Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  Taking a bite of a sausage link, he turned a piece of sliced sourdough bread over in the mixture of egg, milk and cinnamon—dipping it only for a second so it wouldn’t get soggy—and forked it into the pan, where it hit with a satisfying hiss. Outside, the sun had come up hot again. Maybe they’d get an entire weekend of summer this year.

  Frannie was dressed in hiking boots with white socks, khaki shorts and a Giants T-shirt, ready for the historical expedition to Martinez that she, Hardy and Moses had planned for the day. They were going to track down the elusive origin of the martini.

  “Or is it the origin of the elusive martini?” Moses had asked. This had been last Wednesday night at Yet Wah.

  “The martini itself is not elusive,” Hardy had replied.

  “But the ideal martini can be elusive.” Two bartenders, Jesus, finally coming to an agreement. Frannie was smiling, remembering. She came back down the hall from the front door with the morning newspaper and laid it on the table in front of Rebecca, who was finger-painting with baby food on the tray of her high chair. Standing, opening to the front page, she grabbed a sausage and took the mug of coffee Hardy handed her.

  “This Jeffrey Elliot’s turning into a daily feature.”

  Hardy came over and stood with his arm around her.

  SUSPECT ARRESTED IN

  OWEN NASH MURDER

  by Jeffrey Elliot

  Chronicle Staff Writer

  Police yesterday arrested May Shinn, the alleged mistress of Owen Nash, for the murder of the local financier. According to the arresting officer, Sergeant Abraham Glitsky, Ms. Shinn had purchased a ticket to Japan after the discovery of Nash’s body Thursday on a beach in Pacifica, and was attempting to leave the jurisdiction after she had agreed to remain in the city.

  Although Glitsky refused to go into much detail regarding the evidence collected thus far, he did acknowledge that a search of Owen Nash’s sailboat, the Eloise, had revealed traces of blood and a .25-caliber Beretta handgun registered to Ms. Shinn. Additionally, a slug, imbedded in the wall of the boat, was recovered. The gun had been fired twice, and Nash’s body contained two wounds. The ballistics department has not yet conclusively identified the gun as the murder weapon, although Glitsky conceded he thought the possibility “likely.”

  The article picked up on the back page, but Hardy was already at the telephone. “That’s what I like,” he said, “when I follow the comings and goings of my dear friends and professional colleagues by reading about them in the newspaper.”

  “What are you eating?” Glitsky asked. “It sounds great.”

  Hardy swallowed his sausage. “You forgot my phone number, Abe. I’ll get it for you.”

  “On Friday night? Come on. I got done talking to Elliot around nine-thirty, ten. I thought I’d call you this morning.”

  “What were you doing talking to Elliot?”

  “My car went out again. He was at the Hall. He gave me a lift home.”

  “What a guy,” Hardy said.

  “He seems like a good kid.”

  “I know he does. Nicest guy in the world. Is she out of jail?”

  “I doubt it. I guess it depends who she calls. A good lawyer might find a judge to set some bail, get her out today.”

  “And when do I talk to her? Did she do it?”

  After a minute Glitsky answered. “I don’t know. She might have. No alibi. It’s her gun. She was getting out of Dodge, and she bought her ticket to Japan after Nash was identified, after the paper had it.”

  “No alibi?”

  “The famous I-was-home-alone-all-day. When’s the last time you were home alone all day, no phone calls, no nothing? I didn’t want her going to Japan.”

  “You think I ought to go down and see her?”

  “Hey!” Frannie gave him the eye. “Martinez,” she whispered. “The elusive martini, remember?”

  In the normal course of events, there was a skeleton staff at the Hall on weekends. The D.A.’s office was officially closed. Courtrooms were not in use. Of course, there was still police work and people getting into and out of jail, which occupied the top floors until the new one in the back lot was completed. A clerk was on duty twenty-four hours a day to let people out if a bondsman met bail. Defense attorneys came and went. There were visitors.

  Hardy had parked in his usual spot under the freeway, promising an unhappy Frannie he’d be home by noon for their foray into history. You didn’t want to drink martinis before noon anyway, he had told her. She told him she wasn’t going to drink martinis for seven or so months, and in any event, she had gone along with this idea just to be with her husband, brother and daughter and have a relaxing time together, which seemed to be becoming less of a priority for him day by day.

  You thought you had trained yourself. You’d traveled far enough along your own rocky path to some inner peace that you had come to believe you couldn’t go back— events would never control you again.

  Then they took your clothes from you. They gave you a yellow gown that smelled like Lysol and put you in a small barred room with a sullen young black woman and a toilet with no seat, the whole place, beneath the disinfectant, smelling like a sewer.

  You threw away your phone calls on the man who’d been your lover’s attorney. “You ever need help—I mean real help—and I’m not around, you just call on the Wheel. He’s your man.” He would come down and get her out. He was a lawyer and knew about these things. But he wasn’t at the number Owen had given her. No one had answered, and now there was no one to call and she was alone.

