The First Law dh-8

by John Lescroart

  It was a warm, windy Saturday afternoon in late spring and he was with his three best buds from school buying sodas at the Safeway where they'd been let off by one of the moms after the ballgame. In the checkout line, Anne Lerner-the youngest and always the foxiest of Mom's married friends, with a really cute bobbed-nose face and a great smile-was her usual friendly self to all of them. Every one of John's pals admitted having the private hots for her- Mrs. Lerner was the only adult who got mentioned when the guys were making one of their frequent lists of the cutest girls, the best breasts, and so on. Today she looked almost like a teenager herself with her long, tan legs, the short white tennis shorts, the ash-blond hair hanging around her shoulders.

  She had a cart full of grocery bags and all four of the guys were happy to help her load them into the back of her wagon. Since none of them drove yet and all lived up the hill on her way home, she asked if they wanted a ride and all of them piled in, John in the front where, when she leaned forward to put in the key, he couldn't help but see that the top button on her blouse had come undone. She glanced and caught him looking, gave him a playful, open smile, then buttoned up.

  When the last of them but John got out, Mrs. Lerner asked him if he'd mind stopping by her place first-just a few blocks farther up the street-and helping her unload the groceries. Her daughters were both gone on a weekend camping trip with the Girl Scouts and her husband was traveling again and wouldn't be back until midweek. So she was all alone.

  He carried the bags inside. It took him four or five trips, and the button came undone again, and then the one under it. Finally, by the time he put the last bag on the counter and turned to face her, only one button remained.

  "Thanks, John. Can I offer you something? A glass of water?"

  He was mesmerized by the fall of her blouse, but stammered out a no. He had to be getting home.

  She took a step toward him. "Are you sure? You can stay a few minutes. Anything?"

  He swallowed-his mouth had gone dry-then he looked at her face, which wore a mysterious smile now, an expression unlike any he'd seen before. She closed the gap between them even more; they were so close he smelled the wonderful scent of her-almonds and… and something else. She cocked her head up at him. "What?" she asked playfully. "Tell me."

  Following his gaze, she looked down. "Oh, these darn buttons." But slowly, slowly, her eyes never leaving his, her hand went not to any of the open buttons, but to the closed one under them all, which was suddenly open, too. "Oops," she said, laughter in her throat. She took his hands and brought them up to the little snap in the front of her bra, which she helped him open with a practiced ease.

  "What a charming story of young love," Hardy said. "She was how old?"

  "Thirty-five. Forty. Somewhere in there."

  "So if you were fifteen, she raped you."

  "Diz, please, rape has such ugly connotations. I infinitely prefer the word seduced. And I promise it did not scar me for life. In fact"-a slow grin lifted Holiday's corn-silk mustache-"I've been known to drop by in the recent past from time to time. And you know what? She is still hot."

  "I'm happy for you both. Maybe not so much for the husband."

  "Long gone, I'm afraid. I believe his prostate gave out." Holiday kept his grin on, knowing he was pushing Hardy's buttons. They were both sitting on folding chairs in sunshine just outside the propped-open front door of the Ark. Holiday was drinking a Bud Lite from the bottle and had his brown denim workshirt unbuttoned halfway. He was supposed to be bartending, but he owned the place and there weren't any customers.

  "Well, fascinated though I am with all this history, it's not why I came down. You talk to any cops yet?"

  "I haven't had that pleasure."

  "They didn't come by your house?"

  "They might have." Holiday tipped up some beer, the sloe-gin eyes twinkling. "I don't believe I slept there last night, so I can't be sure. But I did stop by here and Clint told me what was up, which was when I called you."

  "And I'm so happy you did." Hardy squinted up at the bright sky. He moved his chair back into the shade of the doorway. "So what do you think? "

  "I think I didn't shoot Sam Silverman or anybody else."

  "You pretty sure?"

  A nod. "Reasonably. It's the kind of thing I'd remember."

  "You got an alibi for when it happened?"

  Suddenly, all trace of the grin was gone. "This is starting to remind me of when you were my lawyer last time."

