Nothing but the Truth

by John Lescroart

  But to this inspector, whether or not Hardy had friends on the police force, he was a righteous suspect. He remained all business. “No, sir. I’m afraid not. There’s no electricity in any case. I don’t know if the captain made it clear to you, but this house is fire department property until we clear it to you.”

  There was nothing to be gained antagonizing the man, although maintaining his demeanor took a serious coefficient of his resources. He forced a patient smile. “No, I understand that. But I’d like to be able to make some plans. Can you give me any estimate how long that will be?”

  Maybe Hardy had worn the inspector down, but it seemed for an instant as if there was a tiny thaw. “Safest guess will be tomorrow morning sometime.” He paused. “Maybe about the time your reporter friend runs his column.”

  No, Hardy realized. It wasn’t a thaw after all. It was a way to tell him that Jeff Elliot had been by, another unwelcome interruption to their task. Jeff had probably bothered them to distraction. “If we get done by dark, we’ll get it boarded up for the night. Somebody’ll be here tomorrow to let you back in . . . if we’re ready.” It was a dismissal.

  There wasn’t anything he could do.

  On his private stool right up by the front window, behind the bar at the Little Shamrock, Moses McGuire was nursing his Sunday Macallan. He allowed none of the other bartenders either to drink or to sit, even for an instant, when they were working. His belief was that professional bartenders got paid to stand while they waited on customers—it showed respect. If they wanted to sit, he invited them to come around to the bar side and take a short break at some risk to their job security, but if they were behind the rail, they stood. And on either side of it, during their hours of employ, they were dry.

  McGuire himself, though, as the owner, could do any damn thing he wanted. When he and Hardy argued about the unfairness of how he applied his rules, he would explode. “I’m a noble publican, not some goddamned wage-slave bartender.” And since McGuire owned three quarters of the place, his word was the law.

  He’d carefully drawn Hardy a tap Guinness and brought it to the bar after the foam had settled out to a perfect head. Now Hardy was down an inch or two into it. The time was a bit after two and the fog wasn’t going to burn off, not today, maybe not until Christmas. The trees at the edge of Golden Gate Park, no more than a hundred feet away directly across Lincoln Boulevard, were barely visible.

  Three other customers quietly took up space in the oldest bar in San Francisco. On a couch in the dark far back, an obviously smitten young couple was possibly engaging in some kind of discreet sex. They had ordered old-fashioneds—the most froufrou drink that the purist McGuire allowed at the Shamrock. In the tiny side alcove, a lone, silent mid-thirties dart player with a shaved head and a camouflage jacket was working on his game, drinking Bushmills Irish, Bass Ale and a raw egg for protein out of a pint glass.

  A year before, Moses had picked up some recently released recordings done in the 30s—Stéphane Grappelli on violin and Django Reinhardt on guitar just swinging their brains out with the Quintet of Le Hot Club de France—and whenever things were slow, as they were today, he’d run them on the jukebox.

  McGuire twirled his glass around on the condensation ring that had formed on the bar. “You’re welcome to come stay with us, you know. The lot of you.”

  “Thanks, Mose, but Erin’s already got the kids. She’s got a bigger place.”

  He twirled his glass some more. “And when is Frannie out?”

  This was treacherous territory. Hardy couldn’t tell Moses that Ron had released Frannie from her promise without revealing that he’d talked to him. And that would, in turn, lead to the minefield of secrets, none of which Hardy could disclose.

  And some of which he still, after everything, didn’t know if he believed.

  So he sipped Guinness, taking a minute. “My bet is that Sharron Pratt lets her go Tuesday morning. She’s taking too much political flack.”

  “Why Tuesday?”

  Hardy explained a little about the difference between the judge’s contempt ruling and the grand jury contempt citation. Two different animals with similar names. Fortunately, this seemed to satisfy Moses. But he twirled his glass a few more times and Hardy knew him well enough—he might have bought the latest explanation, but there was more he needed to talk about. “So what are you thinking?” Hardy prompted.

