The Oath (26 page)

“Wes isn’t on any team of mine, Lieutenant. He’s got his own client and his own problems.”

“Yeah, which includes somebody else who died at Portola Hospital? Just surfacing at this moment? You expect me to believe that? It’s just a coincidence, is it?”

“I don’t expect you’d believe anything I said. But I’m not trying to obstruct this case. I’m trying to see it for what it is and solve it.”

Glitsky just about spit it out. “Yeah, well that’s
my
job.”

Hardy shot it back at him. “Then do it.”

“I just tried and Jackman stopped me.”

“He did you a favor.”

Glitsky snorted scornfully. “You’re telling me I got the wrong man? Then how come every time I turn around, you’re playing some legal game covering his rear end—cutting your deal with Jackman, muddying the waters with Strout, talking to my witness here. You know what that makes me think? You’ve got something to hide. That all you’re doing is trying to get your client off, and be damned with the law, and be damned with the truth.”

“That’s not who I am and you know it.”

“Yeah, well if the shoe fits…” Glitsky turned to Ann Kensing. “You’re making a mistake here,” he told her. “If you want to change your mind again, after you’ve calmed down, you’ve got my number.”

Hardy was in a true high rage now, and he wheeled on them both, his voice laden with disdain. “If you do, make him promise he won’t charge you with perjury.”

Glitsky glared at him. “You think that’s funny?”

“No,” Hardy snapped. “I don’t think it’s funny at all.”

While the Kensing children got used to their mother again, the cast on her foot, the bandage on the back of her head, their father stayed away from her. He called out for a pizza delivery and spent the best part of the next half hour picking up around the house—he collected and started two loads of laundry, put every dish and utensil he could find into the dishwasher, ran a sponge mop over the kitchen floor.

Hardy called Frannie to tell her he would be a little late. Yes, sorry, he knew. But he was still shooting to be in time for dinner, which they’d rescheduled over the past weekend for 8:00, instead of 6:30 or 7:00, to better accommodate Hardy’s workday. He also took an extra minute and described a bit of his terrible fight with Glitsky. He needed to talk to her; he needed her. And he would definitely be home by 8:00. She could set the clock by it.

Hardy went to the bathroom to throw some water on his face, hoping it would counteract some of the nausea he was feeling, the residue of his argument with Glitsky. He felt as though he’d swallowed a rock. When he returned, the children were devouring pizza in the kitchen, a video of some action flick on and purposely turned up loud.

In the living room, Ann and Eric had taken their respective neutral corners, and now they sat in silence, not even facing each other, waiting for Hardy.

He started to go back to his old spot on the couch with Ann, but decided that this might have the appearance that he was taking sides, so he stayed on his feet and stood by the trash-and ash-filled fireplace. “Both of you are doing the right thing,” he began. “I know it’s hard.” He looked from one of them to the other. Both obviously still seethed. He kept on. “I’ve been involved with this case for going on a week now and there’s far too much I don’t know. We need to talk together about it. Who might have killed Mr. Markham.”

Ann took it as an opening, and she wasted no time getting to the crux. “All right. I’ve heard your lawyer tell me you didn’t do it, Eric. Here’s another chance for you. Why don’t you tell me yourself?”

He turned his head to face her, then shook it in disgust and weariness, and brought a flat, dead glance back to her and answered her with no inflection at all. “Fuck you.”

“There!” she exploded to Hardy. “See? That’s him. That’s who he really is.”

Kensing came right at her, up out of his chair, his voice a rasping whisper so the children wouldn’t hear. “You don’t have a clue who I am anymore. I’m just so tired of your shit. Did I kill Tim for Christ’s sake? Fuck that and fuck you again.”

“Eric,” Hardy began.

But now his client turned on him. “I don’t have to listen to this all over again, do I? It won’t work with her. You can see for yourself—she’s an irrational menace. I’m out of here and I’m taking the kids with me.”

“Don’t you touch them again!” She might use crutches for her sprained ankle, but Ann could move quickly enough without them when she had to. She was at the entrance into the hallway, blocking Kensing’s way, before he’d gone three steps.

Hardy moved too, as fast as he could, getting himself between them. For an instant, he thought he and his client were going to mix it up. “Get out of my way, Diz.”

