Casually as he could muster, Hardy put the paperweight into his pocket and walked out past the other suites in the D.A.‘s office. Thinking ’not now,‘ he saw Jeff Elliot coming out of the elevator and turned to duck into the criminal investigations room just outside the D.A.’s door. He wasn’t quick enough, though. He heard his name called and stopped, caught, hands in his pockets.
For a reporter Jeff had a knack of seeming to be sensitive, even reasonable. Maybe, Hardy thought, it was the crutches, that and the grin. To say nothing of today’s puffiness, the indoor sunglasses. You wanted to help the guy.
‘Bad time?’
Hardy nodded. ‘A little.’
‘You go ahead then. I’ll talk to Ms Pullios.’
There was a perverse satisfaction in Elizabeth now being the attorney of record. Naturally she would be a valuable source. But Hardy felt that, at the very least, he ought to have some control over the flow of information to the Chronicle. This wasn’t in the office hierarchy and he didn’t want to give her a freebie on what she most craved – ink. ‘I’ve got a minute, Jeff, what can I do for you?’
‘Can we talk somewhere? I need to go off the record.’
They walked back into the D.A.‘s hallway and Hardy unlocked one of the waiting rooms, provided for the families of victims, witnesses, the odd conference. There was a yellow couch – the city favored green and yellow -and matching armchair. A picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in a special limited edition of three and a half million livened up the wall space.
Jeff lowered himself into the chair.
‘Where have you been lately? You don’t look too well.’
‘Just some new medication. Makes me puff up and get light sensitive. Prednisone.’
‘Steroids?’
Jeff smiled. ‘That’s what they use. It’s okay, I wasn’t going for the Olympics anyway.’
Hardy liked him, no getting around it. ‘Okay, so what’s off the record?’ He pointed a finger. ‘And it is off the record.’
Did Hardy remember last week, after the Municipal Court arraignment, standing in the hallway with Elliot and Glitsky, talking about the bail, the money connection?
‘Sure, of course, what about it? You find something?’
The reporter shook his head. ‘No, not yet, maybe. But you guys said, didn’t you, there were ways to subpoena the bail bondsman for his records.’
Hardy shook his head. ‘Not in this case. Only if we think the money for the bail came from criminal activity.’
‘Well, how would May Shinn get half a million dollars?’
‘What half a million? She only needed fifty thousand for a fee.’
Jeff Elliot shook his head. ‘I thought that at first, too. She still needs collateral on the loan.’
Hardy nodded. ‘Yeah, we’ve gone over that.’ He chewed it around again. ‘I don’t know, investments? Maybe she inherited it? We don’t have any sign of anything. Drugs. Like that.’
‘How about prostitution? That’s illegal, isn’t it?’
It was something to wonder about, but that, too, had already been discussed. ‘Maybe. Technically. But there’s no judge going to give us a warrant to seize records on that.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe the bondsman accepted Owen Nash’s will.’
‘Even if she killed him? Could she collect on that?’
‘That,’ Hardy said, ‘is another legal battle. Fortunately it’s not mine. Whichever way it goes, even if she gets the whole two million, lawyers will wind up with most of it. What do you have that’s so off the record?’
Elliot leaned forward and took off his sunglasses. There was something clearly unfocused there, dark rings in sockets deepened by swelling. Hardy couldn’t conceal his reaction and interrupted Jeffs response. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
Jeff smiled and the bags seemed to lift a bit. ‘It looks worse than it is. Actually I’m feeling much better.’ He put on the glasses again. ‘The chipmunk cheeks go away after a while.’
‘You getting any sleep?’
Now the grin was wide. ‘Not enough.’ Then, slyly proud. ‘I’m seeing somebody. First time.’ He lifted his shoulders with exaggerated nonchalance. ‘Sleep’s not a big issue.’
‘You dog!’
‘Yes, well…’ Suddenly Jeff didn’t want to be talking about it, reducing it, bragging as though it were some casual victory. This wasn’t a conquest, it was Dorothy. ‘Anyway, about the bail, I don’t have any names yet, nothing I can print, but before I even move ahead at all, I want to protect my source.’
‘So how do you do that?’
‘I provide a plausible explanation of how I came to look at some records. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this?’
Hardy passed over that. ‘Have you seen some records?’
‘No.’ Jeff leaned forward. Hardy thought if he took off his glasses he was lying. But he didn’t. ‘Really, no.’
‘Okay. And I’m the leak?’
‘Unnamed, of course. Off the record.’
Hardy found himself reminded of Freeman’s advice to him in the courtroom, of Pullios’s insistence that there were no rules. This was high-stakes poker, and if Jeff could provide Hardy – oops, the prosecution – with the source of May’s bail, it would only help his, their, case.
‘If anything comes out of this and I can’t explain how I got my information, my source loses her job, so I thought I’d cover that up front.’
‘But we’re not subpoenaing the records.’
‘I know, but that doesn’t matter. I just need an answer if the question comes up.’
‘I’m not giving you an answer to anything, Jeff. I’m just telling you a procedure, you got that? The way the D.A. would do it if certain criteria were met, which they have not been.’
‘I got it.’
‘Clearly?’
‘Clearly.’
Hardy picked up a tall pile of blue chips and dropped them into the pot. ‘Okay then.’
Hardy thought he might be getting paranoid, but he took the file home with him anyway. In it was everything they had to date, including the phone records on May Shinn. He stopped out by Arguello and Geary and spent forty-five minutes copying it. He couldn’t have said exactly why it seemed like such a good idea – Pullios might be taking it away from him, maybe he wanted to be able to check up on her in the privacy of his office.
Maybe he was trying to protect Andy Fowler.
No. There was a fine line between the backstabbing, gamesmanship and duplicity that seemed to be the norm and downright unethical conduct. He was going to find out about Andy Fowler’s relationship with May Shinn. Then he would deal with it. He thought.
But first, and in the meanwhile, what he didn’t want was some D.A.‘s investigator, spurred on by Pullios’s zeal, to discover this apparent connection and ruin Andy’s life. And in fact, there might be no connection, or an innocent one. Although Hardy couldn’t imagine what it might be.
Nevertheless, the Boy Scout in him deemed it best to be prepared. He copied the file.
David Freeman thought it had been a long day, but not without its rewards. The trial falling to Andy Fowler had been a godsend, one that he, Freeman, had never given up hope on but one which he couldn’t possibly have counted on.
He had finished a decent meal and a couple of solid drinks at the Buena Vista Bar – not the birthplace but the American foster home of Irish Coffee – and was taking the cable car up toward Nob Hill, named for the Nobs who had originally claimed it as their own: Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker and Collis P. Huntington. Freeman lived there himself in a penthouse apartment a block from the Fairmont Hotel, just above the Rue Lepic, one of his favorite restaurants.
But tonight he didn’t want to go straight home. It was full dark, surprisingly warm again. He sat on the cable car’s hard bench, cantered against the steep grade, rocking with the motion, surrounded by the tourists. It was all right.
He was a man of the people and yet, somehow, above the people. He looked on them tolerantly, with few illusions. They were capable of anything – thirty-five years practicing criminal law had shown him that – but there was something he sometimes felt in a bustling rush of humanity that brought him back to himself, to who he was.
He remembered why he had chosen defense work – and there hadn’t been much glamor, and even less money, in the beginning. The field had attracted him because he knew that everyone made mistakes, everyone was guilty of something. What the world needed, what people needed, was forgiveness and understanding, at least to have their side heard. He described himself, to himself, as a cynical romantic. And he had to admit he was seldom bored.
He dismounted the cable car at the Fairmont and decided to prolong the night and the mood, take a walk, reflect. May Shinn was constantly referring to Owen Nash and always managed to mention his cigars. Freeman found it had given him the taste for one, and he stopped in at the smoke shop and picked up a Macanudo. Outside, while he was lighting up by the valet station, a well-dressed man tried to sell him a genuine Rolex Presidential watch for three hundred dollars. Freeman declined.
He strolled west, over the crest of the hill, craving another sight of the Bay at night. The cigar was full-flavored, delicious.
After the conference he’d had today with Andy Fowler, he was sure he was going to win.
Fowler shouldn’t have gotten the trial. Certainly, when he’d hired Freeman, that couldn’t have been contemplated. May was in Municipal Court and there was no possible way it could wind up in Andy’s courtroom.
Even after the grand-jury indictment had moved it into Superior Court, the odds were still six to one against Fowler getting it. But, even at those odds, Fowler should have gone to Leo Chomorro, spoken to him privately, and taken himself out of the line.
Except that feelings between Andy Fowler and Leo Chomorro were strained, to say the least. Forgetting their philosophical differences, and they were substantial, on a personal level Fowler had been one of the few judges singled out by name in Chomorro’s report to the governor on the ‘candy-ass’ nature of the San Francisco bench. Fowler, in turn, had been an outspoken critic of Chomorro’s appointment to the court. More, Freeman knew through legal community scuttlebutt that Fowler was the man most responsible for Chomorro’s extended sojourn on Calendar. So, for any and all of these reasons, Fowler hadn’t gone to Chomorro, and that’s when he’d cut himself off at the pass.
Because he’d gone on the assumption that he had a fallback, fail-safe position even if the trial came up in his department. Freeman smiled, thinking of it – not unkindly, it was consistent with his view of the folly of man, even judges. Fowler had thought that of course, without a doubt, there was no question that if the Shinn trial came to his courtroom, David Freeman, defense counsel, would exercise his option to challenge the presiding judge, not having to give a reason, and that would be the end of that – the trial would go to another judge.
But Freeman hadn’t challenged, which, of course, was what had prompted the conference.
Fowler, arms crossed, stood just inside the door to his chambers. ‘David, what the hell are you doing?’
‘I’m defending my client. That’s what you hired me to do.’
‘I certainly didn’t think she would get to this courtroom.’
‘No, neither did I.’
‘Well, you have to challenge. I can’t hear this case.’
Freeman hadn’t answered. His hands were in his pockets. He knew he looked rumpled, mournful, sympathetic. Two weeks before he’d been Andy Fowler’s savior, now he was his enemy.
He loved the drama of it.
Fowler had turned, walking to the window. ‘What am I supposed to do, David?’
‘You could recuse yourself, cite conflict.’
‘I can’t do that now.’
Freeman knew he couldn’t.
‘I can’t have my relationship with her come out.’
Chomorro, even Fowler’s allies, would eat him alive for that. It was bad form for judges to go with prostitutes. But sometimes the best argument was silence. Freeman walked up to the judge’s desk and straightened some pencils.
‘David, you’ve got to challenge.’
