Dismas Hardy walked hip-deep in green ice water, his rubber-gloved hands on the fins of a six-foot white shark.
Outside in the world, it was nearly two o’clock of an early summer morning, but here at the Steinhart there was no time. The overhead light reflected off the institutional green walls, clammy with distilled sea-sweat. Somewhere, out of the room, a motor throbbed dully.
The only noise in Hardy’s world was the steady slush and suck of the water curling behind him as he walked around and around, alone in the circular pool.
Pico Morales had called around seven to ask if he felt like doing some walking. When Pico called, it meant that some fishing boat had landed a great white shark and had contacted the Aquarium. The sharks bred just off the Farallons, and the Steinhart – or Pico, its curator -wanted a live one badly. The problem was that the beasts became so traumatised, or wounded, or both, after they were caught, that none survived. Too exhausted to move on their own, they had to be walked through the water so that they could breathe.
It was Hardy’s third and last hour-long shift tonight. He’d been spelled by a couple of other volunteers earlier, and Pico was due any minute, so Hardy just walked, unthinking, putting down one foot after another, dragging and pulling the half-dead monster along with him.
On his first break, he’d stripped off his wetsuit, changed and walked over to the Little Shamrock for a Guinness or two. Hardy’s brother-in-law, Frannie’s brother Moses McGuire had been off. Lynne Leish was working her normal Sunday shift behind the rail, and Hardy had taken his drink to the back and sat, speaking to no one.
On his next break, he’d gone out and climbed a fence into the Japanese Tea Garden. Sitting on a footbridge, he listened to the orchestrated trickle of the artificial stream that flowed between the bonsais and pagodas. The fog had been in, and it hadn’t made the evening any warmer.
Hardy wasn’t paying attention when Pico came in. Suddenly there he was at the side of the pool, his huge bulk straining his wetsuit to its limit. Pico had a large black drooping moustache that got wet every time he brought the steaming cup to his lips. ‘Hey, Diz.’
Hardy, willing his legs forward, looked up and grunted.
‘How’s the baby?’
Hardy kept moving. ‘Don’t know.’
Pico rested his cup on the edge of the pool and slid in. He shivered as the cold water came under his suit. Next time Hardy came around, Pico grabbed the shark and goosed its belly. ‘Let it go,’ he said.
Hardy walked another two steps, then released the fins. The shark turned ninety degrees and took a nosedive into the tiles on the bottom of the tank.
Pico sighed. Hardy leaned his elbows up against the rim of the pool. ‘Lack of family structure,’ Pico said. That’s what does it.‘
‘What does what?’ Hardy was breathing hard.
‘I don’t think they have much will to live, these guys. You know, abandoned at birth, left to fend for themselves. Probably turn to drugs, run with a bad crowd, eat junk food. Time we get ’em, they’re just plum licked.‘
Hardy nodded. ‘Good theory.’
Pico, in the bottoms of his wetsuit, his enormous stomach protruding like a tumor, sat on the lip of the tank, sipping coffee and brandy. Hardy was out of the pool. The shark hung still in the water, its nose on the bottom. Without saying anything, Pico handed his mug to Hardy.
‘We’re doing something wrong, Peek.’
Pico nodded. ‘Follow that reasoning, Diz. You’re onto something.’
‘They do keep dying, don’t they?’
‘I think this one OD’d. Probably mainlining.’ He grabbed the mug back. ‘Fucking shark drug addicts.’
‘Lack of family structure,’ Hardy said.
‘Yeah.’ Pico plopped in and walked over to the shark. ‘Want to help hoist this sucker out and stroll through his guts? Further the cause of science?’
Hardy emptied Pico’s coffee mug, sighed and brought the gurney over. Pico had tied a rope around the shark’s tail and slung it over a pulley in the ceiling. Suddenly, the tail twitched and Pico jumped back as if stung. ‘Spasmodic crackhead shark rapists!’
‘You sure it’s just a spasm?’ Hardy didn’t want to cut the thing up if it wasn’t dead yet.
‘It isn’t the cha-cha, Diz. Pull on that thing, will you?’
Hardy pulled and the shark came out of the water, slow and heavy. Hardy guided it onto the gurney. He waited while Pico hauled himself out of the pool.
‘I am reminded of a poem,’ Hardy said. ‘Winter and spring, summer and fall, you look like a basketball.’
Pico ignored him and reached for his coffee mug. ‘Need I take this abuse from someone who steals my coffee?’
‘There was coffee in that?’
‘And a little brandy. Cuts the aftertaste.’
They flipped the shark on its back. Pico went into his office and came out a minute later with a scalpel. He traced a line up the shark’s belly to its gills, laying open the stomach cavity. Slicing a strip of flesh, he held it up to Hardy. ‘Want some sushi?’
The tank gurgled. Hardy leaned over the gurney, careful not to block the light, while Pico cut. He reached into the stomach and began pulling things out – two or three small fish, a piece of driftwood, a rubber ball, a tin can.
‘Junk food,’ Pico muttered.
‘Leave out the food part,’ Hardy said.
Pico reached back in and brought out something that looked like a starfish. He pulled it up, looking at it quizzically.
‘What’s that?’ Hardy asked.
‘I don’t know. It looks -’ Then, as though he’d been bit, Pico screamed, jumped back, throwing the object to the floor.
Hardy walked over to look.
Partially digested and covered with slime, it was still recognizable for what it was – a human hand, severed at the wrist, the first finger missing, and on the pinkie, a sea-green jade ring.
Hardy expected that the guys in blue would be first on the scene. He would likely know them from the Shamrock, where the police dropped in frequently enough to keep the presence alive. Sometimes your Irish bar will get a little rowdy and it helped to have the heat appear casually to remind patrons that a certain minimum standard of decorous behaviour would be maintained.
For the better part of nine years, Hardy had been the daytime bartender at the Little Shamrock. He’d only been back in the D.A.‘s office for four months now, since Rebecca had been born and he and Frannie had gotten married.
Hardy and his onetime boss, current friend, partner and brother-in-law Moses McGuire were both reasonable hands with the shillelagh of Kentucky ash that hung behind the bar under the cash register. McGuire, Doctor of Philosophy, in his cups himself, had twice thrown people through the front window of the Shamrock. Most other times, the forced exit was, Old West fashion, through the swinging double doors. Neither Hardy nor Moses was quick on the 86 – no good publican was – but both of them had needed assistance from the beat cops from time to time. The Shamrock wasn’t a ‘cop bar,’ but the guys from Park Station had trouble paying for drinks if they stopped in during off hours.
Hardy stood just inside the front entrance to the Aquarium. The black and white pulled up, the searchlight on the car scanning the front of the building. From the street to the entrance was a twenty-yard expanse of open cement at 2:15 of a pitch-dark morning. Hardy didn’t blame them for the caution. He stepped outside.
They walked back behind the tanks in the damp hallway. Bathed in a faint greenish overhead light, the two cops followed Hardy amid the burps and gurglings of the Aquarium. He did know them – Dan Soper and Bobby Varela, a fullback and a sprinter. Hardy thought the three of them made a parade: the give of leather, slap of holster, clomp of heavy shoes, jingle of cuffs and keys – beat cops weren’t dressed for ambush. It reminded Hardy of his days on the force, walking a beat with Abe Glitsky.
He had been a different guy back then. Now he felt older, almost protective of these cops. The beat was the beginning.
They came into what Hardy called the walking room. Pico had changed into a turtleneck and sportcoat, though he still wore his swim trunks. He stared emptily straight ahead, sitting on the edge of the pool next to the gurney that held the shark.
‘Find anything else?’ Hardy asked.
Pico let himself off the pool’s lip, withering Hardy with a look. After the introductions, Varela walked over to the hand, still lying where Pico had thrown it. ‘That what it looks like?’
‘That’s what it is,’ Hardy said.
‘Where’d you get this shark?’ Soper asked. ‘Hey, Bobby!’ Varela was poking at the hand with a pencil. ‘Leave it, would you?’
Pico told Soper how the shark had come to the Steinhart. Soper wanted to know the fishing boat’s name, captain, time of capture, all that. Hardy walked over to Varela, who was still hunched over, and stood over him.
‘Pretty weird, huh?’
Varela looked back over his shoulder, straightening. ‘Naw, we get these three, four times a week.’
‘I wonder if the guy drowned?’
Varela couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the thing.
‘You’d hope so, wouldn’t you? How’d you like to have been alive instead?’
Soper had passed them, going into Pico’s office to use the telephone. Pico came over. ‘He’s getting some crime-lab people down here. No way am I putting my hand in that guy again.’
Varela shivered. ‘I don’t blame you.’ He walked back to the shark and gingerly lifted the incision along its stomach with his pencil. ‘Can’t see much.’
There’s more in there,‘ Pico said. ’We’d just started.‘
Varela stepped back. ‘Dan’s right. I think we’ll just wait.’
Hardy stared down at the hand. ‘I wonder who it was,’ he said.
‘Oh, we’ll find out soon enough,’ Varela said.
Pico leaned back against the pool. ‘How can you be sure?’ he said. ‘It could be anybody.’
‘Yeah, but we’ve got one major clue.’
‘What’s that?’ Pico asked.
Hardy turned. ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘Fingerprints.’
Hardy lifted his red-rimmed eyes from the folder he was studying. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, and last night had been a long one, ending around sunrise. He’d driven home from the Steinhart, changed into a new brown suit, looked in at Frannie curled up in their bed, at Rebecca sleeping in the new room he’d built onto the back of the house, and headed downtown where he now worked as an assistant district attorney on the third floor of the Hall of Justice on Seventh and Bryant.
The job wasn’t going very well. The case he was laboring over now, like the others he was currently prosecuting, came from the lower rungs of the criminal ladder. This one involved a prostitute who’d been caught by an undercover cop posing as a tourist wandering around Union Square. The girl – Esme Aiella – was twenty-two, black, two priors. She was out on $500 bail and was, even now, as Hardy read, probably out hustling.
Hardy was wondering what purpose this all served. Or the bust of a city employee, Derek Graham, who sold lids of marijuana on the side. Hardy had known guys like Derek in college, and very few of them went on to become ringleaders in, say, the Medellin cartel. Derek had three kids, lived in the Mission and was trying to make ends meet so his wife could stay home with the kids.
Still, this was Hardy’s job now – nailing the petty malefactors, the lowlifes, the unlucky or the foolish. This wasn’t the high drama of the passionate crime, the romance of big deals gone crooked, beautiful people desperately denying their libidos, their greed, their shallowness. No, this was down below the stage lights, where the denizens lived on the slimy border of the law, slipping over the line, not even seeing it, trying to get a little money, a little power, a little edge, maybe even some release, some fun in a life story that wasn’t ever going to make it past the footlights. Mostly, Hardy thought, it was sad.
Hardy had thought, perhaps unrealistically, that coming back to work as an assistant district attorney he wouldn’t have to deal with this level again. He was, after all, nearly forty now, and he’d done his apprenticeship with the D.A. ten years ago. Back when he started, he’d had to work through the issue of whether he could morally prosecute the so-called victimless crimes – hookers, casual dopers. Somewhere in his heart, he believed that these crimes weren’t as real as the ones that hurt people. He tended to believe that if grown-ups wanted to get laid or get high or get dead by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge, society should let them. God knows, it had enough truly bad things to correct. Why waste the time on this pettiness?
But this, he knew, wasn’t a good attitude. His job was to prosecute people who broke the law. Whether they had done anything he considered wrong was moot.
And he was a new hire, only brought on because he’d left with a few friends, like Chief Assistant D.A. Art Drysdale. Also, he suspected, although he didn’t know for certain, that his ex-father-in-law, Superior Court Judge Andy Fowler, had put in a good word for him.
He hadn’t actively practiced law in ten years. He’d been a bartender, was still part owner of the Shamrock, and he really couldn’t expect guys who’d made a linear career of criminal law to step aside while the new guy got the hot cases.
Of course, even if he were doing murders – the fun stuff- the majority of them were NHI cases – ‘no humans involved.’ It was a pretty apt term. Lowlifes killing each other for reasons that would be laughable – they were laughable – if they weren’t so tragic…
This morning, Hardy had run into Arnie Tiano and Elizabeth Pullios in the hallway, laughing so hard their sides hurt.
‘…so this poor son of a bitch, the victim, Leon, he’s trying to get some hubcaps back on this car in the middle of the day. It’s his car. Red, you know, an old Ford. So the perp, Germaine, sees him, comes out and asks what he thinks he’s doing messing with his, Germaine’s, car, which in truth is parked around the corner. Looks a lot like Leon’s car, I guess. Same model, red and all. But Germaine is so loaded he can’t see that well, and Leon says fuck off, it’s my car, which it is. So Germaine goes inside and comes out with a gun, and Leon says, “What you gonna do, shoot me?” and Germaine says, “Yeah,” and pumps four shots into him.’
Pullios howls. ‘Get out of here!’
‘Swear to God, I mean, there’s ten witnesses hanging around the curb and this guy just blows Leon away, walks back inside and takes a nap, which is what he’s doing when we get there.’
Both Arnie and Elizabeth laughing, laughing, laughing.
But it beat bartending.
Not that there was anything wrong with bartending. Working behind the rail was an uncomplicated and stress-free life. He’d taken pride in the way he mixed drinks, getting along with everybody, sleepwalking.
Then suddenly it wasn’t enough. Wasn’t nearly enough. After he’d broken his routine, once trying to help the Cochrans, once trying to save his own life, he realized that he’d changed. Survival wasn’t enough. He’d fallen in love. His new wife now had a baby that he’d treat as his own even if it wasn’t.
There was a future again, not a succession of days in half a Guinness haze. It surprised him how good it felt.
The time behind the bar had begun to weigh heavily. The regulars, the pickups at the bar, the stupid Irish fights over darts or whether Jameson, was better than that Protestant piss Bushmills. It was all the same ol‘ same ol’, the alcohol discussions laden with a profundity that never stood the scrutiny of the next sunrise.
So it was back to the law, to a real job, to something he cared about to go with the new life he was building.
Frannie was pregnant again, too.
The coroner’s office was in the same building Hardy worked in, on the ground floor. To wheel the gurneys in, there was easy access from the parking lot. The public could enter without being frisked, without going through the detector at the back door to the Hall of Justice.
Hardy was sitting on one of the yellow plastic chairs in the outer office. It was four-thirty and he was meeting Esme’s attorney at five in his office, so he took a break and decided to go check on the hand.
The receptionist was one of those rare marvels of civil service. Sixto was about twenty-five, wore a tie and slacks, combed his hair, spoke English politely and with some grammatical precision. A miracle.
‘I don’t think they’ve found anything yet, Mr Hardy,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t been a good day. Mondays never are.’
‘Bad weekend?’
Sixto nodded. ‘Two homicides. This drive-by stuff. What gets into people?’ There wasn’t any answer to that and Sixto didn’t expect one. ‘So I doubt if they’ve gotten to anything with the hand, but I’ll keep on it, okay? I’ll let you know.’
Hardy thanked him and got up. Outside the door, in the June fog, he stopped to take in the parking lot, the freeway blocking the horizon to his right, which was starting to sound like rush hour. Walking toward him from the back door were Detective Sergeant Abe Glitsky and Chief A.D.A. Art Drysdale.
‘Guys,’ Hardy said, nodding.
The guys were not in good humor. Coming abreast of him, Drysdale said, ‘We don’t want to talk about it.’
‘The hand?’
Glitsky, as big, black and mean looking as the lanky, white Drysdale seemed benign, snapped, ‘What hand?’ He reached behind Hardy and pulled at the door.
‘We’re not talking,’ Drysdale said.
They were walking in the door. That’s what I like,‘ Hardy said, ’the free and easy flow of information, the genial give and take of ideas…‘
The door had closed on him. Hardy stood a moment, shrugged, and went up to meet Esme’s attorney.
Aaron Jaans crossed spit-shined shoes over his well-creased pants, showing a bit of the red garter that held black socks halfway up his calf. The thought crossed Hardy’s mind that Jaans might be Esme’s pimp as well as her attorney. Hardy didn’t have any moral problem about prosecuting pimps. He hated pimps.
‘I guess the basic problem here is the priors,’ Hardy said. ‘Esme doesn’t seem to be getting the message.’
Jaans leaned onto the back legs of the chair across from Hardy’s desk. He pulled the cuff of his pants down over the distracting garter. The lawyer had a broad, elastic, dark black face, high forehead, aquiline nose, straight hair starting to go a little gray. There was still a trace of a rogue British accent from somewhere.
‘She’s a working girl, Mr Hardy, and you and I both know that you can arrest her every other day and she’s still going to go on the street when she’s out.’
‘Not if she’s in jail she won’t.’
Jaans rolled his eyes, but quickly, deciding against too much histrionics. ‘In jail?’
‘We’ve got felony grand theft here. Four hundred and sixteen dollars. That’s jail.’
Jaans leaned forward again, elbows on his knees. ‘Mr Hardy, you and I know that no judge wants this kind of rap going to trial. Clogs the docket horrible. It also ties up your vice witness for the better part of a day or two, gets him off the street and what good is he doing? You start taking all these people to trial… well, you know this as well as I do.’
Hardy was getting a little tired of the civics lesson. He shuffled the folder in front of him, pretended to be reading. ‘The offer,’ he said, ‘is felony probation, ninety days in jail or a five-thousand-dollar fine.’
‘Are you serious?’
Hardy nodded. ‘Yep.’
‘Is there some new policy going down?’
Hardy shook his head.
‘Where’s my client going to get five thousand dollars? Do you think she’s going to go out and get a job typing somewhere? Managing a McDonald’s? She won’t do that. She has no skills, Mr Hardy. You know what she’ll do, don’t you? She’ll have to be on her back for a month to make that kind of money. Do you want that?’
‘I’m sure her pimp could get her that money in two and a half seconds. But she’s not talking about her pimp. She says she doesn’t have a pimp. So, I ask myself, how can we get a handle on this pimp, close up his shop?’
Jaans took a breath. ‘You know, Mr Hardy, some of these pimps are not nice men, I grant you, but they do provide protection for their girls, abortions if they need them, that kind of thing.’
‘They’re keeping their assets productive, that’s all. Simple business.’
‘You know how long a lone girl on the street is going to last?’
