The Motive

by John Lescroart

  She hesitated. “Well, that was before . . .”

  “Mrs. Willis, I’m sorry.” Hardy cut her off in his most respectful tone. “Is it correct that on this first occasion with Inspector Cuneo, you identified the woman in that picture, Defense Exhibit F, as Missy D’Amiens? Yes or no.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  Hardy held up a palm. “And it was only later that you ID’d the photo of Catherine, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And each time you were shown—Sergeant Cuneo showed you—a single photo, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just to be clear, he never showed you a variety of photos from which to choose, correct?”

  “Right.”

  “And when Sergeant Cuneo showed you the first photograph, Exhibit F, you had already said it was Missy coming out of the house, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And so he clearly expected you to ID the person he named?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you did identify the woman in Exhibit F as Missy D’Amiens on that occasion, did you not?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Hardy took a breath. “All right,” he said. “Now let’s talk for a minute about the next time Sergeant Cuneo asked you to identify the person who’d left the Hanover home that afternoon. On that second occasion, did he also show you one photograph of a single person?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he told you that you must have been wrong the first time, since Missy D’Amiens was dead?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “So it couldn’t have been Missy that you saw?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. And next he told you, did he not, that he thought the person whose photo he now showed you was the person you must have seen?” Hardy didn’t give her a chance to answer. “And again, you ID’d the person whom Inspector Cuneo clearly expected you to ID, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true, but that doesn’t mean . . .”

  “Let me ask you this, Mrs. Willis. Did Sergeant Cuneo ever give you an opportunity to view several photos of different people?”

  “Well, no, he . . .”

  “Did he ever ask you to consider the possibility of a third person?”

  “No.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Willis. That’ll be all.” He spun on his heel and took a step toward his table.

  “But . . .” She started again.

  He whirled on her. “Thank you,” he repeated with slightly more emphasis. “No more questions.”

  But Rosen was already on his feet, moving forward. “Redirect, Your Honor.” A nod from Braun. “Mrs. Willis, did you know Missy D’Amiens well?”

  “No. Hardly at all.”

  “Hardly at all. Had you ever had a conversation with her?”

  “No.”

  “Spoken to her at all?”

  “No. Never.”

  “All right. So you could easily have been mistaken in identifying her?”

  “Your Honor!” Hardy said. “Speculation.”

  But Braun was already ahead of him. “Sustained.”

  Rosen stood in the center of the courtroom for a moment, then came at it another way. “Mrs. Willis, did you have occasion to change your mind about the identity of the woman whom you’d earlier identified as Missy D’Amiens?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And when was that?”

  “When Inspector Cuneo brought a picture of another woman and I realized it wasn’t who I’d first said.”

  “And that is the picture of the defendant, Catherine Hanover, People’s Exhibit 12, that you identified earlier, is that correct?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And did you subsequently identify the defendant as the woman who’d left the Hanover home minutes before the fire from the booking photograph, People’s 11?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you also identify the woman who’d left the Hanover home minutes before the fire from a police lineup held on or about July eleventh of last year? A lineup that included five other women?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And would you please tell the members of the jury once again if you see the woman you saw leaving the Hanover home minutes before the fire in this courtroom today?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You have already pointed her out to the court, but may I ask you to please do so once again?” She pointed and Rosen said, “Let the record show that the witness has once again identified the defendant, Catherine Hanover. Mrs. Willis, thank you. No further questions.” He turned to Hardy. “Recross.”

  Hardy was in front of her before Rosen had sat down. “Mrs. Willis, when you ID’d the first photo of Missy D’Amiens, you were telling the truth, were you not?”

  “Of course I was.”

  “Of course. And you were as sure of that first ID as you later were of the second, true?”

  “Well, at the time . . .”

  “Let me rephrase. Did you express any hesitation or reservation with that first ID?”

  “No.”

  “And that’s because you were sure. Correct?”

  She didn’t like it, but she had to admit it. “At the time, yes, but . . .”

  “So you were sure. As sure as you are now that it was Catherine, correct?”

  She didn’t answer, and Hardy didn’t wait. “But of course you were wrong.”

  28

  Glitsky wasn’t going to deal with any part of the media. He was laying low on this mission. He hadn’t done much more than check into his office early in the morning, then disappeared to move on these D’Amiens questions. He wasn’t carrying his cell phone and had turned his pager to vibrate.

  In the Bank of America’s eponymous polished granite building downtown, he now sat in an enclosed cubicle office in the legal department on the eleventh floor. Outside his windows, an immovable cloud blocked any view. Five attorneys and their secretaries worked in the space just outside—the lawyers in their own cubicles about the size of the one Glitsky was using, their slaves at desks against the opposite wall.

  Glitsky’s guide for his tour of the D’Amiens financials was a serious young woman with mousy brown hair, in a beige suit and Coke-bottle eyeglasses. Probably not yet thirty, her name was Lisa Ravel and she was the right person to sit with him while they searched. Diligent, knowledgeable about the bank’s systems, enthusiastic for the work. She had already printed out the final statement that Glitsky had gotten a look at yesterday at his local branch (they only kept physical records in the branches for two years). Now she suggested that they review deposits over the nearly three-year course of the entire account, moving toward the present.

