by The Hearing
The melody came back to him now. It had been Flo’s song, but the image now was not of his past wife. He opened his eyes, grabbed his book, took out Treya’s card and reached for the phone.
26
Still in his scrubs, Jonas Walsh commanded his own table in the St. Mary’s cafeteria. His newspaper was spread out over every inch of the available surface area, all the sections separated. His tray held the remains of his midmorning snack—the empty bowl that had held his mixed fruit, the plate for the dry toast, three empty juice glasses. He sat back at some distance from the table, an ankle resting on a knee. He held his cup of coffee out at arm’s length. For one man, he took up a lot of room. It was ten-thirty in the morning and his four scheduled hernia surgeries had all gone without incident, as they always did.
Nevertheless, his posture reflected a great deal of frustration. He hated being out here, but the idiot operating-room schedulers had been unable to book in all his patients, even though he had them lined up waiting. There’d been a couple of cancellations and the hospital hadn’t been able to fill the damn time; and when you only have two surgery days a week, you’d better make sure you pack them in. But now, instead of ten hernias today, he had only eight—which meant thirty-two hundred dollars out the window. Plus he had to endure a much-despised break for a couple of hours before he could start making more money with another four in the afternoon. At this rate, he was never going to pay off his loans.
At least you’d think they could have moved up two of the late afternoon jobs, let him get off early. But no. No thought. He was going to complain to the administrator. Get somebody else on scheduling who had some kind of clue.
He finished sports and grabbed at the business section, where he noticed that his stocks remained in the tank. Shaking his head in disgust, he brought his cup to his lips, sipped. The coffee had gone tepid and he swore.
“Is this chair taken?” A large black man with a hatchet nose and a scar through his lips hovered on the far side of the table. He stood casually, his expression relaxed, his hands resting in the pockets of his windbreaker. He was in need of a shave and Walsh thought he detected a slight pallor under the pigment, an almost jaundiced quality to the whites of his eyes.
Was the man sick?
Whatever, he wasn’t welcome. Jonas looked around ostentatiously. There were maybe ten other people in the entire room, forty unoccupied tables all around him. “Sorry. I’m busy,” he said. “Not here, pal, okay?” His eyes went back to his newspaper.
“You’re Jonas Walsh?” The man had taken the seat, cleared a space on the table in front of him.
A dark glance. “I’m Dr. Walsh, that’s right. And I just told you I’m busy.”
“I can see that,” the man replied calmly. “And I could take out my badge and show it to you, but maybe you’d find that embarrassing.”
Walsh snapped the paper down, stared for a while. Then: “You’re Glitsky.”
“That’s right.”
“Elaine’s father.” Walsh fixed him with a challenging look.
“I guess the word’s out. How’d you find out about it?”
“How do you think? We didn’t have secrets. We were engaged, you know—you also might have heard that.”
Glitsky nodded. “That’s why we’re talking right now. And you were happy? Everything was fine with you both?”
“Yes.” A pause. “Of course.” He waited for Glitsky to pursue it, and when he didn’t, added some more. “Sure, why not?”
“No reason.” Glitsky stared across at him. He wore his most bland expression and it finally wore Walsh down.
“What?” the doctor asked. “What do you want?”
“What I want is to fill in a few blanks. You know we’ve got a suspect in custody, but we don’t know why Elaine was downtown at that time. We don’t know who she was meeting, if our suspect knew her somehow.” A shrug. “All of that. If you two didn’t have any secrets from each other, maybe you could help.”
“Of course I’d like to help if I can.” Walsh pursed his lips tightly, cast his eyes briefly to the upper corners of the room, came back to the lieutenant. When he spoke, he’d found his professional, courteous, bedside voice. “I’m sorry if I was rude just now. It’s been a difficult couple of weeks.”
“I would imagine so. I’m sorry.” He took a minute. “So on the Sunday, the night she didn’t come home, did you expect her to be out late?”
“More or less. Yes, I guess. She called and left a message.”
“You weren’t in?”
