Final Option

wanted to trade up from cleaning toilets. She thought that since Hexter and his wife fought all the time she might be able to interest him in some extracurricular activities.”
    “So who took the pictures?”
    “You’re going to love this,” replied Elliott. “Her sister. According to Elena, one sunny afternoon they just went outside and took some happy snaps. You’d better believe there were some guys in love with their jobs at the photo lab the day that film came in to be developed.”
    “But she says she and Hexter didn’t sleep together,” I interjected. “What a world. Do you think she’s telling the truth about seeing the gun in Hexter’s drawer? Could she be lying? An awful lot rests on that.”
    “Of course she could be lying,” conceded Elliott reluctantly. “And you can bet that when she gets on the witness stand Elkin will do his best to make her look like a scheming tramp who would be capable of anything. But that’s an old trick, using a woman’s sexual history against her. You know that just because she wanted to sleep with Bart Hexter doesn’t have anything to do with her being a liar. Besides, what would be the point? With Hexter dead, her hopes for any sort of arrangement with him were over.”
    “I still think she’s a troublemaker,” I said, “but I agree with you, I don’t see the profit for her in that kind of trouble.”
    “Just think of what Hexter must have looked like to a penniless girl from Guatemala.”
    “Or a penniless girl from downstate Illinois,” I pointed out.
    “That’s right. How did it go with Torey Lloyd? Is she on the level?”
    “It was very interesting. On one level her demands seem quite reasonable... considering.”
    “Considering what?”
    “Considering that when Hexter came to see her the Friday before he died he told her that he was going to leave his wife. He asked her to marry him and gave her an eighty-thousand-dollar engagement ring.”
    “You’re joking.”
    “Nope. She showed me the ring. Ruskowski’s the one who told me what it cost.”
    “What a dunk. The prosecutor is going to have the jury eating out of his hand. Now that all this has come out, I wonder whether Elkin will try to cut a deal and get Pamela to plead to a lesser charge.”
    “I hope not,” I said.
    “Why?”
    “Because I don’t think she killed him.” I told him what Stephen said about Hexter’s heart condition and Azor’s new drug, Ventrinome. I also confessed that Ruskowski remained unconvinced.
    “I don’t know,” said the private detective when I’d finished. “I think I’ll cast my vote with Ruskowski. You’d never be able to sell that heart thing to a jury.“
    “I’m not talking about what a jury will believe or not believe,” I insisted. “Juries watch too much TV. I’m talking about what really happened. You’ve only got to look at Pamela. She’s compulsive, a planner, a calculating woman, who, according to Carl Savage, was born wearing a green eyeshade. People like that don’t just pick up a gun and start shooting.”
    “Maybe Hexter finally pushed her too far,” countered Elliott. “Hexter wasn’t any prize to live with. Maybe this thing with Torey was just the last straw.”
    “Assuming that he told her. Besides, she’d been on the receiving end of his temper for all those years. You don’t think she’d thought about what would happen if he didn’t take his heart pills? Come on.”
    “So you buy her story that she didn’t know he had the gun? In her own house?”
    “You’ve seen that house. It’s so big there could be a band of gypsies living in the west wing and nobody would find them until spring cleaning. I bet there are rooms she hasn’t been inside of in years. She told me that the study was the only room in the house where Bart was allowed to smoke his cigars. If she hated the smoke, she probably didn’t go into the room. Besides, there’s something else going on that Ruskowski isn’t taking into consideration.”
    “What?”
    “The day that Hexter was shot he was supposed to give me account statements for his soybean trades and for another account, Deodar Commodities. Those documents have disappeared. So have the office backup copies. The computer files were dumped the morning after the murder. And another thing. I found a wad of cash in Hexter’s office. Pamela was incredibly cheap and Bart was a big spender. Just keeping Torey Lloyd was costing him a small fortune. Where was the money coming