Nothing but the Truth

by John Lescroart

  “I’m thinking everybody . . .” He started over. “I mean, married people . . . I don’t know.” He rubbed at his burning eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “We all get further apart?”

  He shook his head. “Maybe. But I’ve been trying to support us all here for the last few years. It takes a little bit of my time. Hell, it takes all my time. You think I’m okay with no leisure in my life? You think I don’t miss it, too, the fun? But what’s the option? Live poor, let the kids starve . . . ?”

  “Nobody’s going to starve, Dismas. It’s not that. You know that.”

  “Actually, I’m not sure that I do know that. It feels like if I stop working, somebody might. The world might end.”

  “But you never talked to me about that, did you? That fear?” He shrugged and she pressed him. “Because you don’t talk about those kinds of things, not anymore.”

  He shrugged that off. “I never did, Frannie. Nobody wants to hear about that, all those nebulous fears.”

  “Yes, they do. And nebulous hopes, too, and little insignificant worries that just need to get aired out, and the occasional dream that’s just a dream, like we used to have all the time. What we were going to do when we got older, when the kids moved out?”

  “Frannie, you’re talking a decade, minimum. We don’t even know if we’ll be alive in a decade. Why talk about it?”

  She folded her arms. “That’s exactly what I mean. We don’t know something for sure and therefore it’s not on the Top Forty list of acceptable topics.”

  “But Ron does, is that it? You’ve got hopes and fears you can share with Ron, but not with me?” He was hurt and mad and starting to swing pretty freely, maybe rock her with a roundhouse. “So what kind of dreams did you and Ron share and talk about?”

  “I didn’t have any dreams with Ron, Dismas. I only have dreams with you.”

  That stopped him. Her eyes were beginning to well up. He reached over, pulling her to him. “I don’t want to yell at you,” he said. “I don’t understand this right now. I’m trying.” He pulled back so he could look at her. “I’ve been trying with our whole lives, too, you know. I do try to be there for you and the kids. I haven’t been distant on purpose.”

  “I know. I shouldn’t have let Ron even be friends, not that way. That’s all it was, really, but I . . . it seemed innocent, really, starting out. You know, connecting finally to somebody.”

  Hardy knew. Just before Vincent had been born, he’d had the same experience—connection, infatuation. Fire that he had ducked away from before it had burned him and Frannie. He knew.

  “I shouldn’t have let him get important,” she said. “I should have seen it and stopped, but we were just talking. It didn’t seem it would hurt anything.”

  “Except it’s put you here.”

  That brought them back to where they were, although of course they hadn’t gone anywhere. It was almost midnight and the next morning their own children would be waking up at Grandma’s with neither of their parents around.

  Frannie, shivering now, looked down at her orange jumpsuit. This time the tears did well over.

  “I’m so sorry, Dismas. I’m so sorry.”

  He pulled her back to him, moved his hand up and down over her back, feeling pretty damn sorry himself.

  Glitsky was at his desk, sipping from a mug of tepid tea, trying to get a take on what Frannie had told him, which wasn’t much that he hadn’t already known. Bree and the oil wars. But so what? He’d been a homicide inspector for a long time and the idea that this was some sort of business-related slaying was, for him, almost too far-fetched to consider.

  When he got back to basics and asked himself who stood to benefit from Bree’s death, he came up with Ron. Also, the same cop instinct that had momentarily forgotten—simply because she was behind bars—that Frannie was an innocent person, was at the same time screaming that nobody gets as defensive as Frannie was if there wasn’t something to hide. Maybe it wasn’t always true in real life, but if you dealt as much as Glitsky did with the criminal world, you could pretty much bet on it.

  So regardless of how much he’d prefer Sharron Pratt and Scott Randall to be wrong, he was thinking he’d be wise not to forget entirely about Ron. It might be nice to find an alternate suspect, but if homicide took the road less traveled and found no one on it after the DA had shown them the way, he had a hunch he’d be hearing about it for a decade or two.

