There was no reason now for Jeff Elliot to use any of the dirt that Driscoll had supplied on Eric Kensing. If he wasn't any longer suspected of killing Markham and his family, then he was a private person with his own private problems, and they were not the stuff of news-at least not the kind of news that made its way into "CityTalk."
Hardy sat in Elliot's cubicle, the stack of paper Driscoll had provided on the rolling table in front of him. He flipped through the pages slowly, one at a time over the course of the afternoon, while Jeff toiled on his next column. It was really a hodgepodge of data. The letters to Kensing that Elliot had shown Hardy the other day, for example, occurred over the course of several years, and were widely separated within the printed documents. Likewise, the memos to Ross and the board on various issues, including Baby Emily and the Lopez boy, occurred in chronological order. Hardy was finding that only a careful reading of all the documents related to any one issue would lead to any real sense of the gravity of the thing over time.
There were at least a hundred memos to file, as well. Formal documentation-probably dictated to Driscoll-of various meetings and decisions. Nothing that struck him as new or important. More interesting to Hardy, although far more cryptic, were the thirty or forty shorthand reminders and comments that Markham had probably typed to himself. It was obvious that he believed he could write in a secure-probably a passworded-document, but that Driscoll had breached that security and gotten access. But try as he might, Hardy couldn't make much out of them.
Markham's early memos to Portola's administration on Lopez were mostly concerned with the facts of the situation. They were about insurance considerations and a litany of medical explanations of specific decisions that might mitigate their liability in the inevitable lawsuit.
Several memos, both to file and to the Physicians' Group, explored the culpability of a Dr. Jadra, who had been the first physician to examine Ramiro Lopez at the clinic. Somehow, Hardy gathered, it was determined that Jadra's actions were not negligent. The boy's fever had been mild on that first visit. The throat infection had not yet progressed to the point where a reasonable diagnostician would necessarily prescribe antibiotics or even order a strep test. Further, Jadra did not note the cut on Ramiro's lip in his file at all, and when questioned about it later, had no memory of it. These Jadra memos struck Hardy as interesting because he could read the obvious subtext: Markham was looking for a scapegoat, and the case against Jadra would not be as clear-cut as that against Cohn. So these Jadra documents had, to Hardy, an odd, defensive character.
By contrast, when Markham finally recommended that they prepare an 805 on Cohn-which went on her permanent record with the state medical board and the National Practitioner Data Bank-the letter was sharply worded and extremely critical: "…Dr. Cohn's inability to recognize the early signs of necrotizing fasciitis and her failure to recommend highly aggressive treatment was surely the primary factor contributing to the patient's death. By the time he was admitted to the ICU, the disease had progressed to the point where even the most active intervention would probably not have been efficacious. We recommend that Portola suspend Dr. Cohn's clinical privileges for thirty days, that you submit an 805 report on this incident, as required, and that you conduct a full enquiry to determine the advisability of Dr. Cohn's continued employ within the Parnassus Physicians' Group."
Hardy knew what Markham was doing here-trying to distance himself and the hospital from Judith's failure to make an early diagnosis. Again, this decision was about insurance, about getting sued, about the money. From Kensing's perspective, though admittedly biased, the real ultimate culprit in this tragedy had been Malachi Ross, pulling the strings and denying the needed care from on high. Instead, the opprobrium was falling most heavily, and solely, on a relatively newly hired, young female staffer. Even if Judith might have done a better job with the early diagnosis, it was clearly unfair to single her out as the reason the boy had died. Many people contributed, as did the corporate culture, and Hardy thought the whole thing stunk.
It did, however, provide a solid motive for Judith to have hated Markham.
He turned the page and stared uncomprehendingly at the next. Something about Ross he was sure. The initials MR. Then "Priv. Invest." But did this refer to a private investment in one of the drug companies with whom Parnassus did business, or to a private investigator that Markham might hire to keep tabs on his medical director? There was simply no way to know.
He went on to the next page.
"I do not remember." Rajan Bhutan shook his head sadly.
Fisk had had a few ideas he wanted to pursue about the car and some other things, so Glitsky had asked Darrel Bracco if he wanted to sit in with him while he talked to Rajan Bhutan, who'd volunteered to come down to the hall in the early afternoon. Nevertheless, Bhutan seemed nervous and reluctant when he showed up punctually for the interview. He asked Glitsky several times if he needed a lawyer, and once if Glitsky was going to arrest him. Glitsky reassured him that he was free to leave at any time. No one was arresting anyone today.
Bhutan told Glitsky he did not like it that people thought he might have killed someone. Glitsky told him they just wanted to clear up some things he'd said before, maybe get a few more facts. But of course (Glitsky reiterated) he was welcome to call an attorney at any point if he wanted to spend the money.
But now with no attorney, Bhutan was saying he didn't remember the day after Christmas. "You don't remember if you worked at all that day?" Bracco was doing bad cop. Glitsky had already made friends with Bhutan in their earlier interview, and preferred to leave things that way.
"I'm sure there is a record of it," Bhutan responded, wanting to be helpful. "You could check with personnel."
"We've already done that, Rajan, and they tell us you were working that day, and it just seems like you would have remembered. Do you know why? Do you remember Shirley Watrous? She died that day. She was murdered on that day."
Glitsky sat at the head of the table, kitty-corner to both of them. He held up a hand, restraining Bracco for Bhutan's benefit. "Do you remember anything specific about Shirley Watrous, Rajan? Was she a difficult patient, something like that?"
Bhutan hung his head, then raised it again with an effort. "I do remember that name. She was, no, not difficult. There really is no one more difficult than another in the intensive care unit. They are all just people who are suffering."
"The suffering bothers you, doesn't it, Rajan?" Bracco was sitting across from him. There was a video camera masked in an air vent mounted in the corner on the ceiling, an unseen tape running under the table.
"Yes. It's why I became a nurse. My wife suffered terribly before she died, and I learned that I could help."
Glitsky poured more water from the pitcher into Bhutan's paper cup. "Did you ever think you could help patients more by putting them out of their misery?"
"No. I have never done that kind of thing. Not one time."
"Never pulled the plug on anyone when it was clear they were going to die? Anything like that?" Glitsky asked gently.
Bhutan sipped from his cup, shook his head. "No. Always, that is the doctor's decision. I am there only to help, not to decide. If I have a question, I ask a doctor." Again, he drank some water. "And I never know when people are going to die, Lieutenant. No one knows that, not even the doctors. No one but God. In these years I have worked at the ICU, I have seen people come in and think they won't make it to the night. But then, a week later they sit up and can go home. It is just what happens."
Bracco jumped all over that. "Well, Shirley Watrous didn't just happen. Something happened to her. Same as with Marjorie Loring. And you were on duty for both of them. What do you have to say about that?"
Glitsky leaned in helpfully. "Maybe they were belligerent, Rajan. They didn't want you poking at them, changing their beds. Maybe they were making it worse for the others in the room."
Bhutan looked from one inspector to the other. "I don't know what to say. What do you want me to say?"
"You are the common denominator on both of the shifts where these women died, Rajan." Bracco thought they were getting close, and his intensity came through. "We've got another nine or ten people who died in the ICU, and you were on for all of them, as well. If you were sitting here where we are, what would you think?"
He brought his hands to the black circles under his eyes. "I would think I must have killed them myself." His eyes sought each of theirs in turn. "But I swear to you, that isn't true."
Bracco threw Glitsky a quick look, then struck in a loud voice. "Are you expecting us to believe you had nothing to do with the deaths of these women? And the others? Who else was there, Rajan? Who else had any chance?"
"I don't know. I don't know who would do this? There must be a record of who else was there. Some doctor, perhaps. Even a janitor or sometimes a security guard. They come and go, you understand."
Glitsky reached over and touched Bhutan's sleeve. "Do you remember anyone, Rajan?"
Bracco slapped at the table, then stood up, knocking his chair over behind him as he did so. "There's no phantom janitor or doctor, Rajan! There's only you, don't you understand? We have your records. You have been on duty for every death we know of, even Tim Markham's."
"Oh no." Rajan's eyes were wide at the accusation. "I did not kill him."
"But you did kill the other ones?"
"No! I have told you. No."
"Rajan," Glitsky said quietly. "Listen to me. We're not going to go away. We're going to keep on this until we find the proof we need, and we will find it. When you murder ten or more people, I'll tell you for a fact that you've left a trail somewhere, either when you checked out the drugs or someplace else. Maybe you've got vials of it stashed somewhere. Maybe you confided in one of your bridge partners. Or another nurse. Whatever it is, we're going to keep looking until we find it. We're going to ask your friends and the people you work with. It will be very ugly and eventually, after all your efforts to hide it, it will come out anyway. You have to understand that. It will come out."
Bracco: "Or you could just tell us now."
"Do yourself a favor," Glitsky said. "It could all end right now. I know it must be bothering you. I know you need to explain why you had to do this." He stood up, motioned to Bracco. "Let's give him a few minutes alone, Darrel."
Glitsky wasn't going to leave a message at Hardy's conceding his mistake with Kensing. If he'd been wrong, and it looked like he had been-well, he'd been wrong before and would be again. But he wasn't going to give Hardy a tape recording of himself admitting it. His friend would probably run a loop of it and make it a part of the outgoing message on his answering machine. So he'd called once, left his usual, cheery, "Glitsky, call me," and waited.
The callback came at a little after 3:00. "I've got a question," Hardy said.
"Wait! Give me a minute. Fifty-four."
"Good answer. Unfortunately not the right one."
"You weren't going to ask how old I'd be when my child is born?"
"No, but that's an awesome fact. Fifty-four? That's way too old to have new kids. Why, I'm not even fifty-four myself, and my children are nearly grown and out of the house."
"So are mine," Glitsky growled. "So what was your real question?"
"Actually I have two. I had kind of thought we'd agreed on the idea that you'd inform me when you were moving on my client."
"Is that a question?"
"The question is, why'd you choose last night to search his place and not tell me about it first?"
"I won't dignify the second half. As for why we picked yesterday, we wanted to know what we might have with him before he got in front of the grand jury. It would have been embarrassing if he had a floorplan of Markham's home with X's where the bodies were found, and Marlene didn't know about it when she was asking him questions. Know what I mean?"
Hardy did and it made complete sense, as did the lack of warning. If Glitsky had told him in advance when they were searching, Hardy would have gone there first and removed any shred of anything that could have been construed as incriminating. He decided to move on. "The second question is easier. Have you talked to your two cowboys or know where they are now? We were going to get together again and I thought I'd set it up."
"They're out talking to somebody about the hit-and-run vehicle-hey, we don't call them the car police for nothing-but they ought to be back before five. Inspector Fisk has an aversion to overtime, whatever that is. You want to drop by here on your way home, they'll probably be around. I can congratulate you on getting your client off."
"You got the word, did you?"
"Marlene, just before lunch."
