“I think I’ll cut him off here,” Susan said. She lifted what was left of his last beer and held it on her lap. “I still love you but you’re getting close. Jesus. Women lie better. It’s a compliment?”
“Who’s winning?” Hardy asked, trying to end it here, but Frannie wasn’t having it.
“What about men who beat their wives, Moses? You think you can tell just by looking at them? You think that’s not living some monstrous lie?”
Moses thought a minute. “I think you could tell somehow, if you got to know them.”
Hardy entered. “Yeah, like if you got married to one and he beat you, then you’d know.”
“This isn’t funny.” Frannie turned on her husband. “Don’t make a joke of it, Dismas.”
“I’m not making a joke out of it, Frannie. I’m on your side here, okay? What’s your problem?”
“My problem? It’s not my problem! My brother says all women are liars and I don’t accept that and that’s my problem?”
“I didn’t say all women. I said—”
“I know what you said. What I’m saying is this isn’t my . . . god . . . damn problem.”
Suddenly Frannie was on her feet, half-falling over her brother and Susan, getting to the aisle, running up out of the stands. Hardy looked helplessly after her. Susan got up and followed.
Moses was shaking his head. “What did I say?”
It was after six when, exhausted, they finally found a parking space around the corner, unloaded the sleeping kids from the car seats and carried them—one each—a half-block to the picket fence that bordered their lawn.
Phil and Tom DiStephano were sitting on their front steps. They stood up together, both in denim and T-shirts.
Hardy swore under his breath. He opened the gate and stepped in front of Frannie. “This isn’t a good time, guys,” he said. Rebecca shifted, loose and gangling, in his arms, and he bolstered her up.
“You hiding behind some babies and a girl?” Phil had been drinking. A lot. His eyes were out of focus—he was having trouble keeping his balance.
Hardy kept his voice low. “I’m not hiding behind anything. How’d you find out where I live?”
“That’s for you to know, asshole.” Tom, the son, had talked to his dad, got his attitude adjusted. When Hardy had gone down with the six-pack and interviewed him last time he’d been surly but gradually somewhat cooperative. Now—never mind the profanity—his body language said it all. He was ready for a fight, blocking the path.
Hardy gave them both a weary, practiced smile. “Let’s move on, guys. All the way off the property. We’re going in.”
Neither man moved. “You come over to my home and molest my wife? You think you’re getting away with that?” Phil said.
“Put down your kid, asshole.” Tom’s little mantra of “asshole” was getting under Hardy’s skin. He half-turned back to where Frannie stood, as though rooted to the ground, holding Vincent. He was about to herd them all back to the car, drive down to the Safeway on Clement and call the police. Was about to.
“Takes a brave man to hide behind his kid,” Phil said.
“You men get out of here!” Frannie’s momentary shock had worn off. She started to step around Hardy but he held out a hand, stopping her. “We’re going inside,” he said. “Follow me.”
He tried to get Rebecca to stir, to put her down, have her somehow be protected behind him, but she was deadweight in his arms. He turned back. “I’m real impressed with a guy who beats his wife. Takes guts. A real man.”
“You put down your kid I’ll show you a real man.”
“You and your son Tom here. Two on one. That’s about your speed, isn’t it, Phil?”
“What’s your speed, asshole?”
Hardy squared away on Tom. “That’s for you to figure out.” He paused, considered, decided against anything, moving forward. “Get out of my way. Right now. Anybody here gets touched you’re going to wish you weren’t born.”
“Oooh, tough guy!”
Hardy the Vulcan nodded. “If that’s what it takes,” and started walking, Frannie a step behind him. First Phil, then Tom, stepped aside onto the lawn. As soon as they were past them, Hardy moved sideways and let Frannie go by, covering her back. With macho desperadoes like these, he knew a rock wasn’t out of the question.
Her hands were shaking and she had some trouble with the door so he stepped in, turned the key and pushed it open. Before he entered himself, he turned around. “The next time I look out here, you guys had better be gone. Go sleep it off before you get into real trouble.”