Freeman shook his head. ‘You hired me to do the best job defending my client. A trial in your courtroom is clearly to her advantage. I’m sorry if it is inconvenient to you.’
‘Inconvenient? This is a disaster. It’s totally unethical. I can’t let this happen.’
‘That, Judge, is your decision.’ He was matter-of-fact. ‘If it’s any consolation, I have no intention of betraying your confidence.’
Fowler’s eyes seemed glazed. ‘Does May know?’
‘I’d bet against it. I told her it was free advertising for me. It seemed to go down.’
‘Jesus.’ He ran a hand through his hair. Suddenly he looked haggard and old. ‘Jesus Christ.’ He walked around in little circles, then stopped. ‘Do you think I could give her a fair trial, David?’
There it was, the rationality kicking in. That’s what people did, Freeman knew. They made their own actions, however wrong, somehow justified.
Fowler continued, ‘If it ever comes out, I’m truly ruined. Would she say anything?’
‘Why would she, especially since I’m going to get her off? It wouldn’t be to her advantage. Now or ever.’
‘You’re going to get her off?’
‘Of course. There’s no evidence, Andy.’
The judge lowered his voice. ‘But she did it, David.’
‘No one can prove my client killed anybody. If the prosecution can be kept from sexual innuendo and racial slurs, she will be acquitted. It will be essential to control the tone in the courtroom.’
The cigar had gone out and he chewed happily on the butt. It had been a satisfying performance, its outcome so sweet he almost wanted to dance a little jig when he left chambers.
Of course, on the downside, Andy Fowler, with whom he’d always gotten along, had his neck on the block. Andy couldn’t recuse himself without admitting his relationship with May, and he wasn’t going to do that. He was right, it would end his career, and the revelation at this late date in the proceedings would be particularly damning.
But he’d gotten himself in this position. You made your own luck. Good or bad. Andy was a big boy. He should have known better.
The walk had taken Freeman across the top of Nob Hill and back down its north side. He became subliminally aware that his steps were leading him somewhere, and he let them. Slowly, no hurry. He still chewed the cigar.
By night, the corner that May lived on was quiet. The cable cars had stopped running. The surrounding hills were steep, and people heading for North Beach or back out to the Avenues would take one of the larger thoroughfares, Broadway or Van Ness, Gough or Geary. He crossed the street and stood leaning against the window of the French deli, looking up. There was a light on in what he knew to be May’s kitchen. The front of the apartment, the turreted window, was dark.
Across the street in Mrs Streletski’s building shadows danced across the turret, and suddenly Freeman remembered a fourteen-year-old boy named Wayne Allred who’d been hiding in a closet when his mother ran from their apartment, who’d come out to shoot his father dead.
He threw his cigar butt into the gutter. He wasn’t quite disgusted with himself for being less than completely thorough earlier. It had been the end of another long day and he hadn’t been holding out any hope that May was innocent. In fact, he still didn’t.
But his feet, his subconscious – something – had taken him here, and now he knew why. He crossed the street and rang the bell to number 17, Strauss. The speaker squawked by his ear.
‘Who is it?’
Freeman apologized and explained briefly.
‘It’s ten o’clock at night. Can’t this wait until morning?’
He apologized again, and for a moment it appeared that he was going to strike out. But then the buzzer sounded and he was quietly climbing the carpeted steps. The door stood ajar and Nick Strauss leaned against the jamb, wearing white socks and a terrycloth robe. He was a big man, far bigger than Freeman, his black hair still wet from the shower.
‘I’m sorry,’ Freeman repeated. ‘But a person’s life is at stake here.’
‘Could I see some ID?’
The lawyer smiled. ‘Of course.’ It was the standard first line of protection, as foolish, Freeman thought, as most human endeavor. As if – were he a burglar or a murderer – possession of a driver’s license would make him any safer, as if all IDs weren’t routinely, expertly, forged or altered.
But he took out his wallet and offered it. He had a business card in his jacket breast pocket and he gave Strauss one of those too.
The man opened the door further. Freeman saw two boys – teenagers or a little younger – sitting together on the couch, trying to get a look at him. He gave them a little friendly wave, and Strauss said to come on in. ‘But I’ve already told you we didn’t see anything.’
‘Well, Mr Strauss, actually you told me you didn’t see anything. You said you’d ask the boys and get back to me.’
‘If they saw anything -’
‘What, Dad?’
‘Just a second, Nick. I’m talking to this man. This is Mr Freeman, guys. These are my boys – Alex, the big guy, and Nick, the big little guy. Aren’t you, Nick?’
The younger boy, Nick, seemed an echo not only of his father’s name but of the attitude – cautious, watchful. Freeman kept his hands in his pockets, the supplicant. ‘I don’t mean to push. People forget these things all the time. It’s just so terribly important.’
Strauss made some motion that Freeman took for acquiescence; he looked to the boys, then back to Strauss. ‘Would you guys like to show me your room, if it’s okay with your dad?’
The older boy, Alex, said ‘sure’ and jumped up. This was an adventure.
‘How about you, Nick?’
‘Naw. I’ll just wait here.’
Freeman said fine, but Alex was all over him. ‘Come on, you wimp, chicken-liver, baby.’
‘Alex!’
But that did it. Nick got up. ‘It’s all right, Dad. Alex is such a nerd.’ Then, to his brother, ‘you jerkoff,’ remembering the last time he had seen the Chinese woman through the telescope…
Nick Strauss loved his dad’s apartment at the corner of Hyde and Union, especially after the month of traveling with his mom and Alex, staying in those tiny stuffy rooms in Europe. First of all, Dad’s place was humongous, twice the size of his mom’s in Van Nuys, rickety-rackety pink stucco with peeling paint and cars parked all over the place where there should have been grass. Then, at Dad’s, nobody was above them – no Mrs Cutler and her two sons and the bass and drums coming down through the ceiling all day and night like in the Valley. No adjoining hotel rooms with people staying up all the time.
Plus the cable cars; it was a snap to get on and off without paying. And hills for skateboarding like you couldn’t believe, and no damn palm trees. In fact, no trees.
And finally this glassed-in turret in the front upstairs corner of the apartment, which was part of his and Alex’s bedroom when they came to visit on Saturday. And this time, since they’d been with Mom so steadily with school and then Europe and all, they were staying three weeks.
So after the lights went out you could take out the telescope and spy on anybody in the neighborhood, nobody noticing a thing. Or in the daytime, just drawing the drapes and making it all dark in there, looking all around, checking it all out.
And since they’d gotten here, checking her out.
Alex saw her first – across the street, upstairs just like them, probably figuring nobody could see her. It was supremely worth the fifty cents Nick had to pay for the first look – he wondered what Chinese custom it was to walk around your house naked, but he wasn’t complaining. Except for Mom (and she didn’t count anyway), he’d never seen a live naked woman. Even Playboy was hard to get when you were eleven.
And he thought this woman looked as good – at least -as anybody in Playboy, except for the smaller boobs. And being Chinese was a little funny at first. He kind of wished she was a regular American – he wondered if it really counted as seeing a naked woman if she was Chinese, but he asked Alex and Alex said it sure counted for him, and he was thirteen so he ought to know.
She hadn’t been there for a few days; the last time had been a couple nights ago. It had been almost eleven o’clock. He couldn’t get his weenie to go down and he couldn’t get to sleep. He also didn’t want to waste a minute when her lights were on. He put his eye to the telescope. It looked like she was doing some kind of exercise taking things down off shelves, reaching up, then bending over. She turned toward him, her face so full in the telescope he almost jumped back. It looked like she was crying, and that made him feel guilty, spying on her and all.
‘See anything?’ Alex had whispered.
Darn. Nick thought Alex had been asleep. He quickly stuffed a blanket down over his hard little weenie. He took a last look, thinking about the way boobs changed shapes when women moved around, leaned over, stretched up. His brother had called him a ‘boob man’ last week. Well, he guessed he was, if that’s what interested him, and he wore that knowledge like a badge of honor. A man, not a boy.
He pulled the drapes closed in front of the telescope. He’d keep the crying a secret between just him and her. ‘Naw,’ he had told Alex, ‘I think she went to sleep.’
David Freeman, Nick, Alex and their father walked through the living room, Mr Strauss saying he was sorry about his sons’ language, referring to Nick calling Alex a jerkoff. Their mother wasn’t very strict with them and the language thing was impossible to correct in the six weeks or so he had them every year. You had to pick your fights.
Freeman saw the telescope as soon as he entered the room, and walked over to it. ‘This is pretty cool,’ he said. ‘This looks like a real telescope.’
‘It is a real telescope,’ Alex said.
Freeman put his eye to the glass. ‘What can you see through it?’ What he was looking at, what it had been set on, was the turret across the street, the room beyond. He saw May at her kitchen table, drinking something, so close he could see the steam rising off her cup.
There was a knack to putting a little twinkle in your eye, to sounding conspiratorial and friendly. ‘You ever spy on people?’
Alex answered quickly, too quickly. ‘No way.’
‘How about you, Nick?’
Nick pulled himself further behind his father’s robe. Big Nick broke in. ‘What are you getting at here?’
‘Take a look.’
Freeman moved aside and Big Nick came over and lowered his eye to the eyepiece. He stayed that way a minute.
‘That’s her,’ Freeman said. ‘My client.’
Big Nick was angry, turning on his boys. ‘You guys have got to -’
‘Mr Strauss, please. Just a minute.’ The stentorian voice stopped everything. The boys stood transfixed. Freeman muted it, sat on the bed, and gave them Gentle and Soothing. ‘You guys are not in trouble, no matter what. I guarantee it.’
He explained the situation then, slowly, calmly, no judgments. He told them what their father had said about the Saturday they’d first come here, that they’d only changed and had lunch and then gone out for the day. He just wanted to know if that was all they’d done, and were they sure? He didn’t want to lead them.
The two boys looked at each other. ‘I think so,’ Nick said.
‘Alex?’
His eyes went back to his brother, to his father. ‘It’s all right, Alex, just tell the truth.’
‘Well, you know, the telescope was up, so I started looking around a little, just looking at things.’
‘And did you see anything? Anything interesting or unusual, maybe across the street there?’
Alex looked at Nick, shrugged, and gave it up. ‘She was naked. She was walking around naked.’
‘When was that, Alex?’
‘Just before we had to go, when Dad called us, just before lunchtime.’
‘And you’re sure it was that day, the very first day you were here, the Saturday?’
The boys checked each other again. Both of them nodded and said yeah, it was.
Hardy picked up the phone on the kitchen wall on the third ring. He’d gotten out of his warm bed from deep sleep.
