Текст книги "Compelling Evidence"

Автор книги: Steve Martini

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CHAPTER 23

It is a middle-class neighborhood, quiet tree-lined streets, a heavy canopy of leaves that nearly meet over the center of winding intersections. Two-thirty-nine Compton Court is an understated white brick colonial, with a little trim of wrought iron near the front door, and neatly edged ivy in place of a lawn. A quaint hand-painted sign near the door reads: THECAMPANELUS, JOANDJIM.

She still lives here, though Jim has been dead for two years. I ring the bell and wait. There is no sound from within. I punch it again. Then, from a distance, I can hear the increasing register of footsteps making their way toward the door. The click of a deadbolt and it is opened, but I can’t see the figure inside, shrouded in darkness beyond the mesh of the wire screen door.

“Paul. How good to see you.” There is excitement, a little giddiness in this familiar voice, the signal that I am welcome.

“I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by to say hello.”

“Well, absolutely,” she says. She unlatches the screen door and throws it open wide for me. “It’s been such a long time. Please, come in,” she says. “It’s so good to see you.”

Jo Ann Campanelli has one of those faces that has never looked good. Hair streaked with gray from an early age, she has eyes like a basset hound, long drooping bags under each. There are a few rollers in her hair, like coiled haystacks in a field. The net holding them in place is something from the Depression.

In this case the sad face belongs to a warm spirit. If Potter, Skarpellos could ever have been said to have a soul, Jo Ann Campanelli was its embodiment.

She ushers me toward the living room and turns on a floor lamp to give the place some light.

“It has been a while,” I say. “I didn’t have a chance to talk to you at Ben’s funeral.” So here I stand, at the threshold of her front room, trawling for information. It has been a singular question that has eaten at me since I finished our survey of the state’s case against Talia. Why was there no statement from Jo Ann, Ben’s secretary?

She’s leaning over the couch, reaching for the drawstring on the curtains, to let a little daylight into this cavern. She finds it and bathes us both in bright light.

“Oh dear, that is better, isn’t it? I spend so much time in the back of the house, it seems I never use this room anymore. When you’re alone you don’t do much entertaining,” she says. “Not many people come by.

“You were asking about the funeral,” she says, remembering where we were. “I went later, after it was over, to his grave, to be alone with him for a while.”

“Ah.” I nod, like I can understand such sentiment.

“Who wants to be subjected to a crying old woman?” she says. “How’s practice? You’re looking good.” She is uneasy with the topic of Ben’s death, anxious to move on to another.

“It’s going well,” I tell her.

“Yes, I see you on television,” she says. “That shameful thing with Talia, Mrs. Potter. They should have their heads examined. She could no more kill Ben than I could.”

“I agree,” I say. “But circumstances make victims of us all at times. I’m afraid we’ve got our work cut out.”

“Oh, I don’t believe it. They can’t have a case?”

“I wish I could say no.” I tell her without getting into the details that the evidence against Talia is not a happy sight.

“Then they’re wearing blinders,” she says.

“I wish I could put you on the jury,” I tell her.

She laughs. Then mirth fades from her face. “This whole thing makes no sense. The suicide.” She utters a fleeting profanity to herself under her breath, like this is utterly unbelievable.

She shakes her head. “I’ll tell you,” she says, “if they’d talked to me, I’d have set them straight.”

“That’s what I thought,” I say.

“What?”

“They never interviewed you?”

“No.” She says it with some indignation. “How about a cup of coffee. I’ve got some already brewed.” It’s an invitation to exchange more dirt.

“If it’s no trouble.”

“No trouble at all. Do you mind the kitchen? It’s just so much more comfortable than out here.”

“Lead the way.”

It’s a cheery room, yellow wallpaper, little flowers on the diagonal above white, wood wainscot. A copper teapot on the stove, a dozen photographs of grandchildren, nieces, and nephews litter the walls along with a series of plaster-cast geese.

“Regular or decaf?” she asks.

“Regular-black.”

“Good,” she says. “None of that sissy stuff for you.” She reaches for the carafe in the coffee maker, still piping hot. Jo Ann is a coffee hound. There were always three cups in various places in the office, half full, with her name on them.

There’s a certain organized clutter in this room, the kind that neat people engage in. There is a sense that everything can be swept into an out-of-the-way cupboard or closet on a single sortie. The kitchen table is a tangle of heavy brown twine laid out in the loose weaving of a hanging macrame flower-pot holder, the knots not quite tight. An unfinished landscape with twisted tubes of acrylic paint sits on an easel in the corner, near the window. Jo Ann, by either choice or necessity, has become a woman of leisure.

