Nothing but the Truth

by John Lescroart

  Washington nodded at her, looked around the table, came to rest on the young man near the far end. “You’re Randall,” he said, pointing a thick finger.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How old are you, son?”

  Randall bridled slightly at the condescension, but what could he do? “Thirty-three, sir.”

  “You married? Children?”

  “No. Neither.”

  Washington had him on the hot seat and seemed content to let him cook a minute. He slurped some more coffee. “Somebody pass those rolls down here, will you? Thanks.” He randomly grabbed from the pile, took a bite, chewed. “You know why we’re all here.” He wasn’t asking.

  Randall swallowed drily. “The Frannie Hardy matter, I believe.”

  “That’s correct.”

  At this formal corroboration of the reason that this meeting had been called, Marian Braun spoke up. “Excuse me, Richard, but that being the situation, I can’t be here. I can’t discuss a case that’s before my court.” She was already starting to get up.

  But the mayor wasn’t impressed. “Why don’t you stick around anyway, Marian, in case the second half of this conversation concerns the court budget for next year? Maybe that will be worthy of your attention.” He directed a fierce glare at her, and eventually she yielded to it and settled herself back in her chair.

  Richard Washington took another deep draft of coffee, carefully replaced the cup in its china saucer. The silence was perfect.

  The rage came from nowhere, which made it all the more effective. Suddenly the mayor slapped the flat of his palm on the table with enormous force. China rattled and some coffee spilled. Everyone jumped. “Do you have any idea the amount of trouble you’ve caused with this, Mr. Randall?” he exploded. “Any idea?”

  It took a split second for the ever quick-witted Randall to recover. “It was part of my investigation into—”

  Washington interrupted again. “You think we’re all operating in a vacuum? Well, let me help you out—”

  Pratt interrupted. “With respect, sir . . .”

  The mayor didn’t seem any too happy with the DA, either. He faced her and snapped. “What, Sharron?”

  “The issue isn’t that it’s caused some political trouble. The issue is legal. Mr. Randall did the right thing.”

  Washington conjured with that for a moment. His voice with its normal inflection was almost more frightening. “I absolutely reject that,” he said. “What he did— what Marian did, too, for that matter—might not be illegal, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was right.”

  Pratt retained the serenity that only knowing that you are right can provide. “The woman refused to cooperate with the grand jury, Richard. She was belligerent and disrespectful.”

  “She was a housewife worried about picking up her children. That’s what the media seems to have settled on, that’s what Jeff Elliot wrote about yesterday. And now her house has been burned. Did any of you happen to notice that?”

  “That’s irrelevant,” Pratt responded. “What’s your point, Richard?”

  “My point is that I’m taking a tremendous amount of flack for allowing this travesty to continue in my city. Mr. Randall, in his inexperience, overreacted. Folks, I want the woman released. Today.”

  A collective gasp, then silence fell around the table.

  “I can’t do that, Richard.” Braun was firm. “The first contempt citation expires tonight, and she has to serve that out. Mr. Randall here can call her before the grand jury first thing tomorrow morning, at which point her continued incarceration will be up to her if she decides to talk or Mr. Randall if she decides not to.”

  The mayor made no effort to hide his sarcasm. “Thank you, Your Honor, but I want it clear that holding innocent citizens in jail out of personal pique doesn’t sit well with me.”

  Randall finally found his voice again. “The woman is not innocent, Your Honor. She knows something.”

  “She knows something.” Washington nodded, his mouth twitching at the corners. “I’m glad you brought that up, Mr. Randall. Chief Rigby,” he said, whirling, “has anyone been charged or indicted in the murder of Bree Beaumont to date?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So this Hardy woman knows something about somebody, but we don’t know what and we don’t know if it’s got anything to do with that murder?”