‘Dismas, this is Andy Fowler. Did I wake you up?’ The kitchen clock said 10:45.
‘That’s okay, Andy.’
‘I just got your message. What’s so urgent?’
Hardy was coming out of his fog but he wasn’t yet awake enough to beat around the bush. ‘May Shinn.’
A pause. ‘Since you’re on the case, Diz, I don’t think we should discuss it.’ As bluffs went, Hardy thought, except for the pause it wasn’t too bad.
‘I think we have to, Andy. I think you know what I’m talking about.’
In the silence Hardy thought he could hear Fowler’s breathing get heavier. Then he said, ‘Where can I meet you?’
They met at a fern bar on Fillmore, half a mile from Andy Fowler’s house on Clay near Embassy Row. When it was not happy hour it was the local watering hole for doctors and nurses at the local medical center. It wasn’t Hardy’s type of bar but he wasn’t here for the ambience.
He was wearing his prelawyer clothes – an old corduroy sports jacket over a misshapen white fisherman’s sweater, jeans, hiking boots – and felt better for it. At a place like this, at this time of night, those clothes put out the message that he wasn’t a yuppie looking to get laid with the accepted props of elegant threads and the attitude that went with them.
The music was some New Age stuff that was supposed to make you believe real people played it – bass pops, synthesized everything, music that eliminated the strain of having to listen to words or follow a melody. It was just There, like the ubiquitous television blaring in the corner, like the National Enquirer at checkout stands, like McDonald’s.
Surprised that the judge hadn’t arrived yet, he pulled up a stool at the corner of the bar in the back. He ordered a Guinness, which they didn’t have on tap, so he went with Anchor porter, an excellent second choice.
Maybe it was being awakened from a good sleep, but he realized he was in a foul humor.
Andy Fowler’s appearance didn’t pick him up any. The judge hadn’t changed out of his tuxedo. He had his trim body, his thick hair, his guileless smile so different from Hardy’s weathered one.
These good-looking older guys – who were they trying to kid? Suddenly he saw a different man than the Andy Fowler he’d known – vainer and shallower, the august presence and appearance not so much a reflection of an enviable and confident character as a costume that concealed the insecure man within.
Coming back through the bar, the judge checked himself in the mirror. A man who checked his hair in a burning building had his priorities all wrong.
Hardy gave a small wave, and Andy brought up the stool next to him, ordering an Anejo rum in a heated snifter. There was a moment of cheerful greeting, ritual for them both, but it subsided quickly. Hardy reached into his pocket, took out the paperweight and laid it on the bar between them. He gave it a little spin.
There it was – Andy’s Fowler’s whole world in an orb of jade. There was no more avoiding it. ‘May Shinn gave this to you, didn’t she?’
Fowler had his hands cupped around the amber liquid. There was no point in denial anymore. ‘How’d you find out?’
‘Phone records.’ He told him how he’d made the discovery, put the jade jewelry – his paperweight, Nash’s ring – together. ‘Anyway, there were a dozen calls to your number, maybe more.’
‘That many?’ Did he seem pleased?
‘What’s happening here, Andy? You can’t be on this case.’
‘It’s going to come out now, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t see how it can’t.’
‘Who else knows but you?’
Hardy sipped his porter. It wasn’t the direction he’d expected. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean who’s put it together, Diz?’ He brought his hand down on the bar, a gavel of flesh. ‘Goddamn it, what do you think I mean? Who else knows about this?’
Hardy stared into the space between them. They were the first harsh words the judge had ever directed at him. Immediately Fowler put his hand over Hardy’s. ‘I’m sorry, Diz. I didn’t mean that.’
But it was done. All right, he was stressed out. Hardy could let it go, forget it, almost.
Fowler raised his snifter, took a sip, put it down. His voice was under control again. ‘I guess what I’m asking is, what happens now?’
‘I’d say that depends on what’s happened before.’
Fowler nodded. ‘So nobody else knows.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Yes, you did.’
Everybody was a poker player. It was all check, bet, raise. ‘Okay. Why don’t you tell me about it? We’ll go from there.’
The bartender was coming down the bar toward them. ‘Double it up here, would you?’ Fowler said. ‘And give my friend another pint.’
They were at a large corner booth, nobody else within twenty feet, at right angles from each other, almost knee to knee, the older, good-looking man in a tuxedo, and the other one, maybe a construction worker, probably the man’s son. Definitely they weren’t lovers- in San Francisco two men alone were always suspect. But the body language was all wrong for that. They were close, involved in something, and it was putting a strain between them.
‘It was at one of the galleries down by Union Square. I’d had lunch at the Clift and the sun was out so I thought I’d walk a little of it off, maybe drop in at Magnin’s and visit Jane. I so rarely get to see downtown in the daylight.
‘The place was empty except for the saleswoman – she turned out to be the owner – and May. I don’t know what made me stop. They were showing some erotica – I guess that’s what got me to look, but then I saw this Japanese woman standing there, her face in profile, and I walked in. We got to talking, probably talked for half an hour, analyzing all this stuff. It was erotic, I admit, discussing all these positions and anatomies, alone with a beautiful woman you had just met.’
‘So you picked her up.’
‘If only it had been that simple. I hadn’t done anything like that in thirty years, Diz. When you’re a judge…’
Hardy drank his porter, waited. ‘So what happened?’
‘She left, said it was nice meeting me but she had to go. I stayed around a little longer and thought that was that.’ He paused. ‘But it wasn’t. I found I couldn’t get her out of my mind, kept picturing her in some of the positions. Sorry, I know it’s not my image.’
Hardy shrugged. ‘Everybody needs love, Andy.’
‘That sounds good enough when you say it. Try denying it, though, try burying it under your work and your image and your public life until you really believe you don’t need it anymore.’
‘I did it after Michael, and Jane.’
‘So you know. You tell yourself your life is just as good, just as full. It’s not like you don’t do things, but you’re so alone. Nothing resonates.’ Andy got quiet and stared outside at the empty street. ‘So a couple of days later,’ the judge went on, ‘I came back to the gallery and asked the owner if she remembered the woman I’d spoken with. She said she was a regular client.’
‘So she does deal in art?’
‘Who, May? No, she collects some, but I wouldn’t say she deals in it. Anyway, the owner knew her, but she wouldn’t tell me her name, even after I told her who I was. Not that I blame her. As we know, there are a lot of nuts out there, even among my colleagues. So I gave her my card, asked her to have this lady call me. She said she would.’
‘So you got together.’
‘No. Not yet. She didn’t call.’ He swirled his rum, put it back on the table untouched. ‘But I wanted her, I didn’t know her at all and I didn’t care. I had to see her again. I don’t know what it was.’
The vision of Celine Nash danced up before Hardy’s eyes and he drowned it in porter. ‘Okay, what?’
‘I gave it a week, then I went back in and bought one of the wood-cuts, forty-five hundred dollars, and told the owner to send it to May.’
‘That’ll eliminate the riffraff element.’
‘The money wasn’t important. I’ve got money. In any event it got her to call and thank me, and I told her I wanted to see her and she still said no, she couldn’t do that.
‘I asked her why, was she married, engaged, not interested in men? No? At least tell me why. So she agreed to meet me for dinner. And she told me.’
‘Her profession?’
‘What she did, yes. She was scared, me being a judge, that I’d bust her.’ He laughed, clipped and short. ‘I had to promise her immunity up front. I did want her, Diz. What she had done made no difference to me. I told her I wasn’t interested in that kind of relationship, paying her -I liked her, I wanted to see her, take her out legitimately. She laughed. She didn’t do that. So I asked if I could see her at all, under any conditions.’
‘Jesus, Andy…“
‘No, it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t groveling. It was more good-natured negotiating.’
‘So what’d the negotiating get to?’
The judge focused across the room. ‘Three thousand dollars.’
Hardy swallowed, took a long drink, swallowed again. ‘Three thousand dollars? For one time?’
‘No, per month.’
‘You paid May Shinn three thousand dollars a month?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lord, Lord, Lord.’
‘After the first couple of months I would have paid anything. Don’t laugh. I fell in love with her, Diz. I still love her.’
‘Andy, you don’t pay somebody you love.’
‘The money was never discussed after that first night. I thought she was coming around.’
‘To what? What could she be coming around to?’
‘To loving me.’
It was so simple, so basic, so incredibly misguided, Hardy didn’t know what to say. ‘What about her other clients?’
‘She dropped them all, almost immediately. That was one of the things that gave me some hope…’
‘That she would love you?’
‘I suppose.’
‘And then what? You marry her and have a happy little family?’
Fowler shook his head. ‘No, I never thought we’d get married. She made me happy, that was all. She was there for me. She filled up that space. I thought I was doing the same for her.’
‘But you weren’t.’
‘For a while I’m sure I was. She started cooking me meals, making special dishes, giving me presents – the paperweight, for example – things like that. Then four or five months ago it just ended. She called and said we couldn’t go on.’
‘Owen Nash?’
‘I assume so. I didn’t know it then. She said to just make believe she had died. But she was happy, I shouldn’t worry. I shouldn’t worry…’
Hardy sat back into the leather of the booth. All this tracked with Andy’s malaise over the past months, his explanation to Jane about a friend dying. Frannie and Jane had both, independently, been right. A woman had broken a man’s heart, the oldest story in the world.
But now, that story told, the judge had to move on. He took a gulp of his rum. ‘So that’s it, Diz, now you know.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘That’s what Eve said after she ate the apple. It was too late then, too.’
Hardy leaned forward again, arms on the table. ‘You can’t be on the case, Andy. I just don’t understand how it could have gotten this far.’
The answer – the same one that Fowler had given Freeman earlier in the day – was that it had come a step at a time: the Muni-Court arraignment with no chance of getting to Fowler’s courtroom anyway, then the grand-jury indictment leaving only one chance in six it would come to him, then his decision not to go and beg off privately to Leo Chomorro because that Hispanic Nazi would use the Fowler/Shinn relationship as political ammunition against Fowler. Andy didn’t mention the ace-in-the-hole that hadn’t worked – Freeman challenging out of his courtroom. He didn’t have any intention of opening that can of worms. So far, no one else knew he had hired Freeman, and he intended to keep things that way.
‘So then I figured if, after all that, it dropped in my lap, well then, it was fate. You know there’s going to be prejudice against her being Japanese, her profession. At least I could give her an even playing field. I could have helped her. She might have come back to me. There was no reason it had to come out. There isn’t now. I wouldn’t obstruct justice, Diz. I just wouldn’t do it.’
