Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  Hardy stood and thanked him for his time. Farris got up from his chair, shook hands over the desk and apologized again. He wasn’t himself. Sorry. Thanks for coming by.

  Hardy turned back at the door. Farris had sat back down in his chair behind the wide expanse of the oak desk. He was staring out again into the evening shadow cast over the lawns and pine trees, the shade now reaching to his no-view window—a statue of grief.

  The flight was on Japan Airlines at eight-fifteen.

  It was four-fifteen, far too early to leave, yet she had phoned for the cab. What was she thinking of? May knew she would go mad sitting out at the airport for three hours, worrying that someone would stop her, knowing that she had to leave here, that this place, maybe America itself, was over for her.

  Her bags were by the front door. She had decided to pack the Lennons, and the foyer looked bare without them. The sun shone in through the turret windows, which she’d opened due to the heat. The heat made her feel as though in some ways she was leaving a place she’d never been.

  She wore a dark blue linen suit with dark hose, not the perfect outfit for this weather, but she thought it made her look more businesslike. Her hair was in a tight bun, her most severe look. She didn’t want people coming up and talking to her.

  When the doorbell rang, she was surprised. Normally, the drivers would honk out on the street. Nevertheless, she determined that she would tell the man she’d made a mistake; he could come back later if he wanted the fare.

  Or maybe she wouldn’t. Through the peephole, his looks scared her—a light-skinned black man with a nasty-looking scar through his lips, top to bottom. On the other hand, she wanted someone who wouldn’t talk to her and this man looked like that type. She opened the door.

  She was looking at a badge of some kind, the man identifying himself as Inspector Abe Glitsky of the San Francisco Police, Homicide. She stepped back as he asked if she was May Shintaka. “May I come in?” He sounded polite enough.

  “Certainly.”

  He stood in the foyer. There was nothing she could do to keep him from noting the newly empty walls, obvious where the Lennons had been taken down. “I’m here about Owen Nash.”

  A nod. She turned and walked back into the living room. Now she was really hot and she took off her coat, draping it across the arm of the couch. She went to the turret window and heard the honk of the cab down below.

  The sergeant took a few steps into the room, but stopped near the foyer. “Your shoes,” she said. “Do you mind?” She motioned to a long, polished and ridged board that began next to the door. Her own pair of dark-blue pumps were already resting over the ridge.

  Abe stepped out of his wing tips and placed them on the board. “Were you planning on going somewhere?” He motioned to the bags in the hallway.

  She was coming back across the room. He seemed to fill up where he stood even more than Owen had, and Owen was a big man, had been a big man. “That’s my cab down there now,” she said. “But it’s too early anyway. I should tell him.”

  Abe was nervous about letting her go down, but she’d left her bags as well as the jacket of her suit. She didn’t take a purse. If she got in the cab, he’d be able to call the dispatcher and possibly stop her before she’d gone a mile.

  The advantage was his now. She had invited him into her apartment. He hadn’t needed to show a warrant, which in any event he didn’t have.

  As soon as he’d left Hardy, he decided he had to do some police work. He had the phone company run a reverse list on May’s phone number and got her address, which was on his way home. He’d called back Elizabeth Pullios, but she was out with a witness and wasn’t due to return to her office until Monday. He finished up his paperwork on the Nash incident report, grabbed an afternoon cup of tea and some peanut M&M’s downstairs, then went upstairs to the jail and interviewed a snitch who supposedly knew the name of the shooter in last weekend’s drive-by. The information was worth checking, so he scheduled a videotape session for Monday.

  Back at his desk, now getting on four o’clock, he called records and got a registration on the Beretta. The gun belonged to May Shintaka.

  Nash’s autopsy showed that the bullets that killed him were .25 caliber, and Glitsky figured he didn’t have to wait for the formal ballistics report. He had her address, and for the moment at least, May Shinn was “it.”

  She didn’t hop in the cab and make a run for it. He was standing in the turret, watching her say something into the passenger window. After she stepped back, the cab took off with a squeal of rubber.

  Glitsky watched her close the door to the apartment, gently, holding the knob with one hand and fitting the door into the sill with the other, the way mothers sometimes did when their children were sleeping in the room they were closing off. Seeing her dark blue, low-heeled pumps and the tailored suit, he had to remind himself that according to all the information he had, this woman was a prostitute.

  She was out of the shoes, then, turning away from the door. She came back into the living room. He found he couldn’t make a guess as to her age and hit it within a decade. She could be anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five. She had, he thought, a very unusual face, the bones clearly defined, the skin smooth and stretched tight with the hair pulled back.

  She walked over to the low couch, next to where she’d laid her jacket, and floated down onto it. She made some motion that he took to be an invitation to sit, which he did, feeling like a clod in his brown socks and his American sports coat.

  “Would you like some tea?” she asked. “Please, take off your coat. It’s too warm.”

  So far as Abe knew, he was the only male tea drinker on the force. He thought about declining, then realized he would enjoy watching May Shinn move around. “That would be nice,” he said. He folded his coat over his end of the couch, thinking if she kept this up, he’d be stripped before long.

