43
GLITSKY HAD TOLD everybody who wanted to listen that Patti Orosco just didn’t sing for him as a valid suspect in the murder of Katie Chase. Nevertheless, with the client now in jail, the clock was ticking, and he owed it to the integrity of his investigation to pursue all leads until he was satisfied that they led nowhere. In actual fact, he hadn’t pushed hard for answers to any difficult questions from the beautiful millionaire.
After examining his conscience on the matter, he realized there were three reasons for his prejudice in favor of Patti: In his heart, Glitsky didn’t quite believe it, but he knew Hal might have killed his wife; second, he couldn’t get any connection established between Katie’s two-year-old affair and her recent death; finally, Patti was so darn sweet, cooperative, and pretty.
By admitting to her affair with Hal as soon as Abe and the Homicide cops had started circling around it, she’d taken away their big “Aha!” moment. She knew how bad it looked, how it cast them both in a less than flattering light, but what could she do? It was the truth, she said. They had been driven into each other’s arms by Hal’s emotionally disturbed wife. They were deeply in love, but in spite of that, a month before Katie’s death, they’d ultimately decided to end their deception and do the right thing. Though the breakup hadn’t been her idea, and it was still extraordinarily painful for her day to day, her nobler self had prevailed. Surely all the inspectors could understand.
She was a good person caught in a bad situation, and all she wanted was Hal to be all right. She herself was getting by—strong, sad, selfless, and truthful.
As a preemptive strike against the thought that she might be a suspect in Katie’s murder, her attitude and admissions were inordinately effective. But seen in an objective light, uncolored by her sweet personality and physical beauty, her behavior could also be read as brazen, brilliant, and manipulative in the extreme. When Abe had called to make this appointment, she’d told him that she’d make the time for her “favorite almost-policeman.” With a little laugh.
It was a bit too familiar.
Could she really be manipulating him, playing him for a sucker?
The possibility, and the fact that it had taken him so long to acknowledge it, had Glitsky’s back up as he searched for a parking space near her home. He didn’t like being fooled, but that he had not even considered her planning and perfectly executing a scam on him before today was something that galled him.
If it was a scam, he reminded himself.
Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she was all she seemed to be.
Though most people weren’t.
He had argued with Hardy that if Patti had killed Katie to get Hal all to herself, that left Hal hanging out in the breeze as the prime suspect, which wouldn’t have been to her advantage. Likewise, if they’d planned the crime together, he would certainly have arranged it so their respective alibis were bulletproof.
Those arguments left out one other contingency. Patti, a woman cruelly and recently scorned (regardless of the spin she put on it), might very well have been jealous of Katie and, because he had dumped her, hated Hal.
Killing Katie might have been a cold-blooded, carefully planned, perfectly executed murder, and Glitsky had been so charmed and bamboozled that he hadn’t ever considered that as a viable possibility. Now that thought—that she was playing him like every other man in her life and probably many of the women—wouldn’t go away. He heard the pumping of angry blood in his ears.
It didn’t help that the eventual parking spot Glitsky found was at the corner of Van Ness, two long, steep downhill blocks from her place. By the time he rang her bell, he was breathing hard. He could feel the tightness in his jawline, his lips compressed, the scar through them no doubt in high relief. He dragged a hand over his forehead to remove the sheen of sweat.
She came into view at the top of the stairs behind the glass front door. She all but skipped down to open her door. Again she was barefoot—Abe realized that except at the funeral, he’d never seen her wearing anything on her feet—and she wore a black Japanese-looking outfit, silk pants and a matching short tunic buttoned to her throat. Her navel gleamed with a demurely visible diamond.
Stunning.
Opening the door, she favored him with her generous and sincere smile. Immediately, her expression changed to one of concern as she read the obvious signs of his exertion. “Are you all right?”
“Fine. That’s just a bit of a climb.”
“I know. The parking here is murder. When you called, I should have told you to park in front of my garage. I’m sorry. I always forget to tell people.”
“It’s okay,” Glitsky said. “I can use the exercise.”
“Can’t we all?” She half turned away, then turned back and gave him another smile. “Fourteen more steps to the top. You good?”
Glitsky couldn’t help it. He felt his face break into a tight smile. “Lead on.”
The tunic ended just above her waist, and the pants clung to her body. As he followed her up the steps, the shape of her ass made Glitsky wonder briefly if all of his rationalization about not having pushed her enough in his investigation was a flimsy excuse to spend time in her company again.
She led him into the living room and insisted that Abe sit in one of her comfortable chairs while she got him some water with ice and a wedge of lemon. Handing him the glass, she settled herself across from him sideways on her couch, one leg tucked under the other knee, her arm extended over the back of the sofa.
