“And had he?”
“It was more a misunderstanding. It got straightened out.” Deflection time. “You ever catch up with Kerry?”
“Today’s agenda,” Jeff promised, “if I get to it.”
“What would stop you?”
“One of the problems doing a daily column,” Jeff said, “is you’ve got to write it. Kerry’s going to be impossible until Tuesday. Tomorrow I’m going for Thorne.”
“How are you going to get to him?”
Hardy would bet Jeff’s eyes weren’t tired now—he was on a scent. “A little classic bait and switch. I’ve put in a call to FMC that I’d like an interview on the Pulgas story, which he’ll want to talk about. Once I’m in the door, I’ll ask different questions.” He changed his tone. “I think we’re very close, Diz, really.”
“I hope so,” Hardy said, “but do me one favor, would you?”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t go alone.”
After they hung up, Hardy immediately put in a call to Glitsky’s pager. Jeff Elliot might hate him for it, but from Hardy’s perspective this was now a police matter, and that’s where it was going.
In fact, even without Bree Beaumont, the case could be made that the arson at Hardy’s house, if it had been started by the same people who dumped the MTBE, was related to a San Francisco homicide, and therefore in Glitsky’s domain. Even though the Pulgas Water Temple was in San Mateo County, it was City property and Glitsky could assert at least dual jurisdiction—he had authority to investigate the death of the middle-aged hiker who’d been killed there yesterday.
And now, with the new information Hardy could supply from his talk with Jeff Elliot, that investigation might lead him to Baxter Thorne, and perhaps all the way back to Bree.
Waiting for Glitsky’s call, he got up from the desk, stretched, and came around front to throw a round of darts. But he didn’t retrieve any of them. Instead, he walked to the window and looked down onto Sutter Street, then returned to his chair and pulled his collections of paper up closer to him.
Now that he knew he was looking for something specific—evidence of any relationship between FMC and Bree—he thought he might have a better chance of seeing it.
But the telephone rang.
“Yo.”
“Get a car phone, some kind of beeper, something, would you? I’ve been calling all over town trying to run you down.”
“I’ve been here at my office. And I called you, remember?”
“Yeah, well, I couldn’t imagine you’d be working on a Sunday so I didn’t think of there.”
Hardy ignored the bad attitude. Abe had gone to a murder scene and had spent the last several hours there. It was understandable that he was in a surly mood. “Okay, so now we’re talking. You interested in what I called about? You will be.”
“Not as much as why I want to talk to you.”
Glitsky’s tone wasn’t getting any better.
“What?” Hardy asked.
“The cop who got shot.”
It suddenly hit him. If Glitsky needed to reach him on that matter, there could be only one reason. His stomach went hollow in a rush. “Phil Canetta.”
His friend’s voice was grim. “You heard it here first.”
“Where are you?”
Glitsky told him.
25
Hardy was in the Muir Loop, just inside the Presidio. He’d driven through the urban forest many times before, and in his memory it was serene and lovely, a two-lane road overhung with boughs, winding through an expansive eucalyptus glade.
But today in the late afternoon it seemed that menace dripped from every branch. With the dense fog, visibility was no greater than fifty feet. He crept along at fifteen miles per hour, squinting into the nothingness. There were no curbs on the street here, no streetlights, and twice he felt his tires leave the asphalt.
At last Hardy got a glimpse of some parked vehicles and slowed down even more. With the fog, the scene was etched in stark relief—the outlines of three squad cars, a couple of vans, some news trucks by now, the unmarked cars of inspectors. He pulled in behind the line of them, zipped up his jacket, tried to pick Glitsky out of the milling group of spectral figures.
The lieutenant was at the back door of one of the vans, and as he got closer Hardy recognized Glitsky’s companion—John Strout, the lanky, drawling coroner for the city and county. He was nearly on them before Glitsky noticed.
“John, you know Dismas Hardy.”
