The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  He readily admitted that the Baby Emily case had exacerbated the already strained relations between him and Parnassus. There he had simply done the right thing, and doing so had angered the money people in his company. This was a recurring theme in medicine everywhere—money versus care. He was a doctor, and made no bones about where he stood on the issue. Did this, he inquired, make him guilty of something?

  He had come here voluntarily. He could take the Fifth Amendment, yet did not. He wanted to clear the air, clear his name, so he could get back to his life, his patients.

  “All right, then, Dr. Kensing,” Marlene Ash said at last. “You were the last person to see Carla Markham alive, were you not?”

  “I can’t say, ma’am. I’d assume that would be her murderer.”

  A snicker rippled across the jurors.

  “When did you leave the Markham house on the night of Mr. Markham’s death?”

  “At a little after ten.”

  “And you told Lieutenant Glitsky you drove straight home, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s what I told the lieutenant.” He took in a breath, then came out with it. “But that was not true.” He had his hands locked on the table in front of him, and addressed himself to the jurors. “Lieutenant Glitsky interrogated me on this issue. I didn’t want to tell him where I’d been. When I talked to my lawyer, he told me that today I would be under oath. He told me my testimony would be protected and you would keep my secret. I’m sorry I lied to the lieutenant, but I didn’t go straight home. The truth is, I’m an alcoholic and…”

  Fisk and Bracco had decided that their priority was to collect the facts that they’d been unable to gather previously. To do this most efficiently, they should split up. Bracco had drawn Brendan Driscoll, called him from the Hall of Justice, made an appointment. The suspect seemed enthusiastic.

  Driscoll had dressed for the interview—pressed dress slacks, shining wing tips, coat, and tie. When he opened the door, Bracco’s first question was if he was going someplace.

  The answer surprised him. “Don’t I know you?”

  “I don’t think so, no.” He held up his badge. “Inspector Bracco. Homicide.”

  “Yes, I know. Come in, come in.”

  They went into the living room, off to the left of the hallway at the front of the duplex. It was a bright space, made more so by the slanting sun through the open windows, the white-on-white motif. Water bubbled soothingly from a Japanese rock sculpture in the corner.

  Bracco was suddenly, intensely uneasy. He could not place the other man’s face, but there was an unmistakable recognition, a shift in the dynamic between them. Driscoll indicated one of the chairs, then sat kitty-corner all the way back on the couch, almost lounging, one arm out along the top of the cushions. Bracco got out his tape recorder, turned it on, and placed it on the glass tabletop, next to a large, flat tray of raked white sand and smooth stones.

  Keeping himself busy with the standard preamble, he finally looked over again at his potential suspect. “I’m going to cut to the chase, Mr. Driscoll. I understand you were at Carla Markham’s house in the late afternoon through the evening on the day her husband was killed.”

  “Yes. That’s true.”

  “Do you remember what you did later that night?”

  Obviously the question was unexpected, and resented. “What I did? Why?”

  “If you could just answer the question.”

  “Well, I can’t just answer the question without a reason. Why would you want to know what I did later that night? I thought you were coming here to talk about Dr. Ross or Dr. Kensing, that maybe Mr. Elliot had come upon something in what I’d given him.”

  “Jeff Elliot? What did you give him?”

  Driscoll had to some degree recovered his aplomb after the insult. “Some of my files from work. Evidence, I would suppose you’d call it. Although the grand jury didn’t seem interested when I talked to them.”

  “You think these files contain evidence relating to Mr. Markham’s death?”

  “Absolutely. Of course they do. They must.”

  “And do you still have copies here?”

  Driscoll hesitated for an instant, then shook his head. “No. I gave them all to Mr. Elliot.”

  Bracco didn’t believe this for a moment. “And yet you thought I was coming over here to discuss them with you?”

  “I thought you must have talked to him.”

  “No.” Bracco met Driscoll’s eye. “But maybe I should.”