"Which leaves you where with the rest of it?"
"Real close."
Hardy chuckled. "Good answer."
"Why do you care, if it's not your case anymore?"
"It's still my case, Abe. I just don't have a client." A pause. "We had a deal. I may have found out a few things."
Glitsky decided he liked the sound of that. "See you in a couple of hours," he said.
The last time Hardy had just picked up and without any warning decided to pay a call on a working doctor at the Judah Clinic was when he had tried to convince Kensing to talk to him while he was scheduled to see patients. That hadn't worked out so well.
But after two plus hours with Jeff Elliot's documents down in the windowless Chronicle basement, Hardy couldn't abide the thought of returning to his office. When he told Cohn what his unscheduled visit to the clinic was about, he was confident that even if she was busy, she would see him.
But maybe not. He waited outside with his brain on full speed for a little more than twenty minutes and still she hadn't appeared. He would give her another ten before he went inside again and made a stronger demand. It was the sixth consecutive day of sunshine, and he was going to get as much of it as he could before the June fog slammed the city again.
"Mr. Hardy?"
He squinted up, got to his feet, extended his hand. "Guilty."
Judith Cohn's mouth was set in worry, the cause of which immediately became apparent. The same question she'd asked first thing on the phone yesterday. "Is it Eric? Is he all right?"
"He's fine. In fact, he's better than he's been in a couple of weeks." He explained only that his grand jury testimony had made them decide that he was no longer a suspect. He said nothing about the actual alibi, the stop at Harry's bar. If Kensing wanted to tell her about that, it would be his call.
"So he's clear?"
"Looks like."
"Oh God." She put a hand histrionically over her heart, smiling now broadly at him. "That is such a great relief. I am so glad." Then the smile faded. "But you didn't come here to tell me that, did you?"
"No, I didn't."
Her hand was still on her heart. "What?"
He started at the beginning, his call to her yesterday, which had revealed that she did not have any corroboration for where she had been at 10:45 on that Tuesday night. Then the Lopez case. Her problems with Markham. Over-sleeping the morning Markham had been hit. "I'm not saying that I think you've had anything to do with any of this, but the police may not feel the same way if they find out. With very few other people on their radar screens, it's likely that they will. It would be better if you were prepared for their questions."
She'd listened intently and now her face clouded over with dismay. "But I…I was at Eric's. I never thought I'd have to prove that."
"Did you talk to anyone else, see anybody in the hallway? Do you remember if anybody might have seen you?"
She was continually shaking her head, stunned by this development, how it might play. "And so they'd think…I could have killed Mrs. Markham and their children?"
"It would not eliminate you. That's the point. And they're going on the assumption that the same person killed Tim."
"At the hospital?"
"Yes."
For a moment, Hardy thought she might panic. Her eyes locked on his, then combed the street in front of them, as though looking for an avenue of escape. But then, almost as suddenly, the strain bled out of her expressive face. She reached out her hand and placed it on Hardy's sleeve. "Then this would only matter," she said, "if I had been in the ICU within a few minutes or so of Tim's death, right?"
"I don't know exactly. Enough time for the potassium to work."
"So let's even say fifteen minutes outside, and that would be a hell of a long time. That's when I would have had to be there, right?"
"Right. But it was my understanding-you told me last night, in fact-that you were there right after the code blue-"
"I was, but not right before. Right before-a half hour before, at least, maybe more-I was in the ER, putting some stitches in a baby's lip. She dropped her bottle, then fell on it. What a mess. But I had my nurse with me, and the baby's mom. Everybody, in fact. Everybody knew I was there. When they called the code blue, I was just washing up after the stitches and I turned to my nurse and said, 'I've got to go see if that's Mr. Markham.' She'll remember."
When Hardy walked into the homicide detail, it was Old Home Week. Though Bracco and Fisk had not yet arrived, eight out of the fourteen homicide inspectors were at or near their desks. Hardy thought it had to be close to a record for the room. The hazing of the new guys continued, he noticed-a Keystone Kops children's toy, two soft police dolls hanging from a paddy wagon, sat in the middle of their combined desks by the stoplight. While Hardy waited, three separate inspectors pointed out to him that if you squeezed the wagon, it went "oogah! oogah!" When he declined to try it for himself, they all seemed disappointed. Adding to the party atmosphere, Jackman had stopped by with Treya at the close of business and, hearing of Hardy's imminent arrival, had decided to wait around. Marlene Ash had finished up with the grand jury for the day. She wanted to get Glitsky's debriefing of Rajan Bhutan, as well as whatever late-breaking news he might have on the still-live Markham suspects, whoever they might be. Glitsky's office couldn't have held the crowd, so everyone had moved over near the first interrogation room, and that's where Hardy joined them.
After taking the expected grief from Jackman about the merits of the deal they'd made about his client, Hardy listened with growing interest as Glitsky went on about the second proven Portola victim, Shirley Watrous, and Rajan Bhutan. The consensus seemed to be that the two series of multiple murders were unrelated, and that Bhutan remained the prime suspect for the people on Kensing's list. They'd talked to him at length this afternoon, and Glitsky had sent two inspectors over to his home shortly after that with a search warrant.
The inspectors sent up a rousing huzzah when the rookies arrived. Glitsky turned and glared at the world in general, then motioned Fisk and Bracco over to talk with the big boys.
Darrel and Harlen, in Hardy's estimation, had accomplished quite a lot in a very short time. Since they'd just arrived from Markham's old neighborhood and their investigations about the car, Glitsky let Fisk expound on that topic, although his skepticism was evident. He proudly showed off to the assemblage a composite sketch of the car's driver. Hardy was glad to note that the woman bore no resemblance to Judith Cohn except for a halo of unkempt dark hair.
As the composite went from hand to hand around the room, Fisk then announced that their witness, a teenage girl named Lexi Rath, had tentatively identified the make and model of the car that had nearly hit her, and presumably hit Tim Markham. It was a Dodge Dart, probably a model from the last year of the sixties or the early seventies. Fisk had already contacted the DMV and discovered that there were only twenty-three such cars registered in all of San Francisco County. When he'd told Motor Vehicles that they were investigating a homicide, they faxed him the names right away. He now had addresses and registered owners for each of the cars, and with luck, by tomorrow he'd have seen most of them.
"Any of the names look familiar, Harlen?" Glitsky asked. "Related to Parnassus or Markham in any way?"
"No, sir."
"Well, good try anyway. If we get the car, that's something all by itself. Keep looking."
Hardy knew Glitsky well enough to see that he was humoring Fisk about his supposed detective work, but he didn't want to ruin his inspector's day, or dampen his enthusiasm. The man had put in a decent amount of effort, and perhaps it still might all lead someplace. Hardy thought a show of interest on his own part wouldn't be out of place. "Could I get a copy of that list, Inspector?"
Fisk looked the question over to Glitsky, who nodded. But it was clear the lieutenant's real area of concern lay elsewhere, in the alibis for the time of Carla's death. "Darrel," he said, turning to Bracco, "did you get anything more on Driscoll?"
"I don't think Harlen was quite done, sir."
His patience straining, Glitsky yielded the floor back to Fisk. "I thought I'd try to make amends for my giveaway to Dr. Ross. So I called my aunt Kathy-Kathy West," he explained to the rest of the room, "and told her what I'd done and what had happened."
"Which was what, Harlen?" Glitsky prompted him, much to Hardy's satisfaction.
He outlined the story briefly-Ross and his wife and his alibi. Then he went on. "I asked her-Aunt Kathy-if she could get in touch with Nancy Ross, just as a friend, and find out if her husband had called her and asked her to change her memory."
"But it doesn't matter. The wife would never testify any way," Marlene Ash objected, repeating Glitsky's earlier argument.
Jackman added to that. "Your aunt's testimony would be hearsay anyway, and probably inadmissible in any event. Isn't that right, Diz?"
But Hardy was no longer interested in parsing the law. He wanted answers and information. He saw that Fisk had begun to wilt under the heat of the lawyer's questions. He wanted to keep him talking, to find out what had happened. "So what did she say anyway, Inspector? Your aunt."
"That Ross had called his wife and told her she was mistaken about that night. He'd been home by ten. She had to remember that. It was important." He looked around the room again. "But Nancy told Aunt Kathy that in fact he hadn't been home by ten, although of course she'd back him up if it was important to Malachi. It was probably some big hush-hush business deal. But she was sure that he hadn't gotten home until way after midnight, which is when she'd gone to sleep."
"Still," Glitsky said, "all that means is that he didn't go straight home." Hardy was reminded of Eric Kensing and all the variables on that score. "Is there any sign that he went to Carla's, though? Have you got any evidence or testimony or hint of anything putting him there?"
Fisk's face fell. "No, sir."
Glitsky threw him a bone. "I'm not saying it's not something, Harlen. And it does make up for the morning, okay. Keep on it. Now, Darrel, how about Driscoll?"
"He did make that phone call, all right. I talked to Roger-the roommate-and got the phone bill. Forty-eight minutes, beginning at nine forty-six."
Everybody worked it out in their heads. Glitsky said, "So he couldn't have made it to Carla's?"
Bracco seemed to agree. "He would have had to fly."
It was the bottom of the fourth inning and Hardy was standing in the third base coach's box at Pop Hicks Field in the Presidio. It was a great field in terrific condition in a city starved for playgrounds, but in typical San Francisco fashion, the Little League was probably going to get kicked off it before too long. They might be forced to relocate to a field on Treasure Island, in the middle of the bay. This was because someone had raised the issue that there might be toxins in the dirt. Though none had been found to date, every news story on the issue had pointed out that the Presidio had been a military base for years, after all, and who knew what those military types had dumped where. Probably there was poison everywhere-mustard gas, anthrax, battery acid. Hardy considered it foreordained that they'd shut the field down.
But tonight, it was still a wonderful venue for kids' baseball and Vincent had just opened the Tigers' half of the inning by doubling to the gap in left field-his second double of the night. He was now dancing down the baseline, trying to draw a throw from the pitcher.
Hardy's mind was not as much on the game as it could have been. After the meeting in homicide had broken up and Fisk and Bracco had left, he'd stayed around jawing with Glitsky and Treya, Marlene and Clarence for a few minutes. Marlene seemed to be excited about the prospect of getting her hands on Brendan Driscoll's computer disks, but since Hardy had spent a good portion of the afternoon reviewing those printouts to no avail, he didn't quite share her enthusiasm. He still had copies of Markham's cryptic notes in his briefcase-he thought he'd work on those puzzles over the next few days in his free time.
And in fact, he was doing it now, though still going mostly nowhere.
