The First Law dh-8

by John Lescroart

  "Oh, God!" Frannie said, her hand over her mouth.

  Hardy didn't hear her. He was caught up in his own reaction, a veritable flash flood of unleashed obscenity. Spinning all the way round in frustration and anger, he whirled again and threw a vicious backhand fist up against the windshield, spraying more glass inside the car and onto the street. Another spasm of swearing overtook him as he was cupping his bleeding hand against himself, and again he lashed out at the windshield. The immediate anger spent now, he leaned heavily with his one good hand on the car's hood, ragged and desperate gasps punctuated by staccato exhalations.

  Frannie had found that she'd backed herself against a building. Shivering in her heavy coat, she couldn't have said whether it was the biting wind or the chill of fear. Her husband's reaction struck her as more upsetting and in some ways almost worse than the vandalism itself, the violence and obscenity so unlike him. Under normal circumstances, something like this-a car window smashed- would make Dismas mad, of course; he'd be scathing in his wrath for a while, and probably funny about it. But that was nothing like this, nothing close to how she'd just seen him. Whatever this was, it had rocked Dismas to his core.

  Coming forward tentatively, she reached out and touched the windshield briefly-it crinkled almost like cellophane as some glass chipped off onto the dashboard inside. Involuntarily, she backed away a step, another one. "Dismas, what is this?"

  His face was as grim as his words. "This," he said, "is a warning."

  "Against what?"

  "Me. The lawsuit."

  She didn't know what to say to that. He was obviously reeling from David. Of course that would occur to him, but she didn't think there was any way he could be certain. But this was no time to argue, or even discuss. He was too wrought up and, obviously, in pain. Moving close next to him, she put a hand on his back. "Is your hand all right?"

  It was Frannie who took control, getting the passenger door for her husband, helping him inside. Eventually, they were both inside the car against the wind. They turned on the engine for the eventual heat to kick in. Now her husband sat beside her, unspeaking, cradling his injured left hand. She finally ventured a suggestion. "We ought to call the police."

  It didn't call for a reply, and none came. Frannie got out the cell and reported their problem and location, then called her brother at home to ask if he'd like to come and get them. All the while, Hardy sat ramrod straight, well back in the passenger's seat. He stared straight ahead through the kaleidoscope of broken glass.

  Since they were patrolling in North Beach anyway, the squad car got there in under ten minutes. By the time Hardy saw the red-and-blue lights turn up at the corner, he felt he could face another human, talk with some semblance of reason. He and Frannie opened their doors and were standing out in the street as the two uniformed officers-Reyas and Simms from their name tags- He turned and watched them walk away.

  It was obvious enough what had happened, and the officers took their statements with professionalism and even sympathy. While Simms went back to his car to call the towing service, Reyas began walking around the car with his flashlight. He hadn't gotten very far when he stopped and leaned over for a closer look at the hood. "This looks like blood here," he said.

  "It is," Hardy said. "It's mine. I lost my temper and popped the windshield." He held up his hand. "Not my finest hour," he added, "or my smartest."

  Reyas nodded, shifted his attention to Frannie. "Mrs. Hardy," he asked, "you two haven't been fighting, have you?"

  The question surprised her and instinctively she threw a look at Hardy before coming back to Reyas. "No, sir. We were just coming back from dinner, as we said. At Fior d'Italia."

  He appeared to be considering something. Coming back around the front of the car again, he sprayed his beam over them both. "Mrs. Hardy," he said. "Would you mind accompanying me for a minute over to the squad car?"

  Again, she looked at Hardy, and though not happy about this development, he nodded once. "It's okay."

  He turned and watched them walk away. Hardy knew what was happening here. Officer Reyas wanted to get Frannie alone so she could answer a question or two without interference or coercion from her husband. He also wanted some better light-the squad car was parked directly under a streetlamp-where he could observe her more closely to see if she had any visible bruises. If it seemed that the broken windshield was really part of a violent domestic disturbance, Hardy knew they'd handcuff him and take him downtown. As well they should, he thought.

  But they wouldn't find anything to indicate that.