“Please sit down.” She pushes the twine toward one corner of the table. It disappears into a drawer that she slides closed underneath. I pull out a chair and sit.

“It’s good to have company,” she says. “Breaks up the day a little. Here.” She puts a mug of steaming, dark mud in front of me. Now I remember her coffee from the firm. Ben wouldn’t touch it, said it was her way of telling him she didn’t do coffee-except for herself. She brings her own cup and takes a chair catercorner to mine.

“So how’s retirement?” I ask.

“Has its moments.”

“But you miss the office?”

“Is it that obvious?”

I make a face.

“Well, I suppose it gave my life a certain structure, some purpose, especially after Jim passed away. Though I have to admit, it would never have been the same after Ben died.”

“You’re right,” I say. “I’ve seen the place.”

“Don’t go back myself. I don’t think I’d be welcome.” She says this leaning back in her chair smiling a little, like there’s a secret she’s ready to impart.

“Why did you leave?”

She laughs, not hearty, but cynical. “It wasn’t by choice. Had to hire a lawyer to get my retirement,” she says. “Skarpellos-the guy’s lower than the nipples on a snake.” She bites off the words. “Ben wasn’t cold yet. He called me in and told me to clean out my desk. Had a security guard stand over me while I did it. The kind of trust you get after twenty years on the job.” She says this with bitterness.

I don’t say anything, but give her a look, like “Tell me more.” The aroma of the coffee is making its way to my senses. I haven’t tasted it, but the smell is a little like hydrochloric acid.

“I forgot, you weren’t there,” she says. “Most of it happened after you left. The place was an armed camp.” Jo is describing the firm in the days before her departure. “Tony knew where my loyalties rested.”

“He and Ben were at odds?” I say it matter-of-factly, for I saw these pitched battles between them.

“An understatement,” she says. “The partnership was coming apart at the seams.”

That surprises me. While they had a history of fighting, none of it ever lasted more than a day. They could scream at each other at the top of their voices and forget the reason by the next morning.

“Jealousy,” she says. “Skarpellos was green. It was bad enough that Ben was leaving, but it set like a burr under Tony’s saddle that he was going to all that glitter in Washington. He’d been complaining for a year that Ben wasn’t carrying his share. All the partners told him it was gonna be a gold mine for the firm. A former partner on the U.S. Supreme Court. The prestige alone would bring in a dozen new clients. Tony at high tea with the Court. Can you see it?” This brings a little chuckle from both of us.

She takes a sip of coffee and lets it flow like molten lead down her throat. The pack of cigarettes was on the table now.

“Mind?” she says.

I shake my head. I have become the stand-in for a thousand carping coffee breaks that Jo has missed since leaving the firm.

“Anyway,” she says, “the bottom line was getting the clients. And Tony was petrified that with Ben gone the clients would slowly drift away. Everybody knew it was Ben who kept the traffic coming through the door. Skarpellos had taken a free ride for years. It was about to come to an end.” She’s lighting up.

I know that this was true. Though Tony did his share of milking money from corporate clients, it was Ben who kept the cash cow in alfalfa.

“When Ben got back from Washington, his last trip, they had a lulu,” she says.

Between words she emits a stream of forced smoke from one side of her mouth toward the ceiling. A little hardness.

“It was a humdinger,” this argument between Skarpellos and Potter, she says. “You could hear ’em yelling all the way out to reception.”

I’m all ears.

“Funny thing,” she says. “While Tony had his nose in a snit”-smoke followed by little bits of tobacco stripped from her tongue punctuate this monologue-“Ben leaving and all, it was Ben who started the whole thing, the argument.”

“Over what?”

“Money. Seems the trust account was a little light.” She smiles and looks toward the ceiling, like “What else.”

“Let me guess,” I tell her. “Ben caught Tony taking a loan?”

She nods. “Bingo,” she says. “And Ben was spitting fire.”

I am not surprised. There had been little skirmishes over the Greek’s indiscretions with the client trust account on previous occasions, before I left the firm. He used it like a private slush fund, always just a half jump ahead of complaints by clients to the state bar. On two occasions that I know of, Ben had to smooth ruffled feathers over dinner and fine wine with clients who’d caught the Greek with his fingers in the till, borrowing their retainers.

