“Again?”
“I told you, guys were always her problem. She’s kind of pretty, and then of course having her father kill himself, she’s got a few issues of abandonment and self-esteem. Wants to prove she’s attractive to men. You’d think after the first fifty, the issue would kind of go away. But in Dominic’s case, I didn’t ask, and she didn’t say. She did tell me, though, that she didn’t kill him.”
“You asked?”
He nodded. “Directly. I wanted to know what we were dealing with.”
“And you believe her?”
“Absolutely. She wouldn’t ever lie to me. I’m sure of that.”
“Okay.”
“Plus, you should see her. When it finally came out he was actually dead and not just missing, after you found him in the lagoon… I mean, she’s been crying full-time ever since.”
Even with his limited experience of criminal matters, Mickey had learned that crying wasn’t a guarantee of innocence or of much else. Wyatt Hunt had told him that most people who kill someone close to them spend at least some time afterward crying about it for one reason or another-genuine remorse for what they’d done, or self-pity for the predicament in which they’d put themselves. “So what would you want a private investigator to do for you?” Mickey asked.
“I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. I only thought of the possibility of it when I saw you on the tube and they said that’s what you were. I know it’s not much of a connection, you and me. But I thought you might be cheaper than a lawyer.”
That drew a quick laugh. “That’s true enough. Most of the time, we work for lawyers. That’s basically the gig. So you’re right, we’d be cheaper. Although we’re probably not going to be what she needs.”
“Well, I thought that at least you weren’t a cop out to get her. I thought maybe you could find out the truth.”
“Often not so easy. But you should know that the cops aren’t going to be out to get her unless there’s some evidence that points to her. And then after that, the truth might not be what you want to hear, in spite of what she’s told you, or didn’t tell you.”
“I realize that. But I feel like I… I mean we talked about it, and both of us feel like we ought to do something. We can’t just sit and let the cops build a case around her. Especially since it was somebody else.”
Mickey’s mouth broke into a smile. “So basically you’d want us to find out who killed him?”
“Or just eliminate Alicia as a suspect.”
“Well, if she’s really a suspect, what you really need is a lawyer.”
“Except that’s a problem too.”
“Why?”
“Money.” Thorpe came forward, elbows on the table. “I mean, we’ve got maybe a thousand or so between us, but that’s at the outside. It would pretty much tap us both out.”
Mickey sat back and turned his cup slowly on the tabletop. “Actually,” he said at last, “if that’s all the money you have, it’s good news in a way.”
“How’s that?”
“You can’t afford even the cheapest lawyer. And no reputable investigator would even start this kind of open-ended job for that kind of money. So you don’t have to lose any of it. And if somebody-lawyer or investigator-offers to take you on with that little as a retainer, you know you’re dealing with a shyster.”
Thorpe’s shoulders fell.
“Another good-news moment,” Mickey continued. “If Alicia does get charged, the court will appoint a lawyer for her for free. You know that, right?”
But Thorpe shook his head. “Her getting charged wouldn’t be good news, no matter what. I spent some time in custody when I was younger. I think real jail might actually kill her. We can’t let it get to that. She didn’t kill Dominic, I promise you.”
Mickey spread his hands in an apologetic gesture. “In that case, I doubt they’ll get anywhere near an arrest. But I don’t-” Suddenly he stopped as the germ of an idea occurred to him.
Dominic Como was a recent, high-profile murder. San Francisco’s large and generous philanthropic community, and in fact many of the charities with which Como had been actively involved, could be expected to have a vested interest in apprehending his killer. But in general, precisely these very people had a deep-seated mistrust, if not actual hatred, of police and law enforcement in general. In this, the most left-wing big city in the country, better the murder of one of their own should go unsolved than that they should cooperate with the Man. Police, and probably the mayor herself, would be seeking a speedy resolution to the Como case, and at least an arrest. But a lot of the people who might know the most would be the least likely to talk to the cops.
What if, Mickey wondered, the Hunt Club could act as the clearinghouse between the people with information, the police who needed the information, and the institutions that had the cash that would be willing to pay for the information? What if he could pitch the idea of a “people’s reward” for information related to Como’s death?
This could in theory serve a host of purposes: It might provide valuable tips for the police; it would involve the wider community in the investigation; it could, of course, most importantly motivate an otherwise reluctant witness to come forward. On a more personal note, the Hunt Club could stay open servicing the reward hotline. If the reward was a significant dollar number, many a lunatic would also be contacting the charities who’d offered the money with spurious and/or just plain stupid or wrong information.
The Hunt Club might be of real value managing the flow of information to the police, forwarding any genuine leads, and gatekeeping against reports from the nutcase front. The process would save the cops perhaps hundreds of man-hours of unnecessary work winnowing out the wheat from the chaff.
This was work the charities would want done, but they would be ill-equipped to do it themselves, and he and Hunt could do it with their collective eyes closed. Mickey thought that there might be several prospective clients who could chip in to pay for the Hunt Club’s services. Finding them would be a bit of a treasure hunt, but once Mickey did that, he might be able to give Hunt a couple of months’ respite before being forced to go out of business.
The more he thought of it, the surer Mickey was that the money was out there; he just had to find it. And if they did the job right and met with success, it might even help to restore the reputation of the Hunt Club within the legal community. It could, in fact, be a new beginning for Hunt, and maybe even for Tamara. And Mickey, disposed to like Ian Thorpe because they shared such similar tastes and backgrounds, might even be able to set his and his sister’s minds to rest.
All of this came to Mickey in a rush, his eyes glazing over. For those few seconds, he went still as a stone, until Thorpe tapped the table in front of him. “Mickey? You all right?”
He came back to himself with a small start, a fleeting smile. “You know,” he said, “I can’t really promise anything specific, but I don’t see how it could hurt to talk to your sister, maybe give her a heads-up on how the next couple of weeks might go. If you think she’d talk to me.”
“If I think she’d talk to you. Are you kidding me?”
Ian Thorpe already had his cell phone out. Was punching numbers.
5
Alicia Thorpe lived alone in the basement room of a gingerbread Victorian on upper Masonic, and although by now it was close to two o’clock in the afternoon, as she opened the door to her separate entrance around the back, it was clear that she hadn’t really gotten herself moving for the day. It didn’t take a trained investigator to see that she’d already spent some of the day crying, but the lack of any makeup and a blotchy complexion couldn’t disguise the basic truth of Ian’s description of her. She was, at the very least, kind of pretty. And obviously braless under a San Francisco Zoo T-shirt tucked into the slim waist of a pair of red-striped running shorts.