Dead Irish

by John Lescroart

  With the pipe clamped between his teeth, he walked through the echoing house as though fighting a gale. As he flicked the light switch in the hallway, there was a pop and a flash, then a reversion to darkness.

  While he’d been in Cabo the wood in the front door had swollen. Normally, Hardy took care of carpentry that needed to be done, but he hadn’t gotten around to re-planing the door.

  He had to yank on it twice to get it open. Standing for a moment in the hallway, contemplating nature’s perversity, he drew on the cold pipe. Then he stepped into the swirling mist.

  On the way to Candlestick Park he considered stopping by the Steinhart Aquarium to see if Pico would like to accompany him. But he decided against it. Pico would talk about his great passion—getting a live great white shark into the aquarium. Long ago, Hardy had helped “walk” the traumatized sharks that fishing boats brought in, hoping to coax them into swimming on their own. None of them had ever made it, and Hardy didn’t do it anymore.

  He didn’t do anything like that anymore. You could put your hope in anything you wanted, he figured, but to put it in hope itself was just pure foolishness.

  And as Hardy often said, “I might be dumb, but I’m no fool.”

  2

  THE MEXICAN GUY in the upper-deck front row two sections from where Hardy sat was trouble. He probably weighed two hundred fifty pounds. Sitting with his shirt off, a red bandanna around his head, and a big meaty arm around a stout Latino woman, he was intimidation incarnate.

  By Hardy’s best count, since the vendor had stopped coming around in the bottom of the fourth inning, the guy had put away a dozen large beers. He brandished a near-empty pint brandy bottle in his free hand. The entire upper deck smelled like marijuana.

  Hardy had gotten his ticket from Jimmy Deecks, a cop who was working the second deck casual, moonlighting. Mostly it was an easy gig, consisting of exchanging tickets with the scalpers—you took their game tickets and gave them citations. Once in a while you’d take a drunk to the holding tank. Occasionally, like tonight with Hardy showing up, you’d give an old buddy one of the scalped tickets. You’d see a lot of good baseball.

  But sometimes, Hardy knew, you had to work. A guy would try to prove he was the world’s greatest asshole; Hardy had a feeling about tonight and this guy. Jimmy was going to earn his bread.

  Although the sun was barely down and the sky was still blue, the lights were on. The asshole was standing up, waving his arms, trying to get the attention of a beer vendor, screaming “Cerveza” as though someone were torturing him by putting him through beer withdrawal cold turkey. Like a foghorn. Players on the field looked up to see who was making the racket.

  Hardy looked around, wondering when Deecks and his partner were going to come bust the guy. Suddenly the asshole took a swing at the fan sitting behind him. The fan swung back, missed, and took one aside the head that sent him sprawling. That got some other guys up. A couple of women screamed.

  The crowd up there roared, of course. What a good time! A bonus during the ball game! Hardy left his seat. Jimmy Deecks or not, this bullshit had to stop.

  But then he saw Jimmy running down the steps loosening his nightstick, no partner in sight.

  The Mexican woman was pulling at her man’s arm, trying to get him to stop, but three or four other guys were joining in now, with the asshole just screaming and swinging at random. Jimmy blew on his whistle to no effect. Hardy tried to keep moving through the seats, but more and more people were closing in to see the fun.

  “All right, enough, hold it, break it up.” He heard Jimmy’s words, the same ones always used, the ones that never worked. Things started to quiet when Jimmy laid a couple of taps on shoulders with the nightstick.

  Hardy, trying now to step over some seats, saw that only the asshole was still standing. His woman was pulling on his arm, glaring at Jimmy Deecks.

  “Come on, now. Let’s go downstairs.”

  The sweet voice of reason. Hardy loved it. He caught Jimmy’s eye briefly, then saw him fix on the woman, seeking an ally. “Get him downstairs and take him home, huh? How ’bout that?”

  The asshole just kept glaring. The woman pulled at his arm again and he looked down, as though just being reminded she was there, and casually cuffed her face, backhand.

  “Shut up!” Then something else in Spanish.

