DRESSED IN PERFECTLY TAILORED WORK clothes that flattered her figure, and with her face made up, an unexpectedly lovely Theresa Boleyn sat alone against the side wall on a chrome-and-red-plastic chair in the windowless coffee break room at Meyer Eldridge & Kline, a mug in front of her on the small table. When Beth entered, she turned her head and nodded uncertainly, as though she couldn’t place where this woman came from. When recognition dawned a moment later, she let out a sigh. “Inspector,” she said.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” Theresa gestured at the chair cater-corner to her. Behind the coffee mug was a crumpled wad of Kleenex. Close up, Beth could hardly fail to see the swollen redness around Theresa’s eyes. “How are you holding up?” she asked after she’d sat down. “Doesn’t look as though you’re getting much sleep.”
“Not too much. I just can’t seem to get my head around the idea that Peter’s gone. Everybody always says they want finality or closure or whatever you want to call it, but I wish they’d never found his body. Then maybe I could believe he just ran off to Tahiti or someplace, instead of . . . instead of what happened.” Suddenly, she focused and looked sharply over at Beth. “Have you discovered something?”
“Well, then, no offense, but why are you here with me again? I’ve told you everything I could think of that might help.”
“We appreciate that,” Beth said. “But I thought of a few things you might be able to clarify.”
“Okay,” Theresa said uncertainly. “However I can help.”
“Great. Thank you.” Beth took a small tape recorder from her breast pocket and put it on the table between them.
“What’s that?” Theresa asked.
“Usually we tape witness interviews.” Beth pushed the Record button. “Do you mind?”
“Not really.” Her face, however, was clouded with doubt. “But you didn’t do that last time, did you? Did something change?” She hesitated, then let out a few notes of nervous laughter. “Am I some kind of suspect now? We’re surrounded by lawyers here, you know. Should I call one of them?”
“Of course, that’s your absolute right. As to you being a suspect, at this point, most of the whole world is in that category. If you’re more comfortable with a lawyer in here with you, by all means invite one in, but if the advice you’ll get is not to talk to me, as in not say one word, that isn’t going to get us any closer to finding who killed Peter. But it’s your call.”
Theresa pondered for a second. “I just don’t understand why you didn’t tape me before.”
“Last time my partner, Inspector McCaffrey, kind of ran away with the interview and I didn’t think to slow him down and get a tape running. My bad, but there you go. It happens.”
With a sigh, Theresa looked down at the little red dot that meant the machine was recording. “Okay,” she said with resignation. “What do you want to know?”
“Well, a couple of things. First, the last time we talked, you mentioned this mystery woman who called Peter’s office sometime around the Ferry Building attack.”
“Right. I thought you said you were going to check our phone records and see if Peter maybe called her back so you could identify who she was.”
“Well, that’s the issue. We haven’t had any luck getting information about any calls Peter made. So I thought I’d ask you if you could remember anything else about that call or the woman who made it. Even the smallest detail.”
Theresa frowned, leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and crossed her arms over her chest. After a few breaths, she opened her eyes. “I think she asked for Peter, not Mr. Ash. That’s why I thought there might have been something personal in it. Just the way she asked for him.” A pause. “You said the smallest detail.”
“No. That’s fine. It’s something. If there is any information at all that you think of or that comes to your attention, it would be a big help.” Beth figured that this was as far as she could go, especially on tape, to nudge Theresa to take it upon herself to look up the phone records. “Meanwhile, I’ve got another question for you that might be easier.”
“Shoot.”
“This was just Monday, Peter’s last day. You said he left work around four thirty.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you remember, was he in business clothes? Suit and tie?”
This time, it took her only a couple of seconds. She nodded and said, “Yes. I joked with him and straightened his tie when he came out of his office on the way out. He loosened it up again and said he was off for the day and he could undo his tie if he wanted to. So definitely, he left work in his business clothes. Why is that important?”
“Because he wasn’t wearing a suit when we found the body. Which means if he was killed Monday night, he changed after work first.”
“Which means he went home,” Theresa said.
Or someplace else where he kept a change of clothes, Beth thought. But she only said, “It might mean that.” Once again, Beth wished she had some information about Peter’s sexual activity, if any, in the last few hours of his life. But the clothes situation had occurred to her soon after she’d left the medical examiner’s office that morning. “It’s something to consider about the chain of events, in any case,” she said. “Can I ask you another one?”
“As many as you’d like.”
“Did you know a friend of his named Geoff Cooke? He’s another attorney in town.”
Theresa didn’t even have to think about it. “Sure. I mean, I didn’t know him well personally, but he came by here and picked up Peter for lunch or sometimes dinner or whatever. They were buds. Why? What about him?”