  “How to say it.”

  “Just say it, that’s all.”

  Moses drank Scotch, put the glass down, looked his brother-in-law in the eye. “Okay. How’d it all turn to shit so fast?”

  Hardy found some humor in the felicitous phrase that McGuire had been struggling to conjure. The pick-in’s were so slim in the rest of his life that he actually chuckled.

  McGuire’s countenance took on a familiar dark tone—the Irish temper had always flared with the slightest friction. “It wasn’t a joke.”

  Hardy realized he must be on his third Macallan after all, not his second. Well, he thought, it had been a stressful couple of days for him, too.

  “I didn’t think it was a joke, Mose. It’s so true I wanted to cry, so I laughed. You hear what I’m saying?”

  Moses sipped, nodded, an apology. “I mean, one day she’s taking the kids to school and baking cookies, and next day, bam!”—he slapped the bar with his palm—“all of a sudden the next day she’s in jail and her house is burned down. How does shit like this happen?”

  What could Hardy say? That Frannie had taken a series of little steps, secret steps? That it wasn’t really anything at all like “all of a sudden”?

  And it wasn’t only Frannie, either. Hardy had taken them, too, the tiny incremental steps away from intimacy. More, he’d felt the shift in the bedrock of their marriage, the first cracks in the fault line. They’d allowed things to change with the pressures of raising the children—the communication eroded, their respective daily lives on different planets.

  This is where it had gone wrong, what had led them to here, but he wasn’t going to air all that now. He lifted his glass and killed another inch of Guinness. “I don’t know, Mose. I don’t know.”

  McGuire leaned over the bar. Whispered. “Tell me she isn’t sleeping with him.”

  “She says no.” Hardy made eye contact. “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “She wouldn’t,” he agreed quickly, but the relief showed. Her brother, at least, believed it. “She’d tell you first, before anything happened, even if she was only thinking about it. That’s who she is.”

  “Okay.” Talking about it wasn’t going to make it better or worse. It was just going to invite other people to participate in the discussion, and Hardy wasn’t doing that, even with Moses. He and Frannie might have their serious differences, but they were as one in a way that made them aliens in the modern world—they believed that their private lives were private.

  “But your house . . . ?” Moses asked. “This morning you were saying it was part of this, too.”

  “Part of who killed Bree, Mose. Not part of me and Frannie.”

  “And you’re close to finding that? Who did that?”

  “If I am I don’t know it, but somebody must think so. I’ve got to believe hitting my house was a warning to back off.”

  Moses sipped his Scotch, put it down carefully. “Unless whoever it was thought you were home, in which case it wasn’t just a warning.”

  Hardy considered for a beat. “No. I doubt that. I’m not that much of a threat.” He shook his head, the idea rattling around. “I don’t think so,” he repeated, more to himself than to Moses.

  “Well you don’t have to think it for it to be true. If I were you, I’d put it in the mix.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “That somebody’s trying to kill you.”

  On that cheery note, the front door banged open and a mixed six-pack of humanity flowed in, talking football, calling for beer. Moses shrugged at Hardy, gave them a welcome, and headed down the rail for the taps
.

  It was a signal for Hardy that he didn’t want to waste any more time philosophizing with his brother-in-law. Moses was right—there was far too much he didn’t know. He was vulnerable and couldn’t allow himself the luxury of letting his guard down.

  So with neither plan nor destination, Hardy left two-thirds of his Guinness. He’d parked around the corner on Tenth Avenue and pushed himself through the fog, hunched against the wind. Getting in behind the wheel, he hesitated before turning the key, then broke a thin smile as the engine turned over. See? No bomb. Flicking the heater up to high, he pulled out, got to the corner, and turned right. He had no idea where he was going.

  All he knew was that the Little Shamrock wasn’t anywhere he needed to be just now. He needed to work. Time was running out. He couldn’t go back to his house—the fire department owned it. There were still his children, Frannie. But he’d already seen them today. That would have to be enough.

  Where the hell was Ron Beaumont? Or Phil Canetta?

