Hardy 03 - Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  ‘You really think they were going to get married?’

  ‘I do, yes, and I’m not too easily conned.’

  Hardy had never seriously considered that. And why, more than anything, was that? Because Ken Farris had told him May and Owen were definitely breaking up. It brought him up short, wondering what else he’d overlooked or ignored.

  His good friend, and very competent investigator, Abe Glitsky, had supposedly checked the alibi of Ken Farris, but now the thought occurred that in this one area, Pullios may have been right. Abe might have been so burned by the false arrest of May that his heart wasn’t into pursuing the leads in this case as he otherwise might have. He had, after all, not followed up the unidentified fingerprint on the murder weapon — while Struler had done so. He hadn’t discovered the private eye, Emmet Turkel. Hardy found himself wondering if Abe had actually flown to Taos or only made a few phone calls.

  Owen Nash’s death had left Ken Farris in sole charge of a $150 million empire, unencumbered now by a controlling eccentric. Might not that be worth killing for?

  ‘Something ring a bell?’ Freeman asked mildly.

  ‘Maybe.’

  They heard footsteps and were both standing by the time Strout opened the door. ‘Y’all want to come in?’ he said.

  * * * * *

  The body lay covered on a gurney in the chilled room. Strout led the way and pulled back the sheet from over her face. It struck Hardy how young she had been. Her face, without makeup or expression, was one of a young girl, sleeping.

  Freeman moved closer to the gurney, traced a finger along the line of May’s jaw, lifted the sheet further and looked down at her body, grimacing. Strout and Hardy backed away.

  ‘Where are her clothes?’ Hardy asked.

  ‘Bagged and gone. They’re checking for fabrics, hairs, stains, SOP. A waste of time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there is no doubt this woman killed herself.’

  Hardy felt the fatigue leave in a rush. The clock up over the freezers said it was past eleven, and suddenly his client had at least been proclaimed innocent of committing this murder — because, in fact, it wasn’t a murder.

  Somehow he felt the case had turned. Fowler hadn’t killed May. It made no rational difference in this case about Nash, and yet it seemed to matter a great deal. In everything Andy Fowler had done, Hardy saw evidence of confusion, concern for his reputation, a misdirected vision that he could somehow plug eleven holes with ten fingers.

  But what he didn’t see — suddenly and with clarity —was a murderer. Andy did impulsive things and then made up foolish stories to cover up how foolish he had been; he was a man out of his depth with his emotions.

  What Andy had not done was plan the cold-blooded killing of another man. Somebody else had done that —someone cold, efficient and organized, with neither remorse nor emotion. In fact, the murderer of Owen Nash was close to the polar opposite of Andy Fowler.

  * * * * *

  Jeff Elliot knew that in the old days, six months ago, before he met Dorothy, he would have been waiting at the morgue until the results came in on the postmortem so he could have a chance to make the morning edition. But tonight he had written his piece, proofed and filed it and headed home.

  Other stories around the Hall of Justice were getting attention now — one concerned a cat the D.A.s had bought to control the influx of mice that had started to show up in the building in the wake of the construction for the new jail. The cat had been named Arnold Mousenegger and had already gotten several graphs in the Chronicle, a ‘quote of the day’ from Chris Locke (‘Arnold is a budgetary godsend. We couldn’t afford to exterminate the whole building.’) and an appearance on Channel 5. Hot stuff.

  And Owen Nash was still as dead as he’d ever been. Andy Fowler was in jail and wasn’t about to get out to kill anybody else tonight. The trial proceeded at its own pace.

  Jeff’s work would keep until the morning.

  Dorothy had been asleep but got up to greet him when he opened the door. She poured them both glasses of domestic white wine while, sitting on the bed, he took his clothes off. The telephone rang and without thinking he picked it up.

  ‘Jeff, this is Dismas Hardy and I’m doing you a favor.’

  ‘You still awake? Don’t you have a trial in the morning?’

  ‘Good lawyers never sleep, and I wanted you to be the first to know, on the record, that Strout has ruled May Shinn a suicide. Andy Fowler did not kill her. Nobody killed her. She killed herself.’

