Nothing but the Truth

by John Lescroart

  Pierce looked down, set his lips, looked back up. Couldn’t find his voice. Nor, apparently, could his attorney.

  Hardy kept up his onslaught. “Would you please identify this document, Mr. Pierce? For the court?”

  Pierce seemed not to hear. Eventually he sighed, seemingly unable to take his eyes off the document, reading the words silently over to himself.

  Hardy: “It’s a letter written by you to Bree Beaumont, isn’t it?”

  More silence.

  “Would you characterize the document as a love letter?”

  Pierce did not answer.

  “Mr. Pierce, would you like me to read the first couple of lines to the court? Contrary to your earlier testimony, isn’t it a fact you were having an affair with her?”

  By now, Wright was whispering furiously to his client, who seemed not to hear.

  Hardy had to give it to him. The gears shifted quickly and smoothly. Damning revelation went to damage control in the blink of an eye. Pierce flipped a hand, trying and failing to make the gesture appear casual. “It was over long ago.”

  “How long ago? A year? Five years?”

  “Yes. Somewhere in there.”

  Wright was beside himself with frustration and anger. “Your Honor, let the record reflect that anything Mr. Pierce says is against my advice.”

  But Pierce had decided on his own approach. He broke a cold smile. “It was unimportant. A dalliance that I regret.” He turned again to the judge. “Out of respect for my wife, Your Honor, I tried to keep this from coming out in public. It was a mistake.”

  But if he thought he’d get some sympathy from Braun, he was barking up the wrong tree. “Another mistake is perjury in my courtroom,” she said coldly.

  Hardy kept up the press. “Mr. Pierce, I ask you again. When did this affair end?”

  Perhaps unnerved by Marian Braun’s negative reaction, Pierce took a moment to reply. “I said I didn’t know.”

  “Actually, that’s not what you said,” Hardy replied. “You said it was something like one or five years. Would you like the court recorder to read back your earlier answer?”

  “No, that’s not necessary.” He appeared to be trying to recall, to cooperate. “I don’t know when we broke it off. Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly? Isn’t it true, Mr. Pierce, that your affair with Bree Beaumont ended only six months ago, about the same time she quit her job with Caloco?”

  “No, it was longer ago than that.”

  “But you don’t remember when?” he asked. “Exactly?”

  “No.” Pierce was striving to hold his ground. “Just because I wanted to keep an affair private does not mean I killed her.”

  “No,” Hardy agreed. “No, it doesn’t, but I haven’t asked if you killed her. Did you kill Bree Beaumont, Mr. Pierce?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “But you did lie, under oath, about your relationship with her, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes, I suppose I did. But I told you—”

  “Mr. Pierce, did you also lie about your relationship with Sergeant Canetta?”

  A nerve started to twitch slightly to the side of Pierce’s mouth. “I’ve told you. I had no relationship with Sergeant Canetta.”

  “Did you not ask Sergeant Canetta to report to you on Bree Beaumont’s comings and goings after she broke off her relationship with you?”

  “No, I didn’t do that.”

  “And did you not pay him for this service?”

  Pierce’s eyes strafed the courtroom, then settled back down. “No.”

  “No,” Hardy repeated. “Mr. Pierce, did Sergeant Canettacome by your house last Saturday night, the night he was killed?”

  Again, the twitch, the recovery. “No.”

  “And did he not attempt to get more money out of you for misdirecting the investigation into Bree Beaumont’s death? Away from you?”

  “No.”

  “And did you not then invite him into your house to discuss this, and then—”

  Finally, a true rise. Pierce came forward in the box, his eyes ablaze now. “No, no, no. I didn’t do any of that. You’re making all this up to discredit me.”

  Marian Braun finally spoke up. “The witness has a point, Mr. Hardy. You’re making a lot of accusations without any show of proof.”

  Hardy sucked in a lungful of air and let it out. “I have proof, Your Honor,” he said coolly. “Mr. Pierce is holding it in his hand.”

  Pierce still held his letter to Bree and now, in the suddenly silent courtroom, he held it up again. But this betrayed the shaking in his hands, and he quickly put them down on the railing.

