“Thank you. But back to Cuneo . . .”
“Always back to Cuneo.”
“Well, yeah. You blame me?”
Glitsky considered the question for a long minute.
“No,” he said at last. He chewed more ice. “I could just finesse it.”
“How could you do that?”
“I just block his access to her. He’s on nights, right? I make it a point to take her statements during the days. He doesn’t have a reason to see her again.”
“Maybe he doesn’t need one.”
But Glitsky shook his head. “No, he won’t take it further if he doesn’t see her on duty.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“I’ve heard rumors. It’s a pattern.”
“So he’s done this kind of thing before?”
A shrug, then a nod. “And they don’t all resent it, either. The magic of the uniform, even if he doesn’t wear one. Marcel told me he had a thing with his shrink after she stopped seeing him professionally.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Would that I were. Apparently he thinks there’s no harm in asking, or letting a witness know you think she’s hot.”
“Any of these documented?”
“You mean as assault or harassment? Nope. They said yes.”
“So he’s just a dick? Pardon the pun.”
“At least that.”
The two men took a break to eat. Glitsky finished first and was chewing ice again when he said, “I’m going right to him, cop to cop. Tell him what she said, say he might want to be a little discreet.”
“Be his friend.”
“Exactly. Keep him close.”
Hardy swallowed his last oyster, tipped his beer up. “I’ve heard worse plans,” he said. “But do yourself a favor first.”
“What’s that?”
“Memo to file.”
Two o’clock, and Cuneo was blasting away with the Beach Boys. Not that Dennis Wilson was a rock drummer in the league of, say, Charlie Watts of the Stones, or any of the big band guys, but he beat the living hell out of his skins, and sometimes Cuneo just wanted to play loud and hard, not good. He was letting the cymbals ring at the end of “Help Me, Rhonda” when he heard the knock on his front door.
“Hold on!” Barefoot, drenched with sweat, he was wearing a tank top over a pair of lime green swim trunks. Because of his location he didn’t get a lot of action at his front door, so the knock was a little unusual in itself. And he’d been a cop long enough—thirteen years—that he carried the standard load of paranoia around with him wherever he went. His gun and shoulder holster hung from the back of one of the chairs in his kitchen, and he skipped the three steps over to it and had the weapon in his hand within about two seconds. “Just a sec,” he said. “Coming.”
But first he parted the gauzy white living room drapes and looked out. On the concrete apron that comprised his front yard was a city-issue car with a uniformed driver behind the wheel. Pulling the curtains further apart, he put his eye against the window and saw Glitsky standing at ease on his stoop, so he set the gun on top of his television set, went to the door and opened it.
Glitsky began in an amiable way, with a grotesque but perhaps sincere attempt at a smile. “Sorry to bother you, Inspector, but I didn’t know if my messages were getting through, and we need to get on the same page with this Hanover thing. It’s heating up pretty fast. You mind?”
“No. Sure. Good idea.” Cuneo, thrown off-balance, half turned back to his room. “I was just doing my workout. I haven’t got to my messages yet. I think we must have just missed each other last night. I stopped by your office.”
“That’s all right. I was in and out.” Glitsky cast a quick glance over Cuneo’s shoulder. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I? You got company?”
“No. Just me.” Cuneo backed up a bit and said, “You want to come in? We can sit.”
“Thanks.” A step into the room, Glitsky stopped. “Cool place, great location.” He pointed at the drums. “How long have you been playing?”
“A couple of years now. It blows off energy.”
“I hear you,” Glitsky said. “I haven’t had that since I gave up football. If you don’t include a baby. They can wear you out pretty good.” He scanned the room, apparently relaxed. “One of my boys, Jacob, is a musician. A singer, actually. Opera, believe it or not.” Cuneo had no reaction to all the chatter, but Glitsky went on anyway. “We didn’t exactly play a lot of opera around the house when he was growing up, so I don’t know how he got the taste for it, but he’s pretty good. The downside is, he lives in Italy and I never get to see him.”
Glitsky sat himself on the edge of the love seat. He let a silence build, then broke it. “So I’m guessing you’re pissed I’m involved in this. I know I would be.”
Cuneo sat down at the drum kit, hit the kick drum. “Sure, a little, but what am I gonna do? Nobody asked me. But it’s my case.”
“Nobody’s saying it isn’t.”
“Well, pardon me, sir, but that’s just bullshit.”
Glitsky frowned at the profanity, the insubordination, although he’d invited it to some degree by coming to Cuneo’s home unannounced. “Actually, it’s not. As I thought I explained in my message, the mayor had a personal connection to Hanover. She wanted to be in on it.”
“And Lanier couldn’t get it from me, then let her know?”
Glitsky shrugged. “She knows me better.”
“Lucky for you.”
“Maybe. Some people might think that’s debatable. But the point is, as far as I’m concerned, you’re still the investigating officer.”
“And you’re what? My supervisor?”
“I was thinking, for this case, partner.”
Cuneo started a light but quick tattooing on the snare drum. Caught himself and stopped. Started again. “I’ve had most of my luck working alone,” he said.