  Hardy couldn’t get through the crowd that had formed. Jimmy rolled his eyes toward him, as if for support, then unsnapped his holster. Though drawing down on fans wasn’t a recommended procedure at the ballpark, it seemed to work for an instant; the asshole appeared to forget what was going on. He looked up behind Jimmy Deecks and started yelling for beer again.

  It was all the distraction Jimmy needed. He stepped toward the guy and slapped him hard alongside the head just over the ear, and the guy went down sideways.

  There was a hearty round of applause from the stands. The woman, her own nose bleeding, leaned over the asshole, seeing if he was all right.

  Jimmy turned again to Hardy, a plea for help in his eyes.

  Somebody yelled a warning and he turned as the asshole was about to slam into him. Drunk, stoned, and probably half concussed, the guy was formidable. Jimmy sidestepped the main force of the tackle but still fell backward across some seats. The asshole was up again, as fast as he was, and he charged back down the steps.

  Hardy saw Jimmy duck away and swing hard with his nightstick as the guy passed, hitting him high on the back of his neck, probably aiming for and certainly hitting the lower edge of the bandanna. The guy’s momentum carried him down to the railing, which he slammed into, leaned over, weaving, went over some more, and finally, almost in slow motion, disappeared off the second deck.

  Abe Glitsky was figuring out his chances.

  He was one of 1,780 policemen in San Francisco. The voters in their wisdom had just rejected a mayor’s referendum calling for a city/county-wide increase of two hundred cops. The rejection, completely unexpected, though maybe it shouldn’t have been in the City That Once Knew How, had come after the department had already hired many of the new officers, which meant they would now be laid off.

  Worse, from Abe’s point of view, was that all the promotions that had been based on the hirings would be rescinded. As usual in the bureaucracy, they were using “last hired first fired,” so the officers with least seniority would get knocked back: robbery inspectors would go back to desk sergeants, desk sergeants to the beat, homicide guys to vice or robbery. And all because the citizens of this clown town thought too many cops would make the city a police state.

  Glitsky’s desk was in a cubicle of baffled masonite. He had a window with a view of the Oakland-Bay Bridge and his own coffee machine—seventy square feet of the high life, the perks of his seniority.

  He sipped some cold herb tea and thought maybe he should move to L.A. Pick up the wife and kids and go someplace where they believed in law enforcement. He’d heard that down there they were increasing the size of the force by a thousand. A thousand! He ran that number around in his brain. And no one in their right mind would say L.A. was overrun with cops. Everyone already knew that half the town was controlled by gangs; a thousand new cops probably wouldn’t even make a dent. And here in San Francisco, a mere fifth of that made people think about Mussolini.

  Abe didn’t get it.

  He really ought to go home, he thought. Get away from it. The atmosphere in homicide, outside this cubicle, was not good. Three new guys, all just promoted, knew they were going back down. And this was happening in every department, which made the entire Hall a pure joy to work in.

  To make matters more complicated, Glitsky’s lieutenant, Joe Frazelli, was retiring. (Of course, this assured that only two of the three new guys slated for demotion would actually go back to their old jobs. One would stay in homicide. Wonderful for cooperation among the rookies.)

  Abe, along with Frank Batiste and Carl Griffin, was up for Frazelli’s job, which was nine-tenths administrative and wh
ich took you off the street, which was not what any of the guys wanted. But there were other considerations, like power and, not unimportantly, money. Also, it was another rung up the ladder to captain, maybe chief, and like most cops Glitsky entertained thoughts of moving up.

  But it wasn’t easy being half black and half Jewish. Some days, when his paranoia ran high, he was amazed he’d come as far as he had, which was homicide inspector. Other times he’d think the sky was the limit—he was a good cop, he knew his way around, he could lead others.

  But if he was honest, he had to admit there were some problems. First, he knew he could direct investigations, but he had a problem working with the other guys. Out of the fourteen homicide cops, only two worked solo, and he was one of them. He told himself that it was just the way it had happened, but in his heart he knew that he’d worked it around this way.