  "That didn't turn out so bad. Look at you now. They don't let you drink in prison. Bud Lite or anything else."

  "You chumming for business?"

  "Hey, you called me. The last thing I want in the world is a murder case. And here's a hint-you don't want one either. If Frannie wasn't working, I'd be having lunch with her right now instead of checking up on your sorry ass. But as you appeared to be seeking advice and counsel-lo, I appear."

  "All right." Holiday leaned forward in the folding chair, his elbows on his knees. He had his index ringer in the neck of his beer bottle and spun it in little circles near his feet. "So where were we?"

  "On your alibi."

  Holiday gave an impression of thought. "What night again?"

  Hardy came forward and spoke with some sharpness. "Don't give me that, John. It was the night after your poker game, which makes it Thursday. This is Saturday. I'm thinking even you, two days and who knows how many drinks ago, you might remember."

  "Okay, between you and me, I had a date," Holiday said. "Dinner and a movie."

  Hardy sat back, spread his hands in victory. "There you go. Was that so hard?" But Holiday's expression was far from relaxed. "What?" Hardy asked.

  "Well. Couple of things."

  Hardy waited a minute, finally spoke. "Do I guess or are you going to tell me?"

  "No. I'm going to tell you." He pulled the bottle off his finger and took another pull at it. "First, the lady in question is married, so she's not going to want to be involved."

  "Why am I not surprised? Maybe she's not going to have a choice. So who is she?"

  "I can't say. Not even to you. Her husband would…" He let it drop.

  "Well. There's a ray of good news. Her husband, then, is still alive, I take it."

  "Oh yeah. You'd know him."

  "I'd know him? How's that?"

  "I mean he's well known, a public figure. She can't come out."

  "Great. Swell. You're seeing the wife of a famous guy. Do I dare ask if this is a long-term relationship? Between you and her, I mean, not her and her husband."

  "We went out a couple of months, but it looks like it's over now anyway." Holiday shrugged. "It ended Thursday, in fact. Before the movie. Before dinner, if you want to get technical."

  "Technical's good. Let's go that way." Hardy barked half a laugh. "So you didn't go out with this unnamed married woman for dinner and a movie after all? And hence you don't have an alibi for the time of the murder? Is that what you're saying? And might I add parenthetically, do you have any idea how much fun I'd be having with you already if you were on the stand in court?"

  "But I was with her till at least six-thirty, is what I'm telling you, Diz. By which time Silverman was dead."

  Hardy was shaking his head, not sure if he was near despair or enjoying himself. There was no question but that he believed Holiday-who else would go to these lengths to make up something so Byzantine and absurd?-but his predicament vis-a-vis the authorities might become very real if these vital facts couldn't be managed. "I think I could use something to drink, John. You carry any nonalcoholic mixers? Club soda? Cranberry juice?"

  While Holiday went searching behind the bar, Hardy brought in the folding chairs, then sat at one of the bolted-down stools. "Just out of curiosity, where do you take the wife of a well-known public person out to dinner for a couple of months and never get recognized?"

  Holiday shot club soda from the gun over some ice, squeezed in a lime wedge. "Chinatown," he said. "We all look the same to the
m. Hey, it's true. It's the next best thing to invisible." He handed the drink across. "Anyway, the point is, Silverman was dead by the time we got to dinner, am I right?"

  "I don't know. I haven't got the timetable on it. I gathered from Glitsky it was the end of the day, but five-thirty, six-thirty, I don't know. You want to just tell me privately who the woman was?"

  "I could tell you, but so what? She'd just deny it. Especially now. She always had a cover story for her husband anyway, where she was. Look, maybe we won't even need it, okay? Weren't there three guys?"

  Again, Hardy had no previous connection to the case and he didn't know.

  "Well," Holiday said, "I'm telling you, there were. Clint, my night guy, said the cops were trying to scare him putting the three of us together-me, Clint, and Clint's boyfriend Randy. Clint's gay."

