Private

How could he not have thought that I would find out? Had he underestimated how I would react? Or was Andy a far cooler customer than I’d ever known? This was not how I thought of my fraternity brother, my close friend since we were little kids.

I said in a voice that was ringing with shock, “Carmine told me about your request, that you were the one who asked him to have Shelby killed. How could you have done that? Tell me something I can believe.”

Andy’s face fell and his knees caved. I watched him drop to the floor, then I grabbed him up roughly, two steely hands at his shoulders, and threw him into an armchair that almost went over.

He was sobbing now, but I’d seen this embarrassing and pathetic act before.

“Come on, Andy. Really pour it on, you fuck.”

“She was a whore, Jack. You told me so yourself, but I already knew that. She was doing every perversion with every scumbag with a buck. And I had to find out about it from some lowlife greaser who didn’t know or care that Shelby was my wife.”

“There are divorce courts,” I said, but I was thinking of Shelby, seeing her face, remembering the belly laughs at the Improv, how she’d been a rock for me and maybe my salvation right after I’d come back from the war.

It killed me that she’d gone into whatever drug hell had made her fall so far. And then I thought about how I had introduced her to a man who had paid to have her murdered. If I hadn’t introduced them, Shelby would still be alive. I had loved her, and I had trusted him. And I missed her badly.

How could Andy have done that to Shelby? How could anybody want to kill Shelby? She was gentle and kind and she made us all laugh-she made me laugh.

Andy’s weeping was infuriating. The last time he’d sobbed his heart out, I’d felt his grief. Now there was no hiding it from myself: I’d been perfectly played. And my friend had done it to me.

I didn’t know Andy Cushman anymore.

I said, “For a bean counter, you’re a damned fine actor. Maybe overplaying it a touch right now.”

The sobbing stopped, and Andy sobered. “Please, Jack. You don’t understand what it was like living in the same house with her. Knowing what she was doing: the junk, the men. I had to do it-but I couldn’t do it myself. I did love her, Jack. I honestly did. Please. Don’t tell the police.”

“Don’t worry about it. I won’t call the cops. You’re a client, you shit.”

“And a friend?”

The pleading look just enraged me more.

By way of an answer, I punched him in the face. His chair fell back, and when he was down, I yanked him up by his hair, kicked him everywhere: legs, kidneys, ribs. I poured a three-hundred-dollar bottle of Scotch over his head. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, nothing else I could do without actually killing him.

Andy Cushman, my former client, my former friend, was still crying when I left his suite.

Chapter 105

DR. SCI CAME spinning around the corner to Justine’s office, grabbed the doorjamb, and leaned straight out as if he were a flag in a gale.

It was ten after ten in the morning, and he’d been working in the lab with Justine’s two bar glasses all night.

Justine placed her palms flat on her desk and searched Sci’s baby face. He was a scientist, so even if the news was bad, his expression could read happy: happy that he’d solved a problem.

“Tell me something good,” Justine said. “Put a smile on my face, boy wonder.”

“I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news,” Sci said.

Justine put her face in her hands. “Bad news first,” she said.

“The good news is that I have isolated the unknown male’s DNA. It matches the DNA we found in Wendy Borman’s clothing.”

“That’s the good news?” Justine said. “We only got a forensic hit off that male DNA.”

“Yep, he’s still unknown. But you saw him. He’s alive and well and living in LA.”

“Listen, Sci, good news would be that you’ve got a positive match to Rudolph Crocker. I was sitting right next to him in the bar. I wrapped up his glass like I was swaddling a baby chick. His DNA has to be on that glass.”

Sci let go of the doorjamb, came into the office, and sat in the chair across from Justine. He jammed his flip-flops up against the side of her desk. His yellow print aloha shirt picked up the blond streaks in his hair. It made him look like he had just wandered in from a surf shop in Venice Beach.

“The problem isn’t that Rudolph Crocker’s DNA isn’t on that glass. It’s that what I got was allele soup. So while I can’t exclude him from the sample, I can’t positively match his DNA to the DNA we found on Wendy Borman’s shirt. I’m sorry, Justine. The sample is crap.”

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Can you run the test again, try to isolate his DNA somehow-”

Sci watched Justine try to twist the result he’d given her into hope. If he could do it for her, he would.

“-can’t you?”

“No. If I were to guess what happened,” said Sci, “the barkeep was out of clean glasses. He rinsed out a dirty one in the sink and gave it to Crocker. New glasses came after that, and the barkeep gave a clean glass to the unknown male. Plausible?”