“So have I.” Thinking this was about as far as this topic could take them, Glitsky decided to break the stalemate and move along to the facts of the case. “I talked to Becker and he told me some of your witnesses thought they saw Missy leave the house before the fire.”
The drumming stopped.
Glitsky continued. “So I’m assuming first thing this afternoon you were going to put out a net on her. Obvious, right? She was the shooter.”
“So?”
“So have you gotten with Strout yet?” He raised a hand, cutting off the reply. “That’s not a criticism, in case you haven’t. It’s a question.”
“I was planning on seeing him right after I saw you this afternoon.”
“Well, maybe I can save you a trip. I went by the morgue this morning. He ran dental records last night. It was Missy.”
The news finally sparked a show of interest. Cuneo’s whole body came forward, forearms on his knees, his eyes sharp now, focused. “How sure was he?”
Glitsky’s mouth turned up a half inch. “It was Strout.” Meaning that if he said it at all, he meant it completely.
Nodding in understanding, Cuneo asked. “So she went back inside?”
“That’s one theory.”
“She did him, went out to get the gasoline, spent a few minutes pouring it around, then lit it and did herself?”
“Except she didn’t.”
Cuneo cocked his head to one side, then remembered. “That’s right. She was shot pretty far around in the back of the head, wasn’t she?”
“Right. Physically possible, maybe, but not likely. More likely somebody else did both of them.” He spread his palms. “That’s where we are.”
Cuneo tapped his hands on his thighs. “So who did my witnesses see that they thought was Missy?”
“Maybe it was her. Who were your witnesses?”
“Neighbors.”
“So your take is maybe she went someplace and happened to come back in at the wrong time?”
“I don’t really have a take. Do you think it was about Hanover?”
>
“I don’t know. The mayor thinks it, though.”
“She give you any other information?”
“Nope.”
“So she might be someone to talk to?”
Nodding, Glitsky said, “Maybe. I intend to ask.” “And then you’ll tell me what she says?”
“That’s the plan. We’re working together. And that being the case, I wanted to pass something along. I got a call from Catherine Hanover this morning. The daughter-in-law?”
“Sure. I talked to her twice already. She called you?”
“She did. It seems we’ve been doubling up on her. I talked to her yesterday, and then evidently you came by to visit her after we’d talked, she and I?”
He answered warily. “Right. She told me you’d called her.”
“Well,” Glitsky said, “you won’t like this, but she said you came on to her.”
Cuneo’s face hardened down in an instant. “She said what? How did I do that?”
“You touched her.”
“I touched her. Where? Did she say?”
“Arm and shoulder.”
“Arm and shoulder. As if I’d remember arm and shoulder. And that was coming on to her?” Then, a different tone. “Is she filing a complaint?”
“No.”
“She says I came on to her, but she’s not filing a complaint? What’s that about?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Glitsky said. “Did you touch her?”
Cuneo paused for a second. “I really don’t remember.”
“It would be better if you did, one way or the other.”
“Okay then. No, I didn’t.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. If I did, maybe passing by her, it was so innocent I didn’t even notice.”
“So if you did that, maybe by mistake, you’re saying she must have overreacted?”
“Either that or just flat lied. It’s been known to happen.”
“And why would she do that?”
“That’s what I’m asking myself, especially if she’s not filing a complaint.” His fingers tapped a steady beat on the snare drum. Ta da dum, ta da dum, ta da dum. “Maybe I was getting close to something she didn’t want to talk about.”
Glitsky leaned forward. “Do you remember what that might have been?”
Cuneo drummed some more, thinking about it. “Nothing specific.”
“What did you go to see her about?”
“She was a witness who might have remembered something. You know how that is.”
“Okay.”
The fingers stopped. The silence this time thicker. “Okay what?”
Glitsky hesitated. “If you weren’t asking her about anything specific, and didn’t call on her for a specific reason—something she said the night before that bothered you, something like that—people might wonder why you went to see her in the first place.” He held up a hand again. “Just an observation if the topic comes up again.”
Cuneo threw him a long, flat stare. “So what did you call her about, then?”
“I called her because I was hoping somebody in the extended family might know who worked on Missy’s teeth, and she was the only contact I had. I lucked out.” Glitsky kept his voice calm against Cuneo’s clear rage.
“Listen, I’m not accusing you of anything. If you say you didn’t touch her, you didn’t touch her. If you felt you had to talk to her a second time without a specific reason, that’s good enough for me. Good cops have good instincts.”
The kick drum went thud.
Glitsky continued. “After she gave me the dentist’s name, she talked about her family and money. Things are going to be better for them all after Paul’s death.”
“How much better?”
“A lot.”
Glitsky offered his opinion that Catherine’s ingenuous and offhand cataloguing of the benefits of Paul’s death mitigated considering her a suspect. So Cuneo would probably be well advised to stay away from her. If any further direct interrogation of her were necessary, Glitsky ought to do it. Cuneo didn’t buy the argument. But he wasn’t going to argue with the deputy chief, whose visit here had to be intimidation pure and simple.
Instead he said, “If it’s my case, how about if I work it and keep you informed?”
