Q: Let’s talk about Owen Nash and May Shinn. I have here a snapshot of Ms. Shinn. Do you recognize this woman?
A: Oh sure, man. She come here a lot.
Q: A lot? What’s a lot, José?
A: Last three, four months, maybe twice a month, three times.
Q: So you’ve seen her here at the Marina, a total of, say, ten times, twelve times?
A: About that, maybe more, maybe less.
Q: Did you ever see her at the helm of the Eloise? A: Well, sure. She always with Mr. Nash.
Q: I mean alone, guiding the boat in herself, like that. [Pause.]
A: I don’t know. I try to remember.
Q: Take your time.
[Pause.]
A: Yeah, she take it out under motor one time, at least to the jetty. But that’s only like, you see, maybe two hundred feet.
Q: But Mr. Nash wasn’t at the wheel?
A: No. I remember. He’s standing out on the bow-sprit, laughing real loud. That’s when I look up. I remember.
Q: And she’s alone. May is alone, under power?
A: Sí.
Q: And have you seen her since?
A: Steering the boat?
Q: No. Anytime.
A: Sí.
Q: When was that?
A: I don’t know. Last week sometime. I remember, ’cause, you know, you guys . . .
Q: Sure, but do you remember when? What was she doing?
A: I don’t know. She was out there, on the street. Walking back to her car, maybe, I don’t know. I see her going away.
Q: And you’re sure it was May?
A: Sí. It was her.
Q: Are you certain what day it was? It could be very important.
[Pause.]
A: I think it was Thursday. Oh sure. It must have been. I remember, I got the note from Tom he’d locked the boat, which was Wednesday, right? So I go check it. It’s still locked. Thursday, I’m sure, sí, Thursday.
26
“I need to see you.”
Hardy felt his palms get hot. He leaned back in his chair at his desk. Without thought, he reached for his paperweight, cradled the phone in his neck, started passing the jade from hand to hand. There was no mistaking Celine’s husky voice. “Ken says you don’t think May did it.”
“I’m sorry I gave him that impression. I do think May did it. I just don’t think it’s going to be easy to prove.”
“What do you need?”
“What do you mean, what do I need?”
“I mean, what could make it more obvious?”
“It’s obvious enough to me, Celine, but our job is to sell that to a jury—”
“Your job,” she said flatly. “It’s not our job. It’s your job.”
“Yes, right.”
She was breathing heavily, even over the phone. She might as well have been in the room with him. It could be she was still worked up, just off the phone from Farris. There was no avoiding it, the principals—the victim’s circle—tended to talk among themselves.
“What more do you need?” she repeated.
Hardy temporized. “We’ve got more since I talked to Ken. We’ve got ballistics now. May’s gun did kill your father.”
“Well, of course it did. We’ve known that all along.”
He didn’t know how to tell her they hadn’t known it, they’d just assumed it. That the assumption turned out right was fine for them but it hadn’t made the theory any more or less true before the ballistics report came in. “And her prints are on it. And no one else’s.” Silence. “Celine?”
“I need to see you. I need your help. I’m worried. I’m afraid. She’s out on bail. What if she comes after me?”
“Why would she do that, Celine?”
“Why did she kill my father? To keep me from testifying? I don’t know, but she might.”
“So far as I know, Celine, we’re not having you testify, at least not about that.”
“But I know she was on the boat.”
“How do you know that?”
“My father told me he was going out with her.”
“That’s not evidence.”
He heard her breathing again, almost labored. “It is evidence, he told me.”
“Your father might have intended to go out on Saturday with May, but that doesn’t mean he was actually out with her.”
“But he was.”
How do you argue with this? he thought. The woman is struggling with grief, frightened, frustrated by the system’s slow routine—he couldn’t really expect a Descartes here.