  ‘Department of redundancy department,’ Jeff said. ‘Suicide means she killed herself.’

  Hardy thanked him sincerely for the lesson in grammar. Dorothy came over and placed the wineglass on the table next to the phone. She sat next to him and rubbed his shoulders.

  ‘Is this solid?’Jeff asked.

  ‘Horse’s mouth, the horse being Strout. I’m still at the morgue. I thought you’d like to know.’

  Jeff hesitated a moment — it meant he wasn’t going to sleep for a few more hours. ‘I’ve already filed the first edition.’

  ‘Hey,’ Hardy said, ‘it’s not even midnight. Don’t you guys just stop the presses, rip out the front page?’

  ‘Maybe if Arnold Mousenegger had four confirmed kills in one day.’

  Everybody knew about Arnold. ‘By the way,’ Hardy asked, ‘you still willing to dig a little if I can find a likely hole?’

  ‘By the way, huh?’

  ‘It just occurred to me.’

  ‘I’m sure it did. But yeah, I guess so. What is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know.’

  When Jeff hung up, he took a sip of his wine and kissed Dorothy. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘when news breaks…’

  She kissed him back. ‘When you win the Pulitzer,’ she said, ‘I’ll forgive you for this.’

  * * * * *

  ‘Dismas, you’ve got to get some sleep.’ Frannie looked very pregnant, standing in his office doorway. ‘What time is it?’

  Hardy stretched, afraid to check his watch. ‘Time is for wimps,’ he said.

  She came behind his desk and put her arms around him, leaning into his back. ‘How will you be able to think tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Friday,’ he said.

  ‘Good. Actually today is Friday. Does that mean anything?’

  ‘It means tomorrow I can catch up on some sleep. Tonight I’ve got to catch up on these dailies’ — he held up a thick pile of typed pages — ’two days’ worth. I took last night off, remember?‘ He rested his head back against her. ’Remember?‘

  She messed his hair. ‘I remember very well. But still…’

  ‘Andy Fowler didn’t kill May,’ he said. ‘She killed herself, just like it looked.’

  Frannie straightened up. ‘Well, that’s good, I guess.’

  ‘It’s good, though why the idiot went to May’s house —’

  She shushed him. ‘Don’t get going,’ she said. ‘Do your reading, come to bed. Now.’

  ‘A few more pages. Promise.’

  * * * * *

  The first thing he had to do in the morning was call Ken Farris and get some answers. If he didn’t like the answers he would call Jeff Elliot back, maybe even hire his own Emmet Turkel and do a number on a weekend in Taos last June.

  He also had to remember the questions. They kept flitting in and out, and he found himself making a list while he tried to read the dailies from two days before, which now seemed like two months. With all that had happened since they’d testified, he barely remembered Tom Waddell and José Ochorio, much less what they’d said or why it might be relevant.

  The yellow pad with his notes said: ‘Nash paying May? Records?’ On another line, the words: ‘Specifics of O.N. changes? How was he different?’ Then: ‘Breaking up? Why ring?’

  The notion that May had been honest throughout put a very different light on everything that had happened. Hardy started another pad, intending to begin with the assumption
that May and Owen had, in fact, loved each other. He would go through his first file folders — the ones he’d copied so long ago — over the weekend and review every word she’d said.

  He wrote a few words on the May pad, then jumped to the dailies. He had to turn back to see who was talking, Tom or José. He reminded himself — Tom was the afternoon guy, the kid he’d met that first day. He grabbed the early folder, opening it to Glitsky’s interrogations of them both, intending to start over, get a fresh grip on the facts. Again.

  He hadn’t slept in twenty hours. Now he was reading about José seeing May Shinn leaving the boat on Thursday, but José was the morning guy, so he couldn’t have seen May on Thursday morning, it must have been Wednesday, which made no sense because May said she’d gone to the boat on Thursday, so Hardy — quick — went back to the pad with the May questions.

