The 9th Judgment (17 page)

“Sergeant, don’t write me off as a crank. I’m being falsely accused of murder. Do you know what was stolen from the Dowlings?”

“I have a list.”

“Good. Then check it out. I took two opera-length diamond chains, three sapphire-and-diamond bracelets, a large diamond brooch
in the shape of a chrysanthemum, and some other stuff, including an ornate ring with a big yellow stone.”

“The canary diamond.” There was silence. Then…

“It’s a
diamond?
”

“What am I supposed to do with this information, Kitty? I need your statement, or I’ve got nothing.”

“You’re a Homicide inspector. Do your job and leave me out of it,” she said, and she hung up again.

YUKI WAS PULLING into the garage under her apartment building when her mobile rang. The caller ID read “Sue Emdin,” the woman
she and Casey Dowling had both known at Boalt Law. Emdin was the “tough beans” type, but when she spoke now, Yuki thought
her voice was strained to cracking.

“Sue. What’s wrong?”

“Plenty. I saw Marcus having dinner with a woman in Rigoletto’s. It’s a dark, six-table Italian place on Chestnut, home-style
cooking and not Zagat rated. They were in the back corner, laughing and canoodling. It wasn’t a consolation dinner. Not in
my book anyway.”

Yuki nosed the car into her spot, turned off the engine, got out, and headed to the elevator. Sue was filling in her report
with color commentary.

“I wish you could’ve seen this girl. Tight little skirt, V-neckline down to her navel, showing off her great big bouncy boobs.”

“Dowling had a hot date, you’re saying?”

“Hot and a half with whipped cream on top. My husband would kill me for doing this, Yuki. He would say it’s none of my business,
but after the funeral? After that eulogy Marcus gave? Well, it was a performance, and ever since I swore to you that he didn’t
do it, I’ve been worried that I was wrong about him. For God’s sake, what if he did kill Casey and I vouched for him? Makes
me sick just thinking about it.”

“Okay, I understand. Still, Marcus having a date is poor form, but it’s not criminal.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“What does that mean, Sue?” Yuki’s voice went up an octave. “What do you mean, exactly?”

“I’ve been following Marc since the funeral. I follow him all the time. Yuki, I had to do it. I was hoping he was the man
I said he was, but another part of me was saying that he did kill Casey and that I was so under his spell, I didn’t see it.
Casey told me she thought he was seeing someone, remember? Oh my God, I can’t stand it. Tell me I’m crazy and put me out of
my misery, or do something for poor Casey.”

Yuki juggled her handbag and briefcase. What had she created by talking to Sue Emdin? Her hands were shaking as she got out
her keys and opened her front door. “Where are you now?”

“Outside his house. I’ve been here for over an hour. Babe-a-licious is still with him, and if you ask me, she’s not going
home. Not tonight anyway.”

“Tell me again. What does this prove?”

“It proves that all of Marc’s talk about how heartsick he is over losing Casey is bullshit. If he’s lying about that, it means
he could be lying about everything.”

“What kind of car are you driving?” Yuki asked.

“Gold Lexus. I’m parked right across the street from his house.”

“Nobody would notice a car like that.”

“His neighborhood is full of them.”

Yuki put down her briefcase, kicked off her heels, and looked for a pair of flats. She was as crazy as Sue.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said.

MY THIRD CUP of coffee was still hot when Yuki walked through the gate in the squad room at nine thirty a.m. and made a beeline
to where I sat behind my floral barricade.

“I might have something on Marcus Dowling,” she said.

Conklin got up, gave her his chair, and said, “You have our complete attention.”

Yuki told us in one long run-on sentence that Casey’s school friend, Sue Emdin, had been tailing Dowling for more than a week
and had seen him last night in a restaurant made for clandestine meetings, having dinner with a woman who was more friendly
than friend.

“Sue followed them from the restaurant, then called to tell me she was staking out Dowling’s house. I went to sit with her.”

“Jesus, Yuki.”

“Just listen, okay? No laws were broken. At about eleven last night, Dowling and this woman came out of the house, falling
all over each other. She’s in her late twenties, early thirties, Pilates body, long cover-girl hair. Totally gorgeous.”

“You’re saying, totally his girlfriend,” Conklin said.