  His hand was throbbing now. Looking down, trying to make it into a fist, he realized that he might have broken a bone in his little finger. The blood had mostly dried by now, but even with the cold, the swelling was substantial. The pain and this inconvenience to him and to Frannie struck him as being a two-pronged and just sentence for having been such an idiot.

  A fierce and quite deadly calm settled upon him. He knew without any doubt what this had been here tonight. It was part of David and perhaps part of Creed. His earlier explosion was the wrong use for his really unprecedented anger. The calm would serve better.

  He looked again across the street. Reyas and Simms were both talking to Frannie and fortunately, Hardy thought, his fiery, redheaded wife was keeping her own famous temper in check. After perhaps three minutes, both policemen escorted her back to where he waited. Frannie had evidently explained to them that Moses was on his way to pick them up.

  But they weren't done yet. Simms had a notepad out. "Mr. Hardy. Your wife tells us you've got some suspicion of who might have done this?"

  Hardy struggled for a genial tone. "Some," he said. "I'm suing somebody. If I win, and I will, they're out of business."

  "You want to give us a name?"

  "I could, but it wouldn't do you any good. He wouldn't have done this himself. He'd have sent one of his men." He drew a breath to maintain his control. "And there won't be any evidence here. They wouldn't have touched anything. The windshield looks like your traditional blunt object." He indicated the car. "You can see where they hit it."

  "Yes, sir," Simms said. "But if you want us to include anything specific in our report, now is the time. As you say, there's a chance we won't get anywhere with an actual investigation on this incident, but it would be good to have a name if something else happens later. You call us and say, 'This is the second time,' and somebody's going to wonder why you didn't report the first one."

  "What do you mean, if something else happens?" Frannie asked.

  The two cops looked at each other. Surely this was clear enough. But Hardy saved them from having to answer. "Nothing's going to happen," he told his wife. "They see they're not scaring me off and they'll stop trying."

  "Like they did with David?" she asked with some asperity.

  "Who's David?" Reyas asked.

  Hardy sighed. "My partner in this lawsuit. David Freeman. He got beaten up last night. He's still hospitalized."

  "In a coma," Frannie added. "In critical condition."

  Again, Reyas and Simms consulted silently. Finally, Simms tapped his notepad. "Maybe you better give us a name," he said.

  Moses McGuire arrived a little after the tow truck, and after the Hardys' car was on its way, he packed the two of them into the cab of his pickup. It hadn't been a cheerful ride back from North Beach, but Moses had talked them into stopping by his bar to eat their dinner and calm down. Now he'd plied his sister with wine and Hardy with some first aid for his hand and then a double martini. Most of the immediate tension had passed. They were eating their Fior d'Italia antipasto at one of the coffee tables at the back of the Little Shamrock.

  McGuire tipped up the last of his scotch. "I've got an idea," he said.

  "Ideas are good," Hardy said. "I'd take an idea."

  "Paul!" McGuire called to the bartender and held up his empty glass, pointing at it. Then, back to Hardy, "Where does Panos live?"

  "Uh-uh." Frannie shook her head. "Bad
idea."

  "No, really," Moses said.

  "No really yourself. You don't escalate things."

  "You don't? Why not? I think it's a fine idea. Drop by his place, pop a window or two, have a little fun."

  Hardy thoughtfully chewed an olive. "It does have a quaint sort of in-your-face appeal."

  McGuire was getting into it. "Especially if I just do it and don't even tell you." He smiled at his sister.

  She put down her wineglass. Her face had gone hard. "Don't even think about it. I mean it, Moses."

  She turned to her husband for support, but he just shrugged. "I can't control him, Fran. He's a big boy."

  "Boy is the key word." Then, to her brother, "You just don't do this."

  McGuire got his new drink. Service tended to be good for him at the Shamrock. But he hadn't lost the thread. "So what do you recommend?"

  The question seemed to fluster her. "I don't recommend anything. The police said they were going to look into it."

  McGuire barked a deep and scathing laugh. "And then, when they find nothing, what?"

  "Maybe they'll find something," Frannie said.

  "She's right," Hardy said. He'd had enough discord for one night. Moses and Frannie were threatening to really go at it, and he thought he'd try to slow them down. "Maybe they will, Mose. It could happen."

