Glitsky said, “Yeah. I told Debra maybe she moved a little too soon on that. Glass.”
“You know him?” Hardy asked.
“Never had the pleasure.”
“It wasn’t.”
“If it’s any help, I kind of tried to call her and Darrel off.”
“That would have been good if the horse wasn’t already out of the barn.”
“I told her this being an agent of the grand jury wasn’t really recommended SOP. For what that was worth. Which, from her reaction, I gather wasn’t much.” At the table at Kokkari, Glitsky turned a hand over. “Another failure, I’m afraid. I’m going for a record.”
Hardy killed a minute lifting a perfect backbone out of the whole sea bass he’d ordered for lunch. Hardy had cabbed back from Glass’s office and picked up Glitsky in front of the Hall of Justice, thinking maybe some great Greek food would cheer them both up. But so far, halfway through the meal, it wasn’t working too well.
They’d covered Zachary’s situation on the drive over. The doctors were recommending a few more days in the hospital before proceeding to the next operation to replace the dura mater early the next week. The boy had apparently recognized everybody in the family on the visit last night, going so far as to reach out and poke his sister, who’d come along to the hospital for the first time, in the arm, after which he’d broken into a short-lived smile. He still hadn’t spoken yet, which everyone agreed might be a little worrisome—Glitsky loved the word, worrisome!—but his other motor skills had clearly improved. The diagnosis had moved from critical to guarded, and the general tone of the medical team was one of optimism.
Although very little of that optimism had rubbed off on Abe.
The usually glib Hardy kept his peace as he squeezed lemon on his fish. Self-loathing was about the last reaction he’d ever expected to run into from his hard-assed longtime best friend. Glitsky hadn’t before harbored too many doubts about who he was or what he was all about.
Or if he did, he didn’t show it.
Now Zachary’s accident seemed to have unleashed a pride of demons set upon undermining his confidence and self-respect.
Hardy chewed, then put his fork down. “You know,” he began, “I was the one who changed Michael’s diaper before I put him in bed that last night. I had all the time in the world to lift the side of the crib. I mean, there I was, leaning over the damn thing, tucking him in. It was halfway up and all I had to do was stand and pull it up the rest of the way. Easiest thing in the world. Piece of cake. Unfortunately, the thought never crossed my mind.”
Glitsky put his iced tea down halfway to his mouth. “Unfortunately . Think that’s strong enough?”
Hardy’s heart thumped in his chest with an unexpected jolt of rage that it took several seconds to control. Finally, he let out a breath. “It’s how I’ve come to see it, Abe. It’s what I’ve had to get to so I could live with it. You think I’ve been lying to myself all these years?”
“You said it yourself—the thought never crossed your mind.”
Hardy took a sip of his club soda, picking his way with care. “So you’re standing there being a good dad, taking Zack out on his new bike. You get him settled on the seat and think, ‘Oh, yeah, the helmet . . .’ ”
Glitsky cut him off, his volume up a notch. “I know what I did.”
“I don’t know if you do.”
“Don’t push me, Diz. I mean it.”
Hardy drew a breath. “I’m not pushing you. I’m saying you didn’t do anything that caused it. The thought never crossed your mind.”
“It should have.”
“Why? Anything remotely like that ever happen before? You’ve got to think of every single contingency that can happen? If that were true, you’d never let your kids out of your sight. Ever. Hell, you might not let ’em get out of bed because something might happen.”
“Something did happen.”
“You didn’t make it happen.”
“I could have prevented it. If I’d have thought—”
Hardy put a flat palm on the table between them. “If you’d have thought,” he said. “But there was no reason you should have. Nothing like that had ever happened before. Next time, okay, you’ll think to put the helmet on first. But not thinking of it then wasn’t negligence, Abe. It was a freak accident. You could do everything exactly the same a thousand times and nothing bad would ever happen again. It wasn’t your fault.”
