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“Notthatmuch.”
“Everything’s fine,” I lied.
I knew I was going to have to do something about Hamlet Gilbody. I also knew I wasn’t going to do it that morning. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. Best to think about other things. Like Larry Wilkes and getting him out of prison. Around nine, I called The Freedom Agenda and told Karen I’d be working out of the office for most of the day.
“I did some more research on Anne Michaels,” she said. “The guy she married, his brother was murdered by a guy named Larry Wilkes. Is that one of our cases?”
“Maybe. I’m talking to Lydia about it.”
After a judgmental pause, she asked, “How does Anne Whittemore fits into this?”
“She was Larry’s friend.”
“Okay. She married Paul Richard Michaels in nineteen seventy-eight, about a year after Larry’s trial ended. Their divorce has only been final for six weeks.”
This raised a lot of questions. Larry said he’d told Anne to perjure herself and say she was engaged to Pete. How had she gone from a make-believe engagement to one brother to an actual marriage to the other? How much did Paulie know about her fake relationship with his brother?
“Thanks Karen, I appreciate it.”
“Nothing says appreciation like V.S.O.P.”
“I won’t forget that.”
A few minutes later, I drove out to Bellflower. It was two cities north of Long Beach. Anne Michaels lived in a sprawling, two-story, apartment complex on Woodruff. The building was a faded orange. I coasted down the 14400 block of Woodruff until I figured out which of the individual buildings she lived in. Then I found a parking space and walked into the building’s small courtyard.
Her apartment was on the first floor on the side of the building away from Woodruff Avenue. The sky was cloudy and the temperature down around sixty—California frigid. I knocked on her door, and a few moments later a woman wearing a thick chenille robe answered the door.
I should have known. The woman in front of me was the same heavily pregnant woman I’d seen coming out of the Michaels house in Downey. That raised a lot of questions. If she and her husband divorced during her pregnancy, somebody did something very wrong.
“Hi. I’m Dom Reilly. I work for The Freedom Agenda. We’re considering taking on Larry Wilkes as a client. I hoping you’ll answer a few questions for me.”
“Wait. What? Did Larry do something in prison? Did he hurt someone?”
“No. We represent the wrongly imprisoned.”
“Larry wasn’t wrongly imprisoned.”
That brought things to a halt. “But—” I stopped and then started again. “Larry says he wouldn’t have hurt Pete because they were in love.”
“He needs to stop saying that. It got back to my in-laws. They don’t believe it, of course. But it’s a terrible thing to hear about your dead child no matter how untrue it is. I understand Larry wants to get out of prison, but telling a lie like that isn’t going to help.”
“He said you were his friend, that you knew about him and Pete. He said he told you to lie about their relationship in court.”
“None of that’s true. Pete was my fiancé. Larry was a friend of mine for a while. I think I’d know if they were fags together.”
This was not what I’d been expecting. Obviously, one of them was lying, but was it Anne or Larry? I scrambled for a question that might tell me which one it was.
“Tell me about it. How did you go from being Pete’s fiancé to Paulie’s wife?”
She glared at me a moment. “My engagement to Pete had been a secret. No one knew about it until the trial.”
“Why? Why was it a secret?”
“I was only seventeen and my parents wanted me to go to college. Well, my mom did. My dad was relieved when I didn’t. He didn’t want to pay for it.”
“Were you popular in high school?”
“You know, I think I’ve said everything I want to say.”
