This was work the charities would want done, but they would be ill-equipped to do it themselves, and he and Hunt could do it with their collective eyes closed. Mickey thought that there might be several prospective clients who could chip in to pay for the Hunt Club’s services. Finding them would be a bit of a treasure hunt, but once Mickey did that, he might be able to give Hunt a couple of months’ respite before being forced to go out of business.
The more he thought of it, the surer Mickey was that the money was out there; he just had to find it. And if they did the job right and met with success, it might even help to restore the reputation of the Hunt Club within the legal community. It could, in fact, be a new beginning for Hunt, and maybe even for Tamara. And Mickey, disposed to like Ian Thorpe because they shared such similar tastes and backgrounds, might even be able to set his and his sister’s minds to rest.
All of this came to Mickey in a rush, his eyes glazing over. For those few seconds, he went still as a stone, until Thorpe tapped the table in front of him. “Mickey? You all right?”
He came back to himself with a small start, a fleeting smile. “You know,” he said, “I can’t really promise anything specific, but I don’t see how it could hurt to talk to your sister, maybe give her a heads-up on how the next couple of weeks might go. If you think she’d talk to me.”
“If I think she’d talk to you. Are you kidding me?”
Ian Thorpe already had his cell phone out. Was punching numbers.
5
Alicia Thorpe lived alone in the basement room of a gingerbread Victorian on upper Masonic, and although by now it was close to two o’clock in the afternoon, as she opened the door to her separate entrance around the back, it was clear that she hadn’t really gotten herself moving for the day. It didn’t take a trained investigator to see that she’d already spent some of the day crying, but the lack of any makeup and a blotchy complexion couldn’t disguise the basic truth of Ian’s description of her. She was, at the very least, kind of pretty. And obviously braless under a San Francisco Zoo T-shirt tucked into the slim waist of a pair of red-striped running shorts.
The day was warm, the sky clear blue, the air windless. A table with four chairs and a Cinzano umbrella graced the small brick patio area just outside her door, and after the introductions, the three of them gravitated there and sat down.
“So,” Mickey began, “no cops so far today?”
“No.”
“And how long did they talk to you yesterday?”
“About an hour. There were two of them, a man and a woman.”
“Did you get their names?”
She shook her head no, but then said, “Wait,” and suddenly jumped up, heading back to the house. She reemerged a few seconds later and handed Mickey two business cards.
“Well, this is pretty decent news,” he said with a smile of genuine surprise.
“What?”
“I know these people. They’re among the good ones. Devin Juhle is probably my boss’s best friend.”
“I don’t see how that really helps,” Alicia said.
“It helps because they’ll probably talk to us off the record. They might be tempted to extend you a few courtesies, which normally isn’t a big part of the arrest procedure. Every little bit helps. You’ll see.”
“I hope I don’t see.” Now her large eyes opened all the way-white showing around startling green irises-and she reached a hand over and touched his arm for a second. “So you think they’re going to arrest me?”
Mickey backtracked. “No, no, no. I’m just saying it could be an advantage that we know the inspectors, that’s all. And that they know us. It can’t hurt.”
Mickey didn’t know that this was true. Certainly, if Alicia was the bona fide prime suspect, she had a good chance of finding herself in handcuffs the minute the homicide inspectors felt that they had a strong enough case to arrest her. And regardless of any personal relationship between Hunt and either of them, they would move swiftly to put her into custody.
On the other hand, Hunt had been known to play devil’s advocate with Devin Juhle on other cases, which more than once had prevented Juhle from acting too quickly on his gut and arresting the wrong person. In one of Juhle’s most recent homicide cases, though, The People of the State of California v. Stuart Gorman, Hunt’s girlfriend, Gina, had crucified the inspector on the witness stand en route to getting her client acquitted, and this had severely strained the relationship between Juhle and Hunt. So the whole question of familiarity with the homicide pros was both nebulous and personal, but Mickey had seen times when it had worked to Hunt’s advantage, and he’d like Alicia to believe that this could be the case now.
“Maybe it can’t hurt knowing these guys,” Ian said, “but it’s kind of moot if Alicia’s not going to be your client. So let’s not get her hopes up.”
“Why can’t I be your client?” Alicia asked.
“There’s a money issue,” Mickey began, “but I’ve been thinking that over and maybe it’s not insurmountable. I’d have to talk to Mr. Hunt and see what he says, but I think I see a way to investigate this thing on your behalf, which is what you both want, and get paid enough to make it doable, which is what we want.”
“How would you manage that?” Ian asked.
Mickey temporized, since he wasn’t yet exactly sure. “The first step is to hook up with some of the other charities Dominic was involved in, and see if any of them might want to chip in on a reward.” Now he looked directly at Alicia. “Ian told me you’d gotten closely involved with him in the past several months. Is that true?”
She threw a quick glance at her brother, then came back to Mickey. “I was volunteering at the Sunset Youth Project. Getting involved in the process. I hope that’s going to be my life’s work.”
“So you know these people? The people Dominic worked with?”
“Some better than others, but I’m familiar with most of them now, yes.”
“So would you be willing to work with us if it turns out that this means we can help you out?”
She hesitated for only an instant, then met his eyes. “Whatever it takes,” she said.
“All right,” Mickey said. “Let me work out some of the details and run it by Mr. Hunt, see what he says.”
Again, she put her hand on his arm. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.” Her eyes had gone glassy, perhaps a prelude to more tears. “I really didn’t kill him,” she said. “I cared about him a lot, okay? He was a great man, and maybe we were getting a little too close, but I really didn’t kill him.”
“I’m taking that as a given,” he said. Mickey was also tempted to ask her what she meant by “a little too close,” but if she became a client, there’d be time for all of those questions. He was far too aware, he realized, of how her hand felt resting on his arm, so he patted that hand in a professional manner, and pushed himself back from the table. Standing up, he took a business card out of his wallet and handed one to her and one to her brother. “If the cops come again, make me your one phone call and I’ll at least be able to put you in touch with a good lawyer. Meanwhile, let me go see what I can do.”
Wyatt Hunt’s home was a unique environment incongruously existing in its light-industrial, south-of-Market ’hood. Less than three blocks away, San Francisco’s Hall of Justice-a six-story blue-gray slab of concrete that would have been at home in East Berlin before the wall fell-set the tone for the surrounding area. The flat, dirty, perennially windswept streets weren’t so much run-down or dangerous-like the Tenderloin district, for example-as simply depressing, and often deserted, especially now on a weekend.
Each street sported an abandoned storefront or two, some fast food, usually a bail bondsman’s office, a Chinese dentist or acupuncturist, other businesses selling auto parts or advertising specialties or discount clothes. In every block you’d find a bar, or more often a venue that rented itself out as a club catering to a different clientele every night-Monday a hip-hop dance spot, Tuesday a lesbian pickup joint, then salsa after-hours, or karaoke on the Japanese tour circuit. Vagrants and changelings and explorers and the lost among the substrata of humanity that existed in the margins and mostly at night in one of the world’s most glamorous and glittering cities.
In the midst of all this, in a former flower warehouse, Wyatt Hunt had created a kind of wonderland. Hunt had kept the original outer structure intact, so the first thing that hit you, if you entered by the door next to the garage
