The Keeper

by John Lescroart

  “I shouldn’t let you in here,” she said, but with a sigh, she took a step backward and pulled the door all the way open. When he came in, she closed it behind him, then led the way up the stairs and into the kitchen, where he pulled his familiar stool over to the bar and sat. She boosted herself onto the counter, feet crossed at the ankles, and gave him a searching look. “I . . .” she began. “I am so, so sorry.”

  He nodded. “It’s the worst.”

  “How are the kids?”

  “Ruth’s with them for the time being. Will doesn’t have any idea, but Ellen . . . I think she’s starting to get it.”

  “She’s a smart kid.”

  “Yeah. Not always the advantage you think it might be.”

  “No. Probably not.” She lowered her eyes, then raised them and met his gaze. “How are you holding up?”

  “Pretty much not. It’s all so surreal.” He touched her cheek. “Thank you for saying you’d see me.”

  “How could I not?”

  “I could come up with lots of reasons, all of them good.”

  “None would be good enough.”

  He hesitated. “You know that the cops think she’s dead and that I killed her.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  He shrugged. “They don’t think so.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “That’s good. Because I didn’t.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  Hal blew out heavily. “I can’t tell you how good it is to hear you say that. When I didn’t hear from you . . .”

  “I didn’t think, under the circumstances, that my calling you would be the best idea.”

  He held up a hand. “I get it. I really shouldn’t have expected you to call. Not after the way it ended with us. But—”

  “But it didn’t end,” she said. “It’s nowhere near over.” She slid off the counter and put her arms around him. “You don’t have to say anything, babe. You don’t have to make any decisions about me. I’m always going to be there for you, if that’s what you want. You know that, I hope.”

  He leaned in to her. “I do know that. But right now . . .”

  “Of course,” she said. “No pressure.” She gave him a quick kiss on the lips. “I still love you, you know.”

  He nodded. “I’m in bad shape. I don’t know what’s happening. And I don’t know when I’m going to start knowing.”

  “In your situation, that would be normal, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Normal? I can’t imagine normal ever again.”

  “That’s normal, too,” she said.

  “Okay.” He took a breath. “I’m going to believe you.” After hesitating, he said, “You know, it’s not impossible that some Homicide inspectors are going to want to talk to you. About you and me.”

  “How would they ever have heard about you and me?”

  “They’ll be talking to Katie’s friends. Her brother, Daniel. You’ll probably get mentioned by somebody.” He shifted on his stool, and his eyes met hers. “It would probably be better if they didn’t know anything that happened with us.”

  “You want me to lie to the police?”

  “Not necessarily lie. Maybe omit. They’re going to be looking for a motive, and if they knew that you and I had a thing going on . . .”

  Patti flared. “It wasn’t a thing, Hal. I was in love with you. I’m still in love with you. And you still love me.”

  Hal’s eyes bored in on a spot on the wall over her shoulder. He let out another breath. “All right.”

  “All right, what? Yes? No? What?”

  He held up a hand. “The fact is, I was getting back with Katie. I’d made that commitment. I wasn’t planning to leave Katie to be with you. Maybe I should have been, but I wasn’t. That is the real fundamental truth. And if these inspectors come to realize what we had, you and me, they’re going to see a reason why I might have wanted Katie out of the way. So it would be better if they didn’t know.”

  Patti sat for a moment in silence. “You know,” she said, “if they really decide they’re going to look, there’s no way they won’t find out.”

  “Maybe, but not if—”

  She shook her head. “Hal. Think about it. Phone records, restaurant receipts, snoopy neighbors. Things like this always come out, and then everybody looks worse for lying about it to start with. We should tell them what we had and tell them when it ended and stand firm together.”

  Hal brought his hands up to his temples, over his forehead, back down to the bar. “The minute I become the unfaithful husband, to the cops and to the world, I’m done. Nothing else is going to matter. Don’t you see that?”

  “The unfaithful husband is what you are, Hal. That’s also a fundamental truth. And if I deny it, then when it comes out, and it will, we’re both liars, aren’t we? And that makes both of us look guilty, too. Like I was in with you somehow. Like we planned something. It’s better to tell them up front and just live with it.”

  16

  GLITSKY SAT ON the couch in Hal’s living room while Hal paced back and forth. “I told her she shouldn’t say boo about it to the Homicide guys, and I probably shouldn’t be telling you about it, either,” Hal said.

  “No,” Glitsky replied. “Telling me is a good thing.”

  After the client had called and invited him down to his house to talk, Glitsky had beelined out to his place on Stanyan. The stepmother and her son were out grocery shopping; the kids were both napping. It was an ideal moment for confessions, and Hal had just dropped the whopper about him and Patti.

  “How long did this affair last?” Glitsky asked.

  “Five months or so.”

  “And when did it end?”

  “Three weeks ago.”

  Glitsky grimaced. “Weeks?”

  “I know,” Hal said. “Terrible timing.”

  “Maybe better than if it was still going on,” Abe replied. “Did Katie know?”

