A Plague of Secrets (22 page)

The apartment door
opened and Wyatt Hunt stood looking at his young associate. “What is this bullshit, Craig?”

“What bullshit?”

“ ‘What bullshit?’ he asks. Calling in sick when you look about as sick as I do, except for a little red around the eyes. Are you stoned?”

“Slightly.”

“And what do you hope to accomplish by that?”

“Nothing. I’m not trying to accomplish anything. Except figure out how I’m going to get back with Tam.”

“You think better when you’re loaded?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.”

“And yet here you are.”

“I just thought I’d take a day off and think about things.”

“This is thinking about things?”

“No. I felt bad about Tam and was trying to cheer myself up about it.”

“Yeah, you’re just the picture of good cheer.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“There’s nothing you can say, Craig. You know the rules. You want a day off, call in and ask for a day off. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve done that before and it’s never been a problem. But you don’t call in sick when you’re not sick.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well…” Hunt hated this, hated Craig at this moment. “You want to get back with Tamara, it’s not rocket science. She wants you to stop with this dope shit.”

“She send you here?”

“Nope. I wanted to see how bad it was.”

Chiurco blew into the air between them. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“That’s great. I’m glad to hear it. Because to tell you the truth, it doesn’t look too good right now.”

“You going to fire me?”

“I’m thinking about it. I feel a little betrayed, if you want to know.”

“Not by me?”

“Yep, by you.”

“Wyatt, come on. This is the first time for anything like this in like-what?-five years. We’re not exactly in the busiest time we’ve ever had. I just made a bad decision.”

“Couple of ’em. Notice any connection between the dope and the bad decisions?”

“Maybe. A little.”

“Maybe a little, yeah. And in the meanwhile Dismas Hardy comes by my place last night and gives us a shitload of work and I’m thinking you and me are going to be humping round the clock on this Townshend case for at least the next few days, maybe a week. Except you call in sick when you’re not actually sick at all, and Tam’s all messed up back at the office, can barely answer the phone, and I’ve got no goddamn backup.”

“I didn’t know that. I couldn’t have known that.”

“No, I know. Which is why one of the rules is you show up at work when somebody’s paying you, so that if there’s work to do, you’re there to do it.”

Chiurco hung his head; his shoulders rose and fell. “Again, I’m sorry.”

Hunt waited until Craig’s head came back up, then looked him square in the eyes. “Shit,” he said. “This is no way to run an airline. Didn’t we already have a discussion about this once? How am I supposed to write a reference letter if this is going on? How about, if this is your chosen field, maybe you want to avoid things that threaten it?”

“I don’t usually smoke during the day.”

“You shouldn’t be usually smoking at all, Craig. You might lose your job over it-hell, your whole profession. Worse, you’re losing Tam, and you already know that.”

“I know. You think I don’t know that? That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out all day.”

“What’s to figure out?”

No answer.

“And beyond that, Craig, while we’re on the topic, being high isn’t going to help you figure anything out. Especially this. Isn’t that pretty goddamn obvious?”

“It should be, yes.”

“So?”

“So”-a sigh-“so I’m gonna stop. I mean it. Starting now, Wyatt. I swear to God.”

Hunt just stared at him, this discussion already far beyond his tolerance level. “So what do you think I ought to do about this now? About you?”

“You could fire me if you want.”

“I know I could. Maybe I should. If this wasn’t the first time you screwed up like this, I sure as hell would.”

A trace of hope showed itself on Chiurco’s face. “I swear to God, Wyatt, it’s over. You can tell Tam it’s over.”

“You can tell Tam it’s over, Craig. I’ve got other work to do.”

“I could-”

“No, you can’t.” He pointed a finger at Craig’s chest. “Tomorrow you can if you’re straight by then. And this is the one and only warning. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, fuck you. Clear?”

“It is. I hear you.”

“I hope so,” Wyatt said. Then, “Get some sleep and be on time tomorrow.” He turned on his heel and stalked off down the hallway.

Bay Beans West was open again, business at least back to slow but steady.

