Genuine Lies

gut hunch could guide a cop through the labyrinth of suspects, evidence, procedure. Never in his career could he remember his instincts being so dramatically opposed to the facts.
    They were all in front of him, in the fat file he’d been building over the past three days.
    Forensic reports, autopsy, the typed and signed statements of the people he or one of the other detectives had interviewed.
    And the timing, the goddamn timing couldn’t be ignored.
    Both the housekeeper and the secretary had seen Eve Benedict a few minutes before one P.M. on the date of the murder. Gloria DuBarry had left moments before, after a short private conversation with Eve. Julia Summers had arrived at the gate at approximately one, had chatted with the guard, then had gone inside. The emergency call from the guest house had been logged in at one twenty-two.
    Julia had no alibi for that vital length of time, that vital twenty-two minutes, when, according to the evidence, Eve Benedict had been murdered.
    The hook on the brass fireplace poker had impaled the base of her neck. That wound and the blow had resulted in death. Julia Summers’s fingerprints were the only ones found on the poker.
    All the doors had been locked except the main entrance, which Julia had admitted to opening herself. No keys had been found on Eve’s body.
    Circumstantial, certainly, but damning enough, even without the addition of the argument described in both statements.
    Being told she was Eve Benedict’s illegitimate daughter had apparently sent Julia Summers into a wild rage.
    “She was screaming, threatening,” he read from Travers’s statement. “I heard her shouting and came running out. She shoved over the table so that the china broke all over the tiles. Her face was pale as a sheet and she warned Eve not to come near her. Said she could kill her.”
    Of course, people said that kind of thing all the time, Frank thought, digging at an itch at the back of his neck. It was just their bad luck when somebody died hard on the heels of them using the common little phrase.
    Trouble was, he couldn’t think about luck. And with the pressure from the governor all the way down to his own captain, Frank couldn’t afford to let instinct sway him from the facts.
    He was going to have to bring Julia in for questioning.
    The lawyer cleared his throat as he scanned the room. Everything was exactly as Eve had requested it. Greenburg wondered if she could have known when she had demanded he put everything through so quickly that her time would be short.
    He pulled himself up. He wasn’t a fanciful man. Eve had been in a hurry because she had always been in a hurry. The ferocity with which she had approached this new will was the same she had shown for everything. The changes had certainly been brutally simple. That was another quality Eve could assert when the mood struck.
    When he started to speak, everyone in the room fell silent. Even Drake, in the process of pouring another drink, paused. When the statement began with the routine list of bequests to servants and charities, he continued to pour. Over the silence was the sound of liquid hitting crystal.
    The personal bequests were specific. To Maggie, Eve left a particular pair of emerald earrings and a triple rope of pearls, along with a Wyeth painting the agent had always admired.
    For Rory Winthrop, there was a pair of Dresden candlesticks they had purchased during their first year of marriage, and a volume of Keats.
    Gloria began to sob against her husband’s shoulder when she heard she had inherited an antique jewelry box.
    “We were in Sotheby’s, years ago,” she said brokenly. Guilt and grief waged a vicious war inside her. “And she outbid me for it. Oh, Marcus.”
    He murmured to her while Greenburg again cleared his throat and continued.
    To Nina she had left a collection of Limoges boxes and ten thousand dollars a year for every year she had been in Eve’s employ. To Travers she left a house in Monterey, the same financial bequest, and a trust fund for her son that would see to his medical needs for his lifetime.
    To her sister, who hadn’t attended the memorial or the reading, Eve left a small block of rental units. Drake was mentioned only in passing, as having received all of his inheritance during her lifetime.
    His reaction was predictable, predictable enough to bring grim smiles to some of those seated in the room. He spilled his drink, infusing the room with the smell of expensive