the night before he died. Is that true?'
'Okay, but I didn't go to steal it back. I didn't, Diz. I swear to you.'
'You swear to me. That helps. You swore to me about your alibi.' Hardy shook his head angrily. 'It might have been nice to know some of this a week ago.' Collecting himself, he drew in a long, slow breath and let it out heavily. 'Okay, John, suddenly my idea that you turn yourself in because you couldn't have committed any of the murders isn't so doable. Any one of them is good enough.' He looked straight at him. 'How am I supposed to believe you didn't do this after all? You got any suggestions?'
'I'm telling you. You know me, Diz.'
'Right. But these lies, John. I can't think of a reason you'd lie to a friend if you weren't trying to hide something.'
'I felt bad about the way things had gone with Michelle. I didn't want to bring her into it. That's the truth. I swear to God.'
Hardy was still working on his response to that when on his desk, the telephone rang, his direct line. He reached for it. 'Dismas Hardy.' Listening for a moment, he sat up straighter, uttered a syllable or two, listened some more. He put a ringer to his lips and pointed at Holiday. He talked into the receiver. 'Sure, I read all about it this morning. I wondered whether-'
As he spoke, he reached out and pushed down on the button, breaking the connection in his midsentence. 'That was a homicide inspector named Russell,' he said, 'asking if I'd seen you recently. Somebody must have told him that I represented you last time and he thought you might have looked me up again.'
'That was probably me. He and his partner came by the bar.'
'And you gave them my name?'
'Yeah.'
'Terrific, John. Just great. You're batting about a thousand here with bad moves.'
'I know, Diz. I know. I'm sorry. Did he say where he was?'
'He didn't get a chance. We can hope it was the Hall. But I think you'd be smart to get out of here right now. I don't want to know where you are when they ask me, which they will. I'd be surprised if they think you're here now, but to be safe go down through the garage and out the back. Now go! Call me in an hour. We'll think of something. I'll be here. Go! Go!'
When the phone rang a minute later, Hardy picked it up again. 'Inspector Russell? Sorry about that. We're having the devil of a time with the phones lately here. I don't know what it is, except aggravating. You, too, huh? I think it's everybody. But you were asking about John Holiday? I'm afraid I don't know where he is. He's no longer my client.'
Russell said he'd talked to Holiday just two days before and he'd mentioned Hardy by name as his attorney. Said they were close friends. Saw each other all the time.
'I hate to say this, Inspector,' Hardy said. 'But the man's been known to lie. Sure. Anytime. Good luck.'
The lab tests from the Terry/Wills crime scene indicated that the stuff on the shoe in Terry's closet closely matched the gunk Thieu had collected at the Creed scene the day before-brake fluid, animal fats, peanuts and pepper flakes, no doubt from Kung Pao chicken.
Thieu was at his desk comparing the written transcription of a taped recording of one of his witness's interviews to the tape itself. While Russell was on the phone with Holiday's lawyer, trying to track the suspect down, Cuneo read over the lab report on the shoe and decided to thank the veteran inspector and to share the good news with him. 'Pretty cool, huh?'
Thieu put the report down. 'That's enough matches for me. It's the same stuff, all right. Nice work. And I see you found more evidence at Holiday's place.'
'It's been a lucky couple of days,' Cuneo said.
'If you believe in luck.'
'What do you mean by that?'
'Nothing, really. It's just so rare when things fall together so well.'
'I said the same thing to Gerson, but what am I supposed to do, look a gift horse in the mouth? This is about as solid as it gets.'
Thieu made no comment to that. He had put down the transcript and his pencil. Now he took off his earphones and hooked them around his neck. He looked piercingly at Cuneo. 'After I left the Terry/Wills scene yesterday, did you find anything that put Holiday there?'
'Not directly, no. But later in the day we did find money and jewelry from Silverman's at his place.'
Thieu acknowledged that with a nod. 'I heard about that. But no bloody clothes or shoes? Anything tying him directly to Terry and Wills? There was an awful lot of blood.'
'He hadn't been back there, where he lived. There were three or four days' worth of newspapers down on his stoop.'
'Ah, that would explain it then.'
'Maybe he slept in his bar, I don't know. Or he's shacked up with somebody.' Cuneo had pulled a chair around and was straddling it backward. He started tapping a beat with his fingers. 'But that's a good call. We'll check the dumpsters and alleys between the Ark and Terry's.'
'You can't ever have too much, I don't believe.' Thieu leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his middle. Then he smiled politely and, wishing Cuneo luck again, said he had to get back to his editing.
17
Holiday's phone call did not come one hour later as Hardy had suggested, so he had filled his increasingly wide-open morning with visits downstairs to less-than-enthusiastic associates and calls to his deposition witnesses in the Panos suit. He needed to bring them up to date on Freeman's condition and rearrange his calendar so that they could get back on some kind of schedule by, say, the middle of next week. If David still wasn't up to appearing, then Hardy would try to go it alone, or with minimal help, for a while.
It galled him, but he knew he might have to revisit the question of Kroll's settlement offer-four million was starting to look pretty good to him about now. But whether that or any offer was still on the table was uncertain. Hardy himself had already billed something in the order of three hundred hours to the matter in the past four months and now stood to lose all of that time and money if he couldn't make some magic in the relatively short term. So he talked to clients and filled time.
Three full hours after Holiday had ducked out of his office, his call-waiting signal went off. In his mind, by now he had just about come to the conclusion that Inspector Russell had staked out his office after all and that John had been arrested leaving it. And that after he was processed, Hardy would get the phone call.
He asked the client to hold a second, connected to the other line.
No hello, no identification of any kind. Just the words, 'Big Dick,' repeated twice. Then a dead line.
After he finished talking to the client, Hardy hung up and stared into the empty space between his desk and his dartboard.
The voice had been Holiday's, and he had obviously formed the impression that Hardy's phone might be tapped. Hardy reflected that he also thought someone might kill him in jail. He might have found this paranoia amusing if he had any patience left.
Hardy thought about it for another thirty or forty seconds, then stood, threw the last two of Holiday's morning darts into his board-two elevens-and walked out, making sure the door was locked behind him. In the lobby, some semblance of normalcy had returned. Phyllis had returned to reception and her presence was somehow reassuring. One of the associates sat with a client, visible through the glass walls of the Solarium. Norma's door was open and he saw her at her desk, talking on the telephone. Above all, a slight but audible hum permeated the open space. People were here, trying to carry on.
Okay, he thought. Okay.
When Hardy pulled his car out of the garage, he saw that the day had become overcast again. Gray, with hovering wisps and banks of fog that he drove into and out of as he fought the noon traffic. He decided that the first
