The Motive

by John Lescroart

  “You want to give me three guesses?”

  The scathing tone made Lanier talk. “Maybe it wasn’t the D’Amiens woman in the house. Some witnesses may have seen her leaving a little before the fire. Cuneo’s thinking that if that’s true, maybe she was the shooter.”

  “So who was the woman in the house?”

  “No clue.”

  “And where’s D’Amiens?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “I know where she is. She’s in my locker not fifty feet from where we’re resting our tired old bones, Abe,” Strout said. “That’s where she is for a damn pure medical certainty. And as for her doin’ the shooting, well, that would have been highly unusual, if not impossible. Her bein’ dead an’ all at the time.” The medical examiner had his feet up on his desk. Behind him through the window, the barely visible morning freeway traffic was stopped in both directions. The fog gave every indication that it was going to be around for lunch. Strout was opening and closing a switchblade as they talked. “Who’s the perpetrator of this outrageous folderol? That it wasn’t D’Amiens.”

  “Before I tell you that, John, tell me why it’s folderol.”

  “Because I called your Dr. Toshio Yamashiru—who by the way turns out to be one of the premier forensic odontologists in the state, was called in to help identify the 9/11 victims in New York—anyway, I called him within about two minutes of getting his name from you yesterday, and he was good enough to come down here last night with her dental records and compare them to her.”

  “D’Amiens?”

  “Well, they weren’t Marilyn Monroe’s.” He closed the switchblade. “Same person.”

  “Well, wait . . .”

  “Okay.” The knife flicked open and closed four times. Behind Strout on the freeway, a car inched forward from one pane of his window to the next. “What are you thinking?”

  “Have you talked to Dan Cuneo? About this case?”

  “Sure. He was at the scene.”

  Glitsky shook his head. “No. Since then.”

  “Well,” Strout drawled the word, pronouncing it as two syllables—way-all—“ ‘then’ would have been only yesterday morning, Abe. But the answer’s no, I haven’t seen him since then. Why?”

  A pause. “Nothing. Just curious.”

  Strout let a chuckle percolate for a few seconds. “Idle curiosity, huh? Something you’re so well known for.” But he held up a hand, still enjoying the moment. “But seriously, you don’t have to tell me why it matters if I’ve seen him. Maybe it’s none of my business.”

  “It’s not that. I haven’t talked to him, either, but Marcel tells me he’s got witnesses who saw her leave the place and go to her car just before the fire. D’Amiens.”

  “Maybe she came back. Obviously she did.”

  “Good point.”

  “Shot him, then went to her car and got the gasoline, which tends to be obvious if it’s sitting out in the foyer.”

  But Glitsky was shaking his head. “No. That’s if she killed herself, which I think we agree she couldn’t have.”

  Strout chewed on that for a moment. “So somebody who looks like her?”

  “Maybe.” He came forward in the folding chair. As usual, Glitsky was in full uniform, and leaning over, held his hat in his hands between his legs. “How certain was Yamashiru?”

  “That it was D’Amiens? A hundred percent. We went over everything for almost an hour. Anyway, he was certain enough—and so am I—that I’m putting her name to the autopsy.”

  Glitsky had known Strout for thirty years, and knew that this was a point of professional pride and honor. Strout didn’t call it as a matter of law unless he was completely convinced. He knew he might have to testify under oath on the witness stand, and so far as anyone in the city knew, he had never made a mistake on an autopsy—either an identification or a cause of death. He would not hesitate to decline to state when he wasn’t sure. But he’d never been flat wrong. And Glitsky didn’t think he was now.

  Which meant that, with a slight detour, he was back where he’d been before he’d talked to Marcel Lanier this morning, or even when he’d had his discussion with the mayor yesterday afternoon. Somebody had shot Hanover and D’Amiens and then set their bodies on fire.