  He was vaguely aware of two inspectors writing reports out in the open homicide detail. Suddenly there was a shadow in his doorway and he looked up.

  “I was half expecting you not to show.”

  “Which half?” Hardy asked. He stepped into the office and crabwalked around the desk, which barely fit into the room, to one of the wooden chairs wedged into the tiny space that was left. “Frannie told me you two had a nice talk.”

  The lieutenant was twirling his mug around and around, wrestling with something. “I’m not too happy about what I heard, Diz. I’m thinking it may be Ron after all.”

  Hardy was poker-faced, keeping it casual. “How could he have done it? I mean like when and where?”

  “I know. There are problems with it.”

  “Like he wasn’t there? Would that be one of them?” Low-key. But the last thing he needed now was to get homicide on Ron. Because they would have a good shot at finding him, which would put him and his kids back in the system. It would eliminate Hardy’s own private agenda—the only one, he believed, that could produce a satisfactory conclusion to this mess. So he asked, “What do you have on Bree? What did Griffin get?”

  The mug stopped halfway to Glitsky’s mouth, came back down. Glitsky’s normal expression was something between a frown and a scowl, and now it moved a few degrees south. “Carl might have had the case closed in two hours if he hadn’t died. Or he might have been nowhere. Either way, he didn’t get to writing up his reports. Paperwork wasn’t his strong point.”

  “What was?”

  Glitsky narrowed his eyes. “What are you getting at?”

  “Well, he must have done something. Just because there’s not much in the file doesn’t mean there’s nothing. ” He had Glitsky’s interest now and he kept going. “Was Griffin married? Did he talk to his wife? Anybody in the office here? Who supervised at the crime scene? They must have gotten some kind of physical evidence at Bree’s place. I mean, Griffin was in this, right? He had to have something.”

  Hardy found it a lot easier getting into the penthouse with the key that Ron had given him.

  Once inside, he turned and locked the door behind him, then switched on the lights. Nothing obvious had changed since he and Canetta had walked out together last night, but Hardy felt a dim charge as he started for the office with the answering machine.

  What was it?

  Stopping completely, telling himself that it was probably the difference between being merely tired, which was last night, and semi-comatose, now, he still took a minute getting his bearings, casting his eyes around the periphery of the rooms.

  While he’d been visiting downtown with Frannie and then Glitsky, he’d left his gun stowed in his trunk. When he got back to his car he’d tucked it back into his belt. Now, feeling stupid about it for the second time in five hours didn’t stop him from pulling it out again.

  The paintings, the view, the dining area, all the same. It was nothing, he concluded. He was the walking dead at the moment, seeing ghosts, maybe playing with them.

  But suddenly there it was.

  He’d gone out to the balcony last night, and to do that he’d pulled the drapes aside a foot or two. He remembered it specifically because from the inside of the house, where he stood now, he hadn’t been able to see the French doors leading out to the balcony from which Bree had been thrown. He hadn’t known the doors were there.

  And now they were covered again, the drapes pulled closed.

  He crossed the living room again, the dining area with its seating nook, trying to remember, g
rowing more sure of it. Neither he nor Canetta had come anywhere near this area last night. And as Hardy was leaving he’d glanced back at the rooms one last time—the French doors stuck in his mind, and that meant the drapes hadn’t been pulled closed.

  Moving them aside again, he pushed open one of the doors and stepped back out onto the balcony, over to its edge. It still was a long way down. Fighting vertigo, he backed up a step. Nothing had been moved, nothing had changed.

  So somebody had pulled the drapes against the unlikely event that he would be seen moving around twelve floors up at the scene of a murder.

  A last glance and Hardy was inside, this time pulling the drapes behind him. He still had the gun in his hand. “Hello,” he called out. “Anybody here?”

  Silence.

  Flicking the hall and room lights on before him, he took a tour of the back rooms, as he and Canetta had done last night. Nothing looked disturbed. Even the office, presumably the location of Bree’s important files, was as he’d last seen it.