Clarence, obviously frustrated at the pace of the investigation so far, announced that he had heard from the mayor. His Honor had gotten wind of the second verified homicide from Kensing's list and wasn't much impressed with the DA's subtle approach to Parnassus and its troubles. The HMO was a major contractor with the city and their business practices were seriously suspect. Clarence was now of a mind to go and seize all of its records for the grand jury's perusal and forget about avoiding a possible panic among city workers. People were already beginning to panic-the mayor's office was fielding about fifty calls a day. It was high time to put Parnassus in receivership and turn the grand jury and another team of homicide inspectors concurrently onto this second set of homicides. Whether or not there was any relation between them and the Markham deaths, they were a big deal in their own right.
The mayor was adamant that there had to at least be the appearance of progress-he mentioned creating a special task force if there weren't some results soon. Everybody knew what that would mean. Meddling by amateurs, political deals, compromise, and quite probably no resolution ever. The message was clear: If Jackman wanted to get any credit for fixing this mess, this was his chance and he'd better take it.
The next batter lined a sharp single on one hop to the left fielder and Vincent, running on the hit, was to third base and by him before Hardy got his head back into the game. The throw to home beat his son by fifteen feet. After the play, Mitch, the manager, came down to the end of the dugout. "Diz," he said urgently, "you gotta tell him to hold up on that play. Give him a sign. Come on now. You're coaching. Let's get in the game."
The Tigers won in spite of Hardy's mental error, and the team went for pizza to a place on Clement. The whole family had attended the game and didn't get home until 9:30. Frannie and Rebecca had become Survivor fanatics-they'd taped the evening's show and went straight in to watch the replay while Vincent showered, did the last of his homework, made it for the last half of the program. Bedtime rituals consumed another hour, so it was almost midnight when Hardy and Frannie dragged themselves up the stairs to their bedroom.
He came up behind her and put his arms around her as she was brushing her teeth, put his lips against the side of her neck. "I will come straight to bed if you're even remotely alive." They'd been having a decent run of physical contact and he was telling her they could keep the string alive if she wanted, but he knew she was exhausted.
She leaned back into him, managed a goofy smile in the mirror through the toothpaste. "I don't think I am. Aren't you tired?"
"Not really. Evidently I slept during Vinnie's game."
"It wasn't that bad. So what are you going to do?"
"I've got some reading material in my briefcase. Maybe if I blur my eyes just right, I can get it to make some sense."
He was sitting at the desk in the bedroom, five of Driscoll's purloined pages spread out before him. He wasn't completely sure why these five had made his cut-none had more than a couple of lines. But something about each of them had seemed pregnant enough with some kind of hidden meaning to warrant one more round of conjecture.
"See MA re: recom. on SS. Compare MR memo 10/24."
"Talk to MR-address complaints re: hands on at Port. PPG ult."
"Medras/Biosynth/MR."
"Foley. Invest. $$$. Saratoga. DA? Layoff? Disc. w/C."
"See Coz. re: punitive layoffs-MR. Document all. Prep. rpt. to board. Severance?"
And then a little voice said, "Go to sleep. This is not happening." He must have made it to the bed because that's where he was when he woke up.
Glitsky kissed his wife good-bye at the front door.
"If I'm around for lunch, I'll call."
"If I'm around, I might go out with you." Treya gave him a mock-sad moue. "A year ago the mere thought of lunch with me would have made your morning. You'd have planned your whole day around it."
"I know, but we're married now, and you're pregnant and all. It's pretty natural, the romance going away with all that day-to-day stuff."
She put an arm around his neck and brought her mouth up to his ear. "What was last night, then?"
"Last night?" Glitsky scratched at his scar, pretended not to remember. "Last night?"
She swung a hard elbow and caught him in the gut. "Oh, sorry." A smile, then, "Shoot for lunch."
Rubbing his stomach, he closed the door and came back into his kitchen, where Hardy sat at the table. He'd called an hour before and offered to drive Glitsky in to work, though he usually drove in with his wife. But Hardy thought he might have something on Markham, although he didn't know what it was, and maybe Abe, now pulling up his chair, could help.
Hardy drummed his fingers. After twenty seconds, Glitsky said, "You want to stop that?" Then, "Ross looks like he's in some kind of trouble, doesn't he?" A minute later, he pulled one page over in front of him. "This one, maybe, it could be Mike Andreotti."
"New to me," Hardy said.
"The administrator at Portola. He'll talk to you if I ask him to. He's all cooperation with these homicides. I might even go with you. Where'd you get this stuff?"
"Jeff Elliot couldn't make heads or tails of it. He said if I could, I was welcome to it."
"Yeah, but where did it come from originally?"
"It was Markham's, through Driscoll, then through Elliot."
"Not exactly Tinkers to Evers to Chance."
"No, but I'll take it."
"At this point"-Glitsky was getting up-"I'll take anything."
If at Glitsky's last meeting with him, Andreotti had been at the edge of physical and nervous exhaustion, now he was the walking dead. He didn't even bother rising from the chair behind his desk, didn't wonder that the new man, something Hardy, wasn't a policeman or a DA or even a reporter. He just didn't have any more energy to expend. He'd been at work all night, dealing with a sick-out of his nurses, scared off either by the rumors or sensing an opportunity for leverage in their struggle for higher wages. He didn't know and really at this point didn't care. The ship was going down anyway, and he saw no way to stop it.
And now these men had a puzzle for him. He got a perverted kick out of that. He was so beat he'd have trouble with the rules of tic-tac-toe, and they wanted him to decipher this puzzle. It was funny, really, if he had the strength to laugh.
"See MA re: recom. on SS. Compare MR memo 10/24."
"No idea," he said.
The other fellow, Hardy, leaned forward slightly. "We believe the MR stands for Malachi Ross. Does that help?"
Glitsky had seen a lot of burnout in his job and read the signs here. He pulled the page around, facing him again. "See Mike Andreotti about his recommendations on SS. Compare with the Malachi Ross memo dated October twenty-fourth. Does that help? What's SS?"
This time, there was no hesitation. "Sinustop."
"And what was your recommendation?"
"Well, it wasn't mine. I'm just the administrator, but the PPG recommended-"
"Excuse me," Hardy said. "What's the PPG?"
Andreotti blinked slowly, took a breath, and let it out. "The Parnassus Physicians' Group. Basically, they're the doctors that work here."
"Okay." Glitsky, staying with the program, continued, "And what did they recommend about Sinustop?"
"Just that we'd been inundated with samples, and that perhaps we should make it a policy for a while to go easy on giving the stuff out until more data got collected on it. Which now, in retrospect, was a smart suggestion."
"But you didn't implement it?" Hardy asked.
"No. Ross overrode it. He wrote a long memo justifying the position-I've got it somewhere here. I gather the stuff was medically pretty substandard. I'm not a doctor myself, but some of the senior staffers were appalled that our medical director would put his stamp on anything like that. So as usual, we compromised, and Malachi got what he wanted."
"You don't like him much." Glitsky didn't phrase it as a question.
But Andreotti merely raised his shoulders a centimeter. "People become pricks around money and money's been so tight here for so long…" Another shrug. "If it wasn't him, it would be somebody else."
"Only a couple of weeks ago, it was Markham," Hardy reminded him.
"No. It was still Ross. Ross has the passion for money. Markham just wanted to make a profit. There's a difference."
"What's the difference?" Glitsky asked.
"Well, take Sinustop, for example. It didn't have to be any issue at all, but Ross saw it saving us a million bucks a year, right to the bottom line. If there might be some downside, he was willing to risk it if it stemmed the bleeding."
"And Markham wasn't?"
"Sometimes, but nowhere near the way Ross did. You think it was Markham who made the call on Baby Emily? No chance." He pointed at Hardy's page again. "Anyway, I guess that's why he wrote that note to himself. He thought Ross went too far there again."
"What about you, Mr. Andreotti?" Glitsky asked. "What did you think?"
Another weary sigh. "I know this always sounds terrible, but I'm an administrator. I resist the temptation to play doctor. I follow orders."
But Hardy had what he needed, and had already gotten a hint on something else. "If we may, sir," he began, translating the second note as Glitsky had done. "Talk to Ross and address complaints about hands-on at Portola. Parnassus Physicians' Group ult, which must be ultimatum."
"It was." This wasn't any mystery to Andreotti. He actually almost seemed to perk up slightly. "Sometime last year, Ross started coming by the hospital all the time-drop-ins, he called them. Checking up on our physicians' procedures on everything from birthing to surgeries to ER procedures first, making recommendations to save a buck here, a buck there. Later actually advising doctors what they ought to do right while they were treating their patients. Now, when you realize that even the lowliest GP has a self-image just a notch below God's, you can imagine how popular these visits were. Finally, the PPG issued an ultimatum that he had to stop and, mostly, he did. At least enough to satisfy them."
"But not completely?" Hardy wanted to be sure.
"No. But the drop-ins fell off from twenty a month to maybe five and he stopped giving orders disguised as advice."
"Do you have any record of the days he came? The actual dates?" Hardy asked.
Andreotti pondered for a moment. "No, I doubt it. Why would we? He wasn't on staff here, so there'd be no personnel record. He just dropped in. Why?"
"No reason. Just curious." Hardy kept it deliberately vague, pushed the other pages across the desk. "If we could just take one more minute of your time, Mr. Andreotti, does anything else strike you about these?"
The administrator pulled them over and took time now, one by one. "I don't know Medras, but Biosynth is a drug manufacturer. Most of their stuff is low-rent, over-the-counter. They're not real players, but I've heard a rumor they've got something big with the FDA right now." He turned to the next page, looked up. "Foley is Patrick Foley. He's corporate counsel. I don't know who DA is."
Glitsky knew that one. "The district attorney."
A light was coming on in Andreotti's eyes, but he made no comment, turning to the last page. "See Coz. re: punitive layoffs-MR. Document all. Prep. rpt. to board. Severance?"
"Coz is Cozzie Eu. She's the personnel director." He labored over the rest of the note for a few seconds; then slowly he raised his head. "Tim was going to let Ross go, wasn't he?"
Glitsky's mouth was tight. "It's a little early to say, sir. But thanks very much for your time."
As they drove out to the Embarcadero Center and Parnassus Headquarters, the way they decided to phrase it to corporate counsel was that Hardy was an attorney working with the DA. That was true in all its parts if not quite literally. Pat Foley met them at the door, saw them through, then looked back along the hallway in both directions before he closed it. They didn't get a chance to try out their explanation before Foley started talking. "You caught me just as I was going out, but my appointment is just over in Chinatown. Maybe we could talk as we walk."
In five minutes, they were in Portsmouth Square, surrounded by pagodas and tai chi classes, some Asian porn shops, and a line of cars waiting for space in the garage below. High clouds had blown in over the night, and the morning air was chill with a brittle sunlight.
Foley's dome shone even in the faded day. The few hairs that were left were blond, as was the wispy mustache. Thin-shouldered and slightly paunched, he was the picture of what a life behind a desk with tremendous financial pressure could do to a young man-he didn't appear to be much over forty, if that. When he finally sat himself on the concrete lip of one of the park's gardens, he was breathing heavily from the walk.