“Sure do.” Strout had worked with Hardy before and testified at several of his trials. That Hardy was now a defense attorney made it odd that he was at this crime scene, at this stage, but Strout had been around the block many times, and very little surprised him. “How you doin’, Diz?” He extended his hand and Hardy took it.
“I’ve been better,” Hardy admitted. “It’s been a long day.”
Strout was his usual laconic self. “Wish I could say the same for our victim here. His day only lasted a couple of hours. I reckon, given the choice, I’d go for long.”
“Yeah, well.” Glitsky jerked a thumb. “Hardy’s house caught fire this morning.”
“Not by itself,” Hardy said sharply.
Strout caught something between the two men. “There some connection with that and this?”
Glitsky gave Hardy a shut-up look and said he wouldn’t rule it out, there was some possibility, but they had a ways to go on this one first, on Phil Canetta. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions.
Hardy got Glitsky’s message—the relationship between Canetta’s murder and Bree’s, to say nothing of Hardy’s house—wasn’t going to be part of the public debate. Not yet. It was not even immediately clear that Glitsky was overtly, officially pursuing the Griffin parallels.
“So what did go down here?” Hardy asked.
Strout took his boot off the van’s bumper, looked across the street, said, “Reckon they’re close enough,” and headed out. Hardy and Glitsky followed.
The car had all four of its doors open. Strout walked around off the fringe of the road to the driver’s door, but Glitsky touched Hardy’s arm and the two of them stayed in the street, on the passenger side. They could see inside clearly enough in any event, and just as clearly, Glitsky wanted a private ear.
But the first sight of Canetta was more bad news. He was dressed as he’d been at Freeman’s last night, the last time Hardy had seen him. There was no way now that Hardy could pretend that his relationship to Canetta wasn’t relevant to Glitsky’s investigation, and that in turn was going to have to lead to further revelations, none of them even remotely pleasant.
The body was slumped against the back of the seat, canted slightly to its left. Strout spoke in the professorial drawl he adopted when reciting undisputed facts on the witness stand. Today, though, Hardy found the impersonal tone unsettling.
“You can see if you lift that right arm—” He was doing it. “Rigor’s let up enough now—that the second bullet . . .”
“The second bullet?” Hardy asked quietly.
Glitsky nodded grimly. “He wasn’t shot here. First one was in the chest. He was facing the shooter.”
Hardy heard Strout over their conversation. “ . . . probably fragmented into some ribs and ripped the heart into pieces . . .”
He shut that out and went back to Abe. “So you’re saying he was carried into the car and driven here?”
“And pushed over to make it look like he drove out on his own. I’m not just saying it. That’s what happened.”
“But why would somebody . . . ?”
“Because this is what Griffin looked like and they got away with that. Turned out, I’d say it was a bad idea.”
Hardy agreed. “It connects them.”
A nod. “Not only that, my guess is Canetta was shot with Griffin’s gun.”
Strout continued. “. . . time of death, but he’s loosened up enough, it had to be ten hours ago, maybe longer.”
“So who found him?”
“Couple of joggers.”
“And Strout’s saying . . . ?”
“You just heard. Late night, early morning. The second shot’s in a closed car, pea soup outside. Nobody heard a thing.”
Before Hardy could ask, Glitsky expanded on it. “I know what you’re going to say, but don’t. This damn sure could’ve been Ron. We’ll get to that.” He held up a hand, stopping Hardy’s reply. “But because I like to be thorough, I also put Batavia and Coleman out on alibis for all of your own personal heroes—Pierce, Valens, even Kerry. We’re talking between two and six a.m., but guess what.”
“They weren’t all home in bed.”
Glitsky’s mouth turned up, but it wasn’t a smile. “Insight like that is what keeps us friends. Maybe they were, but we haven’t been able to reach any of them. Pierce wasn’t around today. His wife said he was out on his boat from early this morning. Also, we’ve got Kerry’s schedule but he’s not sticking to it—he and Valens didn’t make his first banquet. Two days from the election, he’s in flex mode, I guess. Valens—”
Hardy had to cut in. “Valens was at Kerry’s until nearly midnight. After that, Kerry left home.”
