Nothing but the Truth (43 page)
They both looked over at him with no interest, then held a quiet conference before one of them straightened up, jumped down onto the porch’s foundation. “Your friend said to tell you he went to work. Otherwise, we’re going to be here a while.”
“You got any idea what a while is?”
A flat glare. “Hours, not minutes.”
This was pulling teeth, but Hardy needed to get some information. “You finding anything?” At this, the arson investigator spread his hands in a futile gesture, and Hardy cut him off. “You can’t tell me anything, can you? I might have done it, right? Set fire to my own house.”
“People do it all the time.”
Hardy knew this was true. The man was doing his job, actually protecting Hardy’s interests. “Okay,” he managed to say mildly. “I was wondering, though, if I could go into the back and get a few things—clothes, toiletries, like that? Check my phone messages.”
In spite of what he’d told Valens, Hardy didn’t think the answering machine in the kitchen had been destroyed. Driving over here, it had occurred to him that it might be instructive to see what the tape held.
But to this inspector, whether or not Hardy had friends on the police force, he was a righteous suspect. He remained all business. “No, sir. I’m afraid not. There’s no electricity in any case. I don’t know if the captain made it clear to you, but this house is fire department property until we clear it to you.”
There was nothing to be gained antagonizing the man, although maintaining his demeanor took a serious coefficient of his resources. He forced a patient smile. “No, I understand that. But I’d like to be able to make some plans. Can you give me any estimate how long that will be?”
Maybe Hardy had worn the inspector down, but it seemed for an instant as if there was a tiny thaw. “Safest guess will be tomorrow morning sometime.” He paused. “Maybe about the time your reporter friend runs his column.”
No, Hardy realized. It wasn’t a thaw after all. It was a way to tell him that Jeff Elliot had been by, another unwelcome interruption to their task. Jeff had probably bothered them to distraction. “If we get done by dark, we’ll get it boarded up for the night. Somebody’ll be here tomorrow to let you back in . . . if we’re ready.” It was a dismissal.
There wasn’t anything he could do.
On his private stool right up by the front window, behind the bar at the Little Shamrock, Moses McGuire was nursing his Sunday Macallan. He allowed none of the other bartenders either to drink or to sit, even for an instant, when they were working. His belief was that professional bartenders got paid to stand while they waited on customers—it showed respect. If they wanted to sit, he invited them to come around to the bar side and take a short break at some risk to their job security, but if they were behind the rail, they stood. And on either side of it, during their hours of employ, they were dry.
McGuire himself, though, as the owner, could do any damn thing he wanted. When he and Hardy argued about the unfairness of how he applied his rules, he would explode. “I’m a noble publican, not some goddamned wage-slave bartender.” And since McGuire owned three quarters of the place, his word was the law.
He’d carefully drawn Hardy a tap Guinness and brought it to the bar after the foam had settled out to a perfect head. Now Hardy was down an inch or two into it. The time was a bit after two and the fog wasn’t going to burn off, not today, maybe not until Christmas. The trees at the edge of Golden Gate Park, no more than a hundred feet away directly across Lincoln Boulevard, were barely visible.
Three other customers quietly took up space in the oldest bar in San Francisco. On a couch in the dark far back, an obviously smitten young couple was possibly engaging in some kind of discreet sex. They had ordered old-fashioneds—the most froufrou drink that the purist McGuire allowed at the Shamrock. In the tiny side alcove, a lone, silent mid-thirties dart player with a shaved head and a camouflage jacket was working on his game, drinking Bushmills Irish, Bass Ale and a raw egg for protein out of a pint glass.
A year before, Moses had picked up some recently released recordings done in the 30s—Stéphane Grappelli on violin and Django Reinhardt on guitar just swinging their brains out with the Quintet of Le Hot Club de France—and whenever things were slow, as they were today, he’d run them on the jukebox.
McGuire twirled his glass around on the condensation ring that had formed on the bar. “You’re welcome to come stay with us, you know. The lot of you.”
“Thanks, Mose, but Erin’s already got the kids. She’s got a bigger place.”
He twirled his glass some more. “And when is Frannie out?”
This was treacherous territory. Hardy couldn’t tell Moses that Ron had released Frannie from her promise without revealing that he’d talked to him. And that would, in turn, lead to the minefield of secrets, none of which Hardy could disclose.
And some of which he still, after everything, didn’t know if he believed.
So he sipped Guinness, taking a minute. “My bet is that Sharron Pratt lets her go Tuesday morning. She’s taking too much political flack.”
“Why Tuesday?”
Hardy explained a little about the difference between the judge’s contempt ruling and the grand jury contempt citation. Two different animals with similar names. Fortunately, this seemed to satisfy Moses. But he twirled his glass a few more times and Hardy knew him well enough—he might have bought the latest explanation, but there was more he needed to talk about. “So what are you thinking?” Hardy prompted.
“How to say it.”
“Just say it, that’s all.”
Moses drank Scotch, put the glass down, looked his brother-in-law in the eye. “Okay. How’d it all turn to shit so fast?”
