Nothing but the Truth (46 page)
Glitsky turned his chair around the normal way, pulled the pan over. “That’s because you’re over forty. Nowadays they teach that stuff in school. Multitasking. Makes you a better person, more productive.” He spooned out some food onto his plate, pushed it around a little. “It’s just one of the reasons the world is so much better now than it was when we were kids.” He forked a bite and popped it. “So. You want to just start or would you prefer that I ask questions?”
Dark slammed down like a trapdoor.
An hour later, Hardy was in the tramped-down mud behind his house. Out here closer to the ocean, a fine drizzle had started to condense out of the fog. In the brisk, chill wind, he was impressed by how much the moisture added to the already substantial pleasures of the evening.
Up the backyard stairway, still outside, he turned his key in the back door and, somewhat to his surprise, it opened. He fully expected that the fire department’s security team would have provided their own locks for the various entrances, but though they’d tightly boarded up the front and posted the property with NO TRESPASSING signs, that seemed to be the extent of it.
So he was inside. From the lower shelf on his workbench, he grabbed a flashlight and passed on into his kitchen. He didn’t need the flashlight yet—the distances and angles were all second nature. He checked around— there was no dial tone on the wall telephone, no light in the refrigerator when he pulled it open. The neatly folded heavy brown paper shopping bags were where they always were, in the drawer at the bottom of the pantry. He grabbed one off the top.
In his bedroom, he risked a short beam. His tropical fish—seventeen of them, a collection that he’d nurtured through various permutations over twenty years—were all belly-up on the surface of his aquarium.
A muscle worked in his jaw. He turned off the flashlight and crossed the room. The answering machine was on a small reading table. He unplugged it from the wall, disconnected the telephone jack and placed it in the bottom of the paper bag on a corner of the bed. Next was his dresser—he threw in underwear and a couple of sweaters on top of the answering machine. In his closet, he gathered up a heavy jacket, a business suit, some shirts, all of them smelling of smoke. A complete change of clothes for his wife, too. For when he got her out.
Something in him wished he didn’t need to do it, but he knew he had to. Leaving everything on the bed, he walked back up through the kitchen into the burned-out front of the house and stood in the middle of what used to be his dining room.
He’d once represented a plaintiff who had suffered severe burns in an industrial accident. He remembered preparing the expert he was going to put on, who’d defined the various degrees of burn—first, a sunburn; second, a blister; or the worst, third-degree burns, causing irreparable loss of skin and terrible disfigurement. Any serious percentage of third-degree burns over the body was most often fatal.
But what he felt now seemed even worse—a fourth-degree burn to the core of him, one that charred the edges of his soul.
After a time he moved again—back through the kitchen, to the bedroom for the things he’d left there. He picked up the bag by its paper handles, the clothes by their hangers. At his workbench, he carefully replaced the flashlight, then let himself back out into the awful, awful night.
Hardy left his bag of clothes in the car, but brought the answering machine up to his office, where he plugged it in and found that Al Valens was, at least, not lying all the time. He was the first message—just what he’d said.
The second one stunned him.
No name, but immediately recognizable. “I’m sorry to have moved out of the hotel. I hope I haven’t caused you too much inconvenience.”
Hardy almost laughed out loud—not too much inconvenience indeed.
“The only answer is that I’ve got to be very cautious. I know you will understand. If you could get to me so easily, so could the police. They might have been following you the next time you came down. I don’t know. The point is, I felt like I had to relocate. But I wanted you to know I’m still nearby and appreciate what you’re doing, but very nervous about you coming to me. I hope you’re having some luck. Thanks.”
“Sure, no problem,” Hardy said, then punched at the answering machine’s button, sat back in his chair, and tried to gather some thoughts.
But it was all a jumble. Just today his house had been burned, Canetta had been killed. He’d been running since first light and had one day left to discover any useful truth. He glanced up at his dartboard on the wall around his desk. He didn’t remember throwing them, but his three custom-made darts were stuck haphazardly around the board.
He forced himself up, around the desk, flicked on the bright room overheads. The darts were his worry beads, and he pulled them from the board, walked back to the tape line he’d marked on the floor at eight feet, turned and threw the first one. Triple twenty—a good start.
He threw the second dart, then the third. Walked to the board, pulled them down, returned to his mark.
If Ron hadn’t left town, what did that mean?
The kind reading was to take him at his word. He was cautious, nervous, paranoid, all of these things certainly understandable. He wanted to be nearby in case—as did not appear very likely now—Hardy succeeded in exposing Bree’s killer. If that happened, he and his children could return to their lives. And from what had already happened to the other principals in this drama, Ron was right to be worried.
But as Hardy threw his darts, a more sinister interpretation kept wanting to surface, and he had a difficult time keeping it down. Ron was still nearby. Close enough to set fire to Hardy’s house. Close enough to kill Canetta.
If he’d only left a phone number on Hardy’s machine. Surely there was no danger in that. Then he could answersome of the questions that were fogging Hardy’s consciousness.
What was the truth, for example, about Ron and Bree’s marriage? The separate bedrooms, the infidelity? Ron might be a “miracle” of a father, but he wasn’t the same as a husband. This was not the happy couple they pretended to be. At the very least, Bree was having an affair with Damon Kerry. And she had become pregnant, apparently by him. Although Hardy felt he couldn’t rule out Canetta, or even Pierce.
