Hardy 03 - Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  Up close, the Eloise was even more impressive than it had looked from the guardhouse. With a wide boom, Hardy thought maybe twelve to fourteen feet, it was berthed perpendicular to the main pontoon, too big to maneuver into any of the slips. Technically, the boat was a ketch — two poles, one fore and one aft. The steering wheel was sunk into the deck so the aft boom would clear the head of a standing pilot.

  Casting off under motor power, even at only five knots, Hardy figured it wouldn’t take three minutes on the straight shot to get out beyond the jetty.

  ‘You mind if we go aboard a minute?’

  It was already too dark to see much on the deck, not that Hardy was looking for anything specific. Tom, meanwhile, walked forward to the cabin door. ‘See, this is what I mean.’

  Hardy came up beside him.

  ‘They leave the door unlocked. What are we supposed to do?’

  ‘Anything get taken? Maybe you should check.’

  It was so easy Hardy almost felt guilty, but not enough to stop himself from following Tom down the ladder into the cabin.

  The boy turned on the lights and stopped. ‘No, everything looks okay,’ he said.

  Hardy thought okay was a bit of an understatement. They were in a stateroom that was easily as large as Hardy’s living room. A zebra rug graced the polished hardwood floor. Original art — oils in heavy frames — hung along the walls. There was a black leather sofa and matching loveseat, an Eames chair or a good copy of one, a built-in entertainment center along an entire wall — two TVs, large speakers, VCR, tape deck, compact disc player.

  Being aboard seemed to make Tom nervous — he fidgeted from foot to foot. ‘Maybe we better go back up, huh? Doesn’t look like anything’s gone.’

  But Hardy was moving forward. ‘Might as well be sure,’ he said lightly. He was at the galley — tile floor, gas stove, full-size refrigerator. A glimpse at the wet bar —Glenfiddich, Paradis Cognac, Maker’s Mark Bourbon, top-shelf liquors.

  He heard Tom coming up behind him and kept walking forward to where the bulkhead came down. A full bathroom, far too big to let it go as the ‘head.’ The master bedroom, up front, was as large as Rebecca’s new room, the queen-size bed neatly made. Two desks, one a rolltop, an exercycle and some dumbbells, more expensive knick-knacks.

  ‘This is something,’ Hardy said. Tom stood mutely behind him. ‘Are there rooms aft?’

  Hardy ached to open a few drawers in the desks. Casually, he moved to the desk on the bed’s right and pulled at the top drawer. It appeared to have nothing useful — paper clips, pens, standard desk stuff. The drawer on top to the side contained what looked like sweat bands. Hardy reached in and felt around. Sweat-bands. ‘Nothing here,’ he said, lightly as he could, closing the drawer.

  Then around the bed, hoping Tom would stay another minute. The rolltop was closed up, but the front drawer slid open. Same story — nothing. Hardy pulled the side top drawer. ‘I don’t know if we should…’ Tom said.

  A quick glance down, the drawer open a couple of inches — inside, some maps, navigation stuff. He pushed it closed with his hip and turned around.

  ‘You’re right, good point.’ Mr Agreeable. ‘Let the police get a warrant.’ Hardy turned around and walked quickly back through the galley and stateroom, past the steps leading up to the deck, past another bathroom off the aft hallway, to the first guest bedroom — double bed, dresser, television, a floating Holiday Inn.

  ‘We really should go up,’ Tom said from the steps.

  ‘Okay,’ Hardy, casual but determined, browsed the route back along the opposite hallway, passing through the second room, which was mirrored from floor to ceiling and equipped with most of a complete Nautilus set, a stair-climber, more free weights. Owen Nash took his workouts seriously.

  Up on the deck, Tom took a minute to carefully lock the cabin door. Hardy asked, ‘How’s a boat like this sail?’

  Tom locked the door, double-checked it. ‘Well, it’s not a hot rod. It’s really for deep water.’

  ‘Could one man handle her?’

  They were walking back up the pontoon to the office, Tom leading. ‘Oh sure. The sail’s are on power if you need it. Mr Nash went out alone a lot. Over to the Farallons and back. It’s harder in a smaller boat, but he liked it.’

