“I may have cost you a friend,” says Lenore.
“Harry likes to be angry,” I tell her. “He enjoys it. It’s what keeps him going.”
It is true. Ire, it seems, is the only vital force left in his life. By tomorrow he will find something else to raise his hackles, and forget it just as quickly by the next day.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever looked at myself as a health tonic,” she says.
I give her a look, indicating that there is more truth to this than she knows.
“Any suggestions on what I should do?” she asks. “If they question me?”
“They gotta come over Radovich’s body,” I tell her. “I don’t think he will allow it. The risk of invading client confidences is too great,” I say.
“I could just tell them that I went to the door, touched the outside, but didn’t go in.”
“That assumes your print was found on the outside,” I tell her. Kline did not deliver over a copy of the fingerprint report so we do not, at this moment, know where they found it.
Lenore is a lawyer. In a cooler moment she would know it is a mistake to lie.
“A million ways to catch you up,” I say. “And it would raise more questions than it answers. ‘Why, Ms. Goya, did you go all that way, to the apartment of a murdered woman, merely to touch her front door?’”
She looks at me sheepishly.
“They’re certain to ask me whether I was alone,” she says.
Now it comes down to lying for me.
“They are going to want to know what you saw there, whether you touched anything. But the first question is sure to be why you went there. And then they would get to that. Whether anyone was with you.”
“They can’t honestly think that I killed her. What motive could I have? Besides, I was seen in the alley talking to Tony after the cops found her body. They can put two and two together and figure I went from there to Hall’s apartment, after the murder. That doesn’t make me a killer.”
“No, just someone who tramps around in the evidence,” I tell her. “And it still begs the question.” The one I have thus far delicately asked, and which she is dodging. “What were we doing there?”
She gives me a pained expression. “Would you believe satisfying simple curiosity?”
“In a word,” I tell her, “no.”
Her moves that night had more purpose than idle inquisitiveness. There was a reason why she went there. If I had to guess, it was something in the kitchen. I was with her every moment of the time, except for the short span when she was out of my view in Hall’s kitchen.
“You put me in a difficult position,” she says.
“Another conflict?” I ask.
“Of a sort.”
“Would it help if I guessed?”
She gives me a face, like she might tell if I come close. Then again she might not.
“It had to do with Tony, didn’t it?”
Her face is without expression, but the shift of her eyes gives her away.
“Was he seeing her?” It is not a far call, given the fact that having once set his eyes on Hall, Tony would likely go into rutting, like some oversexed Chihuahua.
Harry has struck out with Hall’s neighbor, the one who saw her with the shiner. The woman never saw the man who did it. But Tony Arguillo is rapidly becoming a candidate, someone who in a fit of machismo might be likely to punch Hall’s lights out.
“Let me guess. He left something behind?”
Lenore doesn’t answer.
“You will tell me if I get warm, won’t you?” I say.
I put one hand to my head like the Great Karnak, and venture a guess. “A used condom into which the Great Tony spilled the better part of himself?”
She laughs and turns her nose up at the thought.
“I will try again.” I muse for a brief instant.
“A mighty jockstrap encrusted with sequins and a gold zipper to encase the family scepter?”
She begins to giggle, gallows humor as a sedative in an otherwise unbearable situation.
“Guess again, O Great One,” she says.
“An isometric exerciser for Tony’s alter ego, the flagging Willard?” I say.
“Who the hell is Willard?” she asks.
“The one-eyed monster in the turtleneck sweater,” I tell her.
With this she breaks out in open laughter. “Nothing so lurid,” she tells me.
“Then what?” Karnak suddenly goes serious.
A deep sigh from Lenore. Fun and games are over. It is time to own up, and she knows it.
“They were supposed to have a date that night,” she says. “Tony and Hall. Obviously she was killed and her body was found before he could keep it.”
“That’s what he told you,” I say.
“Listen, Paul, he didn’t kill her.”
“Is that an article of faith?” I ask her.
“I know him. He couldn’t do that.”
“That’s what I thought. So what was it that he left there?”
“He didn’t leave anything.”
Still, she went there for a reason.
“You have to promise you won’t use it.” She means in Acosta’s defense.
“I can’t make that promise and you know it.”
“Listen,” she says. “I believe him. He didn’t have anything to do with her murder.”
“Try me?” I say.
A face of exasperation from Lenore. “That night,” she says. “When we went to meet him where they found the body. In the alley. Tony and I had a moment alone.”
“I remember.” It was in that fleeting instant when she walked away from me toward Arguillo. They talked briefly and I could not hear.
“He told me about their date. Said that Brittany would have made a note somewhere. Apparently she had a penchant for notes. She didn’t trust her memory.”
“She didn’t seem to have any trouble recalling all the picky little details of her conversation with the Coconut in that hotel room,” I say.
“She also had a flair for creative genius,” says Lenore. “I didn’t believe any of it when I heard her story. I think that’s the problem Kline has. He knows her story was full of holes. If they’d have taken Acosta to trial based on her testimony alone, and if he had competent counsel, the judge would have stuffed the case in the prosecution’s ear. They had no case.”
“But they would have prosecuted Acosta just the same?”
She makes a face like she’s not sure. She tells me there was no consensus in the office, that the only one pushing for a trial was Kline, and Hall herself, who saw her credibility as being questioned.
“She thought that if the D.A. didn’t believe her in such an important case, that it would hurt her chances of landing a job on the force after she finished school. She was angry that people were questioning her honesty.”
“Maybe they had good reason,” I say. “She was running with a crowd most of whom were strangers to the truth. That can be contagious.”
“You think they used her to set up Acosta?” she asks. “You’re thinking Lano?”
I give her an expression like it’s a possibility.
“That would be my guess,” she says.
“Anyway, you went to the apartment,” I say. “What were you looking for?”
“A little yellow Post-it note. Tony told me that Hall had a habit of pasting them on her calendar so she wouldn’t forget things.”
“And you found it?”
She nods. “With Tony’s name and phone number, and the time: seven P.M. It was stuck to the calendar for the day of the murder. It’s when I saw the appointment for the meeting with Acosta written on the calendar. The Post-it note was pasted over it.”
“Run that by me,” I say.
“I found the note for Tony’s date.”
“No. No. Not that. Where you found it?”
“Pasted over the notes written on the calendar.”
She still doesn’t get it.
“Acosta’s meeting,” I say.
And then it dawns. “Oh, shit,” she says.
“Could it have meant that the meeting with Acosta was canceled?” I say.
“I don’t think so,” she says. At least Lenore is hoping that she has not destroyed such evidence.
“Not the way it was pasted on there,” she says. “It was more like an addition, as if Hall ran out of room on the calendar.”