Glitsky sat hunched forward over his plate. Their table was by a window and he glared out at the blustering day. Finally, he came back to Hardy, seemed to force the words out one at a time. “How can it not be my fault when he was my responsibility? If it happens on my watch, I’m at fault.”
“This isn’t police bureaucracy, Abe. This is your life.”
“Being a cop is my life.”
“Don’t give me that shit. Being a cop is what you do. The rest of you is your life. The problem you’ve got here is this really happened to you, to your boy. So you’re both victims of it. And since the one thing you won’t do, ever, is be a victim, that leaves you holding the bag and taking responsibility for it. ’Cause that’s who you are. That’s what you do. It’s automatic.”
Glitsky spit it out. “It’s not wrong either.”
“I’m not saying it is. Not all the time, not usually. But this once, this one time, it’s beating you down when you’re going to need to be strong, when Treya and Rachel and even poor fucking attorneys like me need you to get over it so your troops don’t go riding roughshod over their cases. You didn’t do this. You didn’t cause it. It happened, that’s all. You’re a victim of that, okay, fine. Legitimately. But that doesn’t make you any kind of unworthy human, not if you don’t let it.”
Glitsky’s scar burned white through his lips. His heavy brows hung like a precipice over hooded eyes, which remained fixed on the plate before him and refused to meet Hardy’s, who thought it wasn’t impossible that his friend would suddenly either physically explode at him across the table or throw something and storm out. Instead, though, the eyes came up. “You done?”
“Pretty much.”
Glitsky nodded. “I’ll give it some thought.”
It was a bit of an extra drive—several other churches, and even St. Mary’s Cathedral, were closer to her house—but Maya Townshend felt a special energy connecting her with St. Ignatius, the church at the edge of the USF campus, and it was where she had driven now. She needed all the divine intervention she could get, and here is where she most often came to pray for forgiveness. Those prayers she had prayed here had, for the most part, been answered.
Answered in the form of Joel and her life with him. Their healthy family. Their wonderful home and financial security. If God had not forgiven her, surely he would not have showered such beneficence upon her.
Or so she had come to believe.
But now she was suddenly not so sure. She knew that killing was a mortal sin and wondered if God’s apparent acceptance of her penance and prayers was really just the first stage in a punishment that would strip from her all that she loved and cherished. If, because of all this, if she lost Joel now, or the children, or even their home and fortune, it would be far more devastating than if she’d never known such love and contentment. God demanded justice as well as he dispensed mercy. The Church taught that there was no sin that God would not forgive, and that the failure to believe that was the worst sin of all—despair. God’s mercy was infinite. But the key to any claim to that mercy was confession. And she could not confess.
She could never confess.
And that truth, she believed, stood to damn her for eternity.
A regular here, she went to her usual back pew and knelt, making the sign of the cross, then bringing her hands together and bowing her head.
But no prayers would come. Her mind kept returning to the lies she had told Joel just last night; the lies she’d been living now for so long; the truths that were even worse.
The padded w
ooden rail on which she knelt had a gap in the middle of the pew, and after only a minute of attempting to pray she moved down and again went to her knees, but directly onto that gap now, putting all of her weight onto it, offering up the pain even as it shot up her leg and became nearly unbearable.
“Please, God. Please, please forgive me. I am so, so sorry.”
She raised her head and through tearful eyes tried to focus on the crucifix above the altar far away up front, on the suffering of Christ.
But Christ had never done what she’d done. Christ knew that God’s mercy would save him.
After the events of the past few days she no longer harbored that hope for herself.
14
Not two hundred yards away from where Maya suffered and tried to pray, Wyatt Hunt turned another page in the yearbook, thinking that private investigators in the future would have an easy time of it. All they’d have to do with kids who were going to school now would be call up their MySpace or Facebook accounts, and they’d have a blow-by-blow account of everything their subjects had done from about sixth grade on.
