Glitsky looked at the clock on his stove. Ten after one. There was some chance that Hardy wouldn’t yet be back in court after lunch. In some obscure way, and despite his pure fatigue, Glitsky all at once became aware of a sharp spike in his motivation. Maybe the sense of impotence he’d experienced while unseen doctors performed tests on his newborn had upset his equilibrium. Or was it the fact that now there appeared to be a reasonable chance that his son would be all right? That sometimes a cause might appear lost, and that this appearance of hopeless-ness could be a stage on the route to success, or even redemption? All he knew was that it all seemed of a piece somehow. It was time to get back in this game.
And, a critical point, he could do it from his home. And in a way, conducting an investigation from his home would give him another advantage. There would be no reporters, nobody to witness what he was doing, to question who he might talk to. Rosen and Cuneo, busy in trial mode, would certainly never take any notice. Everything he did would remain under the radar, where he wanted it.
He reached for the telephone.
Hardy’s pager told him to leave a number. He did that, then immediately placed another call to his own office. If and when Hardy called back, they’d coordinate their actions. In the meantime, Missy’s car was a question even Glitsky had failed to ask. In fact, he realized, every strand of his failed investigation up until now had emanated from Paul Hanover—his business dealings, his politics, his personal life. To Glitsky’s knowledge, neither he nor Hardy nor Cuneo nor anyone else involved in the case had given the time of day to Missy D’Amiens. She was just the mistress, then the fiancée, unimportant in her own right.
But what if . . . ?
At the very least it was somewhere he hadn’t looked. And nowhere else had yielded any results.
“Deputy Chief Glitsky’s office.”
“Melissa, it’s me.”
“Abe.” His secretary lowered her voice. “How are you? And Treya?”
“Both of us are pretty tired, but all right.”
A pause. “And the baby? Tom”—Paganucci—“Tom said . . .”
Glitsky cut her off. “Zack’s going to be fine.”
“Zack? Of course, Tom didn’t know what you called him.” She was obviously spreading the news to the rest of his administrative staff. “His name is Zachary.” Now she was back with him. “Thank God he’s all right. We’ve all been sick here wondering.”
“Well . . .” To avoid going into any more detail at the moment, Glitsky switched to business. “Listen, though, the reason I called . . .”
“You’re not working, are you?”
“I’m trying to, Melissa. But you’ve got the computer. I’d like you to run a name and vehicle R.O.”— registered owner—“for me. On a Michelle D’Amiens. D apostrophe . . .”
Hardy felt the vibration of the pager in his belt, but he was in the middle of an uncomfortable discussion with Catherine’s husband. Hardy had originally intended to huddle with Catherine in the holding cell during the lunch recess, but had noticed that Mary and Will were the only family members who’d made it to the courtroom today, and he needed to talk to both of them. Separately. And sooner rather than later.
So he cut his time with Catherine short and was waiting at the defense table when the brother and sister got back from their lunch together. They had nearly a half hour before court would be back in session, so he walked back and said hello and asked Will if he could spare a minute, then Mary when he and Will were finished, if there was time. So, although obviously unhappy about this unexpected ambush—Will thought he knew what it was about, money, and he was right—he accompanied Hardy back up to his table inside the bullpen. Both men sat down.
“So,” Will began with a not entirely convincing show of sincerity, “how can I help you?”
He’d given Hardy a retainer of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars eight months before. Between Hardy’s hourly rate, the billable time his associates and paralegals had spent drafting motions and preparing briefs, the large and long-running newspaper advertisements to try and locate the girl who’d run out of gas in the Presidio, the fees for filings and his jury consultant and the private investigator Hardy had hired to find out the truth about Will and his secretary (an irony Will would certainly not have appreciated, had he known), the retainer was long gone. Now Will was past due on his last two monthly invoices, nearly forty thousand dollars.
“The point is,” Hardy said, after a short recap and overview, “I don’t want this billing issue to interfere with my defense, but we discussed this, you remember, when I first signed on. How it was going to get more expensive when it got to the trial.”
“Not that it’s exactly been cheap up until now.”
“No. Granted. Murder trials are expensive. Even at the family-and-friends rates you’re enjoying.”
Will chuckled. “Enjoying. I like that.”
Hardy shrugged. “I’d hope so, since it’s saved you nearly sixty thousand dollars so far. But even so, I wanted to ask you if there was a financial problem. Frankly, it makes me uncomfortable to be here in the first days of the trial and have my client so far behind in payments.”
“It’s not that far, is it?”
“Sixty days.” Hardy waved that off. “But that’s not the issue. The issue is that I know you’ve come into quite a large sum of money recently. I’m assuming you’ve got significant cash flow, so that’s not the problem. And meanwhile, I’m going ahead with my defense of your wife and you’re not paying your legal bills.”
“Well, I . . .”
“Please let me finish. I find this conversation as difficult as you do, believe me. But I told you coming in that my trial day fees are three times my normal billing rates, and at the time you said that sounded reasonable. It’s still reasonable. But I want to tell you, you’re going to get whiplash from sticker shock next month if you don’t keep up on these monthly payments.”