  Glitsky remembered that he wanted to run Missy’s Social Security number—find out something more about her—and he called back to his office and asked Melissa to get on it, to page him when she had something. Then he and Ravel began in earnest.

  The opening deposit had been in cash for exactly $9,900. Glitsky, who by now was disposed to see a sinister pattern emerging, found that interesting if only because banks were mandated to report any cash transactions of over ten thousand dollars, and this was just under that threshold. At the beginning, now more than four years ago, there’d been very few checks and all of them predictable—to Ruth Guthrie every month for rent, for phone, utilities and the like. Over the next five months, the account had almost gotten down to zero when regular deposits in the thousand-dollar range began turning up. Glitsky, who’d given Ravel an overview of the situation at the outset, said, “I think by now this must be when she’s seeing Hanover.”

  After a while, the deposits started averaging—again, that threshold figure—around nine thousand dollars per month. D’Amiens started making monthly payments on the Mercedes in February of the year before she’d died. Regular deposits and checks started turning up—one every month for twenty months in the six- to eight-thousand-dollar range, but three of them greater than a hundred thousand doll
ars—to Leymar Construction. Then more standard-size monthly payments to a Macy’s credit card, a Nordstrom card. She got a Visa card and started making regular payments on it. Here was a check for $885 made out to the offices of Dr. Yamashiru. Another similar check for $1,435.

  Glitsky pointed to the screen. “This guy. He was her dentist,” he said. “She must have had teeth problems.”

  “Looks like bad ones,” Ravel said. “And no insurance.”

  This struck Glitsky. No insurance?

  They kept scrolling. “I ought to go get a subpoena for Hanover’s accounts while I’m at this,” he said. “Compare the construction bills. I think she was taking cash out of her deposits and putting them in her safe-deposit box.”

  “Well, wait a minute,” Ravel said. She hit a few buttons on the keyboard. “There you go.” The screen revealed that Glitsky’s theory, at least insofar as the deposits went, was correct. The backup record of several of the more normal deposits indicated the cash disbursements from the amount of the checks she’d cashed and deposited. Hanover evidently had written her regular monthly checks to cover both her living expenses (these perhaps unwittingly) and Leymar’s contracting fees. The three that were over a hundred thousand dollars were neatly paired with checks she’d written to Leymar in the same amounts less that critical nineteen thousand dollars. The other Leymar checks, though, came in at nineteen thousand dollars per month. Glitsky surmised that she took this money, deposited half in her checking account and the other half—ninety-five hundred dollars a month—into her safe-deposit box. Over the twenty or so months of Hanover’s regular payouts to her, this would have come to roughly two hundred thousand dollars.

  “So he was supporting her, too,” Ravel said.

  “Look at what she was stealing,” he said. “She wouldn’t have needed him to.”

  “I can’t believe the IRS didn’t get wind of this somehow.”

  “I don’t know. She kept everything under ten thousand dollars, you notice.”

  “Okay, but the income.”

  “Maybe she didn’t file.”

  Ravel shook her head. “Playing with fire.”

  “She wasn’t American. Maybe she didn’t get it.”

  “Well, she may not have been an American,” she pointed at the screen, “but that’s a real Social Security number.”

  “Which reminds me.”

  Glitsky called back to his office, where Melissa had gone to lunch. Leaving another message, he got back to their computer.

  Finally, at it for almost two hours now—printing out pages as they went, the two of them getting along, theorizing—they got to the last month’s closing statement again. At his belt, he felt his buzzer. “That’s my secretary.” But checking the number, it wasn’t. It was Hardy.

  Glitsky called him right back.

  “I just thought of something you said this morning,” Hardy said. “You know the car?”

  “I know the car.”

  “We still don’t know where it is.”

  “Yes we do. Somebody stole it.”

  Disappointment sounded through the line. “You know that for sure?”

  “No. I deduced it since it’s nowhere else. Somebody must have taken it, and there wasn’t anybody to complain.”

  “So it’s not been reported stolen?”

  “Good, Diz. I think I just said that. What’s your point?”

  “My point is where did you look?”

  Glitsky fought the rise of impatience. “You want a list? I looked. Traffic and parking, warrants, booted vehicles, towed vehicles . . .”

  “Where? What towed vehicles?”

  “At the tow lots.”

  “Yeah, but for both companies?”

  A hint of anger leaking through now, Glitsky began, “What do you . . . ?” Then stopped, realizing in a flash that if the car had been towed in the first few weeks after the fire, it would have naturally gone to the Tow/Hold lot. But less than six weeks later, Bayshore AutoTow had taken over, and since that’s where the city now towed its cars, that’s where Glitsky had checked. The transition after the contract change to the city’s new towing company had gone anything but smoothly, with records lost or mislaid, cars dismantled or stolen. With Tow/Hold dragging its feet supplying anything that would help Bayshore become efficient and productive, the city’s computer hadn’t come close to catching up and didn’t look like it would for a while. “Tow/Hold,” Glitsky said.