Maya Townshend, though, at thirty-two, was just a bit too old for that approach. So Hunt was reduced to searching for clues in the hard copy of her college years. Of course, first he’d Googled her and her husband, and though there had been three thousand or so hits, the majority of them by far concerned Joel’s business and their philanthropy. For such a politically connected couple there was very little about either local or national politics, nor were they particularly active in San Francisco’s high society. Hits for Bay Beans West appeared a whopping four times—all of the stories variants on the Little Local Coffee Shop That Could standing up to the Starbucks giant and making it work.
Not a whiff of marijuana or, indeed, troubles of any kind.
On a whim Hunt had done a search for Dylan Vogler, and the coffee shop manager had come up completely empty except for references to his death recently—one of the country’s very few invisible men, Hunt thought.
Maybe Craig Chiurco, he thought, checking the criminal data-banks, would have more luck.
His next stop was the library at USF, where he started on the 1994 yearbook and found the standard posed picture of Maya Fisk looking about fifteen—fresh-faced, perfect hair, big smile. She was one of her class’s representatives in student government her freshman year, on the debate and IM soccer teams, active in music and theater, appearing in two student productions. She was also a cheerleader. Sophomore year was basically freshman year redux.
The change must have occurred late in her sophomore year or in the succeeding summer, because her picture as a junior was so different from the others as to be nearly unrecognizable. Though the hair color had turned light and the style more untamed, the main change from Hunt’s perspective was the facial expression. In place of the adolescent with the sunny smile of the previous two years, now a young woman stared defiantly at the camera with a bored smirk. Seeking another view of this chameleon, Hunt turned to the club and team pages, but here again something drastic had changed—Maya had stopped taking part in extracurricular activities.
In her senior year her photo placed her more closely with the girl from her first two years—she wore a passive toothless smile and she’d combed her still-light hair—but it was a more formal portrait than the others had been. And again, she’d joined nothing.
Pretty much striking out with the yearbooks, Hunt turned to the microfiches of the student newspaper, the Foghorn, for the first couple of years, when Maya was still active, and might have appeared in some captioned photographs with other students. In this he was luckier right away. Here was Maya, in her freshman year, mugging for the camera with three other cheerleader friends at a pep rally. Hunt took down all the names. And three others that he found captioned throughout the rest of her freshman year. Obviously, at the beginning, Maya had been a popular and involved student.
She’d costarred in Othello her sophomore year, and there was a picture of her with her leading man, a handsome African-American kid named Levon Preslee. In an accompanying story entitled “It’s in the Genes,” Hunt read about Maya’s introduction to acting and to the theater through her aunt, the truly famous actress Tess Granat, who’d by that time been the star of sixteen movies and had appeared in four leads on Broadway.
Hunt sat back, intrigued by the connection about which he’d previously been unaware. He’d seen some of Granat’s films before, he was sure, but he couldn’t remember any titles. Or whatever happened to her. Probably the same thing that had happened to so many former talented beauties who lost enough of their looks to become undesirable and uncastable in Hollywood.
Or had she died? Some tragedy?
The name tickled a vague memory of that, but he just couldn’t remember for sure. In any event there was no mention in the article that Granat had played any kind of a day-to-day role in Maya’s life back then, but she was another someone who may have known what the young woman was like or what she had done in those days, and he wrote her name in his notepad.
Sure, he thought, if she was even alive, he’d just call up the once-famous movie star in Hollywood or wherever she was and chat about old times. That was going to happen. Not.
But the afternoon, after all, had not been a total loss. When he was finished, he had nine names of people Maya’s age who had known her in college.
It was someplace to start.
Back in his office downtown Hunt realized that having nine names to work with was all well and good, but seven of them were women, and this made it likely that some of them, like Maya, had changed their last names since college. Meanwhile, he had Levon Preslee and one other male, Jimi d’Amico, and Levon was listed in the San Francisco phone book.
