The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  Treya chewed silently, sipped at her tea. “All right, I’ll go to work. But he can get his own darn coffee.”

  At a quarter to eight, Glitsky flashed his badge at the manager of the Diamond Center lot. At 9:45, he and Hardy were still in Hardy’s car, in a VIP parking space just to the side of the entrance, and directly across the street from the Georgia AAA Diamond Center. Hardy still hurt. He dozed fitfully behind the wheel until Glitsky backhanded his shoulder. “Panos,” he said.

  It was Roy, on foot and in uniform. Stopping at the huge double doors, he checked his watch, paced to the corner, looked both ways, then came back to the doors and looked at his watch again. He wasn’t sixty feet from where they were parked. Both men slumped in their seats, awaiting developments. They weren’t long in coming. Two men coming up out of the lot passed within five feet of Glitsky’s window. Again, he ticked Hardy’s shoulder, and pointed. Sephia in a black leather calf-length coat and Rez in tight black chinos and a tan, torso-hugging sweater that he tucked into his pants.

  They crossed to where Roy waited at the doors. He wasted no time but immediately grew animated, gesticulating, all bulldog. “Next time we bring one of those distance microphones, tape everything they say,” Glitsky said. When Hardy didn’t reply, he said, “That was a joke, Diz.”

  But Hardy still didn’t answer. He just sat, watching the trio across the street. After a few minutes of back and forth, Roy seemed to have shot his wad in terms of aggression, and then the meeting, abruptly as it had begun, was over. Roy resumed the walk on his beat. Sephia and Rez went to the double doors of the Diamond Center and disappeared inside.

  “Well,” Hardy said, “they’re all involved in something together, but we already knew that. I’d love to go inside and have a few words with Nick.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe none. But it would be fun to bait him a little. Cast aspersions about his mother’s heritage or something. See if I could get him to take a poke at me with witnesses around.”

  “It’s nice to see you thinking about having fun again. I wasn’t going to mention it, but your company’s been less than scintillating this morning.”

  “Yeah, but I had all the ideas last night. Speaking of which, no word from Thieu?”

  Glitsky shook his head. “Too soon.” His eyes had never left the double doors, and now he bobbed his head that way. “See? You wouldn’t have had any time anyway. Keep low.”

  But they needn’t have worried. Sephia carried a plain paper bag and he and Rez passed them again close enough to touch, but they were deeply into their own conversation now and never slowed.

  “Now what?” Hardy said.

  “Gentlemen, start your engines.”

  So they were ready. Glitsky, looking back over his shoulder, said “Okay.” Hardy let them pass, said, “That’s the car!” and fell in behind them.

  “What car?”

  “The gray sedan. The one they were driving when they shot at me and John. The bastards are so smug they didn’t even use a rental or a throwaway. Can you believe that?”

  Glitsky had his pad out and got the license number. They were heading west on Geary now, back a couple of car-lengths, but no one in between. “Speaking of fun, if we can ever get somebody to start issuing search warrants, it might be fun to dig around in that thing.”

  “There it is,” Hardy said, “fun again.” But as he said it, he was rolling the muscles of his back. He didn’t look like he was having fun.

  They followed as the car did the one-way-street boogie until it was heading south now on Van Ness, then down Mission to Twenty-first Street, where it turned right and finally pulled to a stop at the curb in front of a nicely maintained, freestanding Victorian house. Hardy drove by as both men were getting out of their car. There was no paper bag, although Sephia walked with both of his hands inside the pockets of his black coat.

  Hardy pulled over a couple of houses up the road. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” Glitsky was writing down the address, though. “Drug drop maybe? I don’t know,” he said again.

  It wasn’t a long wait, perhaps ten minutes. When they came out of the house, this time Rez was holding a briefcase. They got back on the road and the tail continued.