“So it would seem. Dowling helps said blonde into his car and then off they go.”

“And you’re following them?” I said.

“Well, yeah.”

“Really, Yuki,” I said, flipping my ballpoint into the air. “That was nuts and dangerous and you know it. Everyone wants to
be a cop, but it beats the hell out of me why.”

“It’s a glamour job, right?” Yuki cracked, waving a hand to indicate the splendor of our grimy, gray-on-gray bull pen.

“So you’re outside his house. What happened after that?” I asked.

“Okay, so we followed Dowling’s car to Cow Hollow,” Yuki said. “The car stops, and we have to drive past it, of course. We
take a spin around the block, and on the return lap, I see Totally Gorgeous walking by herself to this extremely nice house.
Dowling stayed in his car. He didn’t leave until his girlfriend went inside, but the point is, he didn’t walk her to the door.
Clearly he didn’t want to be seen.”

Yuki paused for breath, took out a business card, and flipped it over so I could see the address she’d written on the back.

Conklin said, “We have his phone log.”

I typed the address Yuki gave me into the computer and came up with a name and a phone number.

“Graeme Henley,” I said to Conklin, and read him the number.

My partner scrolled down his computer screen. “It’s here. He called that number three or four times a day all last month.”

“Graeme Henley is probably not a woman,” I said.

“So the girlfriend is married,” Yuki said. “That’s why he stayed in the car. Lindsay, Casey thought Marc was seeing someone.
If he was, if he was serious, if he couldn’t get rid of Casey… the girlfriend could be a motive.”

“There’s something else,” I told Yuki. “I’ve got a witness who says Casey Dowling was alive when Hello Kitty left the Dowling
house.”

“You’ve got a signed statement?”

“It’s an anonymous source but credible.”

“Huh,” said Yuki. “You have an anonymous but credible source who says Casey was alive when Kitty left the Dowling house. Who
could that be? Oh my
God.
Kitty called you?”

“Uh-huh, and she told me things only Kitty could know. Have we got probable cause for a wiretap warrant?”

“It’s a stretch,” Yuki told us. “I’ll go to work on Parisi. I’m not promising, but I’ll give it everything I’ve got.”

YUKI GOT IT done.

A signed warrant for a wiretap was in my hands by lunch the next day, and within hours there was a tap on a phone circuit
a couple of blocks from Dowling’s house. Effective three o’clock in the afternoon, Dowling’s phone calls were being routed
through a small, windowless room on the fourth floor of the Hall.

The room was empty but for two Salvation Army–quality desks and chairs, a bank of file cabinets, and an outdated telephone
book.

Conklin and I brought coffee and settled in behind a locked door. I was keyed up and bordering on optimistic. The odds that
Dowling would say something incriminating were a long shot—but a shot we actually had.

For the next five hours, my partner and I monitored Dowling’s incoming and outgoing calls. He was a busy lad, having scripts
overnighted from Hollywood, schmoozing with his agent, his lawyer, his banker, his manager, his PR person, his broker, and—finally—his
girlfriend.

The conversation with Caroline Henley was laced with “darlings” and “sweethearts” from both ends of the line. They made a
plan to have dinner together the next week, when Graeme Henley was on a business trip in New York.

Then, when I was sure the conversation was over, it got interesting.

“You don’t know what this is like, Marc. Graeme knows something’s wrong, and now he wants us to go into counseling.”

“I understand completely, Caroline. You have to stall him. We’ve waited for two long years, darling. Another few months won’t
matter in the big picture.”

“You’ve been saying that forever.”

“Three or four more months, that’s all,” Dowling said. “Be patient. I told you it will work out, and it will. We need the
public to get bored with the story, and then we’ll be fine.”

Conklin broke into a grin. “Two years. He’s been seeing her for two years. It’s not a smoking gun, but it’s something.”

I CALLED JACOBI from Yuki’s office and told him that Marcus Dowling had been having an ongoing relationship with a woman,
not his wife, for two years.

“Go get ’em,” Jacobi said.

Conklin and I drove to Caroline Henley’s place, a modern two-story house only blocks from the Presidio.

Mrs. Henley came to the door wearing her blond hair in one long braid, black tights under a blue-striped man’s shirt, a big
diamond ring next to her wedding band. A couple of little boys were playing with trucks in the living room behind her.

