The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [22]
Reggie thought he understood. If lawyering were an art, after all, Reggie Vallentine’s masterpiece had been the unjust acquittal of Solomon Gold.
8
REGGIE PAUSED to assemble his thoughts before saying anything more. He never let even his innocent clients be interviewed more than once for just this reason. To this point, he had recounted that night exactly the way it happened, but in a moment Reggie was going to have to repeat a lie he’d told a decade ago, and a whole hell of a lot depended on him getting it exactly right. “You know NBC did a Dateline on Gold’s murder. You could ask them to send you a copy.” He took a breath. “I also wrote a book.” Published a year after Gold’s death, it was called An Otherwise Infamous Crime.
About a third of it was outright fiction.
Kloska looked up from his notes. “Yeah, I got a signed copy. ‘Justice needn’t be cruel, but it is always unusual.’ That’s what you inscribed in it.”
“It’s still true,” Reggie said.
Kloska blinked. “Did you see anybody else on the way to Gold’s house?”
“No.”
“You didn’t see anything weird or suspicious?”
“Like I said, the door was open. He said the buzzer was broken, so he’d left it open for me.”
“Gold left the door unlocked?”
Reggie raised his hand in a shrug.
“Did you shut it behind you?”
“I’m sure. But I don’t know if it locked.”
“So he tells you about the requiem. What happened next?”
Reggie rubbed his dead arm. “I got shot.”
Kloska licked a bread crumb from his thin lips. “Right. Michael Liu. How did he get in the house?”
“I don’t know. The same way I did, I suppose.”
“You didn’t hear Liu coming up the stairs?”
“No.”
“He surprised you?”
“Yes.”
“He was wearing a mask.”
“A Halloween mask. A monster of some sort. Zombie maybe.”
Kloska nodded as he wrote. “You really couldn’t tell it was Liu?”
“I know it because you tell me it was him. If I was sure it had been Liu, I would have said so that night when I saw you at the hospital.”
Bobby glanced briefly out the window. “We know it was Liu because we had his fingerprints and hair all over Gold’s office. Unless they were poker buddies or something.”
Reggie laughed through his nose.
“Was there anybody else in the room that night besides the three of you? No? Then our masked man was Michael Liu. See, that’s detective work.”
“Well done, then.”
“What did he want?”
“I don’t think he said. I figured it was a robbery. At the time, I thought he might be there for the requiem.”
“What would Michael Liu want with Gold’s manuscript? How would he even know about it?”
“I know he grabbed the song right out of Solomon’s hands.”
“‘Rocky Raccoon’ is a song, Reggie,” Bobby said. “That thing you were holding would have been Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. The Gold Completion.”
“Knowing my client, I’d be surprised if he wouldn’t have wanted his name to go first.” That made Kloska laugh, a welcome break in the tension. Reggie polished his chin with three fingers, trying to distinguish the truth he had observed from the history he subsequently created. “Was anything besides the requiem missing? I don’t remember.” Reggie did remember actually, but he wanted to establish that his memory wasn’t perfect on an inconsequential detail in case he needed to forget a more relevant fact later.
Kloska squinted at his notes. “Gold’s watch and his wallet. Which we found in Liu’s car after he offed himself.”
“Do you think Solomon was killed for his watch?”
“I think we all know why Liu wanted Gold dead. Maybe he wanted to make it look like a robbery. He wears a mask, disguises his voice so you won’t recognize him. Takes a few things to make it look like a B and E.” Kloska lifted the cuff of Reggie’s shirt with his finger. “This big-ass watch of yours. Were you wearing it that night?”
Reggie nodded and stretched his hand beyond the sleeve to show the thick band. “Always show them your