Dead Irish

by John Lescroart

  “Still, you could find out some things. Make sure they’re doing it right.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t do that anymore.” He looked down. “And I’m out of Guinness.”

  “Fuck the Guinness.”

  “And fuck you.”

  The two stared it down. “Well, I don’t know, Mose. Maybe I’ll ask around a little. That’s all. No promises.”

  “Okay, but I want to pay you. And I’ll pay you for the time off anyway.”

  “Don’t pay me. That makes it like a job.”

  “That’s what makes you tick, Hardy. Call something your job.”

  “How about I do it for Frannie?”

  “And what’ll you live on?”

  “Sponge cake, man, shrimp and Guinness. Same as now.”

  McGuire threw a round. “How about twenty-five percent of this place?”

  “The Shamrock?”

  McGuire looked around. “Yeah, that’s this place.”

  Hardy sat down on that, drummed his fingers on a table. “Why don’t we first wait and see what the cops come up with?”

  “And what if that’s suicide?”

  Hardy threw a dart. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I could look into it.”

  5

  CARL GRIFFIN KNEW he had to get over it, but it wasn’t easy. He’d gone up for his performance review on Monday, yesterday, knowing that his performance had been more than adequate, and knowing it might not matter at all. Glitsky and Batiste, a mulatto and a “Latin surname”—Christ, he loved that, Frank being as absolutely white as he was—were also up for promotion, and there was a formal mandate in the entire city and county bureaucracy to move minorities up. He thanked God there wasn’t a gay guy in homicide. He’d be a shoo-in for the next lieutenant. On the other hand, maybe Griffin should announce that he was gay, was coming out of the closet and because of his new status should be acclaimed the next lieutenant.

  So he’d entered the office for his review with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. What he actually said was: “Look, I got any chance for this or not? ’Cause if not, let’s cut the bullshit and I’ll go back to work.”

  And Frazelli had looked over at Rigby, the chief, and they’d both gotten that uncomfortable expression that seemed to come with upper management, passing it along to Carl’s union rep, Jamie Zacharias, who had said: “If Glitsky or Batiste fuck up at all, you’re in.”

  So Carl, before he’d even sat down, found his interview over. What had they been planning to talk about? he wondered. He’d gotten the bottom line out of them in about a second. Waiting for Glitsky or Batiste to fuck up would be like waiting for one of them to die. Eventually they would, but you didn’t want to set your watch by it.

  Maybe he should have asked if Abe or Frank had done anything better than he did, were better cops. But he knew it wasn’t that. They had to pick somebody, and in today’s San Francisco if that somebody was a honky on any level, there had better be a compelling reason. This was a city where people like Ralph Nader and Cesar Chavez were considered near-Fascists by some. Hell, Griffin had interviewed people who believed that Karl Marx himself had been right wing because he hadn’t invented women’s lib, while he was at it, along with communism.

  So he’d stomped out, slamming the door, then sulked in his cubicle the rest of the day, leaving his interviews to Giometti, then letting Abe follow up the Candlestick stiff, which left him the only logical choice when, an hour later, the call from down in China Basin had come in.

  Now Carl Griffin was sitting in his car outside his partner, Vince Giometti’s, apartment on Noe Street. The fog almost completely obscured the streetlight at the intersection in front of him, forty yards away. The steam from the cup of Doggie Diner coffee clouded the windshield. The stuff seemed to stay hot about half a day. Maybe it was the acid they put in it.

  His partner and he had been up until after two, breaking it to the wife. So today was starting late. He honked his horn again. C’mon, kid, put your pecker back in your pants and come to work.

  Christ! he thought. They ought not to let homicide guys be married. So what if he was married—it wasn’t anything to talk about. It had never kept him home and never would, that was for sure.

  He kept thinking about instinct.

  If there was one thing that separated the good cops from the very good, it was instinct. You didn’t want to overdo it, Griffin knew, and ignore evidence, but every once in a while a situation came up that seemed to point in an obvious direction and your instinct made you stop and reevaluate.

