22
Jerry Hobart showered and changed his clothes to be sure there were no glass fragments sticking to him and to remove the gunpowder residue from his hands, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep. He sat on the bed in his hotel room and looked out over the lights in the San Fernando Valley. It was a clear night, and from his window on the tenth floor he could see the long rows of street lamps stretching off to the west, where they seemed to lose their definition and fade to become only an impression that the valley was lighter than the ridge of mountains to the north or the sky above.
Hobart was frustrated and angry that he could not go back out and find Emily Kramer right away. Now that he had gone to her house a second time, she would be hiding, staying with someone probably, and maybe with an armed guard. Phil Kramer’s office was out of reach now, too. Hobart was not going to be able to go back there.
But he had planted a suggestion in Emily Kramer’s skull, and now he had to hope that the suggestion had stuck with her and started to irritate and intrigue her until she couldn’t keep from acting on it. He still wasn’t sure whether she had known all along everything her husband knew about Theodore Forrest, or had known nothing. If Hobart had to take a guess, he would now bet that Phil Kramer hadn’t told her anything. She had seemed genuinely hurt and disappointed when he’d told her that her husband had been holding valuable secret information about a rich man. Hobart had also noticed that she did not doubt it was true.
Hobart brought back the sight of her standing there beside her bed saying she had just learned that her husband was cheating on her. The way she had blurted it out had surprised her as much as it surprised Hobart. It was as though the interrogation he was conducting was, to her, only a part of a much larger, unpleasant conversation she was having with herself. Saying he was cheating on her had made sense to her for an instant. It had seemed to her to be proof that her husband was in the habit of lying to her. Hobart supposed a detective who blackmailed people might also be somebody who wouldn’t tell his wife what he was doing. That wasn’t a stretch of the imagination. He wondered what Phil had planned to tell Emily when he had his million dollars, or whatever price he had set.
Suddenly Hobart realized he had made a false assumption. Phil Kramer had been cheating on her, and he had not told her where he was going the night Whitley had shot him. Kramer had not been planning to walk in the house with a sack of money and say, “Honey, I’m home. Look what I’ve got.” He had been planning to divorce her without letting her know the money existed, or maybe not come home that night at all. What she had learned about her marriage was why she had looked so defeated. Her hurt had been a bigger feeling than her fear of Hobart. She had known-maybe really just learned that day-that when Kramer died, her marriage had already been over for a while. She had already figured out that if Phil Kramer had been paid off that night, he would have been on his way to the airport.
Hobart couldn’t help including in his memory the fact that she had been naked. He had made her strip because it was a quick way to make progress in an interrogation. A person who was naked among enemies started to feel scared and vulnerable and powerless. For a woman it was worse, because it conformed exactly to a nightmare she’d been having since she was a child. When he met her, he had judged her to be someone who would fall apart and hand over everything Phil Kramer had on Forrest. Now he wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have held out, but he was almost sure she didn’t have what he wanted, at least that night.
But now she had to be searching as hard as she could to find the information he had asked her about. It was almost impossible that she wouldn’t. No woman could find out that her husband had been killed over a secret and not ache to know what the secret was. Certainly nobody could be stripped and threatened and humiliated and not want to frustrate and outsmart the man who had done those things to her.
Hobart could only step back now and wait until Emily Kramer found what he wanted. Even if she found the information right away, he knew he could do nothing more tonight because the police would be out searching for him until daylight. He was eager to have the prize quickly, but he could not afford to be impatient and put himself into more situations like the one at the house. He felt restless and dissatisfied. All he could do was let Emily Kramer search, and wait for the moment when the cops ran out of patience and left her alone again.