  “On second thought, he probably wouldn’t show them to you. Sources, you know. But I could call him and get them back, then let you know.”

  “That might be helpful,” Bracco said. “Or we could get a search warrant and go through them ourselves.”

  Driscoll was shaking his head, supercilious. “You’re way late, Sergeant. Ross has erased all the good stuff by now. Everything about him and Tim, anyway.”

  “But you say you had it and gave it to Jeff Elliot?”

  A self-important shrug. “I didn’t read it all, but some of it was certainly provocative, if you know what I mean. He was definitely firing Ross, you know?”

  “Markham?”

  “I’m sure he was taking kickbacks for putting drugs on the formulary. Tim got wise to it, too, after Sinustop. He just needed more proof before he could accuse him directly. But if you read between the lines, you can see it. It was over between them.”

  Bracco decided not to press anymore with Driscoll the issue of whether he’d kept copies of his files, or what might be contained in them. He’d come here today to talk about the Tuesday night, and he returned to that topic. “I’m still wondering about after you left the Markhams’.”

  A petulant glare, then a sigh of capitulation. “All right, then, I came home here.”

  “Thank you. And what time was that?”

  “I’m not sure. Nine, nine thirty. You have to understand that my world had just fallen apart. I wasn’t keeping track of the time very well.”

  A brusque nod. “Were you alone?”

  Brendan brought a hand to his forehead. He closed his eyes for a long moment. “Yes. Roger was working late, which he’s been doing all the time recently. But I called him and he was just crunching numbers, no clients at that time, and we could talk. At least we could talk. It had been the worst day, just the worst. I almost went down to his bank just to be with him, but he told me he’d be coming home.”

  “You called him at his bank after you got home at nine thirty?”

  “Yes. I was so upset, just so upset.”

  “Did you and Roger talk a long while?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed too short, but you know how that is. I just couldn’t tell you how long it was. Honestly.”

  Ross didn’t have any kind of trouble remembering. He told Fisk, “I was talking with Jeff Elliot here in the office until late—I don’t know the exact time, maybe nine o’clock, something like that. It had been the day from hell, I’ll tell you. Then he finished with me—although he didn’t really finish with me until he’d written that fucking column—and I realized I’d hit the wall, so I got in my car and went home.”

  Fisk’s young and earnest face clouded over. “So you got home about nine thirty?”

  “Yeah, something like that. Is there a problem with that?”

  Fisk scratched behind his ear. “Only, sir, that I think your wife said something about you getting home after midnight that night.”

  Ross gave it some more thought, then let out a humorless chuckle. “No. She’s got it mixed up with another night. I’ve been getting home at midnight so often lately, she probably thinks that’s my regular hours. But it wasn’t anywhere near there. Maybe ten, tops.”

  Glitsky had put off taking care of some of his administrative duties as long as he could, but this morning he came in and began. For three hours, he’d been caught up in such minutiae as collating the mileage run up by his inspectors on city-issue cars. Now he was chewing on the last
dry bit of rice cake and sipping the dregs of his tea, which had attained room temperature. So he was in a suitably cheerful mood when Marlene Ash knocked on his door as she was opening it.

  He sat back gratefully, pushed the paperwork aside. “You broke him,” he said.

  She closed the door quietly, then turned back to him and leaned against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest. “Pending verification of his alibi, which I’d expect in the next few hours, Dr. Kensing is no longer a suspect, at least for Carla’s death. And that means Markham’s, too, I’d suppose.”

  Glitsky squinted up at her, shook his head. “He doesn’t have an alibi.”

  “He didn’t tell it to you. He wanted the secrecy protection of the grand jury.”

  “As though I’d tell anybody?”

  “He wanted to be sure.”

  “And you believe it. What was it?”

  Ash uncrossed her arms and took one of the folding chairs across from Glitsky’s desk. “You know the story of the man in the Old West who was sleeping with his best friend’s wife at the time of the murder and got hanged because he wouldn’t admit that’s where he’d been? It was something like that, except it didn’t involve sleeping with anybody.”

