Hardy 03 - Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  The French deli across the street. The cleaners on the opposite corner. Nada, nada, nada. If May had been home, as she claimed, she had been invisible. Of course, he didn’t believe she’d been home, but as he’d told her, what he believed was irrelevant.

  He was on the fourth and last floor of the building directly across the street from May’s. His feet hurt. He was considering rashing his billing rate for this work up to $75 an hour. He rang the bell and listened to it gong for a moment. No one answered. There was one other door down the hall, and it opened.

  ‘Mr Strauss isn’t in. Can I help you?’

  Mrs Streletski was a well-dressed elderly woman and he gave her his spiel. She invited him in and forced him to drink a cup of horrible coffee. She was sorry she couldn’t really help him. She’d been out of her apartment for the last ten days — in fact, she’d just gotten back from visiting over in Rossmoor. She was considering moving into Rossmoor with Hal. They did so much there. It was an active place, even if you were a little elderly, no one treated you like you were old. There were lots of classes, movies, lectures. It was a fun place, a young place.

  Mrs Streletski showed Freeman that you couldn’t see anything of May’s building from her window. He thanked her for the coffee and left his card so that Mr Strauss, who lived alone next door, could call him when he got in if he had the time.

  ‘He’s not home very often, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘He travels a lot. He’s always working. He got divorced last year and I think he’s very lonely. We’ve played Scrabble a few times and I tried to get him to go out with Hal and me, but I think he misses his wife and his boys.’

  ‘Well, if you could have him call me, he might have been home, remember something.’

  She said she would. He thanked her and started walking down the steps, thinking that even when you didn’t get anything, this was probably worth more than $75, call it $100 an hour.

  * * * * *

  ‘Two months before you even set a date for a preliminary hearing?’

  Hardy was biting his tongue, held to the stricture not to leak anything about Elizabeth’s upcoming appointment with the grand jury. Ken Farris, in the interview room down by the evidence lockers, wasn’t happy, and Hardy wondered how far he could go to make him feel better. ‘We’re working on something.’ Lame, he knew.

  ‘Let’s hope so. And meanwhile she’s out walking around.’

  ‘That’s how it works.’ Farris shook his head.

  Hardy thought he’d get away from it. ‘So how are things down in South City? Getting any better?’

  Farris didn’t look better. There were bags under his eyes. His shoulders slumped. He sat kitty-corner to Hardy at a gray-topped metal table, his arms half-cupped — protectively — around the original of Owen’s will. May’s gun was also bagged on the table. The snake ring.

  Farris shrugged. ‘The stocks went down, then back up. We’ve got contracts. People have work and life goes on.’ He looked back down at the piece of paper in front of him. ‘This, though, this is unbelievable. What was he doing?’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Owen. Two million dollars. Christ. Celine told me she talked to you.’

  The man was jumping around, trying to find a foothold. Hardy still wasn’t comfortable talking about Celine. He’d been able to put her out of his mind, but if something came up that put her back in, she tended to stay. He didn’t really understand it. ‘When did you see her?’

  ‘Sunday. The cremation.’

  The cremation. Farris — and Celine — they were both coming off that, too. They’d had a rocky week. ‘How’s she holding up?’

  Farris seemed to be studying the will some more. ‘What? Oh, she’s pretty fragile right now. A little fixated on May. I talked her out of going to court for the arraignment.’

  ‘Good idea. What’s she say about May?’

  ‘She wonders why we waste all the time with arraignments and hearings and trials. And then there’ll be appeals. Somebody ought to go and just kill her. Celine says she’d do it herself.’

  ‘Try to talk her out of that, too, would you? It would be frowned on… You’re sure she did it, huh?’

  That woke Farris up. ‘You’re not?

  ‘Whoa, I didn’t say that. We just can’t put her on the Eloise. It’s kind of a major detail.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got her on the Eloise. Celine told me Owen was meeting her on the Eloise.’

  Hardy nodded. ‘She told me that, too.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what? It’s hearsay. Inadmissible.’