  A couple of scotches now into the wind, McGuire fastened a cold eye on Hardy. "Traitor. And how, pray, is it going to happen? One of Panos's guys leave a card in the gutter?" He took in both of them. "Get real, guys. You've already told me that they don't have anything on who beat up your Mr. Freeman, and he's a moderately important person. You think they're even going to look with your stupid car? This, my naive friends, is not going to happen."

  "My car's not stupid," Hardy replied. "In fact, now that I think of it, it's smarter than some of my clients."

  "Go ahead, Diz. Make a joke of it. I don't think it's funny." McGuire put a spoonful of caponata on some focaccia and stuffed it into his mouth. "These guys really piss me off."

  "I intuited that." Hardy was working on his newfound calm. He put his injured hand on Frannie's knee, shot her his craggy grin. "We're a little angry ourselves, tell the truth."

  "But you don't go breaking his windows," she said. "Then you're just like he is."

  "Sorry, li'l sis, but no you're not." Before Vietnam had killed the scholar he'd been as a young man, McGuire had earned a doctorate in philosophy at Berkeley. "There's one tiny little difference."

  "No. There's no difference. And don't 'li'l sis' me!"

  "All right, strike the 'li'l sis,' but don't give me that 'no difference' bullshit."

  Hardy's efforts to defuse the sibling fireworks weren't working. The area at the back of the Shamrock was small enough to begin with-maybe ten feet across and twelve deep-and McGuire's voice reverberated off the close walls, drowning even the jukebox.

  "There's a fucking huge difference. And you know what it is? They started it! How 'bout that for a concept?" He pointed at his sister, his brow knit, his eyes dark. "They did it to you first. You don't think that makes a fundamental difference, you're dead fucking wrong."

  "Easy, Mose," Hardy said. "We're just talking, okay?"

  McGuire whirled on him. "What do you think that was? You see anybody throwing a punch here? I don't think so. But don't tell me we're just like them, 'cause that's just plain bullshit. We're nothing like them."

  But Frannie was evidently much more accustomed to McGuire's outbursts than even Hardy was, and he'd seen a lot of them. She got up and sat down next to her brother, put an arm around him. "And people wonder where I got so feisty," she said. She kissed him on the cheek. "Okay, you're nothing like them. Just promise me you won't go shoot out anybody's windows."

  Not completely mollified, McGuire came forward heavily. He grabbed for his scotch, picked it up, then put it back down and sat back. After another moment, he leaned over and kissed his sister. "I wasn't going to shoot them," he said. Smiled. The fight was over. "I was thinking maybe a slingshot," he said.

  14

  The call came into homicide at 4:38 a.m. As soon as he heard the tentative identifications, Paul Thieu thought he knew what he had, but for his own reasons, not the least of which was pride in his work, he proceeded in his own ordered, methodical fashion. He had to get to the scene and make his own determination first.

  Gerson wouldn't thank him for a call at this time of the morning anyway. If the crime scene was anything like what it promised to be from the dispatch-double homicide or possibly homicide with suicide-the CSI team wouldn't even have gotten a good jump by the time it was reasonable to call the lieutenant.

  In the cold, dark morning, Thieu left the Hall of Justice through the front doors. A couple of black-and-whites were parked on Bryant just down the steps-the dim light of cigarettes visible in the front one. Thieu didn't want to waste even the few minutes it would take to walk to the back lot and get his assigned Ford Taurus. He walked up to the driver's window and pressed his badge up against it. The window came down in a fog of smoke and coffee. "Sorry to interrupt your coffee break, officers, but I've got a very hot homicide eight blocks away and I'd like to be there ten minutes ago." He slapped the roof of the car. "How fast can you make this thing go?"

  Sirens screaming all the way-Thieu saw no reason why commandeering a squad car couldn't include an element of fun-they dropped him at his address in under five minutes. Two other squad cars were already parked in the street, but there was no sign yet of the coroner's van or any of the CSI people.