Hardy found some humor in the felicitous phrase that McGuire had been struggling to conjure. The pick-in’s were so slim in the rest of his life that he actually chuckled.
McGuire’s countenance took on a familiar dark tone—the Irish temper had always flared with the slightest friction. “It wasn’t a joke.”
Hardy realized he must be on his third Macallan after all, not his second. Well, he thought, it had been a stressful couple of days for him, too.
“I didn’t think it was a joke, Mose. It’s so true I wanted to cry, so I laughed. You hear what I’m saying?”
Moses sipped, nodded, an apology. “I mean, one day she’s taking the kids to school and baking cookies, and next day, bam!”—he slapped the bar with his palm—“all of a sudden the next day she’s in jail and her house is burned down. How does shit like this happen?”
What could Hardy say? That Frannie had taken a series of little steps, secret steps? That it wasn’t really anything at all like “all of a sudden”?
And it wasn’t only Frannie, either. Hardy had taken them, too, the tiny incremental steps away from intimacy. More, he’d
felt
the shift in the bedrock of their marriage, the first cracks in the fault line. They’d allowed things to change with the pressures of raising the children—the communication eroded, their respective daily lives on different planets.
felt
the shift in the bedrock of their marriage, the first cracks in the fault line. They’d allowed things to change with the pressures of raising the children—the communication eroded, their respective daily lives on different planets.
This is where it had gone wrong, what had led them to here, but he wasn’t going to air all that now. He lifted his glass and killed another inch of Guinness. “I don’t know, Mose. I don’t know.”
McGuire leaned over the bar. Whispered. “Tell me she isn’t sleeping with him.”
“She says no.” Hardy made eye contact. “She wouldn’t do that.”
“She wouldn’t,” he agreed quickly, but the relief showed. Her brother, at least, believed it. “She’d tell you first, before anything happened, even if she was only thinking about it. That’s who she is.”
“Okay.” Talking about it wasn’t going to make it better or worse. It was just going to invite other people to participate in the discussion, and Hardy wasn’t doing that, even with Moses. He and Frannie might have their serious differences, but they were as one in a way that made them aliens in the modern world—they believed that their private lives were private.
“But your house . . . ?” Moses asked. “This morning you were saying it was part of this, too.”
“Part of who killed Bree, Mose. Not part of me and Frannie.”
“And you’re close to finding that? Who did that?”
“If I am I don’t know it, but somebody must think so. I’ve got to believe hitting my house was a warning to back off.”
Moses sipped his Scotch, put it down carefully. “Unless whoever it was thought you were home, in which case it wasn’t just a warning.”
Hardy considered for a beat. “No. I doubt that. I’m not that much of a threat.” He shook his head, the idea rattling around. “I don’t think so,” he repeated, more to himself than to Moses.
“Well you don’t have to think it for it to be true. If I were you, I’d put it in the mix.”
“What, exactly?”
“That somebody’s trying to kill you.”
On that cheery note, the front door banged open and a mixed six-pack of humanity flowed in, talking football, calling for beer. Moses shrugged at Hardy, gave them a welcome, and headed down the rail for the taps.
It was a signal for Hardy that he didn’t want to waste any more time philosophizing with his brother-in-law. Moses was right—there was far too much he didn’t know. He was vulnerable and couldn’t allow himself the luxury of letting his guard down.
So with neither plan nor destination, Hardy left two-thirds of his Guinness. He’d parked around the corner on Tenth Avenue and pushed himself through the fog, hunched against the wind. Getting in behind the wheel, he hesitated before turning the key, then broke a thin smile as the engine turned over. See? No bomb. Flicking the heater up to high, he pulled out, got to the corner, and turned right. He had no idea where he was going.
All he knew was that the Little Shamrock wasn’t anywhere he needed to be just now. He needed to work. Time was running out. He couldn’t go back to his house—the fire department owned it. There were still his children, Frannie. But he’d already seen them today. That would have to be enough.
Where the hell was Ron Beaumont? Or Phil Canetta?
What did he have? What could he work with?
The only thing that came remotely to mind was his paperwork, the lawyer’s constant companion and last refuge. At his office he had his copies of pages from Carl Griffin’s file, the notes he’d taken last night with Canetta, the propaganda he’d liberated from Bree’s office, the lettersfrom her high school yearbook. At some point, he reasoned, some part of all of that might intersect.
David Freeman believed that lawyers should work around the clock. He had had full bathrooms installed on each of the three floors of his building so that his associates would not be able to use the lame excuse after an all-nighter that they had to go home to freshen up and get ready for court.
In twenty-five minutes, Hardy was in his office— showered, shaved, changed into the shirt that he’d stashed in his file cabinet a couple of months before.
When he got seated at his desk, he retrieved the four messages he’d received since last night, hoping against hope that one of them would turn out to be from Canetta, or even Ron Beaumont. If Al Valens had left a message Hardy hadn’t been able to get back at his home, then maybe either or both of the men he
wanted
to talk to had tried as well, or called here at his office afterward.
wanted
to talk to had tried as well, or called here at his office afterward.
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