“Comfy?” she asked.
“Perfect, thank you.”
“Before we start, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Are you married?”
A chuckle bubbled up out of Glitsky’s chest. “Pardon me?”
She pointed. “I see you’ve got a ring on. But you could be wearing that to discourage women from hitting on you.”
Still chuckling, Glitsky said, “No.” He held up his ring hand. “That’s a bona fide wedding ring. Why do you ask?”
“Just a pet theory of mine. All the good ones are already married. Witness you. Witness Hal.”
“Well, I . . . Thank you, I guess.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And thanks for agreeing to talk to me again.” Lord, he thought, disgusted with himself, was he flirting with her?
“Of course,” she said. “However I can help.” And then, as though the thought had just occurred to her, “I can’t believe they’ve got Hal in jail. I’m going down to see him later today. Do you know anything about where they’re keeping him?”
“Away from everybody else,” Glitsky said. “You don’t have to worry about him being safe. They don’t put former guards in with inmates.”
“That’s a relief. It was . . . I thought . . .” She shrugged. “I didn’t know.”
“He’ll be fine.” Glitsky sipped at his water. “I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Katie, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh. Okay.”
This was clearly not the direction she was expecting. Glitsky, knowing that he was on a true fishing expedition, felt compelled to explain if he didn’t want to lose her. “We’ve eliminated Hal as a suspect,” he began, “and, frankly, most of the inner circle of their acquaintances. It’s time to widen the net, and the more we know about Katie, the further along we’ll be.” This was, as one of Glitsky’s old professors used to say, vague enough to be true, and it seemed to work: Patti nodded in acquiescence, all cooperation again. Glitsky went on. “She was your best friend?”
“Since college, yes.”
“And you saw her and Hal with some regularity?”
“A couple of times a month, at least. Which was much less than before.”
“Because you had come into all this money?”
“I think so. Especially after Katie stopped working, when they were struggling. I think they felt what had happened to me was unfair. And I guess in a way, it was. In any case, things became . . . awkward.”
“You say they felt it was unfair. So it was both of them?”
She thought for a short moment. “No. I didn’t mean ‘they.’ Hal never turned sour on me. Although he had to be cool about it. He couldn’t get too enthusiastic. About me, I mean.” She brushed a wisp of hair back from her forehead. “I think Katie might have stopped seeing me if she’d been on her own. Except there wasn’t any reason to other than . . . my situation. We never had a fight or anything, but she felt guilty. That was her whole life the last year or two. She felt guilty about everything. Not being nice to me, not trusting Hal with the kids, not working, not being a good enough mom, not making enough money. Everything.”
“That sounds tiring.”
“It wasn’t good,” Patti said. “It really wasn’t good.”
“Do you think the way she was acting might have particularly alienated anyone?”
“Enough that they’d want to kill her? I can’t imagine that.”
“But somebody did kill her.”
“I know. I’m not forgetting that.” She nodded, blinking her suddenly tearful eyes a couple of times. “I still can’t get used to it. It’s completely surreal. I mean, there was no reason for something that final and desperate.”
Glitsky sat back, pausing. “All right. So let me ask you this. When you were together with Hal, can you remember anything he said that, when you think about it now, raises a flag? Was anything bothering him?”
This brought a kind of winsome chuckle. “Well, being with me bothered him. It bothered both of us.”
Glitsky nodded. “Anything else?”
She frowned out at her view. “All the issues with child care, I guess. But that was more a hassle than anything.”
“You mean that Katie wouldn’t use babysitters?”
“That’s not completely true. She’d let her mom or one of her sisters come by when she went out by herself. But when she’d get back, it would turn out that everything they did was wrong—they didn’t get the right food, or enough of it, or they watched the wrong video, or God forbid they got off schedule . . .” She stopped, turned her face toward him. “It was so stupid. Katie knew it was stupid. It was one of the reasons she was going to counseling. And that was with her own family. Imagine how she was with everybody else.”
“You mean Ruth? Hal’s mom?”
“Hal’s stepmother, not mom,” she corrected him. “She didn’t raise Hal as a baby, only his brother, and look how Warren’s turning out. So, no, thank you. Ruth was not in the babysitter pool.”
Glitsky, having witnessed a small sampling of Ruth’s child-rearing skills, thought that Katie’s lack of enthusiasm for her mother-in-law’s babysitting help was probably well placed. But he was not here to pursue phantoms among the larger circle of Hal’s and Katie’s families and acquaintances. He was here to lull Patti Orosco into a false sense of security so that he could question her about Katie’s murder with her defenses down. “All right,” he said. “Moving on. Maybe his work?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t talk about that too much. It was a job. I gather there were politics and other kinds of the usual BS, but it wasn’t like he was a complaining guy. Honestly, this kind of stuff—the families and his job and kids and all that—wasn’t what we talked about most of the time.”