Wyatt Hunt, the embers of his anger still smoldering in his gut, stood across Haight Street on this cool and overcast Tuesday lunch hour and watched people come and go for about twenty minutes. The clientele couldn’t be more diverse, and Hunt reflected that if we were what we eat and drink, then we human beings were really mostly the same; nothing should really separate us at all, since apparently every ethnic group in the world, both sexes, and people at every economic level drank coffee and lots of it.

Hunt entered at last and got his place, fifth in the ordering line. Getting up to the counter, he ordered a regular with a couple of shots of espresso. Leaning over, he then quickly showed his business card and mentioned that he was an investigator-he specifically did not say police investigator. Although quite often that’s what people heard, and he usually didn’t correct them. Could he please, he inquired, have a few words with the manager? It was about the Maya Townshend case.

Before he’d had his order filled, a flamboyantly dressed, pony-tailed young man with a diamond in his ear appeared at Hunt’s side and introduced himself as the manager, Eugenio Ruiz. Thanking him for coming over, Hunt again flashed his business card and this time identified himself as a private investigator working with the defense on the Townshend case.

“Okay, what can I do for you?”

“We’re trying to get a little specific,” Hunt said, “about the way Dylan Vogler ran the marijuana out of here. Did you know anything about that?”

Ruiz had quick, dark brown eyes, and they flashed over to the register and then back to Hunt. “Dylan pretty much handled all of that himself, I think.”

“Really?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

At the counter they called Hunt’s coffee, and he turned and smiled. “That’s me, be right back. You mind we go sit someplace for just a minute?”

“A minute. Sure.”

Hunt got his coffee, turned, and found Ruiz again at his elbow. “There’s some chairs in my office,” he said. “After me.” And led the way.

The room was small and narrow, maybe six or seven by ten feet. A cluttered desk sat along the left-hand wall, and Hunt took one of the two chairs at the far end of it. The walls were papered with posters of coffee-growing locations-Costa Rica, Hawaii, Kenya, Indonesia. Ruiz closed the door behind them, then pulled over a small wooden barrel and sat on it. “I’ve only got a couple of minutes,” he began. “We’re getting into a rush out there.”

“Seems like you’ve always got a rush.”

“That’s pretty much true.” A hopeful smile came and just as quickly disappeared.

Hunt took a small sip of his hot coffee. “Really delicious,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Well,” Hunt said, “I guess the big question is how Dylan distributed the money to the workers here. Was it only the assistant managers, or did everybody get a slice?”

Ruiz, to Hunt’s gratification caught completely off-guard, opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. “Um, no.”

“No, everybody got a slice?”

The quick eyes triangulated the little room, finally came to settle on Hunt. “No, neither. This was all Dylan’s thing.”

“No,” Hunt said. “No, we know that’s not true.”

“It is true.”

“No, it’s not.” Hunt shook his head in commiseration. “Good try, Eugenio, but Maya’s told us in general terms how it all worked. And frankly we’re to the point of getting a little desperate to find somebody else who had a motive to kill Dylan. Or the jury’s going to decide Maya did it. So she-Maya-wants us to go to the police and start bringing you guys downtown to talk. And really, who can blame her? But my boss thinks we don’t have to shake things up that much to get what we need.”

“What do you need?”

“I need to know what you and your coworkers know.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know specifically, you see. But certainly clients who might have been having a hard time paying, or maybe were making trouble for Dylan some other way. Competitors, people threatening to bust you. Come on, Eugenio, you know. You’ve been doing this. You don’t run a ten-grand-a-month drug business and not have some problems.”

Eugenio turned halfway around to check the door. When he came back to Hunt, again he shook his head. “No.”

Hunt smiled. “I thought we’d been over that, Eugenio. ‘No’ is not the right answer. ‘No’ means you and your guys start going downtown.”

“But they say it wasn’t about the weed. They didn’t steal the weed Dylan had on him.”

“There you go. ‘They.’ ‘They’ is not ‘she.’ So who is ‘they’?”

The highly strung manager fidgeted on his barrel. “I don’t mean ‘they’ like that.”

“So how did you mean it?”

“You know, like a figure of speech.”

