Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  She put the edge of the knife up under his throat, sitting, watching him breathe. The bedroom was darker than the rest of the apartment. Finally she laid the blade down across his collarbone and kissed him.

  “Owen.”

  He woke up like no one else. He simply opened his eyes and was all the way there. “What?”

  She moved the edge of the blade back up so it touched the skin above his Adam’s apple. “Do you feel this?”

  “Would this be a bad time to nod?”

  “Do you want me to kill you?”

  He closed his eyes again, took a couple of breaths. “That’s where we’re going, isn’t it?” He didn’t move.

  “Owen. What are we doing?”

  He took a moment. Perhaps he didn’t know either. Maybe they both knew and it scared them too much. “What are we doing?” she asked again.

  “We’re showing each other each other.” He swallowed. She could feel the blade move over his skin.

  “I don’t know what I feel.”

  “You love me.” And as soon as he said it, she knew it was true. She felt her eyes tearing and tightened her hand on the knife. “And I love you,” he said, “but I don’t want you to put your hopes in me. I’m not saving your life, May.”

  “I’m what you want, though.”

  “That’s right. You’re what I want. But I play fair. I’m telling you straight, the best way I know how.”

  “I’m a whore, Owen. I’m nothing, but I play fair, too. You know me. I don’t know how long I’ve loathed what I am. I don’t want to care about you, but you’re my last great chance . . .”

  Owen had closed his eyes again. She pulled the knife away from his throat. “I’ve warned you,” she said.

  “And I’ve warned you.” He pulled her down and kissed her, held her against his chest.

  23

  The next morning, Pullios was sitting in Hardy’s office when he walked in at 8:25. She held the morning Chronicle folded in her lap. “Nice story,” she said. “She opened the paper to the front-page article, in its now familiar spot lower right: “State To Seek Death Penalty In Nash Murder.” And under it: “D.A. Claims Special Circumstances— Murder For Profit—In Tycoon’s Death.”

  He came around the desk, opened his briefcase, started removing the work he’d taken home and ignored—some stuff he’d let slide while concentrating on May Shinn. Moses had come over, worried about Rebecca (and about Frannie and probably Hardy, too) and had stayed to eat with them and hang out.

  “I read it,” he said.

  “I’m surprised Elliot didn’t get the news about the bail.”

  Hardy stopped fiddling. “She made bail? I had a feeling she’d make bail. Freeman put it up?”

  Pullios closed the paper, placed it back down on her lap. “I don’t know. We can subpoena her financial records if we can convince a judge that we think she got it illegally.”

  “Not Barsotti.”

  “No, I gathered that. We’ll look around.”

  “How about prostitution? Last time I checked, that was illegal.”

  “Maybe. It’s a thought, we should check it out.” She recrossed her legs. “Look,” she said, “I came by to apologize again. I was out of line. It should have been your case. I’m sorry.”

  Hardy shrugged. “There’ll be other cases.”

  “Thank you.” She didn’t try her smile or her pout. “ ’Cause we’re going to be busy.”

  “I don’t know,” Hardy said. “We’ve got two months now and I’ve let all this stuff back up.” He motioned around his office.

  Now she was smiling, but he didn’t get the feeling it was for any effect. “You believe we’re going out on a prelim in two months?”

  “I got that general impression.”

  Pullios shook her head. “We’re not letting that happen. There’s no way Freeman and Barsotti are putting this thing off until next year. I talked to Locke after the arraignment and he okayed it—we’re taking this sucker to the grand jury on Thursday. Get an indictment there, take it into Superior Court and blindside the shit out of the slow brothers.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “We can do anything we want,” she said. “We’re the good guys, remember.”

  “I don’t want to rain on this parade, but isn’t there some risk here? What if the grand jury doesn’t indict?”

  Pullios rolled her eyes. “After you’re here awhile, you’ll understand that if the D.A. wants, the grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. Besides, the grand jury always indicts for me. We’ve got everything Glitsky had, which ought to be enough. But if it isn’t, Ballistics says the gun is the murder weapon. But one thing . . .”