“No. I can see that.” Glitsky picked up his glass, drank some water, put it down, and then reached into his back pocket for a small notebook. “How do you feel about helping me with a little investigatory housekeeping?”
“Fine.” She smiled. “I’ll help you any way I can.”
“Do you mind talking again about the night of Katie’s death?” He indicated the notebook. “Written reports are my life.”
“No problem. Shoot.”
“The movie you went to?”
“Life of Pi.”
“And where was it playing again?”
“The AMC down on Van Ness.”
“You drove? Walked?”
She had to think for a beat. “I walked there. I took a cab back.”
“Do you recall the cab company?”
She closed her eyes, thought, shook her head. “I don’t think so.” Then, “Is this about my alibi? Am I a suspect?”
“It would be nice,” Glitsky said, “if we had some clear corroboration, that’s all. You don’t by any chance have the ticket stub, do you? Or maybe you met somebody there who could verify your presence?”
She brought her feet down and came around to face him, a hurt look on her face. “So I am a suspect. You’re working for Hal, and you want to find somebody else who might have killed Katie.”
“I am working for Hal’s lawyer, but as to whether you’re a suspect, there is an entire universe of suspects. My goal is to eliminate as many as I can, beginning with those who are most likely innocent.” He gave her his good-cop smile. “I’d love it if you had your stub or ran into somebody you knew in the lobby.”
She sat back, collected herself. “I didn’t meet anybody. And I looked for the ticket stub last time. I don’t have it.”
“Okay.” Glitsky let things cool down for a second, then said, “You’re not going to like this one, either. Do you now or have you ever owned a firearm?”
She sighed deeply. “Yes. A Smith and Wesson. Registered. A three-fifty-seven Magnum. I haven’t shot it in about five years. I don’t know why I still have it. It’s in my closet in a gun safe I bought at the same time I got the gun. Do you want me to go get it?”
“Sure,” Glitsky said. “Better, maybe, is if you could show me where it is.”
“You mean so I don’t get it and come out and shoot you with it?”
Glitsky tried an apologetic smile. “That’s one of the reasons.”
“Unbelievable,” she said.
They got up and walked to her bedroom at the back of the house. She’d made the bed. The room smelled like sandalwood. Everything was neat, organized, and tasteful. On her dresser, she had a framed color snapshot of Hal Chase. “I’ve never denied I love the man,” she said when she realized Glitsky had seen it, “but I wouldn’t kill for anybody.”
The gun came as advertised. Since a .357 Magnum revolver would shoot a .38 Special round, Glitsky knew that it might be the murder weapon. On the other hand, the fact that she would so blithely hand it over to him seemed to radically diminish that possibility. If she had killed someone with that weapon, in all probability, she would have disposed of it soon thereafter. It was clean, oiled, and unloaded, with no scent of gunpowder. When Patti put the gun away and closed the safe, she turned around, looking up at Abe. “Is that it?” she asked. “Are we done?”
“I have one more question. What kind of car do you drive?”
“A BMW M3. Do you want to see that, too? What’s my car got to do with anything?”
“Ms. Orosco. Patti. Please understand. It’s not what I think. It’s what I’ve got the evidence to support. To get Hal off, I need something from you, from any potential suspect, that makes it possible that you killed Katie. Or something that completely eliminates you as a suspect, that makes it impossible that you killed her. I haven’t seen that yet. If you can think of anything, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, it would make my day. Truly.”
“You mean my car doesn’t do me any good, either?”
“Not by itself, no. Have you had it cleaned recently?”
“Only a few days ago. I got it detailed. It’s a great car. I like to keep it perfect. But let me guess, that’s the wrong answer, too.”
Glitsky shrugged, and she led him back not to the living room, but to the top of the staircase, obviously bringing the interview to an end. She turned and faced him. “You know,” she said, “I had an affair with Hal. I’m not so proud of that. But I’m a good person. And you’ve sat and talked to me a couple of times, and I’ve been honest and forthcoming with you, and you still think I’m capable of killing somebody who was a friend of mine?”
Glitsky had seen enough as a cop to believe in his heart that everybody was capable of killing someone, given the right set of circumstances. He said, “It’s not that I think it. It’s that I can’t prove you didn’t.”
“You think I could, though. Kill somebody. I can tell. You look right at me, and you can’t see who I am at all.” She shook her head, touched his arm, brushed a tear from her eye, and shook her head again. “I feel so sorry for you,” she said. “I really do.”