"Sorry," he said, "I didn't want to talk about it in there. The walls have ears, sometimes."
"Talk about what?" Glitsky asked mildly.
"Well, Susan said you were with homicide. I assume this is about Mr. Markham, or the other Portola deaths. Although I have to say I work almost exclusively with corporate matters. I'm not aware of any information I possess that might be useful to your investigation. If I was, as an officer of the court, of course I would have come forward voluntarily."
Glitsky gave him a flat stare. "Do you talk that way at home?"
Before Foley could react, Hardy stepped in. "Do you really believe your offices are bugged?"
The one-two punch confused him. He couldn't decide which question to answer, so he asked one of his own. "Is this about Mr. Markham then?"
The truth was that neither Hardy nor Glitsky knew precisely what this meeting was going to be about. The telltale initials MR did not even appear in Markham's note. So though they both had their suspicions that Ross was somehow involved, they didn't want to give anything away. "Do you have any idea what the word 'Saratoga' might refer to, Mr. Foley?" Glitsky asked.
"You mean the city down the peninsula, out behind San Jose? I think there's another one in New York, as well, upstate somewhere, I believe. Is that it?"
Hardy and Glitsky fell into a more or less natural double team. Hardy followed up. "Have either of those cities turned up in your corporate work?"
Foley turned to his other inquisitor. He thought a while before he answered. "I can't think of when they would have," he said with a stab at sincere helpfulness. "We don't have any business either place. Maybe a few patients live in the city out here, but that would be about the extent of it."
Glitsky: "So the name hasn't come up recently? Saratoga? Something Mr. Markham might have discussed with you?"
Foley passed a hand over his dome and frowned.
"Maybe not plain Saratoga," Hardy guessed. "A Saratoga something?"
That flicked the switch. "Ah," Foley said. "It's an airplane. Sorry. I think Saratoga and I think Cupertino. I grew up down there, went to Bellarmine. But it's an airplane. It's the one John F. Kennedy Jr. was flying when he went down."
Hardy and Glitsky exchanged a glance, and the lieutenant spoke. "Was the company planning to buy a plane?"
"No, it was Mr. Ross. That's how it was brought to my attention."
"In what way?" Hardy asked.
At this turn in the questioning, Foley actually turned and looked behind him. Wiping some perhaps imaginary sweat from his broad forehead, he tried a smile without much success. "Well, it came to nothing, really."
Glitsky's voice brooked no resistance. "Let us be the judge of that. What happened?"
"One night rather late, I think it was toward the end of last summer, Mr. Markham called to see if I was still working, then asked me to come up to his office. This was a little unusual, not that I was working late, but that he was still there. I remember it was full dark by this time, so it must have been nine or nine thirty. Still, he told me to close the door, as though there might be other people working who could overhear us.
"When I got seated, he said he wanted our talk to be completely confidential, just between the two of us and no one else. He said it was a very difficult subject and he didn't know where he stood, even with his facts, but he wanted to document his actions in case he needed a record of them down the line."
"What did he want to do?" Hardy asked.
"He wasn't even sure of that. Eventually, he came to where he thought he ought to hire a private investigator to look into Mr. Ross's finances."
Glitsky kept up the press. "What made him get to there?"
"Several things, I think, but the immediate one was the Saratoga." Foley was warming to his story, as though relieved that he finally had an opportunity to get it off his chest. "It seems that Mr. Markham and Dr. Ross had been at a party together one night at a medical convention they were both attending in Las Vegas a week or so before. They'd been close friends for years, you know, and evidently they went out together afterward alone for a few drinks, just to catch up on personal stuff. Well, over the course of the next couple of hours, Dr. Ross maybe drank a little too much, but he evidently made quite a point of telling Mr. Markham about the condition of his finances, which wasn't good at all. His personal finances, I mean, exclusive of Parnassus, which was hurting badly enough as it was."
"So Ross cried on Markham's shoulder?" Glitsky asked.
"Essentially, yes. Told him he had no money left, no savings, his wife was spending it faster than he could earn it. Between the alimony for his first wife and the lifestyle of his second, he was broke. He didn't know what he was going to do."
Hardy had gotten some inkling of this from Bracco and Fisk's report on Nancy, but it was good to hear it from another source. "And what did Markham suggest?"
"The usual, I'd guess. Cutting back somewhere, living within a budget. It wasn't as though Dr. Ross was unemployed. He still had a substantial income and regular cash flow, but that wasn't the point, the point of our meeting that night."
"What was?" Glitsky asked.
Foley had sat on the hard, cold concrete long enough. He stood, brushed off his clothes, checked his watch. "Earlier that afternoon, Mr. Markham's wife had called him-this was between the…" Foley decided not to explain something; Hardy assumed it was about Ann Kensing. "Anyway, his wife called and asked if he'd heard the news. Dr. Ross had just traded in his old airplane and bought a brand-new one, a Saratoga. He and his family were taking it to the place at Tahoe that weekend and Markham's wife had called to ask if they wanted to fly up with them, bring the whole family.
"'You know what a brand-new Saratoga costs, Pat?' he asked me. 'Half a million dollars, give or take, depending on how it's equipped. So,' he goes on, 'I arrange to run into Mal at the cafeteria and tell him I got the word about the plane, but I'm curious,' he goes, 'how are you paying for it?'
"And either Dr. Ross doesn't remember details from when he was drunk, or he figured he could tell his friend and it wouldn't matter, but he smiles and goes something like, 'Cash is king.'"
Now that he'd said it, Foley wore his relief like a badge. Again, he drew a hand over the top of his head. Again, he assayed a smile, a bit more successful than the first. "So that's it," he said. "Mr. Markham wanted my opinion on what we ought to do as a company, how we ought to proceed. He thought there was a chance that Dr. Ross was accepting bribes or taking kickbacks to list drugs on the formulary, but he didn't have any proof. He just couldn't think of any other way Dr. Ross could come up with any part of a half million in cash. He'd already talked to his wife and-"
"Carla?" Glitsky jumped on this sign of communication between them. "I don't remember hearing Markham and his wife got along, even when they were together."
"Oh yeah. They were inseparable for a long time. Before they…before all their troubles, they talked about everything. Carla would even come and sit in at board meetings sometimes and she'd know more than some of us did. It pissed off some people, but nobody was going to say anything. And it wasn't like she was a drain on the board's resources. Very direct and opinionated, but smart as hell. Business smart. Put it out there, whatever it was, and let us deal with it."
For Hardy, this cleared up a small mystery. He'd wondered about the note's "Dis./C." and had concluded it must be the personnel person, Cozzie. But now, maybe, C. was Carla. Still, he wanted to bring Foley back to Markham's action. "So what did you both finally decide to do? You said that it all came to nothing in the end anyway."
This was an unpleasant memory. "Well, I told Mr. Markham that if he really thought Dr. Ross was doing something like this, we should probably turn it over to the DA and the tax people and let them take it from there."
"But you didn't do that," Glitsky said. "Why not?"
Foley gave it more time than it was worth. "The simple answer is that Mr. Markham called me off the next day before I could do anything. He said he'd confronted Dr. Ross directly. Their friendship demanded it. Ross told him he should have shared the good news with him when it happened, but the money for the plane had come in unexpectedly from his wife's side of the family. An aunt or somebody had died suddenly and left them a pile."
A morning breeze kicked up a small cloud of dust and car exhaust and they all turned against it. Hardy had his hands in his pockets. He turned to the corporate counsel. "And when you stopped laughing, what did you do then?"
"I didn't do anything. I'd been called off."
"And you believed him? Markham?"
"That wasn't the question."
But Glitsky had no stomach for this patty-cake. "Well, here's one, Mr. Foley. What did you really think? What do you think now?"
The poor man's face had flushed a deep red. Hardy thought his blood pressure might make his ears bleed any minute. And it took nearly ten seconds for him to frame his response. "I have no proof of any wrongdoing, you understand. I'm not accusing anybody of anything. I want to make that clear."
"Just like you didn't accuse anybody of bugging your office?" Hardy asked mildly. "And yet here we are a quarter mile away. We don't care how you justify it. Tell us what you think."
This took less time by far. "Ross had something on Markham, as well. Maybe some shady stuff they both pulled together when we were starting out. I don't know, maybe something even before that. In any case, he threatened to expose Markham, and they got to a stalemate."
"And he heard the original, late-night conversation between you and Markham because the offices are bugged?" Glitsky's scar was tight through his lips.
"That's what I assume."
"How come you haven't swept the place?"
This time, Foley's look conveyed the impossibility of that, especially now if Ross had ordered the bugging and was now running the whole show. "You get on Dr. Ross's wrong side at work, bad things start happening to you," he said. Then added, by way of rationalization, "I've got a family to think about."
There it was again, Hardy thought, that sad and familiar refrain. Today certainly was turning into a day for cliche´s-first Andreotti just following orders, now Foley and his family. For an instant, the question of what he was made of flitted into Hardy's own consciousness. Why was he here without a client, on the wrong side for a defense attorney, at some threat to his own peace if not his physical safety? He couldn't come up with a ready answer, but he knew one thing-he wasn't going to hide behind his family or his job. He was doing what he had to do, that was what it came down to. It seemed like the right thing. That was enough.
Hardy was still tagging along while Glitsky was trying to get his next warrant signed. Judge Leo Chomorro was the on-call judge reviewing warrants today, and this turned out to be extremely bad luck. He wouldn't sign a warrant to search Ross's house or place of business. A swarthy, brush-cut, square-faced Aztec chieftain, Chomorro had ruined plenty of Hardy's days in the past, and more than a few of Glitsky's. But this wasn't personal, this was the law.
"I'm not putting my hand to one more warrant on this case where probable cause is thin and getting thinner. I've been pressured and finagled and just plain bullshat these past few days issuing warrants for everybody and their brother and sister who might have had a motive to kill somebody at Portola Hospital. That doctor you thought did it last week, Lieutenant, you remember? Or that nurse who might have poisoned half the county? And then, last night, Marlene telling me that the secretary had a motive, too?"
"That wasn't my office. I-"
Chomorro held up a warning hand. "I don't care. Probable cause, Lieutenant. Do these words ring a bell? I don't sign a search warrant, which I might remind you is a tremendous invasion upon the rights of any citizen, unless there is probable cause, which means some real evidence that they were at least in the same time zone in which the crime was committed when it was committed, and left something behind that might prove it."
Glitsky swallowed his pride. "That's what we hope to find with a warrant, Your Honor."
"But you've got to have at least some before you can look for more. Those are the rules, and you know them as well as I do. And if you don't"-Chomorro turned a lightning bolt of a finger toward Hardy-"I'll lay odds your defense attorney friend here is intimately familiar with every single picky little rule of criminal procedure, and I'm sure he'd be glad to bring you up to date. To say nothing of the fact that the named party on this affidavit isn't some schmo with no rights and no lawyer, but the chief executive officer of one of this city's main contractors. You are way off base here, Lieutenant, even asking."