  “Okay, but just one.”

  She smiled again. They seemed to be getting along. “No leaks on this. This is an ambush.”

  David Freeman knew his major character flaw—he could not delegate. He couldn’t even have his secretary type for him. He’d let Janice answer the telephones, okay, put stamps on letters if they were in the United States and less than three pages—more than that, he had to weigh them himself and make sure there was enough postage. He did his own filing, his own typing. He ran his own errands.

  He was, after Melvin Belli, probably the best-known lawyer in the city. He had seven associates but no partners. None of the associates worked for him—recession or no—for more than four years. He burned ’em out. They’d come to him for “trial experience.” But if you were a client and came to David Freeman to keep you from going to jail, he wasn’t about to leave that up to Phyllis or Jon or Brian or Keiko—he was going to be there inside the rail himself, his big schlumpy presence personally making the judge and jury believe that you didn’t do it.

  His deepest conviction was that nobody, anywhere, was as good as he was at trial, and if you hired the firm of David Freeman & Associates, what you got was David Freeman. And you got your trial prepared—somewhat— by associates at $135 an hour. When David got to the plate—and he personally reviewed every brief, every motion, every deposition—the price went up to $500, and trial time was $1,500. Per hour.

  It was his pride, and he knew he carried it to extremes. This was why private investigators existed—to do legwork. But no one did legwork as well as he did. One time, when he’d just started out, he’d hired a private investigator to talk to all possible witnesses in a neighborhood where a woman had supposedly killed her husband. The woman, Bettina Allred, had contended she’d had a fight with her husband, Kevin, all right—she’d even fired a shot into the wall. Terrified of herself and her own anger, she’d run from the apartment to go out to cool off. While she was gone, she said, someone had come in and shot her husband with his own gun. So the private investigator David hired had talked to everybody in the apartment and they’d all heard the fighting and she’d obviously done it. Except the P.I. hadn’t talked to Wayne, the thirteen-year-old son who hadn’t even been home during the relevant time. When Freeman double-checked as he always did, he decided to be thorough—as he always was—and found that Wayne had been hiding terrified in the closet, and when Mommy had run out, he’d taken the gun and shot his daddy. He’d had enough of Daddy beating up on him and Mommy.

  Since then, Freeman had done his own legwork. Though it was his precious time, he only charged his clients the $65 an hour he would have paid a private eye. It was, he thought, one of the best bargains in the business.

  No one in May’s building had seen or heard her on Saturday. Now he was going up the other side of the street, ringing doorbells, talking to people.

  “You see the turreted apartment on the corner, up on the top over there? Anything at all? Shades going up, blinds being pulled? How about a shadow? Yes, well, it’s confidential, but it has to do with a murder investigation, Jesus, don’t tell my boss. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  The French deli across the street. The cleaners on the opposite corner. Nada, nada, nada. If May had been home, as she claimed, she had been invisible. Of course, he didn’t beli
eve she’d been home, but as he’d told her, what he believed was irrelevant.

  He was on the fourth and last floor of the building directly across the street from May’s. His feet hurt. He was considering raising his billing rate for this work up to $75 an hour. He rang the bell and listened to it gong for a moment. No one answered. There was one other door down the hall, and it opened.

  “Mr. Strauss isn’t in. Can I help you?”

  Mrs. Streletski was a well-dressed elderly woman and he gave her his spiel. She invited him in and forced him to drink a cup of horrible coffee. She was sorry she couldn’t really help him. She’d been out of her apartment for the last ten days—in fact, she’d just gotten back from visiting over in Rossmore. She was considering moving into Rossmore with Hal. They did so much there. It was an active place, even if you were a little elderly, no one treated you like you were old. There were lots of classes, movies, lectures. It was a fun place, a young place.

