The Night Detectives - страница 17

“Did it bother you that she’d fucked all those men?”

I phrased it as crudely as I could and he stared at the carpet. He was a natural suspect. Jealousy was always a prime motive, wronged spouses and boyfriends always prime suspects.

“All those men, their dicks inside her.” I spoke tawdry fluently. “It would sure bother me. It would bother me to find that my wife had been fucking even one man other than me.”

Trust me. Only every second, splinters under my skin. But the splinters didn’t want to make me kill her.

I said, “I know you’re a nice guy, Tim. But didn’t it get to you? Did you ever think about killing her when you thought about all those men…”

“No!” His face flushed apple-red.

I took my time, studying his expression and body language, and letting the silence work for me, having watched Peralta interrogate many suspects.

Finally, Tim drew up his wiry frame. “That was in the past. She regretted it. I loved her. I’d rather die than hurt her.”

I believed him. He didn’t have murder in him.

“Did she ever talk about a man named Larry Zisman? He used to be a pro football player. Owned a condo downtown.”

“Was that one of her clients?”

I didn’t answer.

“The name doesn’t sound familiar,” he said. “And she didn’t talk about those men. I didn’t want to know and she didn’t tell me.”

“So you guys lived alone here. What about friends?”

“We’d say hi to neighbors. It’s that kind of place. Grace stayed in touch with Addison…”

“Who the hell is that? A man or a woman?”

“A woman. She was her best friend.”

“Did she visit?”

Tim said that Addison had visited several times, but they never left O.B.

“Addison didn’t know anything about Grace’s, you know, business.”

“I need her contact information.” Then I asked when he had seen Grace last.

“The morning of April twenty-second. I had classes. When I came home, she was gone. I never even got a text goodbye. All her stuff is still here. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Are you afraid she’s gone back to the life?”

He shook his head. “She said she was done and I believed her. She got rid of her old phone, even. We were good together.” He sighed. “I wanted to save her from the past.”

Tim Lewis looked like a weak reed of a white knight, but his sincerity was obvious. I had gone through my white-knight phase. Now I was covered with tarnish. I made him go through the day she disappeared in detail. He had gone to classes at eight-thirty that morning. Grace was with the baby at home. When he returned around three that afternoon, she was gone. All she took was her purse and cell phone. She always carried pepper spray and a knife in that purse. Nothing had seemed unusual in their apartment.

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“I filed a missing person’s report the next day. The cops made me wait twenty-four hours and even then they didn’t take me very seriously. I could tell. They thought she’d left me. They said she was an adult and there wasn’t much they could do unless I had evidence of foul play. Of course, I couldn’t tell them she used to be a call girl.” He shook his head. “Anyway, AFP pays the cops off. Grace warned me. I was sure I’d eventually hear from her. I called hospitals for a week. Nothing.”

Grace would have been dead by the time he went to the police. But things fell through the cracks in every police department.

“Where’s her family?”

“They lived in Arizona.”

I asked him to get me their address and he did.

“What about a brother? Big guy? My size with close-cropped hair and a prosthesis on his lower leg?”

“She was an only child.”

I looked at the skinny kid with the cat crawling up his leg: I thought, dear old dad. I said, “Who is this Edward that the pimp was talking about?”

“I have no idea. I swear!”

So I told him she was dead and waited as he cried. It was a long wait. He said over and over that Grace would never kill herself, especially after the baby came.

Finally, I asked if he had any place he could go.

“My parents live up in Riverside. It’s a boring hellhole.”

“My advice is to go there. Right now. And stay awhile.”

He nodded, but it was obvious he was descending into a fog of grief, in addition to being beaten up. I made him repeat what he would do.