have known she was the one.
Face it, a voice in his head said, you’re just all sentimental right now because you’re worried your guts are rotting again and you’ll be alone in your apartment to face it. And she’s dead, so she’s no threat to your “independence.” You can cheat on a dead woman, so you’re free to screw around.
“That’s not fair,” Guma said aloud to his conscience.
“It never is-bad things happen to good people,” Swanburg said. The old man cocked his head to one side and gave him an appraising look. “Talking to the dead, Ray? Don’t worry, it’s okay. I do it all the time. It helps me remember why I’m in this business.”
Guma patted Swanburg on the shoulder. “Thanks, Jack,” he said and pulled the handle to open the door.
As they stood on the sidewalk waiting for the others to unload their equipment and gather, Swanburg looked up at the brown-stone. “Whoo-whee,” he said and whistled. “Nice digs…more impressive from eye level than the aerials. What’s a place like this cost? A million?”
Guma snorted. “Yeah…for the fence around it. Land is at a premium in Manhattan and single-family residences a rare breed. This probably runs more like five or six million.”
Swanburg whistled again, then chuckled. “All the more fun digging it up. Isn’t that right, Mr. Clarkson?” he said to a tall, lanky man who walked up carrying what looked like the handles to a large lawnmower. Behind him two cops struggled with a large case. “Damn straight, Jack,” Dave Clarkson said. “So enough flapping our gums, let’s get to it.”
Guma asked Detective Clarke Fairbrother to do the honors of leading the charge. The old gumshoe, hobbled a bit by arthritis in his hips, knocked on the door as the rest of the team gathered behind him. They included several police officers to secure the scene, plus Guma, Swanburg, and Clarkson.
The door opened and a butler appeared, the look on his face as if he’d just got a whiff of a bad odor.
“Afternoon,” Guma said stepping up next to Clarkson. “Ray Guma, New York District Attorney’s Office. Is Mr. Stavros in?”
The butler couldn’t have looked more uninterested if Guma had just announced himself as a Fuller Brush salesman. “I’m afraid Mr. Stavros is…indisposed at the moment,” he said and began to shut the door.
With a dexterity born of practice, Fairbrother blocked the door with his big foot.
“I’d suggest that your boss might want to be disposed,” Guma said, “or maybe I get my friend Detective Fairbrother here to arrest you for obstruction. Then you’d get to experience a night in the Tombs, see if the rumors about what happens there in the dark are true.”
The butler blanched, then nodded. “I’ll inform him you’re here, Mr. Guma.”
“Thank you,” Guma called after the man and led his party into the foyer. The butler walked up a flight of stairs and disappeared down a hallway. There were shouts from wherever he disappeared and then the butler reemerged. “He’ll be here in a moment,” he sniffed and left the room.
A minute later, Emil Stavros appeared at the top of the stairs in a jogging outfit and looked over the railing. “What do you want?” he demanded. “I just got home after a long day and was going out for a run.”
Guma noted again that the once movie-star handsome face with its strong Mediterranean features had grown jowly and the features more pronounced until he was almost a caricature of his former self. But otherwise he looked to be in reasonable shape; his hair, though a pewter gray, was still full, and the tan looked real.
Reflecting how his former ballplayer’s body had shriveled, Guma felt a twinge of envy. This asshole was her lover, he thought, and he’s still in better shape than me. He shook off the feeling and shrugged apologetically, “I’m real sorry about that…right now, I’m asking your permission for me and my colleagues to nose about the premises a little, if you don’t mind.”
“But I do mind. As I said, I’m about to go out, and then I have a dinner engagement…. Perhaps, if you call my secretary at the bank tomorrow, you can make an appointment, and we can discuss why you think you get to look around my house. Even then, I’m sure my lawyer will insist on a search warrant.”
“Afraid it can’t wait,” Guma replied. “Tomorrow’s too late…you see, this search warrant I have in my hand is specific for today…right now, as a matter of fact. I was asking more as a courtesy.” A courtesy you don’t deserve, you scumbag, he thought. “Now, you can watch, go for a run, call your lawyer, whatever it is you want to do, but we’ll be going about our business. Come on, guys.”
With that Guma led the troop farther into the house toward the back. Stavros followed, protesting “this outrageous invasion. I am calling my lawyer. This is all obviously the Tammany Hall tactics of your boss.”
Guma ignored him and wasted no time getting to the backyard where the team reassembled on the cement patio. The butler was sitting on one of the lawn chairs, smoking a cigarette. “What
“Looking for Jimmy Hoffa,” Clarkson answered, then noticed the strange, pained look on Guma’s face. “Sorry, Ray, bad joke.”
“Fuhgitabowdit,” Guma said, waving him off with a lightness he did not feel. He’d met Clarkson on his trip back to Colorado and after the meeting, they’d gone to have a few beers at El Rancho Historic Inn off Interstate 70 near the little mountain town of Evergreen.
The topic of conversation had turned to the dark sense of humor most of the members of the 221B Baker Street Irregulars, as they sometimes called themselves, revealed when working on cases.
Clarkson now leaned over the large aluminum case the two police officers had carried for him like Moses approaching the Ark of the Covenant. He flipped the latches and gently lifted the lid. Reaching in with both hands, he lifted a large red but otherwise almost featureless rectangle on wheels. He placed it on the ground and attached the handles, then plugged a cable into the top of the box. It kind of resembled an electric lawnmower.
“Gentlemen,” Clarkson said as he plugged the other end of the cable into a computer he set on the patio table, “meet ground-penetrating radar, the closest thing there is to Superman’s X-ray vision.”
Guma smiled at the reference. When they went before Judge Lussman for the warrant bearing the photographs and a summary of the case, the jurist had scratched his head and then started asking questions. A Fordham law graduate and former Navy pilot who despite the gray in his crew-cut hair looked like he could probably still fly, the judge was probably the most liberal judge on the bench. But he also ran a tight, no-nonsense courtroom.
Lussman taught law at NYU at night and expected both his students and the lawyers who came before him to be prepared and to avoid wasting his time. That or risk a glare from his cobalt blue eyes that many a young law student or careless attorney had sworn could see through every excuse and attempt at subterfuge.
There were a lot of legitimate reasons why a homeowner might get rid of rosebushes and replace them with a patio and hot tub, Lussman had said after Guma explained his reasoning for the search warrant. But at last he’d conceded that combined with the other evidence there was probable cause to issue a search warrant; however, he was going to make it conditional.
Guma had started to protest. How were they going to find “something stronger” if they couldn’t dig? But Swanburg, who’d been allowed to attend the meeting to explain how the photographs were taken, leaned over to Guma and whispered.
As he listened, Guma’s frown changed to concentration. Then he’d nodded to the judge and said,
Lussman raised an eyebrow.
When they left the courthouse, Guma asked Swanburg to explain in more detail what he’d meant by
