Fatal

by John Lescroart

  Taking the stool, Peter shrugged out of his jacket, draped it behind him, and suddenly the bartender was in front of him. The ball game he’d turned off at home was playing on three of the television sets to the accompaniment of Dire Straits, loud but not ear-splitting.

  He ordered Hendrick’s gin on the rocks.

  Next to him, a husky female voice insinuated itself just above the music. “I don’t know Hendrick’s. I can’t believe it’s better than Sapphire.”

  He turned his head, noticing her for the first time. “Maybe not better,” he said, “but different for sure. Roses and cucumbers.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The botanicals they use,” he said. “Hendrick’s is all rose petals and cucumbers. The Sapphire is all about the juniper. You taste them together, it’s pretty obvious.”

  “Rose petals? Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I’ve got to try myself some of that while the night’s young and I can still taste it.”

  The bartender was coming back toward them. He placed Peter’s drink in front of him.

  “Stan,” she said, pointing at his glass. “You want to mix one of those up for me, too? Hendrick’s.” She met Peter’s eyes. “Rocks, or up?”

  “Good either way.”

  She nodded to the bartender. “Stan, you decide.” Placing her Sapphire drink in the bar’s gutter, she said, “but let’s hold onto that if the Hendrick’s doesn’t work out.” She came back to Peter. “I can’t let myself forget the basic problem with gin.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Same as with breasts,” she said. “One is not enough and three is too many.”

  Peter chuckled. “I’ve noticed that.”

  “You’ve known women with three breasts?”

  Now he laughed. “No. I didn’t mean that. I meant three is too many gins. Although, I suppose, that goes for breasts, too, of course, now that you mention it.”

  She made a small show of looking down at herself, one side then the other. There was plenty to see on both sides. “Whew,” she said, and they both laughed.

  She put out her hand. “Diane.”

  8

  GEOFF AND BINA COOKE HAD no children and had evolved as a couple to where they either went nearly every night to something culturally rewarding—live music, theater, the opera, a lecture, occasionally a movie—or they dined in or out with friends.

  To keep this organized lifestyle humming along, early on in their marriage, in fact within a couple of months after Bina’s miscarriage, they began scheduling a semiformal meeting for the two of them at their Pacific Heights home for Saturdays at lunchtime. This was their time together every week, almost invariably preceded by sleeping in (9:00 a.m.!) and then making love. After that, they were out of bed, dressed, and ready for business by noon. This schedule had served them well now for over ten years—it wasn’t broken, and they weren’t going to spend any time trying to fix it.

  Now—a rare treat in warm, windless sunshine—they sat outside at their picnic table on the glass-enclosed deck that looked over the Marina District, the bright sparkling bay and Marin County in front of them, the Presidio and Golden Gate Bridge off to the left. On the table were bagels, three kinds of smoked salmon, cream cheese, capers, thinly sliced red onions, fresh squeezed pineapple-orange juice, and a Keurig coffee machine. They’d already scheduled the coming week, and it looked to be a great one—Yoshi’s had Norah Jones coming in, Isabelle Allende was speaking at the Commonwealth Club, they had a wine-pairing dinner at Piperade. The magic that was San Francisco went on and on, into the next week, and now finally they were talking about Friday night two weeks hence.

  “Is it too soon to redo last week with Ron and Peter?” Geoff asked. “It will have been three weeks by then, and last time seemed to be an absolute home run.”

  “It was, I agree. But I don’t know if I told you that I heard from Kate last week when she called to thank me and she insisted that next time we all get together at her house.”

  “Did she have a date in mind?”

  “She didn’t mention one.”

  “Well,” Geoff said, “snooze, you lose. Maybe Peter and Jill would want to go out someplace. Just the four of us.”

  “We could do that, but I’d feel bad not including Kate and Ron. Especially after she kind of went out of her way to say how much she liked them. She even asked for their number. So I thought she’d be putting something together with all of us pretty soon.”

  “And yet she has not done so.”

  “And yet she has not.”

  Geoff sighed. “I suppose it’s not the end of the world to leave a few open dates. Maybe I should try to get a tee time tomorrow and see if Peter’s free.”

  “You like that guy.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay. How about this? Maybe I’ll just call Kate and tell her we don’t mean to be pushy, but we really would like to get everybody together again, so we’re planning another dinner Friday after next, and if she wants to overrule me and have it at her place, she can. But if not, we would love it if they could come.”

  “An elegant solution, Bean”—his term of endearment for her—“and worth a try. But let’s check with Peter and Jill first, make sure that day works for them. How’s that sound?”

  * * *

  “Hey, babe.” Jill lowered herself onto the bed and leaned over, barely whispering. “Are you awake?”

  Peter rolled over and his head appeared out from under the blankets. “What time is it?”

  “About one o’clock. The boys are making some deli sandwiches, and since they’re your favorite . . .”

  “I’ll get up.”

  “What time did you finally get to sleep?”

  “I don’t know. Two or three, somewhere in there.”

  “I’m starting to worry about you.”

  A mirthless chuckle. “Join the club.”

  “Do you know what this is about?”

