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“But you looked at the husband.”
“Yeah, we looked hard, too. Seemed overkill even for the Stallions, unless she was cutting big. And if she was cutting big, where was the cut? Rules of play, they’d’ve warned her off first, or if she was any good maybe give her a chance to work for them.”
Pulliti tapped the side of his nose. “It didn’t smell right.”
“You couldn’t tie him in, the husband?”
“Alibied right and tight. Had the kid at home. About the time she was getting the shit raped out of her, he was knocking on a neighbor’s door to ask for help since the kid was sick, and his wife was—he said—at work. Neighbor verified.”
“Yeah, I see that.”
“But it didn’t smell right. We’re knocking on doors and everybody says how he keeps to himself, hardly says boo, stays with the kid at night, takes him off during the day while the woman sleeps, or goes off on his own. But that night, the night he needs an alibi, he knocks on somebody’s door. Sure was convenient.”
“You think he set her up?”
“Thought it, felt it. See, the Stallions, back then, they’d initiate a member, or a business partner. Beat-down or gangbang, take your choice. You take the beating or the banging, then you give them their cut of your business.”
Sex and drugs, she thought. Quick money, big money.
“You think she went with them for that voluntarily?”
“Maybe, or maybe he gave her over. They’d take a trade, especially a woman. I’ll tell you, that’s the way it smelled to me, but there wasn’t one shred of evidence pointing that way. She was the meal ticket from what I can find, not that they had anything much to show for it.”
“Just a couple months’ rent in the financials,” Eve interrupted. “Not hefty chunks.”
“That’s right. Not a hand-to-mouth kind of thing, but not your caviar and bubble wine either.”
“Under the radar,” Eve voiced.
“You could say. So, maybe he gave her over to the Stallions, and things got out of hand. I don’t know, but it was just too damn pat with him. He comes up with the line about how they were having marital problems, and she was having trouble with illegals. But the neighbors said they never heard them fighting. And they looked like a nice little family any time they went out together, except the woman looked kinda worn down.”
As she talked to him, Eve made her own notes, formed her own theories.
“This address, where she and the man and boy lived. What kind of neighborhood was that?”
“Solid middle. Working families, a lot of kids. They had a good apartment in a nice building. Nothing flashy, but nice. The husband, he had some flash.”
“Did he?”
“Expensive wrist unit, shoes. The boy had plenty of trendy toys. They had upmarket electronics. He was working in e-repair, consulting sort of deal, and she was—according to him—a professional mother. But he hardly put in any time on the job, and did most of the looking after the kid, according to the neighbors. I asked him about the wrist unit. Said it was a birthday present from his wife.
“He was off,” Pulliti said. “My gut said he was off, but the evidence said he was clean.”
When Chicago had given her all it could, Eve sat back, closed her eyes. He was off, but came away clean. There was a pattern.
He let the woman take the fall for him—just as he’d let the woman sleep with, live with his own brother, and like he may have let her scoop up johns and marks in gang territory.
Sex, she thought. Did he like her to use sex to scam? Was that part of a thrill?
When had the illegals come into it? When had she started using?
MacMasters said she might have needed them to have sex with her marks.
Maybe so. Not with the brother. It’s kinship in a twisted way. They’d looked alike, and she’d lived the con of making a family.
She pushed up, paced to the window and back. Paced to her board and away.
No, he hadn’t knocked on a neighbor’s door out of sheer coincidence the night of her murder. No way in hell. But it wouldn’t have been just a cover for the cops. Couldn’t be. They’d never have put him at the scene of the murder.
