Hardy 03 - Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  ‘How do you know when it’s going to turn around so you buy back at the right time?’ Frannie asked.

  ‘You don’t for sure,’ Pico said, ‘but that’s the nature of stocks.’

  ‘Either that, hon, or they go the other way tomorrow and take off because Nash was mismanaging his company and now they can fly. Then you lose everything.’ Angela patted his hand again. ‘Like every other time we have had hot tips on the stock market. Have another piece of pie.’

  ‘I’m interested in what you meant when you said anybody else would have had more money. When?’ Hardy had pushed his chair onto its back legs and was leaning into them, thumbs hooked in his front pockets.

  ‘Today. The last few days. We should already have an agent, be cooking up a book deal, movie rights, something. We’re the ones who found the hand. We should be famous by now.’

  ‘Fame’s an elusive thing,’ Hardy admitted.

  ‘Okay, laugh at me.’ Pico consoled himself with a mouthful of pie. ‘But you wait — somebody’s going to make a fortune off this somehow and then where will we be?’

  ‘We’ll be right here,’ Frannie said. ‘I’m kind of immobilized for a while anyway.’

  ‘Don’t you like where you are, Peek? I mean, curator of the Steinhart Aquarium is not exactly an entry-level position.’

  ‘I just feel like we’re all missing an opportunity here.’

  ‘Probably,’ Hardy said. Angela agreed. So did Frannie.

  Pico ate some more pie.

  * * * * *

  May Shinn’s apartment was on Hyde, directly across the street from a boutique French deli. The cable-car tracks passed under the window, but this time of night, the cars weren’t running.

  There was hardwood in the foyer, an immediate sense of almost ascetic order — a hint of sandalwood? The streetlights outside threw into gauzy relief the one room where she sat in front of her corner shrine, across the room from a low couch with a modern end table and a coffee table. Hardwood glistened around the sides of the throw rug. Along one wall was a high cabinet — thin and elegant lines, glass fronted. Another wall held Japanese prints above a low chair and a futon.

  The entranceway itself was an eight-foot circle. Older San Francisco apartments often had turrets, alcoves, arches and moldings that no modern unit could afford. Another rug, two feet wide, was in the center of the circle. A hand-carved cherry bench, the wood warm, highly polished but not over-lacquered, hugged the side. Close to ten feet long, it was built to the curve of the wall, apparently and impossibly seamless. It would cost a fortune, and that’s if you knew the artist, if he could get the matched cherry, if there was the time.

  The wall in the foyer had an ivory rice-paper finish. Three John Lennon lithographs, which didn’t look like prints, hung at viewer’s height. The light itself came in five-track beams from a central point overhead. Three of the beams were directed at the Lennons, the other two at ancient Japanese woodcuts on either side of the door leading to the kitchen.

  There was another longish block of cherry with a slight ridge down its middle on the floor by the open entrance to the living room.

  May had bathed after forcing herself to eat some rice with cold fish left over from Friday night. She had combed back her long black hair and pinned it, then sat on her hard, low platform bed for a long while, still undressed, unaware of time’s passing.

  When it was dark, she began picking out what she would take with her. Not much. Two suitcases perhaps. She had to decide. Would too little cause someone to notice? What did business people take on a trip to Japan? On the other hand, she didn’t want to tip her hand that she was not coming back by taking too much. She walked around the apartment, taking things down, then putting them back up, unable to decide. Everything was expensive, hard to replace, precious to her. She’d designed her living space that way.

  She went to her shrine and lit a candle. It was not a shrine to any god particularly, just a raised block of polished cherry with a pillow in front of it. There was a white candle, a soapstone incense burner, a knife and, tonight, a plain white piece of bond paper, five by seven inches, with a man’s scrawl on one side of it.

  She had gotten out the piece of paper after reading the Chronicle article about Owen Nash that mentioned her, already tying her to him. The paper was a further tie — a handwritten addendum to Owen’s will leaving $2 million to May Shintaka.

  She didn’t know if it was legal or not. It was dated a month ago, May 23, and was written in ink and signed. Owen had told her that’s all she needed.

