escaped, and he hung his head, shaking it heavily from side to side.
“Did you know him?” Cuneo asked.
Panos didn’t answer right away. He sighed again, then pulled himself up. When he turned around, the Patrol Special met Cuneo’s gaze with a pained one of his own. “Long time.”
To a great degree, Cuneo’s nervous habits were a function of his concentration, which was intense. His mind, preoccupied with the immediate details of a crime scene or interview situation, would shift into some other trancelike state and the rest of his behavior would become literally unconscious. And the humming, or whistling, or finger-tapping, would begin.
Now Panos took up space next to Russell in the front of the shop, neither man saying much of anything, although they were standing next to one another. The body had been taken away and the crime scene people were all but finished up, packing away whatever they’d brought. Cuneo was back in the office, doing snippets of Pachelbel’s Canon in D while he took another careful look around—he’d already discovered the unplugged video camera, located one of the bullet holes in the wall and extracted the slug, lifted some of his own fingerprints.
Matt Creed had finished his regular beat shift after the preliminary interview he’d had with the inspectors at Silverman’s, and now he appeared again in the doorway, this time carrying a cardboard tray of paper coffee cups he’d picked up at an all-night place on Market. He paused at the sight of his boss. “Mr. Panos,” he said. “Is everything all right?”
“I’d say not.”
“No. I know. That’s not how I meant it.”
“That’s all right, Creed. That coffee up for grabs?”
Creed looked down at his hands. “Yes, sir.”
A couple of minutes later, the last of the crime scene people were just gone and Panos, Creed and Russell had gathered at the door to the office, in which Cuneo was now rummaging through the drawers in Silverman’s desk, bagging in Ziploc as possible evidence whatever struck his fancy. He had stopped humming, though now at regular intervals he slurped his hot coffee through the hole in the top of the plastic lid, loud and annoying as a kid’s last sip of milkshake through a straw.
Suddenly he looked up, the sight of other humans a mild shock. But he recovered, slurped, spoke to Panos. “You said he wasn’t your client anymore?”
“No. But he’d been for a long time.” Panos boosted himself onto Silverman’s desk and blew at his own brew. “I had to raise my rates last summer and he couldn’t hack them anymore. But ask Mr. Creed here, we still kept a lookout.”
Creed nodded. “Every pass.”
Cuneo moved and his folding chair creaked. “Every pass what?”
“Every pass I’d shine a light in.”
“No charge,” Panos put in. “Just watching out.”
“But he—Silverman—wasn’t paying you anymore?”
“Right.”
“So then”—Cuneo came forward, his elbows on his knees—“why are you here again?”
The question perplexed and perhaps annoyed Panos. He threw his black eyes over and up to Lincoln Russell, who stood with his arms crossed against the doorsill. But Russell just shrugged.
“The incident occurred on Mr. Creed’s shift, so he was obviously involved, and he was one of my men. Plus, as I say, I knew Sam, the deceased.”
“But this place isn’t technically in your beat? Thirty-two, isn’t it?” Cuneo sucked again at his coffee.
Panos straightened up his torso and crossed his arms. “Yeah, it’s Thirty-two. So what?”
Cuneo sat back in his chair. “So since the deceased is your friend and ex-client, you might know something more about this shop than your average joe off the street, isn’t that right? And if you do, what do you think might have happened here?”
Panos grunted. “Let me ask you one. Did either of you or any of the crime scene people find a red leather pouch here? Maybe on Sam?”
“What leather pouch?”
Panos held his hands about