“No. Here, just here and the laundry room.”
“Anything else out of the ordinary? Signs of disturbance?”
“No. Just the blood.”
“You keep a gun in the house?”
“Gun? No. I wouldn’t know how to use one.”
“Does your wife?”
“No way. She’s afraid of guns.”
“That’s a good thing to be. The laundry room have an outside door?”
He nodded. “It was unlocked.”
“You look around outside?”
“Last night and again this morning. Nothing.”
“When did you last see your wife?”
“Yesterday morning, before I left for work.”
“How did she seem then? Her mood, frame of mind.”
“I don’t know. She was asleep, or pretended to be.”
“How was she the night before?”
“Twitchy and bitchy. Her middle names.”
“Did you take her to see a doctor?”
“She wouldn’t go. Just kept saying she didn’t need one.”
“And I don’t suppose she gave you any idea of who beat her up?”
“She wouldn’t talk about it. Didn’t have much to say to me at all. She stayed in one of the guest rooms Monday night, drinking.”
“Receive or make any phone calls?”
“Not that I know about,” Krochek said. “I checked the answering machine. No messages.”
“Did you talk to your neighbors, find out if they know anything?”
“No. I didn’t want to talk to anybody until I talked to you. Wouldn’t do any good anyway. People mind their own business up here.”
“Rebecca Weaver seemed pretty interested on Monday.”
“That’s because she was out front when you brought Janice home. She’s not usually nosy.”
“You said you got home around midnight. Why?”
“I don’t… what do you mean?”
“Why so late? You had a battered wife and an iffy situation here. Where were you?”
Eyeshift. “A business dinner, I couldn’t get out of it-”
“Don’t lie to me, Mr. Krochek. Not anymore. Not if you want my help.”
He gave his lower lip a workout before he said, “All right. I was with a… friend.”
“What friend? What’s her name?”
“Do you have to know that?”
“What’s her name?”
“Deanne Goldman. She works for another firm down on the Square. We
… she has an apartment near Lake Merritt… Look, you have to understand. There’s been nothing physical between Janice and me for more than two years. A man has needs, you know how that is…”
Justifying himself. His kind of man always does, to others and to himself. I said, “How long has it been going on?”
“A few weeks.”
She wouldn’t be the first. Nor the last, probably. Janice Krochek, in the Hillman last week: You think he’s some kind of saint? Well, he’s not. Far from it. Some pair. A pair I wished now more than ever that I’d never drawn.
“Will she verify you were with her?”
“Yes, sure, if it comes to that. But I didn’t go over to her apartment until after seven.”
“No?”
“I worked until five-thirty, had a couple of drinks and a sandwich at the Ladderback.”
“Alone?”
“Alone,” Krochek said. “I didn’t talk to anybody except the waitress and she was busy as hell. Is there any way to tell what time this… whatever it was… happened? From the blood, I mean.”
“Not exactly. Not now.”
“You see? If I call the cops, they’ll think I came here after work and… you know, that I did something to Janice. Because of all the trouble we’ve been having, the money she’s blown. They’ll think it was a fight and I killed her. You know they will.”
“Did you kill her?”
“No!” He looked stricken, as if I’d betrayed him somehow. “I swear to God, I didn’t have anything to do with this!”
“Take it easy, hang onto yourself,” I said. “Let’s go outside-through the laundry room. Watch where you walk-don’t step in those blood marks.”
He nodded jerkily, led the way into the laundry room. Without touching anything, I looked around in there for signs of disturbance. Nothing. Krochek opened the back door. Tiled patio strewn with outdoor furniture, close- clipped lawn surrounding a kidney-shaped swimming pool with an electric-powered cover drawn over it. Nothing to see on the tiles. On the edge of the lawn near the back-door path there was a short, narrow, crescent-shaped gouge where something heavy had cut into the grass. Not fresh but not too old, either; the mashed-down grass inside the gouge hadn’t browned yet. I asked Krochek if it had been there before yesterday.
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Might’ve been. Damn gardener gets careless sometimes.”
Nothing on the path that led around the side and through a tall locked gate to the driveway. You could get into the garage from the yard; the door there was unlocked. I opened it and looked inside. Empty except for gardening implements and the usual garage clutter. Krochek’s Porsche Boxster was parked in the driveway.
We went back into the house. I had Krochek show me the bedroom his wife had occupied Monday night. Rumpled bed, stink of stale cigarette smoke, bottle of Scotch and a smudged glass on the nightstand, the bloodstained clothes she’d been wearing on Monday tossed haphazardly on the floor. Nothing else out of place. Nothing to grab my attention in the adjoining bathroom. We went into his bedroom, the rest of the rooms in the house. Nothing.
The formal living room was the last of them. He flopped into a leather sling chair and massaged his face with the heels of his hands. “Now what?” he said.
“My advice is to call the police. Right now.”
“I can’t do that. I can’t.”
“It’s the right thing, the smart thing.”
“No.” His head jerked up. “You’re not going to call them on your own, are you? Without my consent?”
“Not without more evidence that a crime was committed here.”
“That’s right,” he said, as if another thought had struck him. “That’s right. It could’ve been some kind of accident. Janice cut herself with a knife or something. And then called a cab to take her to an ER.”
Not too likely, given the blood marks and the way they stopped just short of the laundry room, and the rest of the circumstances. But I said, “It’s possible. You could try calling hospitals in the area.”
“Yeah. I’m going to clean up those stains, too. I almost did it last night. That’s what I should’ve done.”
Instead of waiting to call me, he meant. “I wouldn’t advise it,” I said.
“Why not?”
“If a crime has been committed here, you’d be guilty of destroying evidence. Police forensics could find traces of blood no matter how many times you scrubbed the kitchen floor.”
“There’s not that much. It could be anybody’s.” He massaged his face again. “Christ. You really think she’s dead?”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure I care if she is… no, that’s not true, of course I care. I don’t know what I’m saying. I just want this nightmare to be over with.”
