Hardy 03 - Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  During the recess Hardy argued his 1118.1 motion in Chomorro’s chambers. The judge, to his surprise, seemed to be giving him his full attention and proved it by telling counsel he was going to take the weekend to consider the motion. He would render his decision on the motion for a directed verdict of acquittal on Monday. Meanwhile, however, Hardy should be prepared to begin calling his defense witnesses.

  His client had not said a word to him the entire afternoon. When the judge came out and adjourned court for the week, he only muttered, ‘See you Monday,’ and went back to join his daughter.

  Hardy gathered his papers.

  58

  At ten past five it was already dark as he went out toward the parking lot. A storm was coming in and a wind had risen, steady and cold, Alaska written all over it.

  Hardy put down his heavy briefcase and stood by the entrance to the morgue, looking through a hole in the plywood into the construction site where the new jail was slowly rising. A steady trickle of workers getting off passed behind him, and he envied their snatches of conversation, of laughter, plans for the night, for the weekend. He turned up his suit collar against the wind, feeling alone and desolate.

  ‘Hey, Hardy! Dismas! Is that you? Knocking off early? Glad I caught up with you.’ It was Ken Farris, walking against the tide flowing from the building. ‘I got your messages but couldn’t get away, thought I’d try to catch you after court. You adjourned already? Is it over?’

  What Farris had said was true — he normally could have expected to find Hardy in the courtroom at this time, but his arrival just now struck Hardy as a little convenient. He could just have called back. Hardy said as much.

  ‘Ah, you know the office. You get to the end of the week, any excuse to get out early. This is on my way home anyway. So how’s it going? What can I do for you? This about May Shinn?’

  Hardy looked at him levelly. ‘I guess it’s about a lot if you’ve got some time. You feel like a drink?’

  Farris seemed to rein himself in. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Well, let’s say all’s not right.’

  They walked back through the Hall and crossed the street. Lou’s, crowded and noisy, was hung with yards of red and green tinsel, lit by Christmas bulbs. With all the seats taken, they stood at the bar. Hardy called for a Bass Ale, Farris ordered a Beefeater martini extra dry. Lou, behind the bar, caught Hardy’s eye. ‘He new?’

  Hardy introduced them, and Lou said, dryly, that all their martinis were extra dry — no vermouth. Farris said he’d take whatever Lou poured, which was the right answer — he got some ice, several ounces of gin, a couple of olives.

  ‘Hell of a place,’ he said, taking it in. He clinked the glass against Hardy’s. ‘Okay, what’s happening?’

  ‘The prosecution’s rested. I start calling my defense witnesses on Monday.’

  ‘You’re not asking me to be a witness for Andy Fowler, are you?’

  ‘No. Why do you ask? You think he killed Owen?’

  Farris sipped his gin. ‘Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed May too. I don’t care what they say.’

  ‘No. May killed herself. If they had found anything that connected to Fowler he’d have been long since charged with it. And they were looking.’ But Hardy didn’t like it, because if Farris still genuinely entertained the thought, maybe the jury did, too, in spite of Chomorro’s instructions. He’d better not forget that. ‘About May… when we first talked, you told me Owen had been paying her?’

  ‘Right. He paid all of them. So?’

  ‘Do you know for a fact that he was paying her? Did he specifically tell you he was?’ Farris appeared to be giving it thought. Hardy continued, ‘You told me Nash had changed the last few months. I was wondering, might that have been one of the changes.’

  Farris seemed somewhere inside himself. Finally he said, scarcely loud enough to be heard over the din, ‘Owen went with call girls, prostitutes, call them what you will. It was just his nature. It was who he was. And that’s who, what, May was.’

  ‘Well, maybe not,’ Hardy said, ‘that’s what I’m getting at.’

  Which seemed to anger Farris. ‘Goddamn it, that’s never been in dispute.’

  Hardy sipped his ale. ‘It’s in dispute now. May’s lawyer — you’ve met him, Freeman — he says the two of them actually loved each other.’

