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"She said I deserved the full treatment."
"And had she started giving it to you by last night?" Vince asked.
"He thinks I'm lying," Howard said to his lawyer. "You check it out, Detective. It was her husband. He killed her. I don't know why he killed her, but he got me here to frame me."
"But she was the one who said you deserved the full treatment," Vince said.
"He got her to invite me," Howard said, less assurance in his voice. "He's a subtle one, he is."
Vince said, nodding again, "I hate subtle people. All those hidden agendas."
"So are you going to do something about him? Arrest him?"
"We'll check for his prints on the bottle."
"He'll have wiped them off," Eric Derrick said.
"You sure you didn't take a midnight stroll last night?" Vince asked. "I get lit, I do fu
"I'm quite sure I never left my room," Howard said.
"Is there anything else?" said the lawyer, leaning forward.
"Well, I have to ask, you understand. Whether you did sleep with her way back when in the Kevin Costner days. Since it might have inflamed the husband."
"I never laid a hand on her."
"Oh, come on, how could you resist? You were all going to get rich together, you were at this relaxing place together, hot tubbing and all that, she was a fine-lookin' lady. And it would explain a lot better why the husband would go after you."
Howard said, "Well just the one time."
"One time only. Sure."
"Once or twice. She really wanted me. I was damn attractive in those days." He smoothed back his neat, thi
"I bet."
"Come on, Howard," Eric Derrick said. "Are we finished?"
"For now," Vince said.
"Who's next?" Mike said, sticking his head in. Behind him was a talking head, irate.
"The husband."
Raoul de Vries came bounding in like he was aching to beat some butt on the te
"Your brother out there, H.?" Vince asked the lawyer.
"Yes. It's a small town. We aren't in the same firm."
"You guys could be twins."
"We are."
"What's the H stand for?"
"Herrick. Can we move on?" He was even more humorless than his brother.
"I bet you're the older one. By ten, fifteen minutes," Vince said. The devil made him do it.
"I am the younger. Is this relevant?"
"I guess not," Vince said. "But I don't know what else we're go
"I said without advice of counsel," de Vries interposed. "Let me explain. A long time ago a lawyer told me to say that if I ever found myself in a police situation. It's not that I don't want to cooperate. My wife is dead. My heart is broken. I'm at your service."
"I'm happy to hear that. Really. Because it looked bad," Vince said. "So what was this police situation you were in?"
"I didn't say I was in a police situation. I said if I was in a police situation."
"You ever done time, Mr. de Vries?"
De Vries gave him an incredulous look and turned to Derrick Herrick or whatever the Mother Goose hell his name was.
"I fail to see the relevance," the lawyer said.
This parrot talk didn't go over very well with Vince. He ignored the lawyer and picked up the rap sheet in front of him and said, "You went to Soledad Prison fourteen years ago. For attempted murder. You tried to kill your then-girlfriend. Not Claudia." He turned to Derrick. "Relevant enough for you?"
"Go ahead."
He was ordering Vince around, the twerp, but Vince did want to go ahead, so he contented himself with a scowl and went on. "You served only two years, what with good behavior, good lawyering, and good co
"Is there a question pending?" asked Derrick.
"I didn't do it," de Vries said flatly.
"Yeah? You told the California parole board you did it. You gave plenty of details and said you were sorry. You said you were, let's see, in a rage due to her infidelities and didn't know what you were doing. You beat her up pretty bad."
"If I hadn't told them I did it, I'd still be rotting in jail," de Vries said. He had crossed his leg and was bouncing his foot up and down. He was counting the seconds until he could get out of there.
"Did you already know Claudia by then?"
"Yes. We were married two months after my parole. Which has expired, by the way."
"Where's she now? The girlfriend, I mean."
De Vries jumped up. "Why are we crashing around in this ancient history? My wife is dead! You should be finding her killer, finding out how Hilda Finch ends up getting everything we worked for, everything we own. You should ask me where I was last night, when I went to bed, how we got along! Yes, I went to bed with her! No, we had no quarrel at all! Yes, she must have got up in the middle of the night and gone to check something or maybe meet someone, I don't know!" He covered his face with his hands and started to sob.
Bored, Vince sat back and waited for the curtain to fall. He didn't believe de Vries's performance. Vince was getting the idea that de Vries was a jealous, weak man with a definite place in his scheme of things for women as objects of desire and sources of financial security, who had learned a few things in prison.
Derrick put his arm around his client's shoulder and offered him the paisley handkerchief out of the chest pocket of his jacket. Next he'd be saying de Vries was too distraught to continue.
Time for a little consult with Laidlaw, Vince decided. Laidlaw was the accounting expert the department used in white-collar-crime investigations. Raoul and Claudia had a nice business here. He wondered where the money to start it had come from. Were they pulling down a profit? So much money they could lay almost a million bucks on that stick of a girl out there?
And Fondulac's story, was there anything to it? De Vries was all bent over now, bawling like a baby, getting his back patted. It was a good act, but nothing Vince hadn't pulled himself when his ma caught him stealing papers off the stoops in Philly and reselling them on the corner.
And he thought about ancient history. It had a way of rearing up and biting you on the ass. The whole case had a smell of ancient history.
Chapter Six
OUT OF BREATH, CAROLINE SLAMMED the cabin door behind her and then stood leaning against it, gasping.
"You never did learn to enter a room like a lady," Hilda said. "You came racing through the door like the devil himself was after you." Hilda was once more seated in the morris chair. Quickly she removed the pair of red-framed reading glasses that had been perched on her nose. She stowed them in one pocket of her pink sweats and then gathered up the sheaf of papers and photographs that had been spread in her lap. Those she shuffled back into a manila envelope. Once the envelope was closed, she used the metal fastener to hold it tight.
"Douglas called," she said.
Caroline barely trusted herself to speak. "And?" she said finally.
"He wants you to call him back. At the cabin."
"What did he want?" she asked. Even as she asked the question, it puzzled her why she was carrying on this charade and acting as though everything were normal when she should have thrown herself into her mother's arms and confided in her, telling her the awful truth-that she had already called Douglas that morning only to find another woman at the cabin. But the years of acrimony between Caroline and her mother had left too much of a void between them, too much distance to be crossed all at once.