  By noon, when they turned back into the Diamond Center lot, they’d made four similar stops, from the Mission out to Diamond Heights and then to a palatial, gated home in St. Francis Wood. By this time, both Hardy and Glitsky had concluded that whatever the boys were up to, it wasn’t kosher. But they didn’t get much time to air any of their theories. They were parked in a loading zone, waiting for the two men to exit the lot again. Hardy had just turned off the motor when he looked into the rearview mirror and said, “Okay, here they come.”

  At the same moment, Hardy’s cell phone rang. He watched Sephia and Rez, each with a briefcase now, as they crossed the street, but he stopped paying attention to them when he heard his wife’s voice, crying. “Dismas,” she managed to get out. “Please . . .”

  “What is it, Fran? Do you hear me? Easy.”

  “I can’t be easy!” she screamed. Then, “Dismas, you’ve got to come home.”

  “I will, but . . .”

  “Please! Now!”

  “Are you all right? Should I call nine one one?”

  “No, but it’s . . .” Her breathing came in ragged gasps. “Just get here.”

  “Okay, sure. I’m on my way, but what’s . . .”

  “I can’t explain. You’ll have to see. Oh God, I’ve got to call the school.”

  “The school? Why? Are the kids . . . ?”

  “I’ve got to call the school,” she repeated, and hung up.

  “Fran? Frannie?” He stared at the dead phone.

  “What is it?” Glitsky asked.

  “Not good,” Hardy said. A muscle twitched at the side of his jaw. “Whatever it is, it’s not good. She’s calling the school.” He turned to his friend. “Listen, Abe, I’m done here. I’ve got to go now.” He hit the ignition. “I can drop you someplace on the way.”

  “No.” Glitsky was already halfway out of the car. “You go.”

  The car peeled out in a spray of gravel.

  Holiday was alone now in the Yerba Buena Motel at the corner of Van Ness and Lombard, not even three blocks from Michelle’s house. She had come back home last night traumatized and panic-stricken. She was sure that the policemen that had been at his place had followed her home. They both had to get out of there right away. So they’d walked down here, a few blocks, and Michelle had checked them both in under her name.

  And now she was gone. She had a deadline for a big article on bonzais for Sunset and she needed to do a ton of research. She told him he should just hang out here in the room and she’d be back mid-afternoon with some lunch. He called Hardy’s office three times and redundantly left Michelle’s cell phone number each time, but it appeared that his lawyer had taken the day off. The one time he ventured a look out the window, a black-and-white police car had been parked in the lot outside. The next time he looked, it had gone, but the anxiety hadn’t.

  This was getting bad, he knew. He was going to have to do something. He couldn’t just sit here.

  When the maid knocked, he let her in and went out across the street and into the convenience store on the corner. At least his picture wasn’t on the front page of the newspapers out front today. He bought a quart of milk, a quart of apple juice, six apples, a Snickers candy bar and a copy of the Chronicle. When he got back, the maid had finished.

  He drank the milk and ate an apple and the candy bar. He read the Chronicle, was pleased to note on page two that they still hadn’t found him, although the search continued. He tried Hardy again, but he still wasn’t in.

  Finally, he took a clean towel from the bathroom and used it as a tablecloth on the bedside table. He took his gun from his jacket pocket, made sure there wasn’t a bullet in the chamber, nor a clip in the handle. After wiping
it clean with the towel, he tried the action, sighted down the barrel, squeezed off a succession of phantom rounds. To his surprise, he found that the clip had only four rounds in it, and he opened his box and squeezed in another three, so that it was fully loaded. He worked the action to chamber a round, then dropped the clip and put another bullet in its place.

  Finally, he jammed the clip into the weapon.

  Loaded for bear.

  Thieu didn’t get much sleep, but he wasn’t accustomed to more than five hours anyway, so it didn’t bother him. After he and Faro had finished their dusting at Holiday’s, he decided on his own that Dismas Hardy’s strategy had if not a flaw, at least a difficulty. Thieu still had to find a way that he could plausibly inject himself into a discussion with Sephia and Rez about their possible presence at Holiday’s duplex. That wasn’t his case. On the other hand, he had been the responding inspector to the Terry/Wills scene. Any concerns he had about the inviolability of that scene would be completely appropriate.