“Okay. But let me tell you something. The more we’re looking at this, the more we’re convinced that it is, in fact, about the weed. Maya thinks it’s about the weed, since it’s definitely not about her. So you see where we’re coming from. We’re running out of time.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know any names.”

Hunt broke a frigid smile. “Well, that’s where you’re in luck. Because it turns out we do have names, a whole list of them. We just don’t know what kind of relationships some of these people had with Dylan. We need to talk to you some more and other staff members who were part of this thing.”

“Nobody was part of it. Nobody sold or handled anything except Dylan.”

Hunt leaned back in his chair. “I believe you, Eugenio. But we’re not talking sales. We’re talking cooperation and payoff. You guys knew what Dylan was doing and you helped him do it, and in exchange he paid you under the table, probably pretty well. Now, I know this and you know it, but it hasn’t been the subject of much police concern so far because they’ve been thinking about Maya and murder. So up to now you’re all under the radar. And the really good news here is that talking to me or my colleagues isn’t going to get you in trouble. But if the cops come down here and get involved, that’s all going to change.” Hunt came forward. “Is there something that’s unclear about this to you? This is a great deal for you guys, I promise.”

Eugenio tattooed out a rhythm on the edge of the barrel. “Do you have that list with you?” he asked. “I could look at it, see if any names ring a bell.”

At a few minutes past eight that night Treya and Abe Glitsky were standing over the sink, doing the dinner dishes-Abe washing, Treya drying-in their small kitchen. They had a dishwasher, but it had gone on the blink shortly after Zachary had gone into the hospital, and they’d just never gotten around to fixing it.

Now it was beginning to look as though that might never happen. The simple rhythm of handling the dishes-rinsing, handing the plates and cups and silverware to your partner to dry, talking all the while-had brought to them both an unspoken comfort and even a kind of intimacy that had somehow kick-started their communication during those darkest days when Treya sometimes thought Abe would never really talk again.

Sometime during that crisis time with Zachary, Treya had also instigated a practice she called Parent Savings Time, or PST, and tonight she had put it into practice for the first time in a couple of weeks. The idea, she admitted, was fiendishly simple, and perhaps even inlaid with a tiny element of cruelty. But kids could be such a pain sometimes-even though of course you always loved them-that she didn’t feel too guilty laying some payback on them for their own cruel ways.

PST involved going around the house and setting the clocks an hour, or even two hours, ahead. Then, after dinner, you’d look up with surprise, and say, “Oh, my gosh, where has the time gone? It’s bedtime already.” And you whisk them off to their slumbers.

Now Treya took a dish from the drying tray and began wiping it down. “So what did Diz say?”

“He said it wasn’t Schiff’s finest moment.”

“So what’s going to happen?”

“Nothing. Diz says that the Levon count might not even get to the jury.”

“Wow. How often does that happen?”

“Not too. Normally you go for a double one eight seven, if the second one’s squirrelly, they don’t file it. Or maybe it gets dismissed at prelim, but never in the middle of a trial. Still, Diz is talking about a motion to dismiss as soon as Stier rests. I can’t imagine Braun granting it, but if she did, it would be pretty huge for Diz.” He paused. “It wouldn’t be so huge for me.”

“You? What do you have to do with it?”

“Well, though you might not know it to look at me, especially the last few months, in theory I run the homicide detail. Which means I have some input on what we bring to the DA. Or not. At least where there’s a question.”

“You’re saying there was a question here?”

“I thought there might be when Debra first went to Glass. But I just couldn’t seem to stay focused back then.”

“Gee, Abe. I wonder why that was.”

Glitsky put his sponge inside a drinking glass and turned it absently around the rim. “The reason doesn’t really matter, Trey.”

“No, I know. God forbid you have a legitimate excuse or, worse, use one.”

“I don’t need an excuse. I take full responsibility.”

“You? You’re kidding.”

He handed her the rinsed glass. “Quit busting my chops, woman, would you?”

“I’m not. I’m teasing you.”

“I’m laughing. See me laughing.”

She put down the glass, put a finger into his belt, and turned him toward her. “Kiss me.”

“My hands are all wet.”

“I don’t care. Kiss me.”

After about thirty seconds he said, “Are we going to finish these dishes?”