  Except for one thing. The counter on the answering machine, which last night had read “8,” now was a zero.

  All the messages had been erased.

  PART TWO

  14

  Saturday morning in an empty house.

  Gradually over the past several years, but chronically it had seemed in the last few months, Hardy wasn’t happy at home. Kids constantly underfoot, Frannie with her women friends, talking about kids mostly. Kids fighting, discipline. Kids’ sports, games, school, homework, lessons, meals they didn’t eat, pets they didn’t care for. Kids kids kids.

  Whenever anyone asked him directly, he always said he loved his own kids, and he thought he did. But if he had it to do over, being honest with himself, he had doubts.

  When they’d started out, Frannie and he had read all the books about marriages coping with the changes of a growing family. Hardy had often wondered since why somebody hadn’t written the real book, called Children? Don’t!

  Because he’d come to believe that having a family didn’t simply change things—it ended that earlier existence. You might go into it thinking you were retaining the essentials of the old life, merely adding to its richness and variety. But in a few years you had a whole new life, and it felt as if none of it was really yours.

  He’d come around to accepting as absolute fact that paradise would be sleeping in on a Saturday and waking up to an empty, quiet house. Maybe one that would stay that way.

  Now, doing it, suddenly he wasn’t so sure.

  The sun was in his eyes. He threw a forearm over them, then squinted out his bedroom window over the city. Where was he, anyway? It came back to him—he’d slept in his clothes, crashing on the bed. The gun was on his reading table, where the clock read 8:20. He must have been a zombie on wheels. He didn’t remember anything about driving home, where he’d parked, letting himself in.

  God, it was quiet.

  Bones creaking, he forced himself to sit up, saw the gun and reached for it.

  He got up and went into the bathroom, throwing cold water on his face, trying to wake all the way up. Through the rooms, then, to the front door, which he’d locked, then back down the long hallway to the kitchen. The house felt hollow, as though the soul of it had been sucked out. The kids, he realized. Frannie.

  It struck him forcibly—a revelation. Standing by his sturdy rough-hewn table in a well-equipped and beautiful kitchen on a fantastic Indian summer morning, he felt nothing but an underlying sense of terror, a vast pervasive unease.

  This was the alternative.

  But he had work to do, and yesterday had been a reminder that the engine wouldn’t work without fuel. His black and ancient cast-iron pan was in its place on the back burner. No matter what he cooked in it, nothing ever stuck. He cleaned it only with salt and a wipe with a rag. Since Hardy had first cured it, the pan had never known detergent or water, and now its surface was a flat black pearl.

  Turning the gas on under it, he threw down a thin layer of salt from the shaker, then crossed to the refrigerator. He grabbed a couple of eggs. Evidently Frannie had been marinating filet mignons for Thursday night when the grand jury session had intervened. Hardy picked one of the steaks from its ceramic bowl and dropped it into the pan, then broke an egg on either side of it.

  There was a loaf of sourdough in its bag by the bread drawer and he sliced off about a third of it, cut it down the middle, poured some olive oil onto one of the cut sides, and placed it next to the sizzling steak.

  While everything cooked on one side, he put on a pot of coffee, then turned the bread and the meat, laid the eggs on the toasted side, broke the yolks, turned off the pan, and went in to shower.

  The day, when he hit the street outside, was impossibly bright, warm, fragrant. He felt hopeful and motivated, a far cry from how he’d woken up, when he couldn’t figure out a move and then—unable to focus—hadn’t been able to locate his car for ten minutes.

  But running on automatic, he knew that whatever else he did, he had to go to Erin’s first, to check in and see Vincent and Rebecca, to make sure they were getting along all right at their grandmother’s. And that visit had provided him with a bonus as well as the usual territorial disputes.

  Last night Ed and Erin had taken them to the Planetarium and they were telling him about all they had learned, the cool way the night sky came up. Vincent didn’t believe it was an optical illusion. He was sure it was the real night sky. “It was. It was exactly the sky, Dad. They just opened the roof and there was the moon and the stars and everything.” Shooting a glare at Rebecca the literalist, daring her to contradict him.

