The First Law by John Lescroart Read Free Book Online Page B

eight inches apart. “About this big. Real old, maroon maybe more than red.”
    Cuneo glanced up and over at Russell, who shook his head. Cuneo spoke. “No pouch. What about it?”
    “No pouch makes it open and shut. What this was about, I mean.”
    Russell spoke from the doorsill. “And what is that?”
    “We’re listening,” Cuneo said.
    Panos shifted his weight on the desk. “All right,” he said. “First you should know that Thursdays was when Sam took his deposit to the bank.”
    “Every Thursday?” Russell asked.
    Panos nodded. “Clockwork. Everybody who knew him knew that. I used to walk with him myself over to the B of A. He put the cash in this pouch. It’s not here now.”
    “So,” Cuneo butted in, “he was going to the bank tonight, and somebody who knew him decided to take the pouch?”
    “Three guys,” Creed corrected. “One of ’em pretty big.”
    “Okay, three.” Cuneo hummed a long, unwavering note. “Must have been a lot of money, they were going to split it three ways.”
    “Might have been,” Panos said. “I wouldn’t know.”
    Cuneo indicated the surroundings. “This little place did that well?”
    Panos shrugged. “Wednesday nights they played poker here.”
    The two inspectors shared a glance. “Who did?” Russell asked.
    “Bunch of guys. It was a regular game for a lot of years. Sam took out ten bucks a hand for himself, except when he played blackjack, when he was the house.”
    Russell whistled softly. “Every hand?”
    Panos nodded. “That was the ante. Per guy. Per hand. Ten bucks.”
    A silence settled while they did the math. Cuneo hummed another long note. “Big game,” he said, pointing. “That’s the table then.”
    “Right.”
    “We’re going to need the players,” Russell said. “Did he keep a list?”
    “I doubt it,” Panos replied. “Knowing Sam, he kept them in his head. But I might be able to find out, and you can take it from there.”
    “We’d appreciate that.” Cuneo was making some notes on his pocket pad. “So they came in masked . . .”
    “They weren’t masked,” Creed said. “Not when they came out.”
    “They were when they came in,” Cuneo said. “Because Silverman knew them. They knew him and the setup here.” He pointed to the hidden video up above. “They knew about that, for example.”
    Panos stopped him. “How do you know about the masks?”
    Cuneo reached into his pocket and pulled out a gallon Ziploc bag into which he’d placed the one ski mask that had fallen to the floor.
    “Sons of bitches,” Panos said.
    “Who? “Cuneo asked.
    Panos’s jaw was tight, his heavy brow drawn in. “It’d be a better guess once we know who was at the game.”
    “All right,” Cuneo said, “but this is a homicide investigation. What you’ll do is give us a list of players at the game and we’ll work from that.”
    Panos nodded. “All right, but I’d appreciate it if you’d keep me in the loop. Whoever killed Sam, any way I can help you, count me in.”

3
    F or several years after the death of his first wife Flo, Glitsky had a live-in housekeeper—a woman born in Jalisco, Mexico, with the German name of Rita Schultz. She had slept in the living room of his duplex behind a shoji screen and had come, in her own way, to be almost one of the family. After the marriage, when Treya and her then sixteen-year-old daughter Raney had come to live with Glitsky and his sixteen-year-old son Orel, Rita wasn’t needed anymore and Glitsky, regretfully, had had to let her go.
    Now and for the past eight months since Treya had gone back to work at the DA’s office, Rita, no longer living in, was again at the Glitskys’ five days a week, taking care of the baby. Two months ago, the big kids had both gone off to college—Orel to his dad’s alma mater of San Jose State, and Raney all the way across the country to Johns Hopkins, where she’d gotten a full academic scholarship and planned to major in pre-med. The baby Rachel