The Oath

by John Lescroart

  "Thank you. Did he say it was important?"

  "Not specifically, but I assume so."

  Hardy walked up and leaned against the top of the receptionist's partition. Phyllis hated when he did that. But then, she hated when he did anything. He smiled at her. "Why?"

  "Why what?" Obviously thinking evil thoughts, Phyllis stared at his arms, crossed there on her shelf.

  "Why do you assume it's important?"

  To Phyllis, trained by Freeman, everything to do with the law was intrinsically important. Hardy was untrainable, and try as she might to remain the complete professional, she couldn't seem to maintain her composure when he started in on her. She sighed in exasperation, tried to smile politely but didn't entirely succeed. "I assume all calls to your office are important, Mr. Hardy. Mr. Elliot took time out in the middle of his workday to call you in the middle of yours. He asked you to call as soon as you could. It must have been something important."

  "He might have just wanted to talk. That happens, you know."

  Clearly, Phyllis believed it was not something that should happen. "Would you like me to call him and ask?"

  "Why, Phyllis." Hardy stepped back, took his arms off the shelf, looked at her approvingly. "I think you've just told a joke. And during business hours when you should have been working. I won't tell David." She remained silent as he turned and got to the stairway up to his office. "Oh, and speaking of David, he won't be in for a while. He's with Ms. Roake working on some documents, though I've never called it that before."

  "Called what?" Phyllis asked.

  Suddenly he decided he'd abused her enough, or almost enough. He pointed up the stairs. "Nothing. Listen, I've enjoyed our little chat, but now I've got to run and call Mr. Elliot. It could be important."

  Hardy worked in stark, monklike, even industrial surroundings. Gray metal filing cabinets hunched on a gray berber wall-to-wall carpet. The two windows facing Sutter Street featured old-fashioned venetian blinds, which worked imperfectly at best—normally he simply left them either up or down. Rebecca and Vincent, his two children, had painted most of his wall art, although there was also a poster of the Giants' new home, Pac Bell Park, and a Sierra Club calendar. His blond wooden desk was the standard size, its surface cleared except for his phone, a photo of Frannie, an OfficeMax blotter, a sweet potato plant that reached the floor, and his green banker's lamp. Under four shelves of law books and binders, the dried blowfish and ship in a bottle he'd brought from home livened up a Formica counter with its faucet, its paper towel roll on the wall, and several glasses, upside down, by the sink. The couch and chairs were functional Sears faux leather, and the coffee table came from the same shopping trip about six years before. His dartboard hung next to the door across from his desk—a piece of silver duct tape on the rug marked the throw line at eight feet. His tungsten blue-flight customs were stuck, two bull's-eyes and a twenty, where he'd last thrown them.

  The phone was ringing as he opened the door, and he reached over the desk, punching his speakerphone button. "Yo," he said.

  Phyllis's voice again, but giving him no time to reply. "Lieutenant Glitsky for you."

  And then Abe was on. "Guess what I just heard. You're going to like it."

  "The Giants got Piazza."

  "In the real world, Diz."

  "That's the real world, and I'd like it."

  "How about Tim Markham?"

  "How about him? Is he a catcher? I've never heard of him." Hardy had gotten around his desk to his chair and picked up the receiver.

  "He's the CEO of Parnassus Health," Glitsky said.

  A jolt of adrenaline chased away the final traces of any lunch lethargy. Glitsky usually didn't call Hardy to keep him up on the day's news, unless homicide was in the picture, so he put it together right away. "And he's dead."

  "Yes he is. Isn't that interesting?"

  Hardy admitted that it was, especially after all the talk at Lou's. But more than that, "Did somebody kill him?"

  "Yes, but probably not on purpose. You remember our discussion this morning about hit and runs?"

  "You're kidding me."

  "Nope."

  "Let's remember not to talk about nuclear holocaust on our next walk. Somebody really ran him over?"

  "More like plowed into him. They kept him alive at Portola until a half hour ago, then lost him."

  "They lost him at his own hospital? I bet that was a special moment."

  "It was another thing I thought you'd like. But evidently they couldn't do much. He was critical on admit and never pulled out."

  "And it was an accident?"

  "I already said that."

  "Twice now," Hardy said. "You believe it?"

  "So far."

  Hardy listened to the hum on the line. "The same week he tries to shake down the city? His company's threatening to go bankrupt? They're not paying their doctors and they're screwing around with their patients, and suddenly the architect of all this winds up dead?"

  "Yep."

  "And it's a coincidence? That's your professional take on it?"

  "Probably. It often is, as I mentioned this morning."

  "Except when it isn't. Lots of things happen that never happened before."

  "Not as often as you'd think," Glitsky replied. This time, the pause was lengthy. "But you've answered my question. I just wanted an opinion from the average man on the street."

