The Motive (10 page)

Becker stopped, looked up, smiled politely. “It might not have been D’Amiens,” he said. He scanned the piles in front of him and put his hand on one. A thin one—two pieces of paper.

“Who? The woman in the fire?”

Becker nodded, handed the paper across. “Those two people—they’re married—saw her walking from the house just before the alarm got called in.”

“Saw Missy? They’re sure?”

“A couple of them reasonably enough. Others not so sure.”

“But if it was Missy, then who…?”

“Was in the house? I don’t know.” His face suddenly looked much younger, invigorated by the question. “You’ve got to love a good mystery, though, now and again, don’t you? Who’s missing besides her? And if it’s not her—D’Amiens—dead in the house, then where might
she
be? Huh?”

“Really.” Cuneo looked at the names and addresses. “You got copies of these?”

“Already made ’em. Those are yours.”

A pause. “You talk to Glitsky?”

“This morning, a little after you left.”

“So he knows about this?”

Becker didn’t even look up. Obviously—and why would he not?—he assumed the two cops were working together, and Cuneo saw no reason to raise a flag. The arson inspector continued sorting methodically. “I figured you’d be around sooner than he was and you could tell him. These people aren’t going anywhere. They live right there on Steiner.” Finally, he sat back. “I’d like to know who it was, though. In the house.”

“If it wasn’t Missy,” Cuneo said, “then whoever she was looks pretty good for the murders.”

He nodded. “If it was her that people saw leaving.”

Maxine Willis lived in one of the surviving Painted Ladies, three houses down from Paul Hanover’s. In her early fifties, she was a very large, handsome, well-dressed black woman with a deep and booming voice. Her living room walls were stylishly adorned with tribal African art—dark-wood masks, spears, several framed works depicting working people or animals completely rendered in butterfly wings. The sofa was zebra skin, the chairs brown leather. Out the jutting front window, enough natural light remained that they could still see the park, but it was fading fast.

“No. See? I knew it was her. And it was a little earlier than this,” she said. She turned and they both glanced at the clock on the mantel—8:15. “I saw her clearly.”

“Missy D’Amiens?”

She nodded. “Although I hadn’t ever met her to talk to.
I didn’t know her name until I read it in the paper this morning. But it was Mr. Hanover’s girlfriend all right. I’d seen her here on the block a hundred times.”

“Would you mind telling me exactly where you were and what you saw?” Cuneo’s foot tapped a time or two, but he caught it and willed it to stop, though immediately he began to tap his notebook.

“Well, Joseph and I were having a party with some friends, Cyril and Jennifer. Just some supper and then we were going to go up to Slim’s, where a friend of ours was playing, but then of course the fire put an end to all that.”

“And Joseph is…?”

“My husband. I expect him now any minute. He saw her, too.”

“From where?”

“Right here.”

“In this room?”

“Uh huh. The light is so good come evening. We like to have our cocktails out here, with the park out there across the way.” She closed her eyes for a minute, then moved to the windows that looked out over the street. “I was about right here.”

Cuneo came over and stood next to her. The park was deserted except for a man walking a dog on the crest of the hill. Nearer, the street in front of them yawned empty, although cars lined both sides of it. No pedestrians on the sidewalks, either. The area was still a mess due to the fire.

“Okay, and where did Ms. D’Amiens pass?”

Maxine Willis lifted the lace curtain to one side and pointed. “Just out there. She was parked by that near light post just up the street.”

“So she was going to her car?”

She nodded.

“And do you know what kind of car it was? Could you tell from here?”

“I didn’t have to see it from last night. I knew it from other times, too. She drove a black Mercedes. One of the smaller ones, I think, the C-types.”

Cuneo looked out, then back at his witness. If this was going to be a positive identification, he wanted to eliminate
any possible ambiguities, and one had occurred to him. “Were you facing the way you are now? Toward the car?”

“Yes.”

“And she was on the other side of the street?”

“Right.”

“So you wouldn’t have seen her until she was past you, then. Walking away? Isn’t that right?”

“Well, sideways maybe. Joseph saw her first. He was standing about where you are.”

Cuneo again stared across into the street. After a minute: “Let me ask you this,” he said. “Why would he notice?”

Her face clouded for a moment. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Well, I mean, there’s four of you—four, right?—four of you standing around having some drinks and Joseph sees some woman walk by outside. So what? Why would he comment on it? Weren’t people walking by all the time?”

Striking a thoughtful pose, she crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t recall saying anybody commented about it. Man know better than act like that.” She looked at him, almost challenging, maybe waiting for him to show a sign of understanding. When none appeared, she sighed. “He’s standing here by the window and suddenly his eyes go wide. Poor fool don’t even know he’s doing it. So I look to see what he likes so much. And it’s her all right. So I give him the look, you know, and he knows he’s caught. Man’s always been a sucker for a pretty girl, and she was pretty enough.”

“So the other two, your other guests. What happened with them?”

“Cyril and Jennifer? They look to see what Joseph’s making eyes about. That’s all. It wasn’t a big thing at the time. Nobody even mentioned it out loud until the fire happened. Then later out in the street, we heard people saying it was Missy in the house with him. This was after we told the inspector we’d seen her.”

“So what did you do then? I mean after you heard that?”

She shrugged. “Nothing. What was I supposed to do? I figured I must have gotten it wrong. Until you told me just
now that it might not have been her in the house after all. Which had to mean it
was
her walking by all along.”