  ‘What’s at the Farallons?’ He asked about the small rock islands twenty miles off San Francisco’s coast.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tom said. ‘They say that’s where the great whites breed — you know, the sharks. Maybe he was into them.’

  Bad pun, Hardy thought.

  They were at the Purple Yet Wah, out in the Avenues on Clement. Moses McGuire was sucking on a crab claw. ‘Black bean sauce,’ he said. ‘I believe with black bean sauce on Dungeness crab we have reached the apex of modern civilization.’

  Frannie was glaring at Hardy, who was looking down at his plate.

  ‘I hate it when you guys fight,’ Moses said. ‘Here I am talking about cultural issues, without which we would all soon be savages and —’

  ‘Why don’t you tell your friend Dismas that we had an understanding about telephones and being late.’ She stood up and threw down her napkin. ‘Excuse me, I’m going to the bathroom.’

  Hardy picked up his chopsticks. ‘I think I’ve already said I was sorry four times, now five. I’m sorry. Six. Sorry sorry sorry sorry.’ Hardy put down his chopsticks. ‘Ten.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Moses said. ‘She thought you were dead.’

  ‘She always thinks I’m dead, or going to die.’

  ‘There is some justification there.’

  ‘There is no justification at all. I have not come close to dying. Being late doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily died.’

  Moses rubbed his crab claw around in the sauce. ‘It did for Eddie.’ He held up his hand, stopping Hardy’s response. ‘Uh uh uh. Here’s an area where we could increase our sensitivity.’

  ‘Moses…’

  ‘You could have called. Phones are nearly ubiquitous in our society.’ McGuire was the majority owner in the Shamrock Bar, but he also had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cal Berkeley.

  ‘You, too, huh?’

  ‘She’s my sister. I’m allowed to be on her side from time to time.’

  ‘I was working on a case. I’m a lawyer now, remember. I wasn’t out running around with loose women. I wasn’t narrowly avoiding death. I was working.’

  ‘You had an appointment with me and Frannie. A simple one-minute phone call and all would have been well.’

  ‘Okay, all right, next time I’ll call. Big deal.’

  ‘Frannie’s worried it’s going to start happening all the time. As you say, you’re a lawyer now. Well, that’s the way lawyers are.’

  ‘Lawyers aren’t any one way…’

  Moses stabbed the last pot sticker and popped it into his mouth. ‘Excuse the generalization, but yes they are. Frannie wants you to be a daddy, not to work all the time. That’s why the job looked so good, remember. Regular hours, interesting work. I can hear your words in my memory even as we speak.’

  ‘How late was I?’

  Moses chewed. ‘One hour and forty-five minutes, which is plenty of time to work up a good head of worry. It’s not Frannie’s fault she worries. She loves you, Diz. She’s carrying your baby. It’s pretty natural, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, I love her too.’

  ‘I am sure you do.’

  ‘Well… ?’

  ‘Well,’ Moses repeated. ‘There you are.’

  * * * * *

  Their white frame house was bracketed by two apartment buildings. Back in the mid-‘80s, Hardy had been offered a sinful amount of money to sell to a developer so that a third five-story anonymous unit could rise where now his sixty-foot-deep green lawn was bisected by a stone walkway, a low picket fence, and a doll house with a small front porch and a bay window.

  Before their marriage they had talked about moving —starting over with a place they could equally call their own. Th
e problem was that although the house had been Hardy’s for a decade, Frannie already loved it. One of Hardy’s first actions after the wedding was to transfer half the title to Frannie’s name — they didn’t have a prenuptial agreement. Frannie’s quarter-million-dollar insurance policy was both of theirs; Hardy figured the house put them on relatively equal footing.

  Street parking was often a problem. With no garage, driveway, or back alley, you either got your spot by six o’clock or you had to walk. Now, at ten-fifteen, they couldn’t find a space within three blocks. It was a mild, still night with no fog, and they strolled east on Clement, under the trees of Lincoln Park, back toward their house. Frannie leaned into her husband, her arm around his waist.