  Glitsky was up for lieutenant. He was up for lieutenant. Frank Batiste likewise. Okay. So at this moment one of those two was standing in the roadway, trying to direct traffic, point Griffin in the obvious direction.

  Nine years a homicide cop, and not once before had Abe Glitsky showed up at a scene with his two cents’ worth.

  Why do you think that could be?

  Maybe Glitsky knew something he didn’t know. Okay, the Cochran kid could have done himself, maybe not. But why would it benefit Glitsky if he—Griffin—came down for a homicide, which was the direction Glitsky was pointing?

  Did he know something? Who was that guy he brought to the scene?

  Giometti, cleanly shaved, smiling, opened the door. He had a thermos of what was probably fresh coffee with him, a paper bag full of goodies.

  “Want a bagel, Carl?” he said.

  “Something tells me Cochran might have done himself,” he replied. He took the bagel.

  “But the gun was fired twice.”

  “Yeah, I know. First time could’ve been three weeks ago, two months, a year even.”

  “And the wife said—”

  “Wives don’t know how their husbands feel about squat.”

  Giometti, he could tell, was thinking about saying something and decided against it. He chewed his bagel. “What changed your mind?” he finally asked.

  Damned if Griffin was going to tell him everything. People talked, even partners. Word got around. It would be good for Glitsky’s career if he fucked up. And Glitsky was pushing him—okay, subtly, but it was there—to decide it was a homicide. And Glitsky, he was sure, knew something he didn’t, something that led in another direction.

  Put it together, Carl, he told himself. Make damn sure you’re not being set up.

  “Instinct,” Griffin said.

  Charles Ging’s nose was a map of capillaries, and his breath smelled like gin. His son didn’t often get close enough to smell him, but now, leaning over the blond desk in his father’s office, it was nearly overpowering.

  He was leaning over in anger. His own face was smooth, as though he hadn’t started shaving yet. His eyes were pale blue, hair light brown. He was impeccably dressed in an Italian suit.

  What he was saying was, “It’s beyond me. Absolutely. You think you’re doing the right thing, you’re the nice guy, doing everybody a favor. It’s bullshit, man. What you’re doing is gambling with my future. And don’t reach for the goddamn bottle, please.”

  Ging shrank back into his padded chair. “I don’t like you to use that tone of voice to me, Peter.”

  “The hell with my tone of voice! Listen to what I’m saying, will you? We get blackballed by the Catholic Church and I am personally screwed. You understand that?”

  “Of course, but we’re not going to be.”

  Peter slammed the desk. “Yes, we are. Don’t you see that? Times are changed. Not changing, changed. Past tense. You don’t play straight, it ever comes out, you’re dead. And it doesn’t matter to you, you’re already finished. Me? I gave up being a doctor to get this place, continue the clean business of covering people with dirt, and now you put the whole thing on the line for what? For a favor to some asshole owns a bar? Jesus, it kills me.”

  The telephone on the desk rang. The older man went to pick it up; his son put his hand on the receiver. “Let the machine get it, would you? It’s after hours.”

  He looked down at the hand covering
his father’s. “Jesus, Pop.”

  The machine clicked. They heard the woman on the recorder, another voice struggling for control, calling for arrangements. It almost didn’t register for Peter anymore. He thought for the hundredth time maybe he’d made a mistake deciding to take over the business. The endless parade of grief still got to his dad. And look what it did to the guy. When he finally died, he’d already be pickled. Either that, or if they went to cremate him he’d go up like an alcohol lamp.

  Charles reached for the bottle again, and Peter let him—even grabbed a couple of ice cubes from the refrigerator. Dilute it a little; maybe it would help. Then he sat down.

  After the first sip, his father sighed. “What do you want me to do, Pete? Tell the guy, who I happen to know, that there’s nothing I can do? His brother-in-law apparently killed himself, and the Church says he can’t be buried in holy ground. You call that charity?”

  “Fuck charity. This is business.” And Peter suddenly knew he couldn’t deal with the business on this level much longer. He had to get his dad out of it; the man didn’t see reality anymore.

