Damn. I wish I’d known that.
A few minutes later, Delaney walked out of his office and into the cluster of desks where his detectives were rolling up sleeves and peering at computer screens. ‘I’ve got a meeting at nine that’s probably going to take the whole damn morning,’ he said, ‘and maybe suck up the whole rest of the week. So before it starts, let’s have a quick huddle in my office.’
They all pulled chairs around his desk, settled their piles of notes and looked at him with impatient faces that said, Yeah, what? The second floor of 270 South Stone, on Monday morning, was no place to stand on ceremony.
‘OK,’ Delaney said, ‘who’s got any results?’
‘Let me go first,’ Jason said. ‘I’ll be quick.’
‘Go,’ Delaney said.
‘It worked just the way you said it would,’ Jason said, flashing his evil-wolf smile. ‘Except I didn’t have to take three turns at being a meathead. After the first bunch of merry-makers cleared out of the bar, the bartender came over to my table, gave me a friendly smile and said his name was Dewey. I said how glad I was to know him and he said, “I feel the same way, and maybe if you tell me right now what you want, I might not call my goon squad to break your face.”’
‘Why didn’t you call for backup?’
‘Didn’t have to. I started to tell him who I was and what I wanted, but he pointed to my pocket recorder. Soon as I turned it off, he said, “I’ll tell you what I know but I can’t go on the record. And I won’t testify. The boys I work for would kill me before I ever got to court.” So he did.’
‘Fair enough,’ Delaney said. ‘What’s his story?’
‘Damn near nothing. He did watch the whole thing as it happened, of course. I mean, second-floor window across the street? All he lacked was a Sky box and champagne. He told me the guy took so long getting his little piece of wire, he figured him for a decoy. Thought maybe a bunch of vets were playing a game they’d learned in Iraq, going to stream out of one of these empty buildings and blow away however many cops showed up. But no, the thief just tried to do the job by himself and got capped.
‘Then I grilled ol’ Dewey about the buying and selling, said all those bad-cop things you told me to say. He just laughed at me and said, “You kidding? This ain’t no amateur hour you walked into here, Officer, no offense. We’re not going to get caught dealing with two-bit punks like that bozo, can’t even shoot straight enough to get his man when he had the jump on him.” He said, “I never saw that screw-up before that day, and I hope you’ll do me a favor and never ask me to talk about him again.”’
‘You believe him?’
‘Absolutely. The guy was scared, but not of me. I think the next time we look at that place it’s gonna be locked up and empty.’
‘All right.’ Delaney looked around, nodding. ‘That pretty much confirms what we’ve been thinking about the Ed Lacey shooting, doesn’t it? Very nice police work there, Jason.’
‘Thanks,’ Jason said. ‘Please consider me your go-to guy for bar-hopping jobs from now on.’
‘Don’t spoil it, now,’ Delaney said. ‘Anybody else have any cute stories? If not let’s back up to the first suicide. Frank Martin was living alone at the time, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ Leo said. ‘Ed and Angela were in their own house by then.’
‘And there was no girlfriend? Never a woman in his life after his wife died?’
‘No mention of one, that I found. And I found a lot.’ Leo held up his floppy stack of newspaper copies. ‘His nephew lived with him from young boyhood on, and he seems to have devoted himself to that. Well, and all those favors he did for people – there’s a lot in all these reports about that.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Delaney brooded briefly. ‘Kind of makes you wish you had a psychologist on call, doesn’t it?’ He looked around the circle of Monday morning faces, all of them taut with the desire to come up with something – anything. ‘I mean, a man’s been married several years, his wife dies in childbirth and he, what, stays faithful to her memory forever after?’
‘Sounds pretty Victorian, when you put it like that,’ Leo said.
‘Doesn’t it? I haven’t had time to review any of those newspaper reports, so remind me, he put up his own bail?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he stayed in his own house, I suppose, waiting for a court date?’
‘Yes. He made a date to talk to an attorney, but he didn’t show up for the appointment. When the lawyer inquired, a patrolman went to his house and found him missing. His car was gone too, so Dispatch put out a Need to Locate, and a couple of hours later the car was found parked in the lot in front of the Sears store in the Tucson Mall. Frank was in it, sitting behind the wheel. He’d been dead for at least a couple of hours, the ME said. But you know how those estimates go. “Between two and ten hours” was his actual estimate.’