The Motive

by John Lescroart

  “You mean he might die?”

  Trueblood hesitated, then nodded. “It’s not impossible. We’re still not sure exactly what we’re dealing with.”

  Arguing, as though it would change anything, Glitsky said, “But my wife said it was just a murmur.”

  Trueblood’s red-rimmed, exhausted, unfathomably cheerless eyes held Glitsky’s. His hands were folded in front of him on the table and he spoke with an exaggerated care. “Yes, but there are different kinds of murmurs. Your son’s, Zachary’s, is a very loud murmur,” he said. “Now this can mean one of two things—the first not very good and the second very bad.”

  “So not very good is the best that we’re talking about?”

  Trueblood nodded. He piled the words up as Glitsky struggled to comprehend. “It could be, and this is the not very good option, that it’s just a hole in his heart. . . .”

  “Just?”

  A matter-of-fact nod. “It’s called a VSD, a ventricular septal defect. It’s a very small, pinhole-sized hole that can produce a murmur of this volume. Sometimes.”

  “So the very bad option is more likely?”

  “Statistically, with this type of murmur, perhaps slightly.”

  Glitsky couldn’t hold his head up anymore. They shouldn’t have tried for this baby. He shouldn’t have let Treya talk him into it. She was already in love with it, with him, with Zachary, as was Glitsky himself. After the long wait to welcome him, in only a couple of hours Zachary had moved into their hearts and minds. And not just the thought of him. The presence, the person.

  But Trueblood was going on. “In any event, the other option is called aortic stenosis, which in a newborn can be very difficult to correct.” He let the statement hang between them for a second. “But that’s what we’re testing to see now. We’ve X-rayed the heart already, and it doesn’t seem to be enlarged, which is the most obvious sign of aortic stenosis.”

  Glitsky, grasping at anything resembling hope, said, “And you’re saying it doesn’t seem enlarged?”

  “No. But at his age, we’ll need to analyze the X-rays more closely. A heart that size, we’re talking millimeters of difference between healthy and damaged. We’ll need to have a radiologist give us a definitive read on it.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “We’ve got a call in for someone right now, but he may not get his messages until morning. In any case, it won’t be for a few hours at best. And the echocardiogram couldn’t be scheduled until tomorrow. We felt we had to talk to you and your wife before then.”

  Glitsky met the doctor’s eyes again. “What if it’s the VSD, the hole in the heart? The better option.”

  “Well, if it’s a big hole, we operate, but I don’t think it’s a big one.”

  “Why not?”

  “The murmur is too loud. It’s either a tiny, tiny hole or . . . or aortic stenosis.”

  “A death sentence.”

  “Not necessarily, not always.”

  “But most of the time?”

  “Not infrequently.”

  “So what about this tiny hole? What do you do with that?”

  “We just let it alone as long as we can. Sometimes they close up by themselves. Sometimes they never do, but they don’t affect the person’s life. But if the hole does cause . . . problems, we can operate.”

  “On the heart?”

  “Yes.”

  “Open-heart surgery?”

  “Yes. That’s what it is. And it’s successful a vast majority of the time.”

  Glitsky was trying to analyze it all, fit it in somewhere. “So best case, we’re looking at heart surgery. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No. Best case is a tiny hole that closes by itself.”

  “And how often does that happen?”

  Trueblood paused. “About one out of eight. We’ll have a better idea by the morning.”

  Glitsky spoke half to himself. “What are we supposed to do until then?”

  The doctor knew the bitter truth of his suggestion, but it was the only thing he could bring himself to say. “You might pray that it’s only a hole in his heart.”

  “Only a hole in his heart? That’s the best we can hope for?”

  “Considering the alternative, that would be good news, yes.”

  It was eight thirty and Hardy told himself that he should close the shop and go home. He reached up and turned the switch on the green banker’s lamp that he’d been reading under. His office and the lobby through his open door were now dark. A wash of indirect light from down the associates’ hallway kept the place from utter blackness, but he felt effectively isolated and alone. It wasn’t a bad way to feel. He knew he could call Yet Wah and have his shrimp lo mein order waiting for him by the time he got there, but something rendered him immobile, and he’d learned over the years to trust these intuitive inclinations, especially when he was in trial.

  The primary reality in a trial like this is that there was just too much to remember. You could have pretty damned close to a photographic memory, as Hardy did, and still find yourself struggling to remember a fact, a detail, a snatch of conflicting testimony. The big picture, the individual witness strategies, the evidence trail, the alternative theories—to keep all these straight and reasonably accessible, some unconscious process prompted him to shut down from time to time—to let his mind go empty and see what claimed his attention. It was almost always something he’d once known and then forgotten, or dismissed as unimportant before he’d had all the facts, and which a new fact or previously unseen connection had suddenly rendered critical.

  Once in a while, he’d use the irrational downtime to leaf through his wall of binders, pulling a few down at random and turning pages for snatches of a police report, witness testimony, photographs. Other times, he’d throw darts—no particular game, just the back and forth from his throw line to the board and back again. Tonight, he backed his chair away from his desk and simply sat in the dark, waiting for inspiration or enlightenment.

