I heard Sci say, “That’s right. I’m talking to Jack.”
Mitch Tandy’s face loomed, close up in my hand.
“I’m shutting down your live feed, Jack. But I don’t want to leave you hanging. There was a girl in the backseat of that Aston, sleeping off a party. That’s right. This time the firebug killed a human being. That changes things, doesn’t it, Jack.”
Chapter 45
MY ASSISTANT, VAL, was waiting for me on the steps outside the courthouse.
“Jack, Hal Archer has called four times in the last hour. I told him you’d call when you got out of court. But, you know. He didn’t want to talk to me.”
She handed me a folder of must-read documents regarding our upcoming pan-European office meeting. I thanked her, asked, “Did Archer say what he wanted?”
“‘Tell Jack to call me.’”
I walked her to her car, got into mine, checked Tommy’s location—his car was parked in the lot beneath his office building.
I called Hal Archer.
Archer owned Archer’s Prime, a chain of thirty steak restaurants up and down the coast. He was an empire builder and very adept at snapping his fingers. Archer had history at Private and was part of my inheritance from my father.
He answered the call as I pulled out onto Temple and into the sluggish heart of the afte
rnoon rush. I hardly recognized Hal’s voice. Sounded like he’d been crying.
“I’m afraid for my life, Morgan. It’s my wife. Tule. She’s going to kill me, but I have no proof.”
“Why do you think that she’s going to kill you?”
“She says things. She says to me, ‘Do you believe you can haunt me once you’re dead, Hal?’ Or, this I won’t forget, ‘It’s such a big bed, Hal. I can get used to sleeping in such a big bed alone.’”
“Okay. She’s giving you a hard time.”
“I don’t think you get it, Morgan. These are death threats.”
“But she hasn’t threatened you with a weapon?”
“She’s more subtle than that, damn it.”
“If you’re really afraid of her, you should speak to your lawyer, right? Get a divorce?”
I turned onto West Fifth Street, heading toward my office.
“A divorce will get her two hundred million. She’ll get twice as much if I die. She wants the big payoff. Before I decide to just hand her a two-hundred-million-dollar payout, I want you to come over to the house. Give her a good interrogation. What is it called? Sweat her. Scare the pants off her.”
I tried not to laugh at Hal Archer being scared by the Vegas showgirl he’d married last year. Anyone stood up to Hal, he got fired. But a hundred-and-ten-pound VIP cocktail waitress had Hal Archer by the balls and then some.
“This isn’t a good time, Hal. I have a meeting back in the office, and I’ve been away from my desk all day.”
“Listen, you. You’re on retainer. We have an ironclad contract. When I say come over to my house, you say, ‘I’ll be right there.’”
“Hal, I have prior commitments. I’m sorry. I’ll call you before I leave the office.”
I hung up.
I wondered if Hal’s wife was really trying to kill him by pushing his buttons. Not that hard to do. Hal had had a quadruple bypass in 2012. He could be one confrontation away from a heart attack.
I called Mo-bot, our resident computer genius, and asked her to download the surveillance footage on Tommy’s house and pull the cell-tower signals from Tommy’s phone.