“This time,” she tells me, “it had gone too far. Skarpellos had taken more than petty cash. And a client had in fact filed a complaint with the bar. It ended with Skarpellos storming out of Ben’s office, after Ben had delivered an ultimatum.”

According to Jo Ann, Potter gave Tony forty-eight hours to restore the money to the trust account, two or three hundred thousand dollars, she can’t remember the exact amount, “borrowed” by the Greek for one of his “business deals,” to cover his interest in some glitzy real estate development. It seems that Skarpellos had one of his perennial cashflow problems.

With the state bar already nosing around, Ben had Jo Ann take two letters, a succinct one-pager to the Greek confirming Ben’s demand that he repay the money, in forty-eight hours, and another to the disciplinary authorities at the bar, so that there would be no question as to who was responsible for this trust imbalance. The first letter was delivered to Tony in a sealed envelope. The second was post-dated, to be mailed two days later from Washington, if Skarpellos did not correct the problem.

Whether Ben would have actually followed through on this threat to send the second letter neither of us can say. But if I know Skarpellos, he was sweating bullets. In a hand of high-stakes poker, Potter could always buffalo the Greek.

“Ben was mad as hell,” she says. “He took it very personal, that Tony would act this way just at a time that federal agents were crawling all over the office getting background information on the Supreme Court appointment.”

I now realize that Potter, on his return from Washington, had more on his mind than my fling with Talia. He had a thieving partner who was threatening to damage his reputation. Stories of embezzled trust funds are not conducive to high court nominations. Senate confirmation would take months and would turn over every rock in Potter’s life. Politicos in Washington were not likely to spend the time to consider which of the partners were culpable and which were the innocent victims in such a scam. The mud would spatter far enough to hit Ben.

“Surely Ben must have discussed this with the other partners.”

She shakes her head between gulps of coffee. “There was nobody else he could confide in.” Nobody but her is what she’s saying. “None of the partners wanted to take sides. They figured Ben was leaving, and they’d be left to face Tony-alone. Not a happy prospect,” she says.

An understatement. In any balls-to-the-wall office showdown the Greek would have eaten any one of them for lunch. He had proven on a dozen different occasions that he could cow them, collectively and individually-except for Ben.

“What’s more to the point”-she takes a long drag on her cigarette-“the letter of complaint to the bar, the one I prepared for Ben to sign, it disappeared. The file copies, the original, every trace of that letter is gone. Even the backup on the drive in my computer,” she says, “all gone.”

This interests me, and she can read it in my face.

“The day after Ben died,” she says, “I looked for it in the directory. I tried to pull it up and read it back using Ben’s confidential code. But it was gone. Somebody had erased it. And there’s no hard copy,” she adds. “Ben didn’t want it floating around the office.”

The significance of this correspondence has not been lost on Jo Ann, and I wonder aloud why she hasn’t gone to the cops.

“And tell ’em what? I have no proof,” she says. “But it gets worse. I went to Mr. Edwards. Told him about Ben’s concerns regarding the trust account. He said he’d check into it. The next day he came back, very friendly.” Jo Ann smiles like some innocent. “Told me that the account was solid, that there was no trust imbalance. No imbalance.” She repeats this to herself, nodding with purpose as if to show how inane she’d been to ask. “I got the axe an hour later.”

I could have told her, like O’Mally owns the Dodgers, Tony owns Tom Edwards. They are partners in name only. But there is little point in rubbing this salt into the wounds now.

“Why didn’t the police interview you?”

She shakes her head. “I was in England for four months, visiting relatives. Been wanting to do it for years. Getting canned gave me the opportunity.”

This explains it. The cops weren’t breaking their backs chasing leads or sources. Succumbing to a little convenient myopia, they started with one suspect and back-filled their case against Talia. In no time she found herself buried up to her shoulders, relying on Skarpellos to help her out. Suddenly it all makes sense, the inept Mr. Cheetam, Tony waiting in the wings to inherit Ben’s estate, leading Talia to the precipice. Like fingers in a glove it all fits.

“Would you testify?” I ask her.

“Sing like the little old wine maker,” she says. “What have I got to lose?” Then she pauses. “There’s just one problem. Without something more than my word, the tune may sound a lot like sour grapes.”

CHAPTER 24

“Bad news-and surprises,” says Harry. He waltzes through the door, a thin leather briefcase under his arm.

“Skarpellos has an alibi,” he says. “It gets worse.” His expression is somber. This is a serious blow. “Tod Hamilton does not.”