  Farris was shaking his head. ‘That’s got to be bullshit.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he just didn’t, that’s why. This is Owen Nash we’re talking about. He wasn’t going to marry some whore. Why are you digging all this up?’

  ‘Because I don’t believe Andy Fowler killed anybody. Why is it so upsetting to you if Owen loved May Shinn?’

  ‘Because I knew Owen and that wasn’t him!’

  Hardy stepped back, taking a beat. Both men went to their drinks. Hardy leaned forward again. ‘Listen, Ken, you’ve just spent six months contesting the validity of the will. It’s no wonder you’re committed to your position. I’m just asking if you’ve got any proof Owen was paying her — his own admission to you, canceled checks, whatever. You’re the one who’d told me he’d changed with her. Was a for-hire deal with a whore going to change him? Wasn’t he wearing her ring when he was shot?’

  ‘We don’t know that. Someone could have put it on him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Hardy kept at it. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. He put it on himself. He was planning on telling you sometime, possibly soon. I think he had decided to marry the woman, just as he had said.’

  Ken Farris was down to an olive. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I just…’ He shook his head.

  ‘You just assumed, didn’t you?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he have told me? He told me everything.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe it snuck up on him. But it’s all pretty consistent if you put it together — we’ve got the change in behavior, the settling down, leaving her number with you for emergencies, the will, the ring. If you buy the premise, then May wasn’t lying about anything. Which is why I called you. I needed to verify that.’

  Lou, unasked, had slid another round under their elbows. Farris didn’t seem to notice. He picked up the new drink and knocked off a third of it. ‘There were no checks,’ he said finally. ‘Of course, cash… You know, I don’t think we ever talked about whether he paid her — it never came up.’ A retreat? A cover?

  * * * * *

  The bad news, Hardy thought, was that Farris maybe, probably hadn’t been lying… maybe he’d honestly believed an untruth and passed it along as a fact, which wasn’t nearly the same thing, and it left a hole where there had at least been the chance of another suspect besides Hardy’s client.

  Large drops of rain fell in sheets, splattering on his windshield. He found a parking place half a block down the street from his house and turned off the engine, thinking he would wait for a break in the storm. Could this be the beginning of the end of the drought? Now in its seventh year, and Hardy knew a lot of people in San Francisco who believed it would never end, that this was the new California of the greenhouse effect, the precursor of a future world of ozone depletion, skin cancers, AIDS and acid rain.

  This cleansing Pacific downpour soothed him somehow. He sat back in his seat, eyes closed, listening to the steady tattoo of the drops on the roof.

  There was still an unanswered question with May —the coat — maybe it would lead somewhere. And then on Monday Chomorro might decide to grant his 1118.1 motion and that would be the end of the trial, and he felt sure, the end of his relationship with both his ex-wife and her father. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

  Whatever, if he got Andy off on the murder charge, which is what he’d been hired to do, he’d take whatever fallout developed.

  But he also knew the trial coming to an early end was a very long shot. And it still nagged that the truth, if there was a truth, continued to elude hi
m. He could get Andy off, he could flap his arms and fly to the moon if he wanted, but until he found out who did put two bullets into Owen Nash, he knew he wouldn’t feel he’d accomplished what he’d really set out to do.

  If nothing else, he would still have to live with the fact that he was only ninety-seven-percent certain that Nash’s killer had not been the man he had labored to set free.

  59

  It had rained hard all night, awakening Hardy and Frannie several times with peals of thunder, a sound almost unknown in San Francisco. Sometime in the middle of the night Hardy got up to Rebecca’s cries and brought her to sleep between them in their bed.

  Up alone at dawn, he put on his running shoes, shorts and a t-shirt, and headed out around the park in the rain. After a shower he made himself a breakfast of hash, eggs, toast and coffee, and ate reading the paper, occasionally looking up into the gray clouds through the kitchen skylight.

