Eve Dallas 02 - Glory in Death (9 page)

He sat back, inclined his head, waiting.

"I think it was personal. She was covering something. For herself, for somebody else. She zapped the 'link recording."

"I read your report, Lieutenant. Are you telling me you believe Prosecuting Attorney Towers was involved in something illegal?"

"Are you asking me as my friend or as my commander?"

He bared his teeth before he could control himself. After a short internal struggle, he nodded. "Well put, Lieutenant. As your commander. "

"I don't know if it was illegal. It's my opinion at this stage of the investigation that there was something on that recording the victim wanted kept private. It was important enough to have her get dressed and go out again into the rain to meet someone. Whoever that was, was certain she would come alone and that she would leave no record of the contact. Commander, I need to speak with the rest of the victim's family, her close friends, your wife."

He'd accepted that, or tried to. Throughout his career he had worked hard to keep his loved ones out of the often nasty air of his job. Now he had to expose them.

"You have my address, Lieutenant. I'll contact my wife now and tell her to expect you."

"Yes, sir. Thank you."

Anna Whitney had made a fine home from the two-level house in the quiet street in the suburbs of White Plains. She had raised her children there, and raised them well, choosing the profession of mother over a teaching career. It wasn't the state salary for full-time parents that had swayed her. It had been the thrill of being in on each and every stage of childhood development.

She'd earned her salary. Now, with her children grown, she earned her retirement stipend by putting the same dedication into nurturing her home, her husband, and her reputation as a hostess. Whenever she could, she filled the house with her grandchildren. In the evenings, she filled it with dinner parties.

Anna Whitney hated solitude.

But she was alone when Eve arrived. As always, she was perfectly groomed: her cosmetics were carefully and expertly applied, and her pale blond hair was coiffed in a swept-back style that suited her attractive face.

She wore a one-piece suit of good American cotton, and held out a hand adorned only with a wedding ring to welcome Eve.

"Lieutenant Dallas, my husband said you would come."

"I'm sorry to intrude, Mrs. Whitney."

"Don't apologize. I'm a cop's wife. Come in. I've made some lemonade. It's tablet, I'm afraid. Fresh or frozen is so monstrously hard to come by. It's a little early for lemonade, but I had a yen for it today."

Eve let Anna chatter as they walked into the formal living area with its stiff-backed chairs and straight-edged sofa.

The lemonade was fine, and Eve said so after the first sip.

"You know the memorial service is at ten tomorrow."

"Yes, ma'am. I'll be there."

"There are so many flowers already. We've made arrangements to have them distributed after... but that's not why you're here."

"Prosecutor Towers was a good friend to you."

"She was a very good friend to me and my husband."

"Her children are staying with you?"

"Yes, they're... they've gone with Marco just now to speak with the archbishop about the service."

"They're close to their father."

"Yes."

"Mrs. Whitney, why are they staying here, rather than with their father?"

"We all thought it best. The house -- Marco's house -- holds so many memories. Cicely lived there when the children were young. Then there's the media. They don't have our address, and we wanted to keep the children from dealing with reporters. They've swamped poor Marco. It'll be different tomorrow, of course."

Her pretty hands plucked at the knee of her suit, then calmed and lay still again. "They'll have to face it. They're still in shock. Even Randall. Randall Slade, Mirina's fiance. He'd gotten very close to Cicely."

"He's here as well."

"He'd never leave Mirina alone at such a time. She's a strong young woman, Lieutenant, but even strong women need an arm to lean on now and then."

Eve blocked out the quick image of Roarke that popped into her brain. As a result of the effort, her voice was a bit more formal than usual as she led Anna through the routine questions.

"I've asked myself over and over what could have possessed her to go to that neighborhood," Anna concluded. "Cicely could be stubborn, and certainly strong willed, but she was rarely impulsive and never foolish. "

"She talked to you, confided in you."

"We were like sisters."

"Would she have told you if she was in trouble of some kind? If someone close to her was in trouble?"

"I would have thought so. She would have handled it herself, or tried to first." Her eyes swam, but the tears didn't fall. "But sooner or later she would have blown off steam with me."