  So at a little before two, he appeared at the Diamond Center and ten minutes later found himself in a small anteroom off the showroom floor, explaining about his problem to the private security guards Sephia and Rez. “So the basic security of the scene is still my responsibility,” he lied, “and I know both you guys and”—he looked down at his pad—“and Roy Panos have been helping out Inspectors Cuneo and Russell, isn’t that right?”

  “Some,” Sephia replied. “Mostly that’s been Roy, though.”

  “Yeah. I already got him.” Thieu passed over Roy quickly. He didn’t want them to ask what he meant by saying he “got” him. “But they mentioned you, too.”

  Sephia looked to Rez—a question. Then he shrugged. “We just talked to them a couple of times.”

  “But you never went with them. You never were at Terry’s and Will’s apartment?”

  “Why would we?” Rez asked. “Did anybody say we were? Why don’t you ask them, the other inspectors?”

  Thieu played innocent. “They’re out today interviewing witnesses and they asked me to clear this up. Look, we’re trying to get the neighbors and other folks to tell us who had been in and out of there. It’s a simple question. Have either of you guys ever been there before?”

  Rez looked at Sephia. They both looked at Thieu. “No, of course not.”

  Now Thieu had them. He pulled out his tape recorder and they couldn’t very well refuse to repeat the denial. Then, when he got to the end, he set the hook. “By the way,” he said with the tape still running, “have either of you guys ever been to John Holiday’s apartment?”

  Glitsky wandered around downtown for over an hour, his mind jumping between Hardy’s sudden emergency and the odyssey they’d witnessed with Sephia and Rez. He ended up at David’s Deli, where he sat at the bar and ordered a pastrami sandwich and a Cel-Ray soda. He checked his watch. He was dying to know, but wanted to give Hardy time to work out the problem. Whatever it was, it seemed serious, but if he’d have wanted Glitsky’s company or help, he would have asked in the car.

  Again, he looked at his watch. If he bolted down his sandwich, he could get back to the Hall in time still to get in a half-day. He could just say he was feeling better and didn’t want to be home if he wasn’t really sick. It would be a good example for the troops.

  “No,” he said aloud. Suddenly he stood up, took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his seat to save his place. At the pay telephone, he called Treya at work, but a different woman answered at her personal number, and this brought a crease to his brow. “I’m trying to reach Treya Glitsky.”

  “I’m sorry, but she’s not in. Is this Lieutenant Glitsky?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Treya’s left for the day, Lieutenant. She left a message if you called that you should get home, or at least call, as fast as you could. And that you should be very careful.”

  “Call home?”

  “That’s what she said. She left here in a hurry. She said she’d try and page you.”

  He hung up, dug in his pocket for some coins as his pager went off, and punched in his home number. “Treya, it’s me. Tell me Rachel’s all right.”

  When Treya had her voice under this much control, she was dangerously angry. “She’s fine, but I think you’d better come home.”

  “What is it?”

  “I guess you’d say a threat. A threat to Rachel.”

  “What kind of threat?”

  “Just a picture of her. A Polaroid, probably taken yesterday, from what Rita and she were wearing. Rita’s holding her on the steps. Somebody circled Rachel in red.”

  Suddenly Glitsky understood the urgency of Hardy’s problem, as well as Frannie’s panic. She, too, had gotten a recent Polaroid of her children. The message was unequivocal, its meaning clear. We know where your children are. We can get to them anytime we want.

  Back off or they die.

  27

  A fingerprint search is nearly always run first by a computer against a local database of known criminals. In this case, since Thieu had some specific people in mind, he’d asked Faro to hand check the prints they’d lifted from Holiday’s and Terry/Wills’s places directly against Rez, Panos and Sephia.