  Jeff Elliot was not featured on the front page or anywhere else. The day-to-day workings of the trial were not exactly grist for the media mill. He knew Jeff would be around when the jury retired to deliberate, maybe sit in for the closing arguments, but that the mundane world of the courtroom was no match for the exploits of Arnold Mousenegger. Journalistic priorities. Mice over men.

  After breakfast he leaned over to kiss his wife and baby. He wore jeans and work boots, his old Greek sailor’s hat over a heavy white fisherman’s sweater. He hoped that this day, of all days, José decided to get to work on time.

  * * * * *

  It was still steadily pouring as Hardy turned into the Marina parking lot on a day possibly much like the one on which Owen Nash had gone out for the last time. There were only two other cars in the lot; Hardy got within fifty feet of the guard station, opened his car door, grabbed his smaller briefcase and sprinted.

  José, at the desk beyond the counter, put down his issue of Sports Illustrated and stood up. He recognized Hardy right away.

  ‘I bet you’re getting a little bored with this, but I’ve got a couple of questions for you,’ Hardy said. He took off his hat and put it on the counter next to the briefcase.

  José seemed to be an easygoing guy. It was a miserable morning with no one else around. He was happy with the interruption.

  ‘I was going over your statement yesterday, José.’ Hardy snapped open the briefcase and was getting out some of the paper. ‘And there’s something I didn’t understand.’

  José nodded, leaning over the counter, looking at the inch-thick pile of type. He grinned. ‘I say all that?’

  ‘Well, between your interview with Sergeant Glitsky and your trial testimony —’

  ‘My girlfriend, she say I’m too quiet, I never talk. I should show her these.’

  ‘I could make you a copy if you want,’ Hardy said. ‘Meanwhile, let me ask you, see here, when you were first talking to Sergeant Glitsky…’ Hardy opened the transcript to the page he had highlighted and turned it around for José to see. ‘At the end of the interview you said you’d seen May Shinn here at the Marina on Thursday morning.’

  Jose was frowning, looking at the page. ‘Si,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Tom and me, we talk about that after we see she kill herself, right?’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Well, you know after the trial, we talk about that day.’

  ‘The Thursday?’

  ‘Si. Only I see her in the morning, you know?’

  ‘I know, José. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.’ He pointed down to the transcript. ‘You see this part? Where you say she was going away from you?’

  ‘Si.’

  ‘So how could you be sure it was May?’

  ‘Well, I see her a lot. Tambien, that thing she wear on her head, and that coat. Nobody else with a coat like that one.’

  Hardy tried to keep his voice flat. ‘What was the thing she was wearing on her head?’

  ‘I don’t know how you call it. Like a fur hat.’

  ‘And the coat?’

  ‘Well, you know, the coat like some,’ he searched for the word, ‘like some painting. Muchos colores.’

  ‘Okay, José, let me ask you this, and I’ve got all day if you want to think about it — did you at any time see May’s face?’

  ‘No. I don’t have to think. She was, like, way down there.’ He gestured down the street. ‘She don’t have a car, I think. Least I never see her drive a car. She always before come down with Seňor Nash.’

  ‘She never came down alone, maybe a little early to wait for him, let herself aboard?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. Not that I remember. Maybe Tom, he know something else.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Hardy, trying different combinations, had to look back down at the questions he had prepared. This time he did not want to leave anything out. ‘José, do you remember what time you got into work that morning, that Thursday?’

  José straightened up nervously. ‘The shift begin at six-thirty.’

  Hardy gave him a conspiratorial look. ‘I know that, José. But I’m talking about that specific day. I won’t tell a soul, I promise.’ He was hoping he wouldn’t have to make José himself tell the world on the stand, but he wasn’t promising that.

  José shrugged. ‘I think a little late. Tom talk to me about it that day, I remember. Somebody come by the day before, asking about it, too. So I stop after that.’

  Hardy smiled at him. ‘You were safe,’ he said, ‘that was me. But that day… ?’

