“I don’t know exactly what I believe about that. All I know is that there must have been another way he got her to do it. I don’t know how. But something like that must have happened . . . And the same thing happened with Geoff.”
Something like getting pushed in front of a streetcar? Beth thought. This was making no sense. Beth asked, “Do you have something to back up what you’re saying?”
“Of course,” Bina said. “That’s why I said I’d talk to you.”
“You know something about Theresa that hasn’t . . . ?”
“No. Not Theresa. Geoff. Someone killed Geoff and made it look like a suicide, and of course I can prove it.”
Beth reached out and put a hand over one of Bina’s. “The other night when my partner and I were here, did you . . . ?”
“Did I know then what I have found since? No. I was too devastated to think, but since then . . .”
“You have found some kind of proof?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to say. I have to get the truth out there.”
“Well, I am here now. And I’m anxious to see what you’ve got.” Although her hope for a credible story was fading with every new word out of Bina’s mouth, Beth felt she had to stay until she’d heard it all, and until she’d had a chance to ask her own questions as well.
But Bina was already on her feet. “Let me just get my folder.”
A folder no less, Beth thought.
In ten seconds, Bina was back, sitting down. She opened the folder and pulled out a yellow legal pad where she had written her notes. “Okay,” she said, “number one. The gun. When Geoff got back from Iraq—you know he was in Desert Storm, right? Okay. When he came home, he brought back a couple of Iraqi-made semiautomatic pistols he picked up over there as souvenirs. A couple, as in two of them.”
“All right.”
“All right.” Bina broke a tight smile. “Let’s take a short walk, shall we?”
Again, she was out of her chair. Beth followed her through the professional-grade kitchen, down a hallway to a man’s home office—dark leather chair and love seat, two walls of books, the faint odor of cigars. Bina had already removed some books from one of the bookshelves and now reached in and opened a small wall safe.
She took out one gun, showed it to Beth, then placed it on the desk behind her. It looked to Beth like the exact same gun that Geoff had used to kill himself.
“Don’t worry,” Bina said. “It’s not loaded. The magazines with the bullets are in the back of the safe.” Pulling out the other gun, she placed it next to the first one. “Two guns,” she said. “That’s all he brought home. It’s all he ever had. Look in if you want and check it out.”
Beth gave the safe a quick glance. No more guns.
Bina picked up the guns and put them back in the safe, then closed it and spun the combination lock. Turning, she said, “Two guns, both of them still there in his safe. He didn’t have another gun. So, you’re going to ask, what about the gun that killed him and Peter? Where did that come from? Okay, let’s go back.”
In spite of herself, in spite of the irrationality of opinions about Theresa Boleyn, Beth was getting caught up in Bina Cooke’s narrative, and followed her back through the house.
At her dining room table again, Bina picked up the folder and said, “This is the so-called suicide note that he emailed me, supposedly from his laptop in his car. You’ve already seen this, but . . .”
She read: “ ‘Dear Bina. Please forgive me. They’re going to put it together about Peter and me and I don’t want to put us through that. This is cleaner and better for you. I love you. Geoff.’ ”
Her eyes glistening with tears, Bina said, “Geoff did not write this, Inspector. I’ve got five hundred other emails from him at least, and none of them start with ‘Dear Bina.’ Whenever he wrote me, he called me ‘Bean.’ ‘Bean.’ Not ‘Bina.’ Every single goddamn time. You can look back and check. And while we’re at it, he wasn’t ‘Geoff.’ He was ‘Freddie.’ I don’t even remember why anymore. But the fact is, if he ever even would have written this email, which he would not have done, it would have been to Bean from Freddie. Could it be any more clear? He just didn’t write this thing.”
Bina, wiping the tears from her face, fairly glowed with her conviction. “Anyway, that’s two elements of proof right there. One, he didn’t have any third gun. And two, he never wrote that email. Here’s number three: he was left-handed.”
Beth cocked her head, a question.
“He was shot in the right side of his head. He is not holding a gun in his off hand and shooting himself with it. Think about it. If he’s holding the gun, it’s in his left hand.”
Beth said nothing.
Bina, apparently spent, had found a Kleenex and was wiping beneath her eyes. Finally looking up at Beth, she forced a pathetic facsimile of a smile, her lips trembling. “My husband did not kill himself,” she said. “I promise you. And all of what I’ve told and shown you here proves it. This absolutely proves it.”
Actually, Beth knew, it did no such thing. Compared to the positive evidence—the gun from Desert Storm, the casings proving that that same gun had killed both Peter Ash and Geoff Cooke, the positive ID of the blood on Geoff’s boat as Peter’s—the three objections that Bina had made were not definitive. Although taken together, Beth had to admit that they were tantalizing. If Bina hadn’t led off with her implausible if not impossible theory about Theresa Boleyn, Beth might have found them even more compelling.
Which brought her back to the reason she’d come here, painful though it would be to ask. “You raise some very good points,” Beth said, “and I will keep them in mind if we turn up any evidence of a more positive nature . . .”
“But these are positive.”
“No. Technically, they are all what we call negative evidence—the dog who didn’t bark in the nighttime. In the sense that none of them help identify another possible suspect. Do you see that?”