Phil pointed a finger at him. “You go near my wife again, Hardy . . . ”
Frannie got sick—all day out in the sun, the outburst at the ballpark, the tension out front. Hardy tended to her, ran her a cool bath and did all the kid stuff, getting them down before he tucked Frannie in. It was still light outside.
He went to his chair in the living room, put on some classical music—was Freeman getting to him?—and started reading the paperback of A Brief History of Time, recommended by both Moses and Abe, separately. Black holes, the Big Bang, String Theory, maybe even God.
But he couldn’t concentrate.
Or rather he couldn’t get the confrontation out of his mind. He was racing, the adrenaline pumped and nowhere to go. How had they found where he lived? He’d given Nancy his home telephone number, a mistake. He knew that a reverse listing, even of an unlisted number, was as close as the nearest phone-company employee, and PacBell was probably the biggest employer in the state. Stupid.
He considered options, several illegal—going back out to Phil’s house with a handgun, make the point a little more strongly that he didn’t want them coming around anymore. Go back without the gun. Call the police, report Phil’s battery of his wife? Report tonight’s disturbance and threat? But he remembered Glitsky’s words—random mischief just wasn’t a crime, wasn’t a police matter in San Francisco anymore.
He wondered what Phil had done—might be doing—to Nancy when he got home with his own unspent load of adrenaline. After Tom left, then what?
He picked up the telephone and got the number for Park Station. It might be a dead night, some red-hot young patrol person wanting to make some bones, do a little more than the minimum. Nothing ventured . . . it might do a little good.
“I’m not giving a name,” Hardy said, “and this is not an emergency, but you might want to send a car . . . ”
At the Shamrock it wasn’t dead but it was slow. Sunday night. The new man—Hardy’s replacement—was behind the bar. The juke was going steadily, not too loud—the Shamrock’s usual mix of mostly old rock and roll and Irish folksongs. Since the day two years before when Moses had finally removed and ceremoniously smashed the 45 of “The Unicorn”—“green alligators and long-necked geese, some hump-back camels and chimpanzees”—Hardy didn’t think there was a loser in the box.
On his second Guinness, Hardy was in a game of “301” with one of the locals named Ronnie. Ronnie was one side or the other of thirty, a piano player in a band that had the night off. He also illustrated children’s books. Ronnie was a class act, evidently talented, certainly a match for Hardy at darts. He also possessed a deal of gray matter.
“My problem with it,” he was saying, pegging his own customs at the board, “is I have a hard time imagining some brother or father letting their own sister, or daughter—especially daughter—get executed for a murder they committed.”
“She’s a long way from executed. If she gets off the worst of it is they put her through a very bad time.”
“A murder trial is some serious bad time.”
“Try living with these guys.”
Ronnie retrieved his round—two twenties and a five—drew a line through the “182” on the chalkboard and without a pause, without even seeming to look at the board, scribbled in “137.” Even dumb dart throwers got good at subtraction—and Ronnie was a computer.
Hardy stepped to the line. �
�Could be just bad luck. They didn’t know she was even going to be charged. So now they’re just waiting to see what happens.”
Triple twenty, a good start. He took a sip of the stout.
“You know,” Ronnie said, “I just thought of something—what if one of them was trying to kill her, too—I mean kill all of them—and she just didn’t happen to be home?”
Hardy stopped, his dart poised.
Ronnie was into it. “Do you know who’s the beneficiary if the whole family’s wiped out at once?” Hardy’s dart sailed, a second triple-twenty. Three in a row—a “180” round—was worth a free drink in any bar in the city. “Give me a break,” Ronnie said. Then: “Did he have any other family? The husband? Who might have inherited anything?”
“I don’t know,” Hardy said. “It’s a good question.”
He threw the third dart, which kissed the flights of the other two but landed a millimeter above them in the “20” but outside the triple ring.
“Not a bad round,” Ronnie said.
“Not bad.”
25
“That man was the devil.”