  Thieu got the results at a little before 3:30 and figured he could make it back uptown easily, even with traffic, and get the news to Gerson before the lieutenant went home for the day. First he wanted to share the news and tell Glitsky, though, so he stopped by the fifth floor, only to discover that his old mentor had called in sick—astounding. Certainly Thieu had never known him to do it when he was in homicide. He had his home phone number, however, and closing the door behind him—no one seemed to be minding the store in Glitsky’s absence—he borrowed the phone on the desk to make the call. “Abe? What’s the matter? You don’t sound so good.”

  “No. I’m fine, Paul. Maybe coming down the flu or something, that’s all. What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on is I got the results on the fingerprints and you were right. Hardy was right. Sephia and Rez were all over Holiday’s place. And I have them on tape denying ever being there.”

  Glitsky sounded weary beyond imagining. Even this terrific news of Thieu’s didn’t seem to cheer him in the least. “That’s great, Paul.” He sounded as though he were almost bored by it. “So what are you going to do now?”

  “Lieutenant, are you all right?”

  “I don’t know.” A long pause. “I may not be in for a few days after all. So I assume you’ll be talking to Gerson?”

  “Sure, showing him the results. It’s naked eye stuff, almost. Gerson was my next stop. I’m in your office now.”

  “Well, you want to do me one last favor?”

  “Sure. Anything.”

  “I want you to leave Hardy and me completely out of it.”

  “I can’t do that, Lieutenant. You were the ones who had the idea. If we get these guys from this evidence, people here, I mean in the department, have got to know it was you.”

  Glitsky’s voice suddenly became far more familiar to Thieu—terse, biting, brooking no resistance. “Paul, I want you to hear me good. People have not got to know it was me. Or Hardy, for that matter. In fact, it’s critical—critical, do you understand?—that it look like we had nothing to do with it. Nothing!”

  “But . . .”

  “No buts. If you get this into the system now with Gerson, you’ll be the hero and you deserve to be the hero. You did all the work.”

  “I don’t care about being the hero, Abe. I don’t want to hog your credit.”

  “Forget my credit. I’ve already got way too much profile around this case as it is. You’ve got enough now, with this, that from here on out it’s by the numbers. With any kind of hustle, these guys should be under a lot of heat. I don’t want them to come back on us. So no me, no Hardy. Just good police work did these guys in. And that’s all that did it, okay?”

  “Okay.” Thieu didn’t like it. “If it were me, though, I’d at least want to
remind the people who’d accused me, make them eat a little crow.”

  “I don’t care about that. I really don’t. I’m payroll, remember?” A silence, then, “You still don’t get it, do you?”

  “No, sir. I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

  “All right. I guessed you’ve earned the real reason.” Suddenly, Glitsky’s tone changed again. It became nearly intimate, quietly intense. “They’ve threatened my family, Paul, my daughter. Same with Hardy, his kids. It’s what you’d call a credible threat. So I don’t want them to think we did this. In fact, I want them to think we didn’t. After they’re in prison for life plus a hundred, maybe then we can go back and gently remind some people on our side that we might have had something to say. But as far as the public needs to know, I’m done. Hardy’s done. We were done before you even started thinking about fingerprints. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Just get this to Gerson direct. Don’t go through Cuneo and Russell.”

  “That was my plan.”

  “It’s a good one. You’ve still got time today, I see. Go.”

  Thieu looked out Glitsky’s one window. The sun had just set, but he might just get lucky and find Gerson still at the job.

  “I’m gone,” he said.

  Behind Gerson’s closed door, Thieu had been sitting now for over twenty minutes and still couldn’t believe he was hearing this. The lieutenant had, at first, been reasonably enthusiastic, listening to Thieu’s explanation of how his earlier suspicions at the Terry/Wills scene—the shoe, the plethora of convenient evidence—combined with the suspicion of planted evidence at Holiday’s . . .

  “What suspicion of planted evidence? Have you been talking to Glitsky?”

  “Lieutenant Glitsky? No, sir. I haven’t talked to anybody. This is just me.”

  “Just you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who got these prints for you?”

  “That was Len Faro, but he was just dusting. He had no idea what it was all about. And nobody at all knows about this taped statement. Not a soul.”