  ‘Bullshit. She was on the boat.’

  ‘I didn’t say she wasn’t. We’re trying her for murder.’

  ‘Okay. Sorry.’ Farris looked down again, tapped the paper. ‘This is definitely Owen. Why didn’t he tell me about it?’

  ‘Maybe he thought it would never come up.’

  ‘How couldn’t it come up?’

  ‘If he didn’t die, how’s that? Maybe it was a goof, maybe he wrote the thing drunk. She might have dared him or something. The point is, it’s here, and it’s a damn good reason to kill somebody.’

  ‘Another one,’ Farris said.

  ‘What do you mean, another one?’

  Farris frowned, as though surprised he’d been caught saying anything out loud. He rose from the chair, pushing the physical evidence back toward Hardy. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Figure of speech.’

  24

  Jeff Elliot went blind in Maury Carter’s office.

  It had started, he guessed, on the night after he’d gone to the morgue. The tension of those moments, coupled with his first front-page article and the background stuff, had produced too much stress, and there had always been — and his doctors agreed — a correlation between stress and the onset of his attacks.

  But MS was a sneaky thing. It wasn’t like it came up and wopped you upside the head. With his legs, it had begun with pins and needles one morning. His left leg just felt a little bit like it was asleep, like a low-voltage current was passing through it. Then, over the course of a couple of weeks, the feeling not only didn’t go away, it got worse and his leg became a weight he dragged around. Which was when he’d gone to the doctor and the bomb dropped.

  The right leg had gone two years later. But since then he’d had five good years, three on Prednisone and then, because he hated the steroid, trying to get along without it. And, he had come to think, successfully.

  So successfully that he hadn’t really related it to the MS when he woke up with slightly blurred vision. He ignored it. If he wasn’t looking directly at something, it was nothing.

  This morning, though, he’d noticed it a lot. The right eye didn’t seem to focus at all, and there was a brown smudge over half of what he could see through his left eye. He should go to the doctor, but this was the chance he’d worked so hard for. He was the man of the hour.

  Once he got a few more things tied up here he’d go see about his vision.

  Maury Carter did business out of a building about two blocks from the Hall. There was a black-and-white four-foot-square sign above the doorway outside, bolted up against the old brick, that read ‘Bail Bondsman.’ Inside, a desk for Maury’s secretary took up the big front window. Behind that desk were file cabinets and acoustic baffling that served to separate Maury’s private office from the street.

  It was Tuesday afternoon. Jeff had spent most of the morning following up on what he’d missed the day before — May’s bail. It wasn’t a stop-the-presses story anyway —people, even murder suspects, made bail all the time — but it bothered him that he’d found it out on television. He had to keep concentrating on his story, not worry about his eyes.

  And the real story now, if it existed and he could get it, was the Shinn/Freeman connection. Along with the fact that May had made bail, he’d discovered Freeman’s billing rates, so Hardy and Glitsky must have been right —there was a source of money somewhere.

  But Dorothy, Maury’s secretary, said she
wasn’t supposed to talk about their clients, ‘but we can talk about anything else. Maury’s over at the Hall. Do you want to wait? I can get you some coffee.’

  Jeff thought she was about the nicest girl he’d met in San Francisco. She wore a print dress and her skin was fair with a few freckles. It occurred to Jeff that she might even think he was okay, in spite of his crutches.

  She, too, was from the Midwest — Ohio — and had been out here for four months, living with a girlfriend in the Haight, which wasn’t anything like she’d expected it to be. She was going back to school to get her nursing degree; she’d already majored in bio, so it shouldn’t be too hard, but she was going to be doing it at night and until then this job paid the bills.

  Jeff could have listened all day, was even starting to feel comfortable telling her a little about himself. He found himself looking around the growing brown smudge, willing it away in the vision of her, but then Maury came in, who’d actually put up the bond. And the reason Jeff was here came back.

