After his usual Sunday and Monday off, Moses had been at the bar last night, getting himself blasted nearly to death in the process, and the state of the place reflected his condition. When Hardy came in at four-thirty today, he’d locked the door before getting to work. The sinks were messes of skimming soap and cold water, dirty glasses sat on many of the tables, the back bar was in total disarray, the condiment trays—lemon peel, lime, cherries, cocktail onions, celery—obviously neglected. Moses had left the refrigerator open behind the bar, and needless to say, no one had noticed while negotiating him into the ambulance. The cream for the Irish coffees had gone sour. Hardy would have to send Tony out for supplies first thing.
Even more disturbingly, up near the beer and stout spigots, somebody had damaged the 108-year-old bar. It looked and felt to Hardy, as he rubbed his hand over the ancient wood, as though this had been an act of conscious vandalism—someone had smashed something heavy and solid into it, and it was now uneven, chipped, splintered at the edge. When could this have happened that Moses or one of the other bartenders wouldn’t have seen it? How could Hardy not have heard a word about it? He couldn’t imagine.
Maybe Tony would know.
Reaching under the bar for a towel, he automatically felt that something was different, although what it was didn’t register until he’d taken out a clean dry towel and tucked it into his belt. Suddenly he stopped dead still, a sense memory—or rather, the lack of it—tickling at the corners of his consciousness.
He leaned over and looked into the dark space above the stack of towels, where, for the whole time Hardy had worked here—well over thirty years—the shillelagh had hung from its leather thong down over the towels, within easy grabbing distance for when things got out of hand.
The shillelagh was gone.
“I’M PRETTY SURE it was here Saturday night,” Tony said. “That’s the last I worked. I think I would have noticed if it was gone.”
They had a dozen or more customers now, and Hardy had moved around to the front of the bar. He was sitting on a stool directly in front of the damaged area. It was still light outside, although a quick glance at the bending cypresses across the street in the park announced the return of normalcy in terms of weather.
It wouldn’t do to betray the degree of his concern regarding the latest intelligence from Tony—if the shillelagh had been here Saturday night, then its removal for another use on Sunday became so plausible as to be probable—so Hardy kept his tone even as he leaned back on the stool and indicated the cratered wood. “So what happened here?” he asked. “You know?”
Tony was drying glasses, standing behind the beer taps. “Moses said one of the customers went a little apeshit and started smashing his glass on the bar.”
“More than once, it looks like.”
“At least.”
“Except,” Hardy went on, “wouldn’t the glass have broken?”
Tony nodded at the logic. “You’d think. Maybe it was one of the Guinness pint glasses. They’re pretty solid.”
Hardy ran his hand over the pitted surface. “More solid than this wood?”
The question brought Tony up short. “Maybe not. There was some glass on the floor the next day, but I didn’t notice how thick it was, whether it was one of the pints. It could have broken after a few hits. It’s a damn shame, in any event. The bar was just about perfect. Before, I mean.”
“I’m surprised Moses didn’t kill the guy. Take out the shillelagh, break it over his head. I know he would have wanted to.”
“Maybe he did. Maybe that’s where the shillelagh’s gone.”
“But you said it was here Saturday.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I thought it was, but only because I figured I would have missed it.”
Hardy took a moment, sipped at his club soda. “Moses mention who it was? So we can keep an eye out for the guy. Eighty-six him before he gets in again.”
“No. Not to me. How is he, by the way?”
“Mose? Hungover, I’d imagine. The idiot.”
Tony turned his head both ways, then leaned in toward Hardy, lowered his voice conspiratorially. “You know what happened, don’t you?”
“I know about last night. Susan called us at home, and Frannie and I came down here in time for the ambulance. Good time had by all.”
“Not just last night.” Tony leaned in again and said, “I mean with Brittany.”
Hardy drew in a breath. So Tony knew, too, which was disconcerting news. He turned the glass around in a full circle, then looked up. “We’re not going to mention anything about Brittany,” he said. “I may or may not know what you’re talking about, but whatever it is, it would be better if it never, ever came up again. In any context. Under any circumstances. How about that?”