  No one answered. Washington glared around the table. “And yet she sits in jail.” He shook his mane of hair in disgust. “I called this meeting to acquaint all of you with my very strong feelings about this matter. I’m going to air those feelings at this morning’s press conference, and I wanted to do all of you the courtesy of a heads-up. No one has more respect than I do, Marian—and you, too, Sharron—for the judicial process. But I’m hard-pressed to believe that this woman knowingly holds the key to a murder. So this is mere pettiness.” He pointed again at Randall. “And, son, for you, this is what we call overweening ambition. It’s not an admirable quality. If you hadn’t tried to end-run the police department, we wouldn’t be here now. Chief Rigby?”

  “Yes, sir.” From his expression, he knew what was coming. The chief of police was the pawn of the mayor, appointed by him, accountable to him. And Rigby had just found himself on the wrong side of the fence.

  “Apparently you’ve been trying to make kissy-face with Ms. Pratt so that her fear and loathing of the police would not too greatly interfere with the day-to-day workings of the department. I even applaud your intentions. But we’ve got a homicide department and it’s not run by Mr. Struler here, or by Ms. Pratt. If you don’t like Glitsky, get a new head of homicide. But the police department investigates murders and you back up your people. Clear?”

  It was to Rigby. But Washington wasn’t through yet. “Sharron, Marian. You’re both elected officials. I’m just a layman in matters of the law, but this comes across as serious arrogance and the public seems to have a bad reaction to that particular trait. You might want to think about that.”

  Hardy opened his eyes and for the second time in as many days had to take a minute to figure out where he was.

  Down a floor, in the lobby of the Freeman Building, he put on a pot of coffee, then went in for a shower. In ten minutes, he was back in his office, dressed in his smoky clothes, drinking coffee from an oversized mug.

  The fog remained. He put in a call to Erin, told her where he was, spoke to the kids, who were polite and even solicitous. Was he all right? They missed him. He and Mom were coming to stay with them so they’d all be together at Grandma and Grandpa’s in two days, right? They really, really, really missed him and Frannie.

  He believed them.

  After he hung up, he went back to the couch and sat. His brief from the night before was ready to submit for typing downstairs, and he left it with the early morning staff at word processing, then took the stairs two at a time back to the work that waited for him.

  The xeroxed pages of Griffin’s notebook.

  Griffin had been working on a number of homicides at the time of his death. Snatches from each of them were scattered on each page—names, dates, addresses. Arrows for connections. Exclamation points. Phone numbers.

  In his previous passes through the pages, whenever Hardy had run across a name that didn’t appear elsewhere in some other file on Bree Beaumont, he’d assumed it was from one of the other cases. It was tedious and inexact, but he had to eliminate based on some criterion, and this had seemed as reasonable as any.

  This morning, though, he resolved to read it all through again. Things had changed. And if Damon Kerry had a connection to Baxter Thorne that Griffin had been aware of, he wanted to know about it. Hardy hadn’t even heard of Thorne or FMC the last time he’d read the pages. Nor a lot else.

  Carl had been shot on Monday, October 5th. Bree had died on the previous Tuesday, September 29th, so he started there. At least Carl tended to enter dates with some regularity.

  It appeared that on day three of his investigation, “10 01,
” he’d slogged through the usual opening gambit of talking to people who lived in the deceased’s building. Suddenly the name O. or D. Chinn (or something in a smeared scrawl very much like it) popped up at him.

  Hardy had assumed this was an Asian witness from one of Griffin’s other cases and hadn’t considered it at all, but now, suddenly, he remembered the superintendent in Bree’s building and consulted his own notes on his yellow pad. David Glenn. D. Chinn. Close enough.

  But there wasn’t much Hardy recognized written under it. There was either a “B” or an “R,” then “805.” A time? “NCD!!!”

  Then, a new line. “Herit. TTH!!!” And a phone number.

  Those damn three exclamation points—they clearly meant something significant, but Hardy for the life of him couldn’t figure out what NCD was. TTH could only mean Tuesday Thursday, but what, in turn, was that about?

  Hardy checked his watch. Still too early, before eight o’clock, but he went to his desk and called the number next to Herit. TTH!!! anyway.

  It was a woman’s voice in a heavy Asian accent and Hardy nearly hung up, frustrated for even wasting this much time. This note must have referred to one of Griffin’s other cases after all. But Hardy heard out the recording. “Many thank you for calling Heritage Cleaners. Office hours are Monday through Friday, eight-thirty to six. Please leave message and call back.”