“Celine, listen.” He filled a couple of minutes with Glitsky’s saga of Tremaine Wilson, how the first witness had known he was in the car, holding a gun, using the gun. But he hadn’t actually seen his face. He knew it was Tremaine, he’d recognized him, ski mask and all, but there was no way to even bring that evidence to a jury because it wasn’t evidence. It was assumption. It wasn’t until the next witness showed up and could connect the car, the murder weapon and—undoubtedly—Tremaine, that they’d been able to make an arrest. “It’s a little the same thing here, Celine.”
She was unimpressed with the analogy. She didn’t want an analogy. “I need to see you,” she said for the third time.
She was fixating on him. He didn’t need this. He didn’t need any of it, common though it might be. His reaction to her was too unprofessional. Maybe on some level she knew that, was reacting to it, using it in her own desperation. “I’m here all day. My door’s always open—”
“Not in your office.”
“My office is where I work, Celine.”
“That bar, the last time, that wasn’t your office.”
Hardy was starting to know how people got to be tightasses. It really was true that you gave people an inch and they took a mile—they expected a mile. You didn’t give ’em the full mile and they felt betrayed.
Her voice softened, suddenly without the hint of a demand. “Dismas, please. Would you please see me?”
He sighed. He might know how people evolved into tightasses, but that didn’t mean he wanted to become one himself. “Where’s a good place? Where are you now?”
It was three-thirty now and she was just going to change and then work out. She would be at Hardbodies! near Broadway and Van Ness until around six. If he pushed it a little, he could tell himself it was right on his way home.
Jeff didn’t have a private room, but he had the window, and the other bed was empty, so it was just as good. He was at the Kaiser Hospital near Masonic, and his window looked north, the red spires of the Golden Gate poking through the cloud barrier beyond the green swath of the Presidio. Closer in, the fog had lifted and the sun was bathing the little boxes along the Avenues.
Jeff Elliot wouldn’t have cared if there had been a monsoon blowing out there over a slag heap—at least he could see it.
His vision, coaxed by the Prednisone, had begun to slide back, furtive as a thief, sometimes early in the morning, a dim, lighter shadow amid all the darkness.
He was afraid to believe it. This disease didn’t give back. It took away, and kept what it took. First his legs. Now his sight? And besides, there really wasn’t anything to see. Some shapes, but dark.
He could press his hands into his eyes and hold the pressure for a minute, and there would be little explosions of light—purple, green, white—that seemed to take place inside his brain. He didn’t know if real blind people experienced that. The stimulus, though, didn’t come from outside light. He was sure of that. Could it be his optic nerve was still working?
By morning there was no doubt. At least he wouldn’t, thank God, be stone-blind. And all during the day, between naps, it had gotten better, until now he could see. Not perfectly, still fuzzy, but enough.
Dorothy Burgess—from Maury’s office—had been in before she’d gone to work that morning just to see if he was all right, bringing flowers. Now she was coming through the door again—visitors’ hours—smiling, concerned, the most lovely sight he had
ever seen.
She sat down. “How are you feeling?”
He pushed himself up, half sitting now. “Much better. I can see you.”
He hadn’t called his parents back in Wisconsin. He didn’t want to worry them. He thought he’d call them when the attack was over, when they could assess the latest damage. After he’d been admitted last night, he’d made a call to the Chronicle, but nobody from there had been in to visit.
He didn’t know what to say to Dorothy. Before the MS, he hadn’t done much dating to speak of, and since losing the use of his legs, his confidence in that area had dipped to zero. He’d concentrated on his career. But he was doing all right—he wasn’t asking for anything more.
If you were crippled, you couldn’t expect women to be crawling all over you, except the pity-groupies, and he didn’t want any part of them. He knew he was probably the last midtwenties virgin in San Francisco, if not the known world, and it was okay. He could live with it. At least he was alive. You had to keep your priorities straight.
