The Motive (5 page)

“That’s the assumption, although Strout makes the formal call. But whoever it was—call him Hanover—he fell on his wallet so it didn’t burn completely. It had Hanover’s driver’s license in it, so it looks good for him.”

“What about the other body?”

“No way to tell. Your man Cuneo seemed to think it was probably his girlfriend.”

“You don’t agree?”

“I don’t know. There was nothing to identify her. It could have been.” Becker spoke with little inflection. He was assembling the facts and would share what he knew with any other investigating officials without any particular emphasis. “I can say it was probably a woman—we found what might be a bra strap under her—but that’s all I’d be comfortable with for the time being. Again, Strout’ll tell us soon enough.”

“So what does it look like we have here? The news said murder/suicide.”

Becker nodded. “Might have been.”

“So you’ve seen this kind of thing before? Where somebody kills a partner, then himself, but before he does himself, he lights the place up?”

“Sure. It’s not uncommon.” He seemed to consider whether to say more for a moment, then shrugged as though apologizing. “The relationship goes bad, somebody wants to destroy every sign of it.”

“Any sign that this relationship was going bad?”

Becker’s eyes scanned the floor area. “You mean besides this? Maybe. Cuneo talked to Hanover’s daughter-in-law.”

“When did he do that?”

“She saw the fire on the news and came by here last night. Seems this Missy had just finished redecorating this place to the tune of maybe a million dollars of Hanover’s money. Maybe he wanted to leave a message that it all meant nothing to him. But I will tell you one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“It wasn’t her.”

“What do you mean? What wasn’t her?”

“She didn’t do the killing. I told Cuneo, too. This might not be any kind of a proof that you could use in court, but if it’s a relationship gone bad, there’s two things here. First, if she does it, it goes down in the bedroom, maybe even in the bed.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because that’s the center of the woman’s life.” He held up a hand. “I know, I know, it’s not PC, and people will tell you it’s bullshit, but you ask anybody who’s spent time at this kind of scene, they’ll tell you. If it’s a crime of passion and it’s not done in the bedroom, it’s not the woman.”

“Okay,” Glitsky said. “What’s the second thing?”

“I’m afraid it’s another non-PC moment.”

“I can handle it,” Glitsky said. “What?”

“Women don’t shoot themselves very often to begin with. And if they do, it’s not in the head. They won’t disfigure themselves. It just doesn’t happen.”

Suddenly Glitsky thought back to the suicide of Loretta Wager, the former senator from California who had been his lover and the mother of his daughter Elaine. She had shot herself in the heart. Becker was right, he thought. These were both indefensible sexist generalizations that no doubt would collapse under rigorous debate. That did not stop them, however, from being potentially—even probably—true.

“So you think it was Hanover?”

“I don’t know. Cuneo seemed to take it as a working theory. The gun was kind of under him.”

“What do you mean, kind of?”

“Well, here, you can see.” Becker reached into his inside pocket and withdrew a stack of photographs. “My partner brought these over to the photo lab as soon as they opened. They made two copies and I gave Cuneo the other, but I’ve still got the negatives if you want a set.” Shuffling through them, he got the one he wanted. “Here you go.”

Glitsky studied the grainy picture—shadows in darkness. It was a close-up of something he couldn’t recognize at first glance.

Becker helped him out, reaching over. “That’s the body there along the top, and the end of the arm—the hand became disattached. But you can see there, up against the body, that’s the gun.”

“So not exactly under him?”

“No. Just like you see there. Kind of against the side and tucked in a little.”

“And he was the one in the back here, by the hall? Beyond where the woman was?”

“Yeah,” Becker said. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m just wondering, if they had hoses going in here…”

“For a while.”

“Okay. I’m just thinking maybe the gun was on the rug and the force of the hose hitting it pushed it back against him. Tucked under, as you say.”

Becker didn’t seem offended by the suggestion. “No, I don’t suppose we can rule that out. But it’s not the most obvious explanation for how the gun got there.”

Glitsky scratched at his cheek. Becker had been up front with him about his and Cuneo’s investigation. Although it hadn’t been his original plan, he saw no reason now to try and conceal his motive. “Well, as I said, Hanover was a friend of the mayor. She doesn’t like the idea that he killed himself, to say nothing of his girlfriend. She asked me to take a look.”

Bemused, Becker stood still a moment, shaking his head. Finally: “If that’s what you’ve got to do, I wouldn’t want to have your job.”

Nodding, Glitsky said, “Sometimes I’m not too sure I want it either.”

D
ismas Hardy, managing partner of the law firm of Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, had his feet up on his desk. His suit coat hung over the back of his chair. His shoes were off, his tie was undone, the collar of his shirt unbuttoned. He was taking an after-lunch break from a not-very-strenuous day and reading randomly from a book he’d recently purchased, called
Schott’s Original Miscellany.

Being a fact freak, Hardy considered it one of the most fascinating books he’d come across in recent years, containing as it did all sorts of nonessential but critical information, such as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria), the ten-point Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness (from talc to diamond), the names of the Apostles, and 154 pages of other very cool stuff. He was somewhat disappointed to see that for some obscure reason it didn’t include St. Dismas as the Patron Saint of Thieves and Murderers, but otherwise the diminutive tome was a pure delight, and certainly worthy of his nonbillable time.

