The Keeper (19 page)

The gun came as advertised. Since a .357 Magnum revolver would shoot a .38 Special round, Glitsky knew that it might be the murder weapon. On the other hand, the fact that she would so blithely hand it over to him seemed to radically diminish that possibility. If she had killed someone with that weapon, in all probability, she would have disposed of it soon thereafter. It was clean, oiled, and unloaded, with no scent of gunpowder. When Patti put the gun away and closed the safe, she turned around, looking up at Abe. “Is that it?” she asked. “Are we done?”

“I have one more question. What kind of car do you drive?”

“A BMW M3. Do you want to see that, too? What's my car got to do with anything?”

“Ms. Orosco. Patti. Please understand. It's not what I think. It's what I've got the evidence to support. To get Hal off, I need something from you, from any potential suspect, that makes it possible that you killed Katie. Or something that completely eliminates you as a suspect, that makes it impossible that you killed her. I haven't seen that yet. If you can think of anything, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, it would make my day. Truly.”

“You mean my car doesn't do me any good, either?”

“Not by itself, no. Have you had it cleaned recently?”

“Only a few days ago. I got it detailed. It's a great car. I like to keep it perfect. But let me guess, that's the wrong answer, too.”

Glitsky shrugged, and she led him back not to the living room, but to the top of the staircase, obviously bringing the interview to an end. She turned and faced him. “You know,” she said, “I had an affair with Hal. I'm not so proud of that. But I'm a good person. And you've sat and talked to me a couple of times, and I've been honest and forthcoming with you, and you still think I'm capable of killing somebody who was a friend of mine?”

Glitsky had seen enough as a cop to believe in his heart that everybody was capable of killing someone, given the right set of circumstances. He said, “It's not that I think it. It's that I can't prove you didn't.”

“You think I could, though. Kill somebody. I can tell. You look right at me, and you can't see who I am at all.” She shook her head, touched his arm, brushed a tear from her eye, and shook her head again. “I feel so sorry for you,” she said. “I really do.”

44

M
UCH MORE WORN
down by his interview with Patti Orosco than he'd expected to be, Glitsky was more than surly when he sat down in Hardy's office at a few minutes before noon. “Well,” he said with sarcasm, “I really appreciate your calling me as soon as you knew this was about ­Cushing. Except if you had, then I wouldn't have gotten to go out and ruin Patti Orosco's day, which was a really good time. So thanks.”

“Hey, we thought it might have been Cushing last night.”

“But you
knew
it this morning.”

“Excuse me all to hell, but it's not a hundred percent. I wasn't as sure as I am now until I talked to Hal, and afterward, I needed to talk to Wes more than I needed to tell you. It's not necessarily about Cushing anyway.”

Glitsky cocked his head. “What part's not about him? I just listened to you for ten minutes, and all of it seemed to be about him. Farrell really thinks Cushing killed his investigator?”

“Not Cushing but one of his guys. If Hal's right, it's probably Foster.”

“The chief deputy. I know him. And I don't use the word ‘prick' or that's what I'd call him. What's Homicide say?”

“Not much, not yet. Murder in the commission of a robbery, so far. I guess they're writing off Luther Jones as a coincidence. Me, personally, I'm going to write that off as un-fucking-likely.”

“Because she'd just started on the Tussaint thing?”

“It's quite a large coincidence, Abe. Too large to ignore. And combine that with the new information that it looks like it was Cushing who hooked up with Katie Chase. It's starting to resemble a case, you must admit.”

“Farrell isn't tempted to let Hal go, is he?”

Hardy shook his head. “No chance. Too many headlines already. He'd look like a trigger-happy idiot, to say nothing of the fact that he'd have to talk about his new favorite suspects, which would pretty much tip them off. And there's no new evidence on Katie's murder. So Hal sits where he is. Oh, and P.S.: He isn't talking about covering up anything, and he's ­denying whatever he might have told me. The jail is a well-run and ­orderly place, and Burt Cushing is a saint.”

Glitsky said at last, “This murder last night. Thirty-eight?”

“Nope. Forty. Common law enforcement service weapon.” Hardy nodded. “I know, there are a million of them. But still.”

“So what's Wes going to do?”

“He was thinking about calling in the FBI and going after the big boys themselves—Cushing and Foster—but he doesn't want to give up the jurisdiction, which is basically admitting that he's no good at his job. Plus, he liked this girl Maria, so it's personal. He wants to take these bastards down. But if he calls the FBI, what's he going to tell them? He thinks the sheriff is a bad, bad man? He's got nothing, and with Luther Jones dead, even less nothing than he had before.”

