The Oath

by John Lescroart

  "The usual, I'd guess. Cutting back somewhere, living within a budget. It wasn't as though Dr. Ross was unemployed. He still had a substantial income and regular cash flow, but that wasn't the point, the point of our meeting that night."

  "What was?" Glitsky asked.

  Foley had sat on the hard, cold concrete long enough. He stood, brushed off his clothes, checked his watch. "Earlier that afternoon, Mr. Markham's wife had called him—this was between the " Foley decided not to explain something; Hardy assumed it was about Ann Kensing. "Anyway, his wife called and asked if he'd heard the news. Dr. Ross had just traded in his old airplane and bought a brand-new one, a Saratoga. He and his family were taking it to the place at Tahoe that weekend and Markham's wife had called to ask if they wanted to fly up with them, bring the whole family.

  "'You know what a brand-new Saratoga costs, Pat?' he asked me. 'Half a million dollars, give or take, depending on how it's equipped. So,' he goes on, 'I arrange to run into Mal at the cafeteria and tell him I got the word about the plane, but I'm curious,' he goes, 'how are you paying for it?'

  "And either Dr. Ross doesn't remember details from when he was drunk, or he figured he could tell his friend and it wouldn't matter, but he smiles and goes something like, 'Cash is king.'"

  Now that he'd said it, Foley wore his relief like a badge. Again, he drew a hand over the top of his head. Again, he assayed a smile, a bit more successful than the first. "So that's it," he said. "Mr. Markham wanted my opinion on what we ought to do as a company, how we ought to proceed. He thought there was a chance that Dr. Ross was accepting bribes or taking kickbacks to list drugs on the formulary, but he didn't have any proof. He just couldn't think of any other way Dr. Ross could come up with any part of a half million in cash. He'd already talked to his wife and—"

  "Carla?" Glitsky jumped on this sign of communication between them. "I don't remember hearing Markham and his wife got along, even when they were together."

  "Oh yeah. They were inseparable for a long time. Before they before all their troubles, they talked about everything. Carla would even come and sit in at board meetings sometimes and she'd know more than some of us did. It pissed off some people, but nobody was going to say anything. And it wasn't like she was a drain on the board's resources. Very direct and opinionated, but smart as hell. Business smart. Put it out there, whatever it was, and let us deal with it."

  For Hardy, this cleared up a small mystery. He'd wondered about the note's "Dis./C." and had concluded it must be the personnel person, Cozzie. But now, maybe, C. was Carla. Still, he wanted to bring Foley back to Markham's action. "So what did you both finally decide to do? You said that it all came to nothing in the end anyway."

  This was an unpleasant memory. "Well, I told Mr. Markham that if he really thought Dr. Ross was doing something like this, we should probably turn it over to the DA and the tax people and let them take it from there."

  "But you didn't do that," Glitsky said. "Why not?"

  Foley gave it more time than it was worth. "The simple answer is that Mr. Markham called me off the next day before I could do anything. He said he'd confronted Dr. Ross directly. Their friendship demanded it. Ross told him he should have shared the good news with him when it happened, but the money for the plane had come in unexpectedly from his wife's side of the family. An aunt or somebody had died suddenly and left them a pile."

  A morning breeze kicked up a small cloud of dust and car exhaust and they all turned against it. Hardy had his hands in his pockets. He turned to the corporate counsel. "And when you stopped laughing, what did you do then?"

  "I didn't do anything. I'd been called off."

  "And you believed him? Markham?"

  "That wasn't the question."

  But Glitsky had no stomach for this patty-cake. "Well, here's one, Mr. Foley. What did you really think? What do you think now?"

  The poor man's face had flushed a deep red. Hardy thought his blood pressure might make his ears bleed any minute. And it took nearly ten seconds for him to frame his response. "I have no proof of any wrongdoing, you understand. I'm not accusing anybody of anything. I want to make that clear."

  "Just like you didn't accuse anybody of bugging your office?" Hardy asked mildly. "And yet here we are a quarter mile away. We don't care how you justify it. Tell us what you think."

  This took less time by far. "Ross had something on Markham, as well. Maybe some shady stuff they both pulled together when we were starting out. I don't know, maybe something even before that. In any case, he threatened to expose Markham, and they got to a stalemate."

  "And he heard the original, late-night conversation between you and Markham because the offices are bugged?" Glitsky's scar was tight through his lips.

  "That's what I assume."

  "How come you haven't swept the place?"

  This time, Foley's look conveyed the impossibility of that, especially now if Ross had ordered the bugging and was now running the whole show. "You get on Dr. Ross's wrong side at work, bad things start happening to you," he said. Then added, by way of rationalization, "I've got a family to think about."

  There it was again, Hardy thought, that sad and familiar refrain. Today certainly was turning into a day for cliche´s—first Andreotti just following orders, now Foley and his family. For an instant, the question of what he was made of flitted into Hardy's own consciousness. Why was he here without a client, on the wrong side for a defense attorney, at some threat to his own peace if not his physical safety? He couldn't come up with a ready answer, but he knew one thing—he wasn't going to hide behind his family or his job. He was doing what he had to do, that was what it came down to. It seemed like the right thing. That was enough.