Tony, stunned by the intensity, retreated a half step. “I was just—”
Hardy held up a hand. “Doesn’t matter. Let it go. Right now. I mean it.”
“HE’S STILL PRETTY much in agony,” Susan said.
“Good,” Hardy said. “I want him to hurt. I want him in severe pain.”
“That’s if you can even wake him up.”
“I bet I can.”
They were in the McGuire living room, a much less ordered space, albeit marginally larger, than the Hardys’ counterpart. Two large, soft, bulky upholstered couches squatted on the hardwood on either side of a brown twelve-by-fourteen-foot industrial-carpet remnant. Since the apartment didn’t have a separate family room, this area functioned as one, with a large television mounted on one wall and an old upright piano against the facing one. Susan had filled one sagging bookcase with about twenty years of National Geographic, another one of old oak with paperbacks, a third with CDs, DVDs, and videocassettes from an earlier era. An IKEA computer desk with an older Apple occupied one corner. Every flat surface in the room—the top of the piano, the coffee table, various nooks in the shelves—and nearly every square inch of wall space held a frame with a family picture.
When the Hardys came here for dinner or a party, they most often congregated in the kitchen or on the roof, both of which felt down-home and comfortable, but today Dismas found the living room particularly claustrophobic, even run-down. Of course, Susan had just spent the previous night in the hospital with her husband, and tidying up probably had not made the first cut on her to-do list. Still, he found the clutter and lack of decorative style emblematic of the family’s problems, and more than a little depressing.
“I just came from talking to Tony at the bar,” he said, “in case it seems that I’m a little teensy bit wound up about things. He knows about Brittany.”
“Well, of course he does. He was closing up when she came by, right after it happened. He brought her back here to us and then took her home on Monday.”
“So? They’re an item? I mean officially.”
“I don’t know about that, Diz. After what she’s been through, I don’t think she’s much in the market. And probably won’t be for a while. You said you were just with Tony. Did you ask him?”
Hardy shook his head. “I didn’t want to appear to be prying.”
“Why would you care?”
“No reason, really, except that I think the Beck had a little bit of a crush on him. Not that she won’t survive.”
“I don’t know if Brittany knows that.”
“Maybe not,” Hardy said. “Anyway, I’d hate to see the two of them have a falling-out about some guy.”
“I know they won’t. If Brittany knew anything about how the Beck feels, I’m sure she’d back off. In fact, I’ll tell her the next time we talk.” She sighed. “It is so hard to be a single straight woman in this town. It’s no wonder—you find one eligible guy, the pickin’s are all his. But I really don’t like it if he’s playing one against the other.”
“Yeah, well, I’m the one who brought him around. How do you think I feel? Answer: a little like I’ve been played.”
“I don’t know about that. He seems like a truly nice per
son to me.”
“Every con man does.”
“Do you think he’s that?”
“I don’t know. I’m not comfortable with him knowing about Brittany and what happened to her. Again, strategically.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I keep thinking that way, that’s why. And that’s why I’ve got to talk to Moses right now, pain or no pain.” Hardy paused. “We’re going to get him through this, Susan. We’ve just got to stay disciplined.”
Susan shifted her weight, folded her arms, took a beat. “But, Diz. We just don’t kill people. No matter what they’ve done. I mean, okay, if it’s true self-defense, sure, you can defend yourself. Otherwise . . .” She took a breath. “This is why we have the law, isn’t it? Or the next thing we know, this young man’s brother or father or sister decides it was Moses, and they come after him. Or all of us.”
“Right. I know. That’s the theory. I even mostly believe it. The law’s a good thing. But if that’s not our question anymore, then we need to be prepared for . . . contingencies.”
“I hate this.”
Hardy nodded. “It’s not my favorite, either.”
