As he sometimes did, Abe Glitsky arrived unannounced at the front door. When Frannie opened it for him, he stepped back and whistled. "My, my, my." Frannie was wearing a blue skirt and a plain white blouse, low pumps, nylons. She had touched her cheekbones with subtle highlights they scarcely needed. Her eyes were malachite set into the alabaster of her skin. The red hair, softly styled, fell to just below her shoulders. "Whatever it is," he said, "you'll do."
Frannie curtsied, smiling. "You don't think it's too much?"
"You panning for gold? Playing soccer? Mud-wrestling?"
Frannie looked serious. "No, I'm meeting somebody."
"I think for meeting somebody you're on safe ground."
They were walking to the kitchen. It was a smallish railroad-style Victorian house – one long hallway with openings to the living and dining rooms off it to the right, a bathroom to the left. In the back the house opened up into a pod of rooms – airy skylit kitchen, Hardy and Frannie's bedroom with another bath, Rebecca's room (Hardy's old office) off that to one side, Vincent's nursery to the rear.
Hardy was coming out of the bedroom, a mug of steaming coffee in his hand. He was wearing the slacks to one of his better suits, a white shirt, a silk Italian tie.
Glitsky stopped in the kitchen doorway. "I must have the wrong house. Where are the kids?"
"We're taking a day off," Frannie said. "Their grandmother came and got them. I'll be back in a minute. You want some tea?" Frannie disappeared into the back room.
Glitsky was getting the hot water. "Who are you meeting?"
Hardy was still shaken by Nancy DiStephano. He'd told Frannie about it when he'd gotten home, then sat up alone in the living room, not able to sleep for a long time.
And now here was Abe, dropping in, wanting to know who Frannie was meeting. Abe wouldn't approve of Frannie going to get acquainted with Jennifer Witt. If you were smart and in any aspect of law enforcement, you didn't mix your job and your family life. The problem was that Hardy didn't feel like getting into a defense of why he was going along with Frannie's idea when he knew it wasn't a smart one. "I thought I'd drop Frannie off downtown and later we'd go someplace nice for lunch. What brings you around?"
It slid right by – Glitsky wasn't in his investigator mode, when very little got past him. "I've got to go see this couple about a gun they left laying around for their kid to find and play with." He tightened his lips, the scar shone white. He didn't need to say more – Abe was in homicide and homicide meant that somebody wasn't alive anymore. "It's out this way so I thought I'd stop by here and liven up your morning. You back with Jennifer Witt?"
Frannie and the three of them talked for twenty minutes while Glitsky finished his tea, Hardy and Frannie another cup of coffee. Hardy never mentioned the three-minute difference in times between the ATM machine and 911. By this time, he was convinced that it was evidence in a murder investigation, and if he revealed that it could be part of the defense's case Abe the policeman would be bound to report it to the prosecution.
"But who are you?" Jennifer, in her red jumpsuit, looked through the Plexiglas window in the public-visiting area at the women's jail.
Frannie was no longer sure about this. The woman across from her was certainly no threat to anyone at this moment. Nearly anorexic, with bruises on her face, her hair chopped at different lengths, her eyes skittish. Here was a woman, Frannie thought, who doesn't trust a living soul.
"I'm… Frannie, her mouth dry, tried to swallow. "I'm with Mr. Hardy."
"I know. You've already said that. That's why I came out here. But then how come we're not in the visiting room?"
Frannie didn't know – she thought they were in the visitor's room. She didn't know that this long counter with folding chairs, Plexiglas windows, the telephones to talk through, wasn't where Hardy and Jennifer had their interviews. "I'm… I guess it's just I'm not an attorney, so this isn't official or anything." Suddenly she understood why Hardy hadn't come with her to introduce the two of them. What could he have said? "Hi, my wife just wanted to come down and check you out to make herself feel better. She was a little worried you'd get out of jail someday and try to kill me."
She felt like a fool and she felt angry.
Dismas has humored her to teach her a lesson – a cruel one that he might have argued her out of.
But then she realized that she wouldn't have let him do that. She could be as strong and bull-headed as anyone. She had decided she was going to meet with Jennifer and, by God, she wasn't going to back down – that had been her position and now she was stuck with it.
Jennifer waited, her eyes now fixed on Frannie. Pained eyes. Frannie suddenly thought of the son Matt. What if this woman hadn't killed anybody? She had lost her son? And then got raped and beat up in a Costa Rican jail?
"I know this is unusual," she said. "I'm Mr. Hardy's wife. Frannie. He's told me what's happened to you and I just wondered if I could do anything to make things easier?"
The city-run Mission Hills Clinic was about midway between the Hall of Justice and the Yerba Buena Medical Group cluster on Mission Street but not particularly close to any hills.
Hardy stood across the busy thoroughfare and watched for nearly ten minutes. Judging from the signs people carried, there were, he decided, two separate picket lines – one protesting the abortions that took place here, the other comprised of public-health workers who were being laid off due to cutbacks in the City budget. The groups orbited in their own spheres, which warily circled each other, moving from one front door of the building to the next one and then back again. The dance almost appeared choreographed.
In the months Jennifer had been at large, Hardy had remained subliminally aware of the ongoing escalation of the anti-abortion activists. Since he'd had his discussion with Glitsky, a City worker in the Sunset Clinic had died when she'd had the bad fortune to be working after hours. Probably the people who'd left the bomb hadn't intended anyone to be there when it exploded, just trying to make a point, they'd say. The unlucky worker wasn't any less dead for the good intentions.