  “I wish. Something subconscious.” Subconscious, my ass, he thought. He knew pretty damned exactly what it was, but he wasn’t about to fall into her trap again, where she was kind and understanding and forgiving and he would apologize and amend his behavior to avoid any marital unpleasantness. Or spontaneity. Or fun. “Maybe work, but I can’t figure out what exactly.”

  “Not us? You’re sure?”

  He reached out and put his arm around her. “Nothing to do with us.”

  “I mean, if there’s anything you need me to do . . .”

  “It’s not you, hon. I promise. Just a particularly nasty bout of insomnia.”

  “This from Mr. Fall Asleep Anywhere Anytime.”

  “Maybe not so much anymore. Although I wouldn’t mind having that fall-asleep guy come back. I miss the hell out of him.”

  She hesitated a moment. “When you weren’t here when I got home, and no note, no nothing, I was worried sick.”

  Here it comes, he thought. The Third Degree. He sighed. “I didn’t know I was going to be out so long. I just needed to get out of the house and started walking. Next thing I know I’m at McCarthy’s, then it’s midnight. Then it closes. I’m so sorry. I should have called or something. I don’t know what happened.”

  “So. What? You blacked out?”

  “No. I don’t literally mean I don’t know what happened. I didn’t black out. I watched the game, had a couple, talked to some guys. Maybe had a couple more, thinking they’d help me sleep. And we know how well that worked.”

  She sighed. “It makes me uncomfortable, you feeling like you have to leave the house. I don’t know what that means.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just something that happened.”

  * * *

  Normally he showered in under five minutes, but today, after a tense and quiet lunch with the rest of the family, he let the water run down on him until it turned cool. Stepping out, he dried off and, tying the towel around him, went back into his bedroom to find Jill seated there by the door in what she ca
lled her book chair, though she didn’t have any reading material in her hands. Instead, she had her arms crossed and was staring down at the floor.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She almost swallowed her response. “Hey.”

  He sat on the bed across from her. “Are you all right?”

  She took a deep breath, glanced up at him, then looked back down.

  “Jill?”

  After a long moment, she said, “Did you hear the telephone ring while you were in the shower?”

  “No. Who was it?”

  “Jerry Hobbs. He said he needed to talk to you about one of your cases.”

  “Today?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Okay. I’ll give him a call.”

  Jill went back to studying the floor.

  “Is that it?” he asked. “Is something wrong?”

  She brought her eyes up and looked at him. “I don’t want to be a nag, Peter, but yes, I think something is wrong. Clearly something is wrong. Look at how you’ve been the last couple of days. You don’t have to say anything.” She held up her hand. “After I told him—Jerry, I mean—that you were in the shower and couldn’t talk at the moment, I mentioned that I’d heard that congratulations were in order and he asked me what I meant. So I reminded him of the bottle of Silver Oak that he’d broken out on Thursday after settling whatever it was. But he just laughed and said that must have been another Jerry because it definitely hadn’t been him.” Leveling her gaze at him, she asked, “What the hell is going on, Peter? Why did you lie to me?”

  It took him a long moment to respond. This was his opportunity, he knew. He could just tell her that he’d had enough of the way he’d been living, of the flat suburban nature of their lives together. A stone had been turned deep in his soul. He’d been unfaithful to her now, twice in two days, and in his heart he didn’t care what she felt about it. He could tell her now and everything would change.

  But glancing at her face, expectant and fearful, he couldn’t yet make that sudden leap. He did not picture himself a cruel man. He didn’t want to hurt her, and he didn’t have the simple energy to go through it all now. So he took the easy way, the usual path. The convenient lie. “I guess I just . . .” He hesitated again. “Maybe it’s just that I didn’t want you to know that I’d been drinking during the afternoon at work.”

  “Maybe that’s it? You don’t know for sure?”

  “No. That’s it for sure.”

  “You drank a bottle of wine at work?”

  “Most of it, yes.”

  She nodded as she took in this information. “Has this been going on for a while? Are you telling me you’re an alcoholic? Do you think you need to get into some program? How much did you drink last night?”

  “I don’t know. Six or eight gins, maybe a couple more.”

  “More than eight?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t count them. And I knew I wasn’t driving. It’s not like it’s every day. It’s just sometimes when I get started . . .”

  “You don’t stop.”

  Peter looked down in chagrin. “I didn’t want this to be something you had to deal with. I’ve been working on it on my own.”

  “Peter. Listen to yourself. You’re saying you had a whole bottle of wine on Thursday.” Her voice now had taken on equal parts of its usual reason and sympathy. “And eight or more gins last night. Is that what you mean by working on it? And if it is, I’d have to say it sounds like it’s not working.”

  Their eyes met.

  Peter wasn’t going to be able to take much more of this. He was no more an alcoholic than he was the Queen of Sheba. But until he was ready to tell her the truth, he thought, let her think alcohol was the problem. That would cover a multitude of sins.

  He was the first to look away.

  * * *

  He answered all of Jerry’s legal queries on the phone, but when he hung up, it was a believable and simple excuse, so he told Jill that there was a small crisis at work and he had to go down to the office for a while—probably not more than a couple of hours.

