“Don’t bother,” Roger said. “We’ll be fine, won’t we, Matt? We’ve cooled our heels long enough to bury the hatchet.”
A pretend hatchet, I thought, as the two old codgers were led away to report their findings to their pal and mine, Harold Meeks. Once they left, I fell asleep—on the metal bench, with no pillow necessary. They woke me up at what the clock in an office outside the cell block said was three and led me into a courtroom in the building across the way to be arraigned. I pleaded innocent, of course, and then came the bail hearing.
Even though I could see Harold was tiring, he stood up, leaning on his walker, and made a good case for my being allowed out on bail. He told them I was an upstanding citizen with close ties to the community. He insisted that since my vehicle had been hauled away to the impound lot by the CSI investigators and since my passport had been confiscated as well, I was in no danger of fleeing the area to avoid prosecution. The upshot was, I was allowed to post a $500,000 bond, courtesy of Tim O’Malley. After that, they let me change clothes and gave me back my goods.
When it came time to leave the building, I walked out expecting to have to call for a cab. (Where’s a decent pay phone when you need one?) Instead, I found a spit-and-polished venerable old Lincoln Town Car complete with a uniformed driver waiting out front. The driver got out of the vehicle and hurried to meet me.
“Mr. Dixon?”
I nodded.
“This way, please.”
When he opened the back door for me, I slid onto the backseat and found Harold sitting slumped next to the far window. Out of sight of the detectives and the judge, he seemed to have shrunk. When he glanced at his watch, I followed suit and looked at mine, too. It was four-fifteen.
“Way past my bedtime,” he announced. “Let’s get me back to your place. I need my beauty sleep.”
In other words, I still had an overnight guest.
“By the way,” he added, “when we get back to the Roundhouse, your people are going to be full of questions. You can’t afford to talk to them anymore than you can afford to talk to the cops. I’ve got operatives looking into the Marina Ochoa situation, but we can’t risk taking any of your other employees off the list of suspects just yet. If they ask, tell them you’ve been advised not to discuss it.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Will do.”
In less than twenty-four hours of dealing with Harold Meeks, he had made a believer of me, right along with that search warrant crew he had held at bay on the stairway outside my apartment.
It turns out he was right to have warned me to keep quiet. The people at the Roundhouse greeted us as though we were the second coming with cheers, hugs, handshakes, and tears all around. I helped Harold up the stairs and into the guest room. When I turned around, expecting to go back down to fetch his walker, I discovered Matty had beaten me to the punch and brought it upstairs.
“It was on the noon news,” she said. “They’re saying you murdered your ex-wife. I didn’t even know you had an ex-wife.”
“That’s because it’s not something I like to discuss. And my attorney—Harold here,” I said, gesturing over my shoulder toward the guest room, “says I’m not to talk about it now with anyone.”
“Mum’s the word, then,” she said, giving me a second fierce hug. “All I can say about Mr. Meeks is bless his heart.”
She left then. I went into the bedroom and showered. I needed to scrub the feel of that holding cell off my skin and out of my soul. No need to rub it out of my hair.
When I came back out to the living room, Charles Rickover had let himself in and made himself at home on the chintz sofa. He had somehow managed to talk his way around Matty and come upstairs with a cup of freshly brewed coffee in hand. Maybe I did need to keep my apartment door locked.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought you were going to Vegas.”
“Did,” he replied. “Flew there and back, chop-chop. You ever hear of the Wright brothers?”
“So what’s up?”
“Katherine Melcher’s husband—her most recent husband—is in the clear, at least as far as doing the deed himself. He was out of the country on business. I’ve got airline records, car rental receipts, and passport control stamps coming and going. He could have hired someone to do it, I suppose, but as far as I can tell, Katherine had landed herself a fat cat and was determined to hang onto this one. According to him, after ditching the drugs, she became really serious about working her program. That’s when she changed her name from Faith to Katherine—when the two of them married. It was part of a joint effort on their part to put her past in the past. By the way, my reading on Melcher is that he really is heartbroken.”
“The woman would have dumped him sooner or later, and cleaned him out, too, in the process,” I said. “Knowing Faith the way I do, up close and personal, I suspect her husband probably just dodged a bullet.”