Hardy wanted to tell him he already had. Instead he said, ‘The rationalization maybe moves it out of disbarment range, Andy, but you and I both know it’s still unethical. You know the defendant – hell, you’ve been intimate with the defendant. If that’s not a conflict…’
What could he say? Andy knew this as well as he did. ‘You’ve got to take yourself off the case.’
‘If I did, I’d have to give a reason and I can’t do that.’
Hardy’s drink was gone. He picked up the glass, tried it, put it down. ‘You could retire.’
‘Right now, without notice?’
‘The trial isn’t tomorrow, Andy. There’s plenty of time. It’ll get reassigned. The phone records in the file aren’t strictly relevant to the murder. The police only asked for June twentieth. The rest doesn’t have to be there.’
This was not ethical either, and Hardy wasn’t sure he could do it. The file was the public record. Tampering with it, suppressing potential evidence – even if its relevance hadn’t been demonstrated – was a felony. Still, he wasn’t telling Andy he’d take the earlier phone records out, not in so many words. And if he didn’t say it explicitly, he didn’t say it at all. That was this game, and Andy Fowler played it, too.
Hardy, with the problem of where to draw the line between personal loyalty and the public trust, knew he had to get Fowler off the case and he didn’t want to blow the whistle on him. If a white lie could accomplish both results he thought it might be worth telling. He also thought it might not be. How many venial sins make a mortal sin? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
‘Dismas, I’m only sixty-two, I’m not ready to retire -’
‘You know, Andy, you’ve got to cut your losses, and you’re going to have ’em. At least you’ll still have your reputation. Maybe you’ll get a call to the federal bench.‘
They both got a wry smile at that. They were making last call, the lights coming up, the music going down.
Hardy had to push it. ‘I’ve got to know by the morning, Andy. I’m real sorry.’
Fowler patted his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry I put you through this, Dismas, although I’m glad it was you who found out. Anybody else…’
‘Andy, we’ve been friends a long time, but in this case I am anybody else. I’m just giving you one day to correct an oversight. But it’s got to get corrected, one way or the other. I want to be clear on that.’
The judge was relaxed again, the situation worked out. ‘It’s clear, Diz, it’s clear. Don’t you worry.’
David Freeman had a tradition he’d carried over from his days in law school. Whenever he scored what he considered a clear-cut victory he would celebrate it immediately. His theory was that you never knew when or if you’d get another one, and you’d better savor every drop of satisfaction from the one in hand before it was swept away into the river of your past.
So Tuesday night, after he’d arranged to have the boys and their father meet him at one-thirty the next day for a press conference in his office, he’d called a cab and taken it back to the Fairmont.
After booking a room there he took the outside elevator to the Crown Room and ordered a bottle of Paradis cognac, which went by the snifter at $12.50. The bottle set him back $350 but he could save it and take it home, a trophy for the job well done. He arrived at the Crown Room just after ten and stayed until it closed at two, putting about a six-inch dent in the bottle, sitting at one of the north-facing windows, watching his city sparkle beneath him, a Nob in his own castle.
Which explained why he wasn’t up anywhere near nine-thirty. If he had been, if he’d somehow gotten to Chris Locke and let him know that the May Shinn case couldn’t go to trial, that her alibi was rock solid, then he might have saved Superior Court Judge Andrew Bryan Fowler the trouble of announcing his early retirement, effective September 1.
In a computerized age, Jeff Elliot considered this manual search for title to a piece of property the most unnecessarily tedious job he’d ever done. Yesterday, after only two hours at it, his blurred vision had forced him to give it up.
Now, three hours into it again, not yet noon, he was having second thoughts, wondering if it could really matter. He’d thought of all sorts of plausible reasons to talk himself out of the search, not the least of which was that May Shinn herself might easily have accumulated enough for a down payment on $500,000 worth of real estate.
He remembered stories in Playboy and Penthouse when he’d been in college, about coeds who’d turned to hooking and pulled in $10,000 a month. Even allowing for the hyperbole of the publications, he knew it was possible for a high-class girl to make $200 a night, plus all her normal living expenses. So a smart one could save $4,000 a month, $50,000 a year. A little administrative acumen could provide a shelter for tax purposes – interior design, import/export, licensed sexual therapist.
He’d seen May Shinn in court in her tailored suit. It required no leap of faith to think she had the collateral for her own bail – she’d had the cash to pay Maury, after all. Why not the rest of it?
But – what if she didn’t?
And, as always, it was that possibility that pulled him along. The chance that under the obvious and the plausible, there might lurk the secret, the hidden, the dangerous – the story.
The title clerks could have been more helpful. But they were busy with their own work, with realtors they saw more often. He was a nosy crippled guy who didn’t even know what to ask for. So, like good bureaucrats everywhere, the clerks volunteered nothing.
But the learning curve was kicking in. Even if you knew the city – and Jeff wasn’t yet up to speed even there – the search took some getting used to. There were huge grid books that divided the land into areas that seemed to bear little relation to current neighborhoods. At first glance, street names were useless in determining which grid book – out of more than a hundred – held your property. But he felt he was closing in.
The collateral was a six-unit apartment building three blocks up Powell from Washington Square. After his frustrating search of records the day before, Jeff had come up with the idea that he could just stop by the place and ask one of the tenants who owned the building, and he and Dorothy had tried that.
The one person who’d been home – a mime artist who was preparing to go out and work the streets, whiteface and all – told them she sent her rent checks to a management company.
Jeff thought it unlikely that he’d befriend another secretary who would divulge private records to him, and decided that if he wanted the story he’d have to work for it, like always.
He estimated the books weighed fifteen pounds each. Up close, they smelled like wet newspaper. He had to wait in line, return his previous request, using only one crutch, holding the title book in his other hand. He’d gone through twenty-six books so far, but the closest plot in the last book ended a couple of blocks north of his site.
Why couldn’t you just type an address into a computer and push a button? He’d never figure it out.
Jane was furious. ‘You didn’t have to tell anybody! Daddy’s whole life is the bench. How could you do that to him?’
It was close to one o’clock. Jane had had her own early lunch with her father and he’d told her all about it. Hardy wasn’t too thrilled to learn that the judge had told his daughter, since he himself had elected to treat the entire sensitive subject on a need-to-know basis, hoping no one would.
Frannie hadn’t liked it either. ‘You can’t tell me? What do you mean, you can’t tell me? I’m your wife. We tell each other things, remember?’
‘I can tell you it has nothing to do with us.’
‘You go out in the middle of the night and stay out until God knows when and I don’t even get a hint of an explanation?’
‘Frannie, no. It doesn’t have to do with us. It’s confidential, attorney-client -’
‘Well, la di da. And whose attorney are you? I thought you worked for the city.’ She had him there, but he had made his decision. He had all sorts of conflicting loyalties. ‘This job is changing you,’ she said.
Maybe. Life changed people, big deal, live with it. But he wasn’t stupid enough to say that. Instead he’d gone off to work with the stomachache he got every time they fought.
And now Andy Fowler had told his daughter, or she’d wheedled it out of him. But either way, here was another person – and not the soul of discretion – who knew.
‘I didn’t do anything to him, Jane. If anything, he did it to himself.’
‘You didn’t have to tell anybody!’
‘I didn’t tell anybody. I haven’t told anybody, at least not yet. I hope I won’t have to.’
‘Have to? My, aren’t we getting sanctimonious here.’
Hardy’s door was open. He told Jane to hang on and he got up to close it. Pullios was coming down the hallway, deep in conference with Chris Locke. His stomach tightened further and he shut the door before they saw him.
Back at the phone, he asked Jane if Big Chuck – he’d taken to thinking of her new boyfriend as Big Chuck – if Big Chuck had been there, too, when Andy had told her.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I think it means I don’t have to take any abuse from you, so leave me alone.’
He hung up.
There were lots of ways to do it, and Freeman naturally chose the most flamboyant. Well, perhaps not altogether naturally. The inclination to do things with flair, while meshing well with his personality, had been drummed out of him in law school, but over the years of private practice he had put it back in.
In the first years of his practice he would have taken evidence he had dug up (such as the Strauss boys’ corroboration of May’s alibi) and brought it into the D.A.‘s office, where it would be discussed and some decision would be made about whether it eliminated the need for a trial.
But over the long run he had found that this cooperative attitude did little for him. Prosecutors often disbelieved what he brought them, doubted its truth or relevance, impugning his motives while they were at it. He had found that if he did it only sparingly, when his findings were unambiguous and, as in this case, critical, a public airing of evidence had a way of getting more action out of the D.A. than any attempt at amity, goodwill and cooperation. District attorneys, he had found, were acutely sensitive to public perception – more so, often, than to justice.
A news conference made hairs stand up in the Hall, made young lawyers (and even a few old ones) fear you – a force who dared go outside the system if he had to. They’d call him a loose cannon, and watch out, guys. Loose cannons go boom.
He stood now in the lobby of his office, surrounded by a totally unnecessary phalanx of some of his associates he’d sent home earlier to put on their best threads. He himself was as rumpled as usual in an old brown tweed and scuffed wing tips.
In front of him was a makeshift podium with several microphones. Opposite the podium, facing him, stood a knot of some fifteen reporters, which was a pretty fair showing, considering the short lead time he’d given them. There were three sound trucks double-parked in the street outside, which meant he’d be on television. KGO radio was represented – so he’d get some sound bites on the most popular talk station.
May was a good sport about it. He told her it was time to collect on his advertising fee. He’d come to admire her quite a bit, especially after finding out she had probably been telling him the truth the whole time. Now she was standing next to him, not yet daring to smile, flawlessly turned out as usual.
His fingers did a little tap dance over the microphones and he smiled. Gosh, he wasn’t used to all of this, regular old working stiff that he was. Were these things on? He spoke extemporaneously. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to thank you all for coming here today and I won’t take much of your very valuable time. As you know, a couple of weeks ago Owen Nash, one of the giants of American business, was felled by a gunshot. No one would deny that Mr Nash was a powerful and fascinating man.’
He glanced at May Shinn and got another bonus. At the mention of Nash’s name, a tear had sprung from her eyes and was rolling down her cheek. Don’t wipe it, he thought to himself. A couple of bulbs flashed.
Freeman took her hand, gave it a squeeze. ‘In cases like this, there seems to be a natural inclination to fasten guilt on somebody, to lay the blame somewhere. Who can say why? It could be it satisfies society’s need for order. Maybe our outrage is so great we crave any action that seems to redress the great wrong that murder represents.
