"No," Hardy said. "I'm sorry."
Salarco crossed back to the couch, sat now on the edge of it. He seemed to remember his beer and picked it up, drained it, looked across to Hardy. "Otros?"
Hardy hadn't put much of a dent in his first beer, and didn't want another, but he wanted to keep Salarco talking. "Gracias. Sí."
When he came back with the two cold ones, he put them on the coffee table and began without any prompting. "So the phone is there, and I go to it and push nine one one, and tell what I see, where I am. And while I am talking, I notice the gun on the little table in front of the couch." He leaned forward, knocked wood. "Just the same as this one."
"And then what did you do?"
"Then I see how bad this looks, me in this room with the gun. I think the boy, maybe he's going to come back. If he sees I am there, he can say it was me."
"What was you?"
"Who killed these people."
"Why would you have done that?"
Salarco turned his palms up. "The noise. I already come down one time to stop it. Maybe next time, I bring the gun and make sure. Then the woman on the phone, she tries more to get my name, and the other thing comes to me, la migra. I know I have to go. I cannot be there when the authorities come. So I come back up here and watch out the window until the boy comes back, and the authorities."
"You mean Andrew again?"
"Sí."
"You saw him under the streetlight there out the window?"
"Sí."
"The same boy? You're sure."
Salarco put down his beer bottle, turned and faced Hardy directly. "I'm sorry, señor, but it was him. The same hair, the same clothes…"
"And what were they, the clothes?"
"Like all of them wear. I don't know how you say… loose?"
"Baggy?"
Salarco nodded. "Sí. The pants, baggy. And then the…" He made a gesture of pulling something over his head. "Like Eminem in the movie."
"You mean he had a hood? A sweatshirt with a hood?"
"Sí. That was it."
"And even with the hood, you saw his face? And it was the same face?"
After the shortest pause, Salarco nodded. "Sí. Of course. It was the same boy, I say."
Hardy believed him. In fact, it had to be Andrew returning from his walk, or from wherever he had gone. Perhaps having run away and then realizing he'd left the gun, which could be traced back to him. Looking up, Hardy caught a glimpse of Salarco's wife hovering in the doorway back to the kitchen. He might have to talk to her one day as well, but for tonight, he took a last pull from his beer, then stood up. "I want to thank you for your time. You've been very helpful."
"I am sorry about the boy, señor. Truly I am."
"Thank you," Hardy said. "I am, too."
16
It was well past nine o'clock by the time Glitsky sat down to dinner at the small table in his kitchen.
Treya had gotten good at meals that took fifteen minutes to prepare, and she waited until she heard his tread on the steps up to their duplex before she threw the halibut on to broil in the oven. When she turned it the one time, she would smear it with jalapeño jelly, which would melt, forming a fantastic glaze. The asparagus sat in a shallow covered pan with a quarter inch of boiling water. She'd finish that with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and a pinch of sea salt. A small, still warm, dense loaf of homemade bread-machine bread- roasted-garlic with Asiago cheese- would round out the meal, after which they'd split a plate of frozen grapes for dessert.
Glitsky had fed Rachel in her high chair and for the past few minutes had been doing magic tricks, making a quarter disappear. Now Treya put the adult plates down. "Arranged yet," he said. She'd garnished with a few sprigs of fresh rosemary. A crystal vase sat between the place mats on the small wooden table, and in it bloomed one perfect daffodil.
Glitsky put a finger on his daughter's nose, turned to his food and picked up his fork. "Do I thank you enough for doing all this?"
Treya kissed the top of his head. "Every day." She touched her baby's cheek. "You gave me her, didn't you?" She came around the table and took her seat. "Now shush and eat your fish. It's brain food."
"I'd better, then. I'm going to need it." He chewed, swallowed. "This Boscacci thing."
"At least it's not LeShawn Brodie. I checked, and you'd dropped right off the news tonight, just like it never happened."
"Fresh kill," Glitsky said. "Anyhow, you'll be glad to hear Amy Wu's almost certainly out of it."
"She was never really in, though, was she?"
"No, not really, although she could have timed her last meeting with Allan a little better. The real story, though, is that because of her, I got to give Diz a little grief."
Treya smiled. "Always a plus."
"And even more so because I swung by his office to give him his earful of righteous cop, and while I was there, I found a way to repay him for his little caper with my peanut drawer."
"I thought you weren't sure who that was."
"I wasn't, then I realized it had to be Diz. No one else is that immature."
"I can think of one other person," she said.
The corners of Glitsky's mouth rose a fraction of an inch. "Thank you," he said. "Plus, anybody at the Hall, it's too risky if I catch them. They're flayed, then fired. Diz, I get him red-handed and he says, 'Ha ha, you got me, so what?' It was him."
"Okay. So what'd you do to him?"
"First, you have to promise not to tell under penalty of death."
"That goes without saying."
"Diz or Frannie. You'll be tempted."
"I'll resist, I promise. What?"
A spark of mischief flashed in his eyes. "I stole his darts. You want to hear the best part?"
"That wasn't it? What could be better?"
"Next time I'm there, I'm going to put them back. Then steal them again. My hope is that eventually he'll go insane."
"And that would be so that you two could play together as equals?" Treya put her fork down and looked across the table, her own eyes alight. She turned to Rachel. "Do you know how lucky you are that you can't understand any of this?" she asked.
An hour later, the baby was in bed and the two of them sat in their living room with their after dinner tea. "But that poor man…" Treya was talking about Boscacci. "Do you have anything at all?"
"Well, if you count that we're fairly certain it wasn't Amy, we've got that."
"Well, yes. But we knew that this morning before you even talked to her."
"True. But now we know with more certainty," he said. "And not because she works with Diz. Because she couldn't have done it."
"So who could have?"
Glitsky pulled at the scar at his lower lip. "My best guess now is someone he fired in the last three years. Maybe one of them took it personally."
"So how many people did he let go? Allan?"
"Seventeen."
Treya whistled softly. "That's a lot."
Glitsky sat back into the couch. He reached down near his belt and probed, perhaps unconsciously, at his side. "Well, fortunately," he went on, "I've got a lot of resources for a change. I've got two inspectors from General Work for the canvassing and alibi checking, then Belou and Russell from homicide, and they'll basically be full time to find and interview the folks Allan fired. Then Marcel asked to be part of it, too, back on the street if he had to. And, of course, my own magnificent self."