Nothing but the Truth

by John Lescroart

  “That is a coincidence,” Baxter Thorne was telling Glitsky, “but these little elephants are widely available. You can buy one at any quality gift store. It’s my lucky charm. I’ve carried it with me for years.”

  Another question, another simple answer. “As I have already told you, Dismas Hardy was, I believe, the name of the gentleman who came by my office this morning and made some threatening remarks.” Glitsky still hadn’t let Thorne enter the apartment proper. He sat on one of the chairs in the alcove and the lieutenant hovered above him. “Beyond that, I can’t say I know anything about him.”

  Thorne was completely unruffled, going on again, answering Glitsky’s next question in his maddeningly even voice. He even produced a reasonable facsimile of a heartfelt chuckle. “I filled my tank, Lieutenant, then I’m afraid I committed the cardinal sin of topping off. It got on my coat.”

  Glitsky was coming around to a profound appreciation of just how slick this bastard might be, when the telephone rang behind him. Batavia picked it up, listened for a moment, then held it out to Glitsky. “It’s for you. Vince.”

  Glitsky told Thorne to stay where he was and crossed to the desk. “Pierce is clean at last,” Coleman began, and went on to explain what he’d learned at Caloco—that, again, Pierce had a decent, though not perfect, alibi. Then he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Can you still hear me?”

  “Barely.”

  “That’ll have to be good enough. We got people here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, so I’m writing up this Pierce thing at my desk and guess who drops by? He just left like five ago. Ranzetti.”

  Glitsky frowned. Jerry Ranzetti was with the Office of Management and Control, a department that used to go by the name of Internal Affairs. If Ranzetti had come to homicide, he was on the scent of a bad cop, and this wasn’t good news for Glitsky. The homicide unit was small—thirteen men and one woman—and Abe felt he could personally vouch for the integrity of each one of them. “I gather it wasn’t a social call.”

  “Well, he pretends. I pretend back. Then he says, ‘Oh yeah, maybe there is something, maybe I heard something about it, maybe could tell him something.’ ”

  “Maybe,” Glitsky said. “About who?”

  Coleman paused, and the voice when it picked up again was nearly inaudible. “That’s why I called, Abe. The guy he’s sniffing around? It was you.”

  35

  “When did you know?” Ron asked.

  “I had a pretty good idea by the time I saw your bedrooms, but I really didn’t put it all together until I realized you must be having a sexual relationship with Marie. Bree’s having an affair. You’re having an affair. But somehow you were a happy couple, comfortable together? Contented? It didn’t make sense. The only thing I don’t understand is why you went to all the trouble. Why couldn’t she just have remained Aunt Bree?”

  “At the time, that option just seemed to leave us with a lot more to explain to everybody we met. Nobody questions a man and his children and his new wife. But a man, his sister, and the man’s kids? That’s different—it’s a weird setup, with a way better chance of striking somebody as funny, and we couldn’t have that. You’ve got to understand—I’m wanted for kidnapping, maybe child pornography. This is serious shit. They are on me. We had to look exactly like a normal couple. Not mostly, exactly. And for a long time, we did.”

  “Except for the affairs.”

  Ron shook his head. “Okay, we had to keep the affairs secret. But since that’s generally the nature of affairs with people who are really married, it’s worked out all right.”

  “So you and Marie. How long has that been going on?”

  “A couple of years.”

  “And she’s okay with that? She didn’t push you to get married?”

  He sat back on the couch, crossed one leg over the other. “No. To get divorced from Bree—we’ve had a few discussions about that, let me tell you. But that was before Bree died. Since then, I think she’s waiting for an appropriate time to pass. My mourning period,” he added uncomfortably. “So marriage hasn’t come up yet.”

  “Are you telling me she didn’t know about Bree?”

  “She still doesn’t. Nobody does.”

  Hardy sat back himself, giving that a minute to sink in. “The kids?”

