That wasn’t entirely true, but Weber thought a little white lie couldn’t hurt anyone. With the way Secondhand was operating, he figured the guy must be communicating with Seever somehow—but everyone else thought the same damn thing. The cops were being closemouthed about it, not that they were ever helpful, and he knew Sammie had gone to visit Seever at Sterling; Corbin had called him the day before, specifically to tell him, because a sit-down with Seever might turn into something big. That’s the kind of reporter Sammie is—flay the meat from the bones, go right for the jugular. Hell, that’s the kind of reporter he wants to be, although he knows better than to compete blindly with Sammie, who is still good, even after nearly a year out of the game. Sammie knew cops, she had pull, she was able to get in to interview Seever, no fuss, no muss. He’d showed up in Idaho Springs when he’d heard about Jimmy Galen, but the cops had turned him right around, shooed him back onto the interstate and into town. But, he thought, if he were Sammie Peterson, he would’ve gotten a front-row invitation to the crime scene.
God, he hated her. Everything about her. Before she had the idea to pit herself against him, he’d shown up at her work, thinking that she’d help if he took her out for lunch, kissed her ass some. But she hadn’t been there at all, and then Corbin called her and things went right to hell. But that was this business—if you didn’t keep one step ahead, you might as well throw in the towel.
He hated Gloria Seever too, but he also felt sorry for her, because when he went to her house, hoping to speak to her, there were three words spray-painted across her front door—YOU KNEW, BITCH—and he thought it must be hard to live that way, with everyone thinking you were guilty and despising your very existence. But that didn’t mean she had to slam her door right in his face when he’d knocked and said he was with the Post, so then he’d been forced to stand out on her front step and press his nose into the spot where the door met the frame and yell, more out of frustration than anything else.
“Please!” he’d shouted. “I need this!”
And then the door had pulled open again, maybe it was the desperation in his voice that brought Gloria back, he’d dated women like that, who operated solely on sympathy, who’d do anything if they felt sorry for you.
“Come back this evening,” she’d said. Her mouth was pinched so tight that a sunburst of lines radiated out from the center, pointing out in all directions, and he realized that she was in her robe and slippers, curlers in her hair. “Around seven. I’ll talk to you then.”
*
So here he is, his tank filled and his hands freshly washed to cut the smell of gasoline, sitting on one end of Gloria Seever’s sofa in her pristine living room. She’s very prim, this woman, with her ankles demurely crossed and the heavy strand of pearls around her neck. There’s a silver framed mirror on the wall behind her, hanging above a side table, and he can see a spot on the back of her head where the hair has parted and her scalp shines whitely through, and his own face. He looks wan, frightened, crouched on the flowered cushions. He has the strange urge to grab one of the pillows from beside him and hold it to his stomach, the way he did when he was younger and he’d constantly be sporting wood, although he doesn’t have an erection now, and being in this house makes him feel like he might never have one again.
“Thirsty?” she asks, and he doesn’t have a chance to answer before she starts gathering refreshments anyway, bringing them in from the kitchen. Weber can remember hearing that she’d attended every day of Seever’s long trial, that she’d never cried, never showed any emotion. She was cold. Jacky Seever was a scary bastard, but Weber had to wonder what kind of woman it took to be married to him.
“I don’t know anything about these new murders,” she says before he has a chance to ask his first question. She was bent over the coffee table, pouring tea into fine china cups and taking cookies from a tin and arranging them on a plate. “If that’s what you’re here to ask me about.”
“I didn’t—”
“And I don’t know anything about the things my husband did.”
“You don’t?”
“No,” she says. Puts her cup down, right in the center of the saucer, so there’s not the slightest sound. Gloria Seever is a careful woman.
“Then why did you agree to talk to me?”
“You said you need this. And I need this too.” She takes a cookie off the plate—vanilla with pink sugar frosting—and presses her lips to it. Not a bite, but a kiss. “I want you to write about me, that I’m innocent. That I never knew about any of the things my husband did.”
Weber pinches the web of flesh between his thumb and pointer finger, the same way his mother always did. She said it was a pressure point that would relieve a headache, but he never did buy it. Still, he keeps doing it.
“All right,” he says finally, sighing, and flips open his notepad. This is completely pointless, no one is going to believe that Gloria Seever was in the dark about anything, and he doubts that anyone even cares at this point, but he’ll go through the motions anyway, because sometimes a story sprouts out of nothing. “Let’s see, where should we start? You go visit your husband at the prison, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she says, smoothing her skirt down over her knees.
“And how do those go?”
“We talk, catch up.”
“About what?”
Gloria’s thin shoulders rise up and down in a fluttery, nervous motion.
“Nothing much. I tell him if anything’s happened to me. Jacky tells me about the other inmates, and the guards. What he’s reading. What he’s painting.”
“I didn’t realize your husband still painted.”