  You spent the night in fear, waking up sweating in the still heat, the smell of yourself, or the other woman who didn’t talk, who sat on her mattress with her back against the wall. A clanging wake-up and a meal of cold powdered eggs, the regimented shower, the indifference of the women guards.

  She swore to herself that she would not let them take her so easily, but it was difficult finding a mechanism to deal with it, to keep the loss of herself under control. She felt her will eroding, and she knew that’s what they wanted. To turn her into a victim again.

  She’d really believed she was through with that for good. If Owen had done anything for her, it was that. She would not be a victim. That was something she could control.

  She sat cross-legged on her mattress and closed her eyes. If she did not have a physical shrine, she would create one inside herself, even here. She had been this close to despair before. It was the day she had met Owen . . .

  Alone in a darkened corner at Nissho, an exclusive Japanese restaurant near the Miyako Hotel in Japantown, a thick winter fog out the windows, she had sat contemplating her death. She would use Seconal and alcohol, starting with a small bottle of sake. After lunch she would walk slowly back up to her apartment and sit by her window, watching the fog, and drink the bottle of Meursault. She would disrobe and take a hot bath. She would swallow the pills and draw the clean silk sheets up over her naked body. And she would go to sleep.

  That was where life, after thirty-four years, had led her.

  She could not have said precisely where she had failed, or which failure had marked her Rubicon. Should she have tried harder with her family? Tried to communicate more and break the icy bonds of reserve? There had been two sisters and a brother, living with her parents in a square and empty house under the flight path to Moffatt Field in Sunnyvale. Passive. “Remember, we are Japanese.” Her father never able to get over his internment in Arizona during World War II, when he was a boy, snatched with his whole family from his home. The excuse for his whole life—“We will never belong.” Harboring the hatred and disappointment in who he was, who they all were, doling it out to her mother, to his children, to May.

  Starting college at Berkeley, glad to be rid of them, letting the family fall away. Running out of money in the first semester, taking a job selling shoes to gaijin with their huge feet; marrying Sam Hoshida, ten years older than she, because his landscape work got her out of the shoe store.

  Ano
ther semester in college then, with Sam supporting her. Another year with a man who grew quiet and bitter as he came to know she was using him. Wearing better clothes, becoming conscious of her beauty, other men making her aware of it.

  There was a teaching assistant, then, a half-Japanese, Phil Oshida, for whom she left Sam, for love. They married and she miscarried three times in two years; she could never have children. He hated her for that, felt pity and hate, trying to disguise them as love. She thought that was where the big fall had begun—when the only person she’d ever let herself care for gave up on her.

  She got her meaningless degree in political science and her second divorce. She was a shell, empty and used up at twenty-four.

  The first time it happened, she hadn’t planned it. She had gone to Hawaii for a one-week vacation, her first vacation from her meaningless job at the Bank of America. Of course, as always, she was on a budget—the package was a round-trip ticket, hotel and one meal a day. She let a student on Christmas break from USC buy her an ice cream near the beach. He was big and built and blond and all-American and told her he liked her bathing suit. Could he buy her dinner? He had lots of money. His parents lived on Hilo. Next day he asked her if she’d like to go with him over to his parents’ house. He was straightforward. He was going back to school in a week, he had a girlfriend, so no commitments, but they could have a good time.

  No actual money changed hands, although he did pay for her rebooked return flight. But the experience gave her the idea of what could be done. She quit her job at the Bank of America, shortened her name to Shinn, and started to make a good living, alone, discreetly.

  But there she was at Nissho’s, still a shell, carryingher father’s victim-load around with her. Men had been doing what they wanted with her for ten years. She couldn’t be further debased or devalued. She was still in demand, but there was no May Shintaka anymore, not even, she thought, much of a May Shinn, and she didn’t really care. Her usefulness, if she’d ever had any, was at an end.

  Then Owen Nash had walked to her table. He sat down, uninvited. She raised her eyes to look at him. “Yes?”

  “Are you as alone as you look?”

  Of the many men she had known, she recognized something in Owen Nash that she thought she had given up on.

  In her business—it was inevitable—you got to thinking all men were the same, or similar enough that the small differences didn’t matter.

  Here was a man, though, who on first meeting caught you in an aura, swept you up in it. He stood over her, looking down, giving off a sense of power, with a massive, muscular torso, a square face and eyes that vibrated with life and, half-hidden, suffering . . .

  She stared at him, not wanting to acknowledge what she intuitively felt—that this man already knew her, knew what she was feeling. “Are you as lonely as you look?” An old pickup line. But this, she felt, wasn’t just that. He was telling her that they were connected, somehow. Suddenly, with nothing else holding her to her meaningless life, she wanted to know how the connection worked and what it might mean.

  He had reserved the private room in the back, but had been watching her from the kitchen, where he was helping prepare the side dishes to accompany his main course of fugu, a blowfish delicacy in Japan that killed you if you prepared it wrong.

  After sharing the meal, they both waited for the slight numbness on the tongue. Owen had brought a bottle of aged Suntory whiskey and sipped it neat out of the sake cups.

