I bit off a laugh. “No, I don’t.”
“So why offer him money? Did you want him to leave you alone?”
I shook my head a little, then nodded a little. “Yeah. No. I wanted him to leave me alone, but that’s not why I offered him money. I thought that maybe that was what
Hoffman sighed. “So you offered him money to leave you alone? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, I offered him money to admit that he had meant to kill my mother, that it wasn’t an accident.”
“You said it was murder,” Marcus said.
“I say it’s murder, he says he was too drunk to remember. He pled to manslaughter.”
“Why don’t you tell us what you and your brother talked about?”
I shook my head. “If my lawyer says it’s okay, I’ll tell you, but I really have to talk to him first.”
Marcus shrugged. “It’s your choice, like I said, but—”
“Yeah, I know, but I really want to talk to my lawyer,” I said. “Right now.”
Marcus’s smile melted, and he capped his pen and flipped the pages of his legal pad, then got to his feet with a little sigh. Hoffman shoved off from the wall, went to the door, and leaned out to call to someone. A uniformed officer appeared in the doorway, and Hoffman told him that I wanted to use the phone. The officer nodded, glancing at me, then did a double take.
“You go with him,” Marcus said. “He’ll take you to a phone.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, it’s the least we can do,” Hoffman said. “After all, you’ve been so helpful.”
CHAPTER 17
They let me use the phone at one of the detective desks, and I dialed Chapel while my guardian officer stood by, just far enough to stay out of earshot if I kept my voice low, but close enough to stop me if I decided to make a break for it. There were other cops around, too, other people I assumed were detectives, and they each took their turn staring at me.
The clock on the wall said it was twenty-seven past six, and the lightening gray out the windows confirmed that it was in the morning. I had to call Chapel’s office, because that was the only number I could find, and I got an answering service, and the guy who took the call asked if he could take a message.
“No, actually, you can’t,” I said. “You need to call him and say that Miriam Bracca’s been arrested.”
The answering-service guy told me he would do just that, and I hung up, thinking that it wouldn’t be long before Chapel called back. The officer moved me from the desk to a cheap plastic bench on the other side of the room to wait. Hoffman and Marcus went to their desks and proceeded to ignore me.
The clock read three minutes to seven when Chapel walked through the door. His hair was wet, either from his morning shower or the still falling rain, and he was wearing a suit today, and it fit him perfectly. He made straight for me, and he didn’t look happy at all, and Hoffman and Marcus saw him enter, and moved to join us, but he beat them to it.
“How long have you been here?” Chapel asked me.
“I’m not sure, maybe six, seven hours.”
“Dammit, Mim, why didn’t you call me sooner?”
“She couldn’t,” Hoffman told him. “She was drunk off her ass.”
“Repeat that outside of this room, it’s slander,” Chapel told her.
“Actually, Mr. Chapel, it isn’t,” Marcus said. “I’ll swear out an affidavit to that effect, if you like.”
“I’ll let you know if it’s necessary,” he said. “Is she under arrest?”
Hoffman shook her head.
“Splendid. Now I’d like to speak to Miss Bracca alone, if you don’t mind.”
“Be our guest,” Hoffman said.
Chapel and I talked for most of an hour, with me laying out every damn thing, including my reason for storming over to Mikel’s and the large quantity of Jack Daniel’s I’d consumed on getting home. I fumbled some of it, and he made me go over those parts again, and when I had to describe finding Mikel, it made me want to start crying, because it was finally sinking in.
“I didn’t tell them about the pictures,” I said. “I don’t suppose it matters now, but I didn’t.”
“No, it really doesn’t,” Chapel said. “I’m going to have to tell them about that.”
I nodded.
“All right, I’ll talk to them now. You just sit tight.”
I nodded again, feeling my exhaustion.
It took another fifteen minutes, at the end of which all three of them came back.
“Let’s go,” Chapel told me.
“We’re done?”
“For now,” Marcus said. “We know how to reach you if we need you.”
We were in the elevator going down to the garage when Chapel said, “You can’t go home.”
“But—”
“Mim, the media’s going to climb on this like nobody’s business. They’ll be camping outside of your place, they’ll be dogging you everywhere you go. Unless you want that, and my read on your personality is that you really don’t, you can’t go home.”
“I could stay with Joan.”
“Joan’s your lover?”
“God, what is it with you? Joan’s my foster mother!”
He shook his head. “The press can find her, it won’t be secure enough. I want to check you into a hotel.”
“I don’t want to go to a hotel.”
“It’s either that or meet the press.”
The elevator stopped, and we were in the garage. Chapel led the way to his TT, popping the locks with his remote. He put me in the passenger seat and told me to buckle up, then went around to his door.
“What hotel?” I asked.
“The Heathman.”
At least it was a nice hotel.
“Duck,” he said.
We were on the exit ramp, about to hit the street, and I didn’t get it, just looked at him blankly.
“Duck, dammit,” Chapel said again, and he reached over with his free hand and took my head and shoved me down, and then I got it.
“You’re shitting me,” I said, more to the floorboard than to him.
“Wish I was. All local affiliates have vans, and I’m seeing multiple photographers. Stay down.”
“I don’t have anything,” I said, feeling miserable. “I don’t have clothes or anything for a hotel.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I need to change clothes.”
“Give me your sizes, I’ll have someone pick you up some things.”
“But my guitars are at home.”
“You can buy a new guitar, Mim.” He checked his mirrors. “Okay, you can come up for air, now.”
I sat up, craned around in my seat. We were already a block away, but I could see the vans. He hadn’t been exaggerating. I also saw that we weren’t headed for the Heathman, but instead for the Hawthorne Bridge.
“You’re going the wrong way.”
“I’m making certain we’re not followed.”
That seemed to me to be overly paranoid, and I said as much.