  "I guessed," Hardy said. "And they've got alibis? Clint and Randy?"

  "They were here together the whole time from six. Clint was behind the bar."

  "And customers saw them and would swear to it?"

  Holiday shrugged. "Somebody must have."

  "Very strong, John, very strong. Does Clint remember any of them, these customers?"

  "I'm sure he could come up with somebody."

  This answer didn't warm Hardy's heart. He sipped at his club soda, wiped his ringer along the overlacquered bar. "John, remember our first few interviews when they busted you for the bad scrip? When you just couldn't believe anybody really cared about prescription drugs enough to hassle anybody about them?"

  "I still can't believe it. Adults ought to be able to get anything they want. If they kill themselves with whatever it is, hey, they're adults."

  "It's really special you believe that, and we can have a debate about it later, but maybe right now we can agree that murder is more serious."

  Holiday, on the other side of the bar, was filling the garnish trays. He stopped cutting lemon peel and looked up. "I really didn't kill Sam, Diz. The other thing was different since I actually did it."

  "Then why'd you call me last night? About this?"

  He went back to cutting. "Clint was freaked out about the cops coming by. It got a little contagious."

  "But you're over that now?"

  A shrug. "I really didn't do it. Clint and Randy certainly didn't do it. They're not going to nail three of us when none of us were there."

  Hardy sipped his club soda, said nothing.

  Holiday stopped again. "What? What's that look?"

  "No look," Hardy said. "I guess I forgot for a minute that nobody's ever been arrested for a crime they didn't commit."

  "They're not going to arrest me. They didn't arrest Clint last night and they were right here with him."

  "Okay, I'm convinced. You're in no danger. But do me a favor. The cops come by to talk to you, call me first. Don't say one word."

  Holiday made a face. "Surely I should say hello. If I don't return their greeting, they become surly. I've done experiments."

  "Sure, say hello. Bake 'em a cake if you want." Hardy drained his glass, stood up and walked out the open door without another word.

  After he calmed down a little, he called his home from the cell phone in his car, but nobody answered. At Glitsky's, too, he got the answering machine again. This was turning into a rare day, with no work and no family. He considered going home and doing something physical-they had half a cord of wood that needed to be stacked, or he could take a run-but then he decided screw it. He'd go to his own well-run and pleasant bar and talk to someone with a functioning brain.

  "The guy's an idiot," he told McGuire, who'd once, when he cared about different things, earned a Ph. D. in philosophy from Cal Berkeley. They were both waiting for the churning foam in Hardy's Guinness to fall out. "I don't know why I waste my time."

  "You like him, that's all. I like him, too. He's a firstborn male, right?"

  "And this means something?"

  McGuire had his standard Macallan poured into a rocks glass that sat in the Shamrock's gutter. He took a bite of a piroshki he was eating from a place around the corner and washed it down with scotch. "You got any close friends that aren't?"

  Hardy quickly filed through the litany-McGuire, Freeman, Glitsky, Pico Morales, even Graham Russo, another ex-client. And now Holiday. "That's interesting."

  To McGuire, it was an old, self-evident truth, and he shrugged. "It might be that, but don't mistake it for a character reference. He reminds me of everybody we knew when we went to school. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, party all night. You remember."

  "Not as much as you'd think. I didn't go to Berkeley."

  "You were alive in the sixties, though, if I'm not mistaken."

  "Here's an ugly surprise, Mose. I hated the sixties. The only good thing in that decade was the Beatles."

  "Come on. The Turtles. Herman's Hermits."

  Hardy had to smile. "My point exactly. But I give sixty-eight my vote for the worst year of our lifetime. So saying Holiday brings back those good ol' days isn't what I'd call high praise."

  "I'll tell you something, though, and no reference to the sixties." Moses leaned over the bar, his broken-nosed face six inches from his brother-in-law's. He spoke quietly, nearly in a whisper, but with some intensity, possibly even rebuke. "He's just like you were when you worked here. You weren't so hot on all the rules before you got with Frannie and decided it was time to grow up."