“No. We had breakfast in Sausalito and then she went into work and I took a long bike ride over Tamalpais, back through Lucas Valley. It’s the only exercise I get.”
“Did you go with anybody?”
Walsh hated the question and seemed tempted to reply angrily, but in the end he just shook his head with resignation. “No. I went alone.”
“So you got back home—Tiburon, right?—and there was a message? What time was that? When you got back?”
“Five-thirty or six. Just dusk.”
“And the message was that she wouldn’t be home until after three in the morning?”
The question slowed him down. “Well, no, not specifically. Just that she had an appointment and she’d be a little late. Where does three o’clock come into this?”
“That was when we got around to notifying you.” Glitsky made an effort in the direction of a smile. “She said she’d be a little late, though?”
The doctor sat back again, took a measured pause. “Where are we going with this, Lieutenant?”
Glitsky thought it was a fair question. “Well, if you thought she was only going to be a little late and she didn’t get in by, say, three . . .” Surely Walsh understood what he was driving at.
“I would have called the police by then. I would have been worried.”
“The question came up, that’s all.”
Walsh took another minute deciding whether or not he was going to answer any more stupid, leading questions posed by the police. When he did, the frustration was back in his voice. “First, I went to bed at nine-thirty. I’d ridden many, many steep miles that day. I was tired and had to work in the morning. Second, Elaine’s meetings often ran late, sometimes very late. So no, I wasn’t worried.”
“And she didn’t say who she was meeting?”
“Not then. But I knew who she was meeting earlier in the day.” Suddenly, something else struck him. “You know, it seems like this is an awfully long time after the fact to start asking these kinds of questions.”
“You’re right. If we didn’t have a suspect, we’d have moved on it faster. Now we’re not really looking for anybody. As I said, we’re filling in blanks. We might not need any of it, it’s just gravy. Still, we’d like the case to be as tight as it can be. Does that make sense?”
“Obviously.”
“Good.” They were making progress. Glitsky brought his hands together, a kind of clap of approval. “So the meeting earlier in the day, who was that with?”
“You really don’t know?”
“How would I know?”
“Because it was you guys.” Glitsky showed his surprise. “The police.” Walsh explained about Elaine’s special master duties on the Russian insurance fraud case. She had gone in with a team of police officers to serve a warrant on the law offices of Dash Logan.
“On Sunday?”
A shrug. “Evidently the first time they’d all come by, Logan had really been a pain. He didn’t want anybody looking at his files, wouldn’t tell Elaine where anything was, if he even knew.”
“Why wouldn’t he know?”
“Because—this according to Elaine—there wasn’t any order to it. Elaine said she’d never seen another law office like it ever. She thinks . . . she thought . . . he must be on drugs or something. Logan.”
Glitsky shrugged. A lot of people did drugs. If they didn’t kill people because of it, it wasn’t homicide, and wasn’t his job.
“Anyway,” Walsh continued, “then they found another couple of these Russian guys, cases Logan was handling. They figured this time it would be easier to do the search while nobody was there but him. So they woke him at his house, brought him to the office and served the warrant.”
“They actually went to his office? That Sunday?”
“I don’t know, Lieutenant. I assume so. That was the plan. You could probably find out easier than me.”
This was the truth, and Glitsky accepted it ruefully. “And you didn’t hear from her again?”
Walsh bit down on his lower lip. Suddenly Glitsky got some sense of emotion. “No. Just the last message. You know, it’s funny, I haven’t been able to bring myself to erase it.”
Which was all well and good and perhaps sad, Glitsky reflected as he walked away from the table, but all in all not as interesting as the fact that Walsh had lied about the current state of his relationship with Elaine. He also had no alibi for the time of her murder.
On the other side of the cafeteria, Glitsky’s father and the two older boys were at their own table, reading different sections of the newspaper. Glitsky got to them and pulled a chair around, straddling it backwards.
Nat looked up. “Not to nag, Abraham, but maybe you want to sit like a normal person? Maybe now you go home and get in bed and rest. Enough already with talking to people on this thing.”