  ‘Maybe I’ll die on the way home,’ he’d told her, ‘before I get the Wheel to get it done right. This way, even if it’s disputed, after taxes you ought to get at least half a million.’

  She’d told him she didn’t want it, and he’d laughed his big laugh and said that’s what was so great about it. He knew she didn’t want it. But he’d folded it once and put it in her jewelry box. Every time he came by, he checked to make sure it was still there.

  She wondered if he had told Ken Farris — the mysterious Wheel — about it. Sometimes she wondered if the Wheel really existed, but there he was in the Chronicle article today. She wondered why Owen had never had them meet.

  No, she didn’t. She knew why. It came with her profession. You didn’t meet friends of your clients. In fact, what you did together couldn’t survive outside of its strict boundaries, although Owen had promised her it could.

  But it never had. And now, could she go and present this little scribbling to the Wheel, Owen’s financial protector? He would laugh at her, or worse. Perhaps she would do it later. But later might be too late. All the money might be gone, and none left for her.

  But she had never expected the money, had never wanted to believe any of Owen’s promises. He’d even told her, in other contexts, ‘A promise is just a tool, Shinn. You need to promise something, you promise. Later you need to not remember your promise, you don’t remember.’

  He’d said that before he’d changed, of course, before something had really happened between them. And yet…

  It broke her heart, that heart she’d hardened and decided to keep to herself forever. She was kneeling back on the pillow, and a tear fell and landed on her polished thigh. Should she pick up the knife? Should she burn the piece of paper? What could she take with her to Japan and where would she stay when she got there?

  Part Two

  14

  Elizabeth Pullios found out about it first in Jeff Elliot’s Chronicle story. Owen Nash was a righteous homicide, and probably, she thought, a murder. Also, its position there on the front page changed her opinion about the case.

  While Dismas Hardy was stirring up the kettle she had been all for him — it never hurt for a rookie to get some heavy trial experience, and there were only a few ways a new person ever got to try a homicide. One was getting what they called a skull case — an old murder with some new evidence. Another way was when one of the regulars, like Pullios herself, would hand off a slam-dunk conviction to one of the rising stars, leaving herself time to try a more challenging case. Once in a while one of the regulars would go on vacation and everyone else would be full up, so a case would fall to the next level. But that was about it.

  She had thought that Hardy’s interest in the mystery hand fell more or less under the umbrella of skull cases. Interesting stuff maybe, but not grist for her. There were four, and only four, homicide assistant district attorneys in the City and County of San Francisco. None of these people would hand off a publicity case. If Hardy had hit the jackpot, Pullios felt as though he’d done it by playing what was rightfully her dollar.

  She dressed in her red power suit and sauntered into the Homicide Detail on the Fourth Floor at seven-forty-five on Friday morning. No one sat at the outside desk, and she walked through into the open area for the inspectors’ desks, all twelve of them. The lieutenant’s office was closed up, dark inside. Over by the windows, Martin Branstetter was doing some paperwork. Carl Griffin and Jer
ry Block were having coffee and some donuts at Griffin’s desk, talking sports.

  ‘Hi, guys.’ All the homicide cops liked Pullios. They liked her because when they went to the trouble to arrest a suspect and provide her with witnesses she generally saw to it the person went away, and often for a long time. ‘Anybody got a fuck for me?’ Her smile lit up the office. Branstetter looked up from his report.

  When she was speaking to these guys, she called all suspects ‘fucks.’ She knew, as all of them knew, that anybody who got all the way to arrested was guilty. They had done something bad enough to eliminate them from society forever. Therefore, she would start the process of making them nonpeople. They were fucks, starting here in Homicide. And fuck them.

  ‘Slow night, Bets.’ Griffin put his donut down.

  ‘So who’s got the Nash thing?’ She held up her folded newspaper. ‘Front-page stuff.’

  The cops looked at each other and shrugged. ‘Sounds exciting.’ Griffin was most interested in his donut. It wasn’t his case. End of story. ‘I must have missed it.’

  ‘I think Glitsky might have gone down there,’ Block said. ‘You can look on his desk.’