  Braun pulled her glasses down on her nose and glared over them. “He’s already acknowledged perjury regarding his affair with Ms. Beaumont, Mr. Hardy. But that is not murder.”

  “No, Your Honor, it isn’t. But there is evidence in the letters Mr. Pierce has identified that directly relates to Bree Beaumont’s murder.”

  Braun hesitated—if Pierce hadn’t already perjured himself, she’d have stopped this right now—but she found herself nodding. She wanted to know. “But be careful, Mr. Hardy.”

  He nodded. “If I may, Your Honor, I’d like to read to the court a portion of one of these letters.” Braun nodded.

  “I live

  Longing

  Only for you.

  Vast love

  Eternal.

  Young again

  Overcome with it all

  Untamed.”

  Hardy didn’t wait for the treacly words to have any effect. They weren’t his point. “Nearly each of these letters has a similar poem in it, Your Honor.” He handed the letter he’d just read up to the podium. “As the court will note, the first letter of each line of the poem spells another message—in this case ‘I love you.’ As Your Honor will see, this is consistent with every poem in these letters.”

  Braun turned through a couple of the pages, nodding. “All right.”

  “The letter that Mr. Pierce now holds in his hand contains another similar poem.” He came up to the witness, lifting the paper from his hands. “May I?” He read, breaking the lines.

  “Never have

  I touched or felt

  Never

  Even knew.

  Oh, the craving—

  Touching

  Wanting

  Only you.”

  Again, he didn’t pause. “Mr. Pierce, can you tell the court the significance of the phrase nine-oh-two?”

  The sweat had broken out heavily now on Pierce’s face. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No.”

  This was what Hardy wanted—to get him in a rhythm, saying “no” before he’d considered sufficiently. “Isn’t it true, Mr. Pierce,” he continued, “that nine-oh-two was the number of the apartment in Bree Beaumont’s building where you would conduct your trysts?”

  “No, I . . .”

  “And isn’t it true that you and Bree bought this place together nearly six years ago?”

  Pierce cast his eyes out to the gallery. “No. She . . .” He stopped.

  “She what, Mr. Pierce. She bought it herself?”

  “No. I don’t know that.”

  “Your Honor!” Jared Wright couldn’t stand watching his client self-destruct any longer. “This is an outrageous . . .”

  Hardy raised his voice over the interruption. “But you do know, don’t you, Mr. Pierce, that apartment nine-oh-two is two floors directly below her penthouse?”

  “No. I don’t think it’s . . .”

  But Hardy, at high volume now, couldn’t stop. “Are you saying that it’s not below her penthouse, Mr. Pierce? When you know that to be false?”

  Pierce was unable to answer.

  Hardy leaned in to Pierce and all but shouted. “Mr. Pierce, don’t you in fact know that nine-oh-two is the apartment from which she was thrown to her death?”

  “Your Honor! Please!”
r />   She banged her gavel. “Mr. Wright, sit down. Mr. Hardy!”

  Fighting to slow his momentum, to regain control, Hardy looked up at the judge. His color was high, his breathing ragged.

  Braun’s voice was stern. “I have to stop this now, Mr. Hardy. It’s gone on long enough. You’ve shown the court no evidence that puts Mr. Pierce in apartment nine-oh-two, no evidence for any of these accusations. You said you had proof and presented these letters and this poetry, but neither rises to the level of proof. Mr. Pierce hasn’t admitted the truth of anything you’ve said related to Bree Beaumont’s murder. If you have nothing stronger, I’ve got no choice but to let the witness step down.”

  Hardy took a deep breath and let it out heavily. “I do have physical evidence that places Mr. Pierce in apartment nine-oh-two, Your Honor.”

  The judge, too, had reached the end of her patience. This was clear from her tone. “If that’s true, the court needs to see it now.”

  Hardy walked briskly back to his table and reached into his briefcase, and extracted the xeroxed copy of Griffin’s note about the Movado watch that he’d picked up from Heritage Cleaners.