  Mrs. Streletski showed Freeman that you couldn’t see anything of May’s building from her window. He thanked her for the coffee and left his card so that Mr. Strauss, who lived alone next door, could call him when he got in if he had the time.

  “He’s not home very often, I’m afraid,” she said. “He travels a lot. He’s always working. He got divorced last year and I think he’s very lonely. We’ve played Scrabble a few times and I tried to get him to go out with Hal and me, but I think he misses his wife and his boys.”

  “Well, if you could have him call me, he might have been home, remember something.”

  She said she would. He thanked her and started walking down the steps, thinking that even when you didn’t get anything, this was probably worth more than $75, call it $100 an hour.

  “Two months before you even set a date for a preliminary hearing?”

  Hardy was biting his tongue, held to the stricture not to leak anything about Elizabeth’s upcoming appointment with the grand jury. Ken Farris, in the interview room down by the evidence lockers, wasn’t happy, and Hardy wondered how far he could go to make him feel better.

  “We’re working on something.” Lame, he knew.

  “Let’s hope so. And meanwhile she’s out walking around.”

  “That’s how it works.”

  Farris shook his head.

  Hardy thought he’d get away from it. “So how are things down in South City? Getting any better?”

  Farris didn’t look better. There were bags under his eyes. His shoulders slumped. He sat kitty-corner to Hardy at a gray-topped metal table, his arms half-cupped— protectively—around the original of Owen’s will. May’s gun was also bagged on the table. The snake ring.

  Farris shrugged. “The stocks went down, then back up. We’ve got contracts. People have work and life goes on.” He looked back down at the piece of paper in front of him. “This, though, this is unbelievable. What was he doing?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Owen. Two million dollars. Christ. Celine told me she talked to you.”

  The man was jumping around, trying to find a foot-hold. Hardy still wasn’t comfortable talking about Celine. He’d been able to put her out of his mind, but if something came up that put her back in, she tended to stay. He didn’t really understand it. “When did you see her?”

  “Sunday. The cremation.”

  The cremation. Farris—and Celine—they were both coming off that, too. They’d had a rocky week. “How’s she holding up?”

  Farris seemed to be studying the will some more. “What? Oh, she’s pretty fragile right now. A little fixated on May. I talked her out of going to court for the arraignment.”

  “Good idea. What’s she say about May?”

  “She wonders why we waste all the time with arraignments and hearings and trials. And then there’ll be appeals. Somebody ought to go and just kill her. Celine says she’d do it herself.”

  “Try to talk her out of that, too, would you? It would be frowned on . . . You’re sure she did it, huh?”

  That woke Farris up. “You’re not?”

  “Whoa, I didn’t say that. We just can’t put her on the Eloise. It’s kind of a major detail.”

  “Well, I’ve got her on the Eloise. Celine told me Owen was meeting her on the Eloise.”

  Hardy nodded. “She told me that, too.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what? It’s hearsay. Inadmissible.”

  “Bullshit. She was on the boat.”

  “I didn’t say she wasn’t. We’re trying her for murder.”

  “Okay. Sorry.” Farris looked down again, tapped the paper. “This is definitely Owen. Why didn’t he tell me about it?”

  “Maybe he thought it would never come up.”

  “How wouldn’t it come up?”

  “If he didn’t die, how’s that? Maybe it was a goof, maybe he wrote the thing drunk. She might have dared him or something. The point is, it’s here, and it’s a damn good reason to kill somebody.”

  “Another one,” Farris said.

  “What do you mean, another one?”

  Farris frowned, as though surprised he’d be caught saying anything out loud. He rose from the chair, pushing the physical evidence back toward Hardy. “Nothing,” he said. “Figure of speech.”

  24

  Jeff Elliot went blind in Maury Carter’s office.

  It had started, he guessed, on the night after he’d gone to the morgue. The tension of those moments, coupled with his first front-page article and the background stuff, had produced too much stress, and there had always been—and his doctors agreed—a correlation between stress and the onset of his attacks.