  ‘Pinch me,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’ Hardy tightened his arm across her shoulders.

  ‘Would you have thought this?’

  ‘I guess so. It’s why I thought we ought to be married. But still…’

  She stopped. Hardy took the cue and leaned over and kissed her. ‘What is it?’ Frannie asked.

  ‘Nothing. A little shiver. How often do you notice when everything is perfect? It’s a little scary. I used to believe that’s when things were most likely to go wrong.’

  ‘I think that’s why I was so upset tonight. I’m just getting so I can accept that all this is happening, that it’s not some dream I’m going to wake up from.’ She looked up into Hardy’s face and pulled herself close against him. ‘I don’t want to wake up from this,’ she said. ‘I want this to keep going on.’

  ‘It’s going to, Frannie. I’m not going to let anything get in the way of this, promise.’

  Frannie nudged him with her hip. ‘Let’s get home.’

  * * * * *

  They paid the sitter, looked in on the slumbering baby. Hardy fed his fish while Frannie got ready for bed. In his office, his answering machine had calls from Jane and from Pico Morales, both of whom he could call in the morning.

  He could hear the shower running in their bathroom. He picked up his telephone and hit the numbers he’d memorized earlier that night — May Shinn’s. The phone rang four times, then picked up.

  ‘Just leave a number, please, and I’ll get right back to you.’ That was the whole message. No trace of a Japanese accent. A deep, cultured voice. Hardy hung up after the beep.

  His desk was cleared. The green-shaded banker’s lamp threw a soft pool of light around the room. The dried blowfish pouted on the mantel of the office fireplace. Absently, Hardy crossed from the desk to the mantel, straightened out the pipe rack — unused for over a year —and grabbed three darts from the bull’s-eye of the dart-board, where he’d left them. Back at the line near his desk, he began throwing.

  His dart game was off. In his first round, none of the three darts landed in the 20, where he was aiming. A year before, that couldn’t have happened. If anyone had asked him, he would have said he was semi-serious about darts. He still carried his custom set of twenty-gram tungstens with him every day in his suit jacket’s inside pocket.

  But the reality was that new priorities had taken over. As he retrieved his first round, he heard the water shut off in the bathroom. He was back at the line near his desk now: 20, 19, 18. There you go.

  Then Frannie was in the doorway, barefoot, wearing the purple silk baby-dolls Hardy had bought her for Christmas, the ones she hadn’t been able to wear until after Rebecca was born. A tiny dark spot marked where a drop of her milk had leaked from her nipple.

  Hardy crossed to her, went to his knees and lifted the hem of the pyjamas, burying his face against her.

  10

  FINANCIER MISSING IN ‘MYSTERY HAND’ CASE

  by Jeffrey Elliot

  Chronicle Staff Writer

  The case of the mystery hand found Sunday in the stomach of a great white shark at the Steinhart Aquarium took on a new dimension today as Bay Area financier Owen Nash was reported missing by Ken Farris, counsel and chief operating officer of Owen Industries of South San Francisco.

  Mr Farris reported that Nash was last seen Thursday evening by members of his personal staff at his mansion in Seacliff. On Friday, Mr Nash failed to appear at a luncheon appointment. On Saturday, Nash reportedly was scheduled to go sailing with May Shinn, a friend. Neither Nash or Shinn has been heard from since then, although Nash’s sailboat, the Eloise, remains at its berth in the Marina. It is unclear at this writing whether or not the boat was taken out over the weekend.

  The police will not speculate on the possibility of foul play, although yesterday a representative of the district attorney’s office gave strong credence to that possibility.

  Farris reported that Nash’s life had been threatened ‘half a dozen’ times in the past five years over his mostly hostile takeover efforts of several Silicon Valley companies.

  Strengthening the bond between Nash and the mystery hand is the fact that Nash was a black belt in karate. The hand has several unusual characteristics that can be associated with karate, among them calcium deposits and a somewhat overdeveloped ‘heel,’ or pad, at the side of the hand. San Francisco coroner John Strout, however, had no comment on the likelihood of the hand being that of Owen Nash and dismissed any possible identification at this time as ‘decidedly premature.’

