The First Law

by John T Lescroart

  "I could take you, drop you off a block down."

  It wasn't really a request. Glitsky had years and rank on Thieu, but neither played much of a role in their connection. Thieu's brains commanded respect, and Glitsky simply nodded, then walked over to Treya to give her the news.

  She didn't exactly embrace it. "Unless I'm mistaken," she said, "Paul's still in homicide." Then, "You didn't sneak out and call him, did you?"

  He tried a feeble joke. "Maybe it's about his overtime."

  "Maybe it's about Sam Silverman."

  Last night, Nat had called with a recap of the interview Sadie had had with Cuneo. Not that the inspector's theory was any less defensible than Glitsky's. Certainly it was possible that Holiday had reentered the store with a key and then stolen the ring on another day. But at the very least, Glitsky thought Cuneo should have been open to the possibility that someone—not necessarily Panos but necessarily Silverman's killers—had planted the ring at Holiday's. It made him wonder. Somehow homicide and Panos kept seeing facts—even ambiguous or incriminating facts—in the same light.

  When he'd been in homicide, he'd never had that experience with the Patrol Special.

  It still wasn't his job, but with the attack on Hardy, it was at least his business. Treya, even, had come to agree with that.

  She kissed him good-bye and said she'd be around if he wanted to have lunch. He watched her walking away for a few steps, then put his hands in his flight jacket pockets and crossed the street.

  "I've been wrestling with guilt," Thieu began after they were rolling.

  "Who's winning?"

  "I guess the guilt. I'm here." He threw a quick look across the seat at his old boss. "You know anything about this double in the 'Loin?" Wills and Terry.

  Glitsky chuckled. "Treya just called it."

  "What?"

  "Silverman."

  Thieu took that in, nodding as though it confirmed something he'd been thinking. "I didn't draw Silverman. It wasn't ever my case. You know Cuneo and Russell?"

  "Not personally."

  Thieu shrugged. "Well, they got Silverman. Few nights later, I pull this kid Creed, who was the main witness for Silverman."

  "I heard," Glitsky said.

  "You know about this?"

  "Some." He looked over, qualified it. "What I read in the papers."

  Stopped at a red light, Thieu tried to find a clue in Glitsky's expression. Apparently, there wasn't one. "All right, I'll cut to the chase. Creed and these two poor schmucks in the 'Loin, suddenly they're connected because Creed had ID'd them for Silverman. Then a gun's at their place, ballistics confirms it killed both Silverman and Creed, everybody's happy, right?"

  "I know I am," Glitsky said.

  "Except there's a third guy Creed named."

  "John Holiday."

  The trace of a smile lifted Thieu's mouth. "But you're not following the case."

  Glitsky shook his head, straight-faced. "Hardly at all."

  "Then maybe you wouldn't know they pulled a warrant for him."

  "I did hear something about that."

  "Okay, here's where the guilt comes in. None of these are my cases. Gerson yanked two of them out from under me after I'd already worked the scenes."

  "Let me guess," Glitsky said. "You're conflicted about telling them they screwed up."

  Another red light had stopped them. Thieu turned to his mentor. "Worse. I want them to screw up."

  Glitsky sat with it a minute. "What'd they miss?" he asked.

  It wasn't a long laundry list, but it was compelling enough. Thieu told Glitsky that when it had become obvious that Holiday, by default, was going to become the prime suspect in all the murders, Thieu had gone by the place he worked and, to his own satisfaction, verified that he had a reasonably good and, more importantly, verifiable alibi for the time of his bartender's—Terry's—death. Thieu had questioned dozens of killers and witnesses in his six years in homicide, and was all but positive that if the arrest warrant hadn't been hustled through so quickly, Holiday would have supplied the names of his customers who would have eliminated him as a suspect at least in the deaths of Wills and Terry.

  Beyond that, Thieu said, it flew in the face of reason that this grotesque and sexually tinged double murder had been a result of thieves falling out among themselves. There was also too much of Silverman's money lying around—if it was about the robbery, Holiday would have known it was there somewhere and at least searched for it. Then taken it.