  The main thing was to get away again. Away from the house and Jill and the boys. When they’d all been eating lunch together, he’d found himself growing not more guilty and ashamed as he might have expected, but increasingly angry at the judgment he knew lay dormant in the hearts and minds of his family.

  How dare they?

  So he told his wife another lie—easier than the one before—and got in his Z3 and put the convertible top down and backed out of his driveway and drove a half a mile to Diane’s apartment building, where he pulled over to the curb across the street and kept watch over the entrance for five long minutes. It was a little before 3:00, another atypically warm day, and the sun beat down, glaring off the street and the cars around him. He put on his sunglasses, then a Giants cap, and sat there in the sun.

  At last, he unclipped his cell phone and put in a call to Jerry Hobbs, whom he knew would still be at the office. “Hey, dude,” he said. “I’ve got a favor to ask. I’m out trying to buy a surprise present for my lovely bride, and to do so I had to make up a reason to get out of the house, so I told her I was going in to work for a couple hours. But it’s not impossible that she might try to reach me on the office line. And if she does, I wanted to ask you if you would pick up and tell her I’m in the bathroom or something, then call me on my cell so I can call her back.”

  “I could do that. But why would she call you?”

  “I don’t know. She probably won’t, but she might want me to pick up some groceries on the way home or something. It’s been known to happen. So I can count on you?”

  “Done. Of course. Hey, by the way, who was the Jerry you had the Silver Oak with the other day?”

  Peter forced a chuckle. “I have no idea where she got that.”

  Jerry either did not notice that this was no answer or chose not to pursue it. “Because if you are opening fine wine in the office, I know somebody who’d be happy to share.”

  “You’re the first one I’d call, Jerry. Really. If that ever happens.”

  “So what are you going to get her?”

  Peter almost asked, “Who?” but caught himself in time. “Probably something in a little fuzzy box. That usually seems to do the trick, present wise.”

  “You’re making the rest of us cheap husbands look bad. You know that?”

  “Not my fault. You guys just need to step it up a bit. So . . . you got the phones?”

  “Roger.”

  “All right. Thanks. See you Monday.”

  Closing the phone up, he sat back, squinted into the sun, and let out a breath.

  Another lie.

  He glanced again over at the building across the street. Diane’s apartment was on the third floor facing the street, and in the window he saw a shadowy movement.

  She was home.

  But then he realized he hadn’t driven here to see her again. Last night, Diane had been a substitute for the real thing. Pressing the Start button, he pulled away from the curb and took a right at the first corner. Twelve minutes later, he found a parking space on Washington Street near Fillmore.

  He put up the top of his car, got out, and took his bearings.

  The Jameson house was on the other side of the street, five driveways down. He and Ron had exchanged contact information at Geoff’s place last week, and armed with his phone number, Peter had no trouble finding the address from the reverse directory when he’d gotten back to the office after the tryst.

  Hands in his pockets, his baseball cap and sunglasses still on, he strolled down his side of the street past the large, well-maintained, two-story Victorian that looked all closed up—window blinds down, darkness within. When he got to the end of the block, he turned and retraced his steps. But this time, he stopped directly across from Kate’s address and leaned up against a convenient mailbox, arms crossed.

  “Can I help you?”

  He jumped at the intrusion.

&nbs
p; “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  He held his hand over his heart and broke a small, embarrassed smile. “That’s okay. When my heart starts beating again, I’ll probably be all right.”

  She was a well-preserved, attractive woman of indeterminate age. “You looked like you were looking for something.”

  “Just scouting the block, hoping one of the properties might look like it’s coming up for sale,” he told her. “But I don’t suppose these houses turn over too often, do they?”

  “Not too, I’m afraid. It’s a lovely street, isn’t it?”

  “Beautiful.” He offered her another smile. “Well, I guess I’ll keep looking.”

  “Good luck. It’s a little bit of a tough market nowadays.”

  “I’m getting that picture, but we’ll find something, I’m sure. Have a nice day.”

  “You, too.”

  Shaking, his heart pounding, another lie notched in his belt, he made it back to his car. He hadn’t even heard her coming up behind him. She could have been anybody. Even Kate. And for that he would have been completely unprepared.

  What was he doing here?

  9

  THE SCHOOL CRISIS WITH AIDAN kept Kate distracted over the weekend.

  She and Ron weren’t about to have their son jeopardize his otherwise excellent chances to get into one of his chosen colleges—he had a 4.3 grade point average and was thinking at the Stanford, USC, Princeton level—by dropping out of school with less than a month to go in the last semester of his junior year. On the other hand, they both professed to be very proud of him for his principled stand. They made it a point to tell Janey that they were proud of her, too, for prodding Aidan into taking the big step.

  They weren’t as delighted with the fact that the kids had gone out on their own and kept all these decisions from them.

  In any event, by Saturday morning, she and Ron had decided that they needed to shake up their scheduling to underscore the seriousness of the situation. Their kids were the priority. Always, always, always. Therefore, they would put everything else on hold for the weekend and take off to the small town of Occidental, up in the redwoods, where they would eat large quantities of Italian food at one of the family-style restaurants there and come to some decisions about how they would handle the situation.