  Maury wasn’t going to tell him, though. It was confidential information. They were back in Maury’s part of the office now, behind the partition. ‘But we know how much the bail was.’

  Maury had a shiny, deep forehead with white steel-wool for eyebrows. On the map of his face, his nose was a small continent. His ears stuck out and his jowls hung. He leaned back in his chair, feet on his desk, and brought his cigar to his purplish lips. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Blowing out a line of blue smoke, he chewed reflectively on his tongue. ‘Then what can I tell you?’

  ‘May Shinn put up fifty thousand dollars?’

  ‘As you say, you know how much the bail is.’

  Jeff was fighting a kind of ringing panic attack. He looked down at his notepad and found he couldn’t make out what he’d written there.

  ‘Bail was half a million,’ he persisted. It was the stress, this circular discussion. He should end it and get out of here. The room was closing in — the cigar smoke, the funny light. ‘Let’s be hypothetical,’ he said. ‘Your normal fee — suppose I’m a client now — is ten percent, right?’

  Maury threw him a bone and nodded, blowing more smoke.

  ‘So if I’ve got bail of half a million, I give you fifty thousand.’

  Maury nodded. ‘That would be the fee, yes.’

  Was the smoke getting thicker, the light worse? Maybe he was just getting dizzy. He squirmed in his chair, got the blood flowing a little. Then you pay that to the court?‘ It still wasn’t clear. Jeff knew, or thought he knew, this stuff, but suddenly it wasn’t making any sense.

  ‘No, I pay the court the half million. All of it. Not the fifty thousand, the full half mil.’ Maury pulled his feet down and pulled himself up to the desk. ‘Look, I keep the fifty no matter what. That’s my fee for incurring the risk.

  Let’s face it, these guys — my clients — call a spade a spade, they got lousy credit. Hey, are you okay?‘

  Jeff heard Maury’s chair move back. It was funny — it felt as though he just closed his eyes a minute, then he’d opened them again. But if his eyes were open, how come he couldn’t see anything? He guessed he was moving his head, trying to scan the room and find a flicker of light.

  The panic was taking over. He had to get out of here. He went to reach for where his crutches were, but missed, and knocked them to the ground, now grabbing wildly at nothing, pushing himself from the chair, falling, falling.

  Over the ringing that filled his head, he heard Maury yelling, ‘Dorothy! Dorothy, get in here!’

  * * * * *

  After Farris left, Hardy had put in what he thought was a pretty good afternoon’s work. He pleaded out three assaults — a purse snatching and two robberies. A couple of dope cases were going to prelim. A teenage gang member had ‘tagged’ — graffitied — six police cars, doing $9,000 worth of damage. Hardy was moving toward the opinion that possession of a can of spray paint ought to be punishable, like carrying a concealed weapon, by mandatory jail time. At four-thirty, he left the office and went down to the Youth Guidance Center, where he talked a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl into giving up the name of her thirty-year-old boyfriend who was letting her take the fall for a little friendly welfare fraud.

  But, like to a hole in a tooth, Hardy kept coming back to Owen and May Shinn.

  The drive back home from the YGC, top down on the Samurai, was over Twin Peaks, down Stanyan Street —and other sorrows — by the Shamrock, then the Aquarium, Golden Gate Park, out Arguello through the Avenues. It gave him enough time to worry it.

  The motive thing was a real problem. If they couldn’t sell it to a jury, they didn’t have capital murder, and Hardy couldn’t think of a rebuttal to his own argument: if May had killed Owen for the money, did it make sense for her to leave it to chance that his body would be found? He thought the answer had to be no. Resonantly, obviously, absolutely, no.

  So the strategic issue became whether they could keep Freeman from asking the question. He didn’t see how.

  But more immediately, and this was what occupied him as he ran the red light on 28th, once that initial chink in the motive worked its way around, would the jury start losing faith in May’s guilt altogether?

  He heard the siren and pulled over to the right. It was not yet six o’clock, a glorious night, the warm spell miraculously hanging on. He was surprised when the patrol car pulled in behind him and the cop got out.