“How did you get involved?”

“Hal. The cases are now related, at least tangentially.”

“Okay. And so?”

“So I told Wes we'd do what we could . . .”

“We?”

“You and me. Us.”

“What is it exactly that you think I'm going to be doing, Diz? I'm an unlicensed private investigator working for a murder defendant. You may have met him. His name is Hal Chase. So now somehow I'm supposed to get involved in the murder of an undercover DA investigator and, oh, by the way, the investigation of an accidental overdose in the jail. Let's not even talk about the fact that the SFPD is going to be on both cases. I've got to think they'll take at least a superficial look at Luther Jones, especially under these circumstances. So I'm supposed to do what? Dress up like Superman and use my powers to break the cases?” Glitsky shook his head. “It's completely ridiculous. You're out of your mind.”

“I like the Superman thing, but I have a better idea,” Hardy said. “I've talked to Wes Farrell. If you want it, you're his newest investigator. And guess what your first three cases are.”

Glitsky still balked. “This is way more than I signed up for. It's exactly what Treya didn't want me to do: get involved with dead people and the very bad people who made them dead. Anyway, I'm working for you. How can I work for the prosecution and the defense on the same case?”

“Simple,” Hardy said. “Hal and I will waive confidentiality. You follow the evidence where it leads. The chips fall.”

“You're still out of your mind,” Glitsky said.

•  •  •

“Y
OUR FRIEND MR
. Glitsky still thinks it might have been me.” Patti Orosco sat on one of the dozen hard wooden chairs in the jail's public visiting room, looking through the booth's window at Hal, talking through the speaker in the glass. Correctly guessing that she would be conspicuous among the other visitors in her black Japanese suit, she had changed into jeans with a white collared shirt and a green pullover sweater.

“He's not my friend,” Hal said. “He finds something that gets me out of here, he can be my friend. Till then, he's just a guy working for my lawyer.”

“What about your lawyer?” she asked. “What's he doing?”

“Hardy? Same as Glitsky, I suppose. Trying to get traction with another theory. Any other theory.”

“Even me? Do they really think it could have been me?”

“We haven't talked about it, Patti. I know it wasn't you, if that's any consolation. If they're bothering you, I could tell them to back off.”

“I don't know if you'll need to do that, but it's just so frustrating. Wasting time talking to me when there's somebody else . . .”

“What do they want from you?”

“To come up with something that proves I was where I said I was that night. It makes me wish I'd done something else, some little thing, but I just went to the movies, watched the movie, probably bought popcorn, since I always do. Nothing memorable at all.”

“I'm in the same boat,” Hal said. “I tell myself, if I'd just talked to the bartender, if I'd just stopped for gas. If, if, if . . . but here I am.”

They stared at each other through the glass.

“I miss you,” she said.

“I miss you, too.”

“What are we going to do about us, Hal? Is there even going to be an us?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you want there to be?”

Hal scanned the area around them. Bleak and bleaker. “As long as I'm here, that seems a little moot, doesn't it?”

“Not to me. Do you have any sense of how long they're going to keep you?”

Hal started to give her the short version of what Hardy had told him. He'd stay under arrest, no bail, until the trial, which might be coming up sooner rather than later, since that gave the prosecution less time to assemble its case, which appeared to be fatally flawed for lack of physical evidence. “But maybe not so fatally that they won't convict me anyway.”

“Have they gotten anything at all? Hardy, I mean, and Glitsky.”

“If they're still questioning you, I've got to think not. Except, oh . . .” Hal's effort at a wry smile crumbled under its own weight. “I don't know if this is good or bad or neither, but it seems they've dug up something that ought to make you and me feel a little better, at least.”

“What's that?”

“Evidently, Katie was fooling around, too.”

Patti sat back. “You're kidding me. When?”

“A couple of years ago, just after Ellen was born.”

Patti was silent for a few seconds. “What does that mean?”

“I don't know. Other than I can stop beating myself up so badly over us. So can you.”

“I haven't been,” she said. “I'd do it again. Wouldn't you, too, if you were honest?”

He nodded. “It just makes me look so guilty. Of killing her, I mean.”

“But you didn't, so . . .”

“So without you and me as a couple, I'm not in here, not yet, at least. If we hadn't admitted it . . .” He met her eyes, then lowered his gaze. “I don't know.”

“It would have come out, Hal. Just like Katie's has come out. Then you're a liar on top of all the other suspicion.”

“Better than a killer.” He waved away the thought. “It doesn't matter. It's done.”

Patti looked down, her hands in her lap. “Do you know who it was? With Katie? Might it matter?”