“How do you know that?”
“Jeff Elliot.”
“Where did he go?”
“Only the Shadow knows. But he lives like five blocks from here. And while we’re on it, Pierce isn’t much further and all of it’s downhill.”
Glitsky was silent for a couple of seconds. “I see you’ve done your homework. How do you know all this, hell, any of it?”
“I’m motivated. I talked to Valens this morning . . .”
“When was that? I was with you half the morning.”
“Must have been the other half.” He knew Glitsky wouldn’t let it go, so he continued. “It had to do with my house.”
“Valens had something to do with your house?”
Strout finished his monologue and straightened up, looking over the car’s roof. “This boy’s been sittin’ here in the cold long enough, Abe. You needin’ anything else here?”
Glitsky shifted his attention to the coroner. “Not me, John,” he replied. “If crime scene’s done, you can tag him and bag him.”
Strout took a last look into the car, at the body of Phil Canetta, and clucked sympathetically. Again he straightened up. “Scene calls. I hate ’em, y’know that? They ain’t medicine out here, are they? It ain’t just a stripped body with something to tell you.”
There wasn’t anything to say to that. Everybody there felt the same thing to a greater or lesser degree.
Glitsky gave Strout a gentle slap on the shoulders as he passed. Then he walked a few paces back to where the head of his crime scene unit was huddling with a couple of his team. Hardy heard him say, “If there’s enough lead left, get ballistics to check it against the slug that went through Griffin. I’m betting it’s the same gun.”
A short discussion ensued, after which Glitsky returned to Hardy. “Valens. This morning. Jeff Elliot. Bet you thought I’d get sidetracked, didn’t you?”
“Never crossed my mind,” Hardy said. “I know we’ve got to talk, but maybe someplace else, huh?”
Hands in his pockets, the lieutenant took in the gloom around them. The body was on its gurney and the tow truck started its mechanical cranking, getting ready to lift Canetta’s car and take it to the police lot.
Hunching his shoulders, Glitsky gave a last shudder against the cold. “Good call,” he said.
In one of his brothers’ old rooms down the hall that led off the back of the kitchen, Orel Glitsky was sprawled on the floor, watching television and doing homework. Rita was with him, reading, her Spanish radio station playing softly on the end table next to where she sat on the sofa.
Hardy at his heels, Glitsky checked in with his household—letting them know that he was home now, sorry he’d been out most of the day, glad to see everybody was doing fine. Rita looked up from her book and told him she’d heated up some tortilla pie for a snack and it was probably still warm in the oven. Glitsky got Orel’s attention finally, and asked his son how his day had gone. He got a nod, though his boy’s eyes never left the TV. “Okay.”
“What time did your grandfather go home?”
A shrug. “I don’t know.”
“A little after twelve,” Rita said. “When I get here.”
No one was trying to hide any displeasure about Glitsky’s working on a Sunday after having dumped Orel on his grandfather the day before.
“So . . . anything neat happen today? You guys do anything fun?”
Rita just looked at him.
“Orel?”
The boy shrugged. “Not much.”
Glitsky stood a moment longer in the doorway, then sighed heavily and headed back down the hallway. “So glad I asked,” he muttered.
It was only a few steps to the kitchen, where they closed the door behind them against the competing sounds. Glitsky pulled around a chair and straddled it backward. “They think I want to be gone working all weekend? They think going to murder scenes is my idea of a good time?”
Hardy let him stew, since there was no answer anyway. Sometimes people had to work—a bitch, but there it was. His kids hadn’t understood that he couldn’t go trick-or-treating last night. Now it was Abe’s turn to deal with it.
He grabbed a kitchen towel, opened the oven, and pulled out the flat pan that held the remains of the pie. Hardy grabbed plates from a cupboard, put them down on the table, and started serving himself.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how they can sit there and read and study and listen to music and watch TV all at once. I can’t think with all that other noise going on.”