  Coming back before the bench, he read it aloud and then handed it up to Braun. As she was looking it over, he was talking. “Your Honor, as you see, this note refers to a specific Movado watch which Inspector Griffin took as evidence in his investigation into the death of Bree Beaumont. I am prepared to call a witness, Mr. Lee, who is in this courtroom today. Mr. Lee is the manager of a company called Heritage Cleaners, which cleans apartments in Bree Beaumont’s building. Mr. Lee will testify that this watch was found by his staff in apartment nine-oh-two of that building on the Thursday following Mrs. Beaumont’s murder.”

  Braun looked down at Hardy, across to Wright and Pierce, then out over the courtroom. “All right, but I don’t see . . .” She paused. “But where is the watch itself, Mr. Hardy? Without the watch—”

  Hardy nodded and pointed to the witness. “Mr. Pierce is wearing it right now.”

  Suddenly, finally, there was a deep silence in the room. Hardy spoke into it, almost whispering. “Mr. Pierce?”

  Pierce could not wrangle free. He knew that there was evidence of his presence all over that apartment. And though this wasn’t prima facie proof that he’d killed Bree, he knew what the police would find there once they started looking—glass of the type embedded in Bree’s hairline, evidence of the struggle that had ripped Pierce’s watch off.

  He fixed Hardy with an empty stare. “I didn’t mean—”

  Jared Wright’s voice boomed out in the courtroom. “For Christ’s sake, Jim, shut up! Don’t say another word!”

  And Braun’s gavel pounded again and again over the resulting uproar.

  Glitsky was good about it. The court bailiffs took Pierce into custody over Jared Wright’s heated objections. Then there was the bedlam of the courtroom, all of the wronged witnesses who’d been forced to waste so much of their day. Finally, the Ron Beaumont moment— apologies and thanks. Some not altogether light banter about Cassandra, now back at school.

  Waiting patiently, Glitsky accompanied Hardy, Frannie, and David Freeman as they walked through the steps, processing her out of the system. David Freeman left them to go back to work, and finally they got five minutes alone in the waiting area of the jail as the female bailiff took Frannie back to reclaim her personal effects.

  But Frannie wasn’t three seconds out of sight when Glitsky turned to Hardy. “That’s okay,” he said. “It’s not like murders are my job or anything.”

  Hardy felt bad about the timing of it, but there hadn’t been anything he could do. “I only knew this morning, Abe, and I planned to tell you all about it, but you remember we had our little discussion about if you’d known Ron and then Randall and Pratt showed up in the hallway for their moment. I figured you’d survive.”

  The lieutenant worked it around for a beat, still not thrilled, but more curious than angry. “So what was it? It wasn’t the poems.”

  “No. That was after I already knew. It wasn’t even the watch at first. It was Almond Roca.”

  Hardy explained about the bowl of candy by the door to Pierce’s home, the stomach contents of both Griffin and Canetta, the square gold wrappers in both cars. “I didn’t see it at first because of that damned Almond Joy in Griffin’s car. So I see almonds and chocolate, an Almond Joy, I know where they came from, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Except there wasn’t any coconut in Griffin’s autopsy, so he hadn’t recently eaten the Almond Joy. I checked with Strout. Just almonds and chocolate. Also almonds and chocolate with Canetta, which made me think. Canetta came by Pierce’s house to squeeze him, grabbed a couple of candies by the door, ate them just before he got himself shot.”

  “You think Pierce hit him at his own home?”

  “That’s my guess. They were alone. You’ll find something if you look, but I’m also guessing Pierce is going to tell you. Once they start confessing . . . but you know this.”

  Glitsky did know it. What he didn’t understand was why Canetta had waited so long to start blackmailing Pierce. “Why then? Why not earlier?”

  In truth, Hardy wasn’t sure. But. “My guess is that Canetta originally—and marginally, I might add—was willing to buy the idea that the killer had been Ron. When it became clear to him that it hadn’t been, from his perspective there was only one suspect left, and he happened to have deep pockets.” He shook his head sadly—Canetta might have been crooked and confused, but Hardy had liked him. “He picked the wrong guy.”

  Glitsky chewed his cheek for a while. “Griffin had the watch when he talked to Pierce after the funeral,” he said. “He showed it to him.”

