The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  “No reason. Just curious.” Hardy kept it deliberately vague, pushed the other pages across the desk. “If we could just take one more minute of your time, Mr. Andreotti, does anything else strike you about these?”

  The administrator pulled them over and took time now, one by one. “I don’t know Medras, but Biosynth is a drug manufacturer. Most of their stuff is low-rent, over-the-counter. They’re not real players, but I’ve heard a rumor they’ve got something big with the FDA right now.” He turned to the next page, looked up. “Foley is Patrick Foley. He’s corporate counsel. I don’t know who DA is.”

  Glitsky knew that one. “The district attorney.”

  A light was coming on in Andreotti’s eyes, but he made no comment, turning to the last page. “See Coz. re: punitive layoffs—MR. Document all. Prep. rpt. to board. Severance?”

  “Coz is Cozzie Eu. She’s the personnel director.” He labored over the rest of the note for a few seconds; then slowly he raised his head. “Tim was going to let Ross go, wasn’t he?”

  Glitsky’s mouth was tight. “It’s a little early to say, sir. But thanks very much for your time.”

  As they drove out to the Embarcadero Center and Parnassus Headquarters, the way they decided to phrase it to corporate counsel was that Hardy was an attorney working with the DA. That was true in all its parts if not quite literally. Pat Foley met them at the door, saw them through, then looked back along the hallway in both directions before he closed it. They didn’t get a chance to try out their explanation before Foley started talking. “You caught me just as I was going out, but my appointment is just over in Chinatown. Maybe we could talk as we walk.”

  In five minutes, they were in Portsmouth Square, surrounded by pagodas and tai chi classes, some Asian porn shops, and a line of cars waiting for space in the garage below. High clouds had blown in over the night, and the morning air was chill with a brittle sunlight.

  Foley’s dome shone even in the faded day. The few hairs that were left were blond, as was the wispy mustache. Thin-shouldered and slightly paunched, he was the picture of what a life behind a desk with tremendous financial pressure could do to a young man—he didn’t appear to be much over forty, if that. When he finally sat himself on the concrete lip of one of the park’s gardens, he was breathing heavily from the walk.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t want to talk about it in there. The walls have ears, sometimes.”

  “Talk about what?” Glitsky asked mildly.

  “Well, Susan said you were with homicide. I assume this is about Mr. Markham, or the other Portola deaths. Although I have to say I work almost exclusively with corporate matters. I’m not aware of any information I possess that might be useful to your investigation. If I was, as an officer of the court, of course I would have come forward voluntarily.”

  Glitsky gave him a flat stare. “Do you talk that way at home?”

  Before Foley could react, Hardy stepped in. “Do you really believe your offices are bugged?”

  The one-two punch confused him. He couldn’t decide which question to answer, so he asked one of his own. “Is this about Mr. Markham then?”

  The truth was that neither Hardy nor Glitsky knew precisely what this meeting was going to be about. The telltale initials MR did not even appear in Markham’s note. So though they both had their suspicions that Ross was somehow involved, they didn’t want to give anything away. “Do you have any idea what the word ‘Saratoga’ might refer to, Mr. Foley?” Glitsky asked.

  “You mean the city down the peninsula, out behind San Jose? I think there’s another one in New York, as well, upstate somewhere, I believe. Is that it?”

  Hardy and Glitsky fell into a more or less natural double team. Hardy followed up. “Have either of those cities turned up in your corporate work?”

  Foley turned to his other inquisitor. He thought a while before he answered. “I can’t think of when they would have,” he said with a stab at sincere helpfulness. “We don’t have any business either place. Maybe a few patients live in the city out here, but that would be about the extent of it.”

  Glitsky: “So the name hasn’t come up recently? Saratoga? Something Mr. Markham might have discussed with you?”

  Foley passed a hand over his dome and frowned.

  “Maybe not plain Saratoga,” Hardy guessed. “A Saratoga something?”

  That flicked the switch. “Ah,” Foley said. “It’s an airplane. Sorry. I think Saratoga and I think Cupertino. I grew up down there, went to Bellarmine. But it’s an airplane. It’s the one John F. Kennedy Jr. was flying when he went down.”

  Hardy and Glitsky exchanged a glance, and the lieutenant spoke. “Was the company planning to buy a plane?”

  “No, it was Mr. Ross. That’s how it was brought to my attention.”

  “In what way?” Hardy asked.

  At this turn in the questioning, Foley actually turned and looked behind him. Wiping some perhaps imaginary sweat from his broad forehead, he tried a smile without much success. “Well, it came to nothing, really.”

  Glitsky’s voice brooked no resistance. “Let us be the judge of that. What happened?”

  “One night rather late, I think it was toward the end of last summer, Mr. Markham called to see if I was still working, then asked me to come up to his office. This was a little unusual, not that I was working late, but that he was still there. I remember it was full dark by this time, so it must have been nine or nine thirty. Still, he told me to close the door, as though there might be other people working who could overhear us.

  “When I got seated, he said he wanted our talk to be completely confidential, just between the two of us and no one else. He said it was a very difficult subject and he didn’t know where he stood, even with his facts, but he wanted to document his actions in case he needed a record of them down the line.”

  “What did he want to do?” Hardy asked.

  “He wasn’t even sure of that. Eventually, he came to where he thought he ought to hire a private investigator to look into Mr. Ross’s finances.”

  Glitsky kept up the press. “What made him get to there?”

  “Several things, I think, but the immediate one was the Saratoga.” Foley was warming to his story, as though relieved that he finally had an opportunity to get it off his chest. “It seems that Mr. Markham and Dr. Ross had been at a party together one night at a medical convention they were both attending in Las Vegas a week or so before. They’d been close friends for years, you know, and evidently they went out together afterward alone for a few drinks, just to catch up on personal stuff. Well, over the course of the next couple of hours, Dr. Ross maybe drank a little too much, but he evidently made quite a point of telling Mr. Markham about the condition of his finances, which wasn’t good at all. His personal finances, I mean, exclusive of Parnassus, which was hurting badly enough as it was.”

  “So Ross cried on Markham’s shoulder?” Glitsky asked.

  “Essentially, yes. Told him he had no money left, no savings, his wife was spending it faster than he could earn it. Between the alimony for his first wife and the lifestyle of his second, he was broke. He didn’t know what he was going to do.”

  Hardy had gotten some inkling of this from Bracco and Fisk’s report on Nancy, but it was good to hear it from another source. “And what did Markham suggest?”

  “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 close. “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.”