  What did he have? What could he work with?

  The only thing that came remotely to mind was his paperwork, the lawyer’s constant companion and last refuge. At his office he had his copies of pages from Carl Griffin’s file, the notes he’d taken last night with Canetta, the propaganda he’d liberated from Bree’s office, the lettersfrom her high school yearbook. At some point, he reasoned, some part of all of that might intersect.

  David Freeman believed that lawyers should work around the clock. He had had full bathrooms installed on each of the three floors of his building so that his associates would not be able to use the lame excuse after an all-nighter that they had to go home to freshen up and get ready for court.

  In twenty-five minutes, Hardy was in his office— showered, shaved, changed into the shirt that he’d stashed in his file cabinet a couple of months before.

  When he got seated at his desk, he retrieved the four messages he’d received since last night, hoping against hope that one of them would turn out to be from Canetta, or even Ron Beaumont. If Al Valens had left a message Hardy hadn’t been able to get back at his home, then maybe either or both of the men he wanted to talk to had tried as well, or called here at his office afterward.

  But no such luck.

  Three of the calls were from clients in various stages of feeling abandoned and the last was Jeff Elliot. When Hardy called him back, he was himself on fire over the blaze at Hardy’s house, although he did pay a fleeting moment’s lip service to sympathy for Hardy’s loss. “Is there anything I can do to help you, Diz? You got a place to stay?”

  “Yeah, we’re covered, Jeff. Thanks, though.”

  But back to the scoop. “And you think it was arson?”

  “I’d bet a lot on it. In fact, I wouldn’t rule out that it’s the MTBE people, the Valdez Avengers, all those jerks.”

  “If that’s true,” Jeff said, his enthusiasm overflowing, “it’s a giant break in that story.”

  “That’s my goal,” Hardy said drily. “Sacrifice my home for a good story. Maybe you’ll win the Pulitzer and I’ll be happy for you. We can have a party in my new house.”

  Elliot apologized. “I didn’t mean it like that, Diz.” He paused. “But don’t you want to get whoever did this, take ’em down?”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I bet I do. All I’m saying is here, maybe, we’ve got a real connection.”

  “Between who?”

  “That’s what I think I have, Diz. Do you want to hear it?”

  “Talk,” Hardy said.

  “Okay. After you left yesterday, I went with what you said—the guy from Caloco—”

  “Jim Pierce.”

  “Yeah, all right, Pierce. He’d told you that SKO funded these cretins, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, what if that were true? Where was the connection? So I started poking through among all the crap I showed you yesterday—that thick file of paper—and realized that a lot of the pro-ethanol stuff comes from this organization named the Fuels Management Consortium, FMC for short. It’s here in town. Familiar?”

  “No, but this stuff wasn’t my major until a couple of days ago. I thought FMC made tanks and stuff, big equipment.”

  “Same letters, different company.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “Well, FMC produces pro-ethanol, anti-MTBE press releases. Tons of them. Sometimes the source of them is a little hard, like impossible, to recognize because they get picked up by intermediaries—syndicated as hard news stories in the dailies, also in industry publications, the Health Industry Newsletter, Environmental Health Monthly, like that. So I never put it together that it might be one source.”

  “And then you did?”

  “Right. Plus every time some more MTBE leaks into another well, we get the update before the ink’s dry on the EPA report.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Okay, so a few months ago, we—the Chronicle—we decided to do a big spread on the dangers of MTBE. I mean, this was a four-day front-page feature. Lots of scary stuff—cancer clusters, birth defects, the usual. Even a layperson such as yourself might remember it.”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Well, Kerry had just taken the primary and suddenly this was news, and we ran it. Anyway, the reporter who wrote the article, as it happens, is a friend of mine named Sherry Weir. She shows up in the office last night on this water temple poisoning as I’m thinking about our discussion, yours and mine. She tells me that FMC was the prime source for her feature—it’s an impressive propaganda factory.