  He’d come up four years before when an armed-robbery suspect—J. Robert Ronka, he’d never forget—had dovetailed into a wife killer. Frazelli had admired his handling of that case and put him on another hot one as soon as he’d come on board in homicide. There had been no free partners at the time, so Frazelli had asked him if he minded going solo again until somebody’s vacation ended or somebody else quit or got promoted, leaving another solo spot to be teamed. Then he’d put Glitsky together with that guy.

  Except Abe had never pushed it, and it hadn’t happened. And now he sometimes thought that not being particularly close to anybody might hurt his career.

  But that wasn’t as serious as the other problem—the race thing. The San Francisco Police Department has two unions—one for white officers and one for nonwhite officers. And Abe would be good and goddamned if he was going to use any affirmative-action bullshit to get himself moved up. When he finally did make captain or chief he didn’t want even the tiniest smell of that in his background, and so far he thought he’d avoided it.

  The trouble was, some black cops resented him for rejecting the hard-fought-for rights that they’d earned. And a lot of white guys wouldn’t believe that he didn’t get special consideration because he was black, regardless of what he said or did about it. Hell, he was solo, wasn’t he?

  (The fact that the other solo guy, McFadden, was white wasn’t a comparable situation because everybody knew McFadden was just a mean sorry son of a bitch who hated everybody and their dog Spot. He wouldn’t work with his own mother, and his mother wouldn’t want to work with him.)

  A telephone rang somewhere out in the main room. Glitsky could see three of the maybe five guys who were at their desks doing paperwork. The secretaries had all disappeared. It was close to nine o’clock on a Monday night.

  Frazelli had gone home. Abe and Griffin had rank in the shop. Wearily, Abe stood, stretched, and walked to the entrance to his cubicle. Griffin, three cubicles down, poked his head out the same way. They nodded at one another warily.

  As Abe feared, it was the desk phone. One of the new guys went and picked it up, listened for a minute, then covered the mouthpiece.

  “Anybody want to see a dead guy?” he asked.

  Abe wanted to go home. He was working on four current homicides and one he’d been hounding for sixteen months. On the other hand, his plate had been fuller, and he was gunning for looie. He stepped out of his cubicle. “Want to flip for it?” he asked Griffin.

  “Where is it?” Griffin asked the new guy.

  “Candlestick.”

  “Naw. Baseball’s boring,” Griffin said.

  “Okay, I’ll take it,” Abe said, not liking it. Griffin should have gone for it too. And there seemed to be a personal edge to what he’d said. Something was going on.

  Abe didn’t like it.

  The Giants beat the Phillies, 4 to 3.

  After the last out Hardy stayed in his seat, drinking beer and waiting for what crowd there was to thin out. They stopped selling beer after the eighth inning and he’d gone back and bought three to hold him over to the end of the game. He still had one, open but untouched, in the deep pocket of his coat.

  They left the field lights on. Hardy squinted below to the place the man had fallen. They’d stopped the game back in the seventh right in the middle of what turned out to be the Giants’ game-winning rally, when they had two men on, nobody out and Will Clark coming up.

  Most of the spectators had gone. He figured by now it was just the cops, so he got up and meandered through the seats, sipping beer.

  The area was cordoned off with yellow tape. Deecks was sitting slumped, his legs hanging over the seat in the row in front of him. The Cougar—Rafe Cougat, Deecks’s partner—was talking to one of the techs. They were getting ready to move the body.

  Hardy felt a hand on his shoulder and turned around. “Abraham, my man,” he said. Then, the thought occurring to him, “This a murder?”

  Abe Glitsky grinned, and the scar running through his lips lightened. Fifteen years before, he and Hardy had walked a beat together. They still wrote Christmas cards.

  “You see it happen?” Abe asked.

  “No. I was watching the game.”

  “Still fascinated by crime, huh?”

  Against Hardy’s will, the sarcasm rankled slightly. “I read the sports page, sometimes the food section. I get my current events across the bar.”

  Glitsky jerked his head. “These low railings,” he said. “I mean, you see kids leaning over ’em all the time going for fouls. They ought to put up nets or something.”

