The Motive (27 page)

And then something happened, and she’d had to. It was only a small feat of mental legerdemain. A child, Hardy thought, could do it. And they often did.

At the same time, part of him hated himself for realizing the fundamental truth that while what she’d just said
sounded
like an absolute denial of her guilt, in fact it was not. As a good, Jesuit-trained former Catholic, Hardy was often able to argue himself into a state of tolerable comfort in the outer reaches of moral ambiguity, and he knew that Catherine’s education with the Mercy nuns had trained her in the same way. Hell, she’d been the acknowledged master—it was the thing he could never beat her at. And so now he also knew enough not to ask her for clarification; it would only complicate things down the line.

All this in the blink of an eye.

He asked her, “So what did you want to ask him? Paul, I mean?”

“The same thing I said last time, Dismas. I wanted to know what was going to happen to the money.” She threw him a glance that he couldn’t read. “He was going to marry Missy in the fall and change his will to make her his beneficiary. Maybe he’d leave a few thousand dollars to each of his grandchildren. That was it. They weren’t doing a prenup.”

“Why not? Did he say?”

“Because Missy wasn’t out for his money, and Paul resented the hell out of his family for implying that she was. In fact, before the family had started the campaign, as he called it, he’d been inclined to set up trusts for the kids and all that. But then Will and Beth and Theresa, especially, wouldn’t let it go. And the blind greed of it, he said, made him sick. His kids and their families were getting along just fine. And Missy had had a tremendously difficult life, we had no idea. Now it was her turn for comfort and security and he was going to give it to her. And too bad if we didn’t like it.”

“That sounds harsh.”

She lifted her shoulders. “It didn’t when he said it, though. He was a straight shooter. He’d worked hard to get his kids set on their way. Now they should do the same with theirs.”

“So where did that leave you? Did you tell him about Will?”

“I didn’t need to.” She looked away. “He seemed to know, yes. To have known.”

“You mean about Will’s other affairs?”

She nodded. “Anyway, he gave me what I’d come to find out.”

“And what did that mean to you?”

She worried her lower lip. “I wanted to know where I stood. I know it sounds mercenary, but I’d already endured more than a few rather difficult years with Will. If it looked like he was going to inherit several million dollars…” She stopped, unwilling to enunciate it.

“You might try to endure a few more?”

She scratched at her pants again. “I admit it sounds awful.” She raised her eyes to his. “But if there wasn’t ever going to be a windfall, if he signed it all over to her…”

“You might as well leave him now.”

She bowed her head in tacit agreement. “I needed to know my options, Dismas.” Then, “I hate him.”

Outside the Solarium’s glass walls, a tiny parklike area, a hundred or so square feet of open space tucked between the buildings, held a concrete bench that the associates had chipped in for in memory of David Freeman. Hardy spent a minute watching a few sparrows pecking around in the decomposed granite. Finally, he came back to her. “Had he changed his will?”

“He was going to…oh my God!” Her hand went to her mouth. “The will!”

“What?”

“That’s today!”

Bob Townshend’s office was on the same twentieth floor as Paul Hanover’s in the Bank of America building. Its great windows afforded a stunning view of the city spread out below, with the sunlight glinting on the bay, far off the Golden Gate Bridge standing sentinel over the entrance to the harbor, and closer in the spires of the churches in North Beach. None of the Hanover relatives seated in front of Townshend’s ultramodern chrome-and-glass desk paid it the slightest attention.

Theresa Hanover sat in the third chair from the right in the row of seven that Townshend had set up for the reading of the will. Will Hanover sat in the center chair, next to his mother. The chair next to him was empty, and beyond that to his left sat Mary and Carlos. On the other side of Theresa were Beth and her attorney husband, Aaron.

Townshend had finally put down his coffee cup and saucer at the service table against the inside wall and had come around to claim his seat behind the desk. Florid and overweight, Townshend—unlike his partner Paul Hanover—had never been comfortable interacting with actual living people. He enjoyed numbers and games and legal puzzles. He was also an excellent legal writer and a whiz at business strategy, which made him an invaluable partner to Hanover, but dealing with humans in the flesh was for him always a bit of a strain.