If she'd had time, Eve thought. "You can think of nothing she was concerned about before her death?"

"Nothing major. Her daughter's wedding -- getting older. We joked about her becoming a grandmother. No," Anna said with a laugh as she recognized Eve's look. "Mirina isn't pregnant, though that would have only pleased her mother. She was always concerned for David as well: Would he settle down? Was he happy?"

"And is he?"

Another cloud came into her eyes before she lowered them. "David is a great deal like his father. He likes to wheel and deal. He does a great deal of traveling for the business, always looking for new arenas, new opportunities. There's no doubt he'll take the helm if and when Marco decided to turn it over."

She hesitated, as if about to add something, then smoothly switched gears. "Mirina, on the other hand, prefers to live in one spot. She manages a boutique in Rome. That's where she met Randall. He's a designer. Her shop handles his line exclusively now. He's quite talented. This is his," she said, indicating the slim suit she wore.

"It's lovely. So as far as you know, Prosecutor Towers had no reason to be concerned for her children. Nothing she would have felt obliged to smooth out or cover over?"

"Cover over? No, of course not. They're both bright, successful people. "

"And her ex-husband. He's having some business difficulties?"

"Marco? Is he?" Anna shrugged that off. "I'm sure he'll straighten them out. I never shared Cicely's interest in business."

"She was involved then, in business. Directly?"

"Of course. Cicely insisted on knowing exactly what was going on and having a say in it. I never knew how she could keep so many things in her head. If Marco was having difficulties, she'd have known, and probably have suggested a half dozen ways to right things. She was quite brilliant." When her voice broke, Anna pressed a hand to her lips.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Whitney."

"No, it's all right. I'm better. Having her children with me helped so much. I feel I can stand for her with them. I can't do what you do, and look for her killer. But I can stand for her with her children."

"They're very lucky to have you," Eve murmured, surprised to hear herself say it and mean it. Odd, she'd always considered Anna Whitney a mild pain in the ass. "Mrs. Whitney, can you tell me about Prosecutor Towers's relationship with George Hammett?"

Anna pokered up. "They were dear, good friends."

"Mr. Hammett has told me they were lovers."

Anna huffed out a breath. She was a traditionalist, and unashamed of it. "Very well, that's true. But he wasn't the right man for her."

"Why?"

"Set in his ways. I'm very fond of George, and he made an excellent escort for Cicely. But a woman can hardly be completely happy when she goes home to an empty apartment most nights, to an empty bed. She needed a mate. George wanted it both ways, and Cicely deluded herself into thinking she wanted that, too."

"And she didn't."

"She shouldn't have," Anna snapped, obviously going over an old argument. "Work isn't enough, as I pointed out to her many times. She simply wasn't serious enough about George to risk."

"Risk?"

"I'm speaking of emotional risk," Anna said impatiently. "You cops are so literal-minded. She wanted her life tidy more than she wanted the mess of a full-time relationship."

"I had the impression that Mr. Hammett regretted that, that he loved her very much."

"If he did, why didn't he push?" Anna demanded, and tears threatened. "She wouldn't have died alone then, would she? She wouldn't have been alone."

Eve drove out of the quiet suburbs, and on impulse she pulled her car over to the curb and slumped down in the seat. She needed to think. Not about Roarke, she assured herself. There was nothing to think about there. That was settled.

On a hunch, she called up her computer at her office and had it get to work on David Angelini. If he was like his father, maybe he had also made a few poor investments. While she was at it, she ordered a run on Randall Slade and the boutique in Rome.

If anything popped up, she would have a scan on the flights from Europe to New York.

Damn it, a woman who had nothing to worry about didn't leave her warm, dry apartment in the middle of the night.

Stubbornly, Eve retraced all the steps in her head. As she thought it through, she studied the neighborhood. Nice old trees spreading shade, neat postcard-sized yards with one-and two-story fully detached houses.

What would it have been like to have been raised in a pretty, settled community? Would it make you secure, confident, the way being dragged from filthy room to filthy room, from stinking street to stinking street made her jittery, moody?