"Your Honor." Against the odds, Hardy thought he would try to help. "Dr. Ross is the answer to the most basic question in a murder investigation: cui bono. Not only does he take over Mr. Markham's salary and position-"
Chomorro didn't quite explode, but close. "Don't you presume to lecture me on the law, Mr. Hardy or, in this example, some mystery writer's fantasy of what murder cases are all about. I know all about cui bono, and if you're to the point where you believe that a smattering of legal Latin is going to pass for evidence in this jurisdiction, you'd be well advised to get in another line of work. Am I making myself clear? To you both?" He was frankly glaring now, at the end of any semblance of patience. "Find more or no warrant! And that's final!"
I wish he wasn't a judge." Somehow, magically, the peanuts had reappeared in Glitsky's desk drawer, and Hardy had a small pile of shells going. "I'd kill him dead."
"Don't let him being a judge stop you. It's no worse killing a judge than any other citizen. If your mind's set on it, I say go for it. I'm the head of homicide, after all. I bet I could lose most of the evidence. No, we've done that when we haven't even been trying. Imagine if we worked at it-I could lose all of it. And you heard His Honor-no evidence, no warrant. I might not even get to arrest you, although I'd hate to miss that part. Maybe I could arrest you, then have to release you for lack of evidence."
Hardy cracked another shell, popped the nut. "That's the longest consecutive bunch of words you've ever strung together."
"When I was in high school, I did the 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen' speech in Julius Caesar. That was way more words."
"But you didn't make them up. There's a difference."
Glitsky shrugged. "Not that much. You'd be surprised."
"You were Mark Antony?"
Another shrug. "It was a liberal school. Then next year, we did Othello, and they wouldn't let me do him because he was black."
"Did you point out to them that you were black, too?"
"I thought they might have seen it on their own. But I guess not."
"So you were discriminated against?"
"Must have been. It couldn't have been just somebody else was better for the part."
"Bite your tongue. If you didn't get the part and you were black, then that's why. Go no further. The truth shall set you free. How long have you lived in San Francisco anyway, that I've still got to tell you the rules? I bet even after all this time, you could sue somebody for pain and suffering and get rich. I could write up the papers for you and maybe I could get rich, too. You would have been a great Othello, I bet."
"Freshman year, I didn't get Shylock either, and I'm half-Jewish."
Hardy clucked. "No wonder you became a cop. To fight injustice."
"Well," Glitsky deadpanned, "it was either that or girls liked the uniform."
"Your school did a lot of Shakespeare."
Glitsky slowly savored a peanut. "It was a different era," he said. "The old days."
Rajan Bhutan gripped the telephone receiver as if his life depended upon it. He sat at the small square table in his kitchen that he used for eating and reading, for his jigsaw puzzles and bridge games. This evening, the tabletop was bare except for a drinking glass that he'd filled with tap water against the thirst that he knew would threaten to choke off his words when he began to speak.
Since Chatterjee had died, he had been continually downsizing, winnowing out the superficialities most people lived with and even felt they needed. Now the simplicity of his life was monastic.
The two-room studio apartment in which he lived was at the intersection of Cole and Frederick, within walking distance of Portola. It consisted of a tiny, dark bedroom and a slightly larger-though no one would call it large-kitchen. The only entrance to the unit was a single door without an entryway of any kind. The framing itself was flush to the stucco outside and all but invisible. Painted a cracked and peeling red, and seemingly stuck willy-nilly onto the side of the four-story apartment building, the door itself might have been the trompe l'oeil work of a talented artist with a sense of humor. Because of the slope of the street, most of the studio itself was actually below street level, and this made the place perennially cold, dark, and damp.
Rajan didn't mind.
Rent control would keep the place under seven hundred dollars for at least several more years. He had a hot plate for cooking his rice and one-pot curries. The plumbing was actually quite good. There was regular hot water in the kitchen sink and in the walk-in shower. The toilet flushed. The half refrigerator stuffed under the Formica countertop on the windowless front wall held enough vegetables to last a week, sometimes more. A portable space heater helped in the mornings.
Now, as the first ring sounded through the phone, he raised his head to the one window, covered with a yellowing muslin cloth. Outside, it wouldn't be dark for another hour or more, but the shade cast by his own building had already cloaked the block in dusk. A couple walked by, laughing, and he could make out the silhouettes of their legs as they passed-at this point, the bottom of the window was no more than twenty inches above the sidewalk.
The muscles around his mouth twitched, either with nerves or with something like the sense memory of what smiling had been like. A tiny movement on the Formica counter drew his gaze there-a cockroach crossing the chessboard. For a year now, he'd been enjoying the same game, conducted by mail with Chatterjee's father in Delhi. He thought in another two moves-maybe less than a month-he could force a stalemate, when for a long while it looked as though he'd be checkmated. He believed that a stalemate was far preferable to a defeat-those who disagreed with him, he felt, missed the point.
The phone rang again. He ran his other hand over the various grains of the table, which was his one indulgence. He had always loved woods-he and Chatterjee had done their apartment mostly in teak from the Scandinavian factory stores. Cheap and durable, he had loved the lightness, the feel of it, the grain. They used a sandalwood oil rub that he could still smell sometimes when he meditated.
But he had changed now over the years and this table was something altogether different-it was a game table of some mixed dark hardwoods laid in a herringbone fashion. Each place had a drawer built into the right-hand corner, which players could pull out and rest drinks upon. He hosted his bridge group every four weeks, and the other three men admired the sturdy, utilitarian, practical design.
"Hello. Ross residence."
"Hello. Is Dr. Malachi Ross at home, if you please?"
"May I tell him who's calling?"
"My name is Rajan Bhutan. He may not know me, but please tell him that I am a nurse at Portola Hospital attached to the intensive care unit. He might remember the name. It is most urgent that we speak."
"Just a moment, please."
Another wait. Rajan closed his eyes and tried to will his mind into a calm state. It would not do, not at all, to sound frightened or nervous. He was simply conveying information and an offer. He straightened his back in his chair. Drawing a long and deep breath down into the center of his body, he let it rest there until it became warm and he could release it slowly. He took a sip of water, swallowed, cleared his throat.
"This is Dr. Ross. Who is this again, please?"
"Dr. Ross, I am Rajan Bhutan, from Portola Hospital. Perhaps you remember, I was in the ICU with Dr. Kensing when Mr. Markham died. I am sorry to bother you at home."
"How did you get my home phone number?" he asked. "It's unlisted."
"It can be found if it's needed. If one knows where to look."
After a short silence, Ross sounded slightly cautious. "All right. How can I help you? The maid said it was urgent."
Rajan reached for the water again and drank quickly. "It is that. I need to speak with you frankly. Are you in a place you can talk freely?"
Ross's tone kissed the bounds of aggressiveness. "What's this about?"
"It is something we need to discuss."
"That's what we're doing now but I'm afraid I don't have too much more time. My wife and I are going out in a few minutes. If it can wait-"
"No! I'm sorry, but it cannot. It has to be now or I will speak to the police on my own."
After a short pause, Ross said, "Just a minute." Rajan heard his footsteps retreating, a door closing, the steps coming back. "All right, I'm listening. But make it fast."
"As you may know, the police are looking into the deaths now of several patients at the ICU that they are calling homicides."
"Of course I've heard about that. I run the company. I've been monitoring it closely, but that has nothing to do with me personally."
"I'm afraid it has, instead, to do with me, Doctor. The police have talked to me more than once. I am the only nurse who has worked the shifts when several of the deaths have occurred. I think they will decide I have killed these people."
He listened while Ross took a couple of breaths. Then, "If you did, you'll get no sympathy from me."
"No, I would not expect that. No more than you would get it from me if they charged you with killing Mr. Markham or the others."
This time the pause lasted several seconds. "What are you saying?"
"I think you know what I am saying. We would not be talking still if you did not know. I saw you."
"You saw me what? I don't know what you're talking about."
"Please, Doctor, please," Rajan said. He could feel his throat catching, and reached for the water. "We don't need to waste time in denials. We don't have time. Instead, I have a proposal for you."
"You do? How amusing. You've obviously got an agile mind, Mr. Bhutan. So I'd be curious to hear what it was, although your premise is fatally flawed."
"If it is, we shall see. My idea is only this-you may remember the day after Christmas, four months ago, when you did a drop-in at the ICU? Is that still familiar to you? I was on that shift and there was a patient named Shirley Watrous."
"And the police think you killed her? Is that it?"
Rajan ignored the question. "But you were there with me. I keep a daily diary, but also I remember. You and I had a pleasant discussion about working during the holiday season. People don't like it, but it is in many ways preferable to the family obligations and raised expectations. You may remember."
"Maybe I do, but what's your point? Was that the day after Christmas? I don't remember that."
"But you must, you see."
"I'm hanging up now," Ross said.
But he did not, and Rajan went on. "I didn't even realize what you were doing, of course. And then the police told me the names of some of the others. And I realized you'd been there for all of them, and what you'd done.
"I feel like a fool, really. Perhaps I always knew, but how could one in my place ever even suggest that you were doing…what you were doing? I, not even a doctor.
"And who was to say it was the wrong thing, to put these people beyond pain, even if I had been sure? No one even questioned the deaths before, so how could I accuse you when everyone else seemed to take these things for granted?"
Rajan's clipped tones were speeding up and he forced himself to slow down. "Then when I saw you with Mr. Markham's IV, I thought again I must have been wrong. I did not want to know. I was too afraid to say anything. Then I was afraid because I had not said anything sooner. But now I am most afraid of all, because I know if I accuse you, you will accuse me. But I was not at the hospital for all these killings, and I know you had to be, because you did them."
He was at the end. He closed his eyes for the strength to finish. "So please, Doctor. Please. You must tell the police I was with you when these people died. You will be my alibi. And, of course, I shall be yours."
"You can't be serious?" Ross's tone was harsh, filled with disbelief and even outrage.
But he was still on the line. Rajan had seen similar bluster among the vanquished during bridge tournaments, and even chess games, when in fact they had known all was lost.
"Your nerve amazes me, Mr. Bhutan. Are you sure that's all you want?"
"No, not quite. I'm afraid I will have to be leaving the country soon. So I will also need to have fifty thousand dollars, please. Tonight. In cash."
Panic was the devil.
Ross had a core belief that it was a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate acts. His great talent, he sometimes thought, was in recognizing the desperation of others.
Emergency at the office, he told Nancy. Something to do with an audit. Yeah, even Friday night. These people worked all the time. He had to go in, but he'd make it up to her. Tell the Sullivans he was sorry-to make up for the last-minute cancellation of their dinner date, maybe they'd fly them all up to Tahoe next weekend.