  But Hardy cut them off. “I’ve seen it, too, Vin. It is the exact sky. I love that, too.” A warning eye at his girl—Don’t say anything. Let him have this one.

  Finally he got to her. “So, Beck, what’d you see?”

  His daughter, always ready to show off a fact, no longer cared about the truth of the night sky. Her father had finessed Vincent and given her the floor and that was all that mattered. “Well, the main thing was about, what’s that moon, Vin?”

  “I don’t know, but around Jup—”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Around Jupiter, one of the moons has an atmosphere and water and everything you need for life.”

  “What about heat?”

  “Inside, Dad. Molten core and volcanoes. Just like a mile under the ocean here on earth. Where’s the heat there? Inside. See?”

  “Great. I bet it could happen.”

  “Definitely. They even showed what could grow as if we were there. Some of them—”

  “You know what I thought was the best thing?” Vincent had to get a word in.

  “The Beck’s not done, Vin. One more—”

  “She’ll never get done. She’ll keep going till you have to go.”

  Hardy thought of a new name for his don’t-have-that-child book—The Endless Referee. But he sighed. “Beck? Are you almost done?”

  But she must have been truly happy to have her dad there, or else wanted nothing more than to please him, which did happen. She hesitated only a second before smiling. “He can go.”

  “Okay, Vin, what did you think was the best thing?”

  The boy was so thrilled with his good fortune— interrupting his sister and it worked!—that for a moment Hardy thought he’d forgotten what he was going to say. This happened all the time, and invariably made Vincent cry. But it was, suddenly, a morning for miracles. The fact had come back to him. “How you can see a star when you can’t see it?”

  It must have been obvious that Hardy didn’t understand.

  Vincent tried it another way. “When it’s too dim, when you can’t see it otherwise.”

  “What is?”

  “A star, or a planet, or anything in the sky. If it’s really dim, the way you see it is you don’t look right at it. You look to the side. We did it. It really works.”

  So when Hardy left, his next stop wasn’t Frannie or Abe or his reporter frie
nd Jeff Elliot to catch up on the Beaumont case.

  At his son’s suggestion, he wasn’t going to look directly at it for a while. He still had clients and phone messages and paperwork so he went to his office to attend to those.

  And sure enough, somewhere in the middle of that, he remembered that Phil Canetta had stood behind him with his spiral pocket filing system, and he’d written down all the names on Ron’s answering machine.

  He had told Hardy he worked out of Central Station, so he looked up the number and made the call.

  The Central Station, close to the border of Chinatown and North Beach, was where Hardy wanted to open his restaurant when he retired. Not that there weren’t dozens of other fantastic dining establishments within a couple of blocks—Firenze By Night, Moose’s, Rose Pistola, the North Beach Restaurant, Caffè Sport, the Gold Spike—but the smells of coffee, breads, licorice, sesame, roasted duck, cheeses, fish, and sausages kept tourists in a near constant feeding frenzy.

  Even the locals, such as Hardy, weren’t immune. After his breakfast, he wasn’t at all hungry, but as soon as he stepped out of his car and caught a whiff of it all, danged if he didn’t think he could go for a little smackerel of something. It was a wonder, he thought, that the cops out of Central weren’t the most overweight in the city.

  Plus parking. The five-story public parking structure was directly across the street and would never under any conditions be approved by today’s city planners because, after all, what kind of political statement could a parking structure make? Its only purpose would be functional, and the shakers in the city hadn’t cared about that issue in years and years.

  Hardy was walking out of its utilitarian perfection now, trying to figure whom he could bribe to condemn the station building so he and maybe David Freeman could open some hip new spot there. Somebody had done it recently with Mel Belli’s old building and you couldn’t get inside the place now. Freeman, another old lawyer, might react to the precedent, and certainly he’d know whom to bribe.