Page 27 of The 24th Hour

CHAPTER 31

ALVAREZ, ARTHUR, AND I stood in the doorway of Jamie Fricke’s office. I was desperate to read his will but I wanted to do it privately. I clutched the pages and said to Arthur, “How about giving Inspector Alvarez a tour of the place?”

“My pleasure. Downstairs first?”

As they headed for the parlor, I reentered Jamie’s office and shut the door. Rich Conklin and I had been in this room with Jamie about a dozen times in the last months. Each time I’d steeled myself for what I knew was coming. Jamie would deflect our questions in the way he had of being rude without crossing the line. No name-calling. No actual bullying. He was just cold, contemptuous, and used as few words as possible.

I’d always let the chill roll off my shoulders into the corners of the room while I watched and listened for tells or accidental self-indicting utterances. Which never happened. Fricke saw himself as some kind of royalty and this room was his seat of power. It felt that way to me, too. More than anoffice, the room was also a two-story-tall library, a trophy parlor, and a private sanctuary. Fricke’s large mahogany desk was at the center of the room resting on a jillion-dollar Oriental carpet. Neat stacks of papers and magazines were piled on a credenza behind the desk, and a multiscreen computer sat in the center of it with the power turned off.

I leaned over and pressed the On button. Light blazed. One screen filled with soccer scores and the other was taken up with a TV show, a pair of sports commentators giving excited play-by-plays to enthusiasts in French.

A fireplace was centered on the wall across from the desk, dominated by a large oil painting of Jamie and Holly, his sons from a previous marriage, and his soccer team, the Bleus, arrayed around them. The trophy case was opposite the door and a pin light beamed down from the ceiling onto the gold cups and photos of winning games behind the glass.

I looked out the window onto the front of the house and called Rich on my cell. I asked him to get Jamie’s phone out of the property room and dump the calls, incoming and outgoing.

I said, “He took a call and left the house about five minutes before he was shot.”

“Crime lab has the phone now. You okay?” asked my partner, a man I loved like the brother I’d never had.

“Uh-huh. Why do you ask?”

“Your voice.”

I cleared my throat. “Is that better?”

“Loads,” he lied.

My throat was tight. I hadn’t yet gone through the will but I wanted to, badly.

I said, “Rich, ask Red Dog to put a hot rush on a search warrant. The one in my pocket expires at midnight.”

“He’s done it. Judge Hoffman signed off. I’ve got it in Brady’s desk.”

“Thanks. Anything I need to know, text me. I’ll check in with you after I’ve read Jamie’s will.”

He whistled through his teeth.

“Yeah. His will,” I said. “I don’t want to get overexcited. But ten minutes after we hang up, I’m going to know a lot more about Jamie Fricke than I do now.”

“Do read. Call if you need me. I’m at Brady’s desk making paper clip chains.”

I laughed. “I’ll call you soon.”

There was a leather chesterfield sofa and a pair of matching deep brown leather chairs across from Jamie’s desk. I switched on a table lamp, sat in one of the chairs, and tried to ready myself for the twenty-six pages of Jamie’s last will that were calling out to me from my lap.

CHAPTER 32

I SAT IN the fine leather chair in Jamie Fricke’s office, going through his will, cycling old thoughts and new, sure that the motive for Jamie’s murder and maybe, God willing, Holly’s, too, was just one blink away.

Feelings of imminent solution like this seem real and true and flatter you with your own genius. But I knew not to bet on them. I got a grip on myself, put the pages in order, and flipped to the last one.Thank you, James—he’d signed it, and had had it witnessed by Arthur Bevaqua while Holly was still alive.

If only Bevaqua had told us about it sooner.

I kept reading, skipped over long paragraphs of dense legalese, and halfway through found paragraph VI, the bequests. There. “If my wife survives me …”

I skimmed quickly, then forced myself to back up and slow down. In summary: If Holly had lived, she would have inherited the Pacific Heights manse and seventy million dollars in US T-bills and certificates of deposit. There was atwo-page list of equities in Jamie’s brokerage account that would also have gone to her. A big black X had been drawn with a marker pen through everything Jamie had planned to leave to Holly. He’d dated the changes four months ago and initialed them “JFIII.”

But there was so much more to the Fricke holdings, all printed single-spaced, full of “heretofores” and “whereins,” and sprinkled with Latin. I kept reading. Well, I skimmed. Assuming Holly’s share had been returned to the whole, an enormous sum was now to be divided between Jamie’s two adult sons, Leo and Rodney Fricke, the children he’d had with his first wife, Talia.

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