This is not something I want to hear.

He sits to fill me in on the details.

Harry’s been off doing a little gumshoe. Primed by the information from Jo Ann, he’s backtracked over Tony’s statement to the police, something we hadn’t paid much attention to during the prelim, the Greek’s whereabouts the night of the killing.

“Says he went to a basketball game in Oakland,” Harry tells me, “with a friend.”

“The friend?” I ask.

“You’re gonna love this,” he says. “Your client, Susan Hawley.”

“Sonofabitch,” I say. I snap the pencil I am holding in two.

“Can you beat it?” he says. “No wonder he was so anxious to pay for her defense. Guess who would have shown up prominently in the ‘boink book’ if Lama ever got his hands on it?”

The Greek has been using me to keep Hawley quiet. Tony had lied to me that day in his office. The firm never had a client. There was no prominent politician they were running cover for. The Greek was trying to save his own ass. I wonder how often he had used Hawley to chum the political waters for votes on zoning matters or other “business.”

“Did the cops get a statement from Hawley?” I ask him.

“You bet,” says Harry.

“Does she confirm the facts, his alibi?” I ask.

“Like somebody wrote a script for her,” he says.

I fix on him across the desk. “What do you think?”

“I think Skarpellos had a burning need to put a muzzle in Ben Potter’s mouth, and the opportunity to do it.” He smiles. “I think the lady’s lying. Now ask me how we prove it.”

I keep my own counsel on this, but I tend to agree with Harry. If Hawley had been hired by the Greek to service political patrons before the scandal began to break, she would have been the perfect alibi on the night of the murder.

“For the right price Susan Hawley would willingly allow words to be put in her mouth,” I tell him.

“Among other things,” says Harry.

“What about Hamilton?”

“No such luck,” he says. He looks at me perplexed, but not entirely surprised.

“No alibi?”

Harry nods. “The only thing going for him is that cops never questioned him, so he didn’t have the opportunity to lie for the record.”

It’s what I was afraid of. I’ve had Harry check Hamilton’s alibi, the story he gave me the night of our meeting at Talia’s, when he told me he had dinner with friends at the club the night Ben was killed.

“The club records show he had dinner there, all right,” says Harry, “three nights before the murder, and then again a week later. They have no record of him at the bar or the restaurant that night.”

“Maybe somebody else picked up the tab?” I say.

“No, they have a roster in the main hall, everybody registers on arrival and leaving, members and guests. I checked it. He never signed in that day.”

If Harry can find this, so can the cops. I’m becoming increasingly concerned by Tod’s indiscretions. The fact that he posted a king’s ransom in bail for Talia’s release now lights him up like neon for Nelson. With no alibi for the night of the murder, he is becoming too convenient.

“You think she’s lying to you?” Harry’s concerned about Talia, her relationship with Tod. He’s wondering if the cops may not be right.

“Wouldn’t be the first time that a client lied to me.” Harry’s sitting there looking at me, like maybe, just maybe we’re on the side of the devil in this one. It’s not an unusual position for Harry, or one that bothers him much. But, I tell him, she didn’t kill Ben, with Hamilton or anybody else. Whether she’s lying … I make a face, like “Who knows?”

“Tell me you’re not thinkin’ with your pecker,” he says.

I give Harry an exasperated look.

He takes umbrage at this. “Save it for the jury.” Harry’s irked. “You want me to keep you honest,” he says. “So humor me.”

I wave him on, like go ahead, play your best mind game with me.

“Think about it,” he says. “You go over to her house and this guy Tod is living there. He bails her outta jail. Sure, maybe it’s just that his dick’s run away with his head. That’s one possibility. The other is, maybe he considers this a good investment.” Harry gives me a severe look, like this is not so far-fetched. “If you popped the old man, and Talia knew about it, how secure would you feel knowing she’s in the can, locked up with a case of the screaming meemies? Mmm? How long before she says something to somebody? Wouldn’t you want to get her out of there, like now?”

I’m looking at him soberly, listening to this line.

“And the little handgun,” he says. “You did everything but carve instructions on his forehead, telling him not to handle the thing if they found it. And what does Tod do?” Harry brings one index finger to his temple to show the calculating thought process that went into Tod’s fingering this gun and smudging all the prints.

“Now we find out he has no alibi. What is worse, he lied to you about it.”

“What are you saying-they killed Ben together?”

