insurance, all that."
"Leaving him and wishing he'd die aren't the same as actually killing him."
"Okay, but she'd tried to leave him before – a couple of times – and he'd come after her and beat the shit out of her."
Bingo. "Ned beat her, too? Is there any proof of that?"
"You mean did she report it, anything like that? Get serious."
This was good stuff, and possibly true, but Hardy was more than half-certain that all of it was inadmissible because it was hearsay, and twice removed hearsay at that – Dr. Poole saying that Jennifer had told him that Ned had beaten her. Nevertheless, it was a psychological bombshell. If it was true that Jennifer had killed Ned because he was beating her – to stop him and to get the insurance she could figure she was entitled to – who wouldn't believe she had done the same with Larry?
Because the argument was compelling, the temptation to compare the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Larry and Ned would be overwhelming, and Hardy found himself hoping that Powell and the prosecution would get caught up in the symmetry and pursue it. Because it gave her a sympathetic motive in both cases.
But he didn't mention this to Terrell. Instead, he told him he thought what he had was pretty good.
Friends now, or at least amicable adversaries, they stood by the counter waiting for their change, making small talk, Hardy asking if Terrell had ever noticed the funny coincidences that seemed to happen all the time when you got deep into a case.
"Yeah, I know," Terrell said, "it's weird. Couple of months ago, I'm still in burglary, I get a call out in the Mission and I go down there and I'm checking out a broken window when another window across the alley opens up and some guy yells, 'Hey, Wally!' I look up and it's some guy I played ball with in high school. Amazing, but you're right. It happens all the time."
Hardy told him about the death of Simpson Crane in Los Angeles. "Is that strange or what? Here I'm at a murder victim's house, I find a phone number and call it, and I get another murder victim."
That stopped Terrell by the door. Maybe he just wasn't primed yet to go out into the swirling fog, but Hardy didn't think that was it. "How'd you say this guy – Crane? – how'd he get it?"
"They think it was some union job, a professional hit. Just like Jennifer says with Larry. Hell of a coincidence, huh?"
Terrell shook his head, almost as though he were trying to clear it, shake this rogue thought out completely. "No, Larry wasn't no hit. There wasn't any hit man. Jennifer did Larry."
Hardy didn't want to smile when he set the hook. Give this man a theory, Glitsky had said. "Still, you've got to admit, it's interesting."