  In Thieu's opinion, and he'd given it a lot of thought, only two scenarios worked here. One was Faro's: this was a pickup gone bad. The other was his own: that whoever killed these guys was some kind of psycho who enjoyed it all right, but whose true motive was to implicate the only suspect left alive, Holiday. Who, unfortunately for the actual bad guys, had an alibi. The whole thing screamed over-kill. It was far too neat a package. The dope, the money, the gun, the shoes.

  "Oh, and while we're on the shoes." Thieu had been talking for five minutes and now suddenly paused for a breath. "You read about the gunk? All well and good. Nice Italian shoes, size thirteen. But guess what? Terry wore a thirteen, all right, but the Italian thirteen is at least a half size smaller than our thirteen. No way he wears those shoes. They weren't his. Especially when every other pair in the closet was crappy. Six pairs of sneakers, some Birkenstocks, flip-flops, one lace-up wingtip. Anybody who looked would see which pair didn't belong there."

  "But they didn't look. And you didn't tell them."

  "Another source of my guilt. I figured if they're going to be on the case, they can work it. So the closet's got all these junk shoes, and then this Italian braided beauty with the gunk on it, and half a size too small." Thieu shook his head. "It doesn't make any sense. You want my opinion, somebody knew what we'd be looking for and planted this stuff."

  Glitsky kept his face impassive. "Funny you should use that word," he said, and gave Thieu the gist of Sadie Silverman's testimony, Cuneo's interpretation.

  After Thieu heard it out, he sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. "I've got to tell the lieutenant about these clowns, Abe. I've got to. Except then ..." He didn't have to say it. Cops didn't fink on other cops. Gerson might appreciate the news, but Thieu would forever be tainted in some way, out of the club more than he already was by virtue of his race, brains, physical size. "It'd be sweeter if Gerson found it out by himself."

  It wouldn't only be sweeter, Glitsky knew, but it would save the good Inspector Thieu from the sure-to-be-thorny explanation of why he hadn't told Cuneo and Russell everything that he'd discovered and theorized instead of leaving them to find out for themselves. Thieu felt guilty about it, and Glitsky empathized with where he was coming from.

  But the fact was that he should have felt guilty. He hadn't done the right thing.

  They pulled up to the curb a couple of blocks before they reached the Hall. Glitsky had his hand on the door handle, but paused a last second. "Look, Paul. I happen to know Holiday's lawyer. He'd be motivated to verify some of those alibi names. Maybe he could talk one of them into volunteering to come in. Tell his story."

  "You know," Thieu said, "it's not that I care about this John Holiday. I sure as hell don't want to help his defense if it needs it. But I don't believe he did Wills and Terry."

  He wiped his eyes as though banishing the image. "I screwed up, too, didn't I?"

  "It's a big club, Paul. Welcome to it. At least you feel bad about it."

  "Maybe not bad enough to tell Gerson."

  "Well, the plain fact is that he done you wrong, too."

  He opened the door, got out, and leaned back in. "Give it a day or two. I'll call Holiday's lawyer. Make something happen."

  Holiday's lawyer felt a hundred years old. The bruise on his back had blossomed into a dinnerplate-size black-and-blue mark that woke him up whenever he shifted in bed over the entire weekend. The whole left hand continued to throb.

  Glitsky called. On and on about Sadie, Cuneo, Holid
ay, the planted or not-planted ring. And of course, the client never got in touch.

  Sunday night he'd taken a Vicodin left over from somewhere, then drunk two scotches with his brother-in-law before dinner. Two bottles of red wine with Moses after. Up too late, near midnight, Moses at his most passionate and most drunk, pressing for retaliation against Panos and his people now! Before they could strike at Hardy again.

  Hardy halfway—more than halfway—into it. Really, really pissed off. Embarrassingly so, he supposed. Foolishly. Frannie supervising the kids' homework far in the back of the house where maybe it wouldn't sound so awful. Susan finally packing Moses up and driving him home.

  Both women angry with their men. Frustrated, exhausted, afraid.

  Out of bed, badly hungover—dying—at 5:30, and no chance of going back to sleep, not with the back, the head, the hand. For the first time in months, he couldn't even be bothered with the newspaper. Out of the house before anyone else was up, he stopped at St. Francis to check on David, who perhaps on his deathbed looked just like Hardy felt. An hour in the office produced a cup of coffee and fourteen minutes of disjointed dictation. He was never going to drink alcohol again.