Glitsky looked at his kids. “Not to nag, he says.” Back to Nat. “It’s my job, Dad.”
“Except last I heard, they put you on leave. Am I wrong here? Tell me I’m wrong. Also tell me I’m wrong you had a heart attack three days ago, maybe you noticed.”
“I noticed. But Ms. Ghent told me that he”—he pointed across at Walsh—“that he worked here Thursdays. I was right here. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. Besides, they wouldn’t let me out of here if I wasn’t okay.”
“Famous last words, Abraham. Don’t worry, this parachute opens every time.”
Glitsky threw a half-amused glance at his two boys, both of whom had stopped reading to follow the exchange.
“And enough with that look!” Nat shook a finger at him. “That same look your mother had that she was okay, too. So she goes home and does a load of laundry and dies. God forbid she dies with dirty clothes in the hamper.”
Abe held up a hand. “Okay, Dad, okay. We go home.”
Nat nodded his head violently, included the boys. “Finally, your father says a smart thing.” He pointed a finger at his son. “And rest.”
A nod. “Rest is good,” Glitsky admitted. Although he had no inclination to get any.
Acting on the information Treya had given him on the phone last night about the doctor, Glitsky had called Walsh’s office first thing and learned that he had a break in his surgery schedule. It turned out that it coincided with the arrival of his father and sons with his clean clothes, here to take him home. Glitsky had put on the clothes, but didn’t take the time to shave. Hospital rules mandated that they use a wheelchair to take him outside, so they had wheeled him out the front door where he’d stood up and turned around and walked back in to corner Dr. Walsh, his family in tow, Nat kvetching all the way.
Now they were finally in the car, Isaac driving, his father next to him in the passenger seat. “So how did that interview go?” he asked.
Nat started to mutter an objection from the backseat, but Abe spoke through it. “Pretty good. He only told one little fib.”
Jacob, interested, leaned over from the backseat. “Is that normal?”
“What? That he told a lie, or that he only told one?”
Nat, still unhappy, interjected again. “Your father’s line of work, nobody tells the truth. I don’t know how he stands it.”
Glitsky spoke over his shoulder. “Are you kidding? That’s the best part.”
“But he really lied? Knowing you were a cop? I mean, he’s not some criminal,” Isaac said. “He’s a doctor.”
Glitsky got a kick out of that. “They’ve done experiments,” he said. “You can be both.”
Jacob piped in. “So did you call him on it?”
“Not yet. Maybe never.”
“Why not?” Isaac asked. “If you tell a lie, you’re hiding something, right?”
A nod. “That would be the general rule.”
Jacob again. “Well?”
“Well, you can call someone on a lie, or you can catch someone in a lie. And the second one’s way more fun.”
“Fun?” In the backseat, Nat sounded disgusted. “What do you know from fun, Abraham?”
Hardy had had enough of waiting for Ridley Banks to get back to him. He was reasonably friendly with a fair number of homicide inspectors, and not a one of them—Glitsky included—had as his first priority a callback to a defense attorney. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t pursue an investigation of his own. He killed time at his office for an hour while he waited for the phone to ring, then finally decided to walk the half mile or so down to the jail and the Hall of Justice.
When he got there, force of habit made his first stop the homicide detail, but without an appointment with Banks and in Glitsky’s absence, the reception he got was a little bit cool. Inspector Sergeant Marcel Lanier knew Hardy fairly well, but he was handling the administrative overflow left in Glitsky’s wake, and, stuck at his desk, he was neither a happy camper nor inclined to chat. No, he didn’t know what was happening with Abe, but he hoped whatever it was wouldn’t take too long. No, he hadn’t heard from Banks. So what? No doubt he’d check in when he got far enough behind on his paperwork.
John Strout, the coroner, was in the middle of an autopsy, “up to his elbows,” and couldn’t see him either. Hardy left a message, asking him to call when he could, and walked across the corridor to the jail’s entrance, where he couldn’t make himself go inside. He still tasted a kind of bitter residue from his ruined Date Night with Frannie. Although he was certain that his client would be thrilled to have any visitor, Cole Burgess was the last person he wanted to see.