‘You’re telling me that pimps are solid citizens, is that it?’
Jaans turned his palms up. ‘They provide a service.’
Hardy leaned forward, fingers laced, elbows on his desk. ‘What they do, Mr Jaans, what pimps do,’ he paused, ‘as you and I both know, is take these ignorant, poor, sad, really helpless women and keep them degraded, stoned, and on their backs until their looks go at twenty-five. After which their life span, due to needles and disease and just generally getting the shit beaten out of them, is about six months.’ Hardy took a breath, calming himself down. ‘So maybe this five thousand will make Esme decide to give up her pimp, and then maybe I can have a little fun.’
Jaans nodded. He uncrossed his legs, stood up and reached his hand over the desk. Hardy, surprised, got up himself, hesitated, then decided to take it. ‘I’ll convey your offer to my client,’ Jaans said.
He stopped at the door, turned, raised a finger to make a point, then decided against it and disappeared into the hallway.
Lou the Greek’s was a restaurant and watering hole for cops and D.A.s, across the street from the Hall of Justice. Lou was married to a Chinese woman who did the cooking, so the place served an eclectic menu of egg rolls, chow mein, shaslik, rice pilaf, hot and sour soup, baklava and fortune cookies. Occasionally Lou’s special would be something like Kung Pao pita pockets or pot-sticker kabobs.
There were two bars, standing room only, at the front and back walls. Now, at five-thirty, the din was ferocious. An arm-wrestling contest was going on in the center of the room, twenty or thirty cops screaming, trying to get their bets in.
Drysdale and Glitsky huddled over an ancient Pong machine by the back door. Hardy pushed his way through the crowd. Drysdale was ahead, eight to six. Neither of the men looked up.
‘Boo,’ Hardy said.
Glitsky looked up for an instant, but it was long enough for the blip to get by him. ‘Damn.’
‘Nine six,’ Drysdale said. ‘Gotta pay attention.’
‘Just play,’ Glitsky growled.
Hardy watched the blip move back and forth. Both of these guys were good, playing at the master level, and the blip really moved. Hardy went to the bar, elbowed his way in and ordered a pint of cranberry juice, lots of ice.
Back at the Pong game, Glitsky glowered in defeat. Drysdale sat back in his chair, legs crossed, savoring a beer. Hardy squatted, checking out the final score of eleven to six. ‘You owe me five bucks,’ Glitsky told him.
Drysdale sipped his beer. ‘He never beats me anyway. I wouldn’t pay him.’
‘Can we talk about the hand?’
‘What hand?’
Hardy looked at Drysdale. ‘What hand, he says.’
Drysdale ran it down for Abe, who had spent the day interviewing family members of a murdered old man. The hand wasn’t the most compelling item of the day for him.
‘So who is it?’ Glitsky asked when he’d finished.
Drysdale shrugged. ‘Some guy,’ he said. Then, to Hardy, ‘What’s to talk about?’
‘How about if he was killed?’
‘How about it?’
‘You think he was killed?’ Glitsky asked.
‘I think he’s dead at least. How he got that way I don’t know. I wondered if you’d heard anything.’
‘I heard a good new song the other day,’ Glitsky said.
Hardy turned to Drysdale. ‘I thought the coroner might have come up with something.’
Drysdale frowned. ‘I doubt he’s even looked at it.’
‘It sounded like Garth Brooks, but it could have been Merle Haggard. A lot of these country guys sound the same to me.’
Hardy chewed some ice. ‘Yeah, well, if it does turn out to be a homicide, I wouldn’t mind drawing the case.’
‘Homicide’s a pretty long shot,’ Drysdale said. ‘Guy might have drowned, anything.’
‘I know. I just wanted to put the word in.’
Drysdale thought about the proposal. ‘You haven’t had a murder yet, have you, Diz?’
Hardy shook his head. ‘Not close.’
‘It could have been Randy Travis, though,’ Glitsky said. ‘Sometimes when he sings low he sounds a little like the Hag.’
Drysdale appeared to think hard a minute. Glitsky was humming the first few bars of his song. Finally Drysdale looked at the last inch of beer in his glass and finished it off. ‘Sounds fair,’ he said to Hardy. ‘You found it. If it’s a murder, it’s your case.’
Glitsky stopped humming. ‘Hardy makes the big time,’ he said, reining in his natural enthusiasm.
Hardy fished in his pocket and dropped a couple of quarters into the console in front of him. ‘Have another game,’ he said to Drysdale, ‘and this time let him win.’
Hardy sat on the Navajo rug on the floor of his living room, way up at the front of the house. His adopted daughter Rebecca was in his lap, her tiny hand picking at the buttons of his shirt. In the fireplace, some oak burned. Outside, the cocoon of fog that wrapped the house was darkening by degrees. Up in the kitchen, he heard Frannie humming, doing the dishes from their dinner.
The room, like the rest of the house, had changed with Frannie’s arrival. Previously, Hardy had lived almost exclusively in his back rooms – the kitchen, his bedroom, the office. His house was in the old Victorian ‘railroad’ style, living room up front, a dining room, then a small utility room, all of which opened to the right off a long hallway that ended at the kitchen.
While Hardy had designed and built the back room for Rebecca, Frannie had painted and redecorated the front rooms, brightening them up in white with dusty rose accents. Hardy’s nautical theme pieces, such as they were, were banished to his office. Now, on the mantel in place of the dusty old blowfish, was an exquisite caravan of Venetian blown-glass elephants. A framed DaVinci poster, a study of horses, graced the wall to the left of the fireplace. On the right, Frannie had filled the built-in bookshelves with hardcovers from Hardy’s office -Barbara Tuchman, Hardy’s complete Wambaugh collection, most of Steinbeck, Marquez, Jack London. Four new lamps filled the corners with light.
Hardy took it all in – the plants, the dark sheen of the cherry dining-room furniture, his baby girl. It seemed nearly impossible to him that all of this was so comfortable now, so right. Frannie came through the dining room and stood leaning against the doorpost. Her long red hair glinted in the light from the fire. She wore jeans and a Stanford sweatshirt, white Reeboks.
‘You were so quiet,’ she said.
Hardy rested a flat palm against Rebecca’s stomach, feeling the heart pumping. ‘I don’t think I was home once this time of night when I was bartending.’
‘You miss it?’
‘Bartending?’ He shook his head. ‘No. It’s funny. I used to think I was addicted to it – you know, the noise and the action. Now I’m sitting here, the fire pops and that’s plenty.’
She came over and sat down, Indian-style, across from him. She ran a finger up her daughter’s leg, left her hand there. ‘Aren’t you tired? Did you sleep at all last night?’
Hardy shrugged. ‘As Mr Zevon says, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’
Frannie didn’t like hearing that. Rebecca’s biological father, Eddie Cochran – Frannie’s husband – had been killed just about a year ago.
Hardy sensed it. He put his hand over hers. ‘In truth, I am severely fatigued.’
As Frannie got up to pull the curtains over the bay window, the doorbell rang. ‘We don’t want any,’ Hardy said.
‘I know.’ Frannie went to the door.
Jeff Elliot knew news when he saw it, and if a human hand turning up in a shark’s belly didn’t deserve more than a graph on the back page, he’d eat his press card.
He knew that a good percentage of all the great stories -Watergate, Lincoln Savings, Pete Rose – had begun as tiny drops in the vast pool of information that came to a paper every day. And what made those drops congeal to a trickle that became a flood had been the reporters who viewed the news as their canvas. News happened, sure, but what made the news a story was what excited him. You couldn’t make things up, but you could manufacture interest, an angle, a hook. That’s what made a good reporter. And Jeff knew he had the gift – his bosses just hadn’t seen it yet.
So things weren’t moving as quickly for him as he’d hoped. In college in Wisconsin, he’d been the editor of the paper, then three years at the Akron Clarion, and finally his big break, the San Francisco Chronicle. But now he’d been on the coast for seven months, and he was amazed that even here in the big city, so little came in via the police incidence reports – the IRs – that was even remotely sexy.
And that’s what he’d been doing – the lowest dog work, checking over the IRs, looking for a lead, a grabber, a story. And then, today, finally, the hand.
He balanced his crutches against the doorway to ring the bell. Almost immediately, the door opened to a very pretty red-haired woman in a Stanford sweatshirt. The house smelled of oak and baking bread. He gave his little waif grin.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he said, ‘but is this where Dismas Hardy lives? I’m Jeff Elliot with the Chronicle and I’d just like to ask him a few questions.’
‘It’s interesting you should ask that,’ Hardy said. ‘It came up just today downtown.’
‘What came up, the homicide question?’
They’d moved into the dining room, and Frannie had poured a black and tan – Guinness and ale in two layers -for her husband. The reporter, really not much more than a kid with a pair of bad legs, had a cup of coffee. Frannie, pregnant, had a glass of water and sat quietly nursing Rebecca, listening.
‘Well, the odds are good that whoever it is, he’s probably recently dead. It could be a straight drowning, but we had to consider the fact that somebody killed this guy and dumped him in the ocean.’
The reporter had his dictaphone on the table between them.
‘But,’ Hardy said, ‘we’re still a long way from knowing that. I don’t believe the coroner’s even had a chance to examine the thing yet. At least he hadn’t by the time I left the office.’
‘Is that normal?’
‘Well, if there was a body to go with it, he’d have done something I’m sure. But we haven’t got anything from Missing Persons, at least not yet. They’re checking other jurisdictions, I’m sure.’ Hardy shrugged. ‘It’s a process, that’s all. They’ll get to it.’
Frannie finished nursing and went to the back of the house to put down the sleeping infant. When she got back, Dismas had finished his beer and she could tell by his look that he was fading. He hadn’t slept, after all, in two days.
They were talking about Pico Morales pulling out the hand, back at the Aquarium. Frannie went around behind Dismas, massaged his shoulders and cleared her throat. ‘I’m afraid this news conference has got to come to an end. I’ve got a tired man here who’s too macho to admit it.’
‘Oh gosh!’ Jeff Elliot looked at his watch, flicked off the tape machine. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you. I’ve got to get this story written and filed, anyway.’
‘I’m afraid it’s not much new as a story.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve just got a feeling about this one. It’s somebody’s hand, for gosh sake.’
Hardy nodded. ‘You got a card? I’ll let you know if we find something.’
D.A. CALLS MYSTERY HAND A HOMICIDE
by Jeffrey Elliot
Chronicle Staff Writer
An assistant district attorney conceded last night that the grisly find on Sunday of a human hand wearing a jade ring was a homicide.
The hand was discovered in the stomach of a great white shark – the same animal featured in the movie Jaws - that had been delivered alive to the Steinhart Aquarium over the weekend.
Assistant District Attorney Dismas Hardy, who coincidentally had been present at the Aquarium when the hand was discovered, said the D.A.‘s office was looking into the matter. ’Somebody killed this guy and dumped him in the ocean,‘ Hardy said.
To date, there are no leads on the victim’s identity. Hardy acknowledged that authorities were checking with other jurisdictions in the area.
Although the coroner has not yet performed any tests on the hand, Hardy appeared confident that the victim would soon be identified and an investigation into the probable murder begun.
‘It’s a process,’ Hardy said. ‘They’ll get there.’
Christopher Locke was fifty-two years old and the first African-American ever elected district attorney of the City and County of San Francisco. Locke thought his job essentially took place in the rarefied air of policy. He lobbied hard for the death penalty, for example. He determined whether there would be a crackdown on graffiti prosecutions, on gay bashing in the Mission district; he worked with the police department on coordinating the work of the Gang Task Force. He went to a lot of lunches, spoke both inside the city and around the state on issues involving law enforcement.
Locke’s longtime ally and best friend (to the extent it was possible to have one) was Art Drysdale, with whom he entrusted much of the day-to-day running of the office. Art was fair and firm, too outspoken to be a political rival, a good administrator and even better lawyer. The last thing Locke had time for, or wanted to do, was interact with his junior staff.
But here he was this Tuesday morning awaiting the arrival of Dismas Hardy, four months in the office. Hardy’s file lay next to the Chronicle, open on his desk in front of him.
It didn’t seem to Locke to be much of an article, but it had evidently been enough to prompt a call from some homicide lieutenant to the police chief himself, Dan Rigby, who in turn had deemed it important enough to call Locke at home before he’d had his coffee. Then, fifteen minutes later, he’d gotten another call from John Strout, the coroner, asking what the hell this homicide business was all about.
Drysdale had thought he’d just run down and tell Hardy to button it, but Locke had promised Rigby he’d handle the matter personally, so here he was.
Dorothy buzzed, and a minute later Hardy let himself through the door. Locke remembered him from when he’d welcomed him to the office – a formality about which Locke was punctilious. At the time, Locke had briefly wondered how Drysdale had found an opening on the staff for a male Caucasian.
Hardy wasn’t a kid by any means. This was his second time around with the D.A. He should know better.
‘Don’t sit down, Hardy. This won’t take long.’ Locke busied himself for a moment with Hardy’s file. Without looking up, he said, ‘I notice you’ve got seventeen specially assigned prelims’ – preliminary hearings -’you’re supposed to be prosecuting.‘
‘Yes, sir, that’s about right.’
‘That’s exactly right, according to your file. Am I missing something?’
‘I hadn’t counted them.’
‘Perhaps prelim work isn’t worthy of your time.’
Hardy stood in the classic at-ease position. ‘This is about the article.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘That’s right. It’s about the article.’
‘The quote was out of context.’
‘It happens all the time. I’m wondering why you found it proper to be discussing this matter with the press at all.’
‘I found the hand. I thought the reporter was going for something a little more human interest.’
‘It doesn’t appear he was. It appears you got yourself sandbagged.’
‘Yes, sir, it does.’
‘So I’ve instructed Mr Drysdale to send a little more prelim work your way. The way we do it, we like to have our attorneys work on the cases they get assigned, is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Mr Drysdale will be doing the assigning.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And it would be good policy and a good habit to acquire if you prefaced any remarks you ever make to a reporter with the words “This is off the record.” Understood?’
Hardy nodded and agreed until he was dismissed.
Though Hardy didn’t like him, Aaron Jaans was a decent, even well-respected, attorney. In response to what he considered Hardy’s outrageous offer, he had requested that they talk to a judge in superior court rather than municipal court, before there was even a preliminary hearing to determine whether Hardy’s offer would be made to stick. As a courtesy, Hardy had complied with the request.
Now they were in Judge Andy Fowler’s courtroom and Esme Aiella stood before the bench, next to Aaron Jaans. She was wearing a skin-tight blue tube that began an inch above her nipples and ended four inches below her crotch. Her hair had been straightened and dyed a shade of red that did not occur in nature.
‘Ms Aiella,’ the judge was saying, ‘the facts of this case seem to speak for themselves, but before I make any ruling whatever, I want to hear from you that you are not interested in reducing grand theft, the charge against you, from a felony to a misdemeanor.’
Esme stood silent, her hand to her mouth.
‘Ms Aiella!’
‘I don’t believe you asked her a question, Your Honor.’
Fowler glared at Aaron Jaans, threw a glance at Dismas Hardy, who was standing to Jaans’ right, then spoke again, looking directly at Esme. ‘Ms Aiella, the court directs you to speak up. Can you hear me clearly?’
The woman nodded.
‘Would you please use words? Can you hear me clearly?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Your Honor, my client -’
Fowler held up his palm. ‘Mr Jaans, I am speaking to your client directly, is that clear?’ Without waiting for a response, the judge continued. ‘Now, Ms Aiella, you are in a bad situation here. I must tell you that the charge of grand theft is very serious. If you are convicted, there will not just be a fine, there is the possibility – the very real possibility – of going to prison. Do you understand?’
The hand came away from her mouth. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you care about that?’
She shrugged. ‘It don’t matter.’
‘Going to prison doesn’t matter?’
Esme shrugged again.
Fowler looked over at Hardy. Clearly, it didn’t matter. Lecturing, arguing or threatening wasn’t going to make any difference. The judge’s eyes roamed the back of the courtroom for a moment, then he brought down his gavel. He indicated that Hardy follow him to his chambers. The court will take a brief recess.‘
‘There’s no hope,’ the judge said. It was a statement so atypical of Andrew Bryan Fowler that Hardy couldn’t immediately reply. There was nothing about the judge that suggested he could ever think there was no hope. He looked, as always, terrific. His thick black hair was peppered with enough gray to suggest wisdom, but not at the expense of advanced age. As a teenager he’d modeled for the Sears catalog, and his tanned face still had those fine All-American lines. His gray-blue eyes were penetrating, chin strong, teeth perfect, nose straight.
Andy’s handmade blue dress shirt was wrinkle-free, even under his robes, and the gold cufflinks customized with his initials, ABF, provided just the right tone for a judge.
The cufflinks were often visible as Fowler sat on the bench, his fingers templed at his lips, listening to an argument he would later recall nearly verbatim. The cufflinks added to what the Romans had called gravitas -the nearly indescribable quality that rendered a man’s acts and judgments significant. On the bench, His Honor Andy Fowler possessed gravitas in spades.
Here, in his chambers or at home, it was different, but not so very different. Hardy hung out around the house in jeans and a sweatshirt – in his bartending days, he’d been happy in tennis shoes, old corduroys, t-shirts. Even now, in one of his three new suits, Hardy was aware of the knot of his tie at his Adam’s apple. Andy, by contrast, would arrive at a Sunday barbeque in pressed khakis, tasseled cordovan loafers, dress shirt and blazer, sometimes with a tie. When Andy played tennis, which he did well and often at the Olympic Club, he wore whites. Hardy guessed he slept in tailored pyjamas and wore a bathrobe and slippers to have his coffee alone in his kitchen.
Hardy picked the paperweight off the desk. It was a strange and beautiful piece of light-green jade, nearly translucent, oddly shaped, with sea birds and whales etched in light relief on the highly polished surface.
Fowler was hanging his robe in the corner. He turned around. ‘I don’t like to do this to you, but even without this girl’s cooperation, we’re not going with felony grand theft on this.’
‘We’re not? Why not?’
‘Because this kind of entrapment will not wash in my department, Diz. Chris Locke knows this. Art Drysdale knows it. I don’t know why they keep sending these turkeys up here to Superior Court.’