“But let me get this straight. From last night all the way until when I told you ten minutes ago that maybe it wasn’t Missy in the house, maybe it was someone else, you could
not
have sworn that the woman you saw walking by out there was her?”

Maxine frowned. “No. I didn’t think about that. I just figured she went back in later. Maybe went out somewhere and came back. That could explain it, am I right? I thought it was her.”

Glitsky sat at his desk reviewing utilization and arrest numbers, lost in the tedium, until the telephone rang and he realized that it had grown dark outside. Surprised anew that Cuneo had apparently decided not to check in with him at all, he got the phone in the middle of the second ring.

“Glitsky.”

“Abe.” His wife. A sigh of relief. “Good, you’re there. Is everything all right?”

He looked at his watch. “I guess not, if the time got away from me so badly. Is it really eight thirty?”

“Close enough. What have you been doing? Last I heard you had been summoned by the mayor and were running out to see her.”

“And I did, too. Twice, in fact.”

“What did she want?”

“It’s a bit of a story. It could even be construed as good news of a sort.”

“You sound like Dismas. ‘Construed as good news of a sort.’ You think you qualified that enough?”

“I said it was a story. It’s good that she’s got confidence in me, I suppose. I could tell you in person in twenty minutes.”

“That’d be nice. I have something that might be construed as good news of a sort myself.”

“You got a raise?”

“No, it’s not money. That would be unalloyed good news.”

“Unalloyed. Talk about a Hardy word. So your news isn’t unalloyedly good?”

“Unalloyedly, is that even a word? This is getting too complicated for me. I’ll tell you when you get home.”

Glitsky lived in a smallish three-bedroom upper duplex just north of Lake Street, in a cul-de-sac that bounded the leafy southern border to the Presidio. He’d raised Isaac, Jacob and Orel there with his first wife, Flo. After the cancer claimed her, he moved a Mexican nanny/housekeeper named Rita Schultz into the living room, where she’d slept behind a screen and helped with the boys for six years. Now Glitsky had a new life, Treya’s daughter and all of his sons away living theirs. Rita no longer stayed with them full-time, sleeping behind the screen, but she still came every day to care for Rachel.

If he’d come home when his shift technically ended at 5:00, Glitsky could have had Paganucci drop him at his front step. But since his promotion, he almost never left the Hall until at least 7:00, and often much later. The job didn’t really have anything like regular hours, and to pretend it did was to fail in it. And failure was not on his agenda. So there were always endless meetings—with chiefs, lieutenants, civic and businesspeople, department heads—to attend, tedious yet necessary administrative duties to perform, fences to mend, people to simply visit, flesh to press and parties to attend and press conferences to hold. And all of these things happened on their own timetable, not his. So to get to and from work, he usually checked out a car from the city lot next to the Hall, and invariably had to park it at best a few blocks from his home.

Now Glitsky was on the last leg of a six-block hike from the nearest parking place that he could find. Coming up on the opposite side of the street, with the late-afternoon wind just beginning to ebb now, he stopped and looked up into the lighted front windows of the rent-controlled place where he’d long since decided he would probably die. A shadow moved across the shades and he recognized the cameo of his wife pacing in the living room. The vision stopped him. Against all of his own expectations and preconceptions, he had somehow with Treya been able to find happiness again. Sometimes, as now, the feeling all but overwhelmed him.

“
Señor
Abe?”

He’d neither seen her in the dark nor heard her on the quiet street, and he reacted, startled at the sound. Recovering, he put his hand on his heart and rolled his eyes with what was, for him, wild theatricality. “Rita,” he said. “What are you still doing here?”

“Just talking to
Señora
Treya.”

“What about?”

The housekeeper reached out, took his wrist and tapped on his watch. Looking up, she gave him a look of benevolent understanding. “Women things.”

When he got to his front door, twelve steps up from the street, Treya was there holding it open for him. Two-and-a-half-year-old Rachel, awake way past her bedtime and finally seeing her father, broke from around Treya’s legs and threw herself headlong at him. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” Catching her up, he gathered her in, smothering her with kisses while she squealed with delight. With a last kiss he pulled her close, then caught something in his wife’s eye.

“Rita tells me you and she were talking about women’s things. Does that have to do with your maybe good news?” Treya kissed him hello, quickly, on his cheek, then turned away and stepped back to let the two of them in. “Have you been crying?”

She kept herself turned away, shook her head no. But too fast. And she started walking toward the kitchen. Still carrying Rachel, Glitsky followed. “Trey?”

“I’m just emotional,” she said. “About this possibly good news, which I so hope it is.” She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath and turned to face him. “It looks like we’re going to have another baby.” She waited, breathless for a minute, then unloosed a torrent. “Are you okay with that? Please say you are. I know we never talked about it specifically, I mean whether we were actually trying. And I just found out this morning. I’ve been wanting to tell you all day, but didn’t just want to leave a message, and then when you didn’t call me even once during the day or come home, I thought the mayor must have done something awful, and I didn’t want to bother you by calling at work if you had some crisis, but then it got so late…”

Glitsky closed the distance between them and put his free arm around her.

“Sandwich hug!” Rachel, in heaven between them.

“Sandwich hug,” Treya repeated to her daughter, kissing her. Then she looked up at her husband through a film of tears. “Okay? It’s okay, isn’t it?”

“More than okay,” he said. “Unalloyed.”