Dorothy moved her chair against the bed and rested her arm down by his legs. Her hair was the color of wheat just before it was harvested. The white blouse had a scoop neck, a scalloped row of blue cornflowers that perfectly matched her eyes. Freckles on a tan bosom. He found he couldn’t stop taking her in, like the air he breathed. “I’m staring.”
She laughed, more sunlight. “I’d stare too if I’d been blind yesterday.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He always felt apologetic about this damn disease. “I didn’t mean to get anybody involved in all this. Don’t feel like you have to come visit. I’m okay.”
“It is a terrible inconvenience.” Was she teasing him? “I was just saying to Maury today, ‘I guess I’ve got to go visit that awful Jeff Elliot again. He is really making my life difficult, going blind in our office like that.’ ”
“I was just saying—”
“I know what you were saying. And it’s silly.” She patted his leg. “Are they feeding you all right here?”
He tried to remember. “I guess so. I must have had something. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be out tomorrow anyway. They just wanted to observe me for a day.”
“Kaiser,” she said. “Keep those beds empty. You never know when someone might need one.”
“It’s okay,” he repeated. “All I need is steroids. I don’t need to be in the hospital.”
“You need food.”
“I guess so. I never really thought about it.”
“You never think about food? I think about food all the time.”
His eyes traveled down over her slim body. “Where do you put it?”
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I put it. Now who’s picking you up when you leave here? How are you getting home?”
He hadn’t thought about that, either. He supposed he’d take a cab. He hoped his car was still parked in one of the handicapped stalls behind the Hall of Justice.
“Okay, it’s settled then. I’m coming by tomorrow, taking you home, and cooking you a meal. After that, you’ve just got to stop bothering me.” She stood up, leaned over and kissed him. “Don’t get fresh,” she said, then was gone.
Hardy reflected, not for the first time, that he was too much in touch with himself. Wouldn’t it be nice to sometimes be able to truly fool yourself? Not know every motive you had down to about six levels.
He wanted to see Celine, and not in his office. That was the problem.
He had simply decided—last week, as soon as it had come up—that he was not going to do anything about it. It was too risky—for him, for Frannie, for the new life that was making him more content than he’d ever thought possible. It seemed to him that sometimes you met people who were immediately recognizable as having an almost chemical power to insinuate themselves into your life. Those people—men or women—could power your engines if you weren’t yet settled down. But if you had a career and a family and a rhythm to your life, a blast like that could only destroy things. If you wanted to keep your orbit you avoided that extra juice. Simple as that.
Hardy could control himself—that wasn’t it—but Celine was fire. And the best way to avoid getting burned, even if you were careful, was to avoid the fire.
“Dumb,” he said, pausing a moment before pushing open the semiopaque glass doors of Hardbodies! He was greeted by twenty reflections of himself. Mirrors, mirrors, on the wall.
“Can I help you?”
The name tag said “Chris,” and Chris, Hardy thought, was the Bionic Man. Muscles on his muscles, green Hardbodies! headband, yellow Hardbodies! T-shirt, black Spandex shorts. Wristbands on both wrists. Perfect shiny black Beatle-length hair. Behind the long counter he could see three girls and four guys, all from the same mold as Chris.
“I’m meeting somebody,” he said.
“Sure, no problem,” Chris said. “We got a pager at the desk here.”
He heard her name called while he waited on a padded stool. There weren’t any chairs, only stools. And little mushroom tables with magazines on them: City Sports, Triathloner, Maximum Steel, The Competitive Edge.
There was music playing, heavy-beat stuff. He heard what sounded like a lot of basketballs getting dribbled on a wooden floor.
The place already seemed packed, and people were filing by him as though they were giving away money in the back room.
Suddenly, though he jogged four or five days a week, he felt old and flabby. Everybody in here was under thirty, except for the ones who were fifty and looked better than Hardy figured he had at twenty.
