The Hunt Club

13

Hunt reached Juhle on his cell phone just as the inspectors were leaving their interview with Everett Washburn and Jeannette Palmer. He'd tried him at home first, and Connie had told him that he wasn't there and, no, he probably hadn't had dinner, either. She'd talked to him while he was stuck in traffic on the bridge, and he was going to be working late. By the time he got done, she'd be putting the kids down-not Juhle's favorite time. If Hunt wanted to meet up with him someplace, Connie thought Juhle would probably welcome his company.

Having finally given up on getting his "either way" phone call from Andrea Parisi, Hunt told Juhle that he'd gotten stood up and that the evening yawned open before him. If Shiu would drop him at the Tong Palace on Clement, they might salvage some remnant of this otherwise shitty night.

Now, as the ancient waitress at the dim sum place had done every five minutes or so since they'd sat down, she came by with another tray of delicacies. Hunt and Juhle pointed at what they wanted-sign language was the lingua franca here-and soon their table had plates of shrimp wrapped in transparent wontons, fried oysters, little steamed bundles of dough stuffed with seafood or meat or vegetables, a plate of siu mei, rice noodles with spicy pork. This was their third round, and their enthusiasm for the food hadn't dimmed much. Juhle held his hands apart to indicate a large bottle and said an actual word, "Asahi," while Hunt lifted the teapot and pantomimed for a refill.

"So Jeannette didn't do it?" Hunt said.

Juhle, on five hours of sleep, sagged at their corner table. He tipped up his tea and made a face. "Not if she called her sister from Mill Valley at four thirty and was paying at the Safeway at both seven thirty and quarter to eight. She didn't drive all the way into Marin, then remember, Oh, yeah, I was supposed to shoot George and his girlfriend tonight, so she turned around and went home, did the deed, then turned around again and went back to Novato."

"That does seem unlikely."

"At least. Besides, her neighbor on Clay Street who saw the car parked by her driveway? That was at seven thirty, when she was pretty definitely at the Safeway. You know Everett Washburn, the lawyer? No? Well, he somehow got the manager up there to go back and find her receipts and fax them down to him at his office. We're going to go back and check ourselves, but I'm not optimistic. She was there."

"So who's that leave?"

"As suspects? Approximately the whole world."

"Not me." Hunt held up his right hand. "Monday night, I was down in Palo Alto with my dad. He'd vouch for me."

"All right, except you. And probably Connie, who was feeding me dinner at the time, so I guess she's out, too. Everybody else, though."

Popping an oyster, Juhle chewed and thought for a moment. "The problem is, I can't understand Staci Rosalier being there if it wasn't personal. I mean, it had to be about her."

Hunt shrugged. "Maybe she was just there."

"But why?"

"I don't know. She wanted to do it in the wife's bed. He wanted to do her in the wife's bed. Any combination thereof. Whatever, he knew his wife was going to be gone, he's trying to get away with that much more for the thrill of it. Maybe it was just bad timing."

"And somebody else showed up while they just happened to be there? In other words, a coincidence." Juhle shook his head. "I don't believe in them. Not at murder scenes."

"Maybe this is the exception."

"It isn't. Somebody else was there because they knew Palmer and the girl were there. Count on it. Or, thinking out loud now, Palmer might have been seeing somebody else, too. He invited her over to his house, but the dead girl-Staci-found out about the new one and came by to confront them both." Juhle savored a bite of pork bun. "So Staci brings the gun with her, shoots Palmer…"

"Out around the front of the desk?"

"Sure. Why not? There's a struggle. The gun goes off-the extra round in the book. In the scuffle, the other woman grabs the gun away from Staci and shoots her, then sees what she's done and takes the gun and splits."

Hunt waited for Juhle to take his beer from the waitress and pour it into the chilled glass. "So what actual evidence do you have?"

Juhle drank half the glass. "Damn little. Shiu thinks the shooter might have been short, as in not tall, so as you can see, we've really narrowed things down there. I personally favor the midget-standing-on-a-box theory. Nobody in the neighborhood heard or saw anything, except for a sports car that might have been a BMW Z4 or some look-alike. But there's no connection between that car and anything else inside the house or out. It wasn't a robbery or burglary gone bad, and a burglar's not going to park his car in the driveway." After a long, futile day of investigation, Juhle clearly had wrung about all the amusement he could out of this case.