The judge was getting to be infamous around the Hall for his views on entrapment. His popularity, once very high, had suffered for it, but he was opposed to putting people away for crimes he thought they wouldn’t have committed without a push from the police.
‘The woman,’ he said, ‘picks up a John in Union Square and they go to his hotel room. The television set in the room is, surprise, really a video camera, and when our boy goes out of the room to the bathroom, we get a lovely picture of Esme Aiella taking his wallet, which happens to contain just enough American dollars to constitute what the law calls grand theft.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘Because I like you, I run a bluff like I just did. Who knows, maybe she’ll give up her pimp. But she’s not going to give up her pimp – there’s no way. So now this goes back to what it is – a misdemeanor prostitution that should not take up time in my courtroom.’
‘She did steal the money, Andy.’
‘Diz, they all steal. Why do you think prostitution’s illegal in the first place?’
‘So we just fine her and forget it?’
Fowler’s shoulders sagged. ‘Every single day of the year we fine ’em and forget ‘em. There’s just no hope,’ he repeated.
The heft and balance of the paperweight felt incredibly good. Hardy sat down with it, passing it back and forth in his hands. The judge walked to one of the two windows behind his desk and crossed his hands behind his back.
Hardy got up, put the paperweight back in its spot and went and stood next to the man who’d been his father-in-law for five years. ‘Andy, are you all right?’
The judge sighed. ‘Sure, I’m fine.’ He flicked his smile back on. ‘See?’
Fowler didn’t talk about there being no hope, but if he didn’t want to talk at the moment, Hardy wasn’t going to push it. ‘So what about next time with Esme Aiella? Don’t we ever get the hammer?’
The judge stared at nothing out his grimy window. ‘Cure her, you mean?’ His laugh was more a bitter snort. Fowler parted the shades of his window as if looking for something. Not seeing it, he moved back to his desk, into his red leather chair. ‘A girl like Esme, all the girls like Esme, they’re turning tricks because nothing matters anyway. Their pimp is their father. He beats them and sleeps with them.’
‘You think Esme’s father was sleeping with her?’
Fowler reached for the paperweight now himself, nodding. ‘Or her brother, or uncle, or all of the above. Women in the trade, they were broken in at home. And on the flip side, if their daddy was screwing them, even if they don’t go into it full-time, they’ll turn a trick or two. It’s cheap psychology, but it’s in every profile.’
Hardy knew it was true. He remembered the interview he’d read where some reporter had asked a prostitute whether she had been abused as a child. And the woman had laughed. That was her response – laughter that the guy could be so dumb as to even ask that question. ‘Honey,’ she’d replied, ‘not “abused”. Fucked, hit, messed with, and that’s everybody I know. Every single girl in the trade.’
‘So there’s no hope,’ Hardy said.
‘I wouldn’t hold my breath.’ The judge absently cupped the paperweight in his hand, bouncing it with a dull thump on the desktop.
A minute had passed. Fowler continued to tap the paperweight against the desk. Then, as if they’d been talking about it all along, he said. ‘Yeah, something’s eating me, I suppose.’ He put the jade down, swiveled in his chair. ‘I’m not myself, Diz. I feel like an old clock who’s run out of spring.’
‘How long’s it been since you’ve had a vacation?’
Fowler snorted. ‘A real vacation? A year ago August. But I just spent last weekend in the Sierras, put some miles on the hiking boots, didn’t see a soul.’ Fowler put the paperweight down. ‘Here I am back in civilization and it doesn’t seem to have helped a bit.’
Hardy nodded. ‘Couple of years ago, I was feeling the same way, so I went on the wagon and flew down to Cabo for two weeks.’
‘Did that make you feel better?’
‘Not at all.’
Fowler smiled. ‘Well, that’s a big help. Thanks.’
‘It did pass, though. Other stuff came up.’
‘Yeah, I know. The problem is, life keeps going on while you’re waiting for that other stuff.’ Suddenly, almost with a jolt, the judge straightened up. ‘Oh, listen to me. A little case of the blues and His Honor becomes maudlin.’
‘His Honor’s allowed to get down just like anybody else. You getting out at all? Having any fun? Want to come over and see my new family, have some dinner?’
‘I don’t think so, Diz, but thanks. I’d keep seeing you with Jane, thinking about what might have been.’ Hardy’s first marriage, to the judge’s daughter, had ended in divorce. ‘If you want to play some squash though, I’d be happy to whip you at the Olympic.’ Fowler was up now, going back to his robes.
Hardy reached over and picked up the paperweight again. ‘Deal,’ he said. Then, ‘Where’d you get this thing?’
Fowler turned. ‘What -?’ But seeing what, his face darkened, uncontrolled for a second. ‘Why don’t you take it?’ he said.
Hardy went to put it down. ‘No, I can’t -’
‘Diz, take the damn thing. Put it in your pocket. I don’t want to see it anymore.’
‘Andy -’
‘Come on, Diz, let’s pack it up. I’ve got a courtroom waiting for my august presence.’ He brushed by in a swish of robes. Stopping at the door, he held it open for Hardy. ‘I’ll call you when I get a court. For squash.’
True to his word, Locke saw that Hardy got more prelims. Five new special assignments were in his box when he got back from court. He sighed, pulled the paperweight from his pocket and picked up the telephone. The files could wait.
Jane Fowler worked as a buyer for I. Magnin. She was getting ready to go out to lunch, but she took his call. He hadn’t talked to her since his marriage to Frannie – which he thought was understandable. The idea of platonic friendship with an ex-spouse made them both uncomfortable, and the last time they’d seen each other, before Hardy and Frannie had gotten engaged, they slept together, which also didn’t make things easier.
Hardy and Jane had loved each other for several years. They had had a lot of good times, then had endured the death of their son together. But after that, Hardy had lost faith in everything, and if a marriage needed anything, it was faith.
So they’d gotten divorced. Then, after nearly a decade’s separation, they’d reconnected for a few months, long enough for them both to realize that another try at marriage wouldn’t work. They wanted different things out of life now, and if they were still attracted to one another, Hardy thought it would be bad luck to confuse that with what he had with Frannie.
Jane sounded as she always did – refined and composed. Shades of her father.
‘I’m glad you called,’ she said. ‘I’ve missed you. It’s okay to miss you a little, isn’t it? Are you all right? Is everything okay?’
Hardy laughed. ‘I’m fine, Jane. Everything’s peachy with me, but I just got out of a meeting with your dad. Have you seen him recently?’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I almost called you about it last week, but I didn’t know how you’d feel about that. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.’
‘You can call me, Jane. What’s going on with Andy?’
‘I don’t really know. I’m really a little worried. He asked me over to his house for dinner last week and he was so distracted or depressed. Slower. I thought maybe he was just showing his age finally.’
‘He wasn’t any slower from the bench. It was only back in chambers, on his own time.’
‘I thought he might have had a small stroke or something.’
‘Did you ask him?’
Jane laughed. ‘You know Daddy. The Great Deny-er. He’s picking at his food, hardly talking, and I ask him if he’s all right, and of course he’s just fine, couldn’t be better. And then he got drunk.’
‘Andy got drunk?’
‘You remember the time you and Moses drank a watermelon full of gin? The answer is no, you don’t remember anything about it.’
‘I remember the hangover.’
‘Okay, that, but up till the last time I saw Daddy, I’d never seen anybody so drunk since then.’
Hardy whistled. The watermelon drunk had become part of Moses and Hardy lore. If Andy Fowler had gotten that drunk, he was not himself. Something was seriously wrong.
‘Did he give you any idea what was bothering him?’
‘No. He just said he deserved a little fun in his life. What was the matter with a judge being human too? Then he started drinking cognac, talking about Mom and when I was a baby and all the decisions he’d made not to have fun while he got to be a lawyer and a judge and now his life was almost over… Anyway, finally he just got all slurry and I put him to bed.’ The line was silent for a second. ‘I’m glad you noticed something, too. It wasn’t just me.’
‘No. I don’t think it was just you. Anyway, I’m here to help if something comes up. Just so you know. Maybe I’ll play some squash with him, feel him out a little.’
There was another pause. ‘Thanks for calling,’ she said. ‘We’re still friends?’
‘We’re still friends. We’re always friends, Jane.’
After they hung up, Hardy took the jade paperweight out of his pocket and put it on his desk. Why would Andy have just given him – hell, not just given, demanded he take – such a beautiful piece?
Well, enough about Andy Fowler, he thought. Time to go to work. He reached for the new case folders and pulled them in front of him. He opened the first one – a DUI, driving under the influence, the influence in this case being alcohol. Eleventh offense. Level of point nine, which last year wasn’t illegal. Hardy closed the file, squared the small stack on the middle of his desk, put the paperweight on top of it and decided to go to lunch.
Art Drysdale was juggling baseballs in his office. In his youth, he’d played a couple of weeks as a utility man for the San Francisco Giants, capping a five-year career in professional baseball before turning to the law. Now he coached a Police Athletic League teenage baseball team and played a little B-League men’s softball at nights.
He liked juggling. He could do it blindfolded if he had to. It also tended to disarm anyone watching him, such as Dismas Hardy, who was standing in the doorway in the early afternoon.
‘Pretty great stuff you threw me there,’ Hardy said. ‘There’s even one guy who might have done something wrong, as opposed to illegal.’
Art kept juggling, not looking at the balls. ‘Illegal is wrong. D.A.’s Handbook, Chapter One.‘
‘I like the woman who didn’t use her pooper scooper. We ought to really throw the book at her.’
‘Doggy doo on the street.’ Drysdale gathered the balls in, held them in one huge hand. ‘Heck of a nuisance. We’ve got to enforce those leash laws. Next thing you know packs of wild hounds are destroying our society.’
Hardy came in and sat down. ‘But seriously, Art -’
‘No, but seriously, Diz.’ He moved forward in his chair. ‘You are not making friends here. Friends is how we like to do it. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. It’s a big office, what with the police and the D.A. and the Coroner all here in one big happy building. Now, in one swell foop you have pissed off Rigby, Strout and Locke. This is not good politics.’
‘Politics is not -’
Drysdale held up a hand and three baseballs. ‘I know you’ve been out of the desk-job environment a while now, but any office, I don’t care where, call it what you want, there is politics. Cooperation gets things done. You alienate the chiefs of three departments, I guaran-goddamn-tee you, you will not have job satisfaction.’
‘I don’t suppose it matters that everything the reporter said was taken out of context?’
‘Oh, that matters. You still got your job, so it matters that much. But it’s close. I’d go mend some fences if I were you. Work hard, impress people with your enthusiasm to get convictions on your cases, like that.’
Hardy stood up. ‘This gives a whole new meaning to helping clean up the streets, you know.’
Drysdale allowed himself a smile. ‘Maybe the hand’ll turn into something.’ The baseballs flew back up into the air.
Hardy stopped in the doorway. ‘Maybe the hand’ll turn into something.’
Drysdale nodded, his attention split at best. ‘Could happen,’ he said. ‘Could happen.’
At four o’clock, Hardy called it quits and went over to Lou the Greek’s.
It had been a long afternoon. John Strout, the coroner, was a courtly Southern gentleman who accepted Hardy’s apology with apparent sincerity, although Sixto’s clipped and formal greeting at the desk indicated that there had been some harsh feelings earlier in the day.
The chief of police, John Rigby, wasn’t available, so Hardy scheduled an appointment with him for the next afternoon. The police sergeant who served as Rigby’s secretary took the opportunity to gently remind Hardy that homicides were usually determined by police work, after which they were passed up to the D.A.‘s office.
Hardy tried to cheer himself with the argument that he had very quickly passed through the just-another-face-in-the-crowd stage at work. Everyone in the building seemed to know who he was. It wasn’t much consolation.
He wrote a memo to Locke that he threw in the wastebasket. There wasn’t any fence to mend with Locke. He figured he’d either get a good conviction record and move up, or not get one and move out. There was a fine line between kissing ass and mending fences.
At Lou’s, Hardy sat alone at the bar, spinning the jade paperweight. He was nursing a black and tan when a tall, very attractive woman pulled up the stool next to him. Hardy had never spoken to her before, but he knew who she was. She put a hand on his shoulder, leaned close and told him not to let the bastards get him down.
He dropped the jade into his pocket as she flashed him a mouthful of teeth and extended the hand that had been on his shoulder. ‘Elizabeth Pullios. You’re Dismas Hardy.’
‘Guilty.’ Hardy took the warm, fine hand. ‘Which seems to be today’s magic word.’
Pullios might not be the best-looking woman in the D.A.‘s office, Hardy thought, but she thought she was and so occasionally really could be. Perhaps five foot eight, with shoulder-length chestnut hair that shone even in the dim light at Lou’s, she had a big nose, a generous mouth, deep-set eyes and high cheekbones. She wore a brush of tasteful makeup, just enough to set off the angles and highlight the eyes.
‘Guilty is every day’s magic word,’ she said. She signaled Lou behind the bar for a drink, then came back to Hardy. ‘Ruffled the brass feathers, huh? Art told me about it.’
‘Art told me about it, too.’
‘You get reamed?’
Hardy managed a wry smile. ‘I can still sit down. But I think I’ll pass on talking to reporters for a while.’
‘No, don’t,’ she said. Her drink arrived, a double Scotch mist from the looks of it, and she drank half of it in a gulp. ‘Don’t stop talking to anybody. They’re just trying to bust your balls. Talk to anybody you can use.’
‘Who’s trying to bust my balls?’
‘Locke and Art. You’re new and that’s what they do. Find out what you’re made of. They play the bureaucrat game ’cause it’s their control mechanism. Which sometimes is good for some people, but if you want some kick-ass cases, don’t let ‘em stop you. If you’re good in front of a jury, everything’s forgiven, believe me.’
It was coming back to Hardy, the story on Elizabeth Pullios. She was known as a ballbreaker in her own right. She delighted in prosecuting – did it with a singular passion. It was said, more than half truthfully, that she favored the death penalty for car theft, pickpocketing, purse-snatching. She had been married during her first few years as a D.A. to a guy in the office, and when he accepted a better job in private practice on the defense side, she had divorced him. She couldn’t live with a defense attorney, she said. They were the scum of the earth – worse, almost, than defendants.
Now the word was she’d have you if you were good enough.
So Hardy was forewarned. He figured he could talk to her safely enough. He was, after all, in love with Frannie. ‘I’m afraid this reporter Elliot kind of used me instead of vice versa,’ he said.
She shrugged that off. ‘Look, that’s what reporters do. But they can also keep a case hot. A lot of us have been known to leak stuff- just don’t let your name out.’
‘That message was pretty clear.’
Pullios finished her drink and signaled Lou again. ‘Buy you another?’ she asked.
Hardy wasn’t half through his first, but an old-hand bartender like himself could nurse a couple of brews along for as long as he needed. ‘Did Art ask you to talk to me?’
‘No, but he told me you were frustrated about your work. I put a little together and I hate to see new guys get shafted. It’s bad for all of us.’ The round of drinks came. Hardy and Pullios clicked glasses. ‘To the good guys,’ she said. ‘That’s us, Hardy, remember that. That’s always us.’
Hardy was out of Lou’s before five. There was a steady cool breeze coming off the Bay and it threw some grit up into his face and eyes as he walked down the alley next to the Hall of Justice.
Detective Sergeant Abraham Glitsky was sitting on the hood of Hardy’s Suzuki Samurai. ‘If you’re going home I could use a drop-off,’ he said. ‘My city-owned vehicle is once again on the blink. Why is there never enough money to keep things working?’
‘I’ve got a better one – what accounts for your jolly high spirits lately?’
Glitsky slid off the car, letting out a breath. ‘I know,’ he said. Hardy passed by him and unlocked the passenger door. ‘Too many dead guys, I guess. You go see enough bodies a day, you smile less. It’s a proven fact.’
It brought Hardy up short. His desire to get interesting cases – murders – tended in some way to reduce their horror especially after his chat with Elizabeth Pullios. But most of the time on his job he was in ‘suspect’ mode, where he had a perpetrator he was trying to convict. It was easy to forget that half of Glitsky’s job was concerned with victims – families, friends, mourning.
Hardy got in his seat and started the engine. Glitsky shook his head. ‘One of the weekend drive-bys was a kid about Isaac’s age.’ Isaac was the eldest of Glitsky’s three children, a twelve-year-old. ‘Even looked a little like him, except for the hole in his forehead.’
Even after a few months on the job, Hardy hadn’t developed a taste for cop humor. He didn’t know if he wanted to – it rarely made anyone laugh.
They rode in silence for a minute, heading west into the sun. Finally Hardy said, ‘I’m waiting.’
‘For what?’
‘Your two cents’ worth.’
Glitsky squinted into the sunset. ‘And I’d love to give it, as I know you’re often in need of my counsel and advice. But I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.’
‘The hand being a homicide.’
‘That was you, huh? I was afraid it was you.’
‘You didn’t see it?’
Glitsky shook his head. ‘I didn’t get to the paper today. But some guys were talking about this jerkoff D. A.’
‘Yeah. That was me.’
‘Well, look at the bright side like I always do. Maybe it was a homicide, maybe you’ll get the case, win it, get a big conviction, become D.A., run for governor, win that -’
‘Here’s your stop,’ Hardy said. ‘You need a lift in the morning?’
‘I’ll bet it’s a woman,’ Frannie said.
‘Not Andy Fowler.’
‘You wait and see. It’s a woman. The paperweight was a gift from a woman that he isn’t seeing. She broke up with him and suddenly he couldn’t bear to see it anymore. It reminded him too much of her and she’d broken his heart.’
‘I knew I shouldn’t let you stay home all day. You’ve gotten addicted to the soaps, haven’t you?’
‘Dismas.’
‘My finely honed prosecutorial skills have wheedled the truth from you at last.’
‘Jesus,’ Frannie said, ‘I have never watched a soap opera in my life and you know it.’
‘I’m not so sure anymore,’ Hardy said. ‘The soaring language – “Andy couldn’t bear it. She’d broken his heart.” And all that from a piece of jade.’ He looked across the table at his wife. Her green eyes looked nearly black in the candlelight.
They were in the dining room, finishing up a meal of filet mignon with bearnaise sauce, new potatoes, and string beans that Frannie had cooked in olive oil and garlic. Hardy was half through a bottle of good California cabernet.
‘Okay, Sherlock, but I’ve known Andy for fifteen years, and he doesn’t have girlfriends.’