“But they do eliminate Geoff.”
“Not conclusively, they don’t.” Beth huffed out a breath. “Mrs. Cooke,” she said. “Bina. I have a question to ask you, and I’m afraid it will make you angry, but I can’t help that. Did you have an affair with Peter Ash?”
To Beth’s surprise, Bina’s reaction was a full-bellied laugh. When she finished, several seconds later, she wiped her eyes again. “Why in the world would you ask me that?”
“Because it might have given your husband a reason to kill him. Out of jealousy.”
Bina shook her head, still apparently somewhat amused. “Geoff didn’t kill Peter, Inspector,” she said. “He loved the man. That’s why he came to you and offered his help in your investigation. Does that strike you as the action of a man who wanted to kill his friend?”
“But you haven’t answered me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I had. No, I never had any intimate relations with Peter Ash. Although . . .” She narrowed her eyes.
“What?”
“Actually, this might be important,” Bina said. “Peter did make a pass at me four or five months ago, which I decided to treat as a joke.”
“All right, and . . . ?”
“And Geoff never knew about it. In fact, I didn’t tell Geoff about it until last . . . let’s see . . . it was last Saturday. And he was absolutely furious, that Peter had done that. He almost didn’t go to the funeral because of it.
“Don’t you see?” Bina asked. “That was the first he’d heard about that. If you’d seen his reaction, you’d know. He might have wanted to pick a fight with Peter then, but Peter was already dead. I’d never seen him angry at Peter before because he never had been. That should tell you something. He had no motive to kill him, over me or over anything else.”
Beth straightened up, reached over, and turned off her tape recorder. Again, Bina’s information was interesting and even compelling. Beth felt that it was probably true as well. And most importantly, she believed that Bina Cooke had not slept w
ith Peter Ash.
With that, though it was neither positive evidence nor proof of any sort, in her bones she felt the case against Geoff Cooke collapse.
At the door on her way out, Beth shook Bina’s hand and thanked her for her information. She was halfway down the front steps when suddenly she stopped. She’d come here to get the answer to one simple, specific question, and she’d gotten it to her satisfaction. But in her myopia on that account, she’d lost sight of a potentially larger and more significant fact.
Turning, she trudged back up to the porch and rang the bell again, hearing the chimes echo through the house. When Bina opened the door, Beth apologized for the interruption, then asked, “What is the possibility that Geoff had more than two guns, and that you didn’t know about them?”
“Zero,” she said. “He only had the two. We talked about it quite a lot early on. I wanted him to throw them away a long time ago, but he wanted to keep them as souvenirs to remind him of what it had been like over there.”
“In Iraq?”
“Yes. In Iraq? What are you getting at?”
“Well, just that the gun that killed him is not what I’d call common here in the city, or anywhere else in this country. What are the odds that somebody else would even have that same type of gun? I mean, Geoff was in Iraq and he had a reason to have it, but to me . . . I’m sorry, but it’s more likely that he did in fact have three guns—maybe without telling you about one of them—than that some other person just happened to have the exact same type of very esoteric weapon and used it to shoot Geoff. Do you see what I’m saying?”
Bina went stiff, her eyes glazed over for a moment. “Oh my God,” she said. “Ron.”
* * *
It was a Thursday, not a First Friday, but given the horrific events of the past week, Ron thought that a quiet lunch in their back booth at Sam’s would do them both a world of good.
He was the first to arrive and ordered his usual martini. After delivering the drink, Stefano had left the curtain slightly open and now Ron caught a glimpse of his wife as she came walking down the narrow aisle between the booths. Even after all she’d had to endure in the past couple of weeks, to say nothing of the past six months since she’d been shot, she still radiated warmth and goodness.
She was also, he realized, still and always staggeringly beautiful. Trim and buxom, with her thick, shoulder-length dark hair, today she wore a maroon sweater dress that accentuated her figure, which hardly needed it. As she came nearer, he noticed that she was wearing the solitaire black pearl necklace he’d given her right here at Sam’s before all the madness hit.
He stood up and pulled the curtain back to greet her, holding her against him for a long moment, brushing her lips with a chaste kiss, then another not entirely so. “I’m so glad you decided you could come down,” he said when they’d sat back down.
“You saved my life,” she said. “Four hours is about all I can take with that woman.”
“How is Bina?” he asked.
“Bereft. About like you’d expect. Maybe a little worse.”
“How so?”
Kate arranged her napkin on her lap. “She just seems in complete denial about Geoff committing suicide, as though that’s going to bring him back. And they must have her on some serious antidepressant that I think is making her delusional. You know Peter Ash’s secretary, Theresa? The woman who killed herself?”
“Vaguely. What about her?”
“Well, nothing really, except that Bina seems to think somebody pushed her onto the streetcar tracks. The same person, she says, who killed Geoff.”
“Is there really any doubt that Geoff killed himself? Didn’t they just rule it a suicide, like, yesterday or the day before?”
“Yes. But she doesn’t believe it.” Kate paused. “She asked me about your guns.”
“My guns?”
“Your Iraq souvenirs. They are evidently the same type of gun that Geoff shot himself with.”