“It’s a possibility,” he says. But there’s another theory that Harry thinks may be closer to the mark. “Maybe the boyfriend gets infatuated. He wants Talia to leave the old man. Suppose she won’t do it. Maybe she can’t give up the good life-the prenuptial thing and all. So Tod fixes it for her. Suppose, just suppose, she doesn’t know this until after it’s all over, until after Hamilton has killed Potter.”

I think about this while Harry watches me. I have my doubts about Tod. But for Talia, I have a hard time believing she would keep this from me. With the travail she has been through, I don’t buy it.

“She would have talked,” I tell him. “I know her. She would have broken. She would have told me by now.” Talia, with all of her whimsy, would never come this far, staring death or a long prison term in the face without telling me if this were so.

“Maybe,” he says. “But think about it. Now she’s in a box. What good does it do to tell you? So you know the truth. Is it likely to help her?”

I follow him on this. Harry’s right. This is not a story we could lay on a jury with much success. The fact that Talia, a married woman, had a serious love interest that could motivate murder would be enough to hang her. The best we could hope for is that they would view her as an accessory after the fact. Even this would be a long shot of sizable proportions.

“So what are you saying?” I ask him.

“That maybe the lady knows more than she says. Maybe she can meet Nelson’s terms for a plea bargain after all.”

Harry’s suggesting that we might have Talia roll over on Tod, offer him up to the prosecution as her shadowy accomplice.

“It’s too convenient,” I tell him. “There’s not a shred of evidence linking him to the crime. The fact that he paid her bail money? That’s not evidence of murder. The fact that he has no alibi? Where were you that night?” I ask him.

Harry shrugs, like “Take your best guess.”

“Like half the rest of the city,” I say. “No, it won’t wash. Unless there was hard evidence. Unless Talia could testify that Tod made admissions to her, Nelson would never bite.” This leaves me with the thought of how I would ever approach her on this, to ask Talia about Tod.

“For now,” I say, “let’s concentrate on the Greek.” It’s only a feeling, but something in my bones tells me that Skarpellos is the key.

“So what do you want me to do, subpoena the bank records for the firm’s trust account?”

“No, we’ll wait. We get ’em with enough time to study them and confirm our defense, to see if we can prove somebody was dipping into the trust. But as soon as we go after the bank records, Skarpellos will know what we’re up to. He’ll start squeezing witnesses. Subtly,” I say. “No overt tampering.” The Greek is a master of intimidation.

Harry nods, as if this is his inclination as well. He sees where I’m going, the old SODDI defense-“Some Other Dude Did It.”

Five days after Harry’s mission to the club I am again in Talia’s living room confronting her with the facts on Tod, his lack of an alibi, his generosity concerning her bail.

“You’re doing yourself a disservice,” I tell her. “I can’t defend you without the truth.”

Talia sits in one corner of the couch, looking at me as if I’ve whacked her with a two-by-four brandishing a nail in the business end. Her legs are curled under her, arms folded over her chest, the classic female defensive posture.

She doesn’t answer my questions, but instead looks at me forlorn, accusing, that I too should whip her at a time like this.

“Tomorrow,” I say, “we go to see Nelson. You can be sure he’ll offer us some kind of a deal. I’ve got to know whether we should take it. If you’re hiding things from me, critical facts that may come out during the trial, then you’re hobbling me-crucifying yourself,” I tell her.

She’s in a daze. It is often said that you can key the loss of mental faculties to a singular traumatic event, a fall, an accident, a change of habitat. With Talia, since her incarceration, there has been a conspicuous loss in the powers of concentration, a restless anxiety that is not characteristic. She is slowly unraveling.

I move to the couch and shake her a little, not with my hands, but with the tone of my voice, up close in her ear.

“Do you hear me?” I say. “It becomes more difficult the farther we go. If there’s something you haven’t told me, now is the time.” I can’t afford to coddle her.

Suddenly she turns on me, coils, and strikes. “You think I did it,” she says.

“Did you?” To this point I have never asked her this question. Not overtly. We have done little probing cotillions around it, Harry and I, but never head-on, squarely presenting the question to Talia.

“How can you believe I could do a thing like that, that I could kill Ben?” she says.

“What’s Tod’s part in all of this?” I say.

“He’s a friend.” There’s derision in her tone, as if to say “Unlike you.”

“Good friend.” I say. “A million-dollar bond. I could use a few like that myself.”

She gives me the once-over, up and down, scrambling with her eyes, surprised that I have discovered her little secret, the deep pocket behind her release.