  It was on top of the stack of papers on the corner of Abe Glitsky’s desk. There wasn’t much more than the manila folder with the name NASH in caps on the tab. Inside, Glitsky had started writing up the incident report, but hadn’t gotten far. There were no photos yet, either from the discovery scene or the coroner’s office.

  Pullios closed up the folder, took a post-it and wrote a note asking Glitsky to call her as soon as he got in.

  * * * * *

  Hardy, awakened by Rebecca at five-thirty, had gone out running in the clear and already balmy dawn. Down Geary out to the beach, south to Lincoln, then inside Golden GatePark back to 25th, and home. A four-mile circle he’d been trying to keep up since getting sedentary in March.

  Now, near eight, he sat in his green jogging suit, taking his time over Frannie’s great coffee. She sat across the kitchen table from him, glancing at sections of the paper when she wasn’t fiddling with the baby, who was strapped into a baby seat on the table between them.

  ‘And this was a baby shark,’ he said. ‘Imagine what a twenty-footer would do.’

  ‘I think they made a movie about that.’

  Hardy made a face at her as the doorbell rang, followed by the sound of the front door opening. ‘Don’t get up, commoners,’ Glitsky called out, ‘I’ll just let myself in.’

  The sergeant wore a white shirt and solid brown tie, khaki slacks, cordovan wing tips, tan sports coat. Entering the kitchen, he stopped. ‘Taking fashion tips from dead guys?’

  ‘Hi, Abe,’ Frannie said.

  Hardy pointed to the stove. ‘Water’s hot.’

  Glitsky knew where the tea was and got out a bag, dropped it into a cup, came over to the table. He looked again at Hardy. ‘Oftentimes, I’ll go see a body and the next day decide to wear exactly what it had on.’

  Hardy shrugged. ‘It was next up in my drawer. Am I supposed to throw it away?’

  ‘If anybody ever asks if your husband is superstitious, Frannie, you should tell them no.’

  Hardy explained it to her. ‘Owen Nash was found in some sweats just like these. Abe thinks the streets are infested with sharks that are going to start a feeding frenzy over people in green sweats.’ Hardy lifted the front of his sweatshirt away from his body. ‘Besides, this is different. There ain’t any holes in this one.’

  ‘Major difference.’ Abe nodded and sipped his tea. ‘So tell me everything you know.’

  * * * * *

  Hardy and Glitsky went back into the office, where Hardy had the notes he’d taken after talking with Ken Farris. Abe sat at the desk while Hardy threw darts.

  ‘Who’s this guy in Santa Clara? Silicon Valley.’

  ‘I don’t know. Farris said he’d tell me if we needed it.’

  ‘I need it.’

  ‘Yeah, I thought you would.’

  Glitsky kept reading, taking a couple of notes of his own. ‘He went out with this May Shinn on Saturday?’

  Hardy pulled darts from the board — two bull’s-eyes and a 1. He was throwing pretty well, a good sign. ‘We don’t know that for sure. Farris says he was planning on it.’

  ‘But no one’s talked to her?’

  ‘Right. That’s her number there at the bottom. You’re welcome to give her a try.’

  Glitsky did. He held the receiver for a minute, then hung up. Hardy sat at the corner of the desk. ‘You didn’t want to leave a message? Ask her to call you?’

  ‘I’d love to, but nobody answered.’

  ‘No, there’s a machine. I heard it.’

  Glitsky thought a minute, then dialed again. ‘Okay, last time was four, I’ll give it ten.’

  The sun reflected off the hardwood floors onto the bookcase. Hardy walked over and opened the window, a reasonable action only about ten days a year. The view to his north, up to Twin Peaks and the SutroTower, was blocked from his office by Rebecca’s room, but overhead, the sky was clear. Hardy could see Oakland easily. The air smelled like grass, even out here in the concrete avenues.

  ‘Nope,’ Abe said behind him. ‘Ten rings. This listed? Where’s she live? Where’s your phone book?’

  She wasn’t listed. Without going into it too closely, Hardy said he’d gotten the number from Farris. ‘So she’s home, I’d guess,’ Abe said. ‘At least she unplugged her machine in the last couple days, right? You going to work today dressed like that?’