  “No. I don’t think so, anyway. But she might have suspected. I just don’t know.” Hal made a face. “For years, Patti was her best friend. I know it sounds awful. I promise, it wasn’t like we planned it.”

  Glitsky shrugged. “It is what it is, Hal. It’s not my job to judge you, but Patti was right. It is better to know everything we’re dealing with. And we’re going to be dealing with this, trust me.” He chewed at the inside of his cheek. “Are you sure Katie didn’t know? Could she have found out?”

  “Why?”

  “It occurs to me that if she was feeling betrayed by her husband and her best friend, there’s another way she could have disappeared.”

  Hal worked through the permutations, finally getting to it. “I don’t . . .” he began, then, “You’re saying she might have killed herself.”

  Glitsky nodded. “Call a cab and take it out someplace close to the Golden Gate. Walk halfway across. Most jumpers, no one ever sees them again.”

  Hal brought his hand up to his face. “Christ. I never thought . . .”

  “Was she the kind of person who might have done that?”

  Hal didn’t have to ponder long. “No. She wouldn’t have left the kids. I keep coming back to that. She was a fanatically protective mom. Say whatever else you will about her, the kids were everything. Besides, she left her purse, so how could she have paid for a cab?”

  “Cash still works,” Glitsky said. “Here to the bridge is under twenty bucks. I’m saying it’s someplace we can check that I don’t think anybody’s looked into. But this theory is premised on the idea that Katie knew about you and Patti. And you say she didn’t?”

  “All I can tell you is that there was no sign if she did. She never accused me of anything. We never fought about it. Although our personal life had gotten pretty bleak.”

  “You mean sexually?”

  Hal nodded. “It’
d been probably a month, maybe more.”

  “So a little before you and Patti called it off?”

  Clearly, this wasn’t something Hal wanted to discuss. “Something like that,” he said. “I didn’t keep track, exactly. But I didn’t think it would be forever. I thought we’d get back to the way we were. She was just distant or taken up with the kids most of the time, and I was feeling guilty and didn’t want to push her.”

  “This was when you and Patti were calling it off?”

  “Somewhere in there, yes.”

  Glitsky got to his feet and walked over to the window, where he cracked his back, stretched, and turned around. “This is the second time I’ve heard you talk about how much Katie protects the kids. She wouldn’t get a babysitter, right? Not even Ruth, who lives a half a mile away?”

  “She has a problem with Ruth, but it’s not only Ruth. She has a problem with everybody. She’s the classic gatekeeper. You know the term?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, she’s that in spades. She is convinced nobody else can do the job she’s doing with the kids.”

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  “It’s a little much, if you want my opinion. Not to criticize her, but it’s not her most endearing quality. I can’t do anything. I mean, change a diaper, comb hair, put on clothes, make the beds a certain way. Fold the goddamn towels. Forget it. She did it all. You know why? Because I couldn’t do it right.” Hal looked over at Glitsky. “It pissed me off, to tell you the truth. Not that it’s any excuse, but it’s one of the things that got me together with Patti.”

  “How was that?”

  “Patti had been over a few days in a row—which used to be pretty common for us—and Katie wanted the kids down by seven exactly, so we could have an ‘adult’ dinner later. We all went in to help with the bedtime ritual, you know? Getting pajamas on and reading a story and then a lullaby and all that madness. Anyway, Patti and I were getting a little goofy, and I guess we started doing things out of order—out of order!—whatever that meant, and Katie kicked us both out to the kitchen while she calmed the kids down. She was really a bitch about it.

  “Patti and I poured some wine, and we were laughing at how kind of crazy all of it was, and next thing you know, Katie comes storming out of the kids’ room. We’re keeping them up, for Christ’s sake! She told us to find our own dinner somewhere if we were having such a good time and couldn’t keep quiet enough to let the babies sleep.” He shook his head at the memory. “So we went out. Then we went over to Patti’s.”

  “Maybe you don’t want to tell the Homicide people that story,” Glitsky said.

  “Katie was confused and messed up,” Hal said, “but I loved her. I thought we could work it out. I wanted to for the sake of the kids, if nothing else. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s how I felt. It killed me that Patti and I had started up, and while it killed me to break up with her, Katie and I used to be great together, and I thought maybe we could be again.”

  “But you wouldn’t go to counseling with her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Hal gave Glitsky a cop-to-cop look. “You ever go to counseling?”

  “No.”

  “You think you would?”

  “What I’d do isn’t the issue. You admit you and Katie were having troubles. She wanted you to go with her. You were involved with another woman. Under those circumstances, you might have thought it was worth a try.”

  Hal shrugged. “I’m not a counseling kind of guy. Besides, if I’m in counseling, first thing I’ll have to do is tell Katie about Patti, and that is simply not happening. That would have been the end of us, and I didn’t want that. Besides, I know what Katie’s basic problem is.”

  “You do? What’s that?”

  “The whole stay-at-home-mom thing.”

  “What thing is that?”