I tell her that Nelson too will know this by now, and that at some point we are likely to be confronted with Tod’s lack of an alibi and the fact of their relationship.

From the look on her face I can tell that the significance of these facts has suddenly dawned on her.

“It looks bad,” I explain to her. “You’re living together, he pays for your bail, he has no alibi for the night of the murder, the cops are looking for an accomplice. Some might think that his contribution to your bail is a little investment to ensure your silence, to keep you from fingering him as your helper.”

I can see in her eyes, like those of a startled fawn, that this scenario has never entered her mind, not until now.

“Still,” I tell her, “it could be a persuasive argument to a jury.”

“It was his mother’s money,” she says.

“What?”

“The money for the bail-it came from his mother. Tod doesn’t have that kind of money,” she says. “But his family is wealthy.”

“Whatever,” I say, as if these details don’t really matter. “His name is on the guarantee with the bondsman; that’s all Nelson needs to know. That’s all he’ll care about.”

She tells me that the collateral posted for her bail is part of a family trust, Tod’s inheritance.

“Can’t we keep him out of it?” she says. “He was only trying to help me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, “but it’s what happens when you withhold things from your lawyer. If you’d told me that Tod was willing to guarantee your bail I would have advised against it.”

“And I would still be rotting in the county jail.” Her eyes are now ablaze, glazed a little by the start of tears. “Tod was the only one who cared,” she says. In her own way, Talia is telling me that I am no better than Cheetam, that I too welshed on my promise to spring her from jail. Maybe she is right.

“Do you think they’ll arrest him?” she asks.

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

More tears extinguish the fire in her eyes. There’s real pathos here, the kind of anguished expression that often precedes truth.

“Oh God,” she says. “How did I get into this? How did I get him into this?”

I think for a moment that she’s talking about her general plight, the fact that she’s charged with murder. Then I realize her words have another meaning, some more specific dilemma.

She looks up at me with big, round, pleading eyes.

“He was with me the night Ben was killed,” she says.

My heart thumps, like someone has slammed me into a concrete wall. I’m speechless, allowing my expression to say it all. Like “What are you telling me?”

“The night Ben was killed,” she says. “We were together.” She pauses only slightly, taken aback a little as disbelief is replaced by emerging anger in my eyes.

“I wasn’t in Vacaville. I didn’t leave town. I was at Tod’s apartment.” Then quickly, as if to dispel what she knows is running through my mind, she says: “But I didn’t kill him. I didn’t murder Ben.”

I am walking away from her now, shaking my head as much in frustration as in fury. Angry with the cosmos of criminal defendants who tell unending lies to their lawyers. Little white ones that shade the truth, or whoppers like this one that plunge a spear through the heart of your case.

We have wasted untold hours scouring Talia’s credit card records in hopes of producing some verification of her alibi. Harry’s worn a rut in the highway between this city and Vacaville looking for anyone who might have seen her at the property she was supposedly viewing; he’s been talking to neighbors, the postman, kids on the street.

“Sonofabitch.” I say it to the wall, before I turn and look at her again. “What else?” I say. “What other little surprises do you have?” I wonder if this is only a first crack in the dam, a little leak of real fact, to be followed by a flood of contradictions, a story gone awry, a tale that flies like some wounded duck, conflicted by truth and lies. How many variations on this theme will I hear now that she tells me that her alibi is Tod. A story that, both of us know, even if true will not work.

“We were together until I left his apartment just before ten,” she says. “The police were there when I got home. Ben was already dead.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell the police?”

“What could I say? The police told me that my husband had just shot himself. I couldn’t very well tell them that I was off with another man, alone in his apartment.”

“Observing the social proprieties?” I say.

“I didn’t want to get Tod involved.”

I am wondering more about Harry’s theory. Whether perhaps this infatuation, Hamilton’s and Talia’s, is not mutual, and whether Tod may have acted as Harry suspects, as a lone agent in the interests of love.

“I see. So you spun a little yarn for the cops?”

“I figured they couldn’t check it out-the trip to Vacaville,” she says.

I shake my head again, this time looking straight at her. The wonder of it all. Talia fabricating a story the cops couldn’t verify to protect Tod, and at the same time destroying any hope of an alibi.

“Later I couldn’t tell anyone,” she says.

Caught in a web of her own deceit, Talia was confronted with the unshakable theory of a male accomplice. To reveal her whereabouts was to serve Tod up on a platter to the cops.