But Hunt wasn’t in any kind of conciliatory mood. “You want to step back and let me in? Then we can continue this discussion.”
She backed away from the door, pulling it along with her. Hunt stepped over the threshold, threw a quick glance first over her shoulder down the hallway to the right, then over to his left. “Okay,” he said, reaching for the doorknob and closing it behind them.
“Who’s the third murder victim?” she asked.
“We’ll get to that,” Hunt said. “Meanwhile, what I’d like you to do is go down to the TV room and sit there for a minute and wait for me. I’ll be right with you.”
“Has someone else been killed?” she asked. “If somebody was killed last night, I was with Mickey the whole time. I couldn’t have killed anybody.”
“Maybe not,” Hunt said. He pointed. “TV room. Please.”
She crossed her arms and stared at his face with ill-disguised hostility for a couple of seconds, then let out a frustrated and angry guttural sound and turned back down the hallway, disappearing where Hunt had asked her to go.
As soon as she’d gone, Hunt went to his bedroom, where, with a mixture of chagrin and relief, he saw that his rug had apparently not been disturbed. Nevertheless, he crossed to the corner of it, pulled it up, and lifted out the board that covered his safe. He twirled the combination wheel, which turned easily, signifying that it was locked. But, wanting to be sure, he dialed the combination and opened it again, saw his second gun where he’d left it earlier, and then closed and made sure he’d locked it up one more time before he stood and reversed his actions with the board and the rug.
As soon as he appeared in the doorway to the television room, she looked up. Scrunched over as though she had a stomachache, her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped in front of her, she appeared suddenly small, waiflike. And all the more beautiful for her apparent vulnerability-her doe eyes threatening to overflow, the color high on her cheeks.
For a moment, even in his highly skeptical, antagonistic state, Hunt felt something akin to awe at the power she could wield over men, if only she knew.
But of course she knew, he thought. How could she not know?
“Has someone else died?” she asked. “Please tell me no one else has died.”
Taking her very seriously indeed, wishing to minimize the chance that she would try to play him by mere proximity, Hunt sat in the chair farthest from her across the room. “Al Carter says that you offered to take Jim Parr home from the memorial yesterday,” he said. “Is that true?”
She dropped her head as though someone had cut the tendons in her neck. When she looked back up, the tears had broken from her eyes. “Is Jim all right?”
“No one knows,” Hunt said. “He never made it home.”
She closed her eyes, shook her head back and forth a couple of times. “I didn’t take him home,” she said. “He didn’t want to go home. He wanted to go out to Ortega. That’s where I dropped him off.”
This news, whether or not it was true, sent a jolt of electricity up Hunt’s back. “What time was this?” he asked.
“I’m not sure exactly. One, one-fifteen, somewhere in there.”
“What did he say he wanted to do there? At Ortega?”
“He didn’t say specifically. He just wanted to walk around and talk to people. He still knew a lot of people out there. One of them might have heard something or seen something, or just knew something, that might help Mickey. And you. He really wanted to help get the guy who’d killed Dominic if he could, and he thought there might be some chance up there. But when we got there, the place was all closed up-we realized for the memorial, of course. The staff was downtown.”
“So what’d you do? With Jim, I mean.”
“I told him I’d take him home. But he wanted to stay out there.”
“In the rain?”
“There’s a pizza place down on Irving, near Nineteenth. I dropped him down there. He said he’d wait it out and go back down to Ortega when the building reopened. I tried to talk him out of it, that he should just go home, but no luck.”
“So you left him at this pizza place? You’re saying somebody might remember seeing him there?”
“I don’t know how long he would have stayed, but somebody’d probably remember. One of the workers. Maybe you could call there and ask if an old guy came in alone a little after lunchtime? See how long he stayed.” She met his gaze with a hard one of her own. “And I know you could say that I hung around and picked him up when he came out, but I didn’t do that, Mr. Hunt. I went home and got ambushed by Juhle and Russo and then, when they left, I threw my clothes into my car and called in sick to work and got out of my apartment and went to find Mickey. That’s what I did. I left Jim at the pizza place.”
Hunt had to admire her skill and tenacity. This was another perfectly plausible scenario-albeit a very difficult one to verify definitively- that she’d pulled together on the spot, all the while flawlessly acting out her part as a damaged and falsely accused victim. On the other hand, it might after all be the truth. Hunt found himself fighting against the temptation to believe her. “Do you remember the name of this pizza place?” he asked.
“I’m going to guess Irving Pizza.”
“And creativity still flourishes,” Hunt said.
He pulled his cell phone out, punched in 411, and in a moment had gotten connected. Though it was lunchtime and there was a lot of background noise, the manager found time to come to the phone and listen to Hunt’s question, preamble and all. “Yeah,” he said. “The old guy was here all right. Came in a little after the lunch rush, ate a small pepperoni, and had most of a pitcher of beer. Nice guy. Jim something, I think. We shot the shit for an hour or so. He left under his own power. Is he all right?”
“We’re trying to run him down,” Hunt said. “Thanks for your help.”
When he hung up, he looked across at Alicia Thorpe.
“I’m not lying,” she said. “Not about any of this.”
Hunt said, “You lied about Dominic firing you. Did you forget that one?”
She shook her head. “I was afraid. But I told Mickey about that. I told him why I did it. I’d never gotten grilled by the police before. I thought they’d arrest me because it might give me a motive to have killed Dominic.”
“No ‘might’ about it.”
“But it wasn’t like that. And it wasn’t like I even needed the job. I’ve already got a job, you know. I mean a real, paying job, not that it’s making me rich. But I’m okay with that for now. Besides, Dominic didn’t just kick me out. He explained the whole thing about Ellen to me. He was really sorry, but he just couldn’t deal with his home life anymore with our relationship making Ellen so crazy, even though there was nothing sexual to it.”
“Nothing sexual?”
“That’s right. Ian can tell you, I-”
“Who’s Ian?”
“My brother. He can tell you, I don’t do sexual with older guys anymore, especially married older guys. In fact, I don’t do much sexual anymore, period. It screws everybody up. Not to mention that it screws me up. I’m kind of hoping I get an actual boyfriend someday, then maybe start over with that stuff. But nobody seems to want to take the time, find out if we get along first. You know?”
“I’ve heard stories,” Hunt said. But this was what he’d steeled himself against, this urge to connect, to believe her. And before he got to that place, he was going to take another shot at breaking her story. “But let me ask you something else: If there was nothing sexual going on with you and Dominic, how do you explain the fact that there was semen on your scarf?”
Again, if this was acting, it was brilliant. She straightened up, her face a mask of confusion. “Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“The police didn’t tell me that.”
“No. They sometimes don’t tell you everything they know all at once. They’re hoping maybe you’ll slip and tell them first, before you were supposed to know.”
“Well.” She did not hesitate, did not even seem overly concerned. “I don’t have any idea about that. How am I supposed to know what happened to my scarf after I lost it? Doesn’t that make sense that I don’t?”