  “He was someplace he shouldn’t have been?”

  “Close enough, Abe. And about as far as I want to go, even with you. If this gets out later, and it always might, I want to be able to say I never told a soul. I believe it, rock solid. He didn’t do it.”

  Still way back in his chair, Glitsky sat with this new reality for a long beat. “This is one of the few times, Marlene, when I see the value in profanity. You’re truly satisfied he couldn’t have been at Carla’s? Who’s going to check this out?”

  “Not at ten forty-five, Abe. Unless that time is squishy and I have an investigator out checking now.”

  But Glitsky had taken Hardy’s information, then gone back himself to talk to Frank Husic. He considered that man’s testimony to be unimpeachable, and Carla’s time of death established. If Kensing hadn’t been there at 10:45, he was innocent. He’d give a lot to know precisely where the doctor had been, but knew he wasn’t likely to get it from any source, and certainly not from Marlene Ash. “Thanks for the heads-up,” he told her. “You got anybody else you like?”

  “Not really, Abe. I’m talking to the accountant and maybe a couple of board members this afternoon. I’ve got to broaden the net and make some progress on the money side or Clarence is going to be unhappy. He’s already going to be unhappy that his deal with Dismas got us nothing of any substance.”

  “It got me something,” Glitsky said ruefully. “I didn’t arrest him, which is starting to look like a good idea.”

  This was unarguable, and Marlene went on. “Well, anyway, I’ve subpoenaed all of their financial records for the past three years and we’ll see who can explain them satisfactorily. I’m going to have the grand jury take the fraud issue head-on. Then maybe I’ll get back to the murder indictment, but for now my priority…”

  “What are you guys talking about?”

  Bracco and Fisk weren’t exactly talking. They’d come back and met at the hall after their respective interviews in the morning. The volume of their conversation out at their desks had pulled the lieutenant out of his office and his meeting with Ash.

  “Nothing, sir. Sorry.” Darrel Bracco didn’t want to fink on his partner, although he was plenty disappointed in him.

  “It didn’t sound like nothing.” Glitsky stood over their combined desk with the stoplight in the middle of it. He was looking down on them, one to the other.

  At last, Fisk caved. “Malachi Ross told me when he went home on the Tuesday night, but it was a different time than his wife had said.”

  “So Harlen told Ross what she’d said,” Bracco finished for him.

  “You told him?” Glitsky’s voice was flat. Ash had come out and was standing behind him, shaking her head at these Keystones.

  Fisk nodded. “She said after midnight and he said ten o’clock. So he just said she was wrong. She’d made a mistake.”

  “And then, the minute Harlen walked out the door, he called her.” Bracco was appalled at his partner’s error. “How much you want to bet?”

  “Easy, Darrel.” Glitsky turned a surprisingly patient eye to Fisk. “Usually when you get contradictory statements from two witnesses, especially if they’re closely related, like married, you don’t want to tell the one what the other said until you can get them together and confront them with the contradiction. That can be instructive.”

  “Yes, sir. I got that now. I made a mistake. Do you think he’s called his wife?”

  “Absolutely,” Bracco said.

  Ash spoke from behind Glitsky. “Do you have her number? You could call and ask her yourself.”

  Fisk said he thought he’d try that. While he made the call, Bracco started to tell Glitsky about his interview with Brendan Driscoll. When Ash heard about the correspondence and computer files, she piped in, “What are all these papers? He never mentioned them when he was up before the grand jury.”

  “He told me you didn’t ask about them.”

  “How could I? I didn’t know they existed outside of the company computers. What did he do, steal them?”

  “I gathered he e-mailed them to himself before he got fired.”

  “So he stole them. Are they still at his house?”

  “I got that impression, the disks anyway.”

  Ash turned to Glitsky. “We need that stuff, Abe.”

  “Jeff Elliot’s already got it,” Bracco offered.