  “And the case breaks wide open,” Hardy muttered to himself as he hung up. “Now we know where Griffin did his laundry.” He went back to the couch, to the notebook.

  Still on 10 01, the inspector evidently spent part of the day talking to the crime scene and forensics people downtown. There were scribblings Hardy took to be about Strout, Timms, Glitsky. Then, further down, another maddening three exclamation points—“fab. wash,” “r. stains!!!”

  He shook his head, nearly getting all the way to amused at the prosaic truth. More laundry.

  By Friday, Griffin was checking alibis. Apparently he had spoken to Pierce, “JP,” and perhaps his wife, “CP.” “Time checks?” Evidently referring to Pierce’s alibi.

  The weekend intervened.

  Then on Monday, more alibi checking, this time with Kerry. And here Hardy consulted his own notes for corroboration. “SWA 1140, SD.” Southwest Airlines to San Diego around noon. That checked. But what had Kerry done before being picked up to go to the airport? Griffin’s notes didn’t give a clue.

  A few lines down the page, and apparently still under Kerry, there was another number: “902.” If it was a date, it was over a month out of sync, so Hardy assumed it must be a time. And if it was a time, it would comport very closely with the hour of Bree’s death.

  So what had Griffin discovered about Kerry’s whereabouts at nine o’clock. And why so precisely?

  It had to be a phone call, Hardy reasoned, but where were the phone records? He flipped quickly through the few pages, but was sure he would have noticed them sooner if they’d been there, and sure enough, they weren’t.

  He chewed on possibilities for a couple of minutes, then got up again and went to his desk, picked up the phone.

  “Glitsky, homicide.”

  “Hardy, bon vivant, scholar, champion of the oppress—”

  “What?” Glitsky growled.

  “I’m guessing Kerry called Bree or vice versa on the morning she was killed.”

  “Great minds.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kerry’s got both a residence and a cell phone. I checked already. I got a rush call in on both sets of phone records this morning, see if maybe he didn’t sleep in late like he said he did. I’m waiting for the fax.”

  “So what about Griffin? Did any phone records turn up under that backseat?”

  “Not yet. I stopped by the garage again coming in. They barely got it cleaned out, much less catalogued.”

  “But Griffin must have gotten the phone records, right? Don’t you guys do that?”

  “I would hope so,” Glitsky said, “though I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it.”

  “So where are they?”

  “They’d be with the stuff you have if he’d filed them.”

  “Uh huh. See if you can guess whether they are.”

  Glitsky sighed. “His desk is cleaned out, Diz. It’s all somewhere. Stuff related to his cases supposedly got forwarded to the new teams.”

  “Maybe they were in one of the bags in the trunk, tagged already?”

  “Then they’d be downstairs in the evidence lockup.” Another sigh. “You think there’s some possible phone connection to Kerry?”

  “It’d be sweet if there was.” Hardy hesitated. “I’m really starting to like the good candidate.”

  “I told you last night, I might even vote for him.”

  “That’s not how I meant ‘like.’ ”

  “No,” Glitsky said. “I know what you meant.”

  After he hung up, Hardy went back to his couch and his notes. He had come now to the last full day of Griffin’s life, and under Sunday found what he’d been hoping for: “Box T., Embarc.2, 10/5, 830. Burn. or Bwn. $!! — ??”

  He had earlier assumed that this might be a reference to a post office box in one of the high-rises along the Embarcadero. Now he saw it in a different light. It wasn’t Box T. It was Bax T.

  Baxter Thorne. As he read it now, Hardy realized that the note referred to an eight-thirty a.m. meeting the next day at Thorne’s Embarcadero office.

  Hardy stared at the cryptic note. Here, finally, was Thorne connected to Bree in Griffin’s investigation. Had the inspector in fact gone to question Thorne on the morning of his death? Had they then taken a little drive?

  Suddenly a detail kicked in. He bolted upright and checked his watch. It had at last gotten to eight o’clock, a little after. Jeff Elliot had told him he was setting up a meeting with Thorne first thing this morning, and at it he planned to bait-and-switch him into a corner.