  He hadn’t noticed her approach, but a female figure was suddenly standing in the doorway. She reached for the doorknob and started to pull the door closed.

  “Hello?” Hardy said.

  “Oh, sorry.” The voice of Gina Roake, his other partner. “Diz, is that you? I saw your door open. I thought you’d left and forgotten to close it.”

  “Nope. Still here.”

  A pause. “Are you all right?”

  “First day of trial.”

  “I hear you. How’d it go?”

  “You can flip on the light if you want. I’m not coming up with anything. It went okay, I think. I hope. I even got a little bonus from Strout’s testimony, so maybe I should declare victory and go home.”

  But Roake didn’t turn on the room lights. Her silhouette leaned against the doorpost, arms crossed over her chest. “Except?”

  “Except . . . I don’t know. I was waiting for a lightning bolt or something.”

  “To illuminate the darkness?”

  “Right, but not happening.”

  “It’s the first day,” Roake said. “It’s too soon. It never happens on the first day.”

  “You’re probably right,” Hardy admitted. “I just thought it might this time.”

  “And why would that be?”

  “Because Catherine didn’t . . .” He stopped.

  “Didn’t what?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Okay, I give up. What?”

  “I told her she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life in jail. Spontaneously. That I wouldn’t let that happen.”

  Silent, Roake shifted at the doorpost.

  “I don’t think she did it, Gina. That’s why I said that. She didn’t do it.”

  But Gina had been in more than a few trials herself. “Well, you’d better defend her as though you think she did.”

  “Sure. Of course. That’s about all I’ve been thinking about all these months. How to get her off.”

  “There you go.”<
br />
  “But it’s all been strategy. Get the jury to go for murder/suicide. Play up the harassment angle with Cuneo. Hammer the weak evidence.”

  “Right. All of the above.”

  “But the bottom line is, somebody else did it.”

  She snorted. “The famous other dude.”

  “No, not him. A specific human being that I’ve stopped trying to find.”

  Roake was silent for a long moment. “A little free advice?”

  “Sure. Always.”

  “Defend her as if you believed with all your heart that she’s guilty as hell. You’ll feel better later. I promise.”

  But driving home, he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. So basic, so simple and yet he’d been ignoring it for months, lost to strategy and the other minutiae of trial preparation. If Catherine didn’t kill them, someone else did. He had to get that message into the courtroom, in front of the jurors. In his career, he’d found nothing else that approached an alternative suspect as a vehicle for doubt. It struck him that Glitsky’s failure to get an alternative lead to pursue—another plausible suspect— had derailed him from any kind of reliance on the “soddit,” or “some other dude did it,” defense. He never had come back to it, and he should have, because in this case some other dude had done it.

  It wasn’t his client. It wasn’t Catherine. Somehow, from the earliest weeks, and without any overt admission or even discussion of the question of her objective guilt, Hardy had become certain of that. This was a woman he’d known as a girl, whom he’d loved. They’d met nearly every day for months and months now, and even with all the life changes for both of them, every instinct he had told him that Catherine was the same person she’d been before. He’d been with her when she sobbed her way through The Sound of Music. One time the two of them had rescued a rabbit that had been hit by a car. She’d been a candy striper at Sequoia Hospital because she wanted to help people who were in pain. This woman did not plan and execute a cold-blooded killing of her father-in-law and his girlfriend and then set the house on fire. It just did not happen. He couldn’t accept the thought of it as any kind of reality.

  Every night as he sought parking near his home he would drive up Geary and turn north on 34th Avenue, the block where he lived. He never knew—once or twice a year he’d find a spot. His house was a two-story, stand-alone Victorian wedged between two four-story apartment buildings. With a postage-stamp lawn and a white picket fence in front, and dwarfed by its neighbors, it projected a quaintness and vulnerability that, to Hardy, gave it great curb appeal. Not that he’d ever consider selling it. He’d owned the place for more than thirty years, since just after his divorce from Jane, and now he’d raised his family here. He felt that its boards were as much a part of who he was as were his own bones.

  And tonight—a sign from the heaven he didn’t really believe in—twenty feet of unoccupied curb space lay exposed directly in front of his gate. Automatically assigning to the vision the status of mirage, he almost drove right by it before he hit his brakes and backed in.

  He checked his watch, saw with some surprise that it was ten after nine, realized that he hadn’t eaten since his lunchtime lamburger. In his home, welcoming lights were on in the living room and over the small front porch. When he got out of the car, he smelled oak logs burning and looked up to see a clean plume of white coming out of the chimney.

  Home.

  Cuneo didn’t hear the telephone ring because he was playing his drums along with “Wipeout” turned up loud. He had the CD on repeat and lost track of how many times he’d heard the distinctive hyena laugh at the beginning of the track. The song was a workout, essentially three minutes of fast timekeeping punctuated by solos on the tom-toms. Midway his sixth or seventh time through the tune, Cuneo abruptly stopped. Shirtless, shoeless, wearing only his gray sweatpants, he sat on the stool, breathing heavily. Sweat streaked his torso, ran down his face, beads of it dropping to the floor.