I introduced myself and my partner and asked Mrs. Henley if we could come in to talk, and she opened the door wide.

Conklin has consistently proved that he can get any woman to spill her guts, so once we were ensconced in overstuffed furniture,
I turned the floor over to him.

“Marcus Dowling says you two are very good friends.”

“He never said that. Come on. I’ve met him at a couple of cocktail parties is all.”

“Mrs. Henley, we know about your relationship,” my partner said. “We just need you to verify his whereabouts at certain times.
We have no interest in making trouble for you. Or,” he added reasonably, “we can come back when your husband is home.”

“No, please don’t do that,” she said.

Caroline Henley told us to wait. She bent to talk to the boys, then took their small hands, walked them to a bedroom, and
closed the door.

She came back to her seat and clasped her hands in her lap, then said to my partner, “Casey stifled him. She ground him down
with her jealousy and her constant demands. Marc was waiting for the right time, and then he was going to divorce her and
I was going to leave Graeme. We were going to get married. That’s not bull, that’s the truth.”

I walked around the living room as Caroline Henley told Conklin “the truth.” There were photos everywhere, standing on tables,
framed on the walls. Caroline Henley was either at the center of every group shot or alone, wearing something small that showed
off her figure and her beautiful face.

I wondered why she was attracted to an aging movie star twenty years’ her senior. Maybe her vanity demanded more of a catch
than a stockbroker
ordinaire
.

“So, if I’ve got this right, you and Marcus Dowling have been lovers for two years,” Conklin said.

Caroline Henley looked stunned as she realized why we were there. “Wait a minute. Are you thinking he had something to do
with Casey’s death? That’s crazy. I would have known. Marc’s not capable of that.
Is he?
”

She clapped her hands to her mouth, then dropped them. She almost looked pleased when she asked Conklin, “You think he killed
Casey for
me?
”

Back out in the car, I said to my partner, “So maybe he wanted out of the marriage but didn’t have the guts to tell Casey.
Then Kitty shows up in his bedroom, for Christ’s sake. Dowling couldn’t have planned it better.”

“Another way to look at it,” Conklin said. “Divorce is expensive. But, if you get away with it, murder is dead cheap.”

SARAH WELLS WAS dressed for her night job, black clothes and shoes, car pointed toward Pacific Heights. She hit the turn signal
and took Divisadero as the light went red. A cacophony of horns blared, damn it. Brakes screeched, and she narrowly avoided
a collision with a station wagon full of kids.

Oh my God. Focus, Sarah!

She should be thinking about the work ahead, but her mind kept drifting back to earlier that night, seeing the perfect blue
fingerprints on the soft flesh of Heidi’s arms, the still-vivid bite mark on her neck.

Heidi had tried to brush off the evidence of Beastly’s attack. “He’s out of control,” she said. “But it’s not his fault.”

“Whose fault is it? Yours?”

“It’s because of what he went through in Iraq.”

“It doesn’t make any difference what the reason is,” Sarah had snapped. “You don’t have to take it.”

She hadn’t meant to bark at Heidi, but she was angry and scared at what Pete Gordon could do. Heidi had to get away from Beastly
for her own sake, and for the good of the children.

“I know, I know,” Heidi had cried out, putting her head on Sarah’s shoulder. “It can’t go on.”

No, it couldn’t go on, and it wouldn’t,
Sarah told herself as she cruised along Bush Street. She was meeting with Lynnette Green, Maury’s widow, next week. Lynnette
had told Sarah that she’d buy the jewels and sell them herself. Sarah couldn’t wait to cash out. Could not wait.

She turned on Steiner and again on California, then parked her Saturn at the Whole Foods parking lot, surrounded by other
cars. She took a few minutes to make sure she had all her gear, then locked her wallet in the glove box, got out of the car,
and locked that, too, now thinking about Diana King, her target tonight.

Mrs. King was a widowed philanthropist, a big wheel on the charity circuit, frequently photographed and written about in the
glossies and every month in the
Chronicle.

According to the Lifestyle page, Mrs. King was having a small engagement party for her son and future daughter-in-law that
night in her home, a superbly restored cream-colored Victorian. And also superbly restored was Mrs. King’s classic jewelry:
Tiffany, Van Cleef, Harry Winston.