for herself here, after some hard knocks. How about you?”
“Working on it.”
“You were a decent lawyer, of your kind.” She added that quick smile again. “Trying to be a writer now.”
“That’s right.”
“Your name would make a splash. Old money, scandal, mystery.”
Resentment curdled inside his belly like sour milk. “I’m not looking to make a splash off my family’s money, or my wife’s murder.”
She shrugged. “It is what it is, Mr. Landon.”
“Make it Eli if you’re going to insult me.”
“Just getting a gauge. You cooperated with the police more than I’d have expected after your wife’s murder.”
“More than I should have, in hindsight.” He set her coffee in front of her. “I wasn’t thinking like a lawyer. By the time I did start thinking, it was a little late.”
“Did you love her?”
He’d asked for a woman, he reminded himself. Someone fresh and thorough. He’d gotten one, and an investigator nothing like the one he’d hired after Lindsay’s death.
Now he’d have to deal with the result.
“Not when she died. It’s hard not knowing if I ever did. But she mattered. She was my wife, and she mattered. I want to know who killed her. I want to know why. I spent too much of the last year defending myself and not enough really trying to find the answers.”
“Being the prime suspect in a murder tends to keep you on the hot seat. She cheated on you. Here you’re trying to have a fair and civilized divorce with a lot of money and family rep at stake. Even with the prenup, a lot of money and goods at stake, and you find out she’s been playing you for a fool. You go into the house, one your money paid for as hers was still in trust when you purchased it. You confront her, lose your temper, pick up the poker and let her have it. Then, it’s holy shit, look what I did. You call the cops, covering it with the old ‘I came in and found her.’”
“That’s the way they saw it.”
“The police.”
“The police, Lindsay’s parents, the media.”
“The parents don’t matter, and the media, again, is what it is. And the cops couldn’t, in the end, make the case.”
“The police couldn’t, not definitively, but that doesn’t make me innocent to them, or anyone else. Lindsay’s parents? They lost a daughter, so they do matter, and they believe I got away with it. The media may be what it is, but it’s weight. They made a pretty good case in the court of public opinion, and my family suffered for that.”
She studied him quietly as he spoke, and he realized now she’d gotten a sense of him just as she’d gotten one of Bluff House.
“Are you trying to piss me off?”
“Maybe. Polite people don’t tell you much of anything. Lindsay Landon’s case looked slam-dunk on the surface. Estranged husband, sex, betrayal, money, crime of passion. You’re going to look at the husband first, and the person who discovers the body. You were both. No sign of break-in, of struggle. No sign of a burglary gone bad, the public fight with the victim earlier that day. A lot of weight.”
“I’m aware of the weight.”
“The problem is, that’s all there is. Surface. You go below, and it falls apart. The timing’s sticky—the time of death, the time you were seen by a number of witnesses leaving your office, the time you deactivated the alarm to come in. So you couldn’t have gone in and out again, then back, as you were seen at your office, had appointments, conversations until after six p.m. And witnesses corroborate when the victim left the gallery where she worked. She entered the house, again verified, about two hours before you walked in the house that night.”
“The cops figured the timing was tight, but it was possible for me to go in, argue, kill her, then try to cover it before calling nine-one-one.”
“It didn’t hold up well on reenactment, even the prosecutor’s reenactment. Good coffee,” she said in an aside, then continued. “Then there’s forensics. No spatter on you, and you can’t deliver blows like that without spatter. No spatter on your clothes, and witnesses verify the suit and tie you wore when you left the office. When did you have time, in an approximate twenty-minute window, to change your clothes, change back again? And where were the blood-spattered ones, or whatever you used to cover your suit?”