“And you know, ever since I mentioned it to you, it keeps coming back to me. I don’t know if I can stay with him.”
“I think you can. I hope you can.”
She shook her head. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Well,” Hardy said, “that’s between you and him, but it would break my heart. And Frannie’s.”
“And mine,” Susan said, her eyes going glassy. “But I’ve got to be honest. It might happen.”
HARDY STOOD AT the foot of the bed and took a swat at Moses’s foot. “Hey.”
No response.
He did it again. Harder, letting his own anger simmer, putting a little more English on the swing. “Mose. Wake up.”
Movement under the covers, followed by a low moan, cut off midway. Moses opened his eyes, sighed, closed them again. His face had a pronounced pallor under a second-day stubble. Red-rimmed eyes lay sunk in their sockets. Cracked, dry lips removed any sign of life from his mouth. He managed a syllable. “What?”
“That’s what I want to know,” Hardy said. “What in Christ’s name were you thinking?”
Moses closed his eyes again. “I guess I stopped there for a while. Thinking.”
“I guess you did.”
“Susan said you and Frannie came down and helped.”
“What else were we going to do?”
“Still.”
Hardy could go on berating his brother-in-law for an hour. The experience might even be cathartic, but somehow he couldn’t find the heart for it. So he tamped down his instinct and said, “I’m going to assume that this is the first day of your new commitment to sobriety. You think you’ll be able to handle that?”
“I hope so.”
“It’s not a question of hoping, Mose. You’re either going to do it or you’re not. You get to decide.”
Moses met Hardy’s eyes. “I don’t know exactly what happened.”
“I don’t, either,” Hardy said, “and I don’t care.” Coming up around the side of the bed, without any forethought, he cuffed McGuire in the back of the head. “You realize that you could lose Susan over this. You could lose everything.”
Moses put his hands to his head as he moaned through another pained breath. “You here to bust my chops? Go for it.”
“Partway, at least, yeah. I’m pretty disgusted, if you really want to know. But that’s not the main reason I’m here.”
“You want me to guess?”
“No. I don’t want you to guess. What I need you to do is retain me, and I mean now.”
“What am I retaining you for?”
“My expert representation. I’m going to be your lawyer.”
That brought a weak pulse of humor. “No way could I afford you. You’ve told me that a hundred times. Besides, I don’t need a lawyer.”
“Yeah, you do.”
Taking on a wounded look, Moses asked, “Why is that?”
Hardy fixed him with a hard glare. “Let’s not play this game. And don’t worry about what I charge. We’ll work something out. Maybe I’ll wind up owning the bar, who knows? I’m now your lawyer. Anything we say to each other is a privileged communication. I’ll have Phyllis draw up some formal papers in the next day or so, but in the meanwhile, we’ve got an agreement, correct? You hear me?”
Moses closed his eyes in resignation for another few seconds, then opened them and lifted his right hand off the mattress.
Hardy took it, gave it a formal shake. “If the police happen to drop by and want to talk to you about anything at all, your answer is that you’d love to cooperate, but you can’t talk to them outside of the presence of your lawyer. Do not say anything else. That’s ‘not anything,’ as in ‘nothing.’ I gather you’ve already told them that you were fishing on Sunday night, is that right?”
“I was fishing.”
“Okay. Even that, don’t repeat it. Don’t go into any detail. Leave it as it lies. They need to prove you weren’t. We don’t have to prove you were. Remember that.”
“I won’t say anything. Except to you. I can talk to you, can’t I?”
“Yeah. But you might want to remember that there’s a lot I don’t need to know.”
A silence settled, until Moses said, “Except, you know, I didn’t—”
Hardy put a hand out, stopping him. “Not now, Mose. Maybe not ever. The important thing is, I’m your lawyer, and let’s hope you’re not going to need me.”
Moses hesitated. “You know, really, I don’t think I am.”
“That’s good to hear, but I’m not so optimistic.”
“You’re not? You ought to be. Glitsky pretends not, but I believe he actually likes me, as far as he likes anybody.”