  He looked back. Oh, it must have been Tom, after all, who’d said it. One of the folders was open to Tom.

  Frannie was right — you couldn’t work if you couldn’t think, and Hardy’s brain had just shifted to OFF. Enough. He couldn’t keep it all straight.

  56

  What seemed like only seconds later, he was in bed, the telephone was ringing in his ear and it had gotten light.

  ‘Wake you up?’ Glitsky asked brightly.

  Hardy looked at the clock: 6:10. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was just sorting my socks. I like to get it done before the weekend.’

  ‘This is what time real working people get up,’ Glitsky said. ‘Besides, I thought you might have hung around downtown to find out what Strout decided.’

  ‘Strout decided May Shinn killed herself.’ He started to tell Abe about last night, a little of his talk with Freeman. Frannie came in with a cup of hot coffee, and Hardy, still talking, swung himself up to sit on the side of the bed. ‘So Freeman says they were really planning to get married,’ he concluded. ‘How does that grab you?’

  Glitsky was silent a long moment. ‘Nash was wearing the ring, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Right there on his finger.’

  ‘And he wasn’t wearing it the last time Farris saw him?’

  ‘If Farris wasn’t lying.’ Hardy went on to describe a few of the inconsistencies he’d come across in the last twelve hours. ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘It’s something to think about,’ Abe said, ‘especially if you’re convinced Farris lied.’

  Hardy, fully awake, sipped his coffee. ‘This whole business has made me be not positive of anything, Abe. First, I’m not positive May was in love with Owen or vice-versa. The difference is, now I’m willing to consider it, and once I do that, it opens this other can of worms.’

  ‘Preconceptions are my favorite.’

  ‘Yeah, they’re a good time.’ Hardy was still on his earlier problem. ‘I guess the only thing I’m positive of is that, if May didn’t lie, then I’ve got myself a passel of rethinking to do over the weekend.’

  ‘Well, you know,’ Abe said, ‘I’m busy, but I’m here.’

  It was an offer Hardy knew didn’t come easy. But Abe had his own reasons, too. As had happened with Hardy months before, when Pullios took his case away, it rankled.

  Hardy thought a minute. It had to be something Abe —the police — had access to and he didn’t. ‘You could find out who took the coat,’ he said. ‘I mean, maybe they took something else. One of your guys…’

  No response.

  ‘Hey, Abe, you there?’

  ‘Sure. I thought you were talking to Frannie.’

  ‘No, Abe, I was talking to you.’

  ‘You were talking to me about a coat?’

  Hardy caught up to where Abe must be, then ran it down to him. Abe could check over the inventory on the Eloise, find if a member of the department had taken May’s coat, apply a little pressure, find out if some evidence had been misplaced.

  ‘Diz,’ Abe said, ‘our guys don’t steal from crime scenes. I mean, if they do, we’ve got to go to Internal Affairs. But they don’t.’

  Hardy drank more coffee. ‘It’s someplace to look. See if something jumps out at you. Maybe, although of course I’d never suggest you do this, you could have an off-the-record chat with the guys who were there.’

  ‘Taking the inventory of what was on the Eloise?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I could never do that.’

  ‘I know,’ Hardy said. ‘And as I said, I’d never ask.’

  Hardy had tried Farris at his home and gotten his answering machine. At his office he got another answering machine and left a message, hearing a couple of beeps as he did so. There was a concept, he thought. Recording the answering machine recording. Department of redundancy department indeed.

  He felt like a receptionist. As soon as he’d finished leaving his message at Owen Industries for Farris to call him at home and leave a number where he could be reached, his telephone rang again.

  ‘Grand Central Station,’ he said, picking it up.

  ‘What are we going to do about clothes?’ It was Jane. She told Hardy that they’d taken her father’s suit for the lab tests, and what was he going to wear to court today? Hardy told her to swing by her father’s house, get him a decent change and meet him downtown at eight-fifteen, enough time to change and try to determine where they would try to go today with what he figured would be by now the most hostile jury in the history of jurisprudence, angry at having been locked up themselves. Since Jeff Elliot’s article had made the morning edition, like the rest of the world, Jane knew for certain now that her father hadn’t killed May.

