“That’s not how his lawyer saw it. Or the bureau. He threatened to press charges. Started the paperwork for a civil suit. He got an apology, and all record of the arrest was purged, including his booking photo and prints. That’s why you didn’t get a match.”
“You’ve got an address on him?”
Hank handed him his business card from his lapel pocket, Larson’s address already printed on the backside. He also handed him six typewritten pages of notes summarizing his recent surveillance. It wasn’t until he watched Danes flip through the pages that he fully realized the drive-bys were really over now. No more staring at the ceiling at night, wondering whether Larson was courting another well-to-do woman. Whether he was enjoying his life. Whether he ever paused to remember Ellen.
Hank was grateful for his death.
“You saw him in the gray BMW, huh?”
“Stolen from QuickCar last month. It’s all there.”
“That, we knew. Found it three blocks south of the gallery, unlocked, keys in the ignition. Someone wanted it stolen.”
“Last I saw it, Larson had parked directly across the street from the gallery. And he locked it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I had to use a slim jim to break into it.”
Danes chuckled, then started from the top, asking first about Hank’s general knowledge of Travis Larson, then building a timeline based on his recent surveillance.
“You said you saw the redhead at Larson’s home?”
“That’s right. She either took the train or lives nearby, because she arrived on foot.”
“Hold on a second.” When Danes returned, he handed Hank a cup of coffee. Hank drank it even though it was bitter. Danes slipped two photographs onto the table. “Is that the lady?”
It wasn’t the way they’d handle an ID at the bureau. Always better to use a six-pack. Multiple choices to make sure the witness isn’t just rubber-stamping. One at a time was preferable to all at once. Hank took a moment to consider the images. The first was the kind of blurry that came with resizing low-resolution digital images. It looked like Larson kissing the woman he’d seen at the Newark apartment complex. Same orangey blond hair. Even the same piercing blue coat. The second photograph was a clearer shot of the woman’s face. He recognized the photograph as one he had seen online of the gallery manager. Frank Humphrey’s daughter. What was her name? Alice.
“Yeah, that’s her.”
“Did you ever see Larson with anyone else? Maybe a younger girl? High school age?”
Hank shook his head.
“How about religious involvement? Any church groups or the like?”
“If Travis Larson was going to church, it would be to steal from the collection plate. Why do you ask?”
“Just some angles we’re working. I think we’ve got what we need from you for now. Thanks for coming forward. I hope you’re not in too deep a hole with the bureau.”
“You sure that’s it? Because, trust me, I probably know more about Travis Larson than his own mother, if he even has one. He’s the kind of guy who’s forging checks while peddling fake concert tickets and smurfing Sudafed for meth dealers, all while he’s looking for a woman to pay his bills. I wouldn’t be surprised if a hundred people out there wanted him dead.”
Still, Danes did not voice the obvious follow-up.
Hank felt uneasy as he followed Danes down the hallway, past the interrogation room lined with evidence pertaining to Larson’s murder. Hank had come here expecting a different kind of conversation. By his own statements, he had placed himself on the street outside that gallery immediately before Larson’s death. By his own statements, he had a motive to kill the man. By his own statements, he had stalked him for the last week. He had served himself up as a suspect on a silver platter, and Danes hadn’t taken even a single nibble.
Danes struck him as a good man. He was probably a well-intentioned cop. But Hank had seen this before. Those detectives had not even identified their victim until he did it for them, and yet they had already made up their minds about who killed him. They didn’t want to know anything different at this point. They’d slot the rest of the evidence where they could to fit the story they had already written.
He threw his half-full cup of coffee in the garbage on the way out.
Chapter Thirty-Two
T here was a time when the Upper East Side was Alice’s front and back yard. The townhouse on Seventy- second Street. Shopping on Madison Avenue. Burgers at P.J. Clarke’s. Saturday-morning tea with her mother in the trustees’ dining room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In retrospect, she realized how odd it was that her lefty lib parents opted for a neighborhood where residents were occasionally wistful for the other side of the park’s devil-may-care stance on blue jeans. But the Upper East Side was home to almost all the exclusive girls’ schools, and her mother had always valued Alice’s convenience over Ben’s. Her father had never seen this part of the city as his home, but he would have deferred to her mother, since he basically lived at their country home in Bedford when he wasn’t in L.A. or away on location.
Today, though, he had come into the city especially to see Alice, and he had insisted that she make herself available. She rang the doorbell and then followed the assistant she remembered as Mabel into the front parlor. Mabel was fiftyish and professional, and she looked like a Mabel. She’d appeared in place of the younger, more attractive assistant last year, just after the big blowup. The woman who’d looked like a younger Rose Sampson was out, and Mabel was in.
“Sort of silly to ring the doorbell at your own childhood home, isn’t it?” Her father wore a bulky gray cardigan. She smelled fresh cedar and soap when he leaned in to kiss her cheek.
“It’s a bit presumptuous for a grown woman to walk into her parents’ house without knocking.”
“Touche. I don’t have to tell you to take a seat, do I?”
She took her usual place on a mid-century recliner and waved off Mabel’s gesture toward an aperitif from the bar cart. She knew she had been summoned here for a reason, so wasted no time laying out the abbreviated version of the still-unfathomable events that had landed her and her former employer on the crime pages of the
“You say this like it’s nothing, Alice. As if this were yet another little cycle in your life-getting married, that move to St. Louis, returning home, the MFA, finding a dead body at what turned out to be a nonexistent job. Where is the shock? Where is the fear?”
“You have no right to tell me how to
“Yet you still can’t call us for help. I practically had to beg you to come here and tell me what is happening. You want to punish me so badly that you’ll punish yourself in the process.”
“If I thought you could help, I would have asked you. This isn’t late rent or a job interview. Money or a phone call isn’t going to make this go away.”
“So you think that’s the only way I know how to help? By handing you money or throwing Hollywood names around?”
“No, Papa, that’s not what I meant. I didn’t want you to worry.”
“We always worry about you, baby girl.”
He had called her that as long as she could remember. There had been times as a teenager when the sound of it made her cringe, but she had to admit she liked hearing the term of endearment now. She liked being here in this familiar room. In this particular chair. She wanted to close her eyes and believe her father could make everything all right.
“The police obviously think I was the one who set up the gallery. And if I lied to them, and I was the one who found that man’s body, I can only imagine what they must be thinking. I’m really scared, Papa. I’m scared they’re going to arrest me with who-knows-what kind of evidence someone has cooked up. And I’m scared that whoever killed that man might come after me. But then if I leave town to protect myself, they’ll think that’s a sign of guilt.
