Davis and Greene drove north to break the news to Sharon Beauchamp, the victim’s widow. Neither detective was surprised to find her at home in the middle of the afternoon. Sharon was only forty-five, but drug use and decades of hard living and poor nutrition had yellowed her teeth and shriveled her skin. She came to the door wearing ripped leggings and a long gray sweatshirt. The cigarette in her mouth was mostly ash.
Davis held up his badge.
“We’re here about your husband,” he said.
“Who else would you be here about?”
She waved them in, cleared coupon flyers and magazines and a dirty breakfast bowl from the couch, then gestured for them to sit. She dropped into a hard-backed chair, took one look at their faces and said: “He’s dead, ain’t he?”
Greene, caught off-guard by her matter-of-fact tone, let Davis take the lead.
“If you mean your husband,” the senior detective said, “then yes, he is.”
Sharon lit a new cigarette with the butt of the old one. Any object left lying around served as an ashtray: empty cans, the sole of a worn-out shoe, a cereal bowl, a coffee mug. The trailer smelled like its windows hadn’t been opened in months. Greene wanted to take the conversation outside, but he knew Sharon would be less likely to cooperate with neighbors watching.
“That’s who I mean,” she said. “I had a bad feeling this morning. I told him not to go.”
“Told him not to go where?” Davis asked, curious to see how much he could tease out of her before she started asking questions of her own.
“Where I’m guessing you found him,” she said. “In that prick’s office. Or somewhere nearby.”
“Which prick would that be, ma’am?”
“Call me Sharon. I was already feelin’ old. Now I’m a widow to boot.”
“Sharon,” Davis corrected. “Who was it your husband had gone to see?”
“I’m guessing you know that already, but I understand why you gotta ask. His name’s Hood. Jim Hood. And he played my husband for a big fat fool.”
“How’s that?”
Davis kept his questions deliberately short: Sharon was off and running on her own, and he didn’t want to slow her down. Greene took mental notes.
“Look, I know what it is you want to know, so I’ll just come out and give you everything I got. Hood said he’d pay Bruce to kill his wife. Twenty-five grand up front, plus another twenty-five once it was done. Well, it was done. Bruce nearly went away for it, and he kept his mouth shut about Hood all through the trial. That deserves a bonus if you ask me, but Bruce never even saw that second payment. He went there today to get it. I told him to shoot first and haggle later, but he never did listen to me.”
Greene fought to keep his jaw from dropping. Sharon didn’t seem to realize she’d confessed to multiple felonies, from withholding information about a crime to aiding and abetting a murderer, though it would be nearly impossible to make any charge stick since her husband had been acquitted.
“Your husband told you all of this?” Davis asked.
“He more than told me: I saw that first twenty-five. Of course it’s all gone now, and I don’t got a thing to show for it. Hell, I still got two payments to make on this sorry-ass trailer. We were supposed to put that money towards a real house. Not that I believed it would ever happen. This sardine can’ll be my tomb.”
Her voice was nonchalant, as though she were complaining about a slight hike in the price of gasoline.
“How did your husband come to know Hood?” Davis asked.
“Bruce did some work for him a while back. Legit work, on one of his properties.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Maybe ten years back. Bruce had just gotten out. Again. Jim looked like a real hero then, giving an ex-con a second chance when no one else would. He probably hired Bruce because he was an ex-con.”
“Do you know if your husband ever did any other side jobs for Hood?” Davis asked.
“He did some moving-man work for a couple of Jim’s clients. Nothing against the law.”
Davis looked around at the duct-taped furniture and the stacks of trash. He knew the answer to his next question before he asked it.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any paperwork showing that your husband worked for Jim Hood? Pay stubs, maybe?”
“He paid Bruce under the table. A blank envelope filled with cash every Friday. Maybe you can get the son-of-a-bitch on tax evasion, the way they did with Al Capone.”
“We’ll look into it,” Davis said. “Do you know if Bruce had any friends who also worked for Hood?”
“You mean like to corroborate?”
Davis nodded.
“Bruce was a loner. Kept to himself on legit jobs and was strictly solo in the criminal world.”
“Do you know if he did any other contract work?”
“You mean killings?”
Davis nodded again. Sharon blew out a deep lungful of smoke.
“Ha!” she said. “If he did, I’d be sampling cocktails on a beach somewhere. He did plenty of strong-arm stuff, though. Broke more bones than a schoolyard swing set. Usually for pocket change.”
Davis leaned forward, made his voice soft and gentle.
“I hope this isn’t indelicate,” he said, “but you don’t seem very broken up.”
She shrugged.
“I guess I could sense the end coming. For both of us. Thirty years of chasing a high’ll do that. I won’t be far behind now. I just hope I make it to testify against Hood.”
* * *
“Doesn’t seem like she’s hiding anything,” Greene said, sliding behind the wheel.
“Yeah,” Davis said, “but what kind of a witness will she make? She’s an aging junkie who married a killer and probably has a rap sheet as long as his.”
Greene turned the ignition, tapped his horn to scare off a flock of pigeons who were pecking at breadcrumbs in the gravel behind their car.
“So what’s our next move?” he asked.
“We use what she gave us against Hood. Invite him down to the station as a witness and then hit him with what we know.”
“Won’t he just demand a lawyer?”
“Maybe. But a guy like that probably thinks he’s about a thousand times smarter than a couple of glorified civil servants. We might get lucky.”
“I’ll make the call,” Greene said.