“Right. I think I read that, the Iraqi gun connection. But I had understood it was his own gun. He had a few of them, I thought.”
“Well, apparently, according to Bina, only two. And those two are still in the safe at their house.”
Nodding, Ron lifted his martini glass and took a small sip. “That Bina knew about.”
“Did he have others?”
“Well, at least one more that he kept in the safe in his office. I’ll bet you if the police looked, they could find a couple more.”
“I should tell her that,” Kate said. “I really had the impression she thought it might have been one of your guns.”
“You mean that I had a role in killing Geoff? That is crazy.”
“That’s what I told her, of course, but she was going on about the gun, even after I told her we didn’t have them anymore.”
Ron cocked his head. “But . . .”
Kate shook her head with some vehemence. “We don’t have them anymore, Ron. I remember you turning them in downtown sometime last May or June. I know I didn’t dream that when I was all drugged up. You must remember this. I’m sure you do.”
Ron took a long beat, letting the import of her words settle. He leveled his gaze at her and held it until finally she gave him an almost infinitesimal nod, a whisper of a smile. He then lifted his stemmed glass again. “There was so much going on with you and the kids then, I can barely remember half of what I did.”
“Exactly.”
“Even so, I can’t believe Bina would think I . . .”
“I can’t really blame her, Ron. The case could be made, that’s the point. Although of course it won’t stand up. Even hearing we didn’t have your guns anymore, I don’t think it helped. I don’t know if anything will help. She needs to blame someone. She’s just devastated.”
“Like we all are.”
She took his hand across the table. “Speaking of which, how are you holding up?”
He hesitated and met her eyes, his lips turned up a fraction of an inch. “Poorly. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s going to be a new world with him being gone. It’ll take some getting used to. Not that we didn’t have our differences. And I can’t say I’ll miss him screwing me over whenever he thought he could pull it off, but we go way back. It will take some adjustment, that’s all.”
“An adjustment that, I hate to say it, is probably worth it, Ron. Now that he’s not there standing in your way, there’s no real limit to where we can go.” She reached for his hand. “But let’s just give it some time. Everyone understands that your friend and partner killed himself. You could legitimately plead that you don’t have the strength to get out of bed, much less go to work and kick ass.”
He shrugged. “Day at a time, right?”
The curtain opened and the tuxedoed Stefano welcomed Kate extravagantly, bestowing a kiss on the back of her hand. “It has been too long. You need to come in here at least once a month from now on or we send someone to come and get you.”
“I promise.” Sharing a look with Ron, she said, “But I had a good excuse.”
“No excuses next time,” Stefano said. “White wine?”
“A chardonnay would be nice.”
“On its way. And truly, it is wonderful to see you.”
“You, too, Stefano. Thank you.”
When he’d gone, Ron said, “You ought to try being a little more charming. See if you can get people to like you.”
“I’ll work on it,” she said. Again, she reached for his hand. “But Bina? What about her?”
“Once she gets over the loss, Kate, she’ll be fine. She comes from big money. So that won’t be a problem. Though of course, if she ever needs us, the firm will step up.”
Kate nodded, sighed. “So what—do you think—what did Peter really do to Geoff?”
“I don’t know,” Ron said, “but it must have been terrible.”
She lowered her voice and leaned in toward him. “Could it have been worse than what he did to us?” Because, of course, as Kate and Ron
had worked out their accommodations to what had happened, Kate’s role had morphed from seductress to victim. Her unwavering story by now was that Peter had started it; she’d given in to a moment of weakness.
“We are still us,” Ron said. “Maybe the real story is that Geoff and Bina weren’t as strong.”
“They seemed like it, though, didn’t they?”
“The argument could be made. But the big question is believing that Geoff could have actually done it.”
“The capability must have always been there.”
“And don’t forget, he did keep those guns all these years.”
“Guns,” she said with a tone of disgust. “Such a huge problem for our country, aren’t they?”
“If you got ’em nearby,” Ron said, “you go to them in a pinch. That’s just the way that scenario plays out.”
36
THE LARGE, OPEN SPACE THAT housed the homicide detail sulked in a Friday afternoon lethargy, every workstation but one abandoned. Ike McCaffrey probably wouldn’t have been at his desk, either, except that he’d finally gotten to appear in court and give his testimony in the Raul Sanchez murder case and he wanted to check his in-box and see what, if anything, he needed to do before he went home early. He’d also texted his partner and told Beth where she could find him if anything needed their immediate attention.
Assuming that she was doing some investigating somewhere out in the field, he had discovered that they’d picked up a gangbanger NHI—“No humans involved”—case down in the Mission, he didn’t really expect to see her here at the office. But then, without hearing her approach, he looked up and here she was coming toward him. He flashed her a welcoming smile that almost immediately disappeared. “What’s wrong?”
“Quite a bit, I think,” she said. “Mostly me.”
“In what way?”
“In the way that I am supposed to be a team player—you and me being the team—and there’s some stuff about Peter Ash that I never got around to telling you. You had your issues going on with Heather’s meningitis, I know, but that’s no excuse. It just completely slipped my mind.”
Fatal Page 30