Hunt picked up a shrimp. "I heard a rumor the judge was thinking about messing with the prison guards' union."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"A source who, alas, must remain unnamed. But the gist of it…" Hunt gave him a succinct rundown of what he'd learned that day about the CCPOA and Palmer's interaction with it. Of course, Juhle knew about Palmer's well-publicized battle with the union, but the inside details of the allegations surprised even the veteran cop.

When Hunt finished, Juhle was sitting back again, beer and food forgotten. "The wife, Jeannette, she mentioned them, too, the union," Juhle said. "Of course, this was back yesterday when we thought it was her, so it didn't make much of an impact. Now, though, you've got me wondering. If Palmer was really going to bust them, it's someplace to look. Who told you about this?"

"A lawyer friend of mine. Her firm, Piersall-Morton, represents the union."

"Great. You can save me a phone call. You got a connection there?"

Hunt said, "Of course. Connections are my life. But she's busy, Dev. You're a cop. You call the office, they'll direct you."

Juhle had to take it. "All right, all right," he said. "Piersall. Why is that name familiar?"

"It's a huge law firm?"

"No, that's not…wait." Juhle went to snap his injured fingers and winced against the pain. "Ah. The brain comes alive and it all comes back. I've been meaning to ask you. Andrea Parisi?"

Hunt's frown was pronounced. "What about her?"

Juhle came forward and leaned into the table. "What about her is that as I believe I've mentioned, there are no coincidences, and we found her business card at Staci Rosalier's place last night."

"At the victim's place?"

"In her wallet. So if she's in this somehow, Parisi, I mean, I need to know about it."

"How would she be in it?"

"I don't have any idea, but maybe you do."

"Nope."

"But you've been going out jogging with her."

"Occasionally, Dev. Only occasionally. And so what?"

"So did she ever mention Staci."

"No. Never."

"But Staci had her card."

"Wow. That really narrows it down all right."

"All right. How about the judge?"

"Yes. She mentioned the judge."

"In what context?"

"In the context that Andrea and I were talking today, and Palmer got himself killed two days ago. The topic's come up with just about everybody I've seen in the past couple of days, Dev. Now including you. What exactly are you thinking?"

"Just that if Parisi's with Piersall, that puts her around the guards' union, right? It's a lead. It's something." He snapped his fingers again. "She's your connection there. At Piersall."

Hunt forced a smile. "No comment. Except to say that it's a matter of public record that I bill out some reasonable hours to Piersall. So what? I think I've already told you I didn't kill Palmer. I'm pretty sure Andrea didn't, either. Although you could always ask her."

"I'm not saying she did. But I'd like to know why Staci had her card."

"Coincidence?"

"I hate that."

Hunt shrugged. "It happens. Maybe she saw her at MoMo's and is trying to break into TV."

Juhle shook his head. "That's what Shiu said, too, so it can't be right."

"Okay, so how about the next time I talk to Andrea, I ask her about how Staci might have got the card? If she even remembers at all."

Their waitress arrived with another raft of selections, but after forty-five minutes of continuous eating, both men were done. Juhle asked for the check and came back to Hunt. "So one last question: Who stood you up?"

Hunt decided to tap-dance. "I haven't yet decided if, technically, it was exactly a stand-up. She just decided not to have dinner. She got pretty wrecked last night, and I think she still was hurting. Physically, I mean."

"You're making excuses for her? Do you have any idea how pathetic that makes you? Are you in love?"

"Marginally, maybe a little more."

"Connie will be so relieved. But not if you're in love with somebody who gets wrecked one night and stands you up the next. As qualifications go, those kind of suck."

"She's had a tough week."

"Maybe we should start a Tough Week Club. Now who are we talking about?"

Hunt sat back, drained his teacup, shook his head, put on a smile. "You know me better than that, Dev. I don't kiss and tell."

"But you didn't kiss her. You couldn't have if she stood you up."

"As I said, that point is technically unresolved. I may have kissed her before tonight, in which case I still wouldn't tell."

"You moved on her last night when she was wrecked?"

"That would have been ungentlemanly, so we can rule it out."

"You're not going to tell me, are you?"

"See. That's what makes you so good at your job. The trained inspector sees things other people would clean miss."

Hunt drove by Andrea's house on the way home. It wasn't on the way, and he didn't really plan for it. He pulled up across from where he'd parked that afternoon. The house was completely dark. It was still early, a little short of ten o'clock.

