“What the hell?” I say as soon as he answers. “You own Yamura’s house?”
There’s a long pause at the other end, then David tells me he doesn’t own the house, the company does. “How’d you find out?” he asks. “And why does it matter?”
Through gritted teeth, I explain my scene inspection and all the shit that Tredesco’s dishing out to me. “It matters,” I say, “because with HWI owning the property—and I assume the purchase of the house was your doing—the prosecution has a much stronger link between you and Jennifer than they had before. It matters because you told me you only saw her a handful of times, that it was just a casual thing, when, plainly, she was more to you than a mere fling.” I now know why David had referred to his relationship with Jennifer as a deal. “It matters because you weren’t honest with me.”
“Oh, grow up,” David snaps. “I didn’t give a fuck about her. And I promise you, Jennifer wasn’t the least bit emotionally involved with me. It was a business deal. I had the company buy the house and let Jennifer live there. In return, she would fuck me whenever I wanted. And I wasn’t the only one she was seeing, either. Neither of us cared.”
“Well, I’ll just put it that way to the jury. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, don’t you believe for one second that my client had a motive to kill the decedent. There was no jealousy here, no motive to kill. You see, my client, my married client, the guy with a cancer-stricken wife, simply hired Ms. Yamura to be his concubine.’”
I hang up on David and return to the house. “You could have called me about this ahead of time,” I tell Tredesco. “Instead of waiting until I was at the front door.”
Tredesco smiles again. “Yeah. I know.” He turns to the uniformed officer and tells him to stay outside while Tommy and I inspect the house. “Don’t let them leave with anything,” he adds, winking at me.
Tommy and I watch Tredesco get in his unmarked car and drive down the street. I tell Tommy what David said about not giving a damn about Jennifer, that they both saw other people. Tommy seems to accept this with as much equanimity as he did the news about David owning the house. He turns and leads me up the front steps.
The front door opens into a large living room. It’s expensively outfitted with crown molding, cherrywood floors, and built-in bookshelves on either side of a black-marble fireplace. The walls are painted a muted gray. A small chandelier hangs in the center of the room. Over the fireplace is a pastel watercolor painting of two swans—very feminine. The sofa and love seat are of white fabric and sit around a chrome-and-glass coffee table. A vase with wilted flowers sits in the middle of it. Jennifer Yamura clearly had expensive tastes—good thing her keeper could afford to indulge them.
“Nice place,” says Tommy. “Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, nice,” I say. “Let’s see the back.”
Tommy leads me through the living room to the kitchen, the only other room on the first floor other than the powder room. The kitchen cabinetry is all white, with light-gray marble countertops and brushed chrome hardware. The doors of the upper cabinets are faced with glass to reveal the crystal stemware and china inside. Lights mounted under the cabinets shine down on the counters. The ceiling is fitted with recessed lighting. The refrigerator is a Sub-Zero. The dishwasher is a Bosch. The oven is a six-burner gas Viking. All spanking new.
Tommy and I retrace our steps, enter the short hallway that encloses the door to the powder room and, across from it, the doorway to the basement stairs. A curtain of brightly colored glass beads covers the cellar doorway. “Her hippie side,” Tommy says. He pushes aside the beads, and we both look down the steps. There are twelve—wooden, uncarpeted, old, and splintered. Obviously not part of the remodel. The bottom step rests on a concrete block about four inches high. The last four or five steps are stained with blood, and a large brown stain discolors the concrete block and the floor near it where Yamura’s blood drained and pooled.
Tommy descends the steps, and I follow him. The basement is small, and the walls are cheaply paneled over rough cement. There is no finished ceiling, so I can see the wooden beams, ductwork, and wiring. Tommy walks over to a large plastic basin, turns the water on and off. I nod to the floor behind him.
“This must be where she crawled, tried to get away from her killer,” I say. Tommy looks at me, nods, but says nothing. We dawdle for a few more minutes, looking around, then walk back upstairs.
“I’ll check out back,” I say. I walk through the kitchen and open the back door, step down onto the cement parking area behind the house. It’s just big enough for one car; there’s barely room beside it to get out and walk to the back door. The back wall of the house is stucco, smooth, and freshly painted in a French yellow. The glass-paned back door has a fresh coat of white paint as well.
Waverly Street, the alley that runs behind the houses on Addison, is just wide enough for a single car. Across Waverly, the houses on Pine Street come right up to the sidewalk, leaving no room for parking. Directly across from Jennifer Yamura’s place there’s a courtyard between the back extensions of two large homes. Empty but for trash cans, it’s protected by an eight-foot, iron-barred security gate with a “No Trespassing” sign.
I stand in the alley and look up at the windows on the second and third floors of Jennifer Yamura’s house. After a minute, Tommy appears in the second-floor window just above the kitchen. He looks down at me and I up at him. We hold each other’s gaze for a long moment, and I see something undefinable in Tommy’s eyes. He nods at me and turns away.
I cross the yard, walk up the back steps, and enter the kitchen. I meet Tommy in the living room.
“David spent a lot of money buying this house for her, fixing it up,” I say. “Maybe he cared for her more than he let on.”
“Or maybe he didn’t buy the house for the girl,” Tommy says. “Maybe he bought the girl for the house.”
The following Wednesday, I’m sitting in my office at eight in the morning. David is coming in at ten to discuss his case. I’d called him again following the house inspection. Neither one of us was in a better mood during the second call that day than we had been during the first. I expect our meeting today to be stormy. Then Vaughn rushes in with news that makes me think the meeting will go even worse than I expect.
“Did you read the Daily News this morning?” He hands me the tabloid.
I gape at the headline above the front-page color photo of Jennifer Yamura’s house. It reads: “Addison Street Geisha House?”