  She walked into the kitchen, open from the living room, and he watched her back, the straight shoulders, tiny waist, womanly curve of her hips. Even barefoot, her ankles tapered, thin as a doe’s.

  She poured from a bottle of Evian into a kettle. “Owen’s dead,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Somebody killed him.”

  He kept watching her closely. She was taking down some cups, placing them on a tray. If her hands were shaking, the cups would betray her, but they didn’t. She stood by the stove, turning full to face him. “I read that.”

  Glitsky sat forward on the couch, elbows on his knees. “The suitcases,” he said. “You were going somewhere.”

  “Japan. On business,” she added, spooning tea into the cups.

  “You have business over there?”

  She nodded. “I buy art. I am a—a broker for different friends of mine.”

  “Do you go over there a lot?”

  “Sometimes, yes. It depends.”

  Glitsky would have time to pursue that if he had to. He decided to move things along. “We found your gun on Mr. Nash’s boat. On the Eloise.”

  “Yes, I kept it there.”

  “We’re reasonably certain it’s the gun that was used to kill him.” She seemed to be waiting, immobilized. “When was the last time you saw him, Ms. Shinn?”

  She turned back to the stove, touched the side of the kettle with a finger and decided it wasn’t ready yet. “Friday night, no, Saturday morning, very early. He stayed here.”

  “In this apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then where did he go from here?”

  “He said he was going sailing. He sailed many weekends.”

  “And did you go with him?”

  “Most times, yes. But not Saturday.”

  “Why was that?”

  She tried the kettle again, nodded, then poured the two cups. She brought the tray over and set it on the low table in front of them. “He had another appointment.”

  “Did he tell you who it was with?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

 
; “Or what it was about?”

  “He didn’t say. He only said it was clearing the way for us.”

  “What does that mean, clearing the way for you?”

  “I don’t know. I think he needed to be alone. To think it out.” She seemed to be searching for words, although not the way a foreigner would. She appeared to be a native speaker of English, but there was a hesitation, a pause. It threw Abe off—he couldn’t decide when, if, she was editing, when she was telling the truth. “We were going to be married.”

  “You and Owen Nash were going to be married?”

  “Yes.” Keeping it simple and unadorned. The best kind of lie, Abe thought. And this, he was sure, was a lie. Owen Nash, internationally acclaimed tycoon and business leader, intimate of presidents and kings, did not marry his professional and well-paid love slave. Period.

  “Had you set a date?”

  “No,” she said. She picked up one of the teacups and held it a second, then put it back down. “It is still too hot,” she said. “We only decided, finally, last Friday. It was my ring.”

  “The snake ring? The one on his hand?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “Then you’ve known since Monday that he was dead?” Or since Saturday when you shot him, he was thinking. “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  She picked up the teacup again, perhaps stalling. “When it doesn’t burn the fingers, it can’t burn the mouth,” she said. She handed him the cup.

  It was strong, excellent green tea. Abe sipped it, not really understanding why you could drink hot tea on a hot day and feel cooler. “May, why didn’t you call us, the police?”

  “What could they do? He was already dead. I knew it was Owen. The rest didn’t matter. It was his fate.”

  “It wasn’t his natural fate, May. Somebody shot him.”

  “Monday I didn’t know that. I only knew it was Owen’s hand.”

  “What about today? Did you read the paper today? Or yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  Glitsky waited. “Just yes?”

  May Shinn sipped at her own tea. Carefully she put the cup down. “What do you want me to say? My instinct, after all, was not to call the police. Whoever killed Owen will have to live with himself and that is punishment enough.”

  Abe put his cup down and walked back to the turret window. Across the street was another apartment house, the mirror image of this one. A cable car clanged by below. The sun was still fairly high, slanting toward him. There wasn’t a cloud clear to the horizon.

  From behind him. “Am I a suspect, Sergeant?”

  Glitsky turned around. “Do you remember what you did last Saturday, during the day?”

  “An alibi, is that right? I am a suspect, then.”

  “It’s an open field at this point, but unless you have an alibi for Saturday, I’m afraid you’re in it. Did you kill him?”

  Just say no, he thought, I didn’t do it. But she said, “I was here Saturday, all day.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, alone. I was waiting for Owen to come back.” A little short there, exasperated. Deny you did it, he thought again, just say the words. But she said, “I loved the man, Sergeant.”

  “Did you make any phone calls, order out for pizza? Did anybody see you?”

  Finally it was getting to her. She sat on the front three inches of the couch, ramrod straight. “I got up late, around nine. Owen had left sometime around six. I took a long bath. I was nervous. Owen was doing something to make it so we could get married—deciding, I think, that he was going to go through with it. He thought best out on the water. I waited. I paced a lot. When he wasn’t back by dark, I went to bed. I couldn’t face anybody. I was crying. I thought he’d decided not to.”

  Glitsky put his jacket over his knees. “I think you might want to put your trip on hold,” he said. “And maybe see about retaining a lawyer.”