He walked back through the Hall, out the other side, and jaywalked across Bryant Street. Lou the Greek’s was a bar located there in the basement of a bail bondsman’s building. Lou’s served food, too, for lunch. Since Lou’s wife hailed from Hong Kong, these were mostly Chinese-Greek combinations—hot and sour lemon egg-drop soup, egg rolls stuffed with hummus—the culinary equivalent of colors not found in nature.
It was a dark and somber bar, pure and simple, its popularity now on the wane due to the young, hip legal crowd’s attraction to loud, jumping, music-filled meat markets such as Jupiter and, just down the street, the Circus. Today, though, still early in the morning and deserted except for Lou behind the bar, the place fitted Hardy’s mood perfectly.
“Hey, Diz.” The bartender slid a napkin across the pitted wood.
Hardy nodded. “I’ve got a question for you, Lou.”
“You want a drink while you’re asking it?”
“No. I’m good. Maybe some coffee.”
He waited while the Greek turned and poured a cup into an old ceramic mug, came back and placed it on the napkin. Even in the dim light, Hardy could make out a faint lipstick stain on the rim—cleanliness was never a big issue at Lou’s. He turned the cup around to drink from its pristine side, nearly burned himself on the bitter brew. “Let’s say you’re a lawyer . . .”
Lou crossed himself backwards, smiling. He said something, but it was Greek to Hardy, who pressed on. “You’ve got a client you think is guilty. The evidence says he’s guilty. He—the client—even starts out by saying he’s guilty. He confesses to the cops. Now, get this, the cop who arrests him comes to you and says, ‘No wait, I don’t think the confession’s any good.’ Then the other cop, the one who took his confession, he starts to have doubts . . .”
“This guy, your client—is he a hypnotist or something?”
“He’s a heroin addict. He’s been known to take a drink, too.”
Lou nodded. “My kind of guy—not the
heroin part, though. So what’s your question?”
“Wait. I’m not there yet.”
Lou raised his eyes and scanned his dark and empty bar. He raised his voice. “Anybody need another round?” He came back to Hardy. “Okay, I’ve got a couple more minutes, but my rates are going up fast.”
“Here’s the problem. My client is charged with robbery and murder. I believe I’ve got a better than decent chance to get him off by arguing to a jury that he was too drunk or stoned or both to have planned to tie his shoes, much less rob or kill anybody. You with me?”
Lou guessed that he was.
“Okay, but if I argue that, best case he gets years in prison. Whereas if I argue that he didn’t do it at all, and the jury believes that, he gets off completely. The problem is, no jury is going to believe it, since I’ve got no alternative suspects. Hell, I don’t believe it myself.”
Lou, a lifelong bartender, knew that Hardy wasn’t drinking alcohol, but he also knew that any conversation with even a sober customer that lasted over five minutes was somehow bad for business. He cut back to the chase. “I hope we’re closing in on the question.”
“Almost. So I’m supposed to do what’s best for my client, give him the best defense the law allows. Now, the question is, what do I do?”
Lou cocked his head. “You’re kidding me? That’s the question? What’s best for your client—prison or walk out the door?” He jerked a thumb. “Out the door, no contest.”
“But I’ve got no chance to win. I can’t prove he didn’t do it.”
Lou hadn’t worked in the Hall’s watering hole for a lifetime without picking up some rudimentary knowledge of the law. “I thought they had to prove he did do it.”
“They do.”
“Well, don’t let ’em. It doesn’t matter what you believe. Besides, ask your client. He’s not going to think prison is winning.” Lou thought another minute, picked up a glass from the counter under the bar and began to wipe it with his rag. For the first time in the conversation, Hardy had the feeling that he’d engaged his mind. “You got any idea what you’re going to be doing in ten years, Diz? If you’re even going to be alive? Ten years.”
