A nd Trent Rowley was dead, and so was Gavin. Had he mentioned the money thing to Cooper? Didn't sound like it. Why not? Because Cooper wasn't involved in the hands-on day to day. Because he wanted to be president and would need deniability if some sort of money scandal emerged.
'So why was Gavin having Marlene and Ellen followed?' I said to Susan's picture.
Susan's picture didn't seem to know, either. And why, in addition, was he pursuing an affair with Marlene? Love was of course a possibility. But it wasn't a certainty. The fact that he was having her followed wouldn't be a problem if he wanted to sleep with her. Jerry Francis and his partner reported only to him, and they thought he was Marlene's husband anyway. And she was attractive enough to sleep with if you didn't have to talk with her afterward. Maybe he slept with her because she was available. But he went back, if I could believe her, for more. Why? Research?
Say he was as loyal to Cooper as Adele said he was. Cooper seemed to think so, though I detected no real sense of loss. Cooper probably didn't feel much about people other than Cooper. And say, because he was renting the love nest for him, that Gavin knew Cooper was involved in some sort of seamy sex thing. But he might not have known what, and it worried him. He wanted Cooper to be a senator, maybe president, too.
But the seamy sex thing wouldn't get him killed. Cooper would know he could keep the secret. Hell, Cooper had him rent the apartment on Park Drive. So it was something else. And the only something else I knew about was the money thing. Which Marty was working on. So why was Gavin having two wives tailed about a money thing?
I looked at my picture of Susan again. It had been taken in the country, and she was wearing a straw hat and holding a glass of wine, and talking to someone off camera and smiling, like she smiles, with her head turned and tilted a bit. She was so Susan in the picture. It was my favorite.
'What am I missing?' I said.
Susan's picture gave it some thought. I gave it some thought. Neither of us said anything for a while. It was a humid August. Outside my window it had gotten darker than it should have in the middle of the afternoon. And I could hear thunder. The thunder wasn't close. Too far away yet for lightning. No rain yet. But the air was suspenseful with it, and it would be here soon.
Then I said, 'They intersect.'
I was pretty sure Susan's picture said, of course they do.
There was something in common between the seamy sex thing and the money thing. Otherwise I could make no sense of it. Which meant here came Darrin O'Mara again. And his pal Lance.
57
I went over to police headquarters and sat with Belson. Neither Devaney nor O'Mara had a record. So we looked at pictures. We looked at pictures of people with long hair and big glasses. I didn't see Lance. We looked at pictures of people who had the initials L. D. and D. O. and didn't find Lance or Darrin. We looked under first names. We looked under last names. We tried under sex scams. Extortion. Shooting incidents. Every possible cross reference we could think of. Neither of them was there.
'Maybe if I had the kind of clout that a sergeant of homicide had, I could get the radio station to help us with O'Mara's background.'
'And what do you think the station will say first?' Belson said.
'Freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. Freedom from unwanted search and seizure. Freedom to misinform us about the weather and almost everything else.'
'And if I cut through all that and we get something,' Belson said. 'What issues will come up in court?'
'Freedom of speech,' I said. 'Freedom of the press. Freedom from unwanted search and seizure. Freedom to misinform us. Freedom to sell advertising. . . .'
'So forget the station. Anything we want to find out we have to have a persuasive reason to be asking.'
'Even if it wasn't evidence that would hold up in court,' I said. 'If I knew something about him, I could find a way to get him.'
'From what you told me maybe we could get him for pimping,' Belson said.
'Couple things wrong with that,' I said. 'He gets paid for his seminars, which are legal. Hard to prove any more than that.'
'How about the broads he sends out to clients. He doing that because he's a fool for romance?'
'Almost certainly not,' I said. 'But to prove he's doing anything worse than running a dating service and calling it something else, we'd have to force a lot of people to testify who don't want to.'
'And ruin the reputations,' Belson said, 'of people who didn't do anything worse than get laid.'
'Lot of us guilty of that,' I said.
Belson grinned at me. 'Thank God,' he said.
'So we don't want to do that,' I said.
'Probably not,' Belson said.
'Of course O'Mara doesn't have to know we don't want to do that.'
'That's right,' Belson said. 'He doesn't.'
'I'll keep it in mind,' I said.
'Here's another thing to keep in mind,' Belson said. 'So far you haven't told me anything much that this guy is guilty of that matters much. You got any reason to think he murdered anybody?'
'I know.'