“We could do that, but it might be awkward for me with the mayor. She asked me to stay involved. I’m asking you how I can do that and still let you do your job.”
“I just told you. How about if I work it and let you know what I get?”
Glitsky put his notepad down. “I’ll ask you one more time. Either you tell me how you want to do this or I’ll tell you how we will do it. Is that about clear enough?”
After a minute, Cuneo nodded. “All right.” He got out his own notepad, flipped a few pages. “You said the mayor might know something she’s not telling you. Ask her what she really knows about Hanover.”
“All right.”
“Then you might see if you run across anything about Missy while you’re at it.”
“You think she might have been the primary target?”
“She’s just as dead as Hanover. And Catherine said the two of them had been fighting.”
“About the remodel? Catherine said . . .”
Cuneo interrupted. “Catherine, Catherine, Catherine.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I didn’t touch her.”
“I never said you did.”
A stretch of silence. Then Glitsky pulled a page of newspaper from inside his notebook, unfolded it and handed it across to Cuneo. “That’s Paul and Missy three months ago at a party. It’s the only picture of her I could find, which I thought was a little weird since Paul’s picture was in the paper every couple of weeks. The Chron’s even got a head shot of him on file. But nothing on her except this.”
“She didn’t like to have her picture taken.”
“Apparently not.”
“Why not?”
“No idea.”
Cuneo finally looked at the photograph. “Somebody looks like her, you’d think she’d love to get photographed.”He stared another second, emitted a low whistle. “Definite trophy material.” Still, he kept his eyes on the picture.
“You see something?” Glitsky asked.
Almost as though startled out of a reverie, he said, “No. Nothing. Just a hell of a waste.”
8
Cuneo left his house about a half hour after Glitsky had gone, and this put him in the city at around 3:30, long before his shift was scheduled to begin. But he figured he wasn’t going to be on the clock for a while anyway, not if he wanted to break this case before Glitsky could claim any credit for it.
The Arson Unit had for years worked out of one of the station houses close to downtown. But that station didn’t have toilets and changing areas for female firefighters, so to make room for these improvements, the Arson Unit had been transferred to its present location in a barricaded storage warehouse on Evans Street in the less-than-centrally-located, gang-infested Bayview District, far, far south of Market. Inside the cavernous main room downstairs they kept the arson van as well as spare engines and trucks and miles of hoses and other equipment. There was also the odd historical goody, such as an engine that had been used in the 1906 earthquake and fire, with an eight-hundred-pound, five-story ladder it had taken twenty men to lift.
Becker sat upstairs at a small conference table in a common room outside of his small office. When Cuneo entered, he was turning the oversize pages of some computer printout. Looking up, and without preamble, he said, “Valero gasoline.”
“What about it?”
“That’s the accelerant.” He tapped the pages in front of him. “We had a good-enough sample from the rug under her. We ran a mass spectrometer on it. Valero.”
Cuneo drew up a chair. “They’re different? I thought all gas was the same.”
“Not exactly.” He put a finger on the paper. “This was Valero’s formulation.”
“So what d
oes that tell us?”
“Unfortunately, not a whole hell of a lot. Valero’s the biggest gas producer in the country. However—the good news—it’s nowhere near the market leader here in the city. And there’s a Valero station not three blocks from Alamo Square. Not that our man necessarily bought the gas there, but somebody bought almost exactly two gallons on Wednesday morning. The sales get automatically recorded and we checked.”
“Did anybody notice who bought it?”
“Nobody’s asked yet.”
Cuneo clucked. “I’ll go by. I’ve got a picture of Missy. Maybe it’ll spark something.” He pulled out his notepad, unfolded the picture and passed it across. “Can you say ‘babe’?”
Becker stared at it for a long moment. “This is Missy? She looks a little familiar.”
“You know, I thought that, too. You heard it was her, by the way, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I called Strout, keeping up.”
Cuneo drummed on his chair for a few seconds, staring into the air between them. Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “That’s it. I knew there was something else. You just said something about ‘our man’ when you were telling me about the gas. You got anything that narrows it down to a guy?”
“No,” Becker said. “I’ve just always assumed it was a guy. I told this to Glitsky.”
“And what did he say?”
“Nothing, really. He just took it in. Why? Is something pointing you toward a woman?”
“Maybe,” Cuneo said. “I’ll let you know.”
Glitsky figured that if he didn’t want to ask the mayor directly, and he didn’t, then his best source of information on her perhaps-hidden connection to Paul Hanover was likely to be found in the basement of the Chronicle building at Fifth and Mission. Despite the receptionist calling Jeff Elliot to tell him Glitsky was upstairs wanting to see him, when Glitsky got buzzed down and got to Jeff’s small, glass-enclosed cubicle, the reporter/columnist was in his wheelchair at his desk, typing up a storm at his computer terminal, apparently lost to the world until he suddenly stopped typing and looked over. “This is my Pulitzer,” he said. “You mind waiting for two more ’graphs?” He motioned to a chair just inside the cubicle.
Glitsky nodded and took the seat.
The Motive Page 10