In his office, behind the locked door, he was pulling the tenth pitiable little stack of bills out of his safe. This man Bhutan…he shook his head, almost smiling at the man's naivete. Fifty thousand dollars for what he knew? That was yet another problem with most people-very few had a clue about value. If it were Ross, it would have been ten times that, and a bargain at the price. But perhaps Bhutan really was being shrewd. If he accused Ross, Ross would indeed accuse him, but that would lead to awkward questions about why he had not spoken up sooner.
Just for a moment, he stood stock-still, trying to remember. He had been alone in the room. He was certain. Bhutan had not come in until he was done. Could he really have seen him from the hall? Seen him without being seen?
Not that it was going to matter. He couldn't take the chance that Bhutan would panic and talk to the police despite being paid. Or not panic and decide he needed more money. Or just do something stupid and give them both away.
And if Bhutan was bluffing, if he really hadn't clearly seen Ross at the IV, so much the worse for him. He actually presented an excellent opportunity to resolve this increasingly sticky problem.
The bills would be back in here by tomorrow morning, although he would miss owning what he called his Bond gun. There was a certain charm in the Walther PPK that his father had chanced upon in a downtown gutter one evening, and had eventually given to him. He loved the secret sense of sin it gave him, the thrill of private power.
Carla had brought it all upon herself. "I know what you've been doing," she told him in the hospital that morning. He was almost certain that she was referring to his second source of income, the kickbacks. But it might have been the other, the patients. He'd had a sense that Tim was closing in on that somehow. Checking his drop-in dates at the hospital. Asking questions he must have thought were subtle.
The accident had thrown Carla into a panic. And under that panic was an insane, inflexible resolve. There was no mistaking the hysterical edge to her control as he'd come up to her in the corridor outside the ICU. Seeing her husband smashed up, intubated, unconscious, had undone her. Ross walked up to her, ready with a comforting hug and some platitudes about bearing up and supporting each other. But her eyes had been wild and desperate as she whirled on him. "Don't you dare insult me with your phony sympathy."
"Carla? What?"
"Whatever happens here, you're finished with us, Mal, with all of this. You think this will free you, don't you? You think this will be the end of it."
He tried again, a comforting hand on her arm.
"Don't touch me! You're not our friend. You're not kidding me anymore. You're not Tim's friend and you neverhave been. Do you think he hasn't told me what you've been doing? Well, now I know, and I will not forget. Whatever happens to him-whatever happens!-I promise you, I will take you down. That's what he wanted, that's what he was going to do to save the company from all you've done to destroy it, and if it's the last thing I do, I will see that it happens."
"Carla, please. You're upset. You don't know what you're saying."
But she'd kept on, sealing her own death sentence. "Even if Tim doesn't pull through, I'll owe it to his memory to take it to the board. Even to the police."
After the explicit threat, did she think he wouldn't act? Could she imagine he wouldn't? Unless he acted swiftly, boldly, without mercy, he was done.
Knowing this and what he had to do, Ross first had to disarm her. He took her hands forcefully in both of his. They were eye to eye. "Carla. First let's get through this. Let's get Tim through it. I have made mistakes and I'm sorry for them. But so have we all. I promise you we'll work it out. If I have to leave, so be it. But never say it has anything to do with our friendship. Nothing can touch that. That's forever."
The plan presented itself full-blown. Potassium would leave no trace, and the hospital's PMs were hopelessly shoddy. If the medical examiner hadn't autopsied Tim-and Ross had never envisioned that-the whole plan would have worked. He realized that if he could make it appear that Carla was distraught enough to kill herself and her family, the police would never even look for a murderer. He would use the gun Tim kept in his home office.
When he got to the house, the upstairs lights were out. He wanted the kids to be asleep so he would not have to see them. He would do that part in the dark. They would feel nothing, suspect nothing. Sleep.
But Carla stood inside the door and at first would notopen it to him. "There's nothing to talk about, Mal. We're all exhausted and at the end. We can meet tomorrow."
But he'd worn her down. "Please, Carla. I know Tim must have told you some things, but we were working them out, just like we always have. I loved the man. I need to explain. I need you to understand."
"There's nothing to understand."
"Then I need you, at least, to forgive me."
And she'd paused a last time, then unlocked the chain. As he entered, he took the Walther from his pocket and told her they needed to walk quietly to the back of the house.
Now he would do it again. He had experience now. It had to look like suicide. It had to look as though Bhutan, knowing the police were onto him for all the murders at Portola, including Markham's, chose to take the coward's way out. That would close all the investigations.
He also had to make sure no one heard the shot, which he supposed would be louder with the Walther than Tim's.22 had been.
First he would have to distract Bhutan, then use chloroform to put him out. Except it would stay in the system long enough to be detected. Maybe ether? He had ether in his medical bag right here. That would do, as well. And of course he could simply shoot him as though it had been a robbery attempt or something. But a suicide was far preferable. He'd have to consider his options on the drive over, then play the thing by ear.
Bhutan obviously thought the police were coming to get him at any moment. So he wanted fifty thousand dollars tonight. He was desperate and, being desperate, he was doomed to commit foolish acts, to make dangerous decisions.
Just like Tim, for example. He couldn't get over Tim. When they'd both been humping to get the business up and running and there'd been so many opportunities to make hay under the table-much smaller potatoes than now, of course, and much of it in soft currencies and perks-theweekends in Napa or Mexico, the fine wines, the occasional corporate escorts for the convention parties when the wives couldn't make it. Tim had willingly enough succumbed to those temptations, right along with him. But the first hard money payoff had scared him off. This, he thought, was wrong, where to Ross it was no different than what they'd been doing. In fact, it was better.
But Tim always wanted to believe that somewhere inside he was essentially an honest and good person, the fool. Hence all the agony he'd put himself through over wanting to schtup the admittedly sexy Ann Kensing. Ross couldn't believe that the guy had nearly ruined his life over what should have been at most a playful dalliance. But, no, he'd been "in love," whatever that meant. Stupid, stupid. But not as stupid as letting himself believe that just because Tim had decided not to take anybody's dirty money, Ross was going to do the same thing. Oh sure, Tim had had his little crisis of conscience all those years ago and had come to Ross saying they had to stop-not just because it threatened the health of patients and the company, but because it was wrong. And Ross had pretended to go along. And why not? Why burden the self-righteous idiot? Why split the money with someone who didn't want it? Ross knew the truth was that he wasn't really harming any patients by taking the odious drug money. If Tim was happier living with the fiction that Ross had found the Lord with him, he'd let him enjoy his fantasy.
But then, even while Tim was sleeping around on his wife, he discovered Ross's brilliantly conceived fraudulent billings and could not believe that his longtime partner and medical director still cheated. And took kickbacks. His whining self-righteousness made Ross puke.
What a hypocrite Tim was, coming to Ross in hand-wringing desperation-what should he do? What should he do? It had come to his attention, and so on and so forth. Didn't Ross understand? Tim had asked him. He'd crossed the line where now Tim had to do something, now had to act. Andthe conflict was ripping him up-Ross had been his friend for so long. Their families, blah blah blah.
But even in the face of this direct threat, Ross remained calm and told Tim that of he felt compelled to accuse him publicly of criminal behavior, that Ross would have no choice but to point the finger back at him. They would both, then, be ruined, and who would that serve?
Stalemate.
But he knew that Tim was a time bomb. Eventually he would force the issue again, and again Ross would parry-it was the same with Ann and Carla and Ann again and Carla again. But Ross would not panic. He would calmly wait while Tim vacillated and if something did not change, as it often did, then Ross would eventually have to find a permanent way out, a permanent solution.
And then Tim was suddenly delivered to him, on the edge of death, needing only a push that no one should ever see to send him over.
He kissed Nancy at the door, told the kids to be good. In the circular driveway, he spontaneously decided to take the old Toyota. Bhutan's address was in the Haight and he didn't want to drive one of the good cars, which would only be magnets for the vandals. The old green heap would get him there and attract no attention, and that's what the situation demanded.
Throwing the briefcase onto the seat beside him, he pulled out into the traffic and adjusted the visor against the rays of the sun as it cleared the thin cloud layer above the horizon and sprayed the street in a golden glow.
As Ross drove by, the door threw him off at first.
What kind of place did this guy live in? If it was just the door and the window down almost at the sidewalk level, the apartment didn't look to be much bigger than a closet. No space to swallow the sound of the shot. Fortunately, there was no lobby. He could simply knock and walk in, take care of his business, then walk out with relative impunity. Nevertheless, his heart was pounding much like when he'd gone to see Carla. This was a necessary business, but he couldn't deny the adrenaline rush.
He finally parked a block and a half down and across the street now in the last minutes of daylight. He tried to envision Rajan Bhutan. He must have met him dozens of times in the hospital, of course, but he hadn't paid too much, if any, attention. If he had any impression of him at all, it was of a quiet man of very slight stature. If so, Ross could subdue him easily if he could maintain an element of surprise.
But what was he going to do about the ether? Rajan the nurse would be intimately familiar with the smell, might pick it up as soon as he opened the door if Ross had already opened the bottle, poured it into the gauze, stuffed it into his jacket pocket. And how would he get behind the man? That seemed crucial.
There was no hurry, he told himself. He'd gotten the call no more than an hour before, then had made noises about fifty thousand dollars being difficult to get ahold of in such a short time. But Bhutan hadn't bought that. Told him to figure some way to get it and then be at his address by nine or he would call the police.
Ross looked at his watch again. It was ten to eight. He had all the time in the world. He held his hands out in front of him and looked at them for a long time. No trace of the shaking that had plagued him afterward with Tim, and then with Carla.
He was actually looking forward to the moment. This last-minute planning even had a little bit of the quality of a game. It was amazing how easily the man had delivered himself up to him. A phone call, then one decisive act, and his problems would be over.
And suddenly as he was sitting there, as he knew it would, as it always did when he really needed it, the solution came to him. He had been trying to be too clever by half. There would be no need for ether, no surprise. As soon as he was inside, he would simply brandish the gun and control events from there. Sit down, Mr. Bhutan. Spread your palm against your temple. A little more distance between the fingers please, so that I can put the end of the barrel right up against the hairline where it ought to be. Thank you. Good-bye.
Smiling to himself, he took the bottle of ether out of his pocket and put it and the gauze back in his medical bag. The gun was in his right pocket, small and concealed. He reached for the briefcase, opened the door, stepped out onto the sidewalk.
The dusk was advancing rapidly now. A light shone inside the low window, but there was no light over the door, which was to the good. He stopped and stood still for a few seconds, then proceeded uphill to Frederick, where his street dead-ended. He crossed to Bhutan's side. Now, on the uphill corner, he could see beyond his car down the hill and in both directions on Frederick, the cross street. A few cars were parked up and down both sides of the street, but there wasn't a pedestrian in sight.
