“May have?”
“No one knows.”
“She just walked out on hubbie?”
I shrugged. But she had. Middle of the night, no note, no warning.
No good-bye.
The deepest wound she’d inflicted on Stacy …
“Not very considerate,” he said.
“Pain will do that to you.”
“Time to call in Dr. Mate … Take two aspirins, hook yourself up to the machine and don’t call me in the morning.”
He started up the car, then swiveled toward me again, wedging his bulk against the steering wheel. “Seeing as we’ll be face-to-face with Mr. Doss soon, are there any blanks you want to fill in?”
“He didn’t like Mate,” I said. “Wanted me to tell you.”
“Bragging?”
“More like nothing to hide.”
“What was his beef with Mate?”
“Don’t know.”
“Maybe the fact that Mate killed his wife and he never knew it was going to happen?”
“Could be.”
He leaned across the seat, moved his big face inches from mine. I smelled aftershave and tobacco. The wheel dug into his sport coat, bunching the tweed around his neck, highlighting love handles. “What’s going on here,
Alex? The guy said you could talk. Why’re you parceling info out to me?”
“I guess I’m still not comfortable talking about patients. Because sometimes patients feel really communicative, then they change their minds. And what’s the big deal, Milo? Doss’s feelings about Mate aren’t relevant. He has an alibi as tight as Zoghbie’s. Out of town, just like Zoghbie. The day Mate was killed he was in San Francisco looking at a hotel.”
“To buy?”
I nodded. “He was in the company of a group of Japanese businessmen. Has the receipts to prove it.”
“He told you all that?”
“Yes.”
“Well, ain’t that fascinating.” He knuckled his right eye with his left hand. “In my experience, it’s mostly criminals who come prepared with an alibi.”
“He wasn’t prepared,” I said. “It came up in the course of the conversation.”
“What, like ‘How’s it going, Richard?’ ‘Peachy, Doc— and by the way I have an alibi’?”
I didn’t answer.
He said, “Buying a hotel. Guy like that, rich honcho, gotta be used to delegating. Why would he do his own dirty work? So what the hell’s an alibi worth?”
“The job done on Mate, all that anger. All that personal viciousness. Did it smell like hired help to you?”
“Depends upon what the help was hired to do. And who got hired.” He reached out, placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. I felt like a suspect and I didn’t like it. “Do you see Doss as capable of setting it up?”
“I’ve never seen any signs of that,” I said in a tight voice.
He released his hand. “That sounds like a maybe.”
“This is exactly why I didn’t want to get into it. There’s absolutely nothing I know about Richard Doss that tells me he’s capable of contracting that level of brutality. Okay?”
“That,” he said, “sounds like expert-witness talk.”
“Then count yourself lucky. ‘Cause when I go to court I get paid well.”
We stared at each other. He shifted away, looked past me, up at Zoghbie’s house. Two California jays danced among the branches of the sycamore.
“This is something,” he said.
“What is?”
“You and me, all the cases we’ve been through, and now we’re having a wee bit of tension.”
Veneering the last few words in an Irish brogue. I wanted to laugh, tried to, more to fill time and space than out of any glee. The movement started at my diaphragm but died, a soundless ripple, as my mouth refused to obey.
“Hey,” I said, “can this friendship be saved?”
“Okay, then,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard. “Here’s a direct question for you: Is there anything else you know that I should know? About Doss or anything else?”
“Here’s a direct answer: no.”
“You want to drop the case?”
“Want me to?”
“Not unless you want to.”
“I don’t want to, but—”
“Why would you want to stay on it?” he said.
“Curious.”
“About what?”
“Whodunit, whydunit. And riding around with the po-lice makes me feel oh-so-safe. You want me off, though, just say so.”
“Oh Christ,” he said. “Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah.”