Mike nodded. “Sergeant Sanchez.” He pulled out his ID. “I guess you were expecting me.”
White took the ID and studied it, then handed it back. He didn’t appear alarmed, just tired. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?”
Mike studied him before replying. A man in his middle to late thirties, just slightly leaner than a healthy person his age should be. His dark eyes were sunk deep and ringed with purple. His long face, with its good patrician cheekbones and strong chin, was colorless. White didn’t look particularly gay, but he did look haunted.
“You can tell me what happened between you and Raymond Cowles on the evening of October thirty-first,” Mike said. He was neither hard nor soft, just matter-of-fact.
White swallowed and pushed the paper plate across the desk. “Want some? I’m not hungry.”
“No thanks.”
“I didn’t think so. No one does. I’ve been trying to get rid of it for hours.”
Mike decided this was going to take a while. He sat in the empty chair and unbuttoned his jacket. The very first domestic violence call he’d gotten as a young cop had been between two men. Their yelling and screaming had compelled a neighbor to call the police. When Sanchez rang the doorbell, a young man in a flowered negligee and nothing else had answered the door. The young man had a black eye and blood pouring from his nose but he didn’t want any assistance from the police.
“Men,” he’d sobbed. “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Go home, honey, I love him.”
It was the first time, but it wasn’t the last. Mike Sanchez knew gay guys could get as attached to each other as normal guys did to women, but it made him uncomfortable to imagine it. He also knew it wasn’t politically correct to make any distinctions between gay and normal. For gays it was normal to be gay. But it wasn’t normal to him. As he sat in Tom White’s office, he was made even more uneasy by the distinct feeling Cowles’s lover was more bereaved about his loss than his wife was.
That didn’t make White any less the sharp-eyed lawyer, though. And he knew cops. Mike was always just a little chagrined when people picked up so fast on the fact that he was a cop.
“You know Raymond Cowles is dead?” he asked.
White picked up a pen and played with it. “Yes, it’s common knowledge in the office.”
“You knew him well.”
“Yes.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
“Sure. As you can probably tell, this is the legal department. Ray was in Actuarial. Normally we wouldn’t work together, but six months ago we were assigned a special project.”
“Oh, what was that?”
“Ah, addressing the issue of underwriting risks for lethal illnesses. Ray provided the statistical input I was involved in several areas—drafting policy language, legislative, statutory, and other legal issues.”
Mike raised his eyebrow. “Is that for or against?”
“What?”
“Insuring potential AIDS victims.”
White’s pale face colored slightly. “It’s an issue. We don’t want to discriminate. We can’t lawfully discriminate. But the statistics show that insuring certain groups of high-risk individuals for lethal illnesses without establishing appropriate reserves and some spreading of the risk—for example, through a government-supported pool—can bankrupt a company. We were working on that.”
Uh-huh. “So you knew Ray pretty well.”
“We put a lot of time in on that project. In fact, it’s still in the works.” White’s voice wavered. He glanced down at the pen.
“Did you see him out of the office?”
“We had lunch together occasionally.”
“What about dinner?”
“We may have, a few times. I’m not married. I eat out a lot.”
“Did you know his wife?”
White looked blank. “No. I didn’t know he was married.” He shrugged. “Maybe he was married. I don’t recall.”
“Was Ray disturbed about anything recently?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“He didn’t talk to you?”
“No, we had a business relationship. We didn’t talk about personal things.”
“So you didn’t know he was depressed, worried, troubled about—anything?”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“What about his homosexuality? Did you know anything about that?”
“What?”
“Ray was a homosexual. You didn’t know that?”
Tom White studied the pen in his hands. It was a Montblanc, fat and black. “Yeah, I guess I did.”
“And you were having a relationship with him.”
“Look, I’m going to deny anything you suggest. So—”
Mike took a breath and let it out. “No, you look, Mr. White. We’re investigating a death. You’ve been in the D.A.’s office. You know how that is. We’re going to keep at it until we know what happened. Here are the facts. Ray died. You were with him the night he died. We know that.”
Actually, they didn’t know that, but his words had a certain effect. Tom White shuddered. For several seconds his long body jerked as if he were on the edge of an epileptic fit. But before Mike had a chance to offer assistance, the attorney had regained control of himself. He smiled grimly. “I have the right to remain silent,” he said.
“Look, your private life is your own business,” Mike countered. “All I want to know is what happened. If you didn’t kill him, it won’t go any further than this.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Okay, was it an accident then?”
“What? Was
“He was found with a plastic bag over his head,” Mike said carefully.
Tom White closed his eyes. “I’ve been wondering,” he said to the dark.
“You could have paid us a visit. We would have filled you in.”
“You know I couldn’t do that.” White’s eyes popped open. He was back on the scene. “So a plastic bag was over his head. You don’t have a cause yet?”
“This afternoon.”
“I’d like to see the report.”
“I’m sure you would, but you’re not in the D.A.’s office anymore. And it would be pretty hard to pull strings over there without drawing attention to the case and your involvement in it. Unless you have another very good friend, someone might get interested in your interest and start looking into it.” Mike paused. “You seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
That’s what happened to people who lived secret lives. There was no place to go when the shit hit the fan. Mike almost felt sorry for him. “Look, I have no vested interest in this. You’re probably safest telling me.”
White shook his head. “I don’t have anything to tell you. I wasn’t there when he died. I worked with him. He was my friend.… ” He passed his hand over his eyes. “How could I—let him hurt himself?”
“Maybe you two were getting into things he couldn’t handle.”
“I told you I wasn’t there.”
“And I told you I know you were.” Mike had pulled some strings himself. The police labs were so backed up that hundreds of rape kits hadn’t been tested against the semen of the accused rapers in the last year or so; but on Wednesday, in between following leads on an apartment in Queens, Mike had wandered over to the lab on Twentieth Street and got a friend to test the sheets from Raymond Cowles’s bed just in case they got an ID on the prints. Turned out there were two different blood types in the semen stains. Which meant two men had ejaculated.