  He thought about taking her downtown now, but knew that he’d be asking for repercussions if he did. It was premature. He really had no evidence. It had been a week since the gun had been fired, and even the most sophisticated laser analysis wouldn’t show powder on the hands after that long. What May had told him was plausible,though pretty unlikely, and there was still plenty of legwork to try and verify her alibi or not, maybe neighbors hearing her walking around and so forth. If she agreed to put off going to Japan, there wasn’t any risk of imminent flight, and he didn’t really have any probable cause.

  Plus, she being Oriental and he being half black, he didn’t want to give anybody any ammunition to be able to accuse him of hassling her on racial grounds. She had invited him, without a warrant, into her apartment. It was bad luck to arrest somebody under those conditions. Now if she took flight, it would be a different story.

  But she was standing, too. “All right,” she said. “I understand.”

  Glitsky was picking up his shoes. “Can you get a refund on that ticket? If you can’t, we may be able to help you.”

  She shook her head. “They should refund it. God knows I paid full price, they should.”

  So she’d bought the ticket recently, Abe thought. Probably since last Saturday. He hesitated. Strike two and a half. Tough call, but he was still an invited guest in her house, and she’d promised to stay around. He’d really prefer to have an indictment before he decided to arrest somebody on a murder charge.

  He thought he’d bring his suspicions to Hardy and Hardy could decide whether they wanted to try to persuade the grand jury. But he doubted there was enough yet. Two and a half strikes didn’t make an out.

  He said goodbye and she closed the door, gently, behind him.

  Abe didn’t love himself for it, but it was too close and he thought with a little patience he could at least not have to worry over the weekend. He pulled his Plymouth away from the curb and made a point of turning west at the corner under the turret window. He drove three blocks, turned north again on Van Ness, left on Geary and back up to Union. He parked at the far end of May’s block on her side of the street.

  Even with the windows down, in the shade, it was hot. Fortunately, he didn’t have long to wait.

  A cab pulled up in front of the corner apartment building and honked its horn twice. Glitsky waited as May came out of the building. He let the driver load her suitcases into the trunk, let May get settled into the back seat before he pulled out into the street.

  As the cab rounded the first corner, Abe turned on his red light and hit his siren. The cab, directly in front of him, pulled over immediately.

  Abe came up to the window and flashed his badge. The driver asked what he’d done; Abe had him get out of the car, then asked him where his fare had asked to be taken.

  “Down the airport,” he said. “Goin’ to Japan at eight o’clock.”

  Glitsky thanked the man, then opened the back door and looked in at May. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’re under arrest.”

  17

  It was after five, but yesterday Hardy had gone home early after the beach, so today he felt compelled to check in after his visit with Farris instead of going directly home from the field. He parked under the freeway and stopped for a moment to admire the huge hole in the ground that now, after a year of political struggle, was the beginning of the new county jail.

  Like everything else in San Francisco government, the decision to build a larger county jail had been arrived at after a fair and wide-ranging debate of other uses to which the allotted money should, in a perfect world, be put. Although the electorate had approved the bond measure that would provide the funds, the board of supervisors had at first leaned toward using this money to buy electronic bracelets to keep track of prisoners—Hardy grinned involuntarily whenever the thought crossed his mind—and using the remainder for AIDS research. This enlightened plan was discussed by the mayor, the board and various agencies for eleven months. Finally, over the threatened resignations of both Police Chief Dan Rigby and County Sheriff Herbert Montoya, the
jail had been approved.

  Hardy gazed down into the hole as the last of the workmen were wrapping it up for the day. He had a vision of five gang members in an old Ford cruising out to one of the projects to shoot whoever might be standing around, each of them wearing a Captain Video wrist bracelet to keep him from committing crimes because, see, if the cops knew where you were at all times, then it would be the same as being in jail, wouldn’t it?

  The first time he’d seen her she’d had mascara running down her face, hair witched out in shanks, so Hardy didn’t immediately recognize Celine Nash, who was coming out of the coroner’s office, on Hardy’s left, thirty feet in front of him.

  The ashen hair—or was it blonde?—was thick and combed straight back, to just below her shoulders, looking like it had been professionally done about ten minutes before. She wore a peacock-blue leotard on top that disappeared into a pair of designer blue jeans, cinched at the waist with a red scarf. Watching the body approach him from the side, he was almost preternaturally aware of its substance, the solid thereness of a splendid female— the movement almost feline, the rock of hip and jounce of breast. He stopped breathing.

  Then she turned toward him, and he recognized her.

  “Ms. Nash?” he said.

  She was still ten feet away when she halted. Hardy introduced himself again, coming up to her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “there’s been so many . . .” She let it trail off. “Were you with the coroner?”

  Hardy explained his connection, that he would be handling the case when it got to the district attorney. “I just got back from seeing Ken Farris. He told me you might be up here. He’s pretty broken up.”

  “I imagine he is.” Her eyes were light blue, almost gray. He thought he might as well be invisible—the eyes looked past him, then came back to him, waiting.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” he said, meaning it.