Hunt called the number, got the young man’s answering machine, left a message, and decided that it was time he got Tamara working with him on this tedious business. There were several d’Amicos in San Francisco, and Hunt and Tamara called all of them, hoping to find a Jimi, but since it was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, between them they managed to talk to only one human being, who didn’t know a Jimi.
They left more messages.
As he thought it would be, finding even one of the women turned out to be a chore. He and Tamara were hoping that one of the last names would reveal at least a set of parents who might be inclined to pass Hunt’s name along to one of their daughters, but this was going to involve quite a few phone calls and, again, messages, messages, messages.
By four-fifteen they’d been at the whole business for better than three hours when Hunt punched up the twenty-third telephone number under Peterson and a woman’s voice answered.
“Hello,” he said, “I’m trying to reach a Nikki Peterson.”
“This is Nikki.”
Hunt punched a fist into the air, threw a paper clip at Tamara to get her attention and let her know he’d finally gotten a hit, then went into his spiel, identifying himself and stating his business. When he’d finished, she said, “Sure. I knew Maya. We were cheerleaders together. I don’t know where she is now, though. I haven’t seen her since college. Is she in trouble?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Well, you’re a private investigator asking about her. I wasn’t great at math, but I can put two and two together. So she is?”
“What?”
“In trouble.”
“Not yet,” Hunt said, “but she might be getting there pretty quick.”
He told her he was free if she was, and within an hour she was sitting across from his desk. No longer a cheerleader, but from looks alone she would still have a good shot to make the team.
“So,” Hunt asked her, “I’m talking to people who knew her back then. Did you know a guy named Vogler? Dylan Vogler?”
She hesitated. “I don’t think so. Was he a jock? Mostly I hung out with the jocks.”
“Did Maya? Hang out with the jocks, I mean?”
“Not really. She started out with us, then
dropped off the team.”
“Why?”
“No idea, really. Maybe it was too much practice. I don’t know. Maybe she just lost interest. That happens.”
“You don’t remember any rumors or gossip about her sometime around the time she quit? Pregnancy, abortion, anything like that? Drugs? Arrests?”
“Not really, no. But we weren’t really that close, you know. I mean, I knew her when she was on the team. But after she left, like I said, I haven’t heard from her since.”
“Were there any other cheerleaders who might have known her better? I’ve got a picture of her with you and two other girls in the Foghorn, Amy Binder and Cheryl Zolotny.”
“Amy, no, I’m sure. Cheryl? Maybe a little. But she’s not Zolotny anymore now. Just a second, let me think.”
“Take all the time you need.”
In the reception room, at Tamara’s desk, the telephone rang. Tamara put her own call on hold and answered, then said, “Just a minute, please. Can you hold a sec?”
And then Nikki answered Hunt’s earlier question. “Cheryl Biehl. That’s it. Biehl. B-I-E-H-L. I think she’s still in the city. She was at the reunion last year. You can try her.”
“Okay. Well, thanks, Nikki. You’ve been a help.”
She’d no sooner left the office when Hunt gave Tamara the high sign and immediately was on the telephone again. “Hello.”
“Mr. Hunt?”
“That’s me.”
“My name is Jimi d’Amico. You left a message for me?”
And it started all over again.
“Nothing?” Gina Roake asked.
“Nothing.”
It was six forty-five and Gina, Dismas Hardy and Wes Farrell’s law partner and Hunt’s somewhat clandestine girlfriend, had her shapely legs curled under her on the couch in her well-appointed one-bedroom condominium on Pleasant Street just down from the peak of Nob Hill. Hunt sat across from her, in one of her matched brace of reading chairs. They’d pulled closed the drapes in the picture window behind him and she’d turned on some of the room’s lights and the gas fire-logs as the now-fierce wind rattled the panes. Gina, barefoot but otherwise still dressed for work in a tan skirt and a beige turtleneck, sipped her Oban scotch and sighed. “That sounds like a long day, Wyatt.”
Hardy 13 - Plague of Secrets, A Page 13