  The building had no aspirations to stand out among the other worn and tawdry four-story structures on the block. With its common entrance, yellowing paint and graffiti in a hundred hands and colors, the apartment house squatted all but anonymously amid its identical neighbors, each more depressing than the next. Inside, Thieu knew, the apartments would also be more similar than not, every one squalid. Stained ancient mattresses with no coverings, broken furniture without upholstery, bare walls and sagging wallpaper hanging in sheets no one ever thought or cared to remove. In every kitchen, dirty dishes would lie piled in the sinks and on every flat surface, the stoves would be buried in grease and carbon, the refrigerators nearly living with mold. The stench of the rooms-of tobacco, urine, alcohol, vomit, decay and musk-would, Thieu supposed, never come out.

  When homicides are reported, the sergeant from the local precinct is supposed to come out and maintain security at the sight until an inspector from the homicide detail arrives. In this case, things were working as they should and Sergeant R. Penrose, from his name tag, out of the Tenderloin Task Force was standing, talking to another uniformed patrolman at the building's entrance. Out of the wind, inside the open doorway.

  Thieu introduced himself and noted the look of relief on Penrose's face-the scene wasn't his direct responsibility anymore. Thieu pegged him at about his own age, mid-thirties, but a kind of rigid nervousness made him seem younger. "This is Officer Lundgren," he said. Although Thieu was anxious to get inside, he knew it was smarter to get everything from the beginning. "He and his partner out in the car there, they got the original complaint."

  In this part of town, complaints to the police were decidedly unusual, so this in itself piqued Thieu's interest. "Who complained about what?" he asked.

  "The landlady." Lundgren pointed into the half-shadow behind him where a small Asian woman, dressed now in a heavy overcoat, hovered by the stairway. "Mrs. Chu. Her English isn't so good, but evidently she was trying to sleep and-"

  "Excuse me, Officer," Thieu said, stopping him. He turned to Sergeant Penrose. "Maybe I will see if I can just talk to her for a minute, please."

  Penrose nodded. If he was surprised, he didn't show it. He motioned to Mrs. Chu to come forward. Thieu was not a tall man, but Mrs. Chu didn't reach his shoulders. She looked to be about sixty years old, and as she emerged from the shadows, Thieu took in her threadbare coat, the thin, short gray hair, a pair of red Converse tennis shoes. S
he, too, like Penrose, exuded wariness.

  That was it, Thieu was thinking. Everybody here looks asleep, Sergeant.

  He addressed her in Mandarin, in which he was fluent, and at the familiar sounds, she relaxed slightly. She told him that she'd been watching television (not in fact trying to sleep as Officer Lundgren had volunteered), trying to drown out the loud radio from directly below her. Usually the tenants down there were quiet and polite, but tonight it seemed they were partying. They came in a little after midnight-yes, she thought, several people, at least three but maybe more-and first thing had turned on the radio, very loud. She couldn't hear her television over the blaring radio. But noise was a fact of life in the building, and people tended not to get involved. (Thieu knew that interrupting "parties," that is, drug use or sex or both, was a typical cause of violence in the Tenderloin.) Besides, one of the men downstairs was very big and she did not want him to become mad at her, so she put it off a long time. But eventually, about an hour ago, she needed to sleep and so came down and knocked.

  But no one answered, although the radio kept on and on. Finally, she called the police and they…

  Thieu thanked Mrs. Chu and turned back to Sergeant Penrose. "I'd better go in. I expect the coroner and crime scene investigation unit any time. I'm afraid you're not going to be getting much sleep, Sergeant. Sorry."

  "I think it's going to be a while anyway," Penrose said. "Every time I close my eyes, I…" He stopped, motioned toward the closed door. Again, that spooked quality. He reached out and touched Thieu on the arm, a dramatic gesture under any circumstances, and not at all coplike. "Prepare yourself," he said. "It's bad."

  Dawn ambushed him. One minute Thieu was opening the door to the apartment, flipping on the light against the blackness outside, thinking not only that it wasn't bad, it was incredibly well-kept-the flowers, the polished surfaces, a sense of order and cleanliness, to say nothing of the matching furniture, high-end magazines, framed prints on the faux-painted terracotta walls. A minute later, he stood squinting up at blue sky through the back window that opened on an alley. In three plus hours, he hadn't grown appreciably inured to the sight of the carnage behind him in the bedroom.