  Ron Beaumont shook his head no. “They were two and three when we moved out here. Maybe they’d heard of Bree as their aunt but they didn’t remember. So after a while, she was just Bree, their stepmom. A far better life than what they were used to.”

  “So what about Dawn?”

  This brought Ron’s defenses up. Suddenly, he was all the way forward on the couch, by his body language ready to spring at this threat to his children, even if it was at a man with a gun. “What about her?”

  “That’s my question.”

  He stayed forward, tensed, his hands clenched in front of him. Hardy waited him out. Gradually, the words started to come. “I had never met anyone like her, even remotely like her. I was a junior at Wisconsin. I met her in the library of all places—she was working on her master’s thesis. Sociology.”

  “So she was an academic, too?”

  Ron laughed. “No. Although she was smart, I suppose. No, I know. Very smart. Too smart.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He drew in a breath and blew it out heavily. “She didn’t feel anything, or—no, that’s not precisely it—more like she decided what feelings were rationally defensible and the others she just didn’t acknowledge. She wasn’t going to live a pawn to her weaker emotions.”

  “Which ones were those?”

  “Oh, you know. The conventional ones that hold us all back, but especially women. At least according to Dawn. Love, need, compassion. Anything that stood in the way of her getting what she wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  A shrug. “Pretty simple really. The usual. Money, power, excitement.”

  Hardy almost laughed at the absurdity he was hearing. “And she was getting all this as a sociology major?”

  Ron shook his head. “No. She started as a topless dancer. By the time I met her”—he paused—“she called herself an actress.” He sighed. “When I think back on it, what drew me to her was this sense of . . . I guess I’d have to call it danger.” He fell silent again.

  “Go on,” Hardy prompted him. “Do you mean physical danger?”

  Another empty laugh. “Yeah, I suppose, even that. Or at least it seemed that way to a sheltered kid from suburban Illinois. She was four years older than me and really nothing was off-limits physically.

  “At the time, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I mean, here’s this totally unconventional free spirit in an unbelievable body and she’s in love with me and, of course, we’re both invincible, immortal. Nothing can touch us. We can mix and match with other couples, do every drug known to man, hang out in places I wouldn’t go near today.”

  He stopped, seemed again almost to ask Hardy’s permission to continue. “I look back on that now and it seems impossible, like I was another person.”

  “How long ago was all this?” Hardy asked. “Twenty years?”

  “Something like that.”

  A nod. “You were another person.”

  This seemed to soothe Ron somewhat, and he went on. “I think what I regret most is that both my parents died during this time, in the first phase when Dawn and I were together.”

  “And how long was that, that phase?”

  “Five years, maybe a little more.”

  “Did they ever know what she did?”

  “Oh no. She was a student, like me. But my dad, especially, saw through her, saw what she was. He tried to tell me, but I wasn’t ready to hear anything critical from my hopelessly unhip father. I mean, he sold insurance for a living. He was in the Rotary Club, the Holy Name Society. What in the world could he tell me?”

  “Only everything,” Hardy said seriously.

  The comment made a co
nnection. “Exactly. But I was out on the sexual frontier and he didn’t have a clue. I even thought he was jealous of me.” Again, that distinctive hollow laugh. “So of course I gave up on them, not her. And then Dad died. And then two years later, Mom.” He looked down at his hands.

  “So you were married five years?”

  “Not yet. We were free. We didn’t need the piece of paper.”

  “So what did you do? Were you an actor, too?”

  “No.” He thought for a moment. “I still don’t know why. Chicken, maybe. Screwing on film was too far for me to go. Like some part of me knew I’d outgrow all of that someday. I didn’t want any record of it.”

  “That wasn’t dumb.”

  “No. But it wasn’t something I planned either. I can’t take any credit for it, that I was this virtuous guy. It just happened.”

  “So what did you do?”

  The question seemed to embarrass him. “Not much, to tell the truth. Dawn made sporadic but pretty decent money and I had majored in finance, so I managed it. We had enough to get by, and the main thing was we didn’t want to be tied down to jobs. We had to live.”

  “So what changed?”