  Hardy allowed that he would probably take a shower and get dressed, and moved toward his bedroom, Abe following. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t get too red hot about this.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, the body turns up yesterday, but Nash was probably dead on Sunday, we go on that, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Okay, today’s Friday. One week, assuming he went down on Saturday.’

  ‘And after four days…’ Hardy knew what Abe was saying, understood the statistics. If you didn’t have a suspect within four days of a murder, the odds were enormous that you’d never get one.

  ‘All I’m saying is don’t get your hopes up.’

  Hardy stripped off his shirt. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got Mr Silicon Valley and you got May Shinn if you can find her.’

  ‘If she didn’t go swimming with Owen Nash.’

  ‘Then who unplugged her answering machine?’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m an investigator. I’ll investigate. I also thought we’d check out the boat.’

  ‘No, the boat’s clean.’ Hardy told Abe about his visit on Wednesday night.

  ‘You brought along a forensic team, did you?’

  Hardy shut up and went to take his shower.

  * * * * *

  The case of The People v. Rane Brown was not going to be an easy one.

  Back in late March, at around ten at night, two officers in a squad car cruising under the freeway heard a man calling for help. Turning into the lot, they saw one man down on the ground and another man going through his pockets. When he saw the cops, the suspect took off. The man on the ground was yelling, ‘Stop him! That’s the guy!’ The officers followed the running man as he turned into one alley, then another, a dead end. Getting out of their car, they proceeded cautiously down the alley, guns drawn, flashlights out, until they came upon a man crouched between two dumpsters.

  This man turned out to be Rane Brown, a 5’8“, 135-pound, nineteen-year-old black male with four priors for mugging and purse snatching. When apprehended by the officers, he was wearing a black tank top and black pants that matched the clothes of the man who’d run from the scene. The officers found a .38 Smith & Wesson handgun under the dumpster next to Rane. The gun was registered to a Denise Watrous in San Jose.

  What made the case especially difficult was that when the officers returned to the scene, the purported victim had disappeared, having evidently decided that the hassle of pursuing
justice in this imperfect world was simply not worth the trouble.

  But there was Rane Brown in custody, and the police didn’t particularly want to let him go and mug someone else.

  So Hardy was in Department 11 with Judge Nancy Fiedler this Friday morning, trying to prove a robbery and knowing that he didn’t have a prayer of winning.

  Which is what transpired. After a fairly stern lecture by Judge Fiedler on the advisability of producing some evidence before wasting the court’s time on this minor and unprovable transgression, she had granted the motion to dismiss and Rane Brown was a free man.

  Hardy and the two arresting officers had been waiting by the elevator when Rane and his attorney came up and joined them. Everybody headed to the first floor, and Rane was in high spirits.

  ‘Man, you give me a turn when you walk in that courtroom,’ he said to Hardy.

  ‘Why’s that, Rane?’

  ‘You know, the man here’ — he cocked his head toward his attorney — ‘he tole me you ain’t got no witnesses, no victim, like that. So I be thinkin’ everything’s cool and you walk in and I thinkin‘ you the victim.’ He smiled, broken teeth in a pocked face. ‘I mean, you get it? You look just like the man I rob.’

  Hardy stared at Rane a moment, letting it sink in. He saw the two cops that had arrested him, one on either side of him. Hardy allowed himself a small smile.

  ‘You’re telling me I look like the victim you just got let off for?’

  Rane was bobbing his head. ‘Exactly, man, exactly.’ He just couldn’t believe the resemblance.

  Hardy looked from one officer to the other. ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ he said, ‘we just got ourselves a confession.’ The elevator door opened and Hardy stepped out, blocking the way. ‘Take this guy back upstairs and book him.’

  * * * * *

  ‘The boat was out when you got in? And what time was that?’

  José and Glitsky sat on hard plastic chairs by the doorway to the Gateway Marina guardhouse. José was about twenty-five years old, thin and sinewy. He wore new tennis shoes with his green uniform, a shirt open at the neck. The day had heated up. Even here, right on the water, it was over eighty degrees.