The Oath (30 page)

“If I said it, it must be true,” he admitted. “But that’s the problem. You get a lot of people to start paying you, next thing you know they want you to actually do work for them. It’s a hell of a drain on resources.”

“But you’re going for this anyway?”

“Got to. You’ve seen what happens when you try to hold your practice to only five or six solid clients at a time, as I have so masterfully done. You find yourself turning into some kind of a legal specialist. You turn in the same motions five times each, except you’ve changed the names and one or two details. So you cut your work by a fifth and multiply your billings times five. It’s just a beautiful license to print money. Fortunately I’m man enough to swallow my principles and bill the shit out of all these people, while still providing excellent service, of course.”

“Of course.” She dropped his hand. “I have no idea why I like you.”

“I’m more fun than everybody else, is why. But I’m even more fun than
that
if I’ve got spending money. Hence my five-client plan. Except then what sometimes happens, as we’ve recently seen, is one Supreme Court ruling and the bottom falls out, the money dries up, you leave me. Then I probably kill myself. It’s horrible, and all because of the Supremes and their picky little decisions.”

“Those darn guys,” Sam said.

“And two women, don’t forget, as I’m sure you never would. Anyway, so I figure this might be good press and a golden opportunity. I can expand the business again. Then I can pick and choose great clients who can afford to pay huge fortunes for very little work on my part, and then you and I can go on in our life of meaningless hedonism.”

“You
sound
like an awful, awful person. Do you know that?”

“I keep telling you. It’s the real me.”

“The real you who spent all those nights at your office last summer getting the Mackeys’ suit included with the others, and then forgot to charge them anything for all that work?”

“I know.” Farrell wore a look of chagrin. “I almost fired myself for that. Besides, my real plan was that they’d win the lottery and be so grateful that they’d split it with me. Don’t look at me like that—it could still happen.”

They’d come around to the grass at the very top of the park. Sam sat, and Wes stretched out on the ground and put his head on her lap. Bart, getting on in years, rested his muzzle on Farrell’s stomach.

After a few minutes, Sam stopped combing Wes’s hair with her fingers. “I don’t understand something,” she said.

“No,” he said, “you pretty much seem to get everything.”

“What you’re trying to get is lucky, isn’t it?”

“I’m shocked and dismayed that you could think such a thing.” He put a finger to his forehead theatrically, spoke as if to himself. “Oh no, wait. I can’t be both.” Then back to her, “I’m shocked, Sam, that you could think such a thing. I’d never stoop to flattery hoping to coax a carnal favor from you. Our love is too precious and too real.”

“I should have worn boots,” she replied. “It’s a little thick out here.”

Wes shrugged. “All right, I’ll be serious. What don’t you understand?”

“All this talk about clearing beds. Mrs. Loring even. Dismas Hardy says one possible motive someone might have had for killing her is to get the bed empty. But, so who does that help, if the bed’s empty?”

“Then they can put somebody else in it,” Wes said.

“Right. That’s the part I don’t understand. You’ve got a sick person in a bed, and then that person dies and the next day you’ve got another sick person in the bed. They’re paying the same thing for the same bed, right? So why is it to anyone’s advantage to get rid of person A in favor of person B? I just don’t see it.”

Farrell lifted his head a fraction of an inch. “Bart, you want to tell her? Ow! Those hairs are precious to me.”

Wes put his head back in her lap, rubbed a hand over where Sam had pulled. “If you’re going to get snippy about it, put simply, here it is. The city contracted with Parnassus to provide all its employees with basic HMO health coverage on what they call a capitated basis.”

“Which is?”

“I’m glad you asked. It means that Parnassus gets a set amount every month to provide all the physician and hospital services to city employees who are enrolled in the HMO, which they can do at no cost to them. It comes with the city gig.”

“Okay. We’ve still got that bed.”

“I’m getting there, please. So what happens in real life is that Parnassus gets a monthly check