And if the father was anyone but Ron, this was a motive for murder. For Ron to kill.
Beyond that, if Bree were habitually unfaithful, might that mean . . . with Ron . . .
Hardy tried to shut out the thought, but finally it couldn’t be dismissed any longer. Of course it could mean Frannie. Although, finally, today, she had told him no, it hadn’t been like that. Or had she? Like what, exactly? He hadn’t cross-examined her. He hadn’t had the heart.
And why would he be fool enough to believe her in any event?
Freeman’s words from last night’s conversation echoed and picked at him—Hardy and Glitsky believing that Carl Griffin had gone to interview a snitch
because he had said so.
When in fact that’s not what he’d done. In fact, Griffin had lied.
because he had said so.
When in fact that’s not what he’d done. In fact, Griffin had lied.
To his boss. And for a lot less reason than Frannie had.
Nothing-but-the-truth was a noble courtroom concept,but Hardy knew from a lifetime of trials that even there it was systematically abused. And in life it was much worse.
But he stopped himself before going too far down this road. Frannie wasn’t just another random person. She was the mother of his children, the wife he’d promised to love, honor, and respect. And if those three did not include trust, a basic belief not only in her honesty but in who she was, he was lost anyway.
Frannie had told him clearly. She had been been attracted to Ron but had remained faithful to him. Ron was a good friend, but that’s all she’d let it be. Hardy really had no choice but to believe her, to take it on faith. She was telling him the truth.
And that was the only truth he could let himself act on. To do less would betray both of them.
26
It was Sunday night and Glitsky hadn’t spent enough time at home this weekend. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to anytime soon, either.
In his job, once in a very great while he called in a favor. Three years before, Glitsky had spoken up in defense of Paul Ghattas on one of the dozens of equal employment opportunity lawsuits that were forever being filed among and between workers in the Hall of Justice. Ghattas, a lab tech whose first language was Tagalog, had made a comment to one of his female co-workers that she had interpreted as sexual harassment. The two had been discussing the location of a stab wound, and Ghattas had fumbled with language for a moment, then used the word tit, rather than breast.
Glitsky had been in the lab at the time, waiting for results on another case, and had been the only witness, had heard the whole thing, including Ghattas’s abject apology afterward.
The woman had screamed, “Don’t you piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining,” and run out of the room.
Before Ghattas’s comment, the lab setting had been professional and neutral. But the woman had been offended to the point of being unable to continue coming to work for the following ten days. Then she’d filed her suit, which, it turned out, had not been her first. She wanted Paul Ghattas—a ten-year veteran and father of four—dismissed. She wanted full pay for days missed. She wanted disability for the six months she estimated it would take her to get over the emotional trauma she’d had to endure.
Glitsky had worked with Ghattas many times. The man’s English was poor, but he was a competent work-horse in the lab. So, realizing even at the time that he was wading into troubled waters, Glitsky had stood up for him at the hearing, where—against all odds in an environment where to be accused was to be guilty—Ghattas was exonerated.
So Paul was happy to accompany Abe to the Hall at seven this Sunday night. Glitsky left him downstairs at the lab, then went up to his office. Checking Damon Kerry’s fingerprints against all the others found at Bree’s apartment was going to take Ghattas some time and Glitsky had a slew of his own work now to move on.
The litany of information that Hardy had recited earlier in the evening had been deeply disturbing, mostly because Glitsky hadn’t known any of it. And as head of homicide, to say nothing of being Hardy’s best friend, he should have. Batavia and Coleman weren’t brain-dead by any means, and yet somehow between them they’d missed getting any kind of a toehold in this case.
He was half tempted to arrest Hardy for what he’d withheld from him just on general principles, for not mentioning squat about what he’d found, what he had been doing. Like, he had been working with Canetta. He’d made the connection to Griffin. He’d talked with Valens this morning when neither of Glitsky’s inspectors could locate the campaign manager. Now he had Baxter Thorne, who had possibly been at least the brains behind dumping the MTBE into the Crystal Springs Reservoir and, more relevantly, had killed a man in Glitsky’s jurisdiction in the process.
But for all Hardy did know, Glitsky realized, he had a blind spot, and that was Ron Beaumont. It was a common truth in homicide that the spouse did it, and in spite of all the activity surrounding Bree’s oil interests, Ron still looked pretty good to Glitsky. He had fled the scene, used multiple identities. Judging from the bedrooms in the penthouse, he and Bree hadn’t been intimate recently, and since she was pregnant, this provided a pretty solid motive.
Glitsky hated to give the DA the satisfaction, but he could no longer ignore Ron as a suspect. In fact, from his perspective, the best suspect.
Abruptly, he sat up in his chair, coming to the unpleasantrealization that his friend was still holding out on him—otherwise Ron would be on Hardy’s own short list, too. He would have to be. Therefore, Hardy knew something more and he wasn’t telling. He hadn’t told Glitsky even as he had pretended to bare his soul a couple of hours before, as they’d planned to meet again down here when Hardy got his belongings together.
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