Glitsky turned his chair around the normal way, pulled the pan over. “That’s because you’re over forty. Nowadays they teach that stuff in school. Multitasking. Makes you a better person, more productive.” He spooned out some food onto his plate, pushed it around a little. “It’s just one of the reasons the world is so much better now than it was when we were kids.” He forked a bite and popped it. “So. You want to just start or would you prefer that I ask questions?”
Dark slammed down like a trapdoor.
An hour later, Hardy was in the tramped-down mud behind his house. Out here closer to the ocean, a fine drizzle had started to condense out of the fog. In the brisk, chill wind, he was impressed by how much the moisture added to the already substantial pleasures of the evening.
Up the backyard stairway, still outside, he turned his key in the back door and, somewhat to his surprise, it opened. He fully expected that the fire department’s security team would have provided their own locks for the various entrances, but though they’d tightly boarded up the front and posted the property with NO TRESPASSING signs, that seemed to be the extent of it.
So he was inside. From the lower shelf on his workbench, he grabbed a flashlight and passed on into his kitchen. He didn’t need the flashlight yet—the distances and angles were all second nature. He checked around— there was no dial tone on the wall telephone, no light in the refrigerator when he pulled it open. The neatly folded heavy brown paper shopping bags were where they always were, in the drawer at the bottom of the pantry. He grabbed one off the top.
In his bedroom, he risked a short beam. His tropical fish—seventeen of them, a collection that he’d nurtured through various permutations over twenty years—were all belly-up on the surface of his aquarium.
A muscle worked in his jaw. He turned off the flashlight and crossed the room. The answering machine was on a small reading table. He unplugged it from the wall, disconnected the telephone jack and placed it in the bottom of the paper bag on a corner of the bed. Next was his dresser—he threw in underwear and a couple of sweaters on top of the answering machine. In his closet, he gathered up a heavy jacket, a business suit, some shirts, all of them smelling of smoke. A complete change of clothes for his wife, too. For when he got her out.
Something in him wished he
didn’t need to do it, but he knew he had to. Leaving everything on the bed, he walked back up through the kitchen into the burned-out front of the house and stood in the middle of what used to be his dining room.
He’d once represented a plaintiff who had suffered severe burns in an industrial accident. He remembered preparing the expert he was going to put on, who’d defined the various degrees of burn—first, a sunburn; second, a blister; or the worst, third-degree burns, causing irreparable loss of skin and terrible disfigurement. Any serious percentage of third-degree burns over the body was most often fatal.
But what he felt now seemed even worse—a fourth-degree burn to the core of him, one that charred the edges of his soul.
After a time he moved again—back through the kitchen, to the bedroom for the things he’d left there. He picked up the bag by its paper handles, the clothes by their hangers. At his workbench, he carefully replaced the flashlight, then let himself back out into the awful, awful night.
Hardy left his bag of clothes in the car, but brought the answering machine up to his office, where he plugged it in and found that Al Valens was, at least, not lying all the time. He was the first message—just what he’d said.
The second one stunned him.
No name, but immediately recognizable. “I’m sorry to have moved out of the hotel. I hope I haven’t caused you too much inconvenience.”
Hardy almost laughed out loud—not too much inconvenience indeed.
“The only answer is that I’ve got to be very cautious. I know you will understand. If you could get to me so easily, so could the police. They might have been following you the next time you came down. I don’t know. The point is, I felt like I had to relocate. But I wanted you to know I’m still nearby and appreciate what you’re doing, but very nervous about you coming to me. I hope you’re having some luck. Thanks.”
“Sure, no problem,” Hardy said, then punched at the answering machine’s button, sat back in his chair, and tried to gather some thoughts.
But it was all a jumble. Just today his house had been burned, Canetta had been killed. He’d been running since first light and had one day left to discover any useful truth. He glanced up at his dartboard on the wall around his desk. He didn’t remember throwing them, but his three custom-made darts were stuck haphazardly around the board.
Nothing but the Truth Page 28