‘How many of us, in our heart of hearts, blame Jack Ruby for killing Lee Harvey Oswald? No, when the King falls, the King’s killer must, in turn, be killed. Of course, I’m not comparing Owen Nash to our martyred president. Like Dan Quayle, Owen Nash was no Jack Kennedy.’
He waited for the laughter, stole a glance at May and squeezed her hand again. ‘But Owen Nash was, in his own way, a Titan. And there was that same rush to judgment.
‘Unfortunately, in this case, that rush centered upon the person who now stands here on my right, May Shinn, a natural American citizen, a woman with no criminal record of any kind, a woman whose sole fault, if it is one, was to become involved with, to fall in love with, Owen Nash.
‘In a perfect world the district attorney would never have even condoned the kind of public vigilantism that has been the earmark of this case from the beginning. It is, however, a sad fact that this is not a perfect world and that our own district attorney’s office was from the beginning in the forefront of the racist witchhunt that brought this young woman to the dock without a shred of physical evidence that could implicate her in this horrible deed.’
He stopped, enjoying a minute of eye contact with the journalists and reporters. He had them.
‘From the beginning, Ms Shinn has contended that on the day Owen Nash was brutally murdered she stayed home, waiting for his return. She did not use the telephone. She did not go out to buy a newspaper. She did not play the piano or hammer nails in her wall or sing in the shower. I submit to you all that this is not criminal behavior.
‘And yet, ladies and gentlemen, and let me make this very clear, this was the sum total of the people’s case against May Shinn. That she did nothing to make anyone notice she was home! Imagine that! Time was when that would have been the mark of a good citizen, an ideal neighbor. But because she is of Japanese descent, because she dared have a relationship with a powerful man’ – he lowered his voice – ‘because she was, in fact, a woman powerless to defend herself against the might of the state, she was the perfect scapegoat. She spent a quiet day at home and she is suspected, indeed, accused, of murder.
‘I’d like now to introduce you to two young men – Nick and Alex Strauss – who happen to live directly across the street from Ms Shinn’s apartment.’
He nodded to one of his associates, who went into the adjoining room and brought out the two boys and their father.
‘If the district attorney had been interested in the truth, he too could have found the Strauss boys. They got back from a trip to Europe on June twentieth, the day Owen Nash was killed. You’ll never guess what they saw.’
He was getting a Diet Coke in the lounge, when one of the guys two doors down, Constantino, stuck his head in.
‘Hardy, you better get to Drysdale’s,’ he said.
It was five minutes to three. Drysdale had gotten a tip from one of his connections at KRON, and now Pullios, Chris Locke himself and a third of the rest of the staff were gathered in front of the television set. Hardy squeezed himself into the doorway, reminded of other gatherings like this – the day Dan White had killed Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone at City Hall, the Reagan assassination attempt. He wondered who’d been shot.
Somebody called out. ‘Okay, okay, it’s on, turn it up.’ The room went quiet, except for the anchor’s voice, talking about an exceptional development in the Owen Nash murder case, and in a minute there was David Freeman on the screen in front of a bunch of microphones, May Shinn beside him.
‘He’s paying those kids, or the father. It’s a setup.’ Pullios didn’t believe it, or she was pretending she didn’t believe it.
‘Two kids?’ Drysdale shook his head. ‘What about the naked part? He wouldn’t have made that up.’
Locke was silent, standing by the window, looking out.
‘It is for sure going to play,’ Hardy said.
Everyone else had gone. Ironically, the room seemed smaller with only four of them in it.
‘How could they be sure it was the same day?’ said Pullios.
Drysdale picked up his baseballs and began to juggle.
‘Would you please not do that!’ The exasperation of Elizabeth Pullios. Hardy didn’t mind seeing it, thought she’d earned it. It was, after all, her case.
‘Sorry,’ Drysdale said. He caught the balls and palmed them all in one hand. ‘I think they covered that pretty well. It was the day they came back from Europe, they’d just gotten off the plane. It’s pretty solid documentation.’
‘Maybe they’re just plain lying. He’s paying them -’
‘Pretty risky. Cross-exam would kill them and Freeman knows it.’
‘I want to interview them.’
‘I would think so,’ said Drysdale.
She stood flat-footed in front of his desk. She kept looking over at Locke’s back, but he wasn’t turning around. Freeman’s hammering of Christopher Locke wasn’t lost on any of them. Locke was the district attorney, they weren’t. So far as the public was concerned, Christopher Locke – personally – had screwed this one up. He, a black man, was a racist. He had picked on a woman. An ethnic. It was a disaster.
‘Goddamn it!’ Pullios said.
Drysdale nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said.
When Jeff Elliot discovered at the title office that the owner of the collateralized apartment was Superior Court Judge Andrew Fowler, he was pretty sure he had hit the jackpot.
Then, finding out he’d missed Freeman’s press conference – ‘Why didn’t somebody call me?’ – he saw it all slip away.
Finally, hearing the news about Fowler’s retirement, he knew he had himself the story of his career. There was only one person who held in his hand all the elements to this thing, and he was it.
To Glitsky it meant something else entirely – he’d arrested the wrong person, and they still had a live homicide. He was in the office of his Lieutenant, Frank Batiste, after five, chewing on the ice that was left in his styrofoam cup.
Though one outranked the other, the two men had come up together and knew that politics outside of either of their control had dictated Batiste’s promotion – they still viewed themselves more as partners than anything else.
‘You’re lucky the grand jury indicted,’ Batiste said. ‘It takes the heat off.’
‘I’ll probably still get sued.’ Glitsky found a spot for his cup on Batiste’s cluttered desk. ‘Let’s see, false arrest, sex discrimination, race discrimination… I might as well give you my badge now.’ It wasn’t funny, but they both were smiling. Cop humor. ‘Maybe Locke won’t drop it.’
Batiste looked hard at him. ‘Maybe it’ll snow tomorrow.’
‘The kids could be mistaken.’
‘There could be peace in our time.’
‘You know, Frank, you are solace to a troubled soul.’
‘I try to be.’ Batiste had his feet up on his desk, a legal pad on his lap. He started doodling. ‘So what do you think we’ve got here, the perfect crime? I hope not, because I’ve got a feeling this one isn’t going to go away. Anybody else could have done it?’
‘Maybe. Nobody looks near as good as Shinn did.’ Glitsky told his lieutenant that he’d take another look at the business side, Mr Silicon Valley, somebody else who might benefit, but the evidence was slim and none if it wasn’t Shinn. He flicked ice into his mouth and chewed. ‘You know, this one time I thought I might have a case with, you know, witnesses who weren’t already in jail, maybe a motive aside from lack of imagination.’
‘Maybe next year,’ Batiste said. ‘And in the meantime we still have a very important dead person.’
Hardy called Celine after he returned from Drysdale’s office – he told himself that she at least deserved to be among the first to know that her father’s killer was still on the streets.
He reached her at Hardbodies!, where she’d been working out again. After he told her, he listened to the background noise in the phone – the throbbing music, the torture machines. Finally she asked him what he meant.
‘I mean May’s alibi checks out. She wasn’t out on the Eloise with your father.’
‘But what does that mean’?‘
‘It means she didn’t kill him, Celine.’ He waited, not pushing, for another minute. ‘Celine?’
Okay, he thought, you’ve done your duty. Now tell her you’ll keep her informed of developments and hang up. Just hang up, go home and have a date night with Frannie.
‘So what do we do now?’ Celine asked him quietly, shock in her voice. ‘Can I see you?’
No, I’m busy. How about coming by the office tomorrow‘? ’All right,‘ he said.
He met her at Perry’s on Union, a meat market in the classic sense – fine food, big drinks, good vibes.
Though her hair was still damp, pulled back by a turquoise band, she’d found time to make herself up. But somehow Hardy found her physical presence not quite so overpowering as before. It was the first time he’d seen her since their original meeting that the contours of her body – under the baggy purple sweater, the black and blousy pants – weren’t immediately evident. He was grateful for that.
It was early dusk but the place was already jammed. She was standing near the entrance, which was on the side down an alley, an orange juice in her hand, talking to another man who was about Hardy’s age, though taller, broader and better dressed. When Hardy came in, her face lit up and she moved to him, kissing him briefly on the lips. She took his hand and turned; the man had already started for the bar.
‘I told him my boyfriend was on his way,’ she said, ‘but you know this place. A woman alone is fair game.’ She didn’t let go of his hand. ‘Come, let’s see if we can get a table.’
‘I can’t eat, Celine. I’m just on my way home.’
She stopped pulling him along, still didn’t let go of his hand. ‘You mean you’re going to leave me here alone? I won’t last five minutes.’
‘Oh, you will if you decide to.’
Another side of her, a little more humanity, a trace of humor. She did have a real life he knew nothing about.
A couple vacated their table two feet from them and Hardy let go of Celine’s hand and guided her to it. A waitress appeared and he ordered a club soda. He could feel the heat of her thigh where it pressed against his.
‘Are you always alone?’ Hardy asked her. ‘Every time I see you, you’re alone.’
‘Wrong. Every time you see me, I’m with you.’ She leaned away from him. ‘Why do you want to know? You’re married.’
‘Yes, I am,’ he said. ‘I just wonder.’
She accepted that. ‘Not right now. Does this have to do with my father?’
He tried and failed to find some connection. ‘No, I don’t suppose so.’
She reached for her orange juice, took a sip and cradled the glass in both hands in her lap. ‘I was married one time. I was twenty-one, going through one of my rebellious phases. He was a musician, a good player. He finally made a couple of albums. Heavy metal, which now I truly hate. I think I despised it then, and I know Daddy did.’
‘Did your father and he get along?’
She started to laugh, then stopped herself. ‘No. Daddy hated everything about him.’
‘Is that why you broke up?’
‘No, not really. He was a jerk, which I suppose I knew all along, but Daddy had him followed when he was on the road and he didn’t act like he was married. So,’ she continued, shrugging, ‘we had it annulled. It’s ancient history now, but it kind of soured me on men for a long while. Plus, there’s being rich. You know, it’s hard to find people you believe. Guys try to pick you up, first it’s your looks, then if they find out you’ve got money…’
Hardy’s club soda arrived. He held it, staring out the window. It seemed to not be getting any darker outside.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know exactly. That there’s more than the pickup scene. I mean, didn’t you meet anybody in your regular life?’
She shook her head. ‘Sometimes, once in a while. But my regular life always had Daddy in it.’
‘I think this is where our problem started last time.’
She reached over and took his hand again. ‘We’re not going to do that again. I can’t explain to people about me and Daddy. It was all right, we did everything together.’
‘But he seemed to have a personal life, I mean women friends, and you apparently weren’t allowed to. How can that have been fair? How was it living with that?’