He was poring over the Degrees of Freemasonry when the phone buzzed at his elbow. He marked his place, sighed and lifted the receiver, knowing from the blinking line button that it was his receptionist/secretary, Phyllis, the superefficient, loyal, hardworking and absolutely trying human being who viewed her role as gatekeeper to his office as a vocation decreed by God. She’d filled the same position for Hardy’s predecessor, David Freeman, and was no more
replaceable as a fixture in the Sutter Street law offices than the phones themselves.

“Phyllis,” he said. “Did I ask you to hold my calls?”

He loved that he could make her pause. Mostly he did this by answering with a nonlawyerly “Yo,” but sometimes, for variety’s sake, he’d come at her from another angle. Yahoo, living large.

“Sir?”

“I’m not accusing you. I’m just asking.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay, then. What’s up?”

“Deputy Chief Glitsky is here to see you.”

“In person?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Make a note, Phyllis, I need a back door to sneak out of here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That was a pleasantry, Phyllis, a bit of a joke. You can send him in.”

He mouthed “Yes, sir,” as she said it, then hung up smiling. Sometimes it worried him that Phyllis was among the top sources of humor in his life. It seemed to say something truly pathetic about the person he’d become, but he couldn’t deny it. Leaving his stockinged feet on the desk where they would appall his friend Abe almost as much as the sight would scandalize Phyllis, he waited for the turn of the knob and Glitsky’s appearance.

One step into Hardy’s office, Glitsky stopped. His expression grew pained at the socks on the desk. Hardy left his feet where they were and started right in. “I’m glad you came by. We’ve really got to join the Masons,” he said. “You know that?”

Glitsky closed the door behind him. “You’re going to wait until I ask you why, aren’t you?”

“No.” Hardy closed the book. “No, if you don’t want to know, that’s okay with me. Although I know you pretty well, and it’s definitely something you’d be totally into. But I don’t push my brilliant ideas. It was just a thought.”

Glitsky hesitated another second or two, then sighed audibly. “What
are
the Masons anyway?”

“A secret organization. George Washington was in it, I think. But if it was that secret, how would anybody know?”

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

“See? Great minds.”

Glitsky moved over to the wet-bar area and felt the side of the water-heating pot that Hardy kept there. He grabbed his usual mug, picked up a tea bag from an open bowl of them and poured hot water over it. Turning, blowing over the drink, he took in the spacious office. “I should go into some kind of private business. Here you are, the middle of the afternoon, feet up, reading, no work in sight. Your life is far better than mine.”

“That’s because I’m a better person than you are. But I might point out that you are here, too, in the very same place as me, working about as hard, and drinking my good tea for free on top of it all. Qualitatively, there isn’t much between our relative experiences at this particular moment, and one could argue that your life is in some respects as good as mine.”

“If one lived to argue.” Glitsky got to the armchair in front of Hardy’s desk and settled in. “I still want a better office.” He blew on the tea again. “Okay,” he said, “why do we need to be Masons?”

“Ha!” Hardy’s feet flew off the desk as he came forward. “I knew you’d ask.”

Glitsky gave him the dead eye. “If I didn’t ask, we’d never leave it. So why?”

Hardy opened the book to the place he’d marked. “Because if we stayed at it long enough, you could get to be the Sovereign Grand Inspector General, and I could be either Prince of the Tabernacle or Chevalier of the Brazen Serpent.” He paused a moment, frowned. “Either way, though, you’d outrank me, so that couldn’t be right.”

“How long would all this take?” Glitsky asked.

Hardy nodded ambiguously. “You’re right,” he said, and closed the book with a flourish. “So what brings your sunny personality here today? What did the mayor want?”

Glitsky brought him up-to-date, keeping the punch line for last. “The original inspecting officer—the one I’m supposed to work with or replace—is Dan Cuneo.”

Hardy’s expression hardened, his head canted to one side. “So replace him.”

“That’s not a good idea. He’d see something personal in it.”

“He’d be right.”

“My point, exactly. Can’t replace him.”

Hardy drew in a breath, then let it out. “These past couple of years, I kept hoping to hear he’d been busted out of homicide.”

“Not happening. If you’re a certain type of cop, homicide’s a terminal appointment.”

“Not for you it wasn’t.”

“No. But unlike Cuneo, I’m born for greatness.” The banter fell flat, though, and Glitsky’s face reassumed its natural scowl.

“I don’t like him anywhere near either of us,” Hardy said after a short silence.

“Do tell. Me? I’m thrilled.”

Getting up, crossing to the Sutter Street window, Hardy pulled the shades apart and looked down through them. “And you’ve got to work with him?”

“I don’t see how I can avoid it.”

Hardy kept staring out, down at the street. “You can’t say a word, Abe. Not one word.”

“Oh really?” A hint of anger, or frustration, breaking through.

“Hey.” Hardy, catching the tone, spun around. “You work with a guy every day, you know he suspects you of something—I don’t care what it is—you might get so you want to get along, try to make him understand.”

“Sure, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll say, ‘Uh, Dan, about the Gerson thing…’” Lieutenant Barry Gerson had been Cuneo’s boss, and he’d been killed at a shoot-out in the course of trying to arrest one of Hardy’s clients. In the aftermath, Cuneo pushed for an investigation into the role that Hardy and Glitsky had played in Gerson’s death.