The Motive (28 page)

“You’re billing her, then?”

“Double homicide, special circumstances. I’m billing her, trust me.”

This seemed to give Glitsky a little relief. “Just making sure,” he said.

TWO

H
ardy awoke with a start, sweat pouring off him.

Not that it was warm. In fact, if anything, it was unusually cold, not only inside his bedroom but out in the terrible night. It was the third week of January, and the second full day of the Arctic storm that was pounding at the bedroom windows, shaking them with a low rumble.

He threw the covers off and sat up, trying at once to remember and to banish the dream that had shaken him from his sleep. Reflexively, he checked the clock on his nightstand. 2:53. The trial would start in under seven hours. He had to get back to sleep. He couldn’t show up on the first day wiped out with fatigue. There would be the gauntlet of reporters, first of all. Not only the local channels, but stringers for every station and cable outlet in the country had been parked in the back lot of the Hall of Justice for each of the motion hearings—to quash the warrant, to exclude Catherine’s statements to the cops, admissibility, 995 for dismissal—they’d been there for all of them. And they’d be there this morning, too. The judge had forbidden any communication with them, but they could be relentless and he had to be sharp, get back to sleep.

Now.

The dream had been sexual, that much he remembered. He dreamed almost every night now, and they were all sexual, all mouths and legs, switched identities, all frustration and guilt and deception—his subconscious working overtime to process the conflicts and unacknowledged tensions to which he would give no assent in his daily life.

He wasn’t in love with Catherine Hanover, but there was no point in trying to deny the attraction. He also ached at her plight, at where her life had gotten to. The physical
chemistry between them had always been palpable. As teenagers, to their mutual pride, confusion, horror and shame, they’d gone from untried virgins to lovers without any commitment or discussion on their third date. The care they both took to avoid even the most innocuous and casual physical contact over the past months had been such a constant companion that it felt like a living thing in the visiting room with them.

She’d been in jail for nearly eight months for a crime that with all his heart he wanted to believe she’d not committed. In that time, the weak, circumstantial case against her—which nonetheless had been strong enough to per-suade the grand jury to indict her for special circumstances double murder—had only grown stronger. It hadn’t helped, either, that with all the fanfare, Chris Rosen had succumbed to his ambition and was now a widely rumored, though unannounced, candidate for district attorney in the next citywide election.

Catherine’s own mother-in-law, Theresa, had become the witness from hell. Dan Cuneo had interviewed her for the better part of a week in the first flush of the indictment last May, and she’d done all she could to braid the rope that would hang her daughter-in-law. According to Theresa, Catherine had threatened to kill Paul Hanover and Missy D’Amiens not just once or twice. It had been a running theme. The threats were often given in front of her children and other members of the extended family.

Catherine’s position was that this was just the way she talked when the family was gathered together—she tended to be histrionic, to exaggerate for effect, and this Hardy certainly knew to be true from his own experience. From the beginning, she knew she was unwelcome in the Hanover family. Catherine felt that the only path to even modest acceptance within the family was to be entertaining, a personality. Without a pedigree, a past, a bloodline, it was all she had.

So yes, she’d often joked that they all really needed to get together and kill Missy before the wedding, though of course she’d never meant it. They’d all laughed. They couldn’t have believed she ever meant it. (Beth thought
the repetition ominous enough, though; all the kids considered it unimportant, a joke.)

Her husband piled on as well. In his statements to the police, Will denied that he’d ever had an affair with anyone. He had time cards from his secretary, Karyn Harris, the “other woman” Catherine had suspected, for the days when he’d been fishing, and the records showed that she’d been at the office every one of those four days. Moreover, the captain of the
Kingfisher
, Morgan Bayley, swore that he’d been out on the ocean the whole time with Will, but that their radio had been on the blink. He had the radio repair records to prove it. They’d also been out of the cell-phone reception zone and hadn’t been able to call anyone on shore.

Will told Hardy that his wife had always been jealous. In the past couple of years, she’d become dangerously unstable in a number of ways—accusing him of adultery being just one of them. She’d also, he said, conceived either an affection for his father or a mania for his money. There was a strong and in some ways almost uncanny resemblance between Catherine and Missy D’Amiens—remarked on by anyone who knew them both—and Catherine seemed to believe that if Missy could snag her very wealthy and charismatic father-in-law, she could and should have done it herself. She imagined that Paul had propositioned her when she’d first been married. She should have gone with his father when she had the chance. At the end, Will said that Paul had told him that she’d even come on to him, and he’d had to rebuff her. Finally, she constantly berated Will for his business “failures,” his inability to adequately provide for his children’s education, for his general lack of acumen and drive—this when he made what he called “strong six figures per year.”

Hardy subpoenaed his tax records—his top grossing year was 1999, when he had earned $123,000. Last year he’d earned $91,000.

Catherine’s response to all of these claims? A curt dismissal, a refusal to even discuss it. “He’s delusional.”

For the record, the kids more or less sided with her. But she was in jail and their dad was home full-time, paying her legal bills (out of his four-million-dollar inheritance), peddling
the line that he was on Catherine’s side, he wanted to help her, he felt sorry for her. She was sick, but a good woman. He would still love her and take her back if she ever got “better.” He never, not once, came to visit her in jail.