  Getting nothing done, he went back down to his car, which was parked under the building. Paranoid, he knelt and looked under the chassis, not really knowing what he was looking for. Moses's warnings kept replaying in his brain—the brother-in-law had not been mellow at all about Hardy getting shot at. He got into the driver's seat, stopped himself, then pulled the lever to open the hood, got all the way out and around the front again, and lifted it. "Motor," he said aloud. Disgusted with himself.

  At the Hall of Justice, Hector Blanca was busy; he'd be a while. Hardy waited in the outer office while time passed.

  A half hour. Forty-five minutes. He asked at the desk again, was told that it might still be a few minutes.

  An hour.

  The secretary finally suggested he come back another time. Sergeant Blanca really wasn't going to be able to spare any time this morning. "Well, I wonder if you'll be able to help me, then." He heard himself, the clipped and impatient tone guaranteed in any bureaucracy to produce glassy-eyed, unfeeling incomprehension, if not outright hostility. He reined himself in, fooling no one, however. "Listen. Someone shot at me last Friday—shot at me!—and I was hoping to find out if Sergeant Blanca or anybody else had made any progress finding out who it might have been."

  The secretary shook his head. "Did you make out a report? Well then, as soon as we have something, the sergeant will let you know."

  He walked back down a long hallway to the main lobby, where the day had now progressed enough to where the familiar vulgar din reigned, maybe even louder than usual.

  The traffic court line stretched from the ticket window, out past the elevator banks, over to the coffee kiosk, where he waited in another line to place his order. A baby was crying up front while, closer to him, a couple of five-year-olds chased each other, screaming. In the entrance to the courtroom hallway, a man in a frock and collar was lecturing a group of fifteen or twenty people in Spanish. A shaggy young man, barefoot, fell into line behind him and hit him up for some spare change. Reaching into his pockets, he found some coins and dropped them into the man's dirty, outstretched hand.

  The coffee line wasn't moving, or maybe he had mistakenly wandered into the traffic line after all. Either way, he walked to the elevators and stepped into an open one, pressing 4, Glitsky's old floor, out of habit. Six people shared the car with him—he didn't hear a word of English.

  When it stopped at his floor, he got out and stood lost in the suddenly empty, almost eerily quiet, space.

  The elevator area on all the floors looked almost identical, so he'd gotten well into the hallway that should have led to Glitsky's new digs when it struck him that something was wrong. Familiar, but wrong.

  He stopped again, looked around.

  Out of a doorway further along on the right, two men emerged and turned toward him. One—gray-haired, heavy and bespectacled—wore a well-tailored tan business suit.

  The other was a policeman in uniform. They were coming toward him, talking easily to one another, and at about twenty feet, recognition kicked in. Hardy moved into their path. "Richard," he said to Kroll.

  "Diz! How you doin'? I think you know Roy Panos. Roy, Dismas Hardy."

  "Sure." Roy's smile evaporated. He nodded cautiously, but neither man offered to shake hands.

  Kroll put on the proper face. "So how's David coming along?"

  "Not well, I'm afraid."

  "No change at all?"

  Hardy shook his head. "It doesn't look too good, Dick."

  He put a hand on Hardy's arm. "I am so sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do? Or anybody can do? Anything at all?"

  "I think they're doing all they can." Hardy motioned with his head. "So you been down at homicide?"

  "What? Oh, yeah." Kroll laughed out of all context.

  "Following up on poor Matt Creed. Did you know Matt?"

  "No. Afraid not."

  "Good kid. A real tragedy."

  "Yeah," Hardy said. "I'm aware of the case."

  "Oh, that's right. Sorry."

  "No need to be. It wasn't my client. He didn't do it."

  "No. Of course not. You going down now to explain about that to Gerson?"

  Hardy forced a cold grin. "Something like that."

  "Well, good luck."

  "Thanks."

  Hardy started for homicide as Kroll and Panos walked toward the elevators. He heard their talking resume in modulated tones. Suddenly, Kroll's voice pierced the silence again. "Oh, Diz!"