  “Forget it,” Glitsky said. “He’s a reporter. We’ll never see it.”

  “So we’ll go for Driscoll’s originals,” Ash said. “Where are your warrant forms? You keep ’em up here?”

  “You might not even need them,” Bracco told her. “Driscoll’s just looking for a way that he can disrupt things at Parnassus. He’s bitter. He wants to get back at people, especially people who made life hard on Markham.”

  Ash nodded, but told them to get a warrant anyway. Fisk came back over to the knot of them, dejected. “She didn’t admit he called her, but she said she remembered wrong and changed her mind. She was glad I called. She was going to call me.” He looked mournfully around him. “Ten o’clock.”

  “He called her,” Bracco snapped.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Glitsky was in a fatalistic frame of mind after Kensing. “The wife wouldn’t have testified at trial against her husband anyway. We haven’t lost anything. Not like with Kensing.”

  The two inspectors shot glances at each other. “What about Kensing?” Bracco asked.

  Again, Ash stepped in. “You can take him off your list. He has an alibi for Carla’s murder. I was just telling Abe.”

  This brought them all to silence, which Bracco broke. “So it’s all coming down to Carla?”

  Glitsky nodded. “Looks like. Is there anybody left without an alibi? What about Driscoll?”

  “I asked him this morning,” Bracco said. “He might have been talking on the phone.”

  “To who?”

  “His partner, Roger. I was going to check his phone records. It’s on my list.”

  After a moment, Fisk perked up. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, Lieutenant, but we’ve made some progress on the car.”

  Hardy should have been elated. After all, his client was no longer a suspect. He’d remained on the fifth floor, eschewing an opportunity to visit with either Glitsky or Jackman, waiting on a bench outside the Police Commissioner’s Hearing Room until Kensing had come out. Eric told him how it had gone, which was pretty much exactly as Hardy had predicted.

  The two men had walked up to John’s for a celebration lunch but it had turned out to be a sober affair, in all senses. Hardy made a few—he thought—subtle attempts to get Eric to open up about his girlfriend. How had Judith Cohn gotten along with Markham? With Ross? With all the Parnassus problems, monetary and otherwise, with which Kensing had su
ch difficulty? What were their plans together, if any?

  Eric was reasonably forthcoming. She’d only been on staff at Portola for a year after her residency at USC and internship at Johns Hopkins, then two four-month stints—one in Africa and one in South America—with Me´dicins San Frontie`res.

  “You know, Doctors Without Borders, although she always gives it the French reading, posters in her room and her bumper sticker even. She’s proud of her languages, French and Spanish. And she’s a fanatic about the organization, really. I think she’s got me half-convinced to go over with her next time—it’s Nigeria this summer—although God knows there’s enough to do here in this coun try. But if Parnassus does let me go…andmy kids, I don’t know how they’d handle it. Remember when decisions used to be easy?”

  After they said good-bye, Hardy stood in the sunshine on Ellis Street, about midway between his office and the Chronicle building. It should be over, he knew, but somehow it wasn’t. This wasn’t the familiar emotional letdown after the conclusion of a trial. There was no conclusion here, not yet.

  Someone had murdered Tim Markham and his family. Someone had murdered a succession of patients at Portola.

  And he still had his deal with Glitsky. They were sharing their discovery, and he was privy to knowledge that Abe did not share. It rankled and left him feeling somehow in his friend’s debt, which was absurd. Hardy had, if anything, done Glitsky a big favor.

  But whatever the complications, he knew that he was too involved to quit, even if there was no one left to defend.

  It couldn’t be the end. It wasn’t over.

  PART FOUR

  33

  There was no reason now for Jeff Elliot to use any of the dirt that Driscoll had supplied on Eric Kensing. If he wasn’t any longer suspected of killing Markham and his family, then he was a private person with his own private problems, and they were not the stuff of news—at least not the kind of news that made its way into “CityTalk.”