‘I don’t know how to say it or explain it, but it was okay. You did things with Daddy, you felt a certain way. Ask Ken.’
‘But it couldn’t be the same with him. He’s married, he’s got a life.’
She tightened her hold on his hand. ‘I’ve got a life, Dismas, don’t worry about me.’
‘I guess I do,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why, but I do.’
‘I know.’ She let him go and moved her palm up and down over his thigh. ‘You are a very good man, Mr Hardy. I wish…’
She didn’t finish what she was saying. She didn’t have to.
They never got around to mentioning the name of May Shinn.
Hardy got home just at seven. Rebecca was in bed asleep, one of their regular baby-sitters was in the living room talking to Frannie, and Frannie was dressed up, ready to go out.
He was in the house for less than five minutes. He wanted to peek in on the Beck, to feed the fish. Pit stop.
They walked out to the car, parked two blocks away on Clement, holding hands. ‘Are we still fighting?’ he asked.
‘I wasn’t fighting with you.’
‘Neither were you singing my praises.’
‘I didn’t agree with you. I don’t agree with you. I think your job is taking too much of your time and is threatening you and me and our family and I don’t like you not telling me what you’re doing and where you’re going.’
‘You’ve got to learn to speak out, Frannie. Express yourself a little more clearly.’
‘Not funny.’
They walked on another half block without talking. ‘So if you can’t make a joke out of it you’re not going to say anything?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to say something.’
The last of the chivalrous men, Hardy held the door for her, then went around to his side. The sun had at last gone down. He put the sides up on the Samurai, it was warm with the breeze off the ocean.
‘When?’
‘When what?’
‘When are you going to say something?’
Hardy turned in his seat. Confidentiality obviously meant little to Andy Fowler. Since Jane knew, then certainly by now Chuck Chuck Bo-Buck was in on it. And Hardy had never promised Andy he would keep it private – he’d only promised himself.
He’d only promised himself. He liked that.
This was how it started, he thought. This was the kind of rationalizing that people everywhere seemed to be so good at. And once it was okay to break a promise to yourself, then it wasn’t all that big a step to break one to anyone else. Just so you could end a fight.
Or maybe tell a little white lie to keep from getting into a fight in the first place.
All he had to do was give in, tell Frannie about Andy and they would have a pleasant and well-deserved date. And Hardy’s supposed private integrity would only be slightly diminished – he could make it up on the weekend, do some good works.
‘Did you hear about the May Shinn thing today?’ he asked her. She hadn’t yet, and he filled her in on it.
She listened, and when he’d finished, she told him that it was interesting but that it wasn’t what their fight had been about. Did he want to tell her where he’d been last night or not?
‘I went out to meet a guy who’s got a legal problem, which I can’t discuss. Period. If you want to be mad at me about that, it’s up to you.’
She was biting her lip, not so much angry, he thought, as worried. ‘What about the other stuff?’ she said. ‘These hours at work, getting home when it’s dark, leaving in the middle of the night. What’s that doing to us?’
The two front seats in the Samurai were separated by a well, and he reached for her and put his arms around her. She leaned into him. ‘We’re not being threatened,’ he said. ‘The job is not threatening us. I love you, Frannie, okay?’
She nodded against him, her arms around his neck. Her reserve broke. She started to cry.
When they got home there were calls from Ken Farris, Jane apologizing, and Abe Glitsky wondering about the direction the D.A. was going with this thing.
Hardy went into his office while Frannie drove the baby-sitter home and began rereading the file on the now-dead case. At least it was dead so far as May Shinn was concerned.
He didn’t know what the D.A. was going to do, but he thought he personally was going to go back to doing his prelims, earn his stripes, win a lot of cases and eventually move up the ladder to where he might get a couple of righteous homicides.
There was nothing else he could do. He wasn’t an investigator. He knew Glitsky, after the false arrest, would be super-cautious. He wasn’t inclined to stir things up with Pullios anymore. Frannie had been right… he was putting in too many hours, not having enough fun. He was becoming a lawyer, and if he wanted to do that he could get some corporate work and bill sixty hours a week for five or six years and make some money while he did it.
He’d left Celine at Perry’s, thinking what a good man am I. He thought she might be a little in love with him. Although he knew he was infatuated with her on some level, he wasn’t going to pursue it. He’d made his choice, and not only was he going to live with it, he was going to be happy with it.
That settled, he decided to close up the binder and file it away in the cabinets next to his desk. He arranged the yellow sheets from his own private notes at the beginning of the investigation – his initial talks with Ken Farris, impressions from Strout and so on – and laid them on top of the copies he’d made of the official file.
His office was quiet. From the bedroom the bubbling of the fish tank registered subliminally. Not really looking for anything, waiting for Frannie’s arrival back home, he reread the early notes. All of this seemed so long ago, so distant in time and experience.
He flipped pages, the police reports, Glitsky’s interviews, killing time. Elliot’s articles.
And then the bubbling fish tank was gone. There was nothing in his world but a nagging, half-recognized contradiction. He flipped back to one of Jeff Elliot’s first articles.
Ken Farris had told him that he’d last seen Owen Nash on Friday around lunchtime, after lunch. The article, quoting Farris as the source, said Nash had last been seen by his household staff on Thursday night.
He looked back at his notes – Friday around lunchtime, after lunch. Elliot’s article – Thursday night. Thursday night was not Friday near lunchtime.
He shook his head, rubbing his eyes. What was he thinking of? Farris wasn’t any kind of suspect in this. He had been Owen Nash’s best friend. All right, so he effectively inherited the business when Owen died, that wasn’t -
Or was it?
But all he had done was tell Hardy one day and Jeff Elliot another. The stress of those first days after Nash’s death had undoubtedly played some havoc with his short-term memory.
But Farris was a detail man.
Ridiculous.
He shook his head again…
Frannie was in the doorway to the office. He hadn’t heard her come in or close the front door or walk down the long hallway. She had turned on the light in the bedroom and it hadn’t registered.
‘You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’
He came out of his trance, shook himself. ‘More of this madness,’ he said.
‘I thought you were done with it.’
It was as tantalizing as that last cognac, where you knew if you had it you were going to hurt tomorrow. He would, perhaps, mention it to Glitsky. It wasn’t his job.
‘I am,’ he said, closing the file. ‘I was just waiting for you to get home.’
JUDGE GUARANTEES BOND IN NASH
MURDER CASE
But Defense Attorney Verifies May
Shinn’s Alibi; D.A. to Drop Charges
by Jeffrey Elliot
Chronicle Staff Writer
In a startling series of developments surrounding the murder trial of financier Owen Nash yesterday, Superior Court Judge Andrew B. Fowler resigned just hours before it was discovered that an apartment he owns had collateralized the half-million-dollar bail for defendant May Shinn.
According to sources in the district attorney’s office, investigators may subpoena a defendant’s financial records if there is probable cause that the money used for bail, or for paying a defense attorney, is the result of criminal activity, such as drug dealing or, in this case, prostitution. Ms Shinn has admitted that she has been a highly paid call girl.
In a related story, however, Ms Shinn’s attorney, David Freeman, produced two young boys as witnesses who have testified that, using a telescope, they saw Ms Shinn in her home during the time the district attorney had contended she was aboard Owen Nash’s sailboat, the Eloise.
District Attorney Christopher Locke last night personally interviewed the two boys and announced that all charges against Ms Shinn related to the murder would be dropped.
‘Two eyewitnesses confirm her alibi,’ Locke said, ‘so there is no case. But remember, her gun was the murder weapon, we believed we had a solid motive. But we are dealing with a very clearly defined window of time in this case, and if Ms Shinn was in her apartment on Saturday afternoon, she could not have killed Owen Nash.
‘This office is, of course, distressed by implications of racism used against Ms Shinn, and we intend to investigate those charges and take disciplinary action if appropriate.’
The relationship between Judge Fowler and Ms Shinn remains unclear. The judge has reportedly left the city, but California Supreme Court Justice Marshall Brinkman, who serves on the state’s Committee on Judicial Ethics, stated that he is ‘deeply concerned’ over reports of Judge Fowler’s purported involvement with the defendant. ‘Where there is any relationship, however tangential, between a judge and a defendant, the judge must immediately recuse himself from the case,’ Brinkman said. ‘Any failure in this area is gross judicial misconduct. At the very least it’s a disbarment issue.’
David Freeman refused to comment on Judge Fowler, although he certainly knew the details of the bail arrangement. Citing the attorney-client privilege, he also defended Ms Shinn’s right to her privacy. ‘My client has been through enough,’ he said. ‘She did not commit this murder. She is an innocent woman, falsely accused, wrongly charged.’
‘Wow!’ Frannie said.
‘Yeah.’ Hardy was on his third cup of coffee. He had read the article twice. He was astounded that Andy had essentially put up bail for May Shinn and hadn’t felt compelled to mention that fact to him during his soul-baring two nights ago.
The sun was coming through the skylight over the stove, shining off the pots and pans hanging from the opposite wall. Rebecca was breast-feeding.
‘I’m sure this has nothing to do with a friend of yours who is in legal trouble that you can’t say anything about.’
The shifting sands of the moral high ground. Hardy smiled at it, had some more coffee.
‘Where do you think he is?’ she asked.
‘I think he’s probably home, holed up, not answering the phone.’
‘How much more do you know about this?’
‘A little. Not much.’
‘I don’t know how you can keep this in. How long have you known about it?’
He pulled the paper back in front of him. ‘This stuff, about fifteen minutes. The relationship a little longer.’
‘So what was the relationship?’
‘What do you think, Frannie?’
Frannie was still in her bathrobe. She had a diaper over her shoulder, the baby against it, patting her gently. Rebecca let out a long, satisfied burp. ‘That’s a girl,’ she said.
‘Let me hold her.’
Hardy took Frannie’s daughter – his daughter – into his arms and made a face that was rewarded with a delighted gurgle. ‘Are you my big girl? Am I not spending enough time with you?’ He put his face down on hers, breathing in her scent, rubbing his cheek against hers. Frannie came around the table and pressed herself against him, looking over his shoulder. ‘We’re the lucky ones,’ she said.
‘I know.’
But the newspaper kept drawing them both back. Frannie reached down and turned it back to the front page.
‘What’s going to happen to him now, Diz?’
‘I don’t know. Since May Shinn didn’t kill Nash, the whole thing might just blow over. Couple of days of bad press. You were right, by the way. Remember his paperweight?’
‘She gave it to him.’
Hardy nodded. ‘Reminded him of his broken heart, so he gave it to me. She dumped him for Owen Nash.’