And never more than at a moment like this one, when things weren’t going according to protocol. He’d scheduled the reading of Paul Hanover’s will for one o’clock, and now it was nearly two, and still no sign—not even a phone call—from Catherine Hanover. Neither had she returned any of the several calls he’d made to her home, or to her cell phone. There was nothing absolutely critical about her attendance, of course. Her husband was here representing the family and that was enough, but even with his limited sensitivity to human emotions, Townshend sensed a tension in the group—especially between Will and his mother—that in turn made him nervous.

Now he checked his watch for the twentieth time, ran a finger under his very tight shirt collar, cleared his throat. Over an hour ago, he’d gone to his safe and removed the sealed Last Will & Testament of Paul Hanover, and placed it exactly in the center of his desk. Now he pulled the package toward him. “Well, then, if we’re all in agreement…”

“Lord, Bob, we’ve waited long enough,” Theresa said. “For some reason that I can’t fathom or imagine, Catherine has decided she isn’t coming. But her presence one way or the other doesn’t make any difference anyway, so let’s get this show on the road.”

Mary, holding her silent Carlos’s hand, spoke up in her timid voice. “Isn’t anybody else worried about her?”

Will shot a glance across his mother at his younger sister. “I’m sure it’s something with school and the kids,” he said easily. “It’s always school and the kids. You know that. More important than anything else.”

“But you’d think this…” Aaron began.

Will cut him off. “She knows it’s going to be what it’s going to be. Her being here isn’t going to change anything.”

“Bob.” Theresa, at the end of patience, used her most dismissive tone. “Either you open that damned folder or I’m going to take it from you and read it myself.”

“Mom!” Beth said. “You don’t have to be so difficult.”

Theresa whirled on her elder daughter, her tone sharp and angry. “Don’t you talk to me about difficult, young lady. I’m the one who knows how difficult it can be going it alone in this world. And I’m the one who wants to be sure that my grandchildren don’t have to find out what that’s like. That’s why I’m here, and that’s the only reason I’m here. I doubt if your father left me a dime.” She came back front to Townshend. “Bob? Now. Please.”

With a last look at Catherine’s empty chair, he sighed and carefully unsealed the envelope.

“She called from here,” Hardy said, “and they’d just read it.”

“And he stops,” Glitsky grumbled, half to himself. “You’re going to make me guess?” He stood by one of the windows in Hardy’s office, studying the traffic patterns—unmoving—on Sutter Street below. It was five thirty, still light out, still sunny.

“Of course not. I’ll tell you.” Hardy had his feet up on his desk. “If you just ask me politely, I’ll tell you.”

“All right.” Glitsky took his hand off the window shade, half turned to face his friend. “I’m asking.”

“Come on, Abe. Just say, ‘Tell me about the will.’”

Glitsky threw his eyes to the ceiling, summoning all of his endurance. He sighed heavily. “Okay,” he said, “tell me about the will.”

Hardy shot back. “Say ‘please.’”

“I don’t think so.” Shaking his head in disgust, Glitsky started walking over to the cherry cabinet where Hardy
kept his darts. Glitsky hadn’t stolen Hardy’s darts in nearly six months now, and when he’d come in he’d been thinking that it was getting to be about that time again. If his friend happened to leave the room.

“If you just say ‘please,’” Hardy was grinning broadly, “I promise I’ll tell you.”

Glitsky got to the cabinet and opened up the side doors to reveal the black, yellow, red and green “professional” dartboard within. Hardy’s three custom tungsten darts were hanging in their little holders, blue flights attached. Glitsky pulled them and without a glance at Hardy walked to the dark-wood line in the light hardwood floor that had been inset seven feet, nine and one-quarter inches from the face of the board. Turning, he fired the first dart and hit a double bull’s-eye, smack in the center of the board. He turned around again and put the two other darts on Hardy’s desk.

“All right,” Hardy said. “Bull’s-eye counts as a ‘please.’”

He eyed the darts, looked up at Glitsky. “Hanover hadn’t changed the will. Missy wasn’t mentioned. All the money went to the family.”

“How much?”

“Well.” Hardy pulled his feet off the desk and grabbed the darts. “It’s complicated, with the property and investments and various other liquidatable assets…”

“Liquidatable. Good word,” Abe said.