“I don’t know. Probably nothing. I was hoping maybe you could tell me.”
“You want to give me a hint?”
Beth shrugged. “Really, I don’t know anything about him, other than he came by my office yesterday and asked if he could help us. He basically corroborated most of what you told us about Peter’s change of behavior over the past few months, but he said he might know something that he didn’t know he knew. If there’s a hint in there, it’s all yours.”
After a couple of beats of reflection, she said, “Nothing’s jumping out at me. They hung together pretty regularly—lunch, dinner, ball games, golf—just guy stuff. Sailing.”
The word sent an electric buzz down Beth’s spine, but she kept her voice in check. “Sailing?”
Theresa nodded. “Geoff has a small boat in the marina. I don’t know if they actually went out a lot. I gathered it’s where they broke out the cigars and Scotch.”
“That would have been when Peter wasn’t dating, I presume?”
Theresa narrowed her eyes, tightened her mouth. “What do you mean, when he wasn’t dating?”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider Scotch and cigars the world’s strongest aphrodisiacs.”
“No,” Theresa said with great firmness. “They weren’t seeing women, if that’s what you were thinking. Maybe the one, the mystery woman, back in May. But even she, whoever she was, was out of the picture the last few months. Absolutely.”
“So all this bad behavior with Peter, breaking up his marriage, all of that . . . it wasn’t about him running around or being unfaithful to his wife?”
Theresa shook her head. “Peter was not seeing other women, Inspector. I never heard anything about that, and I would have. The craziness was all about drinking and the breakdown over the stress with work and his family and everything, but . . .” She shook her head in utter conviction. “No. He was confused, but he wasn’t out playing around. I’m sure of that. That’s just not who he was.”
The temperature had come up about ten degrees, though it was still under fifty, the sky bright blue, the sunlight glaring everywhere. Beth sat in her Jetta, parked illegally at a bus stop, talking to her partner about his sick daughter. Heather continued to improve, although Ike didn’t think he’d make it out into the field today.
Eventually they got around to the job.
“So did she come through?” Ike asked. He was still fixated on Theresa somehow getting them the phone records.
“No. I just planted the seed. I didn’t want to ask her straight out since, as you point out, that would be unethical. It’ll either come to her in a vision or it won’t. But meanwhile, you’re not going to believe . . . Peter Ash wasn’t sleeping around.”
“Yes, he was.”
“That’s what I thought, too. It’s also what Geoff Cooke believed, unless he was lying, which he was not. He actually saw our boy Peter with not just a few but many of these alleged women . . .”
“They weren’t alleged women, Beth. They were real women who were Peter’s alleged lovers.”
“Spare me that unclear antecedent bullshit, Ike. You know what I meant. But Theresa says that didn’t happen—he wasn’t sleeping around. She was positive. Defensive, even, on the general topic of Peter’s connections with other women.”
Ike was silent for a couple of seconds before saying, “Peter lied to Theresa.”
“Or,” Beth said, “it was what she wanted to believe and never asked. One of those two or she was lying to me. I take door number one.”
“Me, too. So why would he conceal messing around with other women?”
“Because he and Theresa were having an affair, and he wanted her to believe that she was the only one. Which she dutifully does believe. Right up until last Monday night when she finds out that she’s actually not his one true love, but one of many, and it gives her all the motive we could want for her to shoot him. So I’m thinking you might have nailed it, Ike.”
“It’s a modest talent,” Ike said. “How was she otherwise? Emotionally.”
“A wreck.”
“Because she loved him.”
“That’s how I read it, too. This is not your average mourning over a dead boss, even if he was the best boss there’s ever been. She’s devastated.”
“So what was she doing Monday night?”
“I didn’t ask her. Not yet. I didn’t want to spook her because I’m still hoping she’ll pull those phone records for us. Whipping out the tape recorder was bad enough. So maybe next time. But let’s remember it’s not definitely Monday night, either. Could have been Tuesday morning, maybe Tuesday afternoon. Meanwhile, though, a couple of other things did come up.”
“They must be good if they beat Theresa.”
“They are. At least a tie, anyway.”
“So hit me.”
She did, starting with the most provocative: Geoff Cooke, Peter Ash’s best friend, owned a boat berthed at the marina that the two men frequently used; also, sometime between 4:30 and when he got shot, Peter Ash had changed out of his business suit and into the casual clothes he’d been wearing when they’d found him under the Cliff House—the most obvious conclusion from that being that he went home, although of course he could have gone to another place—Theresa’s apartment?—and changed there. Did he meet a sexual partner at whatever location he chose? Did he, in fact, have a sexual partner on Monday night?
When she finished, Ike said, “You’ve had a productive morning.”
“I’m not done yet.”
“No,” Ike said. “I figured you weren’t.”