“Not happening,” Hardy said. “You going to make me?”

“Don’t you make
me
.”

“See?” Ann was saying. “This was Saturday! This is what he did then!”

“I didn’t do anything on Saturday!” He pointed at her over Hardy’s shoulder. “You want to talk about the problem here! You want to talk danger to the kids, you want to talk unstable?” Then he took it directly to her. “You really think I’ve got it in me to kill somebody? Give me a break, Ann. My whole life is keeping people alive. But you lock me out, raving about maybe I’m here to kill my own children? That’s real craziness. That’s scary fucking lunacy.”

Hardy had to find a wedge to get in or this was over before it started. “Speaking of scared, she was scared, Eric.”

“She’s got no call to be scared of me. I’ve never done anything to hurt her. If she doesn’t know that…” He shifted his focus from Hardy to her, his own anguish now evident in his voice. “What were you thinking, Ann? What’s the matter with you?” Finally, a plea. “Would I ever hurt a kid? One of my kids? How could I ever do that?”

Ann was almost panting—taking quick, deep breaths. “When the police told me, I just…I was afraid…I didn’t…” Hardy thought she would break again into sobs, but she got hold of herself this time. “I didn’t know what to think, Eric. Can’t you understand that? I loved Tim, and he was dead. I hadn’t slept in two days. I was so scared.”

“Of me? How could you be scared of me?”

Now she pleaded for understanding from him. “
I was just scared, okay?
Of everything.” Her voice was small. “I didn’t want to make another mistake and then, of course, I did.”

It was the closest thing to an apology Kensing was going to get. Hardy recognized that and took the moment. “Why don’t we sit back down?”

“Did Ross go in?” Hardy asked. “It must have been minutes before the monitors went off.”

“He might have. He could have. I just don’t know.”

“Where
were
you then?” Ann’s anger hadn’t entirely passed. “I thought you were on the floor. It’s not that big. How could you not know?”

Kensing kept any defensiveness out of his reply, directed as much to Hardy as to Ann. “We had three patients in the hall. One of them was having problems coming out of the anesthesia, so Rajan—he’s one of the nurses—he and I were checking vitals pretty closely. During those minutes, anybody could have walked behind me—I’m sure some people did—and I might not have noticed. An hour before, Brendan Driscoll had just walked all the way in.”

“How did that happen?” Hardy asked.

Kensing shrugged. “Nobody stopped him. You’d have to know him. He carries himself with a lot of authority. If any of the nurses would have said anything, he would have just said, ‘It’s all right, I belong here,’ and they probably would have accepted it.”

“I hate the little bastard,” Ann added. “He actually believed he could order Tim around.”

“Did he?” Hardy asked. “Order him around?”

“He tried, especially when it came to his time. Scheduling.”

“And how did Tim feel about that?”

“He couldn’t live without him,” Eric put in, unable to keep some fresh venom out of his voice. “Brendan did about half his work.”

“Wrong!” Ann Kensing wasn’t going to let Eric slander Tim. “Tim thought big. Brendan was good with details. But Brendan didn’t do Tim’s work. He took orders…”

Eric snorted in disagreement.

“…there’s no question who was the leader.”

“So there was friction between them?”

“Major,” Eric said. “You’ve got to know Brendan to appreciate him. ‘The little engine that could.’”

Hardy came back to Ann. “What else did they fight about? Besides you?”

She hesitated. “I think some of Tim’s financial decisions. Tim was more of a risk taker.”

“With Parnassus’s money?” Hardy’s main interest was the murder, but if he could uncover some business dirt that might be helpful to Jackman, he’d be glad to have it.

“Well, I don’t know exactly. The last couple of years they’ve had to run pretty lean…and then there were some personnel problems—”

“Me, for example.”

Ann shrugged. It was the truth. “Well, yes. Among others.”

Kensing amplified. “Brendan wanted Tim to fire me straight out starting three or four years ago. Make an example of me.”

“Why? What had you done?”

“General attitude, I think, more than anything. Lack of respect. I kind of took the lead in standing up for the patients over money.”

Ann jumped in to qualify that. “Tim would say in resisting the company—”

Hardy cut off the potential argument. “So how did the secretary get involved in all this? He had no real power, did he?”

