sized glass-walled shower with showerheads on three sides and a slate seat along one wall. Most of the surfaces were covered with fingerprint dust. “One shot to the head.”
He looked down at the tub, then moved his face close to examine the blood-spatter pattern on the wall above it. “And you’re sure he didn’t just pop himself?”
“The gun wasn’t found with him. Anyway, the angle was wrong.”
“How?”
“Sort of like this.” She pointed her index finger at her own head. “See? The angle is too high. You can’t get a gun up there and point slightly downward, and why would you?”
Joe Pitt nodded and walked farther into the bathroom, examining the shower and the sinks without touching anything. “Was he taking a bath or did they just shove him in there to keep the job from getting messy?”
“He was naked. There was soap in the tub, and a towel under his head like a pillow.”
Pitt left the bathroom and stared at the bedroom again. “I assume your people didn’t find anything in the rest of the house.”
“It’s all just like what you saw on the way up here. The rooms look like no one’s ever used them. It’s white couches that nobody ever sat in, and glass tabletops without so much as a fingerprint. The kitchen is beautiful, but there’s hardly anything in the refrigerator but drinks. He ate out three meals a day.”
“He seems to have lived up here.”
“That’s how I see it,” she said. “The television gets something like two hundred and fifty channels, about fifty of them sports. He could sit up here forever watching one game after another, and never go downstairs except for more beer.”
“Who dusted the white couches and washed the windows?”
“He had a contract with Mighty Maids. They have a whole crew of women come in at once, clean the hell out of everything, and go away. That was how his body got found. His crew came twice a week during business hours, when he was usually at work. They had a key, but they also had an alibi—people who saw them cleaning houses at the time of death. They came in yesterday and there he was.”
Joe Pitt stood in the center of the room and slowly turned all the way around, studying every detail. “Have you pieced together the sequence?”
She nodded. “He left work earlier than usual, but didn’t have to tell anybody why, because he was the boss. He was wearing a dark gray suit that day. He was home by four, set his briefcase down in the kitchen, and came up here. He took off the suit and tie and hung them up in here.” She walked to the huge walk-in closet and pushed the door open so Pitt could see the neat row of coats and trousers hanging along the pole. At least four were shades of gray. “They’re in the lab, of course. Next he threw his shirt, socks, and underwear in the hamper, went into the bathroom, ran the water in the tub, and got in.”
“So he was still doing everything voluntarily—no chance of force?”
“There are no abrasions or contusions on him to show a struggle, and there was no water splashed around when the maids found him. At some point, the killer probably slipped in, approached him from behind, held the gun a foot from his head, and fired once. The entry wound is behind the right ear. The neighbors on both sides and across the street were still at work, and nobody else in the neighborhood remembers hearing a shot.”
“You figure it was intended to be a faked suicide at first?”
“I think so, but it was botched. Maybe Mr. Poole heard the guy at the last instant and flinched. Maybe the killer just got too eager and fired early.”
“Was the gun Poole’s? Did he have one that’s missing?”
“He didn’t have any firearms registered to him.”
Pitt looked down at his feet. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”
“No,” said Catherine Hobbes. “He seems to have been secure and prosperous. He had no enemies anybody knows about. He just came back from vacation a couple of weeks ago, and the people at work said he seemed happy and relaxed.”
“What about women?”
“What about them?”
“Did he like them? Did he like one in particular?”
“That’s one of the things that’s been worrying me. The trace evidence people found some long, straight blond hairs. There were two on suits of his, a few on the carpet in here, one on a bathrobe. The women on the Mighty Maids crew are all black or Hispanic.”
“Any blondes at his company?”
“Two, but the hair isn’t a match for either one. Nobody seems to remember seeing him with a blond woman lately. There are no female relatives who live in town, and his mother says none have long, straight blond hair.”
“This blond woman seems like the most promising thing I’ve heard,” said Pitt. “She could have been married. That would give Poole a reason to try to keep the relationship quiet, and a good motive for the husband to kill him.”
“We’ve been concentrating on her, and we’ve found nothing yet. On the other hand, we do have one odd thing that turned up unexpectedly.”
“What?”
“You.”
“I don’t feel like an odd thing.”
She shrugged. “I got an order from my captain that I’d be cooperating with an expert from Los Angeles, a former D.A.’s investigator who will help with the case. I looked you up on Google and found lots of articles about you, mostly in the
“Anything interesting?”
“You’re retired from the D.A.’s office—honorably, it said—and now you make a gazillion dollars a year doing private investigation. At that point, I was ready to invite you over for a home-cooked dinner and a shot at meeting my parents. Then I talked to my captain and found out you were working for the cousin.”
“You lost interest?”
“Let’s say the nature of my interest changed.”
“It doesn’t have to,” said Pitt. “I’m not here to do anything wrong, and I really do make a gazillion dollars.”
“You’re working for a bad guy,” said Hobbes. “Lips that have touched Hugo Poole’s ass will never touch mine.”
“Your ass?”
“My anything,” she said.
Joe Pitt nodded. “So up here, when a known criminal asks you to investigate his relative’s murder, you say no?”
“We don’t actually consult him. When there’s a murder we go after the killer, whether anybody wants us to or not.” She patted his arm and said with mock sympathy, “It’s not you, Joe. It’s me. I just don’t like people taking money from a crook to keep him out of a murder investigation.”
“I wasn’t hired to do that,” he said. “Hugo Poole agrees with you. He thinks the killing is a reprisal for something he did down in L.A. If you want to pursue that, he’ll try to help you. But it’s not what happened.”
“You don’t know that.”
“If it’s a reprisal, they wouldn’t try to make it look like a suicide. They’d make it as big and ugly as they could, and make damned sure Hugo knew why.”
Joe Pitt stalked around the room, looking at things. “This place has been cleaned up. I asked you before if something was missing, and you didn’t know. I know now what it is. It’s the mess.”
“But he wasn’t messy,” she said. “Downstairs each room looks like a department store window.”
“Because he didn’t live down there. He lived up here, in this suite. But there’s nothing random, nothing out of its place up here. I know it wouldn’t look like a room in a fraternity house, but this isn’t the way it looked when he died, either. It’s been sanitized. The only person who would have done that is the killer.”
“You think the killer took the time to go through this whole suite wiping off prints and picking up fibers?”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “But I think that what the shooter didn’t want us to know about wasn’t his prints. I think