Penny Roman, mother of Melissa, who had died from the botched abortion attempt, believed it. She was not old but somehow conveyed age—her hair was frosted to a flat glaze, her makeup heavy. She wore a calico print granny dress with a frilly collar that had probably been designed for a teenager and the effect, as she walked in her flip-flops, carrying a tray with coffee and mugs, was nearly grotesque.
“Now, Pen.” Her husband Cecil sported a clipped graying mustache, a pencil behind his ear, over-the-counter reading glasses, green slacks. “He might have been in the hands of the devil, doing the work of the devil . . . ”
“He was the devil.”
Cecil shrugged at Hardy. “It’s been very hard. You can’t imagine.”
“I’m sorry.”
He was almost sorrier that he’d come out here, by Mission Dolores, to the thousand-square-foot house with the feeling of doors and windows that never opened. Jesus and Mary peered down from three framed prints in the small room where they all sat, cramped and airless, Hardy and Cecil on the chintz-covered sofa and Penny on the front half of a wing-back chair. An oversized, ornately framed picture of their daughter Melissa smiled at Hardy from the end table. Cecil wheeled up a little metal portable stand for the coffee tray and their cups.
The Romans were an unturned stone that he had discussed with Freeman, who had upbraided him for his scruples about whether or not the Romans had actually ever even dreamed of hurting Larry Witt. The question was: Could he point at them? Could they, however tangentially, deflect the prosecution’s case?
He also didn’t love the idea that he was here on this Tuesday morning under false pretenses, keeping the appointment he had made with them yesterday after telling them he was a policeman. If Terrell or Glitsky couldn’t or wouldn’t do it . . .
When he had been an Assistant District Attorney Hardy had gone shopping one day in South San Francisco at the badge store. Badges were neither sanctioned nor forbidden by the office—everyone realized that sometimes they came in handy, especially with people whose English might not be perfect and who were used to looking at badges, who knew essentially what they meant even if some of the nuances were missing.
So he had been Officer Hardy on the phone, and now he had a badge. They had let him right in.
“This is just routine, especially after this much time. We keep trying to catch up. Someday, maybe.” Hardy smiled ingratiatingly, sipped his coffee and opened the manila folder he had brought with him. The folder did not contain a police report on the reported vandalism to Dr. Witt’s car. Instead, Hardy had borrowed for the morning his own copy of the police report on his client Mr. Frankl—the man who had thought—erroneously as it had turned out—that he had a defense for DUI. The Romans did not notice the deception.
“What does he say about us?”
Cecil was trying to see something he recognized in the folder. Hardy moved it away. “Frankly, he accuses you of breaking into his car, stealing his radio . . . ”
“That’s ridiculous!” Penny spilled coffee over into her saucer. “He’s a liar, too.”
“He’s not anything anymore, ma’am. He’s dead.”
“Yes, I know that. Of course.” Her lips tightened, trying to hold it in and failing. “And I’m glad he is.”
“Now, Pen.” Cecil reached his left hand across the table and laid it on his wife’s knee. “We have to be Christians here. Hate the sin but love the sinner.”
“I can’t. I can’t do it.”
Cecil patted the knee absently. His attention back at Hardy, his hand stayed where it was and it made him sit crookedly. “Dr. Witt was a sinner, Officer. But that doesn’t mean we broke into his car.” He gestured around the room. “Do we look like the . . . like we steal radios out of cars? Why would we? What would it prove? Would it bring our daughter back?”
Hardy was beginning to think it was pretty likely that, in fact, they hadn’t broken into Dr. Witt’s car. If anyone had. He jotted a reminder to ask Jennifer.
“You say Dr. Witt was a sinner, though. Did you know him personally?”
Hardy saw the tendons of Cecil’s left hand rise up. He was squeezing his wife’s knee hard. There was no reaction from her—Cecil’s calm was chilling. “Dr. Witt was an abortionist, Officer. He killed our daughter.”