  “I guess I did.” Hardy didn’t want to admit it, but there was a charming, self-effacing quality to Ron Beaumont. As everyone else who knew him said, he seemed to be a great guy. “It wasn’t any increase in wisdom,” he admitted candidly, “just age. Maybe my conventional background started to catch up with me, I don’t know, but I figured we’d done the bohemian thing, it was time to move on. Frankly, the scene was getting old, not to mention us.

  “So she got pregnant. We got pregnant. Then she decided to have an abortion. We had a huge fight over it. She was going to do it anyway. And she did. And I moved out.” He sighed. “Then I think for the first time she couldn’t handle . . . the emotions. She was thirty-one years old. The biological clock was ticking pretty good. The whole thing just tore her up. She was shocked that she couldn’t rationalize some way to handle it, but she couldn’t.”

  “And you got back together?”

  He nodded. “We got married. I started working as a teller in a bank. We had Cassandra. A year later we had Max. She hated it.”

  “What?”

  “The whole thing. Babies. Crying, puking, diapers, no sleep. But mostly the boredom, being with them all day. She hated what I was doing, my job. She hated that we had no money. But you know the funny thing?”

  “What’s that?”

  Hardy recognized serenity in the man’s face. “I loved it. I loved them. It was as though somebody just flicked a switch and suddenly I saw everything differently. It made sense. This was what we were here for. Certainly it was what I was here for.”

  This was an incredibly difficult thing to hear. Ron was describing Hardy’s own feelings at the birth of his first son, Michael, who had died in infancy. That tragedy had plunged Hardy into a cold and dark void from which he thought he’d never escape.

  But nearly a decade later, the birth of Vincent had rekindled a flame that had burned brightly for several years. More recently, though, it had dimmed to where it now mostly felt to Hardy as if there was no light or heat, only ash covered by other stuff that didn’t burn at all. He wondered if under it all, the last embers had truly died and, if not, whether there was a way to coax a new flame to life. When this was over, he promised himself, he was going to try.

  “So what happened next?” Hardy asked.

  “About what you’d expect up to a point,” Ron replied. “Fights, more fights, still more fights. She wanted to go back to work and we fought about that.”

  “Doing what she’d been doing?”

  He shrugged. “She said it was all she knew. I told her to learn something else, she was a mother now, think of the kids. Did she want them growing up in that environment?”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said there was nothing wrong with that environment. It paid well and provided a valuable social service.” He rolled his eyes in frustration. “I was being inconsistent. I was becoming too conservative. I was a hypocrite. You name it, I was it.”

  “So she went back to it?”

  “Not right away. Not for a while.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’d like to believe that it was my strength of will.” A dry chuckle. “I didn’t give in. But she really couldn’t stand being at home, and I wasn’t putting the kids in full-time day care, so we switched. Big mistake on my part, as it turned out.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Because she was then the good working mother, and I was the nearly unemployable dad. The courts like mothers best anyway for custody, and when the dad doesn’t have a real career . . .” He shrugged. “He’s dead meat.”

  “So she went to work?” Hardy had to know what had happened.

  Ron nodded. “Some office job, which of course was incredibly boring and didn’t pay anything like she was used to. She wanted out, but I kept wanting to make the family thing work.” He sighed. “Anyway, we made it a couple more years with me not working—bad, bad mistake—but finally I had to get another job, too.” Ron’s eyes grew hard. He was sitting on the front inch of the couch again, his hands clenched so hard the knuckles were white. “Which is when,” he said, “she started selling the kids.”

  Marie and the children finally arrived back at the duplex, which, truth to tell, was a great relief to Hardy. Belief in Ron Beaumont and his idealistic, over-the-top, melodramatic, perhaps heroic story had grown in him like a tumor over the past days. To have it revealed now as malignant just when he’d come to accept it as benign would have seemed a joke almost too cruel to endure.

