“Okay, Mr. Angelidis. I need to know what this is about.”

“About? It’s about your big case. When I listened to Bincher on the TV, I said to myself, ‘This is bullshit, they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.’ Some of the shit he said, it’s gonna waste your time, make you crazy. So I want to do you a favor, set you straight.”

“Set me straight about what?”

“About who killed Carl Spalter. You want to know that, right?”

Chapter 25

Fat Gus

Gurney made his planned call to Hardwick, leaving out any assault on Bincher’s personal style. After all, he was going to have a meeting with Donny Angel at two o’clock that afternoon in a Long Falls restaurant—a meeting that could change everything—and it had obviously been motivated by Bincher’s performance.

After listening to Gurney’s summary of the phone call from Angel, Hardwick asked without much enthusiasm if he wanted some backup or if he wanted to be wired—just in case things in the restaurant started going south.

Gurney turned down both offers. “He’ll assume the possibility of backup, and the assumption is as good as the reality. As for the wire, he’ll assume that too and take whatever precautions he needs to.”

“You get any sense of what his game is?”

“Only that he’s upset by the direction he thinks we’re taking and he wants to head it off.”

Hardwick cleared his throat. “An obvious concern would be Lex’s suggestion that Carl might have been whacked because of a falling-out with someone in the mob.”

“Speaking of which, his shotgun approach to the case seems a hell of a lot broader than your ‘focus, focus, focus’ advice to me.”

“Fuck you, Sherlock. You’re purposely not getting the point. The point is, he’s bringing up scenarios that Klemper should have explored but failed to. Everything Lex said goes to the point of a dishonest, incompetent, prejudiced investigation. That’s it. That’s the point of the appeal. He’s not saying that you should start digging into all the crap he’s mentioning—only that Klemper didn’t.”

“Okay, Jack. New subject. Your friend in BCI—Esti Moreno? Can she get a look at the autopsy report on Mary Spalter?”

Hardwick hesitated. “What do you expect it to say?”

“It’ll say the cause of death was consistent with an accidental fall, but I’ll bet that the description of bone and tissue damage is also consistent with the blunt force trauma you’d expect if someone grabbed her by the hair and bashed her head against the edge of the bathtub.”

“Which won’t prove that it wasn’t just a hard fall. So what then?”

“Then I’ll just keep following the string.”