John Lescroart - Hard Evidence

She wore a dark blue linen suit with dark hose, not the perfect outfit for this weather, but she thought it made her look more businesslike. Her hair was in a tight bun, her most severe look. She didn’t want people coming up and talking to her.

When the doorbell rang, she was surprised. Normally, the drivers would honk out on the street. Nevertheless, she determined that she would tell the man she’d made a mistake; he could come back later if he wanted the fare.

Or maybe she wouldn’t. Through the peephole, his looks scared her – a light-skinned black man with a nasty-looking scar through his lips, top to bottom. On the other hand, she wanted someone who wouldn’t talk to her and this man looked like that type. She opened the door.

She was looking at a badge of some kind, the man identifying himself as Inspector Abe Glitsky of the San Francisco Police, Homicide. She stepped back as he asked if she was May Shintaka. ‘May I come in?’ He sounded polite enough.

‘Certainly.’

He stood in the foyer. There was nothing she could do to keep him from noting the newly empty walls, obviously where the Lennons had been taken down. ‘I’m here about Owen Nash.’

A nod. She turned and walked back into the living room. Now she was really hot and she took off her coat, draping it across the arm of the couch. She went to the turret window and heard the honk of the cab down below.

The sergeant took a few steps into the room, but stopped near the foyer. ‘Your shoes,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’ She motioned to a long, polished and ridged board that began next to the door. Her own pair of dark-blue pumps were already resting over the ridge.

Abe stepped out of his wing tips and placed them on the board. ‘Were you planning on going somewhere?’ He motioned to the bags in the hallway.

She was coming back across the room. He seemed to fill up where he stood even more than Owen had, and Owen was a big man, had been a big man. ‘That’s my cab down there now,’ she said. ‘But it’s too early anyway. I should tell him.’

Abe was nervous about letting her go down, but she’d left her bags as well as the jacket of her suit. She didn’t take a purse. If she got in the cab, he’d be able to call the dispatcher and possibly stop her before she’d gone a mile.

The advantage was his now. She had invited him into her apartment. He hadn’t needed to show a warrant, which in any event he didn’t have.

As soon as he’d left Hardy, he decided he had to do some police work. He had the phone company run a reverse list on May’s phone number and got her address, which was on his way home. He’d called back Elizabeth Pullios, but she was out with a witness and wasn’t due to return to her office until Monday. He finished up his paperwork on the Nash incident report, grabbed an afternoon cup of tea and some peanut M &Ms downstairs, then went upstairs to the jail and interviewed a snitch who supposedly knew the name of the shooter in last weekend’s drive-by. The information was worth checking, so he scheduled a videotape session for Monday.

Back at his desk, now getting on four o’clock, he called records and got a registration on the Beretta. The gun belonged to May Shintaka.

Nash’s autopsy showed that the bullets that killed him were.25 caliber, and Glitsky figured he didn’t have to wait for the formal Ballistics report. He had her address, and for the moment at least, May Shinn was ‘it.’

She didn’t hop in the cab and make a run for it. He was standing in the turret, watching her say something into the passenger window. After she stepped back, the cab took off with a squeal of rubber.

Glitsky watched her close the door to the apartment, gently, holding the knob with one hand and fitting the door into the sill with the other, the way mothers sometimes did when their children were sleeping in the room they were closing off. Seeing her dark blue, low-heeled pumps and the tailored suit, he had to remind himself that according to all the information he had, this woman was a prostitute.

She was out of the shoes, then, turning away from the door. She came back into the living room. He found he couldn’t make a guess as to her age and hit it within a decade. She could be anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five. She had, he thought, a very unusual face, the bones clearly defined, the skin smooth and stretched tight with the hair pulled back.

She walked over to the low couch, next to where she’d laid her jacket, and floated down onto it. She made some motion that he took to be an invitation to sit, which he did, feeling like a clod in his brown socks and his American sports coat.

‘Would you like some tea?’ she asked. ‘Please, take off your coat. It’s too warm.’

So far as Abe knew, he was the only male tea drinker on the force. He thought about declining, then realized he would enjoy watching May Shinn move around. ‘That would be nice,’ he said. He folded his coat over his end of the couch, thinking if she kept this up, he’d be stripped before long.

She walked into the kitchen, open from the living room, and he watched her back, the straight shoulders, tiny waist, womanly curve of her hips. Even barefoot, her ankles tapered, thin as a doe’s.

She poured from a bottle of Evian into a kettle. ‘Owen’s dead,’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am. Somebody killed him.’

He kept watching her closely. She was taking down some cups, placing them on a tray. If her hands were shaking, the cups would betray her, but they didn’t. She stood by the stove, turning full to face him. ‘I read that.’

Glitsky sat forward on the couch, elbows on his knees. ‘The suitcases,’ he said. ‘You were going somewhere.’

‘Japan. On business,’ she added, spooning tea into the cups.

‘You have business over there?’

She nodded. ‘I buy art. I am a – a broker for different friends of mine.’

‘Do you go over there a lot?’

‘Sometimes, yes. It depends.’

Glitsky would have time to pursue that if he had to. He decided to move things along. ‘We found your gun on Mr Nash’s boat. On the Eloise .’

‘Yes, I kept it there.’

‘We’re reasonably certain it’s the gun that was used to kill him.’ She seemed to be waiting, immobilized. ‘When was the last time you saw him, Ms Shinn?’

She turned back to the stove, touched the side of the kettle with a finger and decided it wasn’t ready yet. ‘Friday night, no, Saturday morning, very early. He stayed here.’

‘In this apartment?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then where did he go from here?’

‘He said he was going sailing. He sailed many weekends.’

‘And did you go with him?’

‘Most times, yes. But not Saturday.’

‘Why was that?’

She tried the kettle again, nodded, then poured the two cups. She brought the tray over and set it on the low table in front of them. ‘He had another appointment.’

‘Did he tell you who it was with?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Or what it was about?’

‘He didn’t say. He only said it was clearing the way for us.’

‘What does that mean, clearing the way for you?’

‘I don’t know. I think he needed to be alone. To think it out.’ She seemed to be searching for words, although not the way a foreigner would. She appeared to be a native speaker of English, but there was a hesitation, a pause. It threw Abe off – he couldn’t decide when, if, she was editing, when she was telling the truth. ‘We were going to be married.’

‘You and Owen Nash were going to be married?’

‘Yes.’ Keeping it simple and unadorned. The best kind of lie, Abe thought. And this, he was sure, was a lie. Owen Nash, internationally acclaimed tycoon and business leader, intimate of presidents and kings, did not marry his professional and well-paid love slave. Period.