“Are you saying you’re raising your rates now?”
“Not at all. It’s all in the contract we signed last June. But the trial has started and that changes everything.” Hardy leaned in closer and lowered his voice. “You may not realize it, Will, but it’s standard practice among criminal attorneys to get the entire cost of the defense up front. You know why that is? Because a client who gets convicted often loses his motivation to pay his lawyer anymore. Now I didn’t make that demand with you and Catherine because of the personal connection, but I’m beginning to wonder if maybe I should have.”
Will Hanover’s eyes were flashing around the courtroom, and when they came back to Hardy, he’d obviously decided to be shocked and outraged. “You’ve got some balls trying to shake me down at a time like this. I’ve paid you a hundred and fifty thousand dollars already. Up front. If that’s not good faith, I don’t know what is.”
“It was. Then,” Hardy said. “This is now. And I wanted to put you on notice that it’s becoming a big issue.”
“Or what? You’ll quit? You’d abandon Catherine over a late payment? You’ve got to be kidding me?”
Hardy didn’t rise to the question. Instead, he said, “What might be easiest is if you provide another retainer like the first one . . .”
“You’re out of your mind.”
Hardy didn’t pause. “. . . like the first one, to cover what you owe and get us through this month, if the trial goes on that long. And then to begin the appeals process, if we need it.”
“If we need an appeal! In other words, if you lose.”
“That’s right.” Hardy’s voice was calm. “We won’t need to appeal if we win.”
“Well, I’m not writing you a check for another hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that off chance, I’ll tell you that. And you can take that to the bank.”
Hardy pushed himself away from the table, draped an arm over the back of his chair, and looked into the callow and handsome face. With an air of sadness, he came forward again. “Will. I know that you’re through with Catherine, howe
ver this comes out. I appreciate you coming down here to trial and putting on the face of the good husband. But I also think I know why you’re really doing it, and that’s because you don’t want to lose the respect of your kids.”
Will shook his head in disgust. “I’ve had enough of this. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He started to stand up.
“I’m talking about Karyn Harris, Will. Your secretary.”
Sitting back down, he said, “There’s nothing between me and Karyn Harris.”
Hardy nodded. “That’s been the party line, anyway, that you’ve worked so hard to keep from your kids. You weren’t having an affair. It was just Catherine who was crazed, right?”
“Right.” Defiant still.
“And so to your kids, you’re still the good guy, aren’t you? The dad they can trust, who’s holding the whole thing together?”
“That’s right.”
“But what if they found out you’ve been lying to them the whole time, too? How would they feel about that? About you?”
“I haven’t been lying to them. There was no affair.”
Hardy stared at him for several seconds. When he spoke, there was no threat to his voice or in his manner. It was more the measured tones of disappointment that things between them had come to this pass. “Will,” he said. “Do yourself a favor. Take a look at the statements I’ve sent you over the past months. You’re going to notice payments totaling about five grand to an entity called The Hunt Club. You know what that is? No? It’s a private-investigator service.”
Will’s initial expression of disdain turned to disbelief and then a distillate of fear itself.
Hardy went on. “If you weren’t having an affair, one of the things I considered early on was that you had the same motive to kill your father as Catherine did. You’d gone to some lengths to create an airtight alibi. You would have been perfect. So I had to know, you see, if you were really in San Francisco on May twelfth, or down south.”
He let the words hang in the air between them. “Understand that I don’t have to bring up any of this for Catherine’s sake, and really never planned to. For my purposes, it’s enough that Catherine believed you were being unfaithful, and suddenly she needed to go see Paul to find out where a divorce would leave her. But if you in fact were having this affair, and the jury knew it, they might view Catherine in a more sympathetic light. And all other things being equal, that’s always to the good.”
Will’s hands were shaking; his color had gone gray. “You’re blackmailing me,” he said.
“I’ve had this for four months. If I was blackmailing you, I would have started then.”
Will glanced back at the gallery, which had started to fill for the afternoon session. In the bullpen, the popular court reporter Jan Saunders was sharing a laugh with a bailiff. Several of the jurors had wandered back in and taken their seats. “Where is all this stuff ?” he asked.
“Locked away,” Hardy said. “No one ever has to see it. No one ever will.”
Hardy kept his poker face straight. No one would ever see the documentation of Will’s affair with his secretary because it didn’t exist. The Hunt Club had come to the conclusion that Will and Karyn had spent their four days aboard the Kingfisher. The captain of that boat, Morgan Bayley, wasn’t talking—Hardy’s private investigator was of the opinion that the newly wealthy Will Hanover had sent him a quiet bundle of cash to keep his mouth shut. And had given Karyn a nice raise.
Hardy was running a pure bluff, and wasn’t one hundred percent sure he was right until Will stood up and growled down at him, “You’ll get your fucking check by the weekend.”
21
“Sergeant Cuneo, did you have a specific reason to question the defendant on the night of the fire?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And what was that?”