  This, then, was a straightforward murder investigation. Cuneo was the inspecting officer, and—orders from the mayor or not—Glitsky would defer to him as long as it was practicable. Hardy’s advice echoed—this might be a good opportunity to mend fences with the man, get to some kind of mutual understanding, perhaps the beginnings of respect.

  Finally making it nearly to his own office, Glitsky stood frowning at the door, which sported a cutout of this morning’s Chronicle photo. It shouldn’t have amazed him, though it always did, how the news agencies—print, audio or film—all so consistently managed to convey misleading information, even in a picture. Of course, he’d seen the stupid picture first thing in the morning. It was impossible to miss. He found it odd that he had no memory of the actual moment at all, even though he appeared to be standing at formal attention and the salute was so crisp he might have been posing.

  Aware that someone had come into the conference room that separated the reception area and his office, he turned around. Melissa wasn’t really his private secretary—technically she was merely the gatekeeper for him and the other deputy chief within the suite, Jake Longoria—but as the highest ranking of the six clerks in the reception bay, she took a proprietary, even maternal, interest in the men whose access she protected. Now she was smiling broadly at him, clearly pleased with the reflected glory that the picture brought to her, as well as with Glitsky’s obvious and growing prominence among the city’s leaders. (It wouldn’t be unknown for a deputy chief to take his gatekeeper with him should the promotion to chief ever come along, either.)

  “You like it? That’s a great picture, isn’t it?”

  Behind her, Glitsky saw a couple of the other clerks in the doorway, wanting to share in what would be his no-doubt positive reaction. Feeling that it would be churlish at best and negative for staff morale to follow his impulse and rip the offending thing down, he arranged his face into a bland expression and nodded. “It’s nice,” he said. Feeling a little more might be called for, he offered a small, stiff bow from the waist. “My thanks to you all.”

  Inside the blessed sanctity of his office, a low-level rage humming in his ears, he hung his hat on the rack by the door, then went to his desk and pushed the constantly blinking button that indicated he had messages in his voice mail. Thirteen of them.

  Amidst the usual bureaucratic white noise, no fewer than six of the calls concerned the picture. Jeff Elliot wanted to know about the story he’d clearly missed while they’d been talking yesterday, and could they do an interview sometime soon, maybe today, for a “CityTalk” column. His friend and mentor Frank Batiste left a message tinged with the faint but unmistakable reek of jealousy. Batiste did not say it overtly, but unstated was that if there was going to be a picture typifying the mutual cooperation between the mayor’s office and the PD, maybe the chief ought to have been the one on the front page, saluting. Treya, who’d slept in later than Glitsky’s own six forty-five departure and saw the photo after he’d already left for work, agreed with Melissa that it was flattering and kind of cool. Dismas Hardy, on the other hand, congratulating him with heavy sarcasm on the photo op, wondered if he’d noticed that the name badge on his shirt had a typo that read “Gliktsy.” (Looking down immediately, cricking his neck in the process, he checked—it didn’t.) And, oh yeah, Hardy added, if Glitsky needed a campaign manager for whatever office he was running for, and though somewhat upset that his best friend hadn’t included him in his original plans, Hardy was his man.

  Still no callback from Cuneo, he noticed. Glitsky resolved to call him at home, wake him up if need be, after he’d gone through his voice mail. The last message, though, much to his surprise, was from Catherine Hanover, who had seen the picture and recognized his n
ame from their conversation yesterday. Having thought about it most of the morning, she finally had worked up the nerve to call and wondered if he might get back to her. Sooner rather than later. She’d had a visit last night from Inspector Cuneo and had something a little delicate, as she put it, that she wanted to discuss.

  He looked at his watch. She had placed the call less than fifteen minutes ago. He started punching numbers. “Mrs. Hanover? This is Deputy Chief Glitsky.”

  An audible sigh, then a rush. “Thank you for calling back so soon. I didn’t know if I could just leave a message for you personally, but I . . .” She ran out of breath and, after a slight hesitation, started again in a lower key. “I didn’t know who else to talk to.”