Then there was Hanover’s partner Bob Townshend, who got a call from Paul on the afternoon of the very day that he was killed. Catherine had just come to visit him and he’d felt threatened. She was near hysteria over the imagined infidelity of her husband. She freaked when Paul had told her that he was going to change his will in Missy’s favor sooner rather than later. Townshend told Hardy that Paul had made an appointment for the following week to do just that.

Hardy had fought the good fight to keep much of this testimony out of the trial, but Judge Marian Braun had taken it under submission and Hardy couldn’t shake the suspicion that she would let some, if not most, of it in. Braun herself was one of the worst possible choices of trial judge from Hardy’s perspective (only Leo Chomorro would have been worse). As soon as she’d been assigned, he considered using his 170.6 peremptory challenge—for which no reason need be given and which can’t be denied—to get Braun off the case. But then he stood the risk of drawing Chomorro. In fact, he wouldn’t put it past the Master Calendar to arrange to assign Chomorro to punish him for his arrogance. In the end, he’d kept her on.

There was more. Catherine’s alibi for the night of the murders had been blown by none other than her own youngest daughter, Heather, who kept a diary that Cuneo had discovered during his interview with her. Supposedly out having fast food for dinner with her brother and sister, in fact she’d had “a ton” of homework and she’d had Saul drop her off at the house and “scrounged” something to eat since neither her mom nor dad were home, which was “like, getting to be the norm lately.”

Called on this, Catherine admitted to Hardy that she’d lied to him about that. A low point, to say the least. Catherine was sorry. She’d been trying to save face with him. She didn’t want him to know that she could be the kind of insecure, snooping bitch who would actually go by the house
of Will’s illicit paramour, Karyn Harris, to make sure she was still not home. Every day for four days! And Ms. Harris hadn’t once been there.

Hardy had subpoenaed the flight manifests of every air-line that flew from any Bay Area airport to any Southern California airport on the days in question. No Karyn Harris. The plain truth was that whether or not her husband had been having this alleged affair, Catherine’s alibi crashed.

Further, Glitsky, looking under rocks for other scenarios, both because of his own agenda vis-à-vis Cuneo and because of his work at the mayor’s request, had come up empty. The “other dude” play, the argument that some mysterious other person had committed the crime, was ever popular among defense attorneys. Indeed, Hardy had used it to good effect during other trials. But if there was another dude in this case, Glitsky with the full weight of his position hadn’t been able to unearth him. The Tow/Hold people had lost their contract with the city in June and nobody else had died, or had even caught a cold, as far as Hardy could tell. The mayor abandoned personal interest in the investigation.

With new evidence against Catherine appearing regularly, even Glitsky grudgingly came to consider the possibility that Cuneo had been right. For his own reasons, Glitsky still seemed ready to jump up at the slightest scent of another lead, but they had been scarce to begin with, and dwindled to none. And that left only one alternative—that Paul Hanover’s death, and Missy’s, had come at the hands of Hardy’s client.

There were days Hardy considered the possibility himself.

Now, with his breathing under control, he got up and went into the bathroom where he drank a few handfuls of water and threw some more in his face, then toweled himself dry. Back in bed, he lay on his back, uncovered.

Silent up to now, apparently sleeping, Frannie reached out and put a hand over his hand in the night. “Are you all right?”

“Just nerves,” he said, “the trial.”

“I guessed.”

“No flies on you.”

“Can I do anything?”

“It’s okay. I’ll get back to sleep in a minute.” He squeezed her hand. “I couldn’t find the car,” he said as though the words made any sense.

“The car?”

“In my dream. Missy’s car.” The one he and Catherine were going to go and make out in, in the dream, as soon as they could find it, but he left that part out.

“What about it?”

“I don’t know where it is. I mean, I still don’t know where it is.”

“You know everything that’s possible to know about this case, Dismas. You’ve lived and breathed it for most of the past year. How many binders do you have?” These were his black, three-ring binders for testimony, evidence, motions, police reports, everything that comprised his records on the case.

“Twenty-six.”

“Is that a new record?”

“Close anyway. But I know there’s nothing about the car. How could I have forgotten that?”

“I don’t know. Is it important?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know why it would be. It’s just a question I can’t answer. We start in a few hours, Fran. I can’t have questions I don’t know the answers to. Not now.”

Frannie turned onto her side, moved over against him. “If it’s important, you’ll have it when you need it. But right now, what you need is sleep.”

He let out a long breath. “I’m a mess.”

“You’re fine.”

“I can’t believe Marian didn’t recuse herself.”

“That’s good news, remember. Grounds for appeal. You told me yourself.”

“Or venue? How could she leave the damn trial here? The jury’s tainted. I can feel it.”

“I’ve got a question for you.”

“What?”

“Are you going to play this whole thing over in your mind before morning?”

“No. I hope not.” Then, “You’re right, I’ve got to stop.”

“Okay. So stop then. Go easy on yourself.”

He put his arm around her. “Did I just say you were right?”

“Yep.”

“You are.”

“I know.” She kissed the side of his face. “Let’s say we go to sleep, okay?”