‘That you have known about.’
‘You’d think I would have gotten some inkling once or twice.’
‘Maybe he just keeps that separate. Especially from Jane. Maybe Jane would be hurt.’
‘Why would Jane be hurt?’
‘I don’t know. Her mother’s memory.’
Hardy shook his head. ‘Not after all this time. I’m sure she’d want her dad to have some love life.’
Tm not so sure of that. Maybe he just thinks it’s better to be discreet. I mean, he is a public figure. If he went through a succession of women…‘
‘Now it’s a succession. The guy didn’t keep a harem, Frannie.’
‘He might have. How would you know?’
‘I know him.’
Frannie smiled. ‘You wait.’
Hardy moved the last morsel of his rare filet around in the remainder of the sauce. ‘I’ll wait,’ he said. ‘This is very bad for my cholesterol, you know.’
‘I notice you’re struggling with it. How did Jane sound?’
Hardy swallowed his food, took a sip of wine. ‘Jane was all right.’ He reached across and covered Frannie’s hand with his own. ‘Jane’s okay, and we don’t have any secrets, you and me, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Come around here.’
She pulled away, still smiling. ‘No.’
‘Would you please come around here?’ Hardy pushed his chair back, and Frannie came around the table and sat on his lap.
‘Since you asked so nice,’ she said. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him thoroughly for the better part of a minute.
Hardy stood up, carrying her, and walked through the kitchen into the bedroom.
The Chronicle building was at Fifth and Mission, about six blocks from the Hall of Justice. Hardy walked through the morning fog, which did a lot more than chill the air, and while Tony Bennett might not care, he was probably one of the very few who didn’t. Hardy gave away a few bucks in change to some homeless people who sat against the buildings on Third, wrapped in newspapers or old blankets, shivering. By the time he got to the Chronicle, his bones felt brittle and old.
Jeff Elliot anchored one of the newer desks in a cavernous room that smelled like an old school. His crutches were propped against the desk, all too visible. Propped as in prop, Hardy thought. He was turned to face a video terminal and was talking on the telephone when Hardy got to his desk.
‘All of this is off the record,’ he began.
Elliot turned, saw Hardy, held up a finger and continued talking into the mouthpiece.
Hardy continued right on. ‘When I got into work this morning, I wasn’t as mad as I was yesterday, but pretty close. Did I mention this is off the record?’
Elliot muttered something into the telephone, hung up and turned squarely to face Hardy. He didn’t look so young nor so friendly as he had at Hardy’s house two days earlier. His face, still boyish, looked sallow and wan, as though he hadn’t slept in a couple of days. The dishwater hair hung lank and long, over the ears. His tie was loosened at his throat, although his shirt was fresh.
‘Mr Hardy,’ he said, sticking out his hand over the desk.
Hardy ignored the hand. ‘Off the record. Everything I ever say to you again. Completely and absolutely off the record. Is that clear?’
Elliot, to his credit, didn’t bluff much, though he did try his sheepish grin. ‘My editor wouldn’t run the story without a source. You didn’t tell me not to use your name.’
Hardy held up a hand. ‘I don’t care about your politics. There’s enough where I work.’
Elliot shrugged. ‘I needed the -’
Hardy stopped him. ‘You could have accomplished the same thing being straight with me. I’m a pretty reasonable guy, but I am truly a bad enemy.’
Elliot was sitting farther back, eyes wide. ‘If that’s a threat,’ he said, then stopped.
To his surprise, Hardy noticed Elliot’s hands were shaking on the desk. The boy was scared. Something in Hardy wanted to go for the jugular, but he had liked Elliot at his house and the shaking hands made him lose the stomach for it.
He sat down, put his arms and elbows on the desk. ‘It’s no threat. It’s a tip, that’s all. Don’t make enemies you don’t need to. This is the big city. People play for keeps, even nice guys like me.’ Hardy flashed him a grin. ‘Now I’d like you to do me a favor.’
Elliot came slowly forward. ‘If I can. I guess I owe you one.’
‘That’s the right guess,’ Hardy said.
‘Owen Nash.’ Jeff Elliot’s voice was thick with excitement.
‘Where are you now?’ Hardy, at his desk, pushed away one of the case folders and swirled on his chair to look out the window. Gray on gray. He had asked Elliot to go to Missing Persons and check to see if either a large woman or a man – someone with a full-sized hand – had been reported missing.
‘I’m downstairs. The call just came in this morning.’
‘The timing’s right,’ Hardy said. Missing Persons would not get involved with a person’s disappearance until three days had passed.
‘Right. Well, this was called in by a guy, wait a sec, a guy named Ken Farris, phone number, you got a pencil?’
Hardy took the number. ‘Owen Nash, and this number. Anything else?’
‘They’ve got nine missing kids and three skipped or missing wives – all of them within the range of normal size. But Owen Nash is the only missing adult male this week. That’s not so common. It’s a real start.’
‘It’s a start, maybe, and that’s all it is, Jeff. And it’s a big, big maybe.’
‘Still,’ Elliot said. ‘But why couldn’t you just come down and ask around?’
Hardy sighed. Why get into it? ‘Politics,’ he said. ‘But it was a good idea. I wish it had been mine.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘You don’t do anything. I start a little follow-up and you wait until I call you, got it? And I might not.’
‘But if there’s a story?’
‘It’s yours. That’s the deal.’
Hardy hadn’t intended to mention anything to anybody, but Drysdale poked his head in through his door the minute he hung up. ‘Just making the rounds,’ he said. ‘You better today?’
‘They’ve got a missing adult male.’
Drysdale frowned, leaning on the door. ‘Who does?’
‘Missing Persons.’
‘Does this directly relate to one of the two dozen folders I see so prominently displayed on your desk?’
‘Not even indirectly.’ Hardy smiled.
Drysdale let himself in the door and pulled it closed after him. ‘Diz, do yourself a favor, would you? Clear a few of these.’ He picked up part of the stack of files and dropped it on the middle of the desk. ‘Give me some numbers so I can point to your caseload and say, “This guy’s been a horse in the minors, let’s give him a shot at the big time.” ’
Hardy spun the jade paperweight, now doing its appointed task on his desk. ‘Okay, Art. Okay.’
‘Thank you.’ Drysdale started to go, but Hardy called him back. ‘Can you tell me anything about Elizabeth Pullios?’
‘I can tell you a lot about her. Why?’
‘She kind of gave me a pep talk yesterday, out of the blue.’
‘Maybe she thinks you’re cute.’
‘I got the feeling she doesn’t need to seek out men.’
Drysdale nodded, leaning against the doorpost. He had his hands in his pockets, one leg crossed over the other, relaxation incarnate. ‘No, she does not need to seek out men.’
‘So what’s her story? Why’s she such a red-hot?’
Checking the hallway behind him, Drysdale pulled the door shut and straddled one of the chairs facing Hardy’s desk, looking out the window at the gray behind him. He took a breath. ‘Her mother was raped and killed by a guy who’d been on parole three days. He’d been a model prisoner, in for rape. Served four years when they let him out for good behavior. I think it left her with an impression.’
Hardy whistled.
‘Well, I guess we’re all motivated by something, but some of the staff think Pullios takes it a little far.’ Drysdale stood up and stretched. ‘Anyway, the fact remains, I want to put somebody away, I’d go with her every time. Don’t get personal with her, though. She’s very one-track.’
Hardy held up his left hand, the one with Frannie’s ring. ‘I’m a newlywed, Art. I’m not in the market.’
‘I wouldn’t bet that’s a big issue with her.’
Hardy’s first move after his superior left was to pick up the telephone and dial the number Jeff Elliot had given him – Ken Farris, the man who had reported the missing person, Owen Nash. A sultry-voiced receptionist got crisp and efficient when Hardy said he was from the D.A.‘s office. He patched him through immediately.
‘This is Ken Farris. Who am I talking to?’
Hardy told him. There was a pause.
‘I don’t understand. You’re with the San Francisco district attorney’s office? Is Owen in jail?’
The telephone beeped.
‘If that’s your call waiting -’
Farris cut him off. ‘We record all our phone calls here. Is that a problem?’ He didn’t wait for a response. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but what’s the D.A. got to do with Owen being missing? Is he alive, please just tell me that?’
‘I don’t know that, Mr Farris.’ He heard a deep exhalation – relief or frustration, he couldn’t tell which, and didn’t want to wait to find out. ‘What I’m calling about, how I’m involved here, has to do with a hand that turned up in a shark’s belly.’
Hardy could almost hear Farris’s brain changing gears. ‘The one in the Chronicle? I read about that. What has that got to do with Owen?’
‘Maybe nothing. Mr Nash is a missing male, and the hand may be from an elderly male.’
‘What do you mean, might be? Did the paper have that? You think the hand might be Owen’s?’
‘I think it might be worth a look, that’s all. There might be some bit of skin with something you’d recognize, the shape of a fingernail, something. The fingerprints are gone, but…’
‘Don’t I remember something about a ring?’
Hardy nodded into the phone. ‘There was a jade ring on the little finger.’
The phone beeped again. All their calls? Hardy thought.
Farris was curt. ‘Then it wasn’t Owen. He wore a gold wedding band on his left hand, but no other jewelry. What hand was it?’
‘It’s a right hand.’
‘Well, it isn’t Owen then. That’s definite.’ Farris sighed again, letting out some more pressure. ‘Thank God.’
Derek Graham had been a maintenance man in sewers for thirteen years. He was a forty-year-old Caucasian male supervisor with a wife and three children. As a tenured city employee, he was immune to just about anything that might threaten his job, but the political reality was that a white management person who lost his job in San Francisco would find it filled immediately by a member of any one of the myriad minority groups San Francisco called its own. Already, Hardy knew, the sharks were circling, and a righteous drug-bust conviction could put Derek not only in jail but on the street.
For while it was still only a $100 misdemeanor to smoke marijuana in San Francisco, possession of anything over an ounce was interpreted as intent to sell and that was a felony.
Derek’s city-issued Chevrolet Caprice with its ‘Buy America’ bumper sticker had a burned-out brake light. This turned out to be bad luck for Derek. He had just finished half a joint so he could get home a little relaxed and not snap at his kids when a patrol car pulled him over, the officer had smelled that smell and, with his olfactory evidence as probable cause, had searched the Caprice and found roughly eight ounces of sensimilla in the trunk.
This led to a search of Derek’s house and the discovery of the hydroponic garden in the basement. Derek was in a lot of trouble, and he was very worried about it. ‘Look,’ he told Hardy, ‘I can’t lose my job.’ He was in Hardy’s office with his court-appointed attorney, a young woman named Gina Roake. Ms Roake hadn’t said a word since introducing Derek to Hardy five minutes earlier. Hardy had addressed his remarks to her at first, but Derek kept butting in, so Hardy went to the horse’s mouth.
‘Losing your job isn’t the half of it,’ he said.
Derek was six feet tall and weighed, Hardy figured, about one-eighty-five. He had a handsome, clean-shaven face topped by a businessman’s haircut. For this meeting, at which he wasn’t particularly welcome by either attorney, he’d chosen not to wear a tie. But in dress slacks and a pressed button-down checkered shirt, he looked more than presentable. He could have been applying for a job at a construction site.
‘It’s not like I’ve done anything criminal. Hell,’ he said to Hardy, ‘you work for the city, what do you make?’
‘Growing dope is criminal,’ Hardy answered, ‘and my salary is irrelevant.’
‘I could look it up, but say it’s forty-five.’ Derek continued without pause. Hardy made $52,000 a year in his new job, and he let his suspect go on. ‘You got kids?’
Hardy nodded.
‘Well, then, you know. You can’t make it on forty-five. Here I work for the city fifteen years -’
‘The file says thirteen.’
‘So split a hair. Thirteen. I work here thirteen years full-time and my wife and I are trying to raise three kids right, so she can stay home with ’em. Why have kids if you’re not going to raise them yourself, right? I got no record before this. I’m not whining, I’m just telling you the truth.‘
‘Raising your kids right includes marijuana horticulture?’ Hardy asked.
‘My oldest kid is seven. The grass is a second job, that’s all it is.’
There wasn’t any doubt of that. Hardy made his fifty-two, but he owned one quarter of the Little Shamrock and that brought in another grand or so a month, plus Frannie had a quarter-of-a-million-dollar insurance policy from her first husband’s death, which they were saving for the kids’ college. But at least if they really needed it, it was there. Hardy knew what Derek was saying – it was hard to make it on one salary in these times.
But Hardy, right now, was a prosecutor. He remembered Art Drysdale’s words, Illegal is wrong. He said, ‘You should have thought of that when you planted your garden.’ Not liking himself very much.
‘Who am I hurting? Tell me that. I’m no dealer. I got eight guys I off-load a key on.’
Hardy held up a hand. ‘Now we’re talking. Any of these people have names?’
Derek just shook his head. ‘Come on, man, these are normal people like me and you. How old are you, forty? Tell me you didn’t smoke a little weed in college.’
Hardy couldn’t tell him that. He didn’t know many people of his generation, including many on the police force, who hadn’t had a hit or two of marijuana at one time or another. To him it was a nonissue. But, here he was, playing at – no, being – the law.
Suddenly he turned and spoke directly to Ms Roake. ‘Could we have a conference, please?’ He looked pointedly at Derek. ‘There’s a reason the court appoints an attorney. The coffee shop’s down on one.’
When he’d gone, Hardy closed the file. ‘Ms Roake. Gina, may I call you Gina? What does he want?’
‘He doesn’t want to lose his job, I think.’
‘Is there an automatic administrative removal on conviction? There’s no question the plea is guilty, am I right?’
‘The question is the charge.’ Gina gave him a tight little smile. ‘Misdemeanor, I don’t think so, but if we’re talking felony, he’s fired.’ Gina seemed to be about twenty, although she must have been older. She bit her lower lip. ‘I really think he just wanted the money to help his family.’
Hardy fairly snapped at her. ‘People rob banks and kill people all the time to get money for their families.’ Gina stiffened visibly, and Hardy backed off. ‘Look, I don’t mean to jump all over you, but let’s not play his game. The guy was growing a good amount of dope, and that’s illegal. How about you think up some heavy misdemeanor that will satisfy me? I mean a good one. He pleads to that, pays a heavy fine, does some community service, I’ll try to sell that to my boss, and your man keeps his job.’
Gina’s dark eyes brightened. ‘You’d do that?’
‘He goes near marijuana again – even a little recreational joint – and we’ll crucify him, clear?’
She nodded her head, holding her hands tightly together in her lap, as though she were congratulating herself. ‘Oh, yes, yes. That’s wonderful.’
She got up from the chair in a shush of nylons, shook Hardy’s hand, thanking him, and went out the door before he could change his mind.
He’d just handed one to the defense. He wondered what Elizabeth Pullios would say about that. On second thought, he didn’t have to wonder – he knew what she’d say.
Thinking on that, he crossed his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling, brown water stains on the acoustic tile. ‘Wonderful,’ he said.
On the way into work Hardy had told Glitsky that his wife was coming downtown to meet him for lunch. Now his friend Abe was sitting in the snack bar, holding Rebecca, Frannie across from him laughing at something.
Frannie’s face, her laughter, still had the power to make him forget the bad things life could dish out – it was more amazing to him that she could laugh at all. Only a little over a year before, someone had shot her husband in the head, leaving her a twenty-five-year-old pregnant widow drenched in the gall of that sorrow.
He stood a moment, one step into the employees’ lunchroom, and took in the sight – Frannie’s glowing face, the life in it.
Somehow, Hardy, who had known his own tragedy when he’d lost his infant son years before, and Frannie had gotten together, and suddenly the backward-looking emptiness had changed its direction and its essence. Now they were together; they looked ahead.
Hardy slid in next to Frannie and kissed her.
‘John Strout is a funny guy,’ Glitsky said. ‘I was just telling Frannie.’
‘When did you see our fine coroner?’
‘I see him too much as it is, but this morning I thought I’d do you a little legwork.’
‘Abe does a great Southern accent,’ Frannie said.
‘Wha thenk y’all, ma’am. Jest tryn’ ketch the good doctuh’s flavuh, so to speak.‘ Abe switched back to his own voice. ’You may have got him mad, Diz, but he looked at the hand. I figured it would be easier for me to ask about it than you. Just routine. Is it a likely homicide or not?‘
‘And what’d he say?’
‘He said the guy might have done some karate, maybe some board breaking. There were calcium deposits on the knuckle of the middle finger and the little finger had two healed breaks. Oh, and the pad opposite the thumb was a little thick.’
‘That all?’
‘That’s a lot, Diz. Plus he did die recently. Rigor had come and gone, but Strout thought it was still a fresh hand.’
‘I love it when you guys talk shop,’ Frannie said.
Hardy took his wife’s hand. ‘It’s a glamorous profession. Nothing else could have lured me back.’ Then to Abe, ‘It wasn’t a cadaver, then?’
Glitsky shook his head. ‘Strout’s checked all the local med schools.’ He looked at Frannie. ‘Every couple years some med students steal a body and play some games. This doesn’t look like one of them.’
‘So it’s a homicide?’ she said.
‘A homicide’s just an unnatural death,’ Abe said. Rebecca was starting to get restless and Glitsky moved her onto his other leg, bouncing her. ‘And we don’t even have that officially until Strout says it is, and he won’t say till he’s positive, which means more tests to see if the hand is really fresh, which he thinks it is. Finally,’ Abe said, ‘even if it’s a homicide, a homicide doth not a murder make, much as our man Dismas here might like to try one. We’ve still got three options on cause of death -suicide, accident and natural causes – before we get to murder.’
Rebecca began to squirm some more and suddenly let out a real cry.
‘Here, let me take her,’ Hardy said. He reached across the table and Abe passed the baby over. Immediately she snuggled up against his chest and closed her eyes.
‘The magic touch,’ Frannie said. ‘I’ll go get some lunch.’
She got up, and the two men watched her for a second as she headed toward the steam tables. Hardy stroked a finger along his baby’s cheek. ‘You want to do me another favor?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘It’s not much,’ Hardy continued, ‘a phone call.’
