Robert Crais - The Two Minute Rule

“He was having an affair.”

“Fucking some whore is what I thought, pardon my French, so I decided to see who he was calling and who was calling him. See, here-on his cell phone bill-”

She finally found what she wanted and bent forward to show Holman the pages. Pollard came over and sat beside Holman to see. Holman recognized Richie’s home and cell phone numbers.

Mrs. Fowler said, “I didn’t recognize any of the numbers, so you know what I did?”

Pollard said, “You called the numbers?”

“That’s right. I thought he was calling women, but it was your son and Ash and Mellon. I wish I had thought of the little dots. I asked him what are you doing with these guys, fruiting off? I didn’t mean anything by that, Mr. Holman, I was just trying to be mean. You know what he said? He told me to mind my own business.”

Holman ignored her comment. Richie had been calling Fowler every day, but Fowler had also been calling Richie, Ash, and Mellon. It was clear they were doing more than lining up beer parties.

Mrs. Fowler was back in the anger of that moment and rolling on.

“I didn’t know what in hell they were doing. It made me angry, but I didn’t say much until I had to clean up after him, then I had had enough. He came home in the middle of the night tracking dirt all over the house. I didn’t find it until the next day and I was so mad. He didn’t even care enough to clean up after himself. That’s how little consideration he showed.”

Holman had no idea what she was talking about, so he asked her, wondering if it had anything to do with Richie.

Mrs. Fowler pushed to her feet again, but this time it took more of an effort.

“Come here. I’ll show you.”

They followed her out through the kitchen onto a small covered patio in the backyard. A dusty Weber grill was parked at the edge of the patio with a pair of Wolverine work boots on the ground beside it, caked with dirt and weeds. She pointed at them.

“Here-he clopped through the house in the middle of the night with these things. When I saw the mess I said, Have you lost your mind? I threw them out here and told him he could clean them himself. You should have seen the mess.”

Pollard stooped to look at the boots more closely.

“What night was that?”

She hesitated, frowning.

“I guess it was Thursday-two Thursdays ago.”

Five days before they were murdered. Holman wondered if Richie, Mellon, and Ash had also gone out that night. He told himself to ask Liz.

Pollard, reading his mind, stood.

“Was that a night when he went out with the others?”

“I didn’t ask and I don’t know. I told him if he hated being here so much he should get the hell out. I was fed up with the rudeness. I had had enough with the discourtesy, coming into my house like this and not even cleaning up after himself. We had a terrible fight and I don’t regret one word of it, not even now with him being dead.”

Then Pollard surprised him.

She said, “Did Mike ever mention the names Marchenko and Parsons?”

“No. Are they on the police?”

Pollard seemed to study her for a moment, then made the gentle smile.

“Just people Mike used to know. I thought he might have mentioned them.”

“Michael never told me a goddamned thing. It was like I didn’t exist.”

Pollard glanced back at Holman, then nodded toward the house, the gentle smile deadened by sadness.

“We should be going, Max.”

When they reached the front door, Jacki Fowler took Holman’s hand and held it an uncomfortably long time.

She said, “There’s more than one kind of prison, you know.”

Holman said, “Yes, ma’am. I’ve been there, too.”

HOLMAN WAS ANGRY and unsettled when they left. He had wanted to find a grieving widow with straightforward answers to explain his son’s death, but now he pictured Mike Fowler having secretive phone calls with his hand cupped over his mouth. He saw Fowler slipping from his home too early for the neighbors to see, then returning under cover of darkness. What were you doing, honey? Nothing. Where did you go? Nowhere. Holman had spent most of his life doing crime. Whatever had happened in the Fowler house felt like a crime in progress.

Pollard gunned her Subaru up the freeway on-ramp into the thickening traffic. The drive back would be ugly, but when Holman glanced at her, she was glowing as if a light had been turned on inside her.

Holman said, “What do you think?”

“Talk to your daughter-in-law. Ask if Richard went out the Thursday before they were shot and if she knows anything about where they went or what they did. Ask about the Frogtown connection, too. Don’t forget that.”

Holman was thinking he wanted to drop the whole thing.

“I wasn’t asking about that. You said it wasn’t up to the police to look for missing money.”

She jacked the Subaru between two tractor-trailers, diving for the diamond lane.

“It’s up to them, but recovering loot isn’t a front-burner priority. No one has time for that, Holman-we’re too busy trying to stop new crimes from happening.”

“If someone found it, though-would they get a reward? A legal reward?”

“The banks award a recovery fee, yes, but policemen aren’t eligible.”

“Well, if they were doing it on their own time-”

She interrupted him.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Deal with what you know, and right now all we know is Fowler tracked dirt in the house on Thursday night and didn’t give a shit what his wife thought about it. That’s all we know.”

“But I checked the call dates when she showed us her phone bills. All of the calling started on the eighth day after Marchenko and Parsons died, just like on Richie’s bill. Fowler called Richie and Mellon and Ash, one right after another. Like he was saying, hey, let’s go find some money.”

She straightened behind the wheel, crisp and sharp.

“Holman, listen-we’ve had exactly one interview with a woman who had a bad marriage. We don’t know what they were doing or why.”

“It feels like they were up to something. This isn’t what I wanted in my head.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

Holman glanced at her and saw her frowning. She swerved out of the diamond lane to zoom around two women in a sedan, then cut them off when she dived back into the diamond lane ahead of them. Holman had never driven this fast unless he was high.

She said, “We don’t know enough for you to think any differently about your son, so stop it. You heard this depressed woman with her husband sneaking around and you know the money’s missing, so you’ve jumped to this conclusion. Maybe they just liked to hang out. Maybe this fascination with Marchenko and Parsons was just a hobby.”

Holman didn’t believe it and felt irritated that she was trying to cheer him up.

“That’s bullshit.”

“You’ve heard of the Black Dahlia? The unsolved homicide case?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“That case has become a hobby for a lot of detectives. So many LAPD dicks are into that case they got together and formed a club to talk over their theories.”

“I still think it’s bullshit.”

“Okay, forget it. But just because they were sneaking around doesn’t mean they were doing anything illegal. I can think of plenty of ways we might be able to tie what they were doing with Marchenko and Parsons and Juarez.”

Holman glanced at her, doubtful.

“How?”

“Did you read the obituaries for Fowler, Ash, and Mellon?”

“Just Richie’s.”

“If you had read Fowler’s, you’d know he spent two years on the CRASH unit-that’s Community Reaction Against Street Hoodlums, what the LAPD named their anti-gang unit. I’m going to call a friend of mine who used to run CRASH. I’ll ask him what kind of exposure Fowler had with Frogtown.”