  * * *

  Hardy was still tagging along while Glitsky was trying to get his next warrant signed. Judge Leo Chomorro was the on-call judge reviewing warrants today, and this turned out to be extremely bad luck. He wouldn't sign a warrant to search Ross's house or place of business. A swarthy, brush-cut, square-faced Aztec chieftain, Chomorro had ruined plenty of Hardy's days in the past, and more than a few of Glitsky's. But this wasn't personal, this was the law.

  "I'm not putting my hand to one more warrant on this case where probable cause is thin and getting thinner. I've been pressured and finagled and just plain bullshat these past few days issuing warrants for everybody and their brother and sister who might have had a motive to kill somebody at Portola Hospital. That doctor you thought did it last week, Lieutenant, you remember? Or that nurse who might have poisoned half the county? And then, last night, Marlene telling me that the secretary had a motive, too?"

  "That wasn't my office. I—"

  Chomorro held up a warning hand. "I don't care. Probable cause, Lieutenant. Do these words ring a bell? I don't sign a search warrant, which I might remind you is a tremendous invasion upon the rights of any citizen, unless there is probable cause, which means some real evidence that they were at least in the same time zone in which the crime was committed when it was committed, and left something behind that might prove it."

  Glitsky swallowed his pride. "That's what we hope to find with a warrant, Your Honor."

  "But you've got to have at least some before you can look for more. Those are the rules, and you know them as well as I do. And if you don't"—Chomorro turned a lightning bolt of a finger toward Hardy—"I'll lay odds your defense attorney friend here is intimately familiar with every single picky little rule of criminal procedure, and I'm sure he'd be glad to bring you up to date. To say nothing of the fact that the named party on this affidavit isn't some schmo with no rights and no lawyer, but the chief executive officer of one of this city's main contractors. You are way off base here, Lieutenant, even asking."

  "Your Honor." Against the odds, Hardy thought he would try to help. "Dr. Ross is the answer to the most basic question in a murder investigation: cui bono. Not only does he take over Mr. Markham's salary and position—"

  Chomorro didn't quite explode, but clos
e. "Don't you presume to lecture me on the law, Mr. Hardy or, in this example, some mystery writer's fantasy of what murder cases are all about. I know all about cui bono, and if you're to the point where you believe that a smattering of legal Latin is going to pass for evidence in this jurisdiction, you'd be well advised to get in another line of work. Am I making myself clear? To you both?" He was frankly glaring now, at the end of any semblance of patience. "Find more or no warrant! And that's final!"

  * * *

  I wish he wasn't a judge." Somehow, magically, the peanuts had reappeared in Glitsky's desk drawer, and Hardy had a small pile of shells going. "I'd kill him dead."

  "Don't let him being a judge stop you. It's no worse killing a judge than any other citizen. If your mind's set on it, I say go for it. I'm the head of homicide, after all. I bet I could lose most of the evidence. No, we've done that when we haven't even been trying. Imagine if we worked at it—I could lose all of it. And you heard His Honor—no evidence, no warrant. I might not even get to arrest you, although I'd hate to miss that part. Maybe I could arrest you, then have to release you for lack of evidence."

  Hardy cracked another shell, popped the nut. "That's the longest consecutive bunch of words you've ever strung together."

  "When I was in high school, I did the 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen' speech in Julius Caesar. That was way more words."

  "But you didn't make them up. There's a difference."

  Glitsky shrugged. "Not that much. You'd be surprised."

  "You were Mark Antony?"

  Another shrug. "It was a liberal school. Then next year, we did Othello, and they wouldn't let me do him because he was black."

  "Did you point out to them that you were black, too?"

  "I thought they might have seen it on their own. But I guess not."

  "So you were discriminated against?"

  "Must have been. It couldn't have been just somebody else was better for the part."

  "Bite your tongue. If you didn't get the part and you were black, then that's why. Go no further. The truth shall set you free. How long have you lived in San Francisco anyway, that I've still got to tell you the rules? I bet even after all this time, you could sue somebody for pain and suffering and get rich. I could write up the papers for you and maybe I could get rich, too. You would have been a great Othello, I bet."

  "Freshman year, I didn't get Shylock either, and I'm half-Jewish."

  Hardy clucked. "No wonder you became a cop. To fight injustice."

  "Well," Glitsky deadpanned, "it was either that or girls liked the uniform."

  "Your school did a lot of Shakespeare."

  Glitsky slowly savored a peanut. "It was a different era," he said. "The old days."

  35

  Rajan Bhutan gripped the telephone receiver as if his life depended upon it. He sat at the small square table in his kitchen that he used for eating and reading, for his jigsaw puzzles and bridge games. This evening, the tabletop was bare except for a drinking glass that he'd filled with tap water against the thirst that he knew would threaten to choke off his words when he began to speak.