  “Didn’t you say you’d spoken to Inspector Cuneo last night?”

  “Yes.” Another pause. “I just wondered,” she said, “if I could arrange to talk to you, maybe, instead of Inspector Cuneo. I mean, if you need . . . if the police need to talk to me anymore about Paul or the fire or anything.”

  “You don’t want to talk to Inspector Cuneo?”

  “I think I’d prefer not.”

  This was tricky indeed. Especially in light of Glitsky’s new information that the homicide detail—i.e., Cuneo— was in fact investigating not a murder/suicide, but a double homicide. This made Catherine Hanover not just a witness, but among the universe of possible suspects to the murders. She might not think of herself in those terms. But Glitsky had already been forced to consider them because of what she’d told him yesterday—her powerful financial incentive to see Missy D’Amiens out of Paul Hanover’s will or, failing that, his life. Many people had been killed for far less money.

  And now Mrs. Hanover didn’t want to talk to the investigating officer. On the face of it, Glitsky couldn’t even begin, and wasn’t remotely inclined, to consider her request. If Cuneo’s questions had rattled or upset her, or made her uncomfortable in any one of a number of ways, all the better—maybe he’d come upon something relevant to the murders she was trying to hide. She was not going to be able to avoid Cuneo. It was out of the question and he told her as much. “I’m sorry,” he said in conclusion, “but witnesses don’t get to choose who interrogates them.”

  “All right,” she said, her voice thick with regret. “I tried.” Then, almost as an afterthought, added, “I might have known that you’d stick together.”

  “That who would stick together?”

  “You. The police.”

  “Well, in this case, yes we do. It’s a general rule, for obvious reasons, that suspects are rarely anxious to talk to inspecting officers.”

  He heard an intake of breath. She whispered, “Suspects? Did you say suspects?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So now I’m a suspect? I thought I was a witness.” Her voice went up in pitch and volume. “I volunteered everything I told Inspector Cuneo, both at the fire and then here at my house. How can I . . . how can you think I had anything to do with this?”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “But you just said I was a suspect.”

  His hand tight on the receiver, Glitsky threw a glance at the ceiling. This had gone far beyond where it should have already, and now he felt he needed to explain himself and his position, always a situation he’d rather avoid. “No,” he said. “I said that suspects often didn’t want to talk to their inspecting officer.”

  “But the inference was there, that I was one of them.”

  Glitsky spoke with an exaggerated precision. “Mrs. Hanover, since we have no suspects at all that I’m aware of, everyone is technically a potential suspect. That includesyou, though it doesn’t move you to the head of the pack. You asked if you could somehow avoid talking again to Inspector Cuneo, and I was telling you why that wasn’t allowed.”

  Some steel now in her tone, she pressed him. “All right, then, what if I were to make a complaint about him? Who would I go to for that? What would happen then?”

  “What kind of complaint?”

  She hesitated for a minute. “Inappropriateness.”

  “In what sense? What kind of inappropriateness?”

  Another breath, another pause. “Sexual, I would say.”

  Now it was Glitsky’s turn to go quiet. The silence hung with import. Finally, treading carefully, he said, “There is an Office of Management and Control in the department that investigates these kind of allegations. I could put you through to them right now.”

  But this time she jumped in quickly. “I don’t want to go there. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Why not? If Inspector Cuneo assaulted you . . .”

  “He didn’t assault me. It’s just, I mean, it was clear he was coming on to me, and I’d just prefer if I didn’t have to see him again. He makes me uncomfortable. I’m not trying to get anybody in trouble here. I’m willing to talk to anybody else you send out, but Inspector Cuneo makes me nervous. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Did he touch you?”

  “Several times. Then he squeezed my arm before he left, said I could call him at home anytime, gave me his number. It was definitely . . . inappropriate. He was hitting on me.”

  “But you don’t want to lodge a complaint?”