Hardy cleared seven cases in the two hours after his lunch: three DUI’s with priors, a shoplifting with priors lowered to a misdemeanor for a plea, one possession of a loaded firearm by a felon, and two aggravated assaults – a purse snatching and a soccer father beating up his son’s coach. None of these cases would have to go to trial and further clog the court system, and he was glad about that, but this plea bargaining was demoralizing and tiring.
Glitsky appeared in his doorway just as Hardy finished taking care of the weapons charge – his toughest case of the day. If you were convicted of carrying a gun without a license in San Francisco, you went to jail. So people facing time in the slammer tended to prefer a jury trial where they perceived they’d at least have a chance to get off. But in this case Hardy had persuaded the guy’s attorney to plead nolo contendere and take weekend jail time. A sweet deal for both sides, all things considered.
Glitsky perched on the corner of the desk. ‘So who am I talking to?’ he asked.
Most of the prosecutors shared a room with one of their colleagues, but since Hardy had come on as an assistant D.A., his roommate had been on maternity leave, which suited him fine.
Glitsky got up to close the door behind them and went and sat at the other desk. Hardy got through to Farris’s office, then Glitsky punched in so Hardy could listen. The receptionist told Glitsky to hold, and they waited through five of the beeps that signified the call was being recorded.
Glitsky identified himself, referred to Hardy’s earlier call and told Farris about the new information from the coroner. As soon as Glitsky said the word karate, they knew they were onto something.
Farris was silent a long moment. Then he quietly said, ‘Shit.’
‘Mr Farris?’
Again an interval. ‘I’m here. Give me a minute, will you.’
Glitsky waited, fingers drumming on the desk. Beep. Beep.
‘It might not be Owen. Lots of men do karate.’
‘When did you see him last?’
‘Friday around noon, lunchtime. He wasn’t wearing a jade ring then, just the wedding band. At least, I suppose he had the band on. I would have noticed something different, I think.’
‘But Mr Nash did practice karate?’
‘He was a black belt. He started it a long time ago, when we were in Korea.’
Glitsky’s brows went up. He glanced at Hardy. ‘A bone in the little finger had been broken and healed twice,’ he said.
Farris swore again, waited. Glitsky whistled soundlessly. Beep.
‘I think I’d better come up,’ Farris said.
Hardy almost forgot his appointment to apologize to the police chief, Dan Rigby. Glitsky was going down to Strout to see if he would be amenable to having Hardy around when Ken Farris arrived to inspect the hand. Frannie had called to tell him that at her next Ob/Gyn in a month they could expect to hear the new baby’s heartbeat, and would Hardy try to get the time off so he could go with her? Did he want to know if it was going to be a boy or a girl? She wasn’t so sure, herself, if she wanted to know. Also, she was so young the doctor didn’t recommend an amnio, and she hadn’t had one with Rebecca and she’d turned out fine. What did he think?
Hardy, answering her questions, enjoying her excitement, idly flipped his calendar page and saw the note: Rigby 4:00.
It was 3:55.
He got to the chiefs office on the dot and waited outside for twenty-five minutes. He didn’t want Farris to have come and gone by the time he got out, but he couldn’t really push things too much here. The sergeant/ secretary had made it clear yesterday that he was not one of Hardy’s fans and by extension neither was the chief.
The intercom finally buzzed on the sergeant’s desk. He looked over at Hardy and pointed a finger at the double doors.
Dan Rigby sat back in a leather chair, still talking on the telephone. He had a boxer’s face, red and lined, and gray hair that was nowhere longer than a quarter inch. Hardy knew he often wore a business suit, but today he was in his officer’s uniform. It was meant to be impressive.
Hardy stood on the Persian rug before his desk, trying to hit on a suitable opening. Rigby, listening into the telephone, scrutinized him as he walked in. Hardy waited another minute. Then Rigby hung up and squared his shoulders as though they caused him pain. ‘You used to be a cop, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, sir. I worked a beat about three years.’
‘Then went to the law, right?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Here it comes, Hardy thought.
Rigby relaxed his shoulders, sunk back into his chair. ‘I often wondered about going the same way, though of course it’s worked out well enough, I guess. But getting away from the police end of it – I suppose there just wasn’t enough action anywhere else.’
The law’s not so bad,‘ Hardy said.
Rigby laughed hoarsely. ‘Naw, the law’s all pleading and bullshit. The difference is most of the time we all know, we damn well know, who did it, but you gftys, you lawyers, have got to prove it. Us, we know who did it, we catch ’em, our job’s over, just about. So I figure the thing about this incident yesterday, you got your hats mixed up. You get good training as a cop here, and it sticks with you, you think like a cop. Even when you’re over on the law side. Locke’s got a hair up because I called him and he does hate to be bothered with his department. But you and I got no gripe. You get a murder out of this, or a suspect, you just do us all a favor and keep us informed. We’ll go get the collar, and then you can do your job.‘
The phone rang again. Rigby picked up the receiver and listened for a moment. ‘I don’t care what his constituency is, he does not get a police escort to…’ Rigby looked up, surprised to see Hardy still there. He waved him out of the room and went back to his call.
Ken Farris stood next to the nearly leafless ficus by the window that looked out at the parking lot, his hands crossed behind his back.
He had just come from the cold room, looking at a barely recognizable thing that had four appendages – the index finger was missing – and he went instinctively to the window, as though for air, although the window was never opened.
Farris was a broad-shouldered, slim-waisted sixty. His light brown $750 suit was perfectly tailored, lined with tiny blue and gold pin-stripes. The light yellow silk shirt was custom made; so was the tie. The alligator cowboy boots added an unnecessary two inches to his height.
Glitsky and Hardy sat on the hard yellow plastic couch in the visitor’s room of the morgue. John Strout had pulled up a folding chair and sat slouched, his long legs crossed.
Farris turned around, fighting himself, still somewhat pale. ‘Well, that was a wasted exercise.’
Strout reached into his pocket and extracted a small, plain cardboard box. ‘Maybe this will jog something.’ He held the box up and Farris came over and took it.
It was a jade ring – a snake biting its tail – with a filigreed surface. Hardy leaned forward for a better look; he’d only seen it on the hand. Farris held it awhile, then put it over the first knuckle of his ring finger.
‘This wouldn’t have fit Owen,’ he said. ‘He had bigger hands than me.’
‘The ring was on the pinky,’ Strout said.
Farris moved the ring over and slid it down onto his little finger. It was an easy fit. He removed it just as quickly. ‘Well, that still doesn’t make it Owen.’
‘No, sir, it doesn’t.’ Strout was agreeable, genial, professional. Hardy sat forward, arms resting on his knees.
Abe Glitsky sat back comfortably, watching, his legs crossed. He shifted slightly, enough to bring attention around to him. ‘You and Owen – Mr Nash – were close, is that right?’
‘Could we not say were just yet? He’s been missing before.’
‘Long enough for you to call the police?’
‘Once or twice, I suppose, but I didn’t.’
‘What made you do it this time?’
Farris shook his head. ‘I honestly don’t know. A feeling. Last time he ran off with no notice was maybe ten years ago. That much time, you figure a man’s habits have changed. I can’t fathom his just taking off anymore. Back then I could.’
‘Where did he go, that last time?’
Hardy spoke up. ‘What’s all this running away?’
Farris looked around the room, found another folding chair, and moved it over next to Strout’s. He put the ring in the box and handed it back to the coroner. Then he sat down heavily.
‘Good questions. You think he might have gone back to the same place?’ He shook his head. ‘No, no, I don’t think so. Once he went to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. But it turns out that time he took his daughter, Celine. So they were both gone, and we figured they’d taken off somewhere together. Back then, it was in character.’
‘But not now?’ Hardy asked.
‘He’s mellowed. Or I thought he’d mellowed. You know how it is.’
Glitsky was gentle. ‘Why don’t you tell us how you mean it?’
Farris sat back. He took a deep breath and blew out a stream of air. ‘Time was, used to be every six months or so Owen would do something to make you hate him, or hate yourself. He was like this, this force, where he’d get a notion to go do something and goddamn if anything was going to stop him – not his friends, not his family, not his responsibilities.
‘He had his devils, so I never got inclined to try and stop him. His wife, Eloise, died in a fire in their house back in the fifties. He couldn’t get back in to save her, barely pulled out their child.’ Farris paused, remembering. ‘So he had this guilt over that. From time to time he didn’t feel worthy of all his success and he’d duck out from under it, leave it all for me to run.
‘Other times, just the opposite, he’d figure, “Well, goddamn, here I am, the great Owen Nash, and if I want to go to Bali for a month, let the mortals handle it. They’ll appreciate me more when I get back.” ’
But Glitsky wanted to keep to his line of questioning. ‘So he went once to New Orleans, another time to Bali…?’
‘But that’s just it. He didn’t have a favorite place, at least one that he ran to. We’ve got this place together outside Taos, no phones, no heat, that’s served us the last five or six years, but I was up there – flew up on Friday night – and he wasn’t.’
Strout pulled his long legs in under him and sat up straighter. “Scuse me,‘ he said quietly, ’but it seems the only thing tyin‘ this here hand to Owen Nash is the karate.’
Farris scanned the room. If he was looking for comfort, it was the wrong setting – the yellow vinyl couch, the institutional green walls. A near-dead plant and some artificial ones. ‘I don’t know if he ever broke a finger. I doubt he’d say if he had.’
‘You mean doing karate, breaking a board, something like that?’ Hardy asked.
Farris nodded. ‘That circus stuff, breaking boards, that’s Owen. If he was showing off for some woman… hell, for anybody, he could break his whole hand and never mention it. One of his conceits was he didn’t feel pain like the rest of us.’
Hardy sat forward at the change of tone. This guy might love Owen Nash, but that wasn’t all he felt.
‘The little finger on this hand has two obviously healed breaks,’ Strout said, ‘that were never set.’
‘That sounds more like Owen.’
Strout straightened up in his chair, laced his fingers and stuck his arms out until his knuckles cracked. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this doesn’t move me any further along in the line of identification. We could run a DNA scan, but without a sample of what we know to be Mr Nash’s tissue, it wouldn’t prove anything.’
Everyone sat in silence, all but Strout back in their seats. Farris still sat forward, eyes turned inward, trying to come up with something to settle the question. There was a knock on the door, and Sixto poked his head in. ‘There’s a Celine Nash out here to see Mr Farris.’
The woman’s startling blue eyes were red and puffed, dark circles under them as if she hadn’t slept in several days. Her mascara had run over too much makeup. In a black suit, black nylons, black gloves – even black onyx earrings – she was elegantly turned out, but she’d run her hands through her ash-colored hair too often, and it straggled in uneven shanks to her shoulders.
She came forward and hugged Farris, choking back a sob, and he held her for half a minute, patting her back. ‘It’s okay, honey, it’s okay. We still don’t know.’
She pulled back slightly, took Farris’s pocket handkerchief out and dabbed at her eyes. She briefly held herself to him again. Hardy saw her close her eyes as though gathering her strength. Then she turned to the other men. ‘Is one of you the coroner?’
Strout stepped forward. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I’m sorry, but I thought Ken said…’ She looked around as though lost. ‘I mean, when I heard coroner, I just assumed…’
‘No, ma’am, we just don’t know yet. You might see if you recognize this.’ Strout proffered the small ring box.
Celine stared at the ring for a moment. ‘What is this?’
‘It was on the hand,’ Strout said.
She took it from the box, looking at him quizzically. ‘But Daddy didn’t wear this ring. Ken, Daddy only wore Mom’s ring, didn’t he?’
‘I already told them that.’
The handkerchief went back to her eyes. She held it there a minute, applying some pressure. ‘Are you all right?’ Hardy asked. He moved forward.
Celine had gone a little pale. She gave Hardy a half-smile, but her eyes went back to Strout. ‘Well, then, this couldn’t be my father.’
Glitsky, in his softest voice, asked her when the last time was she had seen her father. Her eyes narrowed for an instant, and Hardy thought he saw a flash of resistance, perhaps even fear. ‘Why? I’m sorry, but who are you?’
Farris broke in and introduced everyone, after which Glitsky explained, ‘He may have gotten the ring after you’d seen him.’
She nodded, accepting that. ‘I don’t remember exactly. Two weeks ago, maybe. But he didn’t have this ring on then – he wouldn’t have worn it anyway. This just isn’t him.’
Farris, up beside her, looked at it again and shrugged. ‘He wasn’t much of a jewelry person.’
‘All right,’ Strout said. ‘It was worth a try. Thank y’all for your time.’
After he’d escorted them to the door, Strout shambled back, hands in his pockets, to Hardy and Glitsky. ‘It might be Owen Nash,’ he said simply. ‘Off the record, of course, but it might be. I’ll keep y’all informed.’
The garage had Glitsky’s car repaired and ready to go for him, so Hardy found himself walking alone through the parking lot at 5:45, ready to head for the Little Shamrock, where he was meeting Frannie. The fog, which had clung to downtown all day, had lifted, or moved west with the breeze off the Bay; the sky overhead was a cloudless evening blue.
Most of the staff at the Hall of Justice had gotten off at five, and the lot was about half empty. Two rows down from where Hardy was parked, Ken Farris sat in the driver’s seat of a Chrysler LeBaron convertible with its top down. Hardy slowed down and finally stopped.
Farris was staring into the distance, arms crossed over his chest, unmoving. He might have been a statue. He’d left Strout’s office with Celine Nash nearly forty-five minutes ago, and he was still in the parking lot? Maybe she had stayed and they had talked awhile. Still, Hardy found it odd. The man wasn’t even blinking. Maybe he was sitting up, dead.
Hardy crossed a couple of rows of parking places. He got to within ten feet of the LeBaron before Farris moved. It was a slight shift, but Hardy knew he was in view now.
‘I saw you sitting here so still,’ he said. ‘I wondered if you were all right.’
The mask gave way to a self-deprecating smile. ‘Relative term, “all right”. I guess I’m all right.’
Hardy gave him half a wave and had started to walk away, when Farris called his name. He came back to the car. ‘You know, Celine mentioned something. I don’t know. It might be relevant.’
Hardy cocked his head. ‘You wouldn’t be a lawyer, would you, Mr Farris?’
A flash of teeth. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘Well, defining “all right” as a relative term. Something you might know as relevant. Those are lawyer words.’
Farris stuck out a hand. ‘Good hunch. Call me Ken, would you. Stanford, ’55. But I never practiced, other than being counsel for Owen.‘
‘Full-time job?’
‘And then some. Now I’m COO of Owen Industries. Owen’s CEO. Electronics, components, looking into HDTV.’
‘I don’t know what that is, HDTV.’
‘High-definition television. More dots on the screen. Better picture. The Japanese are miles ahead of us on it, but Owen liked it, so we’re moving ahead.’
‘So what’s your maybe-relevant information?’
‘Celine just mentioned it to me. Owen had told her he was going out on the Eloise...’
‘The Eloise?’
‘Owen’s sailboat. He was supposedly going out Saturday with May Shintaka – May Shinn she calls herself.’
‘His girlfriend?’
Farris made a face. ‘Something like that. More a mistress, I guess you’d say.’
‘He kept her, you mean? People really do that?’
Farris laughed without much humor. ‘Owen figured you paid for your women one way or the other. “Cost of doin’ bizness, Wheel” – he called me Wheel, like Ferris Wheel, spelled wrong of course – “cost of gettin‘ laid, same goddamn thing. Might as well pay for it up front. No bullshit.” ’
‘It’s an approach, I guess,’ Hardy said.
‘Mr Hardy…’
‘Dismas.’ Then, at the squinted question. ‘Dismas, the good thief on Calvary.’
‘Okay, Dismas. It’s not my approach, I’ve been married to my Betty twenty-five years. But Owen isn’t like me or anybody else I know. He loved Eloise, his wife, and after she died he knew he wasn’t going to love anybody else, so he wasn’t looking for love and wasn’t going to kid around about it. It might sound cold, but it was pretty honest.’
‘So this May Shinn…?’
‘He’s been pretty steady with her since January, February, around in there.’
‘Did she go out on Owen’s boat Saturday?’
‘Celine says he was planning on it. That’s all I know.’
‘If he did, our probabilities increase,’ Hardy said.
‘Why do you say that?… Oh, I see.’
‘Do you have a way to reach her, May Shinn? Find out right now.’
The shadows had lengthened, the breeze had died. Farris dug into his wallet and pulled out a square of white paper. ‘Emergency numbers. I don’t know why I never thought of May.’
Hardy walked back beside him as Farris punched numbers into his car phone. He squinted at the paper. Next to Shinn’s name, he had just enough light and distance to make out the numbers, just enough time to memorize them.
He thought he’d also have enough time to swing by the Marina on his way out to the Avenues. It wasn’t far out of the way. And if he could prove Owen had been on the ocean on Saturday, the day before a hand that might be his turned up inside a shark at the Steinhart, he thought he’d be on his way to having a case.
May Shintaka hadn’t been home – or she hadn’t answered her telephone. Ken Farris had gotten an answering machine and asked her to call him as soon as she could.
Now at full dusk, there was a traffic jam just outside the Marina Safeway. Hardy remembered. It was Wednesday, the night the Marina Safeway turned into a meat market, the yuppies picking up each other with clever lines about the freshness of the arugula or the relative merits of dried versus handmade pasta.
His Suzuki Samurai out of place in the row of Beemers and Miatas, Hardy waited in the line of traffic, feeling old – so much older than when he’d been a father the time before. He was really running late. He ought to call Frannie, or Moses, at the Shamrock. Let them know he was on his way.
Or else forget about stopping at the Marina. What did he expect to find on or around the Eloise that wouldn’t be there in the morning? Except that he was already here. He’d call the Shamrock from a pay phone. Frannie would be with her brother – it wouldn’t hurt the two of them to kill a little time together alone. He’d only be a minute or two looking at the boat.
The light changed and he got through it on the yellow, after which it was only two blocks to the Marina itself, two hundred craft along four long pontoons behind a jetty, the land side closed off with an eight-foot fence topped with barbed wire.
Hardy sometimes thought he must have been a sailor in an earlier life – he had a visceral reaction to anything nautical. He loved to fish, to scuba dive, to walk sharks -trying to will them to life as though he had a special bond with them.
Now the briny scent of the air pumped him up. Locke and Drysdale be damned – he felt in his bones he was onto something and he was going to pursue it.