  Hardy turned.

  "On the other matter." He walked a little back the way he'd come, lowered his voice. "I don't know if you've heard. Your witness LaBonte?"

  "Aretha? What about her?"

  He moved two or three steps closer, started to talk, stopped, started again. "I just heard about it from Gerson.

  You know they hauled her in for hooking again yesterday."

  He hung his head for an instant. When he looked up, he met Hardy's gaze. "I know you're getting a lot of bad news this week, Diz, and I hate to add to it, but I guess she couldn't take the life anymore. Sometime last night she hanged herself in her cell."

  Hardy never intended to go to homicide anyway, so deciding to climb to Glitsky's floor by the inside stairs wasn't much of a change of plans. But he didn't go up them right away.

  When the hallway door closed behind him, he turned around and sat heavily on the second step. He leaned over, feeling sick, elbows on his knees, his pounding head resting on the heel of his one good hand.

  Hardy hadn't been Aretha's criminal defense attorney because, frankly, she couldn't afford him. She was a professional girl who got busted two or three times a year. Nevertheless, in the past six months, he'd come to know Aretha fairly well. She was twenty-four years old, black, functionally illiterate. The fact that she did not have a pimp contributed to the continuing difficulties in her life because she had no street protection, but she did have a steady boyfriend, Damoan. Quiet and polite, although unkempt and gang-dressed, Damoan often accompanied her to depositions and court appearances. It seemed to Hardy that the couple was happy with each other, unlikely as that might seem.

  With Freeman, Hardy had spent several hours with her, coaching her, taking her statements. But also having coffee, joking, driving someplace or another. He'd come to know her as an honest, uncomplicated person with a surprisingly sunny disposition and outlook. Things—sometimes terrible things—seemed to roll right off her. She'd probably spent two hundred nights of her life in jail. She'd told Hardy, and he believed her, that she viewed the experience as a neutral one. On the one hand, it gave her some time off; on the other, it was a hassle and an inconvenience.

  Kroll's statement that she must have "grown tired of the life" didn't wash with anything Hardy knew about the woman. She hadn't begun to lose her looks yet. Sephia's plant on her notwiths
tanding, she didn't use hard drugs.

  Unless she and Damoan had broken up, and he'd seen them apparently happy together within the past week, she was as unlikely a candidate for suicide as Hardy could imagine.

  He opened his eyes and raised his head, slowly got to his feet. He turned around, looked at the stairs, wondered if he could muster the strength to climb them.

  When Hardy first came in, Glitsky brought him a glass of water and four aspirin. Now the door to the office was closed. Glitsky sat behind his desk, scowling, tugging absently at a rubber band. "She must have, though."

  "I can't accept it. Somebody got to her."

  "In her cell? Not as easy as it sounds, Diz." He snapped the band a few times. "But don't get me wrong. I'm not ruling it out entirely." After a minute, he added, "Maybe you were right keeping Holiday outside."

  "It wasn't my decision," Hardy said, "but I'd advise against it now. Not that I've had a chance."

  "You haven't talked to him?"

  "Not since Friday. I don't even know where he is."

  Glitsky pulled the rubber band apart and sighted through it.

  "You can give me that look all you want," Hardy said, "but it's a true story. He's gone to ground."

  "All right, let's say I believe you. I'm still having trouble with Panos somehow connected to the jail."

  "Maybe he passes the word through homicide."

  Glitsky snorted. "Now you are dreaming."

  Hardy lifted his shoulders and immediately regretted it.

  He didn't care if Glitsky couldn't see how it might happen.

  Something had happened. Aretha LaBonte was dead in jail and he didn't believe she killed herself. And that left only one other option. "You can laugh," Hardy said, "but I just saw them down there."

  The laughing, if that's what the snort had been, stopped.

  "Who? Down where?"

  "Roy Panos. Downstairs. One floor down."

  "In homicide?"

  "With my close friend Dick Kroll. Evidently checking up on the Creed investigation."

  Glitsky sat up straight. "What were they checking on, the shoes?"

  "What about the shoes?"

  It didn't take Glitsky long to tell it.