said.
He smiled and said, “What?”
“Confess. Or do I have to beat it out of you?”
For a long moment Eric looked at me, trying no doubt to find out if I was serious. I let dead serious spill out of my eyeballs.
Finally he said, “What do you think you know?”
“Where’s Carl’s Dodger hat?” I said. “The one you wore to BevMo when you bought the Cuervo and Pepsi?”
No answer, which was answer enough. Now was the time to hit him with a theory I’d worked out with Zebker.
“With the hat pulled down, you could pass for Carl. If you moved fast and didn’t talk to anybody. My guess is you went to see Carl and somehow got his Visa and lucky hat. Maybe you offered to go to BevMo for him. Maybe he was already buzzed, but you went out for the stuff at BevMo, borrowing his car. You came back, got him good and liquored up, which wouldn’t have been hard. I didn’t know until now that with a little prep an empty plastic liter bottle makes a good sound suppressor. Was Carl passed out when you shot him? Maybe leaning back with his mouth open? But no soot in the mouth, right? You blasted him, then used the plastic bag to transfer gunshot residue. How’m I doing?”
Eric issued a long breath, never taking his eyes off me. “You’re my lawyer. Whatever I say you can’t repeat, and I can’t be tried again, because of double jeopardy, right?”
“You watch a lot of TV, don’t you?”
“Am I right?”
“You’re right. You can’t be tried again for Carl’s murder, and whatever you say to me about it is privileged. That doesn’t mean I have to like it, or you, or suppress my desire to turn your face into a Picasso.”
“Look, Ty, listen, please.” Eric rubbed his hands together, as if he’d dipped them in holy water and was rinsing away his sins. “It’s this way. Carl wanted to die, okay? I hope you can at least understand that. He was unhappy and hated his life. But he didn’t have the guts to kill himself. I did it for him.”
“That’s what he told you he wanted, was it?”
“Yes.”
“You lie,” I said. “You wanted Carl dead because he was going to blow the whistle on the subcontractor scam running up to Jamie MacArthur’s office.”
Eric looked at me a moment, wheels turning somewhere in his lying head, then shrugged.
“The call girl,” I said. “Is she even a call girl? She was so good, a good little liar. Is she an actress or something?”
“I think real. I mean, I never met her. Bacon set it up.”
“Set it up?” A couple of thoughts bumped in my mind. “Bacon did all this to get you off.”
No response.
“Bacon was the heavy hitter for MacArthur, or Nielsen, or whoever on the contract scam. And you, you were in on it. A bagman maybe. And Carl was going to talk. You took his computer, didn’t you? Why? Did he have it all on there?”
Eric said nothing.
“Did Bacon pay you to get rid of Carl? And then promise to get you off if you blew the suicide thing and managed to get yourself caught?”
“Ty, please.”
“And your lovely wife,” I said. “She was in on this too, wasn’t she? That’s why you’re not out on your ear. Was she with you the night you shot Carl? Waiting out back to drive you away?”
“Now Ty, you got to understand,” Eric said. “Carl’s better off. He was going to do himself sooner or later, I guarantee you. And yeah, Turk Bacon is not a man you want to mess with, Ty. I’m telling you for your own good.”
“You threatening me?”
Eric didn’t hesitate. “Yeah. I don’t want to, but Ty, come on.”
“And I sat there like a rube and got you acquitted.”
“It’s the system. You’re not at fault for that.”
“Sure, I did my job in that system, didn’t I? I get to pretend I was only upholding the Constitution, that the system worked. But this time it didn’t, and I can’t stand to look at your ugly, lying face another minute.”
“Now, look—”
“You don’t deserve a mother like Kate.”
“You’re not gonna tell her anything, are you?”
“It would destroy her,” I said. “But she will find out. Someday you, or the De Medici you’re married to, will say something or give out a vibe. And when that happens, I’ll come to see you again.”
“And do what?”
“Lay a little retribution on you.”
Eric snorted. “You can’t do anything to me.”
“It might