  Since Chatterjee had died, he had been continually downsizing, winnowing out the superficialities most people lived with and even felt they needed. Now the simplicity of his life was monastic.

  The two-room studio apartment in which he lived was at the intersection of Cole and Frederick, within walking distance of Portola. It consisted of a tiny, dark bedroom and a slightly larger—though no one would call it large—kitchen. The only entrance to the unit was a single door without an entryway of any kind. The framing itself was flush to the stucco outside and all but invisible. Painted a cracked and peeling red, and seemingly stuck willy-nilly onto the side of the four-story apartment building, the door itself might have been the trompe l'oeil work of a talented artist with a sense of humor. Because of the slope of the street, most of the studio itself was actually below street level, and this made the place perennially cold, dark, and damp.

  Rajan didn't mind.

  Rent control would keep the place under seven hundred dollars for at least several more years. He had a hot plate for cooking his rice and one-pot curries. The plumbing was actually quite good. There was regular hot water in the kitchen sink and in the walk-in shower. The toilet flushed. The half refrigerator stuffed under the Formica countertop on the windowless front wall held enough vegetables to last a week, sometimes more. A portable space heater helped in the mornings.

  Now, as the first ring sounded through the phone, he raised his head to the one window, covered with a yellowing muslin cloth. Outside, it wouldn't be dark for another hour or more, but the shade cast by his own building had already cloaked the block in dusk. A couple walked by, laughing, and he could make out the silhouettes of their legs as they passed—at this point, the bottom of the window was no more than twenty inches above the sidewalk.

  The muscles around his mouth twitched, either with nerves or with something like the sense memory of what smiling had been like. A tiny movement on the Formica counter drew his gaze there—a cockroach crossing the chessboard. For a year now, he'd been enjoying the same game, conducted by mail with Chatterjee's father in Delhi. He thought in another two moves—maybe less than a month—he could force a stalemate, when for a long while it looked as though he'd be checkmated. He believed that a stalemate was far preferable to a defeat—those who disagreed with him, he felt, missed the point.

  The phone rang again. He ran his other hand over the various grains of the table, which was his one indulgence. He had always loved woods—he and Chatterjee had done their apartment mostly in teak from the Scandinavian factory stores. Cheap and durable, he had loved the lightness, the feel of it, the grain. They used a sandalwood oil rub that he could still smell sometimes when he meditated.

  But he had changed now over the years and this table was something altogether different—it was a game table of some mixed dark hardwoods laid in a herringbone fashion. Each place had a drawer built into the right-hand corner, which players could pull out and rest drinks upon. He hosted his bridge group every four weeks, and the other three men admired the sturdy, utilitarian, practical design.

  "Hello. Ross residence."

  "Hello. Is Dr. Malachi Ross at home, if you please?"

  "May I tell him who's calling?"

  "My name is Rajan Bhutan. He may not know me, but please tell him that I am a nurse at Portola Hospital attached to the intensive care unit. He might remember the name. It is most urgent that we speak."

  "Just a moment, please."

  Another wait. Rajan closed his eyes and tried to will his mind into a calm state. It would not do, not at all, to sound frightened or nervous. He was simply conveying information and an offer. He straightened his back in his chair. Drawing a long and deep breath down into the center of his body, he let it rest there until it became warm and he could release it slowly. He took a sip of water, swallowed, cleared his throat.

  "This is Dr. Ross. Who is this again, please?"

  "Dr. Ross, I am Rajan Bhutan, from Portola Hospital. Perhaps you remember, I was in the ICU with Dr. Kensing when Mr. Markham died. I am sorry to bother you at home."

  "How did you get my home phone number?" he asked. "It's unlisted."

  "It can be found if it's needed. If one knows where to look."

  After a short silence, Ross sounded slightly cautious. "All right. How can I help you? The maid said it was urgent."

  Rajan reached for the water again and drank quickly. "It is that. I need to speak with you frankly. Are you in a place you can talk freely?"

  Ross's tone kissed the bounds of aggressiveness. "What's this about?"

  "It is something we need to discuss."

  "That's what we're doing now but I'm afraid I don't have too much more time. My wife and I are going out in a few minutes. If it can wait—"

  "No! I'm sorry, but it cannot. It has to be now or I will speak to the police on my own."

  After a short pause, Ross said, "Jus
t a minute." Rajan heard his footsteps retreating, a door closing, the steps coming back. "All right, I'm listening. But make it fast."

  "As you may know, the police are looking into the deaths now of several patients at the ICU that they are calling homicides."

  "Of course I've heard about that. I run the company. I've been monitoring it closely, but that has nothing to do with me personally."

  "I'm afraid it has, instead, to do with me, Doctor. The police have talked to me more than once. I am the only nurse who has worked the shifts when several of the deaths have occurred. I think they will decide I have killed these people."

  He listened while Ross took a couple of breaths. Then, "If you did, you'll get no sympathy from me."