At a quarter to seven, Hunt and Juhle had baseball gloves on (Hunt owned several) and were playing hardball catch, soft-tossing, alongside the basketball court in Hunt’s warehouse, both of them dressed in street clothes.
“What pisses me off,” Juhle was saying, “is people telling you stuff that they didn’t tell me and Russo when we talked to them. What’d they think we were doing, just dicking around?”
Hunt caught Juhle’s toss and threw it back. “People don’t trust cops. Either that or they’re scared of ’em.”
“Me and Russo? She looks about fifteen and scares no one, trust me. And I can’t even scare my own kids.”
“It’s what you represent. You’re involved with the cops, everybody knows that basically you’re in some kind of trouble. You talk to me or Mickey, or even Tam, it’s just a conversation. Besides, you didn’t want to talk to the blimp lady. We saved you from that.”
“I’m grateful. You guys are my heroes.”
Juhle threw. Hunt caught.
Hunt threw. Juhle caught.
Juhle said, “Ellen Como. We talked to Ellen Como for like an hour, maybe more. She told us basically nothing helpful, and she gives you the store.”
“She got the feeling you thought she was a suspect.”
“Well, she wasn’t all wrong there. She is a suspect. Note the clever use of the present tense. What’d she think? She doesn’t call to report her missing husband for a whole day? She lives two blocks from where they find his body? He got left off outside their house? No, no, it can’t be her. What can we be thinking?” He unleashed a fastball.
“Hey! You’re gonna throw the arm out again. Easy.” Hunt demonstrated, a nice soft sixty- foot toss. “So anyway,” he concluded, “Ellen’s pretty sure it’s her. Alicia.”
“She said he fired her on that day?”
“The very one.”
“Well, the girl said there wasn’t anything physical between them.”
Hunt caught the next throw and shrugged. “Maybe there wasn’t.”
“I’ve seen her, if you remember. I’d bet there was. But even if there was, so what? That doesn’t mean she killed him. And you realize that Ellen could have just been trying to deflect the investigation away from herself?”
“You’re kidding,” Hunt said. “I never would have thought of that.”
“Yeah, well. The thing is, they both had a reason, and she’s the spouse, so she gets top billing until we find some evidence leading someplace else.”
“And on that front…?”
Juhle shook his head no. “Somebody must have dragged him to the lake, or even went in with him and got him tucked under the trees, but there’s no sign of struggle on any of the banks. We’ve just got the body with the bump on the head.”
Hunt threw. “What caused the bump? Any idea?”
“ME says no pattern injury. No definite shape or weight to the weapon. Other than that, something hard. A rock, a piece of lumber. Hell, a baseball bat, an anchor, a sap, a gun? Who knows? Maybe somebody will call you and give you a hint, and then you can tell us. Did I mention that this pisses me off?”
“I think so.”
“You dangle three hundred grand out there-and by the way, that’s obscene in its own right-and suddenly you’ve got witnesses, you got people just dying to be good citizens. You think any one of ’em might just think to pick up the phone and tell what they think they know to the police? You think that maybe could happen just once?”
“You want the truth?”
“Always.”
Hunt caught Juhle’s toss and kept the ball in his mitt, signifying the end of the catch. “I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
Hunt met his girlfriend, Gina Roake, for a late dinner at Sam’s Grill. Sam’s was a hopping power room during the lunch hour, but settled into a more intimate groove as the evening wore on. Now, closing in on nine o’clock, Roake and Hunt sat in one of the booths back by the kitchen. Their waiter had pulled the curtain on them after he’d left their dinners, and there might as well have been no one else in the restaurant.
Roake was older than Hunt, closing in on fifty, but as an inveterate exerciser and outdoors person, she was in excellent shape. After twenty-five years in the practice of law, she’d just recently had her first legal thriller, Brief Deception, accepted for publication, and she was thinking about her next one.
Most of the dinner, they’d talked about what that one might be about, and of course the marketing for the first one. Would they want her to go on tour? What about her law practice when she was out of town? Should she spend her own money on advertising? Did she want to use the same character in the second book, or break in an entirely new one? Maybe she should go to nonfiction, write up one of the real cases she’d seen or worked on? God knows, there had been some good ones. Did she have a big enough theme? Did it have to be a murder case?
Hunt nodded. “Got to be murder.”
“They’re always murders, though. All these books.”
“Right. You know why? Any violent crime that’s not a murder has a living victim. And the victim can tell you what happened. You could write a book, but it would probably be pretty short, and it wouldn’t be much of a mystery.”
She smiled.
“Besides, people don’t care so much about bicycle theft, or other lesser crimes. Except maybe rape, now that I think of it. You could probably do a rape case, but you’d have to kill people in it eventually anyway. And if you’re going to be knocking people off, might as well make it a murder case to begin with.”
“Maybe you’re right.” She put her fork down, reached across the small table, and took his hand. “Have I been monopolizing the conversation?”
“Very charmingly.”
“But that means yes. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. It’s all been interesting.”
“And yet, in spite of that”-she broke a smile-“you seem slightly distracted.”
“Maybe a little,” he said.
“Maybe a little,” she repeated. Then, “What?”
“Actually, it’s been a hell of a day.”
“Good? Bad? I was thinking bad, and didn’t want to ask. You’d get to it.”
“Well, in fact, in a remarkable and unexpected change of pace, it’s been nothing but good. Pretty amazingly good, in fact.” He ran down the events for her, from Tamara’s appearance in the office this morning, to Mickey’s idea and the miraculously ever-growing reward, the reprieve on his business, short-term at least. Ending it with Ellen Como and the tragicomic relief of Virginia, now and forever to be known as the Blimp Lady. The victim’s fall from the sky into the lagoon, “which,” he concluded, “we’ve pretty much discounted as improbable.”
“Good decision.” Gina shook her head in gentle amusement. “This town.” But after another minute, her expression grew serious. “So in effect you’re investigating this murder?”
“Not exactly. Passing what we find, if anything, along to Juhle, is all.”
“He’s talking to you again? I’m glad to hear that.”
“Me too.”
“I felt a little guilty, I still feel a little guilty, about driving you guys apart. Does he know you’re still seeing me?”
“I assume so. He’s a cop. He knows everything. But that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t you and him. It was me and him. Although he’s not too thrilled that people seem to be coming to me now and not him.”
“Is he offering them money too?”
“That’s what I told him. It wasn’t much consolation.”
Gina sipped wine, put her glass down, something obviously still on her mind.
“I can hear the gears turning from over here,” Hunt said.
A fragile smile. “I just worry about you getting in the face of these murder suspects. That’s not exactly the same thing as surveillance, or rounding up witnesses, or subpoena service.”
Hunt downplayed it. “I’m not really getting in anybody’s face, Gina. Just passing along information.”