  José grinned back. ‘Pretty bad,’ he said. ‘Maybe eight, eight-thirty.’ The rain pounded at the glass all around them. ‘But I really stop being tarde back then, you know? This morning, even, no one going out, I’m here.’

  * * * * *

  He was close to Green’s, a place he favored for lunch for their breads and coffees and the sculpted wood and the view of the water. He had never been there this early in the morning, and they weren’t yet open for business, but they took pity on him standing out in the rain and let him sit at the bar and have a cup of coffee.

  Okay, it wasn’t certain that it hadn’t been May. Remember that. Keeping up about the trial on her own, May could have realized the implications of José‘s testimony — she’d been seen in her coat — and then gotten rid of it, trying to scam with Struler to cover where it had gone.

  He didn’t think so.

  What he thought, was at least beginning to consider, to realize it had been perking for a while, was that someone else — the person who had really killed Owen Nash — had returned to the Eloise on Thursday morning. Maybe she —it had to be a she now, even in May’s coat José wasn’t going to mistake Andy Fowler for May Shinn — maybe she had left something incriminating on the boat, and seeing the Eloise in the morning paper, realized she’d have to work fast. Helped by José‘s tardiness, she had gone aboard, taken out whatever it was, stolen May’s coat so that in case she was seen (which she was), identification would be confusing.

  But wait… she couldn’t have gotten aboard. Tom had locked up the boat in Hardy’s presence the night before, and José had rechecked it on his shift the next day.

  Unless, of course, the person had a key to the Eloise. Or how about if she wasn’t going to remove something from the boat but was going to put something back in? For the twentieth time, Hardy tried to picture that drawer in the rolltop desk — the drawer where Abe had discovered the murder weapon, the same drawer he’d looked in on Wednesday night and seen nothing.

  Maybe, as they were so fond of saying about baseball, it was a game of inches.

  * * * * *

  ‘This is ridiculous.’

  Abe hadn’t been thrilled to get his call before nine on a Saturday morning, but Hardy sweetly reminded him of his own call at six the day before. Besides, Glitsky was a cop first, and he was dressed and going out for another interview anyway. He might grumble, but Hardy knew that the murder of Owen Nash would get Abe’s attention until it was solved. As it was, Abe made it down to the Marina in less than a hal
f hour and he, Hardy and José walked together in the steady rain out to where the Eloise still rested at her slip.

  ‘I know it is.’ Hardy agreed, but the implications of his what-ifs were staggering. He wouldn’t have to consider them — in fact he couldn’t — if he didn’t get this fact nailed down.

  The police tape had been removed, and José unlocked the door and stepped aside so Glitsky could lead the way down.

  The generators were off. It was dark inside. The rain thrummed above as the three of them stood a minute, letting their eyes adjust.

  ‘Looks about the same,’ Hardy said.

  Glitsky wasn’t here to take inventory. ‘All right, what?’

  Hardy went forward through the galley, the short hall, the master suite. The police might have removed May’s belongings but the room seemed eerily the same — the exercycle, desks, as though someone still lived aboard. Glitsky pulled back one of the curtains to let in a little more light, and Hardy walked to the rolltop desk. He opened the drawer.

  ‘Okay, humor me, would you? Take your time, close your eyes and visualize it. Show me exactly where you found the gun.’

  Glitsky came around the bed and looked in at the open drawer. He took a small knife out of his pocket — ‘This is about the same length, right?’ — and placed it on top of the maps that were still in the drawer, back maybe three inches from the front.

  Hardy nodded. ‘Did you jerk the drawer open?’ Which would have caused the gun to slip forward or backward on the maps.

  Glitsky was patient. ‘No. I was my usual wonderful methodical self. You want to tell me what this is about?’

  Hardy looked down again at the knife in the drawer, doing his own visualizing, making sure. He picked up the knife and gave it back to Glitsky. ‘The gun wasn’t there Wednesday night, Abe. I looked in this drawer.’