Free Shadow of Power by Steve Martini Page B

pleasantries until he realizes that there is someone behind him, standing in his shadow. “This is my daughter, Sarah.” He turns to look, takes her hand, and shakes it as well.
    “So do you practice with your father?”
    “No. No. Just on vacation,” she says.
    “Oh, good, then it’s not all business.” He smiles, large and buoyant, an affable soul. We talk about the trip, the endless hassle that is now American air travel. Finally he motions us toward a set of double doors off the entry hall. “We can talk in here. Janice, maybe you can bring us some coffee. What would you like?”
    “Just some water,” I tell him.
    “Bottled water, Janice.”
    He asks Sarah, and she begs off again.
    He leads us through some double doors, what used to be the front parlor, now a sizable conference room with a large oval table in the center ringed by comfortable executive leather chairs. “Have a seat, wherever you want.”
    Bonguard settles into the chair at the small curve of the oval, the head of the table to my left. Sarah and I take the two closest chairs, our backs to the door, Bonguard to my left and Sarah on my right.
    “Is this the first time you’ve been to New York?” Bonguard asks her.
    “No. I’ve been here twice before. But I was pretty young.”
    “Then you have to stick around for a while and enjoy the city. Tell your dad to hold over for a few days, and I’ll get you some Broadway tickets,” he says.
    “That would be great.” Sarah’s ready to put the arm on me.
    “I wish we could. Unfortunately, business calls.” I am the ogre.
    “I regret that we have to meet under these circumstances,” he says.
    “I agree. I do appreciate your willingness to talk with me.”
    “Oh. No problem,” he says. “Why not? After all, you’re just doing your job. I can’t imagine how I can possibly help you, but ask away.”
    I know that the cops have already talked to him. This was reflected in the investigator’s notes immediately following the murder. They caught up with Bonguard before he could leave San Diego. I mention this.
    “Yes, I talked to them,” he says. “Not that I wouldn’t have cooperated, but they didn’t give me much choice. They threatened—” He stops, thinks for a moment. “‘Threatened’ may be too strong a word. They intimated that they might be compelled to name me as ‘a person of interest’ with the press if I didn’t tell them everything I knew.”
    A fact that of course was not in the investigator’s notes.
    This, according to Bonguard, was because he was the last person to see Scarborough alive, except for the killer.
    “You can imagine what that would have done to my business,” he says. “Half my clients would have bailed on me before morning.”
    I am packing a subpoena for Bonguard to appear at trial. It is in my coat pocket. Depending on what he says here, it may or may not stay there.
    “It was fortunate for you that the police landed on Carl Arnsberg so quickly,” I say.
    “One person’s misery is another’s relief,” he says. “But so that there’s no misunderstanding, I have no problem talking with you. I talked to the police, I’ll talk to you. Fair is fair,” he says. “So how can I help you?”
    “I suppose you knew Mr. Scarborough as well as anyone. Do you know anyone who might have wanted to kill him?”
    “Besides your client, you mean?”
    “My client had no reason to kill Mr. Scarborough.”
    “Of course.” He smiles at me. “Well, as to the issue of potential suspects, you might say that you have an embarrassment of riches. As you may have guessed by now, Terry was a man who went out of his way to collect enemies, most of them anonymous. I’m told that more than a little of his fan mail included death threats, though I suspect that most of these were from cranks who had no intention of carrying them out. Still, it may be grist for your mill,” he says. “As for me, the long and short of it is, I don’t have a clue as to who