  Half joking, Hardy had warned Jeff to make sure he didn’t go alone. Now there was no joke about it.

  He called Jeff’s home and got no response. At the reporter’s personal number at the Chronicle, he left a message, then checked the general switchboard. No. Mr. Elliot hadn’t come in yet. Would he care to leave a message?

  In a flash, Hardy was grabbing his jacket. At the office door, he stopped still, then turned and went back to his desk.

  In thirty seconds, armed, he was flying down the stairs, pausing for a second at the reception desk. “Is David in yet?”

  Phyllis replied in her usual icy fashion. “Not as yet. I haven’t heard from him at all this morning.”

  “Is he at court?”

  The gimlet eyes fixed on him. “I wouldn’t know, Mr. Hardy. I haven’t heard from him.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Hardy thought it was kind of sad that someday he knew he was going to kill Phyllis. “I think you said that.”

  “Twice.”

  “Right.” He couldn’t help himself. “So I guess he’s not in?”

  Although it was fifteen or twenty blocks from his office to the Embarcadero, there was no point in trying to drive. Between the morning traffic and parking when he arrived, it would take longer than walking.

  So Hardy was breathing hard from the forced march. In spite of that, he was also chilled from the fog and painfully aware of a gnawing in his stomach—he hadn’t eaten since midafternoon yesterday, those tasty few bites of lukewarm tortilla pie at Glitsky’s.

  The directory listed the Fuels Management Consortium on the twenty-second floor and the elevator had him there in seconds. The office was anything but threatening. Lots of glass—they were floating in the clouds up here. Modern furniture, partitioned workstations, piped New Age music. The hum and bustle of a busy workplace.

  “Can I help you?” The receptionist was a very young woman, perhaps even a teenager, with a warm smile.

  Hardy returned it, fantasizing about what it would be like to have a cheerful presence, as opposed to Phyllis, greeting visitors to one�
�s workplace. “Is Mr. Thorne available?”

  “I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting right now. I can take your name, though. Did you have an appointment?”

  “No, no appointment. Can you tell me, is he by any chance with Jeff Elliot? A Chronicle reporter?”

  She looked down, biting her lip, clearly wanting to do the right thing, not knowing if she should give out this information. Hardy smiled at her, told her his name and spelled it out. “I’m a friend of Mr. Elliot’s. I’m sure he’d like to know I’m here.”

  The streets on the walk over had been cold with the fog-laden wind, but Baxter Thorne’s large corner office was positively arctic. The executive director of FMC wasn’t a big man by any means, and seemed a shrunken, pugnacious, malevolent gnome behind the cluttered expanse of his desk.

  In his wheelchair, Jeff Elliot simply turned his head when Hardy was announced. Thorne nodded at the nice receptionist and she withdrew silently, closing the door behind her. No pleasantries of any kind were exchanged.

  From the feel of things, the bait had been taken and the switch had just begun. “As a courtesy, Mr. Elliot, although I’m beginning to wonder why I would want to extend one, I’ve admitted your acquaintance. Now what?”

  “You don’t know Mr. Hardy?”

  Thorne threw a glance Hardy’s way, came back to Elliot. “I’ve never seen him in my life.” Hardy was taken aback by the voice—deep, quiet, cultured.

  Elliot was shaking his head. “That’s not what I asked. I asked if you knew Mr. Hardy.”

  “Should I?”

  “You seem unable to answer the question, Mr. Thorne. I wonder why that is.”

  Hardy, believing in his heart that Thorne was in some way behind the arson of his home, had to fight the urge to withdraw his weapon and end the cat-and-mouse right here. But he thought he’d let Jeff play the hand awhile first. At the very least, he already seemed to have gotten under Thorne’s skin.

  The gnome cast a gaze out toward the side window, where the fog was swirling past. To Hardy, it felt for a moment as though they were in an airplane. The wind moaned—keened really—just at the threshold of sound.

  Thorne looked back at Elliot. “I don’t know Mr. Hardy.”