He wanted to see her again. It was as simple as that.

Hunt pulled into her driveway, turned off his ignition and lights, and got out of his car. Her garage door had small windows at eye level and Hunt looked in. Her car was gone. Nevertheless, he walked over to the stoop and peered through the glass panes in the top of her door into pure darkness.

Back in his car, he sat behind the wheel with the motor off for the better part of another half hour, until the cold had eaten through him. If she came home and found him sitting there, what was going to be his pathetic excuse? He'd come across as clinging, needy, lovesick, maybe even a potential stalker.

He turned on the ignition. He'd catch up to her tomorrow. Backing out of her driveway, he drove half a block down to Bay Street and turned south, heading for home.

Alone in the front of his warehouse, Hunt shot hoops.

Basketball wouldn't ever hold the place in his heart forever reserved for baseball, but besides shortstop, he'd played point guard on his high school team and still got in at least twenty-two games a year with a city league team that played through the fall and early winter, although ironically he wasn't much of a fan of the pro sport. He and Juhle called the NBA the TMA-the Tattooed Millionaires Association-and he also wasn't really fond of the music they played at the games.

But shooting hoops-shooting hoops was the best therapy in the world.

And tonight he needed some, self-administered. So he'd start right at the edge of his half-court hardwood, take a shot, move up a few steps, but still outside the three-point range, take another, get to the top of the key, then the free-throw line. Whenever he missed, he, of course, charged the basket for a layup, then ran it out for another round until he tired. He stood six foot two, and when he'd been a teenager, he'd considered his ability to stuff one of the great athletic achievements of his life, but somewhere in his twenties, that skill had left him. He still tried every time he suited up in his sweats, though-the springs might come back for one fleeting day, and he didn't want to miss them.

Finally, though, the industrial clock over the backboard said it was 11:42. He was dripping and about done in. He liked to go out with three in a row, and he'd made his first two and now stood at the free-throw line, bouncing the ball at his feet a couple of times. Then another two times. Then once. Held the ball for maybe thirty seconds. His breathing slowed.

Dropping the basketball, he stopped the bounce with his foot, pushed it back under him, and sat down on it.

Without taking that last shot, he walked off the court and turned out the lights on the playground side of his place, flipped on the overheads on the living side, went in and showered. When he finished, he went into his bedroom, opened his dresser, pulled out another pair of gray sweats and put them on, then opened another drawer and reached under the T-shirts where he kept the picture.

He hadn't taken it out in a couple of years. He didn't even remember the last time.

It was the only one he had kept of Sophie. The night he'd burned all the rest of them, he'd taken this one out of the frame, but something about it had stopped him. He hadn't been able to make himself erase all signs that she'd ever existed. He couldn't do it.

It wasn't a glamour shot, which was maybe what he liked about it the most-although God knew she'd had the capacity for glamour when the mood struck her-but it captured her. The laugh, the skin, the magic of her. It might have been the night she got pregnant, or, as her glow revealed, she may have already known. But in this shot, she was in her medical scrubs, just off her rounds at the Med Center, on a Saturday evening at the Shamrock Bar where they'd met.

She'd given him a new telephoto lens for his birthday, and Hunt had been shooting extreme close-ups of birds in Golden Gate Park all day. When she'd come in and sat down at the bar, he'd been in the bathroom-timing was his specialty-camera and new honking lens around his neck. When he'd come out, she hadn't seen him. She was talking to the bartender there, laughing at something he was saying. And Hunt had raised his camera, brought her up close enough to touch, and caught her in that moment. When he saw what he'd captured, he'd blown it up to eight by ten and framed it and put it next to their bed, along with her favorite shot of him-on a windboard flying over the bay.

Now he moved the glossy over under the light and laid it flat on the dresser. His face softened by degrees until he put his hands down on either side of the picture and leaned on them.

He'd considered sharing his life with someone back when he was with her. But since then, that feeling had left him. There had been a few women since-nice enough, attractive enough-set-ups by Connie, that type of thing, but if the kind of involvement he'd had with Sophie was going to empty his soul out so thoroughly, his own preservation demanded that he avoid it. He just wasn't going to open that door again. It wasn't worth the pain.

He didn't even know Parisi. Not really. And what he did know wasn't all good by a long shot. But she'd gotten inside him.

"How dumb is this?" he said aloud to the picture.

But, of course, Sophie couldn't answer.