  * * * * *

  ‘The boy bushwacked me,’ Farris said. ‘He was waiting at my houseboat when I got home, had already charmed the skirts off of my Betty.’

  Hardy, in his office at home, was beginning to admire Jeff Elliot’s spunk. The reporter was nobody’s little lost boy. Hardy had thought he’d scared him into some controllable space yesterday, but evidently he’d read that wrong. Hardy wasn’t going to get Jeff Elliot off his story. It didn’t look like anybody was.

  ‘You never told me about the death threats.’

  ‘I never took them seriously anyway. People say things when they lose negotiations, you know.’

  ‘But you thought enough to mention them to Jeff.’

  ‘Not really.’ Hardy heard a rustling noise. ‘I’ve got the paper here in front of me, and I must admit it reads pretty dramatically, but all I did was answer a straight question —had anybody ever threatened Owen? I said, “Sure, half a dozen times,” but it wasn’t anything. At least, until I saw it here in print.’

  ‘You don’t think it could be related?’

  ‘I guess anything’s possible. But as I said, this was all settled a long time ago. I think the last man who got bitter — Owen took him and his wife to Hawaii for a couple of weeks, wined and dined them, bought her a Mercedes, made him president of some division somewhere. The man made out like a bandit. ’Course, Owen made out better.‘

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘It wasn’t any real threat. I’ve told Owen I was gonna kill him twenty times myself, and half those times I meant it.’

  ‘Okay, but if Mr Nash turns up dead, somebody’s going to want that name.’

  ‘I still pray to God he’s not dead.’

  Hardy sat still a moment, drumming his fingers on his desk, trying to decide whether or not to tell Farris what he knew. Hell, the man had been forthcoming with him. He said. ‘The Eloise did go out on Saturday.’ He told him about his visit to the Marina, his tour of the boat.

  ‘But if the boat went out, and now is back, and the hand is Owen’s…’

  ‘Those are big ifs…’

  ‘But you see what that means? It means May —’

  ‘No… May or someone else. Maybe not May at all. Or May and some third party.’

  Farris was collecting himself. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘A boat like that, it’s not unknown to get used once for drugs, then abandoned.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘It’s more common in Florida, or down south in San Diego, but it’s happened here. Smugglers board the ship, kill whoever’s on it, throw them overboard, load up their cargo, deliver it, dump the boat.’

  ‘Back at its own slip?’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s likely, but
the boat being back doesn’t say much about anything.’

  ‘I’ve got to find May,’ Farris said.

  ‘Why don’t you go by where she lives?’

  ‘I don’t know where she lives. Owen never told me that. Getting her phone number was a major concession.’

  ‘How about if they just ran away, like you were saying he might have done yesterday, except that it was Owen and May together, not just him?’

  ‘I hate to think we’re down to that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I really think the running off— it’s something Owen’s outgrown. I just don’t see him doing that anymore. If anything, he was more settled, less spontaneous, since he’s been with May. She really calmed him down. I mean, for Owen, he seemed relatively at peace for the first time in his life. Since Eloise, anyway. Besides, they’ve gone away together before — and told nobody except me. But he did tell me.’

  ‘And this time he didn’t.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Hardy looked up as Frannie walked by the door to his office, holding Rebecca, singing quietly to her. He missed Farris’s next sentence.

  ‘I’m sorry, what was that?’

  ‘I said it’s getting more unlikely every day anyhow.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Well, I’m Owen’s executor and I’ve also got power of attorney. It’s Thursday now and nobody’s seen him in a week. If he ran away, even with May, he’d need money, right? And he never carried much cash.’

  ‘So he’d use a credit card, and you’d have found out about that?’

  ‘Right. I checked all his accounts this morning — so far there’s been no activity.’

  Hardy wished he could say something about not giving up hope until they had some more information, something definite.

  Farris cut that thought off. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  The answer to that, a line from a comedy routine of the old, now-defunct Committee, a NorthBeach comedy troupe, was ‘Deader than hell, Bob.’