Sixty-Eight

DETECTIVE BEN CANTOR TRIED to call Jenny when the Oprah interview was over just to tell her that even though he was hardly an impartial observer, he thought any open-minded person who’d watched her had to be on her side now.

And it wasn’t just his opinion. He did something he hardly ever did—checked Twitter and found that the majority of the people weighing in seemed to agree with him about what they’d seen tonight from Jenny Wolf.

Would it help her with the other owners? He had no way of knowing that, and neither did she. She had told him before she got to Los Angeles that she felt like she was down two touchdowns and running out of time.

The call went straight to voice mail. He left a message telling her that he thought she did great, that she should call him when she got the chance, and that there was nothing new to report on Thomas.

Cantor went back to his notes then, spread out once again on his kitchen table. He was still going through the grunt-work process of trying to get as complete a list as he could of the people who’d been in Thomas Wolf’s suite that night. It felt like he was assembling one of those thousand-piece puzzles. He’d talk to people who were there, and they’d give him as many names as they could remember. Working horizontally. Then those people would give him more names. It kept going like that.

Jenny was right. Her brother had had a lot of friends. Cantor was starting to think most of them had been there long after they’d all watched the Wolves game together. And he kept trying to see one or two of them as being capable of staging a drug overdose and then throwing Thomas to his death.

As he did, he was trying to process what the death of Tommy Wolf might have to do with Joe Wolf’s death, if anything at all. He knew he had to push that piece of the story, if it even was a piece, to the side. He would get to it at some point. Just not right now. He kept plodding along on Thomas Wolf. Ben Cantor was nothing if not a patient man.

Maybe not with Jenny Wolf. But in general.

“There it is,” he said, looking at his list. The guest list for the last party of a former party animal named Thomas Wolf. Next to it was as much of a timeline as Cantor could establish, from when the party seemed to have ended and the custodial staff had cleaned up the suite to the time of death. Two hours at least. Maybe a little more. The head of the custodial staff had told him that Thomas was no longer present when they started the clean-up job.

Did it mean that Thomas could have been somewhere else in the stadium? Or that he had gone to have a face-to-face with the person he told Jenny he needed to talk to?

Who’d you talk to, Thomas?

And about what?

As was standard when the Wolves were playing out of town, a skeleton crew had worked Wolves Stadium that Sunday. By now, Cantor had talked to every one of them on the list provided by the head of stadium operations. Cantor had asked the guy, Gabe Martinez, if somebody could have hidden somewhere and then headed upstairs to Thomas’s suite without being seen.

“It’s a seventy-six-thousand-seat stadium,” Martinez, a former cop, had said. “Figure it out for yourself. And know that Mr. Wolf senior wasn’t ever a bear for security cameras.”

Cantor already knew that.

He opened his laptop. He was still waiting for Thomas Wolf’s cell-phone records, for which he’d needed a subpoena, not just to see who he’d called on the day of his death but also to see who he’d called in the days leading up to it. But even that was complicated, because Jenny had told Cantor that Thomas had more than one phone, a habit from his life drinking and drugging.

Once Cantor had the records, he could check the phone from which Thomas had called Jenny and, more important, track his whereabouts on the night he died.

Cantor’s contact at Thomas’s service provider, an old friend, had told him that he was working late and that there was a chance the records could come in tonight. And when Cantor went to his email, there were the records he’d been seeking. The PDF documents his friend had attached contained the numbers for the handful of other calls Thomas Wolf had made that day.

For now, Cantor was more interested in where he’d gone in the hours after he’d called Jenny and the party had ended—the GPS tracing of his phone, point to point. One document had the addresses. The other tracked him by longitude and latitude.

Cantor placed them next to each other. Usually he was old-school and preferred longitude and latitude.

This time, though, it was the addresses that caught his eye.

He grabbed one of the notebooks on the table just to make sure he was right.

He was.

“Sonofabitch.”

Cantor used the Waze app on his phone to determine how easy it would have been for Thomas Wolf to make the Sunday night round trip between Wolves Stadium and that part of town. Then he grabbed his car keys and drove over to Pacific Heights.

He parked his car at a hydrant on Broadway, walked up to the town house, gave a good loud rap with the door knocker, then another even harder rap, until he heard the voice from inside, “Relax, for chrissakes. I’m coming.”

When Jack Wolf finally opened the door, Cantor said, “How come you forgot to tell me that your brother paid you a visit the night somebody threw him out a window?”

Then Cantor was pushing past Jack and saying, “May I come in?”