  “Look, Pop, you tell this guy—What’s his name?”

  “McGuire.”

  “Right, you tell McGuire there’s a chance it’s not a suicide, you think that’s the end of it?”

  “There is a chance it’s not a suicide.”

  “You saw the powder burns, the wound, the whole thing. The guy shot himself.”

  “Still, there’s a chance he didn’t—”

  “So you tell Cavanaugh there’s reasonable doubt . . .”

  “I didn’t tell him that. Father Cavanaugh and I go back a long way. He told me he guaranteed it wasn’t a suicide. The boy was like a son to him. And Jim Cavanaugh and I, we understand each other.”

  “And it’s all good old boy, isn’t it? You defraud the Church, Cavanaugh goes along with it, nobody loses, right?”

  “I know you don’t agree, but right.”

  The son looked at the father, shook his head.

  The father lifted his glass and drained it.

  Hardy, his shift over, back at home in early dusk, was looking at a picture of himself and Abe Glitsky in uniform. Glitsky’s broad unlined forehead, he decided, was the only part of his face that couldn’t terrify. The rest of it could keep small children awake with nightmares—hatchet nose, overlarge, sunken cheeks, eyes whose whites were perennially red, thin lips with a scar through them upper to lower, the result of a teenage parallel bars accident, although Glitsky told his fellow cops it was an old knife wound.

  Abe chewed ice on the telephone. Sometimes he was easier to talk to when you weren’t looking at him. Hardy heard the ice crunching like rocks. Glitsky chewed some more, and Hardy pictured him tipping up a cup and hitting the bottom to loosen the last of the ice. He kept chewing.

  Hardy blew again on a cup of espresso at his kitchen table. He waited, thinking Glitsky could make an ice cube last as long as a stick of Juicy Fruit.

  “I’d just like to see the pm, check the file, see if I’m missing something,” Hardy said.

  Glitsky must have flicked at the near-empty cup. “Yeah, I know what you want.”

  “Come on, Abe. I’m not getting paid for this. It all comes down to insurance for the widow. I’d rather have you guys find it a homicide, and that’s what Moses wants me to check into. I have no interest beyond that.”

  “You don’t think we’re competent to do that, to find that out? ’Cause that’s what it sounds like you’re saying, and that kind of pisses me off.”

  Hardy sighed. “Are we a little defensive here in our declining years, or what?”

  Abe chewed on some more ice. “You don’t understand what it’s like here lately.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not asking for much, either.”

  “You’re asking to get in somebody’s face around their investigation. That’s pretty much.”

  “Well, then you do it for me.”

  Glitsky laughed. “Yeah, that’d work.” Hardy knew that the humor he heard wouldn’t ever get to his eyes. “Do you even know what we’ve got? Why don’t you wait a day or two? If it’s a homicide, we’ll likely decide it’s a homicide.”

  “I know that.”

  “And don’t brownnose me.”

  Hardy had forgotten that he’d never been much good at getting things by Glitsky. He was beginning to remember. “Look, Abe,” he said, “it’s not like I’m a private investigator wanting to go around you guys. I’d just like a little information, that’s all.”

  “That’s the line, huh?”

  “It’s the line, but it’s also the goddamn truth.”

  Glitsky flicked at his cup—rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat. “Griffin and I aren’t exactly sleeping together,” he said. “You’ll have to play it very straight.”

  “I just want to meet the guy,” Hardy said. “I’ll dazzle him with my Irish charm.”

  6

  THE SUN HAD COME OUT. The morning was beginning to get warm. Hardy took off his sweater before he got to his car. He felt slightly nauseous. He had felt it was his duty to look at the body again.

  He’d seen quite a lot of blood in Vietnam before he himself had been hit in the shoulder. As a cop, he’d run across his share. But he was far from hardened to the effects of metal passing through flesh at high speed.

  They hadn’t yet dressed it. Hardy had started at the toes and worked up. Eddie had been five-ten, about 160 pounds. He had an old, healed moon-shaped scar about three inches long on his upper right thigh, calluses on the tips of the fingers of his left hand, a fairly new bruise on his left forearm, and a small scratch near his left ear, just under the hole the bullet had made going in.