“How did Rasputin get in?” Eric asked. “He had no real power, either.”

The dynamic was still eluding Hardy. “But the guy’s just a secretary, right?”

For the first time, Ann and Eric shared the same reaction—a shared joke. “Mr. Driscoll,” Eric explained, “was an executive assistant. Never, ever, ever a secretary.”

“And I hope that’s clear,” Ann added, a wan smile flickering.

“As to how he got where he did,” Eric kept it on point, “as Ann’s mentioned, he was the detail guy. Well, you take care of enough details, pretty soon it looks like you run the shop.”

Ann started to say something, perhaps defend Markham again, but Eric held out his hand, stopping her. “Look, this is what happens. You get called to the office of the CEO, you’re uptight to begin with. So you’re waiting outside Markham’s office by Brendan’s desk, and his attitude tells you that whatever trouble you might have thought you were in, in fact it’s worse.

“Then, while you wait and wait, and you do, Brendan the very well-dressed and extremely formal executive assistant basically explains the ground rules. Mr. Markham doesn’t like personal confrontation. He prefers to keep meetings short. Within a week, he tells you, you’ll receive a written pre´cis of the main points covered and actions you discussed that would be taken. You should then sign this letter to acknowledge its contents and return it to the office.

“The point got made. The guy had developed this just unbelievable array of rules and protocol, all designed to insulate and protect his boss. I mean, he’d write in unsigned postscripts at the bottom of letters, and you’d think they were from Tim.”

Suddenly, hearing the specifics, Hardy understood completely. David Freeman’s receptionist, Phyllis, was a lesser version of Brendan Driscoll. Hardy had been humorously pressing Freeman to fire her for about five years, but the old man wouldn’t hear of it, saying he’d never get his work done without her. And perhaps he believed it. But Hardy had on several occasions seen Phyllis restrict access to Freeman so thoroughly—and with such sincere compassion and sympathy—that associates she didn’t like had finally quit the firm over it, thinking all the while it had been Freeman who’d been stiffing them. “And Tim was okay with this?” Hardy asked.

“Actually, no,” Ann said. “When he finally started seeing the extent of it. I think it was one of those things that started small, you know, then over time got out of hand.”

“Enough to get Driscoll fired?” Hardy asked.

Ann hesitated. She brushed some hair back away from her forehead. “The truth is that Tim felt he was having some kind of midlife breakdown. The business was falling apart around him, then his marriage, his kids, all that. That’s why he went back to Carla, to see if he could save something he’d worked years to build, but it’s also why he couldn’t fire Brendan, though he knew he should. But he couldn’t while everything else in his life was in such upheaval. He depended on him too completely.”

Hardy didn’t know how much of it was true, how much was a function of Markham’s rationalizations to his mistress so that he could appear sensitive and caring. One thing was sure, though—Ann believed it.

“Did Tim talk to him?” Hardy asked. “Give him any kind of warning?”

“Sure. Brendan knew, I think, that Tim had made up his mind to let him go. It was just a question of the timing. Tim couldn’t hide that from him if he wanted to, I don’t think. If that’s what you’re asking.”

And suddenly, Hardy was thinking that Driscoll was at least some kind of suspect. “How did he feel about Carla?”

“You mean would he kill her? And the kids? What for?”

“That’s my question.”

She was still thinking about her answer when Kensing had one. “If he felt that Tim was personally dumping him, I could see him wanting to wipe out any trace of him. The whole family.”

But this was San Francisco. Hardy had to ask the question. “And you’re convinced, Ann, that Tim was completely straight. Sexually. He and Brendan didn’t have something else going on?”

“Tim wasn’t gay,” Ann said, dismissing the idea out of hand. “Promise.”

Which, Hardy knew, did not make it a certainty by any means.

Eric spoke up again. “But if Brendan kills Tim, he’s unemployed.”

“But he’s not fired, is he? He’s the loyal and hardworking executive assistant up until the very end. He gets another job in fifteen minutes.” Another thought occurred to Hardy, another tack. “When you threw him out of the ICU, where did he go?”

“I don’t know. Off the floor, anyway.” There must have been very little pleasure in the original situation, but Kensing relished something about the memory of it. “He didn’t seem to believe that I could do that to him. Order him out of there. He found out.”