  During the meal, he had gotten back some of what she would come to know as his usual garrulous persona. Now he ran with it, laughing, loud in the tiny room, emptying his sake cup.

  “I think you’re unhappy,” she said. “If the fish had been wrong, it could have poisoned you.”

  He drank his whiskey. “There’s risk in everything. You do what you need to—”

  “And you need to risk death? Why? Someone like you?”

  They were alone in the room, sitting on the floor. The table had been cleared—only the Suntory bottle and the two cups were left on the polished teak.

  “It’s a game,” he said, not smiling. “It’s something I do, that’s all.”

  She shook her head. This wasn’t any game for him. “I think that’s why you came over and talked to me. You recognized me. I am like you.”

  She told him she wanted him to follow her—she would show him what wanting to die was really like. They walked twenty blocks in the deep fog to her apartment. He followed her up the stairs. In the foyer, she stepped out of her shoes and went into the bathroom, where she turned on the bath. She went to the refrigerator and got out the wine, opened it. It was as though he weren’t there.

  She went to her dresser and took off her earrings, her necklace. Unbuttoning the black silk blouse, she felt him moving up close behind her, but he didn’t touch her, didn’t speak. That was the understanding. She continued to disrobe—her brassiere, her slacks, the rest.

  She finished the first glass of wine in a gulp and poured herself a second, which she brought to the bathroom. The bath was ready, the mirror steamed. He sat on the toilet seat, watching her lather, occasionally sipping from the Suntory bottle he’d carried with him.

  She stood and rinsed under a hot shower, then stepped out and over to the medicine cabinet, where she took down the prescription bottle and poured the pills, at least twenty of them, into her hand. She lifted her glass of wine, threw back her head and emptied her hand into her mouth.

  Which is when Owen moved, knocking the glass out of her hand, smashing it to the tiles, grabbing her, his fingers in her mouth, forcing the pills out into the sink, the toilet, onto the floor.

  That had been the beginning.

  The shrine was gone in the clang of the bars, the door opening. “Shinn. D.A.’s here to see you. Move it.”

  Remember who you are, she told herself. You are not what they think you are.

  It wasn’t quite eleven in the morning. Out the windows, through the bars, she saw the sun high in the sky.

  The interview room was like a cell without toilet or bars. It was furnished with an old, pitted gray desk and three chairs. She sat down across from the man, casual in jeans and a rugby shirt. He introduced himself, Mr. Hardy, and some woman he called a D.A. investigator. He would be taping this interview. He asked how they were treating her.

  “I need more phone calls,” she said. “I shouldn’t be in here.”

  She was not stupid. She was a citizen, and she wasn’t going to fall into the trap that had ensnared her father. She had to believe that there was another reason she was arrested—it was not because she was Japanese. She told Hardy about her attempted call to Ken Farris.

  “I could call Farris for you. He tried to call you several times last week, you know.”

  “I didn’t kill Owen Nash,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t say anything you didn’t want to hear repeated.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I thought you might want to tell me what happened. Maybe we could both get lucky.”

  “What happened when?”

  The man shrugged. “Last night. The arrest. The last time you saw Owen Nash.”

  “Shouldn’t I have a lawyer?”

  “Absolutely. You have the right to one. You don’t have to say one word to me.”

  But she found she wanted to explain, to talk. “I’m not sure I even understand why I’m here.”

  “I think trying to leave the country was a bad idea.”

  “But I knew—” She stopped herself. “Don’t you see?”

  “See what?”

  She picked her words carefully, slowly. “When I saw my name in the paper, I knew I’d be suspected.”

  “Were you out on the boat with him?”

  “No! I told the officer that, the one who arrested me.”

  “Then why would we suspect you?”

  “I’m Japanese.” No, she told herself. That was her father’s answer. But it was too late to retract it now. “And it�
��s true,” she said. “You do suspect me, with no reason. Who I am, what I have done for a living.” She knew she should be quiet, wait for an attorney, but she couldn’t. “The gun, too.”

  “Your gun?”

  She nodded. “I knew it was on the boat. That’s where I left it. I didn’t want it in my apartment. I couldn’t even bring myself to load it. Owen thought I was silly.”

  “So you kept it on the Eloise?”

  “In the desk, by the bed.”

  The man frowned, something bothering him. “You knew it was there when you went out on Saturday?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “So you did go out on Saturday.”

  “No! I didn’t mean that. I meant when Owen went out. I knew it was there all the time. That’s where I kept it.”

  “Did anyone else know it was there?”

  “Well, Owen, of course.” There was something else. She paused, not quite saying it. “Anyone could have.”

  “Anyone could have,” he repeated.

  “Yes!” She was starting to panic, to lose herself, and hoped it didn’t show in her voice. She forced herself to breathe calmly. “If it were me, why would I leave the gun on the boat after I shot him? Why wouldn’t I have thrown it overboard?”

  “I don’t know, May. Maybe you were in shock that you’d actually done it and reverted to habit, not thinking,putting the gun where it belonged. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “I loved Owen. I told that to the sergeant.”

  “You loved him.” Flat, monotone. “Nobody else seems to think he was very lovable.”