And Celine, who wasn’t anywhere near fifty and looked better than any of the twenties, even with a good sweat up. Especially perhaps, with a good sweat up. A blue sweatband held her hair back, a towel was draped around her neck. She wore a fluorescent blue Spandex halter top soaked dark between her breasts. The bare skin of her stomach gleamed wet and hard. The leotard bottoms rose over her hips at the sides and dipped well below her navel in the front. A Spandex bikini bottom matched her top. White Reeboks.
He was standing almost before he was aware of it. They were shaking hands, hers wet and powdery. She brushed his cheek with her lips, then wiped the slight moisture from the side of his mouth. “Sorry. Thank you for coming down.”
Hardy stood, wanting to rub the spot on his cheek. Fire burns.
“I feel a little funny here,” he said. “I’m afraid this isn’t my natural environment, especially dressed like this.”
She took him in. “You look fine.”
“Is there someplace to talk?”
Celine told him there was a juice bar on the second floor. Would that be all right? Hardy followed her up a wide banistered granite staircase to the upstairs lobby, the entire space bordered by hi-tech metallic instruments of torture—exercycles, Climb-Masters, rowing machines, treadmills. Each was in use. You couldn’t avoid the panting, the noise of thirty sets of whirring gears, occasionally a moan or a grunt. Beyond the machines, the glass wall to the outside showed off another of the city’s famous views—Alcatraz, Angel Island, Marin County. You could see where the fog abruptly ended a mile or so inside the Golden Gate.
The juice bar was about as intimate as a railroad station, but at least the noise level was lower. The aerobic music wasn’t pumped in here, although it did leak from the lobby. Celine ordered some type of a shake that the perfect specimen behind the bar poured a bunch of powders into. Hardy thought he’d stick with some bottled water; he paid $4.75 for the two drinks.
They sat at a low table in the corner of the room where the glass wall met brick. “Do you come here a lot?” Hardy asked.
“Sometimes it’s like I live here. Then since Daddy . . .” She sipped her shake. “It works it off. I don’t know what else to do to fill up the time.”
“What did you do before?”
“What do you mean?”
“Before your father died. Sometimes the best thing you can do is go back to your routines, what you were used to.”
A ta
nker that appeared through the fog bank on the Bay seemed to take her attention for a minute. “But I didn’t really do anything routinely,” she said. “I mean, I don’t work or anything. I just lived. Now . . .” She let it trail off, went back to staring.
“Did you see your father every day?”
“Well, not every. When he wanted to see me, I had to be there. I mean, I know that sounds weird, but he’d get hurt.”
“He’d get hurt if you didn’t drop everything to see him?”
“Well, not everything. I had my own life too.”
“That’s what I was talking about. Getting back to your own life.”
She was shaking her head. “But it’s like there’s no point to it now. Don’t you see? It’s like the center’s fallen out.”
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s how it feels, but it hasn’t really. You’ve got your own center. You do. You just have to find it again.”
But he seemed to keep losing her. Again, her eyes were out toward the evening sky. “Celine?” He brought his hand up and laid it over hers, exerting a little pressure. She came back to him. “You mind if I ask you how old you are?”
“No, I don’t mind. You can ask anything you want.” She met his eyes, solemn, then suddenly broke into a smile. “Thirty-nine,” she said. “Almost got you, didn’t I?”
Hardy nodded, smiling himself. “Almost.”
“So what about thirty-nine?”
“I’m just thinking that’s not too young to stop being dependent on your father.”
He felt the shift in her tension just before she pulled her hand out from under his. “I wasn’t dependent on my father. I loved my father.”
“Of course, I’m not saying anything else. But, well, isn’t thirty-nine a little old to be at his beck and call?”
“I wasn’t at his beck and call.”
“But he made you feel guilty if you weren’t there when he wanted to see you. That’s pretty classic parental control.”
“It just hurt his feelings. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, that’s all.”
Hardy knew he was digging a hole, but thought he might get all the way through to China and see some light. “Remember when we were talking the other day, what you said about being so mad at him? Maybe that’s why.”
Hard Evidence Page 21