‘So they weren’t together anymore, Andy Fowler and Shinn?’
‘No, I mean that was kind of the point.’
‘So then why would he put up her bail? Why would he be the judge on her trial?’
‘I don’t know. If he helped her out, maybe he could get her back eventually.’
‘That never happens,’ Frannie said.
‘What doesn’t?’
‘You don’t dump somebody for someone else, then go back to the first one. If you’re the one dumped, okay you might. But if your heart goes cold on somebody…’ She shrugged. ‘It just doesn’t happen.’
‘I don’t know if it was May’s heart that went cold, Frannie. The woman is a hooker. Maybe she really fell for Nash, but it was probably just a better financial deal with him. So Andy helped her out with the bail… it might have just been him putting out the word that he had money too, and he’d spend it on her. Hell, half a million, that’s serious good-faith money.’
‘And he’d be satisfied with that?’
‘I don’t know. I guess so. Anyway, that’s what he had before.’
She was rubbing his back, rocking back and forth against him. ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘He loved her, and however she felt about him, he had to believe she loved him too. The paperweight, remember? That’s a special gift. That’s a message.’
‘So?’
‘So what was it? After she left him I don’t believe he really thought he was buying her back. By then he had to realize she didn’t love him, even if he’d made himself believe it before. So there must have been another reason.’
Hardy shook his head and leaned back into Frannie’s body. ‘Well, until you get it figured out, at least you’ll know why this thing has kept me up nights.’ He stood and shifted the Beck over his shoulder. ‘But it’s not going to anymore.’
‘I just feel sorry for Andy. I mean, if the Shinn woman really is innocent, then he just gave up everything for nothing.’
‘That’s right,’ Hardy said. ‘People do that all the time.’
He stopped by Glitsky’s before going to his own office, but the sergeant wasn’t in. He wrote him a short note about the discrepancy in Ken Farris’s recollection of when Nash had last been seen, and figured that was the end of his active involvement with Owen Nash.
Then, taped to the center of his desk, he read the summons from Drysdale to see him as soon as he got in and to bring all of his binders on the Nash matter.
It was getting to be a habit, the walk down to Locke’s office, although this time with the bulging, special ‘lawyer’s briefcase.’ Hardy sat in the anteroom, listening to muffled sounds through the closed door. The secretary seemed unusually preoccupied, typing away, filing. The intercom buzzed and she punched it and said yes, he was out here.
Another few minutes and Hardy sat back, relaxed, crossed his legs and picked up the sports page from the low end table next to his chair.
In the day’s latest, Bob Lurie was trying to move the Giants to either Sacramento, San Jose, or Portland, although he mentioned Honolulu – the great baseball tradition in Hawaii. Talk about a homeless problem, he thought. This is the team nobody wants to take home. He turned to the standings. Halfway through the year – nine games out, third place. Not terrible, not great. How could they have traded Kevin Mitchell?
The door opened and Elizabeth Pullios came out. She didn’t appear to be in any particular hurry, yet she walked by Hardy, ignoring his greeting as if she’d never seen him before. ‘Have a nice day,’ he said to her back.
Drysdale was at the door, gesturing with his forefinger.
‘Why do I get the feeling this isn’t a hundred-percent social?’ Hardy asked.
Locke got down to it immediately. ‘Did you tell this reporter Elliot that our office subpoenaed Andy Fowler’s financial records?’
‘No. Somebody tell you I did?’
‘We’ve had a discussion about leaks and so on before, right?’
‘Yes, sir. Somebody tell you I was the leak? Did we subpoena his records?’
‘I want you to tell me everything you know about Andy Fowler.’
‘Was it Pullios? If it was, she’s a liar.’
Drysdale, who’d been standing halfway behind Hardy, hands in his pockets, stepped forward. ‘We’ve got a problem, Diz. A real problem. You’ve got a problem.’
‘Fowler.’ Locke didn’t want to leave the issue.
‘How is Fowler my problem?’
‘You were seen entering the witness’s waiting room the other day with Jeff Elliot.’
‘Can I ask who saw me? Or rather, who thought it was important to tell you?’
‘It’s irrelevant,’ Locke said. ‘What’s relevant is that you knew something critical to a murder case and withheld it from us.’
Hardy found himself getting pretty hot. ‘Like hell it’s irrelevant! You accuse me of something and you don’t let me face my accuser. I thought perhaps in an office practicing law we’d give a nod to the niceties of getting to the truth.’
‘We already know the truth. Fowler was your father-in-law, wasn’t he?’
‘That came from Pullios. Deny it.’
‘I don’t have to deny anything. Pullios, unlike you, is a damn good lawyer.’
‘Oh, that’s right. She really did a great job with May Shinn, locked her up tight.’
Drysdale tried to slow it down. ‘Guys…’
‘If Elizabeth knew that Andy Fowler had gone the bail for May Shinn, she would have come to me with it, not the newspaper.’
‘Well, isn’t she the nice little Gestapet.’
Drysdale butted in. ‘When did you know about Fowler, Diz?’
Hardy stopped and took a breath. ‘You know, Art, it’s funny, but I don’t believe we’ve established that I did know about Fowler yet. We have some unnamed source finking me into a room with Jeff Elliot. Although I’m beginning to suspect that in Mr Locke’s little fiefdom here, if you’re accused, you’re guilty.’
The district attorney was on his feet. ‘Don’t get any smarter with me, Hardy.’
‘It’s too late for that.’ He paused, then added, ‘Chris. From what I’ve seen, I’m already smarter than you.’
‘What you are, is out of a job.’
‘And what you are, Chris…’ Hardy slowed down, pulling out of it. He looked him in the eye. ‘What you are, Chris, is a total flaming asshole.’
He thought about it at Lou’s over his third black-and-tan. They’d planned to fire him all along. They didn’t want any new information out of him, anything incriminating. That had been a front.
Figure it out – before they’d asked him question one they’d told him to bring all the Nash files down to the office. They were planning on taking them from him. Which they’d done.
Ha, guys. Guess what?
The funny thing was he had withheld information from them. But he really hadn’t leaked the news about Fowler and bail. He’d only found that out this morning when he’d read the newspaper. Jeff Elliot had discovered it and used the information Hardy had given him about subpoena policy to make it appear it had been a D.A. leak. He was a clever guy, Jeff Elliot, and he’d cost Hardy his job, though at the moment Hardy was thinking that fell more into the category of a favor.
So maybe Locke and Drysdale had had grounds to fire him after all – he had known about Andy Fowler’s relationship with May Shinn and hadn’t come forward with it immediately. That wasn’t being a team player. But, he told himself, even if they had reasons they didn’t have the right reasons.
It still wasn’t noon. He thought he’d call Frannie, see if she was home, take her and the Beck out for a nice lunch.
Of the three men A.D.A. Elizabeth Pullios slept with on a fairly regular basis, two were married and two worked in the district attorney’s office.
There was District Attorney Chris Locke, who called her Pullios. She had him for the rush and the control -intimacy with your superior might be a double-edged sword, but so far it had cut only one way. Actually, in this case, Locke was the one who had most to lose if it came out. She knew not only the law on workplace harassment but the implications, if played right, and she knew how to play them. If a strong man who happened to be your boss had a relationship with you, it was his problem. You were the employee, he was the boss. And he could – and often did – fire you if you weren’t cooperative. The true vulnerability of many women in the workplace was something that played into the hands of someone like Pullios. Further, the odds of a backlash were long in her favor. For example, the way she had pushed and manipulated to get May Shinn indicted after lifting the file from another prosecutor… most any other assistant D.A. would have been stripped and flayed by Locke. Instead, since Locke knew Pullios was a damn good prosecutor, as well as ‘one helluva squeeze,’ diverting his gaze and rage to a junior scapegoat like Hardy had been so easy it was almost unfair. Except that nothing was unfair. If you won, fairness was a concept that didn’t apply.
Her second lover was Brian Powell, to whom she was Elizabeth. Brian had been her ‘boyfriend’ for three years. Forty-five, handsome, politically correct, he was a divorced, childless stockbroker who made six figures and did not hassle her. He understood when she was busy. She considered getting engaged to him (he hadn’t asked yet but she could lead him to it if she wanted) when it was time to run for D.A. and a mate would be helpful; until then he was someone pleasant to be with and be seen with.
The other man in the office – and in some ways the only one personally dangerous to her, called her Molly. That was Peter Struler, married and the father of three. He gave her the impression that he could take her or leave her, though he’d been taking her with some regularity for the past four or five months. With a law degree from Duke and three years in the FBI, Struler was both brain-smart and street-smart. He was also irreverent and funny. As an investigator for the district attorney’s office he worked under a separate jurisdiction from both the SFPD and the sheriffs department. It was the private police arm of the district attorney’s office and was used to protect attorneys going out to see witnesses in bad areas, to deliver subpoenas and, occasionally, to carry on its own investigations.
The danger of Peter Struler was that Elizabeth Pullios liked him a lot. She had met him when he had escorted her, in his official capacity, on an interview with some lowlifes she had needed to put away even lower life-forms. After she had been her very efficient self, talking to witnesses hiding behind their drawn curtains, she had come out into the sunlight to see Struler playing basketball, shirt off, with eight black high-school dudes on a glass-strewn court – a little boy having the time of his life. She had fallen for him, gotten uncharacteristically shy and made excuses for them to get together officially until he called her on it and she told him, driving out to another site, that she thought maybe she was in love with him. He didn’t have to worry about it, though, she added quickly. She would get over it. And she didn’t want to hurt his marriage.
‘My marriage is solid,’ he had said, pulling the car over. ‘Nothing is going to threaten my marriage. But I think we ought to get something straight between us.’ And they did, right there in the car.
Now they sat, again in his city car, eating Chinese takeout at a parking lot at the Presidio. There were whitecaps on the Bay and you could see halfway to Alaska.
Struler was quoting from the front of his chopsticks wrapper. ‘ “Welcome to Chinese Restaurant. Please try your Nice Chinese Food with Chopsticks, the traditional and typical of Chinese glorious history and culture.” ’
She nodded. ‘It’s a wonderful view, too.’
‘Now look at this,’ Struler said. ‘If this is true, why did they have to invent cranes.’
‘Cranes?’
‘You know, derricks, cranes.’
‘If what’s true?’
Struler read:‘ “Learn how to use your chopsticks Tuck under thumb and hold firmly Add second chopstick hold it as you hold a pencil Hold first chopstick in original position move the second one up and down Now you can pick up anything!” ’
He tried to lift the briefcase. ‘It’s just not true. How can they get by with that. I can’t even lift this thing. I bet there’s no way you could even pick up a dog.’
