She returned her gaze to Frank Schuler. “Yes, we think that Sean O’Brian was an affiliate of Sammy Bell, the mobster.”
“Is he dead now?”
Marie threw up her hands. “Jesus.”
“Is who dead?” Gail asked. This conversation was beginning to feel like a windstorm.
“This Sean guy. You referred to him in the past tense.”
Oh, shit, Gail thought. “I meant that as in he used to work for Sammy Bell.” She hoped her poker face held.
“What did he do for him?” Frank asked.
Gail took a deep breath and sighed. “Look, Mr. Schuler-”
“Frank.”
“Okay, Frank. I know you’re anxious to learn as much as you can, but I need to ask you to let me ask the questions.”
“You have something to hide?”
Jesus, Gail thought, this guy is sharp as a tack.
“We all have something to hide, don’t we?” she countered. As she asked the question, she offered a coy smile.
He acknowledged her with a little nod. “Yes, I suppose we do.” He regrouped. “I do know who Sammy Bell is-and for the benefit of the transcriber, I’ll note that you, too, Mr. Transcriber, have also probably heard of him-but Sean O’Brian still means nothing to me.”
Off to her left, Gail noticed that Marie had relaxed a little. She looked like a dental patient whose procedure hadn’t hurt as much as she’d feared.
Frank continued, “But if you believe in six degrees of separation, I’m only two away from Sammy Bell.”
Marie sat tall in her seat. “Holy shit, Frank.” Relaxation gone; welcome, raw horror.
“Actually, maybe I’m three degrees separated. I guess it depends on how you count.”
Marie said, “As your attorney, I am advising you in the strongest possible terms to shut the fuck up.”
Frank laughed-a deep, throaty laugh that showed he was genuinely amused. “Marie, I love you. And I agree that ‘shut the fuck up’ ranks right up there with the strongest possible terms.”
Gail found herself laughing along with him.
When the moment passed, Frank continued, “My wife, Marilyn, used to work for one of Sammy’s mouthpieces. One of his attorneys.”
Gail clicked her pen open. “What was his name?”
Frank’s face folded into the now-familiar faraway scowl. “Navarro,” he said, snapping his fingers as the name returned to him. “Bruce Navarro.”
Gail made her note. “Do you know what his legal specialty was?”
“Keeping crooks out of jail, I would guess.”
Obvious enough, Gail supposed. “I was hoping for something more…”
Frank waved off her words. “I know what you were looking for. I was just being an asshole. He did contract law, whatever that means.”
“It means five hundred bucks an hour,” Marie grumped.
Gail continued, “And what did your wife”-she consulted her notes-“Marilyn do for him?”
He shrugged. “Clerical stuff. Secretarial stuff. Nothing terribly important. I just thought it was interesting that Bell’s name came up.”
Something churned in Gail’s distant memory, something from the notes she’d read from the research file. Something about Bruce Navarro. More specifically about Navarro amp; Associates.
“Aaron Hastings,” Gail said.
Marie groaned, “Oh, please shut up.”
“Marilyn’s lover,” Frank said. “He’s also the man who I think killed Marilyn and framed me for it.”
Gail had read that such had been Schuler’s claim all along, but there’d always been problems with his argument. “But you don’t know why,” she reminded.
“The whole world doesn’t know why, because the police decided from the very beginning that I was their man. They never bothered to investigate anyone else.”
Gail looked to Marie for confirmation and got a nod. “From Day One, Frank was the only suspect in their crosshairs,” she said. “Remember how the system works: The Commonwealth doesn’t have to be right; they only have to convince a jury that they’re right.”
To someone outside the system, the statement might have seemed overly cynical, but Gail understood that Marie was stating fact. The entire industry of private investigation-such as it was-was built around the all too frequent occurrences of prosecutorial misconduct. At the end of the day, lawyers on both sides were merely human; and humans were hardwired to reject failure. Gail had known a dozen or more prosecutors in her time-at both the local and federal levels-who would consider a win at the expense of justice to be a perfectly fair deal. Even the venerated FBI had recently been caught fabricating evidence for the purpose of convicting those who were presumed guilty.
Gail didn’t want to let him go that easily. “You have a theory, though? For why Aaron would have killed Marilyn?”
He gave a tentative glance to Marie, then took a deep breath. “Theory is too strong a word,” he said. “I have questions, though, and I think that by stitching them together with answers, you’d have her real killer.”
“I’m listening.”
“Did you know that Bruce Navarro disappeared around the same time that Marilyn was murdered?”
“What do you mean, disappeared?”
“I mean just that. He was around one day, fat and happy with a flourishing practice, and then he was gone. Nobody ever heard from him again, as far as I know.”
“You think he was killed?”
“I don’t know one way or the other,” Frank confessed. “But there’s a guy in here who swears that there’s a contract on Navarro’s head that would pay a fortune. You don’t put that out for someone who’s already dead.”
“Anyone can say anything,” Gail observed.
“True enough. But this is a guy who would know.”
“Who?”
Frank shook his head. “Not your concern.”
“But if I could talk to him-”
“No. Being in this place on these terms, I don’t have much, but I won’t turn into a rat in my last days on the planet. You’ll have to take it from me that if you talked to him, he’d tell you what I just said. I got no reason to lie. Not to you, anyway.”
Gail searched his face.
“You’re not seeing it, are you?” Frank pressed. “I can see it in your eyes.” He leaned in closer to the table and rested his forearms on it. “Navarro, Hastings, and my wife all worked together for a law firm with mob connections. Now, they’re all missing or dead. You say you’re a private investigator, Gail. How big a stick do you need to be hit with?”
Gail turned to Marie. “How did the police just write that off?”
She shrugged. “They had the guilty party they were after.”
“Have you ever tried to trace it all to ground?”
Marie’s expression said, Give me a break. “Of course we have. But the time for suppositions and alternative scenarios passed the moment a jury found Frank to be guilty. It takes a twelve-to-nothing vote to make that happen. In Virginia, once the jury has spoken, it takes truly incontrovertible evidence to turn things around. DNA is working for wrongly accused rape convicts, but even that can be hard to get introduced into the system. Too many political careers get harmed when a prosecutor is found to have made a mistake. Some would rather see an innocent man die than look in his eyes and apologize for countless years lost to wrongful incarceration.”
The cynical words stung. Gail had been a part of that system for long enough to know that the threads of truth within the bitterness were thick and strong.
“I think it might be even worse than you think it is, Frank,” Gail said.