“That’s really special, Mose, but he’s the head of Homicide. It’s not like he gets to choose. His inspectors will go where the facts lead them. Do you honestly think he’d back off if the evidence seems to point in your direction?”
“What evidence? For what crime? I haven’t heard about any evidence.”
“No?” Hardy saw a good moment for a curveball. “Where’s the shillelagh?”
McGuire’s eyes sharpened right up. “What shillelagh? The Shamrock’s?”
“You know any others?”
“It’s not under the bar? If it’s not under the bar, I don’t know where it is. Are you kidding me? It’s gone?”
“You didn’t notice it was missing yesterday?”
“I can’t say I was paying close attention.”
Hardy searched McGuire’s face for signs of duplicity and saw none.
“Diz, listen. They’re not going to come for me. I tuned the kid up a few months ago, sure, but that doesn’t put me anywhere near him on Sunday night.”
“Well, let’s hope nothing else does.”
“How could it,” McGuire asked, “if I wasn’t there?”
20
GLITSKY SAT ON the development he’d broken with Wes Farrell—that the rape victim was undoubtedly Brittany McGuire—until he got to work the next morning. When he walked into the Homicide Detail’s main room at seven forty-five, Brady and Sher were already there, hunched over something on Lee’s desk, eating doughnuts, drinking coffee.
For reasons that might have had to do with the quality physical time he’d gotten with Treya after they put the kids to bed last night, Glitsky was in rare joviality, and he gave it a short run. “I don’t want to tell you what an embarrassing cliché you guys are at this moment,” he said. “Coffee and doughnuts? What are you thinking? This is San Francisco. It ought to be quiche and tea, don’t you think? Maybe a croissant.”
“No,” Sher replied. “Doughnuts are okay now. They’re selling them at the Ferry Building.” This was the city’s gourmet mecca. “Which means they’re automatically hip.”
“Maybe for normal people,” Glitsky said. “But cops? Doughnuts? R
eally?”
“They’re awesome,” Brady said. “You can have one if you move fast.”
“Can’t,” Glitsky said, putting his hand to his heart. “Ticker.”
“One won’t kill you,” Sher said.
“My doctor says it might.” Then, striking like a snake, he grabbed a fat glazed one and took a bite. Chewing happily, he added, “On the other hand, the signature you want on your death certificate is your cardiologist’s.” He pointed to the surface of Sher’s desk. “What’s that you’re studying so intently?”
“That’s Sammy,” Brady said. “Gus Huang’s take on the guy with the club.”
Sher cast a glance at the artist’s rendering, then came back up to Glitsky. “Except we’re thinking of changing his name to Moses.” She lifted the sketch and revealed under it the six-pack of photographs they’d put together. “McGuire. He’s top middle. The resemblance is pretty damn close, wouldn’t you say?”
“Gus is good at his job.” Glitsky had another bite, chewed thoughtfully. “What’d your eyewitnesses say?”
Brady clucked in frustration. “We couldn’t reach any of them yesterday, but one of them got back to us this morning. It’s our first stop. By then, hopefully, we’ll connect with one or both of the others.”
“For the record,” Sher said, “we’re betting the farm it’s McGuire.”
“Funny you should mention,” Glitsky said, and launched into a quick rundown of the talk he’d had with Farrell. “So after you two left Brittany yesterday,” he concluded, “she called Mr. Farrell’s girlfriend, which pretty much identifies her as the rape victim, doesn’t it?”
“Which also gives her dad his motive,” Brady said.
Glitsky nodded. “No flies on you.”
“Plus,” Brady added, and put a finger on the six-pack, “this.”
Any discussion about McGuire put Glitsky in a tenuous position. It was already far past the time when he should have admitted to his inspectors that he and Moses knew each other. As the once delicious doughnut curdled into a noxious ball in his stomach, he realized that every second he continued to withhold the information would make the omission that much more difficult to explain.
The Ophelia Cut Page 19