  “She was raised to believe that she could have it all. Great career, lots of money, motherhood, perfect kids, you name it. When she got out of school, she started her career and was great at it. By the time I met her, she was making way more than I was with the sheriff, and she thought she’d keep that up forever. We got married and saved our money and bought this house, and for the first couple of years, everything was easy and fun and we were really happy. We had friends and we went to restaurants and clubs and lived like royalty. It was great.

  “Then we had Ellen, and we were both blown away by how much time she took and how much work she was. Still, Katie went back to her job, like she’d planned. We got a nanny who basically cost my entire salary, but we were all right, both money-wise and together. Then Will came along, and everything changed.”

  “What happened?”

  “The main thing is Katie decided she had to quit working. She thought that it wasn’t fair to be raising kids without at least one of the parents at home. I told her if that was the case, it should be me, since I made so much less. We wouldn’t miss my salary as much as we’d miss hers. But she wouldn’t do that. She was going to stay home and be there for the kids, and that was all there was to it. And since the kids had become her full-time job, they were going to be her full-time responsibility. She would do everything for them. And nobody else, including me, was going to poach on her turf. What I was making didn’t turn out to be nearly enough, and things started sliding from there. On all kinds of levels.”

  Glitsky’s cop instincts were on full alert. He’d just heard Hal confess not only to his own infidelity and estrangement from his wife but to the financial difficulties brought on by her quitting her job. This, in the usual course of events, should have raised Hal’s profile as a murder suspect.

  But as it had from the beginning of his dealings with Hal, Glitsky’s gut was overriding his mind. He felt in his gut, God help him, that his client was telling the truth. Hal’s was a common enough human story, and while it wasn’t a particularly happy one, it didn’t strike Glitsky as the prologue to Hal deciding to take his wife’s life.

  “It was you who called things off with Patti, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “Not great. She thought we were going to be together. I thought so, too, for a while. But it felt too wrong. As I’ve told you.”

  “You thought you could get back with Katie without telling her about Patti at all?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have any idea how everything was going to work itself out. But I was going to give the marriage another chance.”

  Glitsky had come up to the couch and rested a haunch against the back of it. “Okay. Before today, when was the last time you talked to Patti?”

  Hal pondered for a second or two. “When we broke up. I could probably check the exact day; it was something like a month ago. Why?”

  “Just checking things. How about Katie?”

  “How about her?”

  “Might she and Patti have talked?”

  “Sure. They were friends forever. If Patti had stopped all communication, that would have been more suspicious than anything else. On the surface, everything was the same. Patti agreed we were going to try to keep it that way.”

  “But the two of them, they might have talked just before Katie disappeared?”

  “I don’t . . . No, wait. Now that you mention it, Patti was going to come to Thanksgiving dinner with us. She called Katie to say she was down with the flu and wouldn’t be able to make it.”

  “That day? The day before Thanksgiving?”

  “Maybe. Or the day before that, I’m not positive. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking about people who might have had a reason and an opportunity to kill your wife.”

  “You’re not saying it could have been Patti?”

  Glitsky scratched at the side of his face. “Why not?”

  “Because it’
s just . . . She wouldn’t ever have done anything like that. I told her it was over between us, and she didn’t like it, but she accepted it.”

  “You just told me it was because you didn’t want to break up your family. Is that what you told her?”

  “I told her I thought I owed it to Katie not to give up.”

  “But if Katie were gone, suddenly out of the picture, leaving you free?”

  Hal swallowed, then took a breath. “No,” he said at last. “That’s not possible.”

  Glitsky put some edge into his voice. “I promise you it’s possible. People kill each other over jealousy every day. Now, you’ve got your recently jilted lover Patti talking to your wife on the day she disappears, possibly discovering exactly when you’re driving down to the airport, when she’ll be alone. Why couldn’t she have done it? Do you know what she was doing that night?”

  Hal, mulling it over, shook his head.

  “Okay, if it’s not you and it’s not Patti, maybe you could point at somebody else Katie knows. Because right now, I’m seeing a mom with very little life outside the walls of this house. So you tell me, Hal. Am I missing something?”

  17

  FRANNIE HARDY MOVED up the hallway, past the closed doors to three other offices on her right, past the stairway on her left. At the front of the hall, a window looked down onto Clement Street, and she stopped when she got to it, pushing the white gauze curtains to one side.

  A steady stream of pedestrians filled the opposite sidewalk, the majority of them Asians. The storefronts across the street mirrored this demographic. Standing in the window, Frannie had within her field of vision a sushi bar, an acupuncture studio, a Thai and a Chinese restaurant, a fishmonger, a corner grocery with crates of fresh vegetables, two massage parlors, and a store featuring lots of camera equipment and electrical gear.

  Frannie normally loved not just her work but going to work, since it wasn’t quite a mile from her home and she almost always walked. It was like traveling to another country every day. But today she stood at the front window, frowning. She’d seen two clients in the morning, then she’d gone out for sushi, which she found herself unable to eat. She had sipped at her green tea until it was lukewarm, then, exhausted, had walked back home and lay down for an hour and a half. Finally, her mind empty, she had walked back to her building.