“Hardy's got an idea who it is, and it might matter,” he said. “It's probably better if we don't talk about it until we're sure.”

“So he, this guy, might have still been seeing her?”

“Not impossible.”

“If he was,” she said, “that could be important.”

“Yes. Hardy doesn't want to say it and get my hopes up, but it could be the ball game.” He leaned in toward the speaker. “But we don't know anything for sure, and in any event, we need to nail it down. At least it's something.”

“You'll tell me the minute you know something? Promise?”

He nodded. “The minute,” he said.

•  •  •

T
O THE CASUAL
observer, Nat Glitsky was an old white man with wispy white hair, iceberg-blue eyes, and a somewhat shuffling gait. His clothes didn't fit him because he bought the sizes that had always worked, even though he'd shortened up and thinned out considerably over the past few years. Now he checked in at five-eight or -nine, one-forty-five. Even a short conversation with this octogenarian, however, revealed a feisty and opinionated personality, a wide-ranging intellect (he'd all but memorized the Torah), and a soft-spoken gentleness that seemed to belie his other attributes.

Abe had left Hardy's office not knowing whether to be amused or outraged by his friend's apparently serious suggestion that he join the district attorney's Investigations Division as an inspector. The irony was that he would have taken that job in a heartbeat if Wes had offered it only a few weeks ago. Maybe, because it was Hardy's idea, he felt pressured, even coerced. But he could not deny that he was starting to care a lot about this case, following his own rhythm. It had somehow gotten into his bloodstream. He had something to prove about himself: He was still a more than competent investigator. After he'd spent a lifetime following strict procedures and protocols, he found the freedom to investigate in his own way more than appealing.

But in a larger sense, Glitsky had to admit that Hardy's proposed strategy might produce the evidence that would free Hal Chase. It was bold and unorthodox, and it might bring down a corrupt sheriff and his henchmen in the bargain.

By the time he'd turned onto his father's block in the inner Richmond, Glitsky found that the idea appealed to him. For the better part of the last two weeks, he'd been working on this elusive murder case. He was in his element, he knew: what he was born to do. And now his own efforts—the jail connection with Katie's lover—had unearthed what appeared to be the first legitimate clue that might lead him to the killer, or at least to a new line of questioning. Was he ready to abandon his search right when it appeared that it was getting him someplace? Right now it looked as though deciding not to pursue Burt Cushing would amount to just that, and he might as well drop out of the investigation altogether.

“So,” Abe said when he'd finished laying out his situation, “there you have it.”

Father and son were sitting in Nat's small sun-dappled living room, Abe in a rocker and Nat in a lounger across from him. Sadie, Nat's wife for nearly a decade, was out visiting some girlfriends.

“Got it. What's your question?”

“I don't think Hardy has any right to put me in that position.”

“That's not a question.”

“Close enough.”

“Does he have that right? Sure, you two go way back. He can ask you anything. Then you can answer however you want.”

“Of course. But you know what bothers me most? I have a hunch that if I'd come up with the idea, I'd think it was brilliant.”

“So the idea itself is good?”

“The idea is the only place the sheriff and our client intersect. Hardy's theory is that the sheriff had this other investigator killed last night, made it look like a robbery gone wrong. He's also covering up at least one other murder in the jail. That's two people we're almost certain he's had killed. Maybe several more. It's not that great a stretch to think he might have had Hal's wife killed as well.”

“Why would he have done that?”

“Because she'd called to threaten him with what she knew.”

“Why would she do that? Wouldn't she have known that he'd come to shut her up?”

“Maybe she thought she had influence over him, that he was still in love with her. Maybe she called to warn him that it had to stop. That if it didn't, she'd have to tell somebody.”

“A busybody, this woman?”

Abe shrugged. “Mostly confused and unhappy. A buttinsky, we used to say.”

“And she butted in at the wrong time to the wrong guy?”

“That's the theory. Here's the problem. We have no proof the sheriff did anything. Katie's murder has virtually no trail. So we're stuck. Unless we connect him to Hal, which now it looks like we might be able to do. The thing is, if he sees anybody coming, he smells it a million miles away. The only way investigating him works is if it looks like I am—or somebody in the same position is—investigating something else entirely. Of course, a little slip and . . . it might be fatal.”

“So what's your problem?”

“I don't know, Dad. Something about having a wife and two kids at home.”

“What? You didn't have them before? I seem to remember you worked in the Homicide Department.”

“Treya thought I was done with that.”

“What were you doing these last two weeks?”

Abe made a face. “You think I should do it, then?”