  Hardy nodded. “Right. And Pierce obviously thought Griffin himself had found the watch—not the cleaning people. And if that was true, then only Griffin knew about nine-oh-two and the watch was the only evidence. So Pierce grabbed his gun—they may have struggled over it, I don’t know—but somehow Pierce won. He got ahold of it and shot Griffin. Then he took the watch.” He shook his head. “Spur of the moment, but it almost worked. Except for the Heritage note.”

  Glitsky could have gone on and on about the note that Hardy hadn’t shown him, but he realized that he’d just be whining. His friend had done what he thought he’d had to do, and nothing Glitsky said was going to change that. Or influence his future behavior, for that matter. But there was one last issue. “So Frannie never had to tell Ron’s big secret, did she?”

  A sideways glance. “Now that you mention it, I guess not.”

  “And there’s no chance you know what it was, is there?”

  “What?” Hardy pulled at his ear.

  Glitsky started to repeat the question, but Hardy held up a hand, stopping him. “I can’t hear you,” he said. “I’ve got a banana in my ear.”

  EPILOGUE

  On Friday, March 26, Governor Damon Kerry signed into law a bill outlawing the use of MTBE in California. The bill—nicknamed “Bree’s Law” by the media—was the culmination of the governor’s main legislative effort of his first three months in office, and was popularly viewed as a political and moral victory against the powers of Big Oil and special-interest lobbyists. Kerry was cleaning up the statehouse, cleaning the state’s water supply. There was already talk of a national campaign in his future.

  Al Valens saw to it that the results of Bree Beaumont’s report blasting ethanol and all other oxygenates never made it to the governor’s desk. In fact, the law’s preamble praised the EPA for mandating the use of oxygenates in reformulated gasoline. The state’s air had improved under the oxygenated formulas, and was now at its cleanest in decades. Oxygenates, such as ethanol and MTBE, had proven effective in reducing air pollutants.

  Unfortunately, the petroleum additive MTBE had been shown to be carcinogenic. Other oxygenates, notably ethanol, were available in sufficient quantity to supply the state’s needs. MTBE’s ever-increasing presence in the groundwater of
California constituted a considerable and ongoing health hazard, and from this date forward, its use would be aggressively phased out.

  Two weeks later, at the Spader Krutch Ohio share-holders’ meeting in Cincinnati, CEO Ellis Jackson proudly read aloud from the annual report, embellishing for his audience where it seemed appropriate.

  “Regarding ethanol production, I am delighted to report that the latest battle in the war between the Middle East and the Midwest has turned for the moment in our favor. The increased demand for ethanol as a gasoline additive in many states, but particularly in the huge California market, has spurred the U.S. government to continue its exemption of the federal fuel tax on ethanol. In addition, the government has guaranteed to buy every barrel of surplus corn ethanol produced in this country well into the millennium.”

  This brought a huge round of applause.

  “. . . of course has not come without its costs. The corporation’s state and federal lobbying and education efforts on behalf of the ethanol subsidies during the fiscal year, amounted to eight point six million dollars. Of course, last year was an election year. We supported political campaigns in all twenty-three states that held elections,and it is a great pleasure to report that seventy-two percent of our candidates succeeded to elective office.

  “As our political influence increases, so inevitably will our lobbying costs. But this figure pales in comparison to the forty-five million dollars profit—I repeat, this is a profit figure—generated by sales of ethanol last year in the United States. With its recent banning of MTBE, California’s use of ethanol is expected to multiply exponentially in the short term. And we are seeing similar campaigns in many other regions of the country.”

  Jackson refrained from reading the next sentences aloud. They read: “Unfortunately, the markets in California and other states still remain somewhat undersupplied because of our continued inability to provide ethanol in sufficient quantity and, without the government subsidy program, at a profitable cost. However, research on this problem is ongoing. Currently, without goverment assistance, real costs of producing ethanol—including wages, refinery costs, tractor fuel to plant and harvest the corn— average about one dollar per gallon, or roughly twice as much as gasoline. Fortunately, governmental tax credits keep us competitive, but clearly, this is an area that needs improvement.”