  "You'll have to call somebody a little dumber than me, then," Hardy said, "but I'll send you a bill anyway."

  * * *

  Jeff Elliot's call turned out to be about the same thing, but he wasn't interested in Hardy's coincidence theory, dismissing it even more definitively than Glitsky had with one line. "You don't murder somebody with a car, Diz, not when guns cost a buck and a half and knives are free."

  "I'd bet it's been known to happen, although Glitsky says not, too."

  "See? And even if it has, it also has been known to snow in the Sahara."

  "Is that true? I don't think so. But if it is, it proves my point."

  A sigh. "Diz? Can we leave it?"

  Hardy was thinking that all of his friends had lost their senses of humor. He didn't really think it was probably a murder, either, but it was interesting to talk about, and so much else wasn't. "Okay, Jeff, okay. So how can I help you?"

  "Actually, you can't. This is just a mercy call, see if you'd like to take the rest of the day off, which I noticed at lunch you might be in the mood for."

  "That obvious, huh?"

  "I'm a reporter, Diz. Nothing escapes."

  Hardy looked down at the massive pile of paperwork on the floor by his desk—his own and other lawyers' briefs, which were anything but. Memoranda. Administrative work that he'd been neglecting. Billing. A couple of police incident reports from prospective clients. The latest updates of the Evidence Code, which it was bad luck not to know. He had an extremely full workload at the moment. He was sure he ought to be glad about this, although the why of it sometimes eluded him.

  Elliot was going on. "I'm thinking the shit's got to be hitting the fan over at Parnassus. It might be instructive to swing over and check things out. See if anybody'll talk to me and maybe I'll get a column or two out of it. So what do you say? You want to play some hooky?"

  "More than anything," Hardy said. "But not today, I'm afraid."

  "Is that your final answer?"

  He pulled some of the papers over in front of him, desultorily flipped through the stack of them. A trained reporter like Elliot, if he'd been in the room, would have recognized some signs of weariness, even malaise. Certainly a lack of sense of humor. Hardy let out a heavy breath. "Write a great column, Jeff. Make me feel like I was there."

  * * *

  It wasn't the kind of thing Glitsky was going to talk about with any of his regular professional associates, but he couldn't keep from sharing his concerns with his wife.

  Jackman let Treya take a formal fifteen-minute break sometimes if she asked, and now she and Abe sto
od in the outside stairway on the Seventh Street side of the building, sipping their respective teas out of paper cups. An early afternoon wind had come up and they were forced to stand with their backs against the building, the view limited to the freeway and Twin Peaks out beyond it.

  "And here I thought you brought me to this romantic spot so we could make out in the middle of the day."

  "We could do that if you want," Glitsky told her. "I'm pretty easy that way."

  She kissed him. "I've noticed. But you were really thinking of something else?"

  He told her about Markham, how intensely uncomfortable he was with coincidences, and Markham's death fell squarely into that category. "But I wasn't lying when I told Diz that probably it wasn't an intentional homicide. That was the voice of thirty years' experience whispering in my ear."

  "But what?"

  "But my other guardian angel, the bad one, keeps on with this endless, 'Maybe, what if, how about "'

  "You mean if somebody ran him down on purpose?"

  He nodded. "I'm trying to imagine an early-morning, just-after-light, lying-in-wait scenario, but I can't convince myself. It just couldn't have happened in real life. Well, maybe it could have, but I don't think it did."

  "Why not?"

  She was about the only person he ever smiled at, and he did now. "How good of you to ask. I'll tell you. The first and most obvious reason is that the driver didn't finish the job. Markham lived nearly four hours after the accident, and if he hadn't been thrown into the garbage can, he might have pulled through it. The driver couldn't have known he'd killed him. If he'd planned to, he would either have backed up over him or stopped, got out of the car, and whacked Markham's head a few times with a blunt object he'd been carrying for just that reason."

  "Sweet," Treya said.

  "But true." He went on to give her the second reason, the one he'd given Hardy. A car was a stupid and awkward choice as a murder weapon. If someone were going to take the time to plan a murder and then lie in wait to execute it, with all the forethought that entailed, Abe thought even a moron would simply buy a gun, which was as easy if not easier to purchase, far more deadly, and simpler to get rid of than any vehicle would be.

  "Okay, I'm convinced. He probably wasn't murdered."

  "I know. That's what I said. But "

  "But you want to keep your options open."

  "Correct. Which leads me to my real problem. Did you get the impression at lunch today that my friend and your boss Clarence Jackman is going to get considerable political heat around anything to do with Parnassus? The death of its CEO isn't going to hide out in the Chronicle's back pages and then disappear in a couple of days when it isn't solved."

  "No, I don't think so," Treya agreed.

  "So who gets the case, which is definitely a homicide and might conceivably be, but probably isn't, a murder?"