“Thank you.” Hardy was now around the desk and standing at the throw line. “But the best ballpark estimate looks like it’s going to come out at something like seventeen, eighteen million.” He threw the dart, then the next one in rapid succession. Two twenties. He leaned back against his desk. “Which of course isn’t the best news in the world for Catherine.”

“Or any of them,” Glitsky said, “if they didn’t all have alibis, which Cuneo says they do. Except the ex-wife, Theresa.”

“Maybe it’s nobody in the family. Are you getting anything on Tow/Hold?”

Glitsky shook his head. “I talked to a lot of people. Harlan Fisk, Granat again, went down to the corporate office in San Bruno. Swell group of folks. Nothing.” Now he
pushed himself against the back cushion and ran both hands over his buzz cut. “I know I’m a cop and ought to be glad we’ve got a suspect, but I don’t want to think Cuneo has got this one right. Catherine doesn’t
feel
right. Hasn’t from the beginning.”

“I love when you say that,” Hardy said. In truth, though, he was far from sanguine. He flatly didn’t believe, despite her low-key and self-effacing protestations to the contrary—“
I am so scattered lately. I think all this stress must be eating my brain cells.
”—that Catherine had simply
forgotten
that the reading of the will was going to be today. She could have told him she didn’t want to be in the same room as her husband, and okay, he could have possibly accepted that. But even with the distractions of a spouse’s affair, a subpoena to testify before the grand jury and a police search of her house in progress, Hardy had to believe that your average person would probably remember that this was the day you found out if you were a millionaire or not. Sitting on his desk, the darts stuck in the board and forgotten, Hardy laid all of this out. “She didn’t forget that today was the reading of the will, I promise you.”

Glitsky, who’d settled on the first couple of inches of the couch, listened without interruption and when Hardy had finished said, “I admit it’s improbable. So why would she pretend?”

“The drama of it. She didn’t really need to be at the reading, did she? Her attendance wouldn’t change anything. But she could make me feel her urgency, hook me into it.”

“So call her on it and let her go.”

“I know. I know. I’m tempted. Except what if she really did forget?”

“You just made a pretty good case that
that
wasn’t likely.”

“No, not likely, but not impossible, either.” Absently, he pulled the darts from the board again. “This is the kind of thing she always did to me. It used to drive me crazy, but at least it was never dull.”

“Dull gets a bad rap. Give me dull anytime.”

Hardy broke a smile. “That’s why you went into police work, right? For the slow times.”

Glitsky shrugged. “I was younger.”

“So was I. I loved the mystery.”

“I thought it drove you crazy.”

“That, too. It was complicated. In fact, it was too complicated. It was fucking exhausting, which was why I gave it up.”

“You miss it?”

“Not at all.”

“But here you are, taking her on.”

“Yeah.” A small silence settled. At last Hardy said, “She’s not stupid, Abe. There’s no reason she would have given you her own motive.”

“Except if she knew that that’s exactly what I’d think.”

“The old double-reverse, huh?”

A shrug. “It happens. And in the same general vein, why wouldn’t she file a complaint against Cuneo? If she’d have filed the first time I talked to her…”

“I know.”

But Glitsky went ahead. “If she’d done that, end of story. He was off the investigation against her. But now it looks like she was trying to run him off with a bluff. And why had she wanted to run him off? Because he was getting close, and because she was guilty.”

But Hardy said, “I don’t know why she didn’t file. A million reasons. Fear, mostly, then maybe embarrassment, finally just hoping it would go away. You know as well as I do.”

Glitsky had come forward to the front of the couch again, elbows on his knees and hands clasped. He let out a heavy breath. “You want my advice?”

“No. You’ll just tell me I don’t want to do this.”

“Right.”

“So how do you propose I get out of it? Give her to somebody else?”

“It’s possible.”

Hardy shook his head. “Not in real life, it isn’t. I believe I can help her. I know her. I
want
to help her.”

Glitsky narrowed his eyes. “You believe her?”

“I think so. I’m not sure.”

“Which one?”

“Right.” Hardy shrugged. “I know. On the basic question—is she a killer?—I’m with her. Other than that…” He let
the sentence hang. “Here’s some good news, though. At least now I know she’s got the money to pay me.”