  They spent a few moments explaining Hardy’s presence and involvement to a skeptical Marie. But Ron and the kids—Cassandra particularly—sold her. Hardy was on their side. He could be trusted absolutely. He was Cassandra’s hero. Clearly, she was thrilled to see him again, and so glad it was she who’d finally convinced him to help them. He told her he’d made a lot of progress. He’d give her a final report tomorrow. She loved that.

  Otherwise, they were the well-mannered children they’d been at the hotel, although Hardy was delighted when Ron had to tell them to stop bickering over whose turn it was to get to choose the video. They were regular kids, after all. Much like his own. It continued to be a relief.

  Marie—a handsome, physically confident yet soft-spoken woman in her late twenties—put on a brave front, but Ron’s situation with the children here was precarious enough without the added bonus of a stranger. Even if that stranger was presented as their savior.

  But after the kids had retired to the television, Ron and Marie unpacked the groceries with the practiced efficiency of a long-term couple. When they’d finished, Marie broke out a beer for each of the men and said she’d be with the children if they needed her.

  Hardy stopped her. His tone was relaxed, but he wasn’t fooling anybody. “So have you guys been here all weekend?”

  Marie looked to Ron. “Except just now.”

  “But yesterday? The day before?”

  “What is this?” Ron asked. Hardy backed him off with a palm.

  “Marie? Were all of you here all weekend?”

  She met his gaze frankly. “Yes. Ron got here midday Saturday and we all got settled. Then Sunday you remember was so bad, the weather. We just stayed inside and played games and watched videos.”

  “What about Saturday night?”

  “What about it? Did we go out? Why would we go out?”

  “Halloween,” he said.

  She sighed heavily, threw a quick glance at Ron. “We tried to make it up to them here, bobbed for apples, let them watch scary stuff on TV.”

  Ron amplified. “And it gave Max night terrors. We were up half the night.”

  Marie crossed her arms, impatient with Hardy’s cross-examination. “Ron tells me tomorrow he’ll be able to go home. We’ve kind of been making a game out of this. Is that what you wanted to know?�
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  “Exactly,” Hardy said.

  Marie nodded, the worry back on her face. She spoke to Ron. “If you need anything, just yell, all right?” She closed the door to the kitchen on her way out, telling Hardy it was nice to have met him.

  He didn’t completely believe her.

  Although he did tend to believe what she’d said about Saturday night. And if Ron had been here with her, he hadn’t been out shooting Phil Canetta.

  But the questions had ruffled Ron’s feathers. “What was all that about?”

  Hardy was matter-of-fact. “That was about proving you didn’t kill Bree, which is an issue to more people than you’d like to believe. By the way, do you now or have you ever owned a Movado watch? You know, the museum timepiece, little dot at twelve o’clock?”

  Ron was getting sick to death of all the questions. “By the way, isn’t this getting a bit much?” Hardy didn’t respond, waiting him out, wearing him down. “No,” he answered finally.

  “Did Inspector Griffin ever ask you the same thing? About a Movado watch?”

  “No. Why?”

  “No reason,” Hardy said. “Now, the day of Bree’s funeral—tell me about that.”

  “Jesus Christ, I don’t see . . .”

  “Ron.” Hardy was firm. “Humor me.”

  Frustration showed in his face, but resolve must have shown more clearly in Hardy’s. “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know what you did, what the kids did, where you were.”

  For Hardy, it was a fundamental recital. At eight o’clock, Ron and Father Bernardin had hosted a breakfast at the St. Catherine’s rectory for the pallbearers—four of the other soccer dads—and he’d of course kept the children out of school so that they could be with him. The funeral mass had been at ten. At around eleven-fifteen, accompanied by Marie, the children, the priest, the pall-bearers and a couple of other acquaintances from Ron and Bree’s limited social circle, he drove down to Colma, where she was buried.

  Both Kerry and Pierce had been to the funeral. Neither had attended the burial.

  There was a short graveside service, after which Ron took Marie, Bernardin, and the kids to lunch at the Cliff House. He dropped Max and Cassandra back at Merryvale at around two, about the time Carl Griffin’s body was discovered.