  But MS was a sneaky thing. It wasn’t like it came up and wopped you upside the head. With his legs, it had begun with pins and needles one morning. His left leg just felt a little bit like it was asleep, like a low-voltage current was passing through it. Then, over the course of a couple of weeks, the feeling not only didn’t go away, it got worse and his leg became a weight he dragged around. Which was when he’d gone to the doctor and the bomb dropped.

  The right leg had gone two years later. But since then he’d had five good years, three on Prednisone and then, because he hated the steroid, trying to get along without it. And, he had come to think, successfully.

  So successfully that he hadn’t really related it to the MS when he woke up with slightly blurred vision. He ignored it. If he wasn’t looking directly at something, it was nothing.

  This morning, though, he’d noticed it a lot. The right eye didn’t seem to focus at all, and there was a brown smudge over half of what he could see through his left eye. He should go to the doctor, but this was the chance he’d worked so hard for. He was the man of the hour. Once he got a few more things tied up here he’d go see about his vision.

  Maury Carter did business out of a building about two blocks from the Hall. There was a black-and-white four-foot-square sign above the doorway outside, bolted up against the old brick, that read “Bail Bondsman.” Inside, a desk for Maury’s secretary took up the big front window. Behind that desk were file cabinets and acoustic baffling that served to separate Maury’s private office from the street.

  It was Tuesday afternoon. Jeff had spent most of the morning following up on what he’d missed the day before—May’s bail. It wasn’t a stop-the-presses story anyway—people, even murder suspects, made bail all the time—but it bothered him that he’d found it out on television. He had to keep concentrating on his story, not worry about his eyes.

  And the real story now, if it existed and he could get it, was the Shinn/Freeman connection. Along with the fact that May had made bail, he’d discovered Freeman’s billing rates, so Hardy and Glitsky must have been right—there was a source of money somewhere.

  But Dorothy, Maury’s secretary, said she wasn’t supposed to talk about their clients, “but we can talk about anything else. Maury’s over at the Hall. Do you want to wait? I can get you some coffee.”

  Jeff thought she was about the nic
est girl he’d met in San Francisco. She wore a print dress and her skin was fair with a few freckles. It occurred to Jeff that she might even think he was okay, in spite of his crutches.

  She, too, was from the Midwest—Ohio—and had been out here for four months, living with a girlfriend in the Haight, which wasn’t anything like she’d expected it to be. She was going back to school to get her nursing degree; she’d already majored in bio, so it shouldn’t be too hard, but she was going to be doing it at night and until then this job paid the bills.

  Jeff could have listened all day, was even starting to feel comfortable telling her a little about himself. He found himself looking around the growing brown smudge, willing it away in the vision of her, but then Maury came in, who’d actually put up the bond. And the reason Jeff was here came back.

  Maury wasn’t going to tell him, though. It was confidential information. They were back in Maury’s part of the office now, behind the partition. “But we know how much the bail was.”

  Maury had a shiny, deep forehead with white steel wool for eyebrows. On the map of his face, his nose was a small continent. His ears stuck out and his jowls hung. He leaned back in his chair, feet on his desk, and brought his cigar to his purplish lips. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Blowing out a line of blue smoke, he chewed reflectively on his tongue. “Then what can I tell you?”

  “May Shinn put up fifty thousand dollars?”

  “As you say, you know how much bail is.”

  Jeff was fighting a kind of ringing panic attack. He looked down at his notepad and found he couldn’t make out what he’d written there.

  “Bail was half a million,” he persisted. It was the stress, this circular discussion. He should end it and get out of here. The room was closing in—the cigar smoke, the funny light. “Let’s be hypothetical,” he said. “Your normal fee—suppose I’m a client now—is ten percent, right?”

  Maury threw him a bone and nodded, blowing more smoke.

  “So if I’ve got bail of half a million, I give you fifty thousand.”