Maybe there were fathers here who snuck into their little girls' bedrooms, too. But it was hard to believe it. The fathers here couldn't smell of bad liquor and sour sweat and have thick fingers that pushed themselves into innocent flesh.

Eve caught herself rocking in the seat and choked back a sob.

She wouldn't do it. She wouldn't remember. She wouldn't let herself conjure up that face looming over her in the dark, or the taste of that hand clamping over her mouth to smother her screams.

She wouldn't do it. It had all happened to someone else, some little girl whose name she couldn't even remember. If she tried to, if she let herself remember it all, she would become that helpless child again and lose Eve.

She laid her head back on the seat and concentrated on calming herself. If she hadn't been wallowing in self-pity, she would have seen the woman breaking the window at the side of the modified rancher across the street before the first shard fell.

As it was, Eve scowled, asked herself why she'd had to pull over at just this spot. And did she really want the hassle of dealing with intra-jurisdiction paperwork?

Then she thought about the nice family who would come home that night and find their valuables gone.

With a long-suffering sigh, she got out of the car.

The woman was half in and half out of the window when Eve reached her. The security shield had been deactivated by a cheap jammer, available at any electronic outlet. With a shake of her head for the naivete of suburbanites, Eve tapped the thief smartly on the butt that was struggling to wiggle through the opening.

"Forget your code, ma'am?"

Her answer was a hard donkey-style kick to the left shoulder. Eve considered herself lucky it had missed her face. Still, she went down, crushing some early tulips. The perp popped out of the window like a cork and bolted across the lawn.

If her shoulder hadn't been aching, Eve might have let her go. She caught her quarry in a flying tackle that sent them both sprawling into a bed of sunny-faced pansies.

"Get your fucking hands off me, or I'll kill you."

Eve thought briefly that it was a possibility. The woman outweighed her by a good twenty pounds. To ensure it didn't happen, she jammed an elbow against the woman's windpipe and dug for her badge.

"You're busted."

The woman's dark eyes rolled in disgust. "What the hell's a city cop doing here? Don't you know where Manhattan is, asshole?"

"Looks like I'm lost." Eve kept her elbow in place, adding just a little more pressure for her own satisfaction while she pulled out her communicator and requested the closest 'burb cruiser.

CHAPTER SIX

By the next morning, her shoulder was singing as fiercely as Mavis on a final set. Eve admitted the extra hours she'd put in with Feeney and a night tossing alone in bed hadn't helped it any. She was leery of anything but the mildest painkillers, and took a single stingy dose before she dressed for the memorial service.

She and Feeney had come across one tasty little tidbit. David Angelini had withdrawn three large payments from his accounts over the last six months, to a grand total of one million six hundred and thirty-two dollars, American.

That was more than three-quarters of his personal savings, and he'd drawn it in anonymous credit tokens and cash.

They were still digging on Randall Slade and Mirina, but so far, they were both clean. Just a happy young couple on the brink of matrimony.

God knew how anybody could be happy on the brink, Eve thought as she located her gray suit.

The damn button on the jacket was still missing, she realized as she started to fasten it. And she remembered Roarke had it, carried it like some sort of superstitious talisman. She'd been wearing the suit the first time she'd seen him -- at a memorial for the dead.

She ran a hasty comb through her hair and escaped the apartment and the memories.

St. Patrick's was bulging by the time she arrived. Uniforms in the best dress blues flanked the perimeter for a full three blocks on Fifth. A kind of honor guard, Eve mused, for a lawyer who cops had respected. Both street and air traffic had been diverted from the usually choked avenue, and the media was thronged like a busy parade across the wide street.

After the third uniform stopped her, Eve attached her badge to her jacket and moved unhampered into the ancient cathedral and the sounds of the dirge.

She didn't care for churches much. They made her feel guilty for reasons she didn't care to explore. The scent of candle wax and incense was ripe. Some rituals, she thought as she slipped into a side pew, were as timeless as the moon. She gave up any hope of speaking directly with Cicely Towers's family that morning and settled down to watch the show.