A doctor and a nurse had had their homes vandalized – windows broken, threats tied to rocks or tagged – graffiti'd – on stucco. There had been at least six reports of muggings of public-health workers after they had finished their shifts, although no one was saying whether these were typical late-night random acts of violence or related to the clinics.
Larry Witt had done volunteer work here, performing – Jennifer guessed – between two and five abortions per week. It was something Jennifer said he believed in – people shouldn't have unwanted babies, the biggest problem the earth faced was overcrowding, a child born to poverty and neglect would most likely stay there.
It was tragic and Hardy believed all of it, but the moral dilemma of when life started and – beyond that – the value of human life itself, wasn't going to go away soon for an Irish ex-Catholic. He strongly believed that people ought to be able to choose, but he also didn't particularly approve of abortion on demand as a form of birth control. At the very least, he thought, people ought to make a decent effort to remember what they forgot last night. But people should also make a decent effort to remember not to shoot each other, and that didn't seem to be happening with any great frequency, either.
He crossed the street, feeling overdressed in his suit. There wasn't another coat and tie on the block. The people in the picket lines – male and female – wore jeans and T-shirts, 49er and Giants jackets, running shoes, boots and Birkenstocks. Timing his approach, he crossed both lines and entered the building without incident.
Inside, the clinic was along the lines of what he'd expected and not seen at YBMG – yellowing tile, glaring fluorescence, that old hospital smell.
In the main office lobby he waited in a line for twenty-five minutes and got sent to talk to the secretary to the clinic administrator. When she returned from her break and discovered that Hardy wanted to talk about abortion records, she told him he could have called and found out hat they released no records whatsoever, and no information on what might be within them. As Hardy surely could understand, these files were completely confidential.
Frustrated, and with another hour until he was supposed to pick up Frannie, he paused outside in the cavernous main lobby, then followed the signs down a long echoing hallway to OB-GYN.
There were eight young women in the room. All seemed to be under twenty-years-old, a couple closer to fifteen. Two sat next to – maybe – their boyfriends, holding hands. One, crying, was flanked by her parents. Five sat alone, empty chairs between them – popping gum, flipping through magazines, listening to Walkman. Bored and unconcerned? Scared and withdrawn? It was hard to tell which.
The receptionist at the window was a cheerful and cooperative young black man with a neatly trimmed beard and Afro. He wore a white smock with a Gay Pride tag that said "Sam." Hardy handed him a card, introducing himself, asking if Sam might direct him to someone who could tell him a little about Dr. Witt.
"You can ask me. I remember him pretty well. Too bad what happened."
Hardy agreed, saying that's what he was trying to get clear on.
"I thought his wife did it."
"That's what they're saying."
"You think she didn't?"
"She says she didn't, so I'm just turning over rocks – maybe find a snake."
"Here? At the clinic?"
"Seems like a lot of angry people out there on the sidewalk."
Sam waved that off. "The pro-lifers? No, forget them. Those people live there on the street."
"People have been killed, Sam, beat up leaving work at these clinics."
Sam kept up a confident smile. "What about grocery checkers or bus drivers? They get beat up too. Welcome to life in the big city."
Hardy tried another tack. "All right, maybe it was personal. Someone on the staff? I don't know. Maybe Dr. Witt had a run-in with somebody?"
"No way, no way. This isn't a social club here. These volunteer docs come in and put in their time and leave. And Witt more than most. Nobody's billing anybody here – no reason to hang out." He gestured at the waiting area behind Hardy, lowering his voice. "This is not fun city west."
Hardy recognized the gospel when he heard it. He pointed at his card lying on the window ledge between them. "If you do think of something personal – anything at all – would you mind giving me a call?"
Hardy watched his wife walk from the back of the restaurant, noticed the heads at the bar turning. One of the problems he had had when he was starting to fall in love with her had been her looks – they were too good. He knew it was easy to get fooled by a pretty face. It had happened to him before.
And even though he had known Frannie since she was a young girl – Moses' kid sister – once he started connecting with her, letting himself really see her, he made himself put on the brakes. Not for too long, but enough to persuade himself that at least most of what he loved about her wasn't on the outside. He had to admit, though, that even after three years, a lot of it still was.
The waiter was there, holding her chair out for her. The little amenities.
"What are you smiling at?"
"I'm shallow. I have no depth. I wonder if our relationship is purely physical."
Frannie daintily popped a bite of calamari into her mouth. They were by the window at Mooses', looking out through the sunshine onto Washington Square. "Well, some of it, anyway."
They hadn't discussed it, but they had both felt they needed to go someplace nice – light, upscale, carefree – to wash away the tastes of their mornings.
She reached across the table and touched a finger to Hardy's cheek, trailing it along his jawline. Picking up her glass, she swirled the Chardonnay, staring into it. "Wine two days in a row. You think Vincent will be all right?" Their son was living on breastmilk and a few squashed bananas.
Hardy told her he didn't think Vincent would notice. It wasn't as if she was out pounding herself into the ground with alcohol.
"I know. Sometimes I just worry." She put the glass down, scratched at the tablecloth. But she wasn't really worried about Vincent – it was something else and Hardy was fairly certain he knew what it was.
"Pretty bad?"
She nodded. "You look around here, and you see all these people being so happy, and then back there, in the jail… it kind of makes you wonder what's the real world."
Hardy covered her hand with his own.
"I mean, how isolated are we?" she asked.
The waiter lifted the empty plate from the middle of the table. He removed some non-existent crumbs from the starched linen tablecloth with a small rolling hand-brush. Someone began playing classical music – expertly – at the piano by the bar.