  Treya had been living with the problems within the homicide detail and had a good sense of the dilemma. In the normal course of events, Abe would never have anything to do with this case. It was a hit and run. Someone from that detail would be assigned to locate the vehicle, they probably wouldn't, and that would be the end of it. Now, because he had Fisk and Bracco, he'd have to give the case to them—in fact, he already had. If he tried to pass it to one of his veteran inspectors, first his guy would be insulted and laugh at him; then the mayor and the supervisor would demand his head, and probably get it.

  And then if—wonder of wonders—it turned out to be a real-live, politically charged, high-profile murder after all, he'd have given it to his two rawest players, who would probably screw it all up, and that would not only infuriate Jackman, it might harm the district attorney's relations with the police department for a good portion of this administration.

  "I'd say you've got to let the new boys keep it."

  "That's what I've come to myself. But it's lose-lose."

  "Luckily," she said, touching his cheek gently, "with all the practice, you've gotten so good at those."

  * * *

  But he had Fisk and Bracco back in his office at the end of the day and gave them the best spin he could put on it. " an opportunity to give you guys some quality time. You do good on this, people here might be inclined to think you might turn into good cops after all." He paused, and purposefully did not add "and not just political stooges."

  Darrel Bracco was as he'd been this morning, and as he always was in here—standing almost at attention behind the chair where his partner sat. "We never asked to get moved in here, Lieutenant. Neither one of us. But we did jump at the chance. Who wouldn't?"

  "Okay." Glitsky could accept that. "Here's your chance to make it work."

  A few minutes later, he was reading from a notepad he'd been filling with ideas as they struck him on and off for most of the afternoon. " girlfriends? And if so, did they just break up? Then his children. How did he get along with them?"

  "Excuse me." Fisk had a hand up like a third grader.

  Glitsky looked over his notepad. "Yes?" With exaggerated patience, "Harlen?"

  "I thought this was about all the problems Markham was having with his business? And now you're talking about his family?"

  Glitsky pulled himself up to his desk and placed his pad flat upon it. His blue eyes showed little expression. "I want you both to understand something. The odds that Mr. Markham was killed on purpose, and hence this is a murder investigation at all, are not large. Harlen, you and I and Inspector Bracco were talking this morning about the fact that you didn't have much to do here in the detail. I thought you might enjoy taking a look at this thing from the ground up. And the ground is a victim's family."

  "It's got nothing to do with the car, you're saying?"

  The lieutenant kept his impatience in check. "No, I'm not saying that. The car is what hit him. And if somebody he knew was driving it, then it starts to look a lot more like a murder. Which, I repeat, and you should, too, it probably isn't."

  "But it will keep us out of the detail," Bracco said. "Is that what you're saying?"

  Glitsky nodded. "It might do that. And that is to the good, I think you'll agree."

  When the inspectors had returned from their morning's exertions, they discovered a Tom Terrific beanie on the center of each of their desks. The detail didn't appear to be moving toward acceptance, or even tolerance, of the new crew. It was a drag to have to deal with, Glitsky thought, but he wasn't going to get involved in disciplining the hazing activities. That wasn't his job, and if he tried to move in that direction, he'd lose whatever authority he did have before he knew it.

  So, yes, it would keep Fisk and Bracco out of the office. A good thing. Glitsky picked up the notepad again and read from it. "Do any of his children have friends with a green car? What about the wife's social life, if any? Beyond that, everybody you talk to needs an alibi, and remember the accident happened at six or so in the morning, so anybody who says they weren't sleeping should be interesting."

  "What about his work?" Fisk asked. "Parnassus?"

  "We'll get there. It's a process," Glitsky said evasively. This was, after all, mostly a charity mission for his new inspectors, and he wasn't inclined to let them get in the way and muddy the waters in case Jackman did decide to convene a grand jury over business irregularities at Parnassus, which may or may not have involved Markham. "Let's see where it takes us," he said. But then he did remember a detail. "You'd better take a look at the autopsy, too."

  The guys eyed each other, and Bracco cleared his throat. "He died in the hospital, sir," he said. "We know what he died of."

  "We do?" Glitsky replied. "What was that?"

  "He got run over. Thrown about thirty yards. Smashed into a garbage can."

  "And your point is? Look, let's assume we find somebody who wanted to run over Mr. Markham and in fact did a pretty good job of it. So we arrest our suspect and somehow we've never looked at the autopsy. You know what happens? It turns out he died of a heart attack unrelated to his injuries in the accident. O
r maybe somebody entirely different from our suspect stuck an ice pick in his ear, or poisoned his ice water. Maybe he was a spy for the Russians and the CIA took him out. The point is, somebody's dead, we check the autopsy first. Every time, capisce?"

  He looked up and gave them his terrible smile. "Welcome to homicide, boys, where the good times just keep on comin'."