  “So yesterday, when Sherry hears about the Pulgas Temple, her first stop on the way to the office is the FMC offices in the Embarcadero buildings. Okay, she knows it’s Saturday afternoon, they’re probably closed up, but it’s a shot. And what does she find?”

  “An armed nuclear weapon?”

  “She finds that nobody’s there, all right, but out in the hallway for pickup are the day’s press releases, bound and labeled for distribution, all about the water poisoning, doomsday in San Francisco, sidebars on the dangers of MTBE pollution, like that. Anyway, she pulls a few off the top of the pile and brings them back for her article.” A beat. “Get it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Jeff’s voice went down to an excited whisper, but it rang with triumph. “They had to be written and printed up before it happened.”

  Hardy took a moment to let it sink in. If this was true, it appeared to link some of the eco-terrorist activity with FMC, but not necessarily to SKO, and certainly not to Valens or Kerry. How could it help him?

  But Jeff thought he had the answer to that, too. “Because FMC is run by this joker named Baxter Thorne ...”

  “Who works for SKO,” Hardy guessed.

  “You’re too smart, except not so fast, Red Ryder. Back when she interviewed him, Sherry couldn’t get Thorne to admit who paid him. He calls himself a public affairs consultant. According to him, he represents all kinds of environmental groups and other clients, but says his contracts demand confidentiality. She asks him specifically about some of these activist groups and he admits he’s given them some advice.”

  “Advice. That’s a nice word.”

  “I thought so, too. But even nicer is this. I call this buddy of mine, a colleague in Cincinnati, at the Sentinel—”

  “You’ve been a busy boy, Jeff.”

  “This could in fact be my Pulitzer, Diz. You’d be busy, too. Turns out that Baxter Thorne is not unknown in Cincinnati. It wasn’t exactly common knowledge, but my buddy knew—for years Thorne was the dirty-tricks guy for Ellis Jackson.”

  “Who is . . . ?”

  “You’re going to love this—Jackson is the CEO of Spader Krutch Ohio.”

  Hardy felt a little tingle along the back of his neck and knew it wasn’t the cold outside leaking through his office window.

  Jeff was going on. “So we’ve possibly got SKO paying for dirty tricks in San Francisco. We’ve got somebody who mig
ht put MTBE in the water, might kill Bree Beaumont ...”

  “Might burn my house down,” Hardy added evenly.

  “That, too,” Jeff agreed. “But what we don’t have and we do need is how, if we’re on the right track, Baxter Thorne came to be worried about you.”

  “Somebody told him.”

  “I’m with you. But who?”

  Hardy racked his brain, trying to keep himself from the kneejerk reaction for the second time today that it had to be Valens. But it might go higher—Hardy couldn’t rule out that a directive could have come from Damon Kerry himself, although Jeff Elliot wasn’t going to accept that.

  But why stop with Kerry? The connection with SKO might even be Phil Canetta—cops who worked freelance security at conventions had also been known to provide muscle, to help with dirty tricks. Had Canetta ever done that kind of work with SKO, he wondered. Or with Baxter Thorne?

  “I really don’t have any ideas, Jeff,” he said, “other than I’d like a few private moments with this Thorne fellow.”

  “Did you talk to Al Valens this morning, by the way?” Jeff asked. “At the Clift? Since you woke me up for it.”

  “Didn’t I tell you all about that?”

  He heard Jeff sigh. “No. I think you left it out.”

  And suddenly, the morning’s information clicked with what he had just learned from Jeff. Bree’s report. She had changed her mind about ethanol and Valens had tried—successfully he said—to keep her from talking to Kerry about it. Who would this silence benefit even more than Kerry himself? SKO. And SKO was the operative Baxter Thorne.

  What if Valens’s efforts to keep Bree quiet hadn’t worked after all? What if someone needed to shut her up?

  Valens again, once removed.

  Maybe.

  But Hardy didn’t want to lead Jeff Elliot there. He had his own agenda and he figured he’d sure as hell earned the right to pursue it now. “I thought he’d told me a lie,” Hardy said mildly, “and I wanted to talk to him about it.”