  This brought Hardy up short, threw him back on himself as McGuire straightened back up and turned to check on the other five customers in the bar. Hardy took a slug of his daytime stout and looked at his face in the back bar mirror.

  McGuire was right, he realized. Crippled by grief, loss and guilt over his baby's death and the breakup of his marriage in the wake of that, Hardy had walked the boards behind this very bar for most of another decade. A lawyer without a practice, a thinker without a thought, he hadn't been able to commit to much more than waking up every day, and sometimes that was too much.

  Now, with a good marriage, a thriving practice, and teen-aged children, Hardy had a life filled-sometimes overfilled-with meaning, import, details, routine, relationships and responsibility. Holiday's life, his situation, couldn't be more different and more importantly, it hadn't been of his choosing. Hardy, of all people, should remember that Holiday was living day-to-day, waiting for that first flicker of meaning or hope to assert itself. Until then, he'd take his solace from whatever source, a woman or a bottle or easy money at the poker table.

  McGuire was back in front of him. He poured another half inch of scotch, dropped in one ice cube and stirred with his finger. "So where were we?"

  "At the part where I was being a judgmental old dick."

  "There's a sixties concept, the famed value judgment." His brother-in-law reached over and good-naturedly patted his arm. "But you can't qualify for true old dickdom for at least a couple of years."

  "The sad thing is, though, Mose, I kind of believe in value judgments nowadays."

  McGuire clucked. "Yeah. Well, as you say, most of those sixties ideas-value judgments are bad, dope won't hurt you, fidelity's not important-they haven't exactly stood the test of time. But there's still that old nagging tolerance for different lifestyles."

  "And the Beatles," Hardy said. "Don't forget the Beatles."

  "Only two of 'em left, though, you notice," Moses said.

  7

  Hardy didn't talk to Glitsky again until he showed up unannounced late Monday afternoon at his office. His baby's fever hadn't been from teething, and by early Saturday morning it had gotten to 104 degrees and he and Treya were with her at the emergency room. Roseola.

  "You should have called me," Hardy said. "The Beck had it, too. I could have diagnosed it over the phone."

  "Next time she wakes us up screaming at three a.m., I'll call you first."

  "I'll look forward to it." For the past couple of hours, Hardy had been reviewing the technical specifications of a supposedly fully automated truck-washing unit. One of
his clients had bought it for a million and a half dollars. It hadn't worked even within the ballpark of the manner promised by the company's brochure from day one. The gap between the gallons of recycled clean water the system could actually process and the gallons guaranteed by the brochure was big enough, Hardy thought, to drive an eighteen-wheeler through. He'd studied the numbers enough to master that fact. He was taking the case to trial in a little over a month.

  He could spare his friend some time. "So what's up? Did you take today off?"

  Glitsky sometimes wasn't much of a sitter. First he'd crossed over to one of the windows and peered out, now was pulling darts from Hardy's board. "Amazingly enough, I finished all my critical work by," he looked at his watch, "about six hours ago."

  "You must be underutilized. I hope at least you looked busy."

  Glitsky threw a dart. "I sat behind my door and gnashed my teeth."

  "For six hours? That must be hell on your molars."

  "I don't care about my molars."

  "You would if you cracked one with all that gnashing. But then, you're the guy who chews ice all the time. I bet you grind your teeth at night, too."

  Glitsky turned to face him. "How'd you like a dart in the eyeball?"

  "You'd probably miss." He stood and came around his desk, strode over to the dartboard, and waited for Glitsky to throw the third dart. "So did you ever get to find out anything else about Silverman?"

  "Else implies I found out anything at all." He threw.

  "And yet just today you whiled away six perfectly good hours when you could have been detecting."

  "Except I'm not a detective anymore."

  "Nor much of a dart player." Hardy pulled the darts, walked back to the tape line on the floor. He whirled, paused for an instant setting up, and threw a triple twenty-one of the very difficult shots. "Right now you're probably asking yourself how I can be so good."

  "The question fills my every waking moment. Nat tried to find out something, though, about Silverman."