“Look how upset you are.” There was a level calmness in the sound of her words. I imagined it was her therapist voice, the one she’d used in her old job when she counseled people or led support groups.
“That’s not why. It’s because she was intentionally trying keep me out of the loop. I worked that case. It was mine.”
“But it’s not yours anymore. There’s nothing you could have done today except stay home and worry or go to the station and get in their way. I know it feels shitty. But wouldn’t you have rather had a day off and gotten some rest instead of feeling like you do right now?”
“You’re on her side.”
She laughed at that and I got even more angry. “You think that’s funny?”
“No,” she said. “I think it’s sad.”
That shut me up.
“There’s only one side, Danny,” she said. “And everybody’s on it.”
“What side is that?”
“Yours.”
After I finished the calzone, Julia told me she needed to get back to Trev’s gallery to continue planning the workshop she’d told me about. “Why don’t I come to Jen’s tonight?” she said as we rode down in the elevator.
“I’d like that.”
We said good-bye in the lobby, where Lauren was finishing a slice of pizza.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“Your girlfriend bought it for me. She’s good people.”
In the car on the way back to Jen’s, Lauren said, “So, you think Novak did it?”
“Not my call,” I said.
“But you’re thinking about it.”
“You want to be a detective,” I said. “You even went to law school. Do you think he did it?”
“His prints on the bottle put him in the apartment along with Joe. They both had similar motives. Collect money from Denkins to square the debt. So unless one of them left before the murder, they’re both culpable.”
“Right,” I said. “But how do we find out which one pulled the trigger?”
She thought about the question. “If they’re acting in concert, it doesn’t really matter.”
“True, but that’s weak. What would happen if it went to trial? Would the jury buy that?”
Lauren knitted her eyebrows and checked the cross traffic before turning off of Broadway onto Ximeno. “Maybe.”
“Is ‘maybe’ good enough?”
She didn’t need to answer that one. “So it comes down to the interrogation?”
“I think this time it does, yeah.”
“But Novak’s lawyered up, so what will you get from him?”
“Probably nothing, but maybe his attorney will try to turn him against Joe to get a better plea deal. Then what?”
She smiled. “Then Joe’s screwed.”
“Joe’s already screwed.”
“Tell Joe,” she said, thinking as she spoke, “that Novak is selling him out, get him to go all in with his statement.” She tossed the idea around a bit more, then added, “But what’s to stop him from trying to put the whole thing on Novak?”
“Nothing at all. He’s almost sure to try to do that. He might even have something on Novak that’s worse than Denkins.”
“So how do you deal with that?” she asked, turning right onto Colorado.
“Mostly, you try not to ask any questions you don’t already know the answers to. They taught you that in law school, right?”
“Yeah. The difference between an interview and an interrogation.” She paused for a moment. “That doesn’t answer the question, though. How do you figure out the truth?”
“Sometimes you don’t,” I said.
We drove in silence for the last few blocks, then Lauren turned left into the driveway. “That was fun,” she said. “Right up until the part at the end when you depressed the shit out of me. I thought you had the answers.”
“If only.”
The nights were growing warmer as we got closer to the end of summer and the miserable heat that came with it. The weather forecasters were telling us to expect the average high temperature to set records and that we were likely to have more one-hundred-plus-degree days than in any year since they started keeping records. But we probably still had a few weeks of bearable temperatures ahead of us before the hotpocalypse arrived.
Julia invited Lauren to join us watching TV, but when she found out we were planning to continue our Downton Abbey marathon, she declined.
I assumed she turned us down for the same reason that I’d been initially reluctant to watch, so I said, “It’s really not as lame as you think it’s going to be.”
“Lame?” She seemed genuinely offended. “If it was ‘lame’ would I have watched the whole thing twice?”
Julia thought that was hysterical.
A few episodes later, when I started complaining that I didn’t