The guardhouse was set in a manicured square of grass at the entrance to the boat area. Hardy knocked on the open door and walked in. The attendant was about nineteen, dressed in a green uniform with a name tag that read ‘Tom’. He stood up at his desk behind a low counter. ‘Help you?’
To Hardy’s right, he could see the boats through the picture window. Four strings of white Christmas lights glittered over the pontoons.
He showed the boy his D.A.‘s badge, which was not issued by the office and not officially condoned. Hardy had gotten his at a uniform store down the peninsula and knew it could come in handy, especially with people who perhaps couldn’t read but understood a badge. He asked the young man if they kept a log of boat departures.
‘We tried that,’ he said, ‘but most of the people here like to come and go as they please. Still, we generally have some idea who’s out.’
‘Is the Eloise here now?’
‘Sure.’ Tom looked out the window and pointed. ‘She’s that low forty-five-foot cruiser at the end of Two.’ In the fading light, the sailboat looked beautiful. ‘Last time she went out was Saturday.’
‘Saturday. Did Mr Nash take her out?’
Tom shrugged. ‘I suppose so, but I didn’t see him. She – the Eloise - was out when I came on.’
‘When was that?’
‘Around noon. I work twelve to eight.’
‘Does somebody else come on then, after eight?’
‘No. We close up till next morning at six. What’s all this about? Is Mr Nash in some trouble?’
Hardy gave him all he really had. ‘He’s missing. It’d be helpful to know who saw him last.’
Tom bit his cheek, thinking. ‘I don’t think you’ll have much luck here. José, the morning guy, said she was already out when he came on.’
‘At six in the morning?’
Tom shrugged, wanting to be helpful. Hardy could tell he was wrestling with something. ‘Sometimes José’ll be a little late,‘ he said finally. ’But when that happens, he always stays late and makes up the time.‘
Hardy fought down a shiver of frustration. ‘What time did he stay till on Saturday?’
Tom got a little evasive. ‘I don’t know exactly. Three, three-thirty, around there.’
‘So he wasn’t here until seven or seven-thirty?’ Another shrug. ‘I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t here, either.’ Hardy blew out a breath. ‘Okay, this isn’t about José anyway. Could I take a look on board the Eloise?
Grateful to abandon the discussion on José‘s tardiness, Tom bobbed his head. ’Sure. It’s pretty slow now anyway.‘
On their way out to the boat, Hardy learned that security wasn’t all it could be at the Marina. Though Tom had a ring of master keys for the boats and a key for the gate that opened through the fence, the reality was that people slipped through with other parties all the time and owners forgot to close the gate behind them, or even to lock their boats. Theft wasn’t rampant by any means, but neither was it unknown. But what could the attendants do? Tom and José tried, but they had no real authority. If the boat owners weren’t going to follow their own rules, whose fault was that?
Up close, the Eloise was even more impressive than it had looked from the guardhouse. With a wide boom, Hardy thought maybe twelve to fourteen feet, it was berthed perpendicular to the main pontoon, too big to maneuver into any of the slips. Technically, the boat was a ketch – two poles, one fore and one aft. The steering wheel was sunk into the deck so the aft boom would clear the head of a standing pilot.
Casting off under motor power, even at only five knots, Hardy figured it wouldn’t take three minutes on the straight shot to get out beyond the jetty.
‘You mind if we go aboard a minute?’
It was already too dark to see much on the deck, not that Hardy was looking for anything specific. Tom, meanwhile, walked forward to the cabin door. ‘See, this is what I mean.’
Hardy came up beside him.
‘They leave the door unlocked. What are we supposed to do?’
‘Anything get taken? Maybe you should check.’
It was so easy Hardy almost felt guilty, but not enough to stop himself from following Tom down the ladder into the cabin.
The boy turned on the lights and stopped. ‘No, everything looks okay,’ he said.
Hardy thought okay was a bit of an understatement. They were in a stateroom that was easily as large as Hardy’s living room. A zebra rug graced the polished hardwood floor. Original art – oils in heavy frames – hung along the walls. There was a black leather sofa and matching loveseat, an Eames chair or a good copy of one, a built-in entertainment center along an entire wall – two TVs, large speakers, VCR, tape deck, compact disc player.
Being aboard seemed to make Tom nervous – he fidgeted from foot to foot. ‘Maybe we better go back up, huh? Doesn’t look like anything’s gone.’
But Hardy was moving forward. ‘Might as well be sure,’ he said lightly. He was at the galley – tile floor, gas stove, full-size refrigerator. A glimpse at the wet bar -Glenfiddich, Paradis Cognac, Maker’s Mark Bourbon, top-shelf liquors.
He heard Tom coming up behind him and kept walking forward to where the bulkhead came down. A full bathroom, far too big to let it go as the ‘head.’ The master bedroom, up front, was as large as Rebecca’s new room, the queen-size bed neatly made. Two desks, one a rolltop, an exercycle and some dumbbells, more expensive knick-knacks.
‘This is something,’ Hardy said. Tom stood mutely behind him. ‘Are there rooms aft?’
Hardy ached to open a few drawers in the desks. Casually, he moved to the desk on the bed’s right and pulled at the top drawer. It appeared to have nothing useful – paper clips, pens, standard desk stuff. The drawer on top to the side contained what looked like sweat bands. Hardy reached in and felt around. Sweat-bands. ‘Nothing here,’ he said, lightly as he could, closing the drawer.
Then around the bed, hoping Tom would stay another minute. The rolltop was closed up, but the front drawer slid open. Same story – nothing. Hardy pulled the side top drawer. ‘I don’t know if we should…’ Tom said.
A quick glance down, the drawer open a couple of inches – inside, some maps, navigation stuff. He pushed it closed with his hip and turned around.
‘You’re right, good point.’ Mr Agreeable. ‘Let the police get a warrant.’ Hardy turned around and walked quickly back through the galley and stateroom, past the steps leading up to the deck, past another bathroom off the aft hallway, to the first guest bedroom – double bed, dresser, television, a floating Holiday Inn.
‘We really should go up,’ Tom said from the steps.
‘Okay,’ Hardy, casual but determined, browsed the route back along the opposite hallway, passing through the second room, which was mirrored from floor to ceiling and equipped with most of a complete Nautilus set, a stair-climber, more free weights. Owen Nash took his workouts seriously.
Up on the deck, Tom took a minute to carefully lock the cabin door. Hardy asked, ‘How’s a boat like this sail?’
Tom locked the door, double-checked it. ‘Well, it’s not a hot rod. It’s really for deep water.’
‘Could one man handle her?’
They were walking back up the pontoon to the office, Tom leading. ‘Oh sure. The sail’s are on power if you need it. Mr Nash went out alone a lot. Over to the Farallons and back. It’s harder in a smaller boat, but he liked it.’
‘What’s at the Farallons?’ He asked about the small rock islands twenty miles off San Francisco’s coast.
‘I don’t know,’ Tom said. ‘They say that’s where the great whites breed – you know, the sharks. Maybe he was into them.’
Bad pun, Hardy thought.
They were at the Purple Yet Wah, out in the Avenues on Clement. Moses McGuire was sucking on a crab claw. ‘Black bean sauce,’ he said. ‘I believe with black bean sauce on Dungeness crab we have reached the apex of modern civilization.’
Frannie was glaring at Hardy, who was looking down at his plate.
‘I hate it when you guys fight,’ Moses said. ‘Here I am talking about cultural issues, without which we would all soon be savages and -’
‘Why don’t you tell your friend Dismas that we had an understanding about telephones and being late.’ She stood up and threw down her napkin. ‘Excuse me, I’m going to the bathroom.’
Hardy picked up his chopsticks. ‘I think I’ve already said I was sorry four times, now five. I’m sorry. Six. Sorry sorry sorry sorry.’ Hardy put down his chopsticks. ‘Ten.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Moses said. ‘She thought you were dead.’
‘She always thinks I’m dead, or going to die.’
‘There is some justification there.’
‘There is no justification at all. I have not come close to dying. Being late doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily died.’
Moses rubbed his crab claw around in the sauce. ‘It did for Eddie.’ He held up his hand, stopping Hardy’s response. ‘Uh uh uh. Here’s an area where we could increase our sensitivity.’
‘Moses…’
‘You could have called. Phones are nearly ubiquitous in our society.’ McGuire was the majority owner in the Shamrock Bar, but he also had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cal Berkeley.
‘You, too, huh?’
‘She’s my sister. I’m allowed to be on her side from time to time.’
‘I was working on a case. I’m a lawyer now, remember. I wasn’t out running around with loose women. I wasn’t narrowly avoiding death. I was working.’
‘You had an appointment with me and Frannie. A simple one-minute phone call and all would have been well.’
‘Okay, all right, next time I’ll call. Big deal.’
‘Frannie’s worried it’s going to start happening all the time. As you say, you’re a lawyer now. Well, that’s the way lawyers are.’
‘Lawyers aren’t any one way…’
Moses stabbed the last pot sticker and popped it into his mouth. ‘Excuse the generalization, but yes they are. Frannie wants you to be a daddy, not to work all the time. That’s why the job looked so good, remember. Regular hours, interesting work. I can hear your words in my memory even as we speak.’
‘How late was I?’
Moses chewed. ‘One hour and forty-five minutes, which is plenty of time to work up a good head of worry. It’s not Frannie’s fault she worries. She loves you, Diz. She’s carrying your baby. It’s pretty natural, don’t you think?’
‘Well, I love her too.’
‘I am sure you do.’
‘Well…?’
‘Well,’ Moses repeated. ‘There you are.’
Their white frame house was bracketed by two apartment buildings. Back in the mid-‘80s, Hardy had been offered a sinful amount of money to sell to a developer so that a third five-story anonymous unit could rise where now his sixty-foot-deep green lawn was bisected by a stone walkway, a low picket fence, and a doll house with a small front porch and a bay window.
Before their marriage they had talked about moving -starting over with a place they could equally call their own. The problem was that although the house had been Hardy’s for a decade, Frannie already loved it. One of Hardy’s first actions after the wedding was to transfer half the title to Frannie’s name – they didn’t have a prenuptial agreement. Frannie’s quarter-million-dollar insurance policy was both of theirs; Hardy figured the house put them on relatively equal footing.
Street parking was often a problem. With no garage, driveway, or back alley, you either got your spot by six o’clock or you had to walk. Now, at ten-fifteen, they couldn’t find a space within three blocks. It was a mild, still night with no fog, and they strolled east on Clement, under the trees of Lincoln Park, back toward their house. Frannie leaned into her husband, her arm around his waist.
‘Pinch me,’ she said.
‘I know.’ Hardy tightened his arm across her shoulders.
‘Would you have thought this?’
‘I guess so. It’s why I thought we ought to be married. But still…’
She stopped. Hardy took the cue and leaned over and kissed her. ‘What is it?’ Frannie asked.
‘Nothing. A little shiver. How often do you notice when everything is perfect? It’s a little scary. I used to believe that’s when things were most likely to go wrong.’
‘I think that’s why I was so upset tonight. I’m just getting so I can accept that all this is happening, that it’s not some dream I’m going to wake up from.’ She looked up into Hardy’s face and pulled herself close against him. ‘I don’t want to wake up from this,’ she said. ‘I want this to keep going on.’
‘It’s going to, Frannie. I’m not going to let anything get in the way of this, promise.’
Frannie nudged him with her hip. ‘Let’s get home.’
They paid the sitter, looked in on the slumbering baby. Hardy fed his fish while Frannie got ready for bed. In his office, his answering machine had calls from Jane and from Pico Morales, both of whom he could call in the morning.
He could hear the shower running in their bathroom. He picked up his telephone and hit the numbers he’d memorized earlier that night – May Shinn’s. The phone rang four times, then picked up.
‘Just leave a number, please, and I’ll get right back to you.’ That was the whole message. No trace of a Japanese accent. A deep, cultured voice. Hardy hung up after the beep.
His desk was cleared. The green-shaded banker’s lamp threw a soft pool of light around the room. The dried blowfish pouted on the mantel of the office fireplace. Absently, Hardy crossed from the desk to the mantel, straightened out the pipe rack – unused for over a year -and grabbed three darts from the bull’s-eye of the dart-board, where he’d left them. Back at the line near his desk, he began throwing.
His dart game was off. In his first round, none of the three darts landed in the 20, where he was aiming. A year before, that couldn’t have happened. If anyone had asked him, he would have said he was semi-serious about darts. He still carried his custom set of twenty-gram tungstens with him every day in his suit jacket’s inside pocket.
But the reality was that new priorities had taken over. As he retrieved his first round, he heard the water shut off in the bathroom. He was back at the line near his desk now: 20, 19, 18. There you go.
Then Frannie was in the doorway, barefoot, wearing the purple silk baby-dolls Hardy had bought her for Christmas, the ones she hadn’t been able to wear until after Rebecca was born. A tiny dark spot marked where a drop of her milk had leaked from her nipple.
Hardy crossed to her, went to his knees and lifted the hem of the pyjamas, burying his face against her.
FINANCIER MISSING IN ‘MYSTERY HAND’ CASE
by Jeffrey Elliot
Chronicle Staff Writer
The case of the mystery hand found Sunday in the stomach of a great white shark at the Steinhart Aquarium took on a new dimension today as Bay Area financier Owen Nash was reported missing by Ken Farris, counsel and chief operating officer of Owen Industries of South San Francisco.
Mr Farris reported that Nash was last seen Thursday evening by members of his personal staff at his mansion in Seacliff. On Friday, Mr Nash failed to appear at a luncheon appointment. On Saturday, Nash reportedly was scheduled to go sailing with May Shinn, a friend. Neither Nash or Shinn has been heard from since then, although Nash’s sailboat, the Eloise, remains at its berth in the Marina. It is unclear at this writing whether or not the boat was taken out over the weekend.
The police will not speculate on the possibility of foul play, although yesterday a representative of the district attorney’s office gave strong credence to that possibility.
Farris reported that Nash’s life had been threatened ‘half a dozen’ times in the past five years over his mostly hostile takeover efforts of several Silicon Valley companies.
Strengthening the bond between Nash and the mystery hand is the fact that Nash was a black belt in karate. The hand has several unusual characteristics that can be associated with karate, among them calcium deposits and a somewhat overdeveloped ‘heel,’ or pad, at the side of the hand. San Francisco coroner John Strout, however, had no comment on the likelihood of the hand being that of Owen Nash and dismissed any possible identification at this time as ‘decidedly premature.’
‘The boy bushwacked me,’ Farris said. ‘He was waiting at my houseboat when I got home, had already charmed the skirts off of my Betty.’
Hardy, in his office at home, was beginning to admire Jeff Elliot’s spunk. The reporter was nobody’s little lost boy. Hardy had thought he’d scared him into some controllable space yesterday, but evidently he’d read that wrong. Hardy wasn’t going to get Jeff Elliot off his story. It didn’t look like anybody was.
‘You never told me about the death threats.’
‘I never took them seriously anyway. People say things when they lose negotiations, you know.’
‘But you thought enough to mention them to Jeff.’
‘Not really.’ Hardy heard a rustling noise. ‘I’ve got the paper here in front of me, and I must admit it reads pretty dramatically, but all I did was answer a straight question -had anybody ever threatened Owen? I said, “Sure, half a dozen times,” but it wasn’t anything. At least, until I saw it here in print.’
‘You don’t think it could be related?’
‘I guess anything’s possible. But as I said, this was all settled a long time ago. I think the last man who got bitter – Owen took him and his wife to Hawaii for a couple of weeks, wined and dined them, bought her a Mercedes, made him president of some division somewhere. The man made out like a bandit. ’Course, Owen made out better.‘
‘Who was that?’
‘It wasn’t any real threat. I’ve told Owen I was gonna kill him twenty times myself, and half those times I meant it.’
‘Okay, but if Mr Nash turns up dead, somebody’s going to want that name.’
‘I still pray to God he’s not dead.’
Hardy sat still a moment, drumming his fingers on his desk, trying to decide whether or not to tell Farris what he knew. Hell, the man had been forthcoming with him. He said. ‘The Eloise did go out on Saturday.’ He told him about his visit to the Marina, his tour of the boat.
‘But if the boat went out, and now is back, and the hand is Owen’s…’
‘Those are big ifs…’
‘But you see what that means? It means May -’
‘No… May or someone else. Maybe not May at all. Or May and some third party.’
Farris was collecting himself. ‘You’re right.’
‘A boat like that, it’s not unknown to get used once for drugs, then abandoned.’
‘Drugs?’
‘It’s more common in Florida, or down south in San Diego, but it’s happened here. Smugglers board the ship, kill whoever’s on it, throw them overboard, load up their cargo, deliver it, dump the boat.’
‘Back at its own slip?’
‘I’m not saying it’s likely, but the boat being back doesn’t say much about anything.’
‘I’ve got to find May,’ Farris said.
‘Why don’t you go by where she lives?’
‘I don’t know where she lives. Owen never told me that. Getting her phone number was a major concession.’
‘How about if they just ran away, like you were saying he might have done yesterday, except that it was Owen and May together, not just him?’
‘I hate to think we’re down to that.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, I really think the running off- it’s something Owen’s outgrown. I just don’t see him doing that anymore. If anything, he was more settled, less spontaneous, since he’s been with May. She really calmed him down. I mean, for Owen, he seemed relatively at peace for the first time in his life. Since Eloise, anyway. Besides, they’ve gone away together before – and told nobody except me. But he did tell me.’
‘And this time he didn’t.’
‘Nothing.’
Hardy looked up as Frannie walked by the door to his office, holding Rebecca, singing quietly to her. He missed Farris’s next sentence.
‘I’m sorry, what was that?’
‘I said it’s getting more unlikely every day anyhow.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Well, I’m Owen’s executor and I’ve also got power of attorney. It’s Thursday now and nobody’s seen him in a week. If he ran away, even with May, he’d need money, right? And he never carried much cash.’
‘So he’d use a credit card, and you’d have found out about that?’
‘Right. I checked all his accounts this morning – so far there’s been no activity.’
Hardy wished he could say something about not giving up hope until they had some more information, something definite.
Farris cut that thought off. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
The answer to that, a line from a comedy routine of the old, now-defunct Committee, a North Beach comedy troupe, was ‘Deader than hell, Bob.’
Hardy wasn’t even tempted.