“Well, I was called to the scene to investigate a double homicide. The defendant said that she was related to the owner of the house. That alone justified talking to her. But she also admitted that she’d been to the house that afternoon and had talked to Mr. Hanover.”
“Did she say what they’d talked about?”
“At first, yes. She said they’d talked about family matters. But when I asked her if she could be more specific, she became evasive.”
“Evasive?”
Hardy stood up with an objection. “Objection. Witness is offering a conclusion.”
Braun overruled him, and Rosen barely noticed the interruption. “When you asked the defendant to be more specific about these family matters, what did she say?”
“She asked why I wanted to know.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“I said I was going to need to know everything that happened in Paul Hanover’s last hours, which included what she’d talked to him about.”
“And did she then go into the substance of her discussion with Mr. Hanover?”
“No. She did not.”
“Did you specifically ask her about this?”
“Yes. Probably half a dozen different ways.”
“And she did not answer?”
“Not the substance of the questions, no. She kept saying, ‘It’s private,’ or ‘That was between me and Paul,’ or ‘I can’t think about that right now.’ ”
“Did you press her on this issue?”
“No, not really.”
“Why not?”
“Because she was obviously distraught over the fire. She’d acted like she’d just learned that her father-in-law, her children’s grandfather, was probably dead. She became very upset after a while. At the time, I thought she had a pretty good reason. I decided to let it go.”
Hardy thought this was pretty good. Rosen letting Cuneo present himself as sensitive and empathetic. And now he was going on. “All right. Now, Inspector, did you have occasion to notice anything specific about the physical person of the defendant?”
“Of course. I’m supposed to notice things. It’s my job. I checked out her clothes.”
“And what was she wearing?”
Hardy squirmed in his chair. He wanted to break this up, object on relevance, but he knew that Braun would overrule him. Catherine had been wearing what she’d been wearing and there wasn’t anything he could do about that now.
“A blue blouse under a leather jacket. And jeans.”
“Would you please tell the jury why you particularly recall the defendant’s clothing that night?”
“Sure.” Accommodating, Cuneo faced the panel. Hardy wondered if he might have taken a Valium or two during the lunch recess. There was little sign of the trademark jitteriness he’d exhibited before the break. “When we interviewed witnesses later, someone described a woman who had left Paul Hanover’s house just before the fire wearing a blue blouse under a leather jacket and jeans.”
“But you didn’t know that on the night of the fire?”
“No.”
Rosen wore his satisfaction on his sleeve. He paused for a drink of water, then came back to his witness. “Sergeant, we may as well address this question now. Did you make a comment to Inspector Becker about the defendant’s attractiveness?”
Cuneo handled it well. They’d obviously rehearsed carefully. He shrugged with an almost theatrical eloquence. “I may have. I don’t remember specifically, but if Inspector Becker said I said something of that nature, I probably did.”
“Does a remark like that seem out of place to you in that context? At the scene of a fire and double murder?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even remember saying it or thinking about it. It was a nonevent.”
“All right, Sergeant, moving along. On the day after the fire, did you see the defendant?”
“Yes. I went to her house.”
“And what was your specific purpose on that visit?”
“I had two reasons. First, she’d mentioned the night before that the victims had been fighting, and I wanted to find out a little more about that. Second, I wanted
to get some answers about the family issues she’d talked to him about.”
“At that time, did you consider her a suspect?”
Here Cuneo showed a little humanity to the jury, another nice move. “That early on,” he said with a smile, “everybody’s a suspect.” Then he got serious. “But no, the defendant wasn’t particularly a suspect at that time.”
“Okay, and did you get to ask your questions?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because right after she asked me inside and offered me some coffee, she told me that she’d been talking to Deputy Chief Glitsky.”
“For the record, you mean Abe Glitsky, San Francisco’s Deputy Chief of Inspectors?”
“That’s right.”
“How did he know the defendant?”
“I don’t know.”
Rosen threw a perplexed glance at the jury. He came back to his witness.
“Inspector, is it unusual to have a deputy chief personally interview witnesses in a homicide investigation assigned to another inspector?”
“I’ve never seen it happen before.”
“Never before? Not once?”
Hardy raised a hand. “Your Honor. Asked and answered.”
“Sustained.”
“All right,” Rosen said. “We may come back to the involvement of Deputy Chief Glitsky in a little while, but meanwhile you were with the defendant in her kitchen?”
“That’s right.”
“Can you describe for the jury what happened next?”
“Sure. She was in the middle of making homemade pasta noodles and she asked me if I liked them. Her husband, she said, was out of town . . .”
Catherine grabbed at Hardy’s arm and started to whisper something to him. He couldn’t let the jury see her react badly, and he all but jumped up, raising his voice. “Objection, Your Honor!”
Braun’s voice was mild, merely inquisitive. “Grounds, Counselor?”
Hardy’s thoughts churned. He had gotten to his feet to shut Catherine up and to challenge Cuneo out of pure rage because he knew the man was lying, but these weren’t grounds for objection. “Relevance?”
The Motive Page 28