He walked past the window once, leaning over to glance inside. It was covered with a cheap cloth he could see through when he got close. And there, waiting alone inside at a table, he saw Bhutan. He remembered him now, a nonentity. He stood another instant at the door, savoring the power.
It was time.
It had been a long hour and then some. Rajan felt himself nearly crying with fear and apprehension when the knock came at the door. He picked up his water and sipped so he would be able to speak, then put the glass down on the table, wiped his hands on his pants legs, said, "Come in, please. It's open."
He almost expected Malachi Ross to look somehow different, but it was the same man who'd appeared at the hospital so frequently, over the past couple of years. Tall and thin, controlled and commanding, Ross exuded a quiet, terrible power in the halls of Portola. As soon as he was through the door, Rajan felt that physical force in the room. His bowels roiled within him, and it occurred to him that this might not work. That it had been a mistake. He might not be able to pull it off.
Ross closed the door behind him and took in the tiny room with a dismissive glance. "You live here?"
"There is another room," Rajan replied defensively, indicating his darkened bedroom through the open doorway. "I have simple needs."
"Apparently."
Ross still stood by the door. He held a briefcase and Rajan pointed to it. "Have you brought"-his throat caught-"the money?"
"This?" Holding up the briefcase, the man seemed almost to be enjoying himself, which Rajan could not imagine. "How much was it again?"
He knew that Ross was playing with him, but he didn't know the rules of this game. "Fifty thousand dollars."
"And I'm giving this to you because why? Maybe you could refresh my memory?"
"It does not matter. You know why. That's why you have come here."
"Maybe not, though. Maybe not the reason you think."
Rajan's eyes raked the room's walls. He reached for his water again and drank quickly.
Ross crossed the room in two steps and pulled a chair out from under the table. "You seem nervous, Rajan. Are you nervous?"
"A little bit, yes."
"It's not quite the same as making threats over the telephone, is it? You and me here together, one on one?" Ross placed the briefcase between them in the middle of the table.
Bhutan tried to answer, but no words came. He tucked his head down quickly and tried to swallow. When he looked up, Ross was holding a gun in his right hand, pointing it at his heart. "Oh dear mother of God," he said under his breath.
Ross still spoke in the same conversational tone. "Do you want to know what I find supremely ironic about this situation? Are you interested? I'd think you would be."
Rajan could only manage a nod. His eyes never left the weapon. Ross continued in almost a playful banter. "Because, you see, what's funny is that you're afraid that the police are going to arrest you for all those poor sick souls at Portola that they think you killed. And you want to run, don't you, because you don't have any defense except to say you didn't do it. Imagine that. I'll be the first to admit that it looks bad for you, and I don't blame you, really. But I'll tell you something. You want to know?"
"Yes. What's that?"
"I think you're going to help the police solve this case, Rajan. In fact, I know it."
"And why is that? I would never tell. What reason would I have to say anything?"
"I'll bet you can figure that out, Rajan. The answer is that you won't need to say anything. But the great irony is that after tonight, after you kill yourself, everyone will know not only that you killed all those patients-all those poor patients who were costing me thousands of dollars a day-but that you also killed Tim Markham and his family."
"You can take the money back." Rajan's voiced echoed in the tiny space. "A gun! There's no need to use a gun!"
Ross pushed his chair back and started to stand up.
Don't move! Police! Drop the gun!" Glitsky came out of the darkness and was in the doorway to the bedroom, his weapon extended in both hands before him. "Drop it!"
Ross froze for an instant, turned his head, then slowly lowered his hands to the table. He dropped the gun the last inch to the wood, where it landed with a hollow clunk.
"All right, now, knock it to the floor. All the way."
Ross's eyes never left the weapon that was on him. He still had his hands where he'd let go of the gun over the table and he reached his right hand back as if to swat it onto the floor.
Glitsky saw his move and perhaps misreading it, perhaps lowering his guard for an instant, he let the angle of his own weapon drop a half inch.
Ross moved like the strike of a snake. He grabbed at the briefcase and with a vicious lunge, threw it across the tight space at Glitsky, who fired-a tremendous explosion in the small room-and blew the briefcase open as it hit him, knocking the gun from his hand, spilling the stacks of money onto the floor. Plaster from the back wall rained onto the Formica countertop.
Another explosion and more plaster.
"Don't you move!" Ross had his own gun back in his hands and had fired it at the floor where Glitsky had reached for his own. "Get up, then kick it over here! Now!"
Rajan was huddled in the corner by the refrigerator. Ross glanced over at him and told him to get up, too, then motioned for Glitsky to move out of the doorway to the bedroom and into the kitchen itself. The medical director was breathing heavily, but his eyes were clear and focused. He held a gun in each hand now. His mouth arced in a tight half smile. "You guys stung me," he said. "I'm impressed. Especially you, Rajan, good work." But then the mouth turned into a line of bitter resolve. "But I see what's going to happen here now. You! Cop! You came here to arrest Mr. Bhutan and he decided that he wasn't going without a fight, so it looks like there's going to be a shootout here after all. And sadly, neither of you are going to survive."
Still stuck where he'd been all along, standing behind the wall in the darkened bedroom, Hardy had no choice. There was no way he could predict when Ross might take the first shot at one of the two of them. He had to move first and fast.
The light switches were next to the door and he was right there. He reached up and flicked the switch down, plunging the apartment into total darkness.
And, it seemed, immediately into deafening sound, as well. He dropped to the floor and counted four shots in an impossible succession, running together almost as one within the first heartbeat. Then the sickening and unmistakable crunch of a body ramming into another one and taking the wind out-"Hnnh!"-slamming it back into something immovable, and accompanied by the crash of more breakage. Another explosive shot, then a further struggle before a final crash, a hollow thumping sound, and Glitsky's voice, almost unrecognizable, but clearly his, yelling: "Lights, Diz, lights!"
Which he hit just in time for the front door to slam open and Bracco's form to appear in it, gun drawn, hands extended. Turning the light off, and then on, was the signal they'd worked out for reinforcement. Then Bracco was all the way inside the room, Fisk behind him, with his weapon out, as well. Hardy leaned in adrenaline exhaustion against the frame of the doorway into the bedroom.
Rajan Bhutan was still huddled in his corner, crying softly, his head down on his knees. Glitsky, a gun in each hand, had gotten to his feet and was standing unsteadily over the prostrate figure of Malachi Ross, who was bleeding from the nose and mouth.
Turning, Glitsky handed both the weapons, butt end first, to Bracco.
Then he took an awkward half step backward, and stumbled, seeming to lose his balance.
Hardy took a step toward him.
"Abe, are you-"
Glitsky turned to him and opened his mouth to speak, but a trickle of blood was all that came out, tracing the line of his scar before he fell again to the floor.
CityTalk
by Jeffrey Elliot
THE TRAGIC DEATH OF THE CHIEF of the San Francisco Homicide Department, Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky, marks a bitter last chapter in the saga of the Parnassus Medical Group and its efforts to remain solvent at no matter what cost to its subscribers and constituency. Glitsky, 53, had been a cop with the city for his entire working life of thirty years. In all that time, half of it spent in the homicide detail, he worked almost ceaselessly in the city's underbelly, interrogating often hostile witnesses, arresting desperate murderers who would not hesitate to kill again. His professional world was filled with violence, drugs, and disregard for civility and even for life. Yet the greatest boast of this deeply humble man was that he had never drawn his gun in anger.
Last night, for the first time, he had to. And it killed him.
He was not working with what the police facetiously call a no-humans-involved case, where everyone involved whether as witness or suspect already has a substantial criminal record. In fact, his killer was a classic white-collar businessman who had been the subject of a recent column in this space-the CEO of Parnassus Health, Dr. Malachi Ross. Glitsky's investigation, which had begun with the death of Tim Markham, Ross's predecessor, in the ICU of Portola Hospital, had grown to encompass the murders of Markham's family, and then, most unexpectedly, numerous other terminally ill patients over the course of a year or more at Portola. Dr. Ross now sits in jail, allegedly the murderer of all of these people, and of Lieutenant Glitsky.
Glitsky was a personal friend of this reporter. He did not drink or swear. He liked football, music, and reading. He had a dry sense of humor and an acerbic wit informed by a wide-ranging intelligence. Beneath a carefully cultivated, somewhat intimidating persona, he was the soul of compassion to the friends and families of victims, a firm yet flexible boss to his colleagues in homicide, and a paragon of honesty and fair-dealing within the legal community. Half-Jewish and half-black, he was well aware of the sting of discrimination, yet it did not color his judgments nor his commitment to due process. He treated everyone the same: fairly. He was justly proud of the way he did his job. He will be sorely missed.
He is survived by his father, Nat; his three sons, Isaac, Jacob, and Orel; his wife, Treya Ghent; and his stepdaughter, Lorraine. Funeral services are-
The phone jarred Elliot from his words.
His weary eyes scanned back a few graphs, realizing that it wasn't nearly enough. It didn't capture the way Glitsky was, the essence of him, the force he'd been to those who had known him. He looked at his watch-it was nearly one in the morning. He had another hour until he had to submit this copy instead of the other column he'd written this afternoon. Maybe he could pull the file for an anecdote or two, maybe a picture if they had one of him with something resembling a smile-highly unlikely, he knew-anyway, something to humanize him more. The telephone rang a second time-not picking up wouldn't help, wouldn't change anything one way or the other.
He grabbed at it-Hardy.
"What's the word?" he asked.
On the following Tuesday morning, Hardy sat in the Police Commissioner's Hearing Room, kitty-corner from Marlene Ash's place at the podium. He raised his head and saw the clouds scudding by outside and thought them somehow fitting. It was going to be a cold spring, probably a cold summer. He was going to take a sabbatical for a couple of months after the school year ended, rent an RV with Frannie and the kids, drive all the way to Alaska and back, camping. He was going to fish and hike and take some time, because you never knew how much you were going to have. Things could end abruptly. He needed to think about that, to do something about it.
"I'm sorry. What was the question again?"
"The events that led to Lieutenant Glitsky's presence at Mr. Bhutan's apartment."
"Okay." He spoke directly to the grand jurors assembled before him. "As I've said and as Ms. Ash has explained, I'd been working independently but in a parallel arrangement with the district attorney on elements of the Portola homicides. I had obtained access to some documents that Mr. Markham had written, and following up on those, asked Lieutenant Glitsky to join me. In the course of the morning, we spoke to Mike Andreotti, the administrator at Portola, and then the Parnassus corporate counsel, Patrick Foley.
"Lieutenant Glitsky thought we had enough information to obtain a search warrant for Dr. Ross's house-specifically, he wanted to confiscate his clothing and deliver it to the police lab to check for trace amounts of Mrs. Markham's blood, which-as I understand it-allegedly did turn up on one of his suits. But Glitsky was unable to obtain a warrant with the information we had.