  He drove up Mission Street with the windows open. The radio in his Suzuki wasn’t working, but still Hardy tried to turn it on three times in the thirty blocks between Ging’s Mortuary and his destination. The damage done by the tiny piece of lead kept jumping up behind his eyes, short-circuiting other connections.

  The parking lot was between a local office of the Pacific Telephone Company and the Cruz Publishing Company.

  The lot was now filled with cars. Hardy had a hard time, for a moment, remembering what it had looked like empty. This was industrial wasteland, without a house around. Railroad tracks, train yards, glass, stone and cement. He parked along the curb, letting the site work itself into his consciousness. The sun was hot now and glared off the side of the Cruz Building.

  Arturo Cruz stopped dictating and dismissed his secretary, then gave all his attention to the two men six floors below him in the parking lot. Immediately he knew it had been a mistake to send Jeffrey to get rid of the cop—it must be another cop. Jeffrey was too young, inexperienced. Loyal as a dog, a body to die for, but not by any stretch a jack-of-all-trades.

  Jeffrey was having a conversation with the man, showing him around the long, narrow lot that was now filled with the cars of Cruz’s employees.

  His publication was a newspaper called La Hora, which catered to the large Latino population of San Francisco. It was an intensely competitive market, and to make it you had to do things that maybe when you started out would have bothered you.

  Now, the point was, you’d done them, and it wasn’t good luck to have too many policemen making themselves at home in your parking lot. The other night, then yesterday, had been bad enough.

  Cruz turned from the window and decided to go down himself to see what was what.

  The back of the lot was bounded by a Cyclone fence eight feet high, but entrance by the front was wide open. The canal, now at medium tide, ran parallel to the back fence perhaps thirty feet from the buildings. Between the fence and the canal was a no-man’s-land of shrubbery and debris.

  Hardy leaned against the fence, at the end of the ten-foot-wide corridor between the last row of cars and the building, squinting. He had brought his old badge—illegal but helpful—and was making what he thought was a little progress with a boy named Jeffrey.

  Jeffre
y had already admitted that he’d known Ed Cochran “just to talk to.” He had no doubt—and Hardy briefly wondered why—Eddie had killed himself. What stumped Jeffrey was why he had gotten out of his car with a loaded gun and walked forty or fifty feet to almost lean against the building and shoot himself. It was a point Hardy hadn’t considered. Hardy looked around, thinking for a fact it couldn’t have been for the view.

  “Everything under control, Jeffrey?”

  Hardy looked into the glare where the voice had come from. “You must be Mr. Cruz,” he said. “Sorry to keep having to inconvenience you, but there’s always this kind of thing in a violent death.” He kept talking. “Jeffrey was just showing me where the body was found. Pretty bad, was it?”

  Cruz cocked his head, hesitating. He wasn’t older than thirty-five, and he radiated both authority and good health. Black, perfectly styled hair capped a face with a slightly Arabic cast. But his eyes, or perhaps his contact lenses, were light hazel and his skin, though tan, was fair. His mouth turned in disgust. “It was pretty bad,” he said.

  Hardy smiled. “They probably covered this yesterday, but you know bureaucracies.”

  Cruz, understanding, nodded to Hardy. He dismissed Jeffrey with a look. “Anything to help,” he said, though Hardy thought he appeared nervous.

  “Jeffrey said it was near here, the body. But there’s no sign of it now at all.”

  “It was right here,” he said. “They had it cleaned up by the time we got to work the next morning.”

  “Was anyone still in the building?”

  Cruz was scrutinizing Hardy, his expression still wary, but he answered quickly enough. “No, I don’t believe so. We don’t encourage overtime. I know the lot was empty, except for my car, when I went home.”

  “And when was that?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I told the other inspector yesterday—maybe eight or eight-thirty. It was still light out.” At Hardy’s questioning glance, he volunteered: “I was the last one to leave. I always am. Bosses’ hours.”