  In the kitchen, he grabbed a can of beer, popped the top and drank half of it off in a gulp. Noticing the blinking light on his phone, he crossed over to it and pressed the button.

  “Dan? Dan, you there? Pick up if you’re there, would you? It’s Chris Rosen. Okay, you’re not there. Call me when you get in. Anytime. I’m up late.”

  Cuneo finished his beer, went in to take a shower, came out afterward wrapped in a towel. Armed with anothercold one, he sat at his kitchen table and punched up Rosen’s numbers. “Hey, it’s me. You called.”

  “Yeah, I did. I just wanted to make sure you were still cool about this Glitsky thing.”

  “Totally.”

  “I mean, today, earlier . . .”

  “It just pissed me off, that’s all. It still does. But what am I gonna do?”

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. What you’re going to do.”

  “Nothing. That’s what you said, right?”

  “It’s what I said, yes, but I’ve been reconsidering. Maybe we can spin this sexual thing back at them. I mean, everybody already believes Hardy’s poking her, right? So she’s the loose one, she’s easy, get it?” Rosen gave Cuneo a moment to let the idea sink in. “I mean, isn’t she the kind of woman who would have made the first move? We didn’t want to bring it up before because, well, I mean, what would be the point? Try her on the evidence, not on innuendo or her personal habits. More professional. Blah blah blah. We didn’t want to embarrass her. But once they introduce the whole question, the jury needs to hear the truth. I mean, only if it is the truth, of course—I’m not trying to put words into your mouth. But if she did come on to you first, and you rejected her . . . it’s your word against hers. And you’re a cop with an unblemished record and she’s a murder suspect. If we bring it up first as soon as I get you on the stand . . . you know what I’m saying?”

  Cuneo brought the ice-cold can of beer to his lips. His internal motor suddenly shifted into a higher gear, accelerating now on the straightaway instead of straining up a steep grade. He’d never done anything to harass Catherine Hanover. He knew it. Whatever it was had been her imagination and her lies. Not him. He was sure of that.

  Let’s see how she liked it.

  For the first couple of Hardy’s murder trials, Frannie had tried to have some kind of dinner waiting for him when he got home. She went to some lengths to try to time his arrival at home to coincide with dinner being done so that they could sit down as a family together—the sacred ritual, especially when the kids had been younger. But the effort turned out to be more a source of frustration than anything else. Try as he might, Hardy couldn’t predict when he’d get home with any regularity. It was another of the many things in their daily lives that was out of their control. Aspects not as ideal as they had once imagined it, and yet were part and parcel of this constantly evolving thing called a marriage. Tonight, as Hardy stood at the stove and Frannie, in jeans and a white sweater and tennis shoes, sat on the kitchen counter with her ankles crossed, watching him, neither of them remembered the growing pains of the dinner issue that had led them here. Hardy was in trial, so he was responsible for his own meals. That was the deal because it was the only thing that made any sense.

  From Frannie’s perspective, the best thing about Hardy’s cooking was that it was all one-pot—or, more specifically, one-pan. He never messed up the kitchen, or created a sinkful of dishes. This was because he was genetically predisposed to cook everything he ate in the ten-inch, gleaming-black cast-iron frying pan that had been the one item he’d taken from his parents’ house when he’d gone away to college. Ignoring his own admonition to keep the iron from the barest kiss of water lest it rust, she noticed that he was steaming rice as the basis of his current masterpiece, covering the pan with a wok lid that was slightly too small.

  Talking about the usual daily kid and home trivia, interspersed with trial talk, and then some more trial talk, and once in a while a word about the trial, she’d watched him add a can of tuna to the rice, then a lot of pepper and
salt, a few shakes of dried onions, a small jar of pimentos, a spoonful of mayonnaise, some green olives, a shot of tequila. Finally, she could take it no more. “What are you making?” she said.

  He half turned. “I haven’t named it yet. I could make you immortal and call it ‘Frannie’s Delight’ or something if you want.”

  “Let’s go with ‘something.’ Now what are you putting in there?”

  “Anchovy sauce.”

  “Since when do we have anchovy sauce?”

  “Since I bought it. Last summer I think. Maybe two summers ago.”

  “What does it taste like?”

  “I don’t know. I just opened it.”

  “And yet you just poured about a quarter cup of it into what you’re making?”

  “It’s the wild man in me.”

  “You’ve never even really tasted it?”

  “Nope. Not until just . . .” Hardy put a dab on his finger, brought it to his mouth. “Now.”

  “Well? What?”

  “Primarily,” he said, “it smacks of anchovy.” Hardy dipped a spoon and tasted the cooking mixture. “Close. We’re very close.” He opened the refrigerator, nosing around, moving a few items.

  “I know,” she said, teasing, coming over next to him. “Banana yogurt.”

  “Good idea, but maybe not.” He closed the refrigerator and opened the cupboard, from which he pulled down a large bottle of Tabasco sauce. “When in doubt,” he said, and shook it vigorously several times over his concoction. He then replaced the cover. “And now, simmer gently.”

  “Are you taking a conversation break while you eat this,” she said, “or do you have more work?”

  “If you’re offering to sit with me if I don’t open binders, I’ll take a break.”