  “Just a thought,” Hardy said.

  Joseph Willis was the last eyewitness, and presented the most significant challenge, which was of course at the same time a golden opportunity.

  Erudite, soft-spoken, nattily dressed in a soft camel-hair sport coat, light blue dress shirt and red bow tie, Maxine’s husband didn’t have any uncertainty whatsoever surrounding his identification of Catherine. Rosen had walked him through his testimony, which was unambiguous and delivered with great confidence. Unlike his wife, on the night of the fire he had never told arson inspector Bosio that it had been Missy leaving the house. He’d only ventured that it had been a woman. He hadn’t been home for Inspector Cuneo’s first visit when he’d brought around the newspaper photo of Missy, either, and so he hadn’t tentatively identified her first. He, too, had picked Catherine first from Cuneo’s photo, next from her booking mug shot, and finally from the July lineup.

  Hardy, rising to cross-examine, knew that he had his work cut out.

  “Mr. Willis, I’d like to go over your testimony about the woman you saw leaving the Hanover home on the night of the fire, and whom you’ve identified as Catherine Hanover.”

  “Certainly.” Like his wife, Joseph knew he was key to the prosecution’s case, and he, too—and with more justification—seemed to revel in the role. “I thought you might.”

  This brought a titter to the gallery, and Hardy let himself appear to smile. He was a swell guy able to take a little good-natured ribbing.

  “Splendid,” he said. “Then we’re in accord.” He paused for an instant. “Would you mind telling me about what time you saw the woman leave the Hanover home on that night?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I didn’t check my watch.”

  “Could you hazard a guess?”

  “Well, our friends had come by and we’d made cocktails. The show we hoped to attend started at nine and we wanted to get there by eight thirty, which meant we’d have to leave by eight. So I’d say we were in the living room between seven fifteen and seven forty-five.”

  “And what kind of evening was it?”

  “As I recall, it was cool with a breeze, and then got foggy later.” He looked over to the jury, and added, “As usual in May and June.” Meaning to be casual and friendly but coming across to the jury, Hardy hoped, as pedantic and even condescending.

  “All right. Cool with a breeze. And you’ve testified that you noticed the woman’s dark blue shirt because it was shiny, some kind of silklike material, is that right?”

  “Yes?” Joseph Willis shifted in the witness box, crossed one leg over the other. From his expression, he didn’t understand where this line of questioning was headed.

  “Was that a question, Mr. Willis? Or an answer.”

  “I’m sorry. Yes. The shirt was shiny.”

  “And so are we to assume that the sun was out?”

  “Your Honor!” Rosen spoke from his table. “Calls for speculation.”

  Braun looked down over her podium. “Mr. Hardy?”

  “Let me rephrase.” He came back to the witness. “I’d ask you to close your eyes if it would help you to remember, sir. When you first saw the woman leaving the Hanover home, was the sun shining?”

  Much to Hardy’s surprise, Willis actually complied. When he opened his eyes again after a couple of seconds, he nodded. “I believe it was, yes.”

  “Good. Now when did you first notice the woman?”

  “Coming down the steps at Hanover’s.”

  “Three houses up the street from your own?”

  “Tha
t’s right.”

  “About a hundred feet, would you say?”

  “About that.”

  “And at that time, the very first look you got, you told Mr. Rosen that you thought the woman was Missy D’Amiens?”

  “I did.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Well, primarily I think because it was her house. She lived there. I’d seen her in similar clothing. I would have expected it to be her.”

  “All right. And where were you standing in your own home?”

  “By the front window.”

  “A jutting bay window, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Now, after this woman came down the steps, you said she crossed the street, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “On a diagonal, or directly across?”

  “I wasn’t really watching that closely. I couldn’t say.”

  “You weren’t watching her?”

  “No, not specifically. I was having cocktails with friends, as I said . . .”

  “That’s right. How many cocktails had you had by this time, by the way?”

  For the first time, Willis’s affable manner slipped. Clearly affronted, he flashed an angry look at Hardy. “One,” he answered with no expression.

  “In other words, you were on your first cocktail? Or you’d already had one and were on your second?”

  “Your Honor.” Rosen trying to come to the rescue. “Argumentative.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Rosen,” Braun said. “Overruled. Mr. Willis, you may answer the question. Janet.”

  Jan Saunders read it back and Willis straightened his shoulders. “I don’t recall exactly. I believe it was my first one.”

  “All right,” Hardy said. “And for the record, what kind of cocktail was it?”

  “Your Honor!” This time Rosen stood up with the scraping of his chair.

  But before he could even state his grounds, Braun overruled him.

  “It was a Manhattan,” Willis said.

  Hardy gave him a cold grin. The men were enemies now, punctiliously courteous in direct proportion to their growing hatred for one another. “That’s two shots of good bourbon and a shot of sweet vermouth, is that right?”