"At that time, Lieutenant Glitsky returned to his duties as chief of homicide. He couldn't lawfully pursue Dr. Ross without more. I was on my own for the rest of the day. During our talk with Mr. Andreotti, I had conceived the notion that Dr. Ross may also have been at Portola and had a hand in the homicides on what we'd been calling Dr. Kensing's list-terminal patients who had unexpectedly died there in the past year or so. Another suspect for those homicides was a nurse at Portola named Rajan Bhutan. Mr. Bhutan appeared to have been the only person with opportunities for these multiple deaths, and with a reason to have killed them-euthanasia. His wife died several years ago after a long illness, and inspectors had noted that for a nurse he appeared suspiciously oversensitive to suffering. The police had interviewed Bhutan, but the lieutenant and I agreed that I should do another interview. Perhaps I would be less threatening since I was not a police officer.
"In any event, I asked Glitsky if I could talk to him and he gave me his permission and Mr. Bhutan's home address and phone number. I went to Bhutan's house after work. As I hoped, he finally voiced suspicions about Dr. Ross. He also admitted to a very great fear that the police would try to blame him for the murders. It became clear that Dr. Ross had been at Portola quite frequently, and at least on several other dates when the homicides were suspected to have occurred.
"At that point, I thought it might be worthwhile to try and force Dr. Ross's hand. Because of some other information we'd gathered, I suspected he had large amounts of cash on hand at his house. I enlisted Mr. Bhutan's aid to pretend to blackmail him, to see if we could lure him out and make him come to us."
Reliving it, Hardy now hung his head, ran a hand over his brow. "In hindsight, this was probably a mistake. I should have simply tape-recorded Mr. Bhutan's original phone call, which would probably have been enough for Judge Chomorro to sign a search warrant. But I didn't do that. Instead, Mr. Bhutan made the call. When it seemed to work, I called Lieutenant Glitsky, who arrived there with Inspectors Bracco and Fisk within about a half hour.
"I want to add that both Lieutenant Glitsky and the other inspectors were upset with and vehemently opposed to my plan. The lieutenant actually predicted that Dr. Ross, if guilty, would become unpredictable and violent. He was very unwilling to involve a nonprofessional such as Mr. Bhutan in such a situation. Nevertheless, since events had already been set in motion, and since Mr. Bhutan was not only willing but eager to participate, we went ahead. There seemed no way to halt events without ruining whatever chance remained to force Ross's hand.
"So Lieutenant Glitsky and I waited in the darkened bedroom, just off the kitchen, while Inspectors Bracco and Fisk were stationed in their car around the corner with instructions to come running when the lights went on and off."
He shrugged miserably. "The plan seemed reasonable and not excessively risky. But I did not contemplate that Dr. Ross would act so quickly. In fact, had Mr. Bhutan not found a way to mention the gun out loud without giving away our presence, and had Lieutenant Glitsky not acted so quickly, though at great cost to himself, Mr. Bhutan might have been killed."
A week later, after hours, coming out of a client conference in the solarium in Freeman's office, Hardy was surprised by the appearance of Harlen Fisk, waiting in an awkward stance by Phyllis's receptionist station. The chubby, fresh-faced inspector looked not much older than twenty. He seemed uncomfortable, nearly starting at the sight of Hardy, then bustling over to shake his hand.
"I just wanted to tell you," he said, after they'd gone up to Hardy's office, "that I'm going to be leaving the department. I'm really not cut out to be a cop, not the way Darrel is anyway, or the lieutenant. I don't know if you heard, but Darrel's starting over, in a uniform again, with motorcycles. My aunt's offered to find me something in her office, but I'm not going to go that way. People seem to resent it somehow."
"That's a good call," Hardy said.
"Anyway, I've got some friends with venture capital and they think I'd be valuable to them in some way. I'd like to give something like that a go. Be in business for myself. Be myself, in fact. You know what I mean."
Hardy, with no idea in the world why Fisk was telling him any of this, answered with a neutral smile. "Always a good idea. Is there anything I can do for you?"
"Well, you know," Fisk sighed, "I had hoped that I'd be able to find something on the car that killed Mr. Markham. I know people always were laughing at me, but I really thought for sure there'd be some connection, and I'd show them. But you were the one person who took me seriously, who listened, took a look at my Dodge Dart list, even asked for a copy. I just wanted to let you know I appreciated it."
The kid was going to be a great politician, Hardy thought. Every connection was a chance to make a friend, make an impression, trade a favor. "I thought it might lead somewhere itself, Harlen."
"Well, that's the last thing. I wanted you to know that it didn't. I checked out every one of the twenty-three cars in the city. There were really only twenty. Three were nowhere to be found. I just thought you'd want to know how it ended."
"I appreciate it," Hardy said. "Your new company needs a lawyer, look me up."
"You do business law, too?"
"Sometimes. I'm not proud."
"Okay, well…" Fisk stuck out his hand. "Nice to have worked with you." At the door, he turned back one more time. "Nobody blames you, you know. In case you thought they did."
The trail led Hardy to one of the housing projects, apartment house boxes in the Western Addition-three-story blocks of concrete and stucco, once bright and now the color of piss where the graffiti didn't cover it. As he expected, nobody knew nothin'.
But he knew that 1921 Elsi Court, apartment 2D, was the last known address for Luz Lopez, who had been the registered owner of one of Fisk's missing three Dodge Darts. Finally, he convinced one of the neighbor women that he wasn't a cop, that he was in fact with the insurance company and was trying to locate Luz so that he could send her some money. About her child.
She had moved away, the neighbor didn't know where. One morning, maybe three weeks ago, she had just left early and never come back. Though the neighbor thought she had worked at the Osaka Hotel for years. Maybe they had a forwarding address for her.
The car? Yes, it was green. The bumper sticker said, "FINATA."
Hardy did some research on the Net. FINATA had been an agricultural reform movement in El Salvador, where ten percent of the population owned ninety percent of the land. About ten years before, FINATA had been a radical government plan for redistributing the wealth in that country, but its supporters had mostly been killed or driven out.
She'd come here with her son, he reasoned. And then Parnassus had killed him. Markham, as the spokesman for the company, had taken the public responsibility for the boy's death, though Hardy knew it had been Ross.
But to Luz Lopez, Markham had killed her boy.
Powerless, poverty-stricken, and alien, she probably felt she had no recourse to the law. The law would never touch such a powerful man. But she could avenge her baby's death herself. She could run over the greedy, unfeeling, uncaring, smiling bastard.
It was four o'clock, a Saturday afternoon, the second day of June. Outside, the sun shone brightly and a cold north wind blew, but it was warm inside the Shamrock, where Hardy was hosting a private party. The bar was packed to capacity with city workers, cops, lawyers, judges, reporters, assorted well-wishers and their children.
They'd pulled in sawhorses from the back and laid plywood across them to make a long table down the center of the room. There were going to be a few minutes of presents and testimonials, then no agenda except to enjoy. The two guys in wheelchairs were at the head of the table, back by the sofas. Jeff Elliot's was the first gift and he banged on his glass to get the place quieted down. McGuire turned off the jukebox right in the middle of the song Hardy had bought for the occasion-it was the only disco song on the box, Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive."
"I think this is only appropriate," Elliot said, handing the flat package across the table.
"What is this?" Glitsky asked.
"It's the page proof of the 'CityTalk' column I was in the middle of writing when it looked good that you were going to die. It's a pack of lies."
"I wasn't ever going to die. I was just resting. It was a fatiguing case."
"Well, you had a lot of us fooled then."
At the shouted requests, Glitsky held the framed page up for the amusement of the crowd and everyone broke into applause.
Hardy, Frannie, and Treya sat around the far end of the table. "The wheelchair is a bit much, don't you think?" Hardy asked. "He was walking fine yesterday at your place."
"He's not supposed to exert himself for another few weeks," Frannie said.
"Doctor's orders," Treya added, then whispered, leaning over, "The fool was trying sit-ups last week and ripped open one of the scabs. Sit-ups!"
"How many'd he do?" Hardy asked.
"Dismas!" Frannie, on his case.
"Eight, the fool!"
Hardy shook his head in disgust. "Only eight and he busts his gut." He looked down the table, glad as hell to see his best friend sitting there in whatever condition he might be. "What a wimp."
The trip took Luz thirteen days. It amazed her that after so much time, she could still find the house she'd grown up in. That was because things made sense here, not like in San Francisco. She had turned from the highway and come up through the town. One of the first things she saw gave her some hope. They had rebuilt the building where the newspaper had been, from which they had dragged her father. The last time she'd seen it, it had been a burnt-out shell, but no one seeing it now would ever suspect that.
Then her brother's clinic, Alberto's old clinic. It was still there, in the same place, looking well cared for with the bright flowers planted all around. She didn't remember those, if they had been there when she'd gone. There were a few cars in the lot out in front, people going in to see a doctor they knew. One they could trust.
She felt a sharp stab of regret, but she didn't want to let herself start thinking this way again. She had struggled for months to see that the bitterness was for the most part behind her now, purged in the tears and finally in the taking of that pig's life who had cost her son his. Now, although the loss of Ramiro would never cease to ache in her chest, she could imagine someday coming to a kind of peace with it all.
It all might have been to teach her something she might not have seen on her own. There was only this life and she had squandered a decade of it trying to fit into that foreign place, ignoring her own happiness and trying to make something that would be better for her boy. But what had come of that? Demeaning work, a life she did not enjoy for one day and never would, a boy who never knew the joy of a family, of the love of his father. A pain with no sides.
She was thirty-two years old and a graduate of the university. There was, she knew, work to do here in El Salvador -not only family work, starting over with Jose
´ perhaps-but work with the people, to make this land theirs. This was where she would make her stand.
Her mother's house had grown young. The banana trees now grew nearly wild over the porch, hiding it in blessed shade. The paint was fresh, the screens fixed tightly to the doors and windows.
She had not called here since she'd left. They would be worried sick. She had just been driving, surviving to get here, through California, Mexico, Guatemala. The borders and guardia and men. But she had made it to here now and she stopped the car. After all the breakdowns in San Francisco whenever she really needed it, the car had finally been fuerte when it mattered. She pulled to the side of the road. Getting out, stretching, she was aware that she stunk.
She did not care. It didn't matter. She wasn't in the U.S. anymore.
There was a motor going somewhere in the back and she walked around the house to the sound of it. Jose´-strong, silent, ugly Jose´-had his shirt off working over the generator they still used most of the time for their electricity. After all these years, she still knew his body.
Standing ten feet from him now in the saw grass, she waited in a kind of hysterical suspense. How badly did the scars show on her? Had she changed beyond his recognition, and if he did know who she was, would he still love her? Would she love him?
Suddenly the noise stopped. He straightened up, wiped his forehead with a bandanna, then saw her.
For a long moment, nothing in the world moved. Then his face broke into the smile of his youth. He held out his arms, took a step toward her, and she ran to his embrace.