Officer Patrick Resden was never going to make inspector. He was never going to make sergeant. He was fifty-one years old, a big, wheezy, friendly dog of a cop who was twenty years on the same beat.
Resden had taken the sergeant’s exam five times in the early ‘70s. Hardy had helped Glitsky study for the sergeant’s exam around the same time, but after a review of the first few chapters of the prep book, those ’study sessions’ had become the boys’ night out – Jane and Flo, respectively, staying home while their husbands improved their minds and careers. What they had really improved was their tolerance for alcohol. They knew they’d drunk enough on any given night when a question in the prep book – any question – stumped them.
Hardy had known plant life – and definitely some of his fish – that were smart enough to pass the sergeant’s exam on the second try, and Resden had flunked the thing five times.
But this did not mean he didn’t have a place on the police force. He could follow simple instructions. He did not abuse his gun or his badge. Resden was a good beat cop – his heart was in the right place and he had a lot of experience helping people out, pulling kittens out of trees, busting neighborhood bullies.
One of whom – the defendant in this case – was named Jesus Samosa. It seemed that about two months ago, Officer Resden had had occasion to reprimand Samosa when he caught him about to spraypaint a sidewalk in front of the Mission Street BART station. Instead of getting a hard-on for him, Resden had simply confiscated the can of paint and let the boy go – he was only eighteen – with a warning.
Two days later, in the street in front of the same BART station, Samosa failed to stop at the sign on Mission. His maroon ‘69 Chevy got pulled over and Resden was the citing officer. This time, Resden gave Samosa a ticket -this was evidently very funny to the passengers in the Chevy, but again, Resden simply warned everyone and let them go their way.
Now, it turned out that Jesus Samosa worked at the Doggie Diner three blocks from the BART station. About a week after the stop-sign incident, Resden and his partner, Felice Wong, decided to take their lunch at this same Doggie Diner. Resden ordered his usual couple of double burgers, double cheese – a special order. Felice was grabbing some napkins, with a clear view of the grill area, when Jesus, to the delight of his broiler mate, spit into the bun that he then placed on top of one of the double burgers.
Felice drew her gun, walked behind the counter, confiscated the burger for lab analysis and bagged Jesus Samosa on the spot.
Now this defendant, Hardy thought – this guy is going down. Hardy gave a moment’s thought to ordering an HIV test – if the guy tested positive they might be able to charge him with attempted murder. On reflection, though, that might be a little extreme, even if an Elizabeth Pullios might go for it.
As it was, they had Jesus on a couple of health and safety-code violations, misdemeanor aggravated assault, profane language and resisting arrest. The maximum penalty if he got everything was forty-five days in the county jail and fines totaling $3,115.
If the defendant’s attorney wanted to bargain, Hardy figured he would be a sport and knock the fines down to an even three grand.
After he’d talked to Ken Farris, Hardy had taken his yellow legal pad from his top drawer and wrote notes on everything he could remember relating to Owen Nash. It took him almost twenty minutes, filling two pages.
He then called Art Drysdale at his home, making it clear that he had taken no part in supplying Jeff Elliot with any information used in the Chronicle story. ‘But just between you and me, Art, my bones tell me the victim is Owen Nash. And if May Shinn is still alive, we may be looking at my murder case.’
Once again, Drysdale counseled Hardy to cool his jets and wait for the police investigation to catch up. Hardy replied that of course he would do that.
He dialed Jane, but she hadn’t been home – either out working early or spending the night in a strange place. Well, Hardy didn’t know that and it was none of his business anyway. He’d left a message.
The morning light in Hardy’s office at the Hall of Justice was especially flattering to Elizabeth Pullios. She wore a blue leather miniskirt – far enough down her leg by about an inch to still be professional if the term were loosely applied- with a tailored robin’s-egg man’s shirt made less conservative by the three-button gap at the top. A raisin-sized ruby on a thin gold chain hung to where her cleavage began. Her chestnut hair was loosely tied at the back of her neck. She knocked demurely at Hardy’s door.
‘Good work,’ she said.
He invited her in and she closed the door behind her.
‘What is?’
She placed her rear end on the corner of Hardy’s desk and pushed herself back so she could sit back with her legs crossed, showing and showing. Hardy pushed his chair back almost to the window, put his own feet up on the desk, crossed his hands behind his head and leaned against the glass. ‘What is?’ he repeated.
‘The Chronicle thing. Keeping it alive.’
‘Believe it or not, that wasn’t me.’ But then he realized that it had in fact been him who had sent Elliot on the mission that took him to Missing Persons. ‘Not completely, anyway.’
She waved him off. ‘Well, whatever, it’s still on the burner. Who killed him?’
Hardy spent a couple of minutes on Owen Nash, Farris, May Shinn, the Silicon Valley connection. ‘The bottom line, though, is that we don’t have an identified victim yet, so there’s nowhere to go. I think we’re going to need a body.’
‘Well’ – she leaned toward Hardy, both palms resting flat on Hardy’s desk, the ruby swinging out from the gap in her shirt – ‘not necessarily. You remember the Billionaire Boys Club case down in L.A.? They never found the body in that one. And you’ve got part of a body. Get some good pathologist -’
Hardy laughed. ‘Whoa. I don’t think we’re there yet. What about the ring?’
Pullios shrugged, mercifully straightening up. ‘The ring’s a detail. Maybe his friend Farris was wrong, or lying. Maybe Nash only wore it sailing. Who knows?’
Hardy put his feet down and stood up. ‘That’s just it. If nobody knows -’
She shook her head. ‘Dismas, this is too good. You’ve got to grab these when they come around, which, believe me, isn’t often. Mega-rich victim, corporate intrigue, the paper’s already on it. This could make a career.’
Hardy remained casual, motioned to his stack of folders. ‘I think until I clear some of these, my career is on hold.’
She slid off the desk, adjusting her skirt, which entailed leaning over again. If body language talked, Hardy thought, this woman was yelling from the rooftops. He didn’t get it.
‘Well, it’s your decision,’ she said.
It was that rare San Francisco treasure, a truly warm day. Hardy had decided to walk down to Fifth and Mission without calling first. He wanted to be outside, and going to see Jeff Elliot was an excuse more than anything else.
Jane had reached Hardy during the morning, and the two of them were having lunch at noon at Il Fornaio. Hardy reasoned he could pass a pleasant hour until then, putting in some nonbillable time.
Now he stood in bright sunlight on the steps outside the Chronicle Building. Jeff Elliot hadn’t been at his desk, and the guy who sat next to him told Hardy he thought Jeff had said something about going down to the Marina and did Hardy want to leave a message. He did.
Walking down Howard toward the Ferry Building and the Bay, hands in his pockets and tie loosened, Hardy drank in the smells of truck fumes and pork bao, of tar and roasting coffee. Whenever he passed an alley, about every half block, the heavy odors of urine and garbage would overlay the city smell, but even these were, in their own way, mnemonic and pleasant – Paris when he was in college, Saigon later. He found himself whistling, marveling at the new skyline with the Embarcadero torn down after the Big One, the World Series quake.
He decided to keep walking along the waterfront. Gulls sat on guano-stained pilings, occasionally lifting off with a squawk. Three or four of the docks were unfenced, and a few Orientals squatted fishing with long poles. The Sausalito ferry came in with a deafening honk of its horn, spewing out a carefree river of tourists. Hardy went with the current, letting it carry him inland with the flow. He turned uptown, noticed the time and hailed a cab to take him the last ten blocks.
Jane was in a banquette in the dining area behind the bar. There was a tulip glass of champagne on the table in front of her. She had cut her dark hair very short, but Jane always managed to look good. As a buyer for I. Magnin, she always hovered at or near the top of haute couture, six weeks ahead of everybody else. He leaned over and kissed her cheek.
‘Ivoire de Balmain,’ he said. It was the perfume he’d always bought her on Christmas. He didn’t think it was a coincidence she was wearing it now.
‘You have a good nose.’ She kissed him again, quickly, on the lips. ‘It’s good to see you.’
‘It is,’ he admitted.
He ordered a club soda and found out Jane was seeing a younger man, an architect named Chuck.
‘Chuck, Chuck, bo-buck, bo-nano-bano, bo-fu…’
‘Dismas.’ She put a shushing finger to his lips.
‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ he said.
‘I’m sure you have.’ She gave him an amused look. ‘He’s a wonderful guy.’
‘I’m sure he is. It’s a wonderful song, too. You can’t do it to Dismas, you know. Dismas, Dismas, bo-bismas… it just doesn’t scan,’ The club soda arrived.
‘Club soda is a change,’ Jane said.
Hardy sipped. ‘Change is my life right now. If I have my old usual couple of beers for lunch, you can forget about the afternoon. I tried it a few times. Bad idea.’
She sipped her champagne. ‘So you’re really back at prosecuting?’
‘I am.’
‘And you like it?’
He lifted his shoulders. ‘Sometimes. It’s more b.s. than I remember, but it’s all right.’
They waded through another five minutes of small talk before they ordered – calamari for Hardy, quattro formaggio calzone for Jane. Hardy broke down and decided to have some wine, so he and Jane ordered a half bottle of Pinot Grigio.
When the waiter had gone, Hardy said, ‘So you’ve seen your dad?’
She nodded. ‘You were right. There’s definitely something.’
‘That’s what I thought. Frannie says it’s a woman.’
Jane took that in, sipped at her champagne. ‘Why did she say that?’
Hardy told Jane about the jade paperweight, how Andy had demanded he take it. ‘Frannie said seeing it every day reminded him of his broken heart, so he had to give it away.’ He held up a hand. ‘Her words – she’s more melodramatic than I am.’
‘I also think she’s right.’
‘Did he say that?’
‘He didn’t deny it. I asked him point blank if he was all right, if something was bothering him.’
‘And what’d he say?’
‘He said he’d just become more aware of mortality lately, that nothing lasts forever.’
‘This is not exactly headline stuff, Jane.’
‘I know. It just seemed evasive, the way Daddy’s always been about his personal life. So I asked if something specific had triggered all those feelings, you know. He said a friend of his had died and he just had to accept it. I asked who, and he said I didn’t know him, it didn’t matter.’
‘He said you didn’t know him?’
She shook her head. ‘But I don’t think he meant that, meant it was a man.’
It occurred to Hardy that, impossible as it might seem, Andy Fowler could be gay. In San Francisco, you never knew. ‘But if that’s what he said…?’
‘No. There was a pause before he said that. Something, anyway. Then he patted my hand and thanked me for being concerned, but that he could work all this out himself, he was a big boy.’
The food came, the wine ritual. Hardy dipped some fresh bread in a little bowl of olive oil on the table. Jane cut into her calzone and let the steam escape.
‘What I think,’ she said, ‘is it might have been someone he’s ashamed of being involved with, maybe the wife of one of his friends, something like that.’
‘And she broke it off?’
‘Either that, or he couldn’t go on with it anymore. Can’t you just hear one of them saying it? “We’ll just pretend the other one died.” I can imagine Daddy taking that tack.’
‘Yeah, that flies.’
‘It’s a problem when you’ve always been perfect. You can’t even let your daughter see anything else. Even when I told him that whatever it was, I’d still love him.’
‘You told him that?’
‘Of course. I would.’
‘No, not that you would. You told him you suspected it was something he might be ashamed of?’
‘Not in so many words.’
Hardy was thinking Andy Fowler didn’t need so many words. He was a subtle and intelligent man, accustomed to dealing with nuance every day on the bench. He could imagine Jane’s forthright approach scaring him off, driving him back further within himself, if that’s where he was.
Hardy chewed on the delicious bread, filled his mouth with wine and sloshed it around. ‘Well, whatever it is, you think we can do anything to help him out? He talked about a vacation.’
Jane half smiled. ‘Sure. Daddy’s idea of a vacation is not bringing work home for the weekend. You know any women he might like?’ But she tossed the idea away. ‘No. I can hardly see Daddy allowing himself to be set up.’
‘Maybe it’s what he says – awareness of mortality. That can stop you.’
Jane scratched at the tablecloth with a perfect coral fingernail. She and Hardy didn’t need reminders of the lessons of mortality. Every time she thought of their son, Michael, who’d died in a crib accident ten years before, it stopped her again, as it had stopped her life, and Hardy’s, back then. A tear came from one eye and she turned away.
Seeing it, or simply knowing, he reached over and covered her hand. ‘Let’s leave it for now, Jane. Come back to it later,’ he said. ‘We’ll think of something.’
He missed the stud the first time and figured it must have been the wine.
After lunch, he’d stopped at a sporting goods store on Market and picked up the dart board he’d promised himself. Back at his office, he’d banged on the wall opposite his desk, listening for the hollow sound to give way to solid wood, locating the stud, or thinking he had.
The first stroke of the hammer drove the nail through drywall clear up to its head. Hardy was a good carpenter. Wood was one of his hobbies. It wasn’t like him to miss a stud. He banged on the wall, thought he’d found the stud again, and this time was right.
Measuring off eight feet with a ruler from his desk, he put some tape down on the floor just under where his chair would normally be. Then he moved the chair back up, took out his leather case and fitted the blue flights onto the shafts of his darts. He stood up at his tape line and threw two bull’s-eyes and a 20. Leaving the darts in place, he picked up his phone.
Judge Fowler had called in sick. That was odd. Judges never called in sick – their dockets were too full. A sick day inconvenienced too many people. Hardy tried his home, but no one was there either, not even an answering machine. He was tempted to call Jane again but why worry her?
Maybe Andy was simply taking a mental-health day. God knew, he worked hard enough to deserve it. Maybe after seeing Jane last night, he’d gotten drunk again and was hung over. In any case, if Andy Fowler wanted to take a day off, Hardy would not disturb him.
He looked at the still-large pile of case folders on the corner of his desk, wondering what unknown thrills lay in store for him in that mountain of paper. He considered going around to his darts and throwing a solo game of 301 to keep his eye up. He wondered if Jeff Elliot was back from the Marina or wherever he’d gone. He should call Frannie and see how Rebecca was doing.
Anything, he thought, but…
It wasn’t a big enough room to pace in. He pulled his chair up to the desk and sat down, feeling lethargic and heavy. The wine. Blame it on the wine.
Elizabeth Pullios was still wearing the gold chain with the ruby, but that was all she was wearing. Christopher Locke, the district attorney, was lying with his hands crossed behind his head. He had a barrel chest covered with curls of black hair. His stomach was beginning to bulge, but it was a hard bulge. He had a pretty good body for an older guy, she thought. And as long as he let her be on top, his mobility wasn’t much of an issue – she could control things, which was how she liked it.
She moved forward a little, adjusting her position. The D.A. moaned with pleasure. His black, broad-featured face broke into a grin. ‘My, don’t we look smug,’ Pullios said. She tightened herself a little around him and he closed his eyes with the feel of it.
‘I feel smug,’ Locke said. ‘Come down here.’
She leaned down over him. He took one breast in each hand and pulled her face up to his. She took his tongue into her mouth and bit down on it gently, then pulled away.
‘You are such a bitch,’ he said. Still smiling. She moved her hips again. He tried to come up to meet her face, but her hands were on his shoulders, forcing him down, grinning at him.
‘I know, and you love it.’ She came down and licked the bottom of his ear, staying there, beginning to rock rhythmically.
‘God, Pullios…’
She pulled away, halfway up. Her face now was set. She had found her angle, concentrating. Her hands cupped his head, tighter. He rose to meet her, feeling it build.
‘Not yet, not yet…’ She was breathing hard, her teeth clenched. ‘Okay, okay.’ She pounded down against him, now straightening up, arching, her head thrown back. ‘Now. Now. Now.’ Grinding down into him as he let himself go, collapsing against his big chest, a low chuckle escaping from deep in her throat.
Turning south on Highway 1, Hardy was thinking that fate could be a beautiful thing.
The dunes with their sedge grasses obscured the view of the ocean, but with the top down on the Suzuki, Hardy could hear and smell it. The afternoon, now well along, was still warm. Dwarf cypresses on the east side of the road attested to the near-constant wind off the ocean, the evergreen branches flattened where they faced the beach, as though giants walked the land, stomping them to one side.
Where the highway turned inland at Fort Funston near the Olympic Club golf course, hang-gliders filled the sky. Even on a windless, cloudless day, thermals up the cliffs at the shoreline provided decent lift. Hardy thought he might like to get into hang-gliding sometime. Take the wife and kids. Soar.
The fate that had saved him from his files had come in the guise of a call from Abe Glitsky, who’d been called down to Pacifica to view a body that had washed ashore. Calls from the SFPD to other local jurisdictions over the past few days had gotten the word out, and when the call came in, Abe had been in the office and volunteered to go down and have a look. He’d called Hardy from his squawk box, patched in.
The turnoff was just north of Devil’s Slide, a two-mile stretch of Highway 1 where the curving roadway’s shoulder disappeared at the edge of a three-hundred-foot cliff. Most of the time, the area was shrouded in fog, and it was the rare year that didn’t see another verification of the fact that automobiles could not fly.
Hardy wound back on a rutted and unpaved roadway toward the city. Glitsky’s car was parked in the dirt area at the bottom, along with a couple of Pacifica police cars. As Hardy was getting out of his car, an ambulance appeared on the road he’d just used.
The tide was out. Getting on four o’clock, there was still no wind at all, no fog. Maybe, Hardy thought, we’re going to have our three days of summer.
He nodded to the ambulance guys, but was too anxious to wait for them. Crossing the soft sand, he got to harder ground and broke into a trot. The officials were knotted around a still green form about twenty yards from the line of surf.
Hardy nodded to Glitsky, who introduced him around. ‘Here’s your victim,’ he said.
The body lay covered with a tarp, on its back. Hardy asked permission to look, and one of the Pacifica cops said go ahead. He pulled the tarp away and involuntarily stepped back.
Sand flies buzzed around the half-open mouth, the nose, the empty eye sockets, the thinning head of gray hair. Hardy was momentarily startled by the fact that the body wore jogging sweats identical to the pair he owned -except that the body’s green sweatsuit had a large crescent-shaped tear in the right torso. There was also a ragged break in the lower left leg, with flesh showing beneath it. Two small clean holes – one in the chest and one just over the crotch – spoke for themselves. Forcing himself to take it all in, Hardy noticed the wedding band on the left hand. But, by far, the most arresting detail was the end of the right arm, a jagged and torn mess of tendon, bone and sickly greenish white flesh. Hardy knew what had happened to the hand.