They went through it, as Hardy knew they would have to. Penny began to cry, silently, unmoving. To them both, it was a seamless tale of evil’s cause and effect—their daughter’s unfortunate lust, her sin, not accepting God’s will and bringing to fruit the life she had created, allowing Witt to turn the blade on her baby, finally casting her lot with the abortionists, the killers, and—as Cecil and Penny had known would happen—they wound up killing her.
Hardy closed the folder.
“He deserved what he got.” Penny couldn’t hold herself in any longer. Cecil’s hand tightened again. “We read about it in the papers, naturally. The Lord takes care of His own.”
“I think someone else took care of Dr. Witt,” Hardy said.
“He wasn’t the Lord’s, Officer. He was the devil. He was the last instrument of Melissa’s torture. We never even saw his car. I don’t know what kind of car he had.” Penny began crying. “We didn’t know anything about him. Now he’s coming back from the dead to punish us some more.”
Hardy was standing up, wanting out of there. “No, ma’am, he’s not. He’s not going to punish you. I’m closing his file and we’re going to forget all about it. I believe you.”
Gradually, the fire went out. Penny sat back, deflated, managing a weak “Thank you.”
Cecil walked with him to the door, took a couple of steps outside. It was another clear morning, with a light breeze. The Sutro Tower sparkled in the sun a mile away. Cecil stared at it for a long moment. “It does get meted out, you know. Punishment.”
“We hope so.” Hardy the cop, playing the role.
“I’m talking about him, about Dr. Witt.”
Hardy waited.
“You know, after he killed Melissa, before he was killed himself, I knew he was living up there in his fine house, making all kinds of money, profiting from his sins . . . ”
Hardy wondered if Cecil knew that Witt had volunteered for his work at the Mission Hills Clinic. But this wasn’t the time to tell him.
“And I know that’s the way in this world. Sinners prosper. But once in a while we see proof. We see some justice here in this world. It gets meted out.”
“Yes, sir.” They shook hands.
It wasn’t until he was back downtown, parking at Sutter Street, that he realized what Cecil had said. Penny may have believed she knew—they knew—nothing about Dr. Witt, but Cecil obviously knew he lived in a fine house up by Sutro Tower. And he had known that before he’d read about it in the papers.
Hardy talked to Jennifer and learned that Larry’s car had been vandalized but he hadn’t reported it to
the police. What were the police going to do about it? He’d simply gotten it fixed, bought a new radio. That’s what you did. Insurance had covered it.
Larry had been an only child and his parents had died long ago. The Witt family had been alone in the world and they felt like it. That was why, she said, Larry was so protective, wouldn’t let her go out on her own, wanted to know where she was all the time—so he could be sure she was all right, that the family was safe.
She and Larry had agreed that they didn’t want Phil and Nancy to be Matt’s guardians. So Larry had asked one of his cousins—Laurie something who lived down in Orange County—if she’d take the responsibility if it ever came down to that.
But all that notwithstanding, Jennifer’s family—as closest next of kin—in fact would have inherited if Jennifer had been killed along with Larry and Matt.
Still, after all that, and though he’d be happy if it turned out that Tom or Phil or even the Romans had had a hand in Larry Witt’s murder, Hardy didn’t really believe any of them had. He was reaching.
After his day with her physicians, his gut told him that Jennifer was probably guilty of what she’d been charged with. He’d just about come around to believing, as Freeman did, that she had killed first husband, Ned, and second husband, Larry, to stop them from beating her. And somehow, tragically, by mistake, Matt had gotten in the way.
Frannie put her hand up against the Plexiglas and Jennifer did the same. They stared at one another for a long moment. Frannie hadn’t really planned to visit Jennifer again. She’d left the kids with Erin, intended to go shopping.
Maybe it had been the scene with Jennifer’s father and brother, maybe she just wanted reassurance that they weren’t really so dangerous. Maybe she felt a little guilty, starting something with Jennifer she wasn’t prepared to follow through on. She wasn’t sure—it was complicated, but the fact was that she was here now.
Jennifer broke the silence. “You don’t look so good. Are you all right?”
The 13th Juror Page 22
