A gravelly male voice answered from an interior hallway, “Back here.”
As I curved around the desk and down the hall, I smelled tobacco smoke. The sickly-sweet odor drifted out of the open door to a green shag-carpeted office. A tall red Chinese cabinet took up the wall to my right. A massive mahogany desk spread in front of a window overlooking the west valley. Behind the desk, an olive-skinned mid-fortyish man with curly brown hair rocked in a leather chair, puffing on a cigar. A striped tie hung loose from the open collar of his white dress shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows.
With the cigar between his teeth, he stood and straightened his shirt. He stuck out his hand and with a glint in his eye said, “Oliver Paul.”
“Liz Cooper,” I said, accepting his handshake.
Short and slight, Oliver Paul exuded confidence as big and comfortable as the furniture surrounding us. He pointed at a banker’s chair facing the desk. “Sit down, Liz Cooper. Tell me your troubles.”
I sat with my purse in my lap, relating an extended, detailed version of how I wound up a suspect instead of a witness at a murder scene—my history with Laycee, Jarret, and Kyle, along with my reason for being at the house. Oliver listened without comment or expression until I started to tell him about my meeting with Carla Pratt at Aroma.
He doused his cigar in an ashtray and sat forward. “You went alone?”
“I had nothing to hide,” I said.
“Go on.” He dragged his hand across his mouth then rested his cheek on his fist.
Twenty minutes later, he was up to date on every conversation I had and every movement I made over the past two days, ending with Carla’s accusation at my house. “That’s when I told her to contact my lawyer if she wanted to talk to me again.” I felt proud of my smart move to shut her down. I knew he would approve. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re doomed,” he said.
I closed one eye, not sure I heard him right. “Excuse me?”
“What? You want me to tell you everything is okay? Everything’s not okay. You got a homicide detective accusing you of murder. What’s okay about that?”
“What should I do? Jarret’s lawyer is fueling her suspicions about me.”
“Well, what can you do? Ya know?” He shrugged. “Give the cops somebody else to look at. Another schmo to tag the murder on. That’s what your ex-husband, Jerry, did.”
“Jarret.”
“Jerry, Jarret, whatever. I don’t know. What do you want me to do? I can bring in my private detective to follow him. Well, ah, you know, we’ll have a…” Oliver rubbed his mouth again and studied the wall behind me. “Who is Jason’s lawyer?”
“Jarret.” I sunk into the hard-backed chair, my faith in Oliver shriveling. “My ex-husband’s name is Jarret.”
“I know.” Oliver cracked a smile. “I know everything about Jarret Cooper. He graduated from the University of Illinois. He’s a Major League left-handed reliever with an ERA of four-point-four in his career with the Dodgers and an ERA of four-point-one-eight when he played for the Braves. Want me to recite his win-loss statistics? His history in the minors?”
“No, I get it. You know who he is.”
“No, you don’t get it. You see, every time you correct me, I ask myself, ‘Why does this woman care so much about me, a total stranger, getting her ex-husband’s name right when she’s accused of murdering his girlfriend?’ You’re lucky I’m not a cop, because right away I think four years after your divorce you still give a crap about him. He has a lawyer busy creating a smoke screen to cover his ass and you’re upset that I’m getting his name wrong?” Oliver relit his cigar and blew smoke in the air. “Let’s start again. Who is Jarret’s lawyer? That’s the guy who’s pointing the finger at you.”
“I don’t know his name,” I said.
“Find out. Now tell me about you and Jasper. You were married a long time. What happened?”
I sighed. “Fifteen years sounds like a long time, but we lived separate lives. Jarret spent the six or seven months during baseball season on and off the road. I buried myself in studies for my PhD, then built my career. It’s painful to admit, but I dealt with broken relationships in my practice while ignoring the destructive signs at home. Jarret’s affair with Laycee forced me to face the truth about his infidelities. He and I made a haphazard attempt to stay together after I found out, but I had stopped trusting or caring. I was done.”
“You hated this Huber woman?” Oliver said.