The ambulance men had made their way across the beach with a stretcher. Hardy stepped away and let them move in.
‘You get an ID?’ he asked Glitsky. Glitsky had a scar that ran through his lips, top to bottom; when he got thoughtful or tense, it seemed sometimes to almost glow white in his dark face. It was glowing now. He wasn’t saying anything.
‘Looks about the right age for Owen Nash,’ Hardy said.
Glitsky nodded, still thinking, looking off into the horizon. ‘That’s why you’re here,’ he said.
‘Shot twice?’ Hardy asked.
Glitsky nodded again. ‘Before the sharks got him. Small caliber, one exit wound out of two.’ Like a dog shaking off water, he came back to where they were. ‘Once in the heart, and whoever it was tried to shoot his dick off.’ He thought another moment. ‘Probably not in that order.’
Hardy felt his balls tighten. Suddenly Glitsky spoke to the ambulance attendants who had opened the stretcher and were preparing to lift the body. ‘Excuse me a minute.’ He went over to the body, got down on one knee and picked up the left hand. ‘I’m going to take off this ring,’ he told the Pacifica cops.
He looked at it briefly, showed it to them, then brought it over to Hardy. ‘You see anything?’ he asked.
It was a plain gold band. On the flat inside surface, there was a tiny stamp in the gold that said IOK. Nothing else at first glance. Hardy faced away from the sun and held the ring up to catch the light, turning it slowly. ‘Here you go,’ he said. He brought it closer to his face. Worn down flush to the gold, invisible except at one angle, Hardy could make out some initials. ‘E.N. and some numbers – something looks like fifty-one.’
‘What was Nash’s wife’s name?’
Hardy remembered mostly because of the boat. ‘Eloise. And fifty-one – sounds like a wedding date, doesn’t it?’
Glitsky uttered an insincere ‘Absolutely brilliant’ and held out his hand. Hardy dropped the ring in it. He put the ring in a zip-loc evidence bag and stuck it in his pocket. ‘So I can either check the prints, have Strout do some DNA testing this month at a cost of ten grand or call his attorney again. How do you vote?’
The body was on the stretcher, and the ambulance attendants began carrying it over the beach. Hardy, Glitsky and the other men fell into a rough line behind them, and the caravan trudged over the sand. Nobody said a word.
‘The Eloise was out all day Saturday!’ Jeff Elliot was excited.
‘I knew that,’ Hardy said. He was at home, talking on the kitchen extension. He lived fifteen blocks from the beach, just north of Geary, and he’d seen no point in going downtown for ten minutes so that he could turn around and drive back home.
Twenty minutes after leaving Devil’s Slide, he was cutting up some onions in his kitchen. When the spaghetti sauce was made, bubbling on the stove, he opened himself a beer and called Jeff Elliot.
‘I thought you were keeping me up on the breaks in the case,’ Elliot said. ‘If you knew the boat had gone out -’
‘We didn’t even know it was Owen Nash, so what difference could his boat make? In fact, I would tend to agree with our good Dr Strout,’ Hardy drawled, ‘that yo’ conclusions were de-sahded-ly prematuah. All we knew was that a man was missing and the hand might show that it was used in karate. That’s a long stretch for hard news.‘
There was silence on the other end. Then, ‘You got something, don’t you?’
‘Turns out,’ Hardy said laconically, ‘odds on you were right.’
He told him about the body, which was on its way, or had just arrived at, the morgue – the hand bitten off, and where the shots had gone.
‘He was shot? Somebody killed him you mean?’
Hardy thought of where Glitsky thought the first bullet had gone. He felt he could rule out suicide. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Somebody killed him.’
‘God, that’s great!’ Elliot nearly shouted. ‘That is just great!’
‘The guy’s dead,’ Hardy reminded him. He took a sip of his beer. ‘That’s not so great.’
‘The story, I meant the story.’
‘I know what you meant. Listen, if you’ve got a file picture on Nash, you might bring it down with you, remove any doubt in case no one’s identified him yet.’
‘Good idea!’
‘Oh, and Jeff, if Mr Farris or Celine Nash – Owen’s daughter – is down at the morgue, try to rein in the enthusiasm a little, would you? I don’t think they’re going to be as happy about it as you are.’
‘No, I understand that. Of course.’
Hardy rang off. ‘Of course,’ he said.
It was going to the front page in tomorrow’s edition, Jeffs first front-page story. Not the main headline, but lower right, three columns, his byline – not too shabby.
Not only that, but the lead graphs had already gone out on the wire that night, and Jeff had received a followup call from the L.A. Times, la-di-da, and from Drew Bates over at KRON-TV, who wondered if he – Jeff – had anything more to give out on the Owen Nash murder. Imagine, TV coming to him! The L.A. Timesl
He had left his forwarding number at night reception and now sat in the bowels of the building where he worked, checking the Nexis listing on Owen Nash. It was nine-thirty at night, and he’d been up since six, but he felt completely fresh. Parker Whitelaw, his editor – Christ, THE EDITOR – said he’d give him a sidebar on Nash, they’d run with the pickup on the back page of the first section, but he had to have it done by eleven-thirty. Did Jeff think he could do it?
Jeff thought for a lead story and a sidebar he could stand on his head and spit nickels, dance with Nureyev, run a ten-flat hundred. He looked at the mute reminder, his crutches, leaning on his right against the table. Well, the hell with them. He could get this done. He had the raw data – now it was just putting it together. Piece of cake, though there was more than he would have thought – and he had to get it down to three hundred words maximum. Well, hit the high spots.
Jeff had started the Nexis search at quarter to seven after getting back from the morgue. Almost three hours, close to two hundred articles – some merely a mention at a society event, a few substantial interviews, a cover story in ‘87 in Business Week. Owen Nash, from the evidence here, had been a very major player. He’d been mentioned in one U.S. publication or another on an average of once every six weeks or so for what seemed like the past twenty years.
Jeff looked away from the orange-tinted screen. He was having a problem reconciling the Owen Nash in these articles to the body he’d witnessed at the morgue.
He’d gotten there as a limo had been pulling up. Ken Farris and his wife had recognized him immediately from the previous night, and while they didn’t seem all that happy to see Jeff, they were also too distracted to make any real objection when the hawk-faced black inspector with the scar through his lips admitted them.
The other woman in the limo was Celine Nash, Owen’s daughter. She was much older than Jeff, probably near forty, but something about her, even in grief, made him react. He didn’t know if it was posture, attitude or the shape of her, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Stupid really. A cripple like him stood no chance with most women, much less a beauty of her class and caliber -if that powerful a sexual draw could be called beauty – but he thought there couldn’t be any harm in letting it wash over him.
Until, of course, they saw Owen Nash. At the sight of him, everything else vanished. The assistant coroner had pulled back enough of the sheet to show the face, and there was no question of identification. Celine sobbed once. Farris hung his head and pulled his wife closer to him.
The inspector – Glitsky – had asked the formal question and the assistant was pushing the body back, when Celine told him to stop. She wanted to see her father one last time.
Nobody moved. The assistant coroner looked at Glitsky, who nodded, and the sheet came off, revealing Owen Nash, naked and blue, on the gurney.
First, of course, was the hand, or the lack of hand. The ragged stump without any cauterizing or sutures – one pink tendon extending two inches beyond the rest.
Jeff had seen pictures of the damage a shark bite could do to, for example, a surfboard, but he found that it did not prepare him for the sight of Nash’s ribs opened by the slashing teeth, the wedge taken out of his lower leg.
Celine walked up to the body. Her eyes, he noticed, were dry in spite of the sob. Perhaps they glistened with shock. The coroner’s assistant made a motion to come and steady her, but something in her bearing stopped him. The room became for an instant as silent and colorless as an old black-and-white snapshot – all the life, not just Owen’s – leached out by the tension.
Celine put a hand on the body’s chest, another on the thigh. It might have only been five seconds, but it seemed she stood there forever, unmoving, taking it in. Now a tear did fall. She leaned over and placed her lips against the center of his stomach.
Suddenly it was over. She nodded at the inspector, then turned around and walked past them all to the door and on out without looking back.
In the lobby, Ken and Betty thanked Glitsky. Celine was already in the limo. The evening light was startling -Jeff remembered walking out of matinees as a child, how the Saturday-afternoon light after the dark theater was so jarring, so unexpected. He’d felt that way, squinting against the setting sun.
He knew he should have asked someone more questions – the assistant, Glitsky, Ken or Betty – but he’d been too shaken. By the time he recovered, the limo had driven off. Glitsky had gone into the Hall of Justice. He couldn’t bring himself to go back into the morgue.
He shook himself, pulling out of the memory. The orange screen still hummed in front of him. He looked at his watch and saw that he’d wasted twenty minutes. He had to get down to work.
There was, first, the business side. In 1953, Owen had borrowed $1,500 from a G.I. loan program and put a down payment on a near-bankrupt television repair shop in South San Francisco. He began tinkering with used parts, and within two years had perfected and patented an improved insulation technique for the hot tubes of early TV. General Electric picked it up, and Owen was on his way. He diddled with vacuum tubes, invested in copper wiring, got into simple components before the microchip came along. By the time Silicon Valley exploded, he was ready for it.
Shares of Owen Industries, Inc., were trading on the New York Exchange for $17 a share, and Nash himself had controlled eight hundred thousand shares when he took the corporation public in 1974. Figuring three or four stock splits minimum, Nash’s personal worth on stocks alone, at the time of the Business Week cover story, was close to $70 million.
His other assets were also substantial. Besides the $250,000 Eloise and his Seacliff mansion, he owned a house and more than a thousand acres of land in New Mexico, pied-a-terres in Hong Kong and Tokyo, a condominium in New York. According to Business Week he also held part or controlling interest in three hotels, ski resorts in Lake Tahoe and Utah, a restaurant on St. Bart’s in the Caribbean. His one failure, as of five years ago, had been an airline, the Waikiki Express, which had made two round trips daily between Oahu and Los Angeles for sixteen months before it went bankrupt.
But the man hadn’t spent all his time in boardrooms. The first mention of Owen Nash in any publication had nothing to do with business. In 1955 he was the first non-Oriental to break more than six one-inch pine boards on top of one another in a sanctioned karate exhibition. Jeff was tempted to get up from his chair and see if Archives had the picture referenced in the display, but decided against it. Time was getting short.
In 1958 Nash’s house in Burlingame had burned to the ground. He managed to rescue his six-year-old daughter, Celine, but had nearly died himself trying to get back inside to pull his wife, Eloise, to safety.
After his wife’s death, he bought his first sailboat and took it around the world, accompanied only by Celine. The papers picked up on the rugged outdoorsman life now – for a year in the 1960s he held the all-tackle world record for a black marlin he’d taken off the Australian Barrier Reef. As recently as last year he and Celine and a crew of three college kids had sailed a rented ketch to runner-up in the Newport-Cabo San Lucas race.
His forays into big-game hunting stirred more and more controversy over the years. Jeff Elliot thought the change of tone of the articles was interesting: when Nash bagged a polar bear in 1963 he was a man’s man featured in Field & Stream; by 1978, taking a zebra in the Congo got him onto the Sierra Club’s public-enemy list.
He didn’t ‘give a good goddamn’ (Forbes, Ten CEOs Comment on Image,‘ Sept. ’86) about the public. He was one of the only western industrialists to attend the coronation of Bokassa; the Shah of Iran reportedly stayed aboard the Eloise in the Caribbean while the U.S. government was deciding how to handle him after he was deposed; Nash appalled the Chronicle reporter covering his trip to China in ‘83 by feasting, with his hosts, on the brains of monkeys who were brought live to the table.
He made Who’s Who for the first time in 1975. He never remarried.
‘I wish I made more money,’ Pico Morales said. ‘I wish I had more money. Anybody else, they would have more money.’
His wife, Angela, put her hand over his. ‘English isn’t even his first language,’ she said, ‘but he sure can conjugate the dickens out of “to have money.” ’
They were in the Hardys’ dining room, sitting around the cherry table. After the spaghetti and a jug of red wine, Frannie had brought out an apple pie, and Pico had put away half of it.
‘He is a man of many talents,’ Hardy said.
‘Is there anything special about today and money?’ Frannie asked.
‘See? That’s what I mean.’ Pico had a knife in his hand and was reaching again for the pie. ‘We don’t think – I don’t think – like a rich person. I think it’s genetic.’
‘He thought sharks dying was genetic, too,’ Hardy said.
‘No, that was lack of family structure.’
‘What would you do if you had money,’ Angela asked, ‘besides maybe eat more?’
Pico had no guilt about his size. He patted his stomach and smiled at his wife. ‘What I would do, given this news tonight about Owen Nash that the rest of the world doesn’t know yet, is go out and invest everything I owned in stock in his company.’
Hardy shook his head. ‘That stock is going to dive, Peek.’
‘I know. So you sell short, make a short-term bundle, buy back in.’
‘How do you know when it’s going to turn around so you buy back at the right time?’ Frannie asked.
‘You don’t for sure,’ Pico said, ‘but that’s the nature of stocks.’
‘Either that, hon, or they go the other way tomorrow and take off because Nash was mismanaging his company and now they can fly. Then you lose everything.’ Angela patted his hand again. ‘Like every other time we have had hot tips on the stock market. Have another piece of pie.’
‘I’m interested in what you meant when you said anybody else would have had more money. When?’ Hardy had pushed his chair onto its back legs and was leaning into them, thumbs hooked in his front pockets.
‘Today. The last few days. We should already have an agent, be cooking up a book deal, movie rights, something. We’re the ones who found the hand. We should be famous by now.’
‘Fame’s an elusive thing,’ Hardy admitted.
‘Okay, laugh at me.’ Pico consoled himself with a mouthful of pie. ‘But you wait – somebody’s going to make a fortune off this somehow and then where will we be?’
‘We’ll be right here,’ Frannie said. ‘I’m kind of immobilized for a while anyway.’
‘Don’t you like where you are, Peek? I mean, curator of the Steinhart Aquarium is not exactly an entry-level position.’
‘I just feel like we’re all missing an opportunity here.’
‘Probably,’ Hardy said. Angela agreed. So did Frannie.
Pico ate some more pie.
May Shinn’s apartment was on Hyde, directly across the street from a boutique French deli. The cable-car tracks passed under the window, but this time of night, the cars weren’t running.
There was hardwood in the foyer, an immediate sense of almost ascetic order – a hint of sandalwood? The streetlights outside threw into gauzy relief the one room where she sat in front of her corner shrine, across the room from a low couch with a modern end table and a coffee table. Hardwood glistened around the sides of the throw rug. Along one wall was a high cabinet – thin and elegant lines, glass fronted. Another wall held Japanese prints above a low chair and a futon.
The entranceway itself was an eight-foot circle. Older San Francisco apartments often had turrets, alcoves, arches and moldings that no modern unit could afford. Another rug, two feet wide, was in the center of the circle. A hand-carved cherry bench, the wood warm, highly polished but not over-lacquered, hugged the side. Close to ten feet long, it was built to the curve of the wall, apparently and impossibly seamless. It would cost a fortune, and that’s if you knew the artist, if he could get the matched cherry, if there was the time.
The wall in the foyer had an ivory rice-paper finish. Three John Lennon lithographs, which didn’t look like prints, hung at viewer’s height. The light itself came in five-track beams from a central point overhead. Three of the beams were directed at the Lennons, the other two at ancient Japanese woodcuts on either side of the door leading to the kitchen.
There was another longish block of cherry with a slight ridge down its middle on the floor by the open entrance to the living room.
May had bathed after forcing herself to eat some rice with cold fish left over from Friday night. She had combed back her long black hair and pinned it, then sat on her hard, low platform bed for a long while, still undressed, unaware of time’s passing.
When it was dark, she began picking out what she would take with her. Not much. Two suitcases perhaps. She had to decide. Would too little cause someone to notice? What did business people take on a trip to Japan? On the other hand, she didn’t want to tip her hand that she was not coming back by taking too much. She walked around the apartment, taking things down, then putting them back up, unable to decide. Everything was expensive, hard to replace, precious to her. She’d designed her living space that way.
She went to her shrine and lit a candle. It was not a shrine to any god particularly, just a raised block of polished cherry with a pillow in front of it. There was a white candle, a soapstone incense burner, a knife and, tonight, a plain white piece of bond paper, five by seven inches, with a man’s scrawl on one side of it.
She had gotten out the piece of paper after reading the Chronicle article about Owen Nash that mentioned her, already tying her to him. The paper was a further tie – a handwritten addendum to Owen’s will leaving $2 million to May Shintaka.
She didn’t know if it was legal or not. It was dated a month ago, May 23, and was written in ink and signed. Owen had told her that’s all she needed.
‘Maybe I’ll die on the way home,’ he’d told her, ‘before I get the Wheel to get it done right. This way, even if it’s disputed, after taxes you ought to get at least half a million.’
She’d told him she didn’t want it, and he’d laughed his big laugh and said that’s what was so great about it. He knew she didn’t want it. But he’d folded it once and put it in her jewelry box. Every time he came by, he checked to make sure it was still there.
She wondered if he had told Ken Farris – the mysterious Wheel – about it. Sometimes she wondered if the Wheel really existed, but there he was in the Chronicle article today. She wondered why Owen had never had them meet.
No, she didn’t. She knew why. It came with her profession. You didn’t meet friends of your clients. In fact, what you did together couldn’t survive outside of its strict boundaries, although Owen had promised her it could.
But it never had. And now, could she go and present this little scribbling to the Wheel, Owen’s financial protector? He would laugh at her, or worse. Perhaps she would do it later. But later might be too late. All the money might be gone, and none left for her.
But she had never expected the money, had never wanted to believe any of Owen’s promises. He’d even told her, in other contexts, ‘A promise is just a tool, Shinn. You need to promise something, you promise. Later you need to not remember your promise, you don’t remember.’
He’d said that before he’d changed, of course, before something had really happened between them. And yet…
It broke her heart, that heart she’d hardened and decided to keep to herself forever. She was kneeling back on the pillow, and a tear fell and landed on her polished thigh. Should she pick up the knife? Should she burn the piece of paper? What could she take with her to Japan and where would she stay when she got there?