  ‘How you doin’?‘ Hardy asked.

  The cop nodded. ‘May I see your license and registration please?’

  Hardy reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He opened it to where he had his D.A.‘s badge pinned in across from his driver’s license. He was reaching across into the glove box to get his registration when he felt the cop’s hand on his arm.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, sir, but you ran a red light back there.’

  Hardy half-turned. He must have. He didn’t even remember seeing it. He apologized. Besides, he had no intention of failing the attitude test.

  The cop handed him his wallet. ‘Eyes on the road, huh.’

  ‘Gotcha.’

  He waited until the cop was back in his car, then started up again, getting into the traffic with a nice signal, turning right off Geary at his first opportunity.

  * * * * *

  Hardy pulled up in front of his house still feeling foolish and a little guilty. It was the first time he’d experienced that particular professional courtesy — getting a break on a ticket — and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

  Rebecca was in her stroller next to Frannie, who was sitting on the front-porch steps, wearing sandals, Dolphin shorts and a tank top. The sun hit her hair just right, like a burning halo around her.

  ‘You ought to get prettier,’ Hardy said, coming through the gate. ‘It’s hell coming home to an ugly woman. And try to look a little younger while you’re at it.’

  He was almost to her when she jumped with an animal growl. She hit him high, wrapping her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, kissing him, then biting his ear, hard. He held her, marveling at her tininess, her smell, her fit to him. ‘Okay, okay, I guess you don’t have to look younger.’

  She clung to him. ‘Wet willie,’ she said.

  Hardy bore up under the torture. ‘See, you’re making the baby cry.’ He took the last step to the porch and made a face at the baby. ‘It’s all right, Beck, your mother’s just a little bit insane. I’m sure it’s not hereditary.’ Rebecca kept crying and Hardy kissed Frannie, then let her down and reached into the stroller. ‘I’ll carry this neglected child,’ he said. ‘You push the stroller.’

  They walked east on Clement, past the Safeway and the little Russian piroshki houses and Oriental restaurants, the antique shops, Rebecca now happy in the baby seat, Frannie’s arm through Hardy’s, his coat hung over the stroller’s handles.

  They caught up on everything — Rebecca’s spots mostly gone now; the decision about the second car they were considering buying as so
on as the Shamrock profit payment came in, which ought to be when the fiscal year closed this week; Pico’s weight, which led to Frannie’s own weight gain (monitored daily); the Fourth of July picnic this weekend. The pregnancy was going smoothly. Boys’ names. Girls’ names. The ticket Hardy almost got for running a red light.

  They walked as far as Park Presidio — over a mile —before they turned around and started back home. Hardy told Frannie about Pullios and her decision to get an indictment before the grand jury, move the proceedings to Superior Court.

  ‘Why does she want to do that? What’s the problem with a delay? I thought all trials took forever.’

  Hardy walked on a few steps, strolling really, relaxed, squinting into the sun. ‘This is a hot story. She’s not going to let it cool off.’

  ‘Jeff Elliot,’ Frannie said.

  ‘Exactly, but we’ve got a real problem.’ Hardy briefed her on it, moving on to what had concerned him when he’d gotten pulled over. ‘The thing is, once you start asking about the motive, you open another can of worms.’

  ‘If she did it for the money, why did she dump the body? But if she didn’t do it for the money, why didn’t she burn the will or something?’

  ‘Right.’

  They walked along, pondering it. The sun had gotten behind the buildings. It was not cold, but there was a nip in the shade, and Hardy stopped and tucked his jacket around Rebecca. ‘Another thing, too,’ he said, ‘although I hate to mention it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The ring. May’s ring.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘He was wearing it. Owen was wearing it.’

  ‘Does that mean something?’

  ‘I don’t know what it means, but it could mean that he put it on, that he left it on, that they had a relationship, that he wasn’t leaving her. And if that’s the case, and if she wasn’t killing him for money, bye-bye motive.’