  This time, when he hung up, Frannie poked her head in his office. ‘In keeping with your popularity this morning,’ she said, ‘your daughter would appreciate a short audience.’

  Hardy glanced at the pile on his desk — the two days’ worth of dailies, the binders and notepads, the cassettes. He raised his eyes back to his wife. She was smiling but did not appear particularly amused.

  The Beck appeared on her still wobbly legs next to Frannie. Seeing Hardy, she lit up like the Christmas tree, held out her hands, yelled ‘da da da’ and started to run toward him, tripping on her own feet and pitching headlong into the front of his desk.

  Hardy was up and around before Frannie could get to her. He picked her up, holding her against him, rubbing the red spot on her forehead where the bump would come up, kissing her. He hugged and rocked her. ‘It’s okay, Beck. It’s okay, honey. Daddy’s here. Everything’s all right.’

  * * * * *

  He took the dailies with him. He’d have to find the time to review them, maybe during lunch, maybe while Andy was getting dressed. He and Jane had delivered the new suit upstairs, leaving it at the guard’s desk with instructions for delivery, then he’d asked her if she could leave him to his reading until nine-fifteen, half a precious hour later.

  He got settled in their little conference room, took the binders from his huge lawyer’s briefcase and spread them out, intending to start where he’d left off last night, or with where he thought he’d been — Tom’s testimony about May coming to the Eloise on Thursday.

  But he couldn’t find it.

  After the first pass through every word Tom had said to him, Glitsky or the court, Hardy rubbed his hands over his eyes and wondered if he had finally lost his mind. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for this kind of pressure. He ought to buy a boat and move to Mexico, start a fishing fleet.

  Not by bread alone, he thought. No, sleep, too. Sleep ought to come into the picture. He wondered if Pullios was sleeping. Should he hire someone to call her every hour around the clock, level out the field?

  He forced himself back. All right, it wasn’t in Tom’s testimony, where it should have been. How about José‘s?

  Finally he found it at the end of Glitsky’s initial interview with José. But that was wrong. It had to be wrong. Hardy reread the transcript, José answering when Glitsky asked if he remembered exactly what May had been doing when he’d seen her:

  A: I don’t know. She was out
there, on the street. Walking back to her car, maybe, I don’t know. I see her going away.

  Q: And you’re sure it was May?

  A: Si. It was her.

  Q: Are you certain what day it was? It could be very important.

  [Pause.]

  A: I think it was Thursday. Oh sure. It must have been. I remember, I got the note from Tom he’d locked the boat, which was Wednesday, right? So I go check it. It’s still locked. Thursday, I’m sure, si, Thursday.

  * * * * *

  Had May mentioned going back to the Eloise twice on Thursday? For some reason, because Tom and José had both seen May on Thursday, Hardy had been assuming it was the same sighting. But it couldn’t have been. José was there in the morning and that’s when he saw her. Later that same afternoon, Tom said that he saw her there again.

  Hardy pulled another legal pad and wrote a heading on the top. ‘Questions for Freeman.’ Someone who had talked to May more frequently might be able to supply answers. Under his heading he wrote: ‘Number of visits —Thursday?’

  It didn’t even matter, or rather he couldn’t figure why it might matter, but he was starting to believe that nothing here was irrelevant.

  * * * * *

  Hardy, walking next to Jane, got to the courtroom as Celine was coming up. As she had taken to doing, she looked right through him. Maybe that was the best way she could handle it. He thought probably it was best for him too. If they were going to be seeing each other on a daily basis it would be easier, better, if she avoided communication. But here they were, face to face. He reached for her arm and stopped her.

  She froze.

  Hardy backed off a step and apologized. ‘I just wondered if you’d heard from Ken Farris lately.’

  She tried to gain control. ‘I spoke to him last night. I asked him about the Shinn woman’s claim, now that she was dead.’ At Hardy’s uncomprehending stare, she quickly, with annoyance, added, ‘The two million dollars.’