‘A dog?’
He pointed at the paper. ‘It says “anything.” “Now you can pick up anything!” You’re missing a bet here, Molly. You’re the lawyer. I smell a major lawsuit. Class action, false advertising, big bucks.’
She let him rave. It was one of the things she liked best about him, his capacity to run with essentially nothing. ‘Plus their punctuation is really weak. They don’t use periods. Did you ever notice that?’
She reached over and grabbed the briefcase herself, placing it on her lap, snapping open the clasps.
‘Why do I sense you don’t share my fascination with this topic? The future is the Orient, mark my words.’
She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Business before pleasure.’
He put his hand between her legs. ‘Who made that up? Some lawyer, I bet.’
‘You’re a lawyer, Mr Struler.’
‘No, I just went to law school, I never took the class on business before pleasure. Come to think of it, that’s probably why I flunked the bar.’ He moved his hand a little. ‘Actually, I never took the bar, did I?’
‘Peter.’
He made a face. ‘Molly.’ But he put his hands in his own lap. ‘Okay, what?’
‘This is a two-week-old murder…“
‘My favorite.’
‘My point is, the police have already embarrassed themselves over it – the Owen Nash thing. Abe Glitsky has been handling the case and he made the original bust.’
‘Lucky guy.’
‘Right. He’s not going to do it again. There’s very little evidence. Plus the guy who got fired today -Hardy – they’re at least pretty good friends. Anyway, the police cooperation is going to slow down for a while.’
‘And you turn to me. I am touched.’
‘I’d just like you to take a fresh look at it, that’s all. This is an important case and I don’t want it to go away. I made a big pitch for this one to Locke. Whoever killed this guy, they’ve made me look pretty bad.’
Struler thought a moment, then took some papers out of the briefcase and glanced at them. ‘Is this all of it?’
She nodded. ‘That’s all the paper. There’s some other evidence logged, the murder weapon, stuff like that, but it’s been pretty well gone over.’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘Start over. We need a new theory and it’s in here somewhere. Somebody killed Owen Nash.’
‘If you tell me you don’t have any ideas who, that would be a fib, wouldn’t it, and then I’d have to spank you.’
She leaned toward him and licked his ear. ‘I don’t have any ideas.’
In spite of Elizabeth Pullios’s belief that the police were going to let it lie, Glitsky jumped on Hardy’s discrepancy. There was nothing better than a suspect who told a lie. It opened up all the doors and windows, let some new air in. Of course, he didn’t know for a fact that Farris had lied -he could have simply made a mistake, remembered incorrectly. But he was on the record – Glitsky had been in on the conversation, he remembered it – as having said white was white one time and then white was black the next. It deserved reflection.
Glitsky’s own reports revealed that Farris had been at Taos during the weekend of the murder. What was at Taos? Hadn’t he said it was a place with no phones, no electricity? Had anyone else seen him there? Were there records of his plane flight? A hotel? Rental car?
He took some notes, placed a call to the Albuquerque police, then reached Farris at his office at Owen Industries in South San Francisco.
‘Sergeant, what can I do for you?’ A busy man, sounding like it.
‘You know we’ve got an open case again, sir. It looks like May Shinn wasn’t on the Eloise. And if that’s true she didn’t kill Mr Nash.’
‘Of course, I read that. I’m not sure I think it’s true.’
‘Well, yes, sir, but the D.A. seems to think it is. And while that’s the case, we have to go on with the investigation.’ There was one of those infernal beeps again. Glitsky had forgotten about them.
‘Just a minute, would you?’
He sat on hold for twenty seconds, keeping time with a pencil on his blotter.
‘Sergeant? Sorry about that. It’s still crazy here. I know, I tried to call the D.A. this morning but they told me some nonsense that your man Hardy wasn’t working there anymore and nobody’s gotten back to me.’
‘They said Hardy didn’t work there anymore?’
‘That’s what they said.’
Glitsky shook his head. ‘Well, that’s ridiculous. I’ll give him your message, but I’m calling to clear up a little inconsistency. We’re kind of starting over here, so I apologize.’
‘It’s all right, but what’s this story on this judge knowing May? That’s really a shock.’
‘We’re looking into that, too. But what I’m wondering is when you last saw Mr Nash alive.’ He did not explain about the apparent conflict in Farris’s testimony.
‘I remember distinctly. We had lunch down at the Angus.’
‘Yes, sir. And you told us it was on Friday.’
Beep.
‘I did? I don’t remember which day it was. If I said Friday, I must have been mistaken.’
‘This was the weekend you went to Taos.’
‘I remember what weekend it was. I always fly out to Taos in the morning, which would have been Friday, so the lunch must have been Thursday. I could call the restaurant and double-check.’
‘That would be helpful.’
‘You want to hold, I can do it right now.’
He came back in about a minute, saying that the restaurant still had the reservation records and it had been Thursday.
There was no way to make this next question sound innocuous, but if the answer was yes, it would save Glitsky a lot of footwork. ‘Mr Farris, is there staff at the place where you stay in Taos?’
You didn’t have to draw a map. He didn’t answer right away. Glitsky heard him take a breath on either side of the recording beep.
‘Owen Nash was my best friend, Sergeant. I don’t benefit in any conceivable way from his death. To the contrary. I’m personally devastated and professionally handicapped in ways you can’t imagine by Owen’s death. I’m sure there’s a substantial paper record of my comings and goings that weekend and if you decide it’s your duty to look into it, you go right ahead… If I were you, Sergeant, I’d first spend some time on this judge. But that’s up to you. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a full load here.’
The connection went dead in Glitsky’s hand. He tapped his pencil on his blotter. Farris’s reaction was not unusual – folks were generally unappreciative when told they were under suspicion. But, Glitsky couldn’t help but notice, he didn’t say that anybody had seen him in Taos or anywhere else. Could be an oversight, like Thursday or Friday or whatever day it had been when he’d last laid eyes on his best friend. Could be.
It was the kind of thing, though, that Glitsky thought he’d remember.
The nap helped a little, but not much.
After the three black-and-tans in the morning, Hardy and Frannie and Rebecca had shared some outstanding gambas at Sol y Luna. Also, because Frannie wasn’t drinking at all, he’d had a bottle of a light white Rioja. Hell, he was celebrating.
He’d broken the news about his job and she took it in very much the same vein as he had himself. They had most of a quarter million dollars in the bank, the profit check on Hardy’s percentage of the Shamrock was coming in this week – money wasn’t the biggest problem in the world, and she didn’t like what practicing law had been doing to him.
Which called for a little Fundador after lunch.
Frannie drove home and Hardy got his shirt off before he crashed to sleep, waking up to Rebecca’s wails and a thundering head. He walked into the back room and picked up the baby, patting her gently, holding her against him. She tried to fasten herself onto his nipple and cried all the more at the lack of result. Frannie was coming through the kitchen.
‘We’re really having another one of these baby things?’ he said.
‘She didn’t have the lunch you did.’
‘She doesn’t have the head I’ve got either.’ He held Rebecca in front of his face. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know for a fact I feel worse than you, and I’m not crying.’
The logic didn’t have any effect. He handed her off to her mother and in seconds she was suckling.
That’s an excellent trick,‘ Hardy said. He was changing into his running clothes, his green jogging suit next up in the drawer. ’You mind if I run a little of this off?‘
He took the four-mile circular route out to the beach, along the hard sand south to Lincoln. The air was clear, the temperature was in the low seventies and got a little nippier with the wind off the breakers.
Here he was, unemployed during a major depression, and he smiled as he ran, the headache gone in the first twenty minutes. Down the beach, back along the park, up the Avenues, to his home.
He was sitting on his porch, cooling down, the sun still up but hidden now behind the buildings across the street. On the back-half of his run he had decided that, with his calendar suddenly free, the Hardy family should book a flight to Hawaii and disappear for a couple of weeks. He was daydreaming about some serious beach time, rum drinks, Jimmy Buffett riffs on a balmy breeze.
From Hardy’s porch the six-story apartment buildings on either side blocked his vision both up and down the street, so there was no warning when Celine Nash appeared on the other side of his picket fence – stone-washed jeans, sandals, magenta silk blouse.
He might have expected something like this to happen – perhaps he should have called her, Farris, even Glitsky with the news of his termination. Was she coming to offer her condolences, ask what happened, get news about who would now be handling the case? How did she get his address?
He stood up, deciding he was going to change his phone number and have it unlisted. Get his address out of the new book. He should have done it – he now realized -when he had been re-hired at the district attorney’s office last February, but with the new marriage, new job, new baby, other things had filled his mind.
He took a couple of steps off the porch. Celine saw him and stopped in her tracks.
He came down toward her and he realized her face was frozen. Had something else happened? She stood stock-still, as though in shock.
‘Celine, are you all right?’
He took a few more steps toward her, stopping just before the gate. There was a long moment. She stared at him with a look that seemed to combine horror and loss.
Hardy heard the front door open, heard Frannie say, ‘Diz?’
Celine’s eyes went behind him, to Frannie, fastened back, first it seemed hopefully, then almost in panic, on him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, starting to back away, ‘I’m sorry. This is a mistake.’
‘Celine. What’s the matter?’
She shook her head, looking him up and down. Everything between him and Celine had always been too personal. Now, seeing his house and his wife, she couldn’t ignore the reality. Not only was he a good man, he had a life that didn’t include her on any level. She backed further away, then stopped and seemed to regain some control.
‘I’m sorry, Dismas. I don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘It’s all right. What is it?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. It’s a mistake.’ She was backing away again, turning. She lifted a hand, a diffident wave, and walked away.
‘Who was that?’ Frannie was up next to him, arm in his.
‘Celine Nash. Owen Nash’s daughter.’
‘God, she’s beautiful, isn’t she?’
Hardy tightened his arm around her. ‘You’re beautiful.’
She bumped her hip against him. ‘What did she want?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe she heard I got dumped.’
She was getting in her car, parked halfway down the street. They both watched her.
‘So why didn’t she stay?’
‘She’s been sort of unstable since the loss of her father.’ They were going back to the porch. He told Frannie about Celine’s explosion at him the other day, her mood swings. He neglected to mention the after-hours meeting at Hardbodies!
‘I know after Eddie I was a bat case.’
Hardy tightened his hand around her waist. ‘You were a mensch,’ Hardy said. ‘She’s not holding up so well.’
‘You shouldn’t be too hard on her.’
Hardy kissed his wife. ‘I’m not going to be anything on her. I’m fired, remember? All that’s over.’