  “That just seems a little strong for what it was. I don’t want to overreact. I don’t really want to get him into trouble. . . .”

  “He may already be.”

  “No! I really don’t want that. But look,” she said, intensity now bleeding through the line. “Really. I just didn’t want to see him, that’s all. You could come out if you need to talk to me, or anybody else. I’m not trying to avoid anything with the police, and he didn’t do anything so blatant that I feel like I need to file a complaint.”

  “All right, but if you don’t file a complaint, then officially nothing happened,” Glitsky said. “That’ll be the story.”

  “But nothing really did happen.”

  “He didn’t touch you?”

  “Yes. I already said that.”

  “Well, that’s something. It’s grounds for a complaint.” He wanted to add that if she wanted to know what he’d do if he were in a similar position, he would file immediately. But he couldn’t say that. It was completely her decision, and couldn’t be any of his.

  “Well, maybe, but even so . . . I’ll think about it.”

  7

  Hardy and Glitsky were at the counter of the Swan Oyster Depot on Polk Street, way in the back, eating fried oysters and iceberg lettuce salad with Louie dressing. Hardy nursed a beer while Glitsky, incognito without his hat on and with his old flight jacket covering the uniform, stuck with his standard iced tea. “And of course,” Hardy was saying, “if you get the message through to him in any official way at all, he’ll either accuse her of lying or you of making it up.” He sipped his beer. “It just gets better and better, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ve got to tell him. I can’t not tell him.”

  “I thought that was why you needed to see me so urgently. So I could advise you how not to do just that.”

  “But I’ve got to.”

  “Okay, then. Now maybe we can enjoy this fine lunch.”

  “If she—Hanover, I mean—doesn’t file a complaint, it didn’t happen.”

  “I thought we were done with the discussion.”

  “So it’s really not a department matter.”

  “If you say so. On-duty cop hits on pretty witness— I’m assuming she’s pretty. . . .”

  “I haven’t seen her, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course not. I jest. But pretty or not, witness gets hit on . . .”

  “Possible suspect gets hit on.”

  “That, too. But whatever, she gets hit on, maybe even assaulted, depending on your definition of the term, by an on-duty officer. You’re saying that it’s not a department matter?”

  Glitsky chewed ice from his tea.

  “I’m hoping you’ve already written a memo to file, at least.” Reading Glitsky’s face, he went on.
“Okay, and this is your legal adviser talking, do that first, as soon as you get back to your office. Then at least you’re covered if it gets bigger or, God forbid, Cuneo rapes her or kills her or something.” He wiped some dressing around the plate with a crust of sourdough. “It’s got to get official in some way. Don’t tell Cuneo directly. Take it to Batiste, man to man. He’ll support you.”

  “Maybe not. He’s none too pleased with me at this exact moment—the Chronicle picture. Besides which, he won’t want to be bothered. It’s my problem.”

  “No. Your problem is that you think it’s your problem. We’ve already determined by the process of rigorous debate that this is a police department matter, and Frank’s the chief of police. So it’s his problem more than yours. He’ll probably fire Cuneo, in fact.”

  “Not without a complaint he won’t.”

  “Call Hanover back. Convince her to file one.”

  “Good idea. Except what if she’s the killer?”

  “That would be bad luck, I admit.”

  “More than that.”

  “And how likely is that anyway? That she’s the killer?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I’m completely out of the loop on Cuneo’s suspects or anything else, for that matter. She sang me a long song about money that gives her plenty of motive, but it sounded like everybody else in the family knew the same tune. And you know a guy like Paul Hanover always had some deals going on. You see the profile on him Channel Four did last night? He had his hands in a dozen pots, and not just here in the city. Or Missy. Nobody knows squat about her either, except that she spent a lot of money on the house.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “What?”

  “Who’d she spend the money with?”

  “I don’t know. The contractor, I’d guess.” He put down his tea, wrote a note to himself on his memo pad. “But that’s not your worst idea.”