  Three men lifted the body bag and were carrying it over the seats. Another group waited on the cement stairs. The gurney waited at the top of the ramp. “I’m kind of surprised you bothered to come over and check this out.”

  Hardy lifted his shoulders an inch. “Parades,” he said, “can’t get enough of ’em.” A section of seats separated them from the rest of the group. Hardy asked why Abe was here himself if it wasn’t a murder.

  Glitsky pursed his lips, thinking for a minute. “Long story,” he said finally. “Politics.”

  “You? I thought you didn’t do that.”

  Glitsky made a face. “I used to think you got political to move ahead. Now you need it to stay even.”

  Hardy sipped at his next-to-last cup of beer. “Gets to that point, it’s too much stress.”

  “That’s how people live, Diz,” Glitsky answered. “It’s how you stay alive.”

  Hardy took a long, deliberate drink. “Is it?”

  Glitsky’s nose flared. They had come up to the concession area, still away from the others, the gurney. “Yeah, it is. I got a wife and three kids. What am I supposed to do?”

  The vehemence took Hardy back a step. “You feel that locked in, Abe?”

  “I don’t know how I feel. I’m trying to do my job right and not lose what I got.”

  “Well, there’s your problem,” Hardy said, trying to make it lighter, “you’ve got stuff you care about.”

  The gurney went by. Deecks and the Cougar followed it, talking quietly. One of the techs came up and started saying something to Glitsky. He listened, nodded once, started walking. “But to answer your question,” he said, “no, this wasn’t a murder. The gentle victim got a little overenthusiastic near the railing. Deecks’ll write it up. End of story.”

  “So why’d you come out?”

  Glitsky sucked his teeth. “Because, like you, Diz, I am enamored of all aspects of police work.” He flicked a finger at Hardy’s cup. “You spare a hit of that?”

  Hardy took the backup beer out of his pocket. “Boy Scout training. Be prepared.”

  They walked out of the park and started down Cardiac Hill, both of them sipping beer. “The politics really that bad?” Hardy asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just on the rag tonight. Tired. This call came in, I was thinking about going home.”

  “So go home now.”

  “Yeah.”

  They got to Glitsky’s green Plymouth. Hardy tipped his cup back. “You notice beer never gets warm here? It’s one of the great things
about this ballpark.”

  Glitsky squinted through the fog out toward the Bay. “Nothing gets warm here.” He stood without moving, maybe waiting for some signal. “I’m gonna check in,” he said suddenly.

  Hardy eased himself up onto the car’s hood, waiting, wondering. What was Abe checking in again for after he should have been home with his wife and kids five hours ago? Hardy didn’t believe anybody had to be that much of a red hot.

  But when Glitsky came out of the car, he was smiling his tight, scar-stretching smile. “Serves the fucker right,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The guy who scammed this”—he motioned back to the stadium—“off on me. Two minutes after I left he got himself a righteous homicide. Ought to keep him up all night.” The smile tightened farther. “You know, Diz, I think I better see how he’s doing.”

  “That smacks of cruelty, Abe.”

  “You know, I believe it does.”

  They sat in the front seat and waited while Glitsky got patched through. “Carl? Abe. What you got?”

  “What do you want to know for?”

  “I got done here. Thought you might want some help.”

  Hardy heard the voice change. “I don’t need no help, Abe.”

  “I said want, Carl. Not need.”

  There was a pause. “Okay. Sorry. No, we got it under control.”

  “What is it?”

  “White male, midtwenties, tentative ID Cochran, Edward. Shot once in the head—”

  “Find out where it is,” Hardy said.

  “What? Hold on,” Abe said to the radio.

  “Find out where it is,” Hardy repeated. “I know an Ed Cochran. It better not be him.”

  The rookie, Giometti, was coming back from the fence that fronted the canal.

  “You all right?” Griffin asked.

  The kid tried to look brave, even smile, but it didn’t work. What he looked, even in the phony bright lights that had been set up for the techs and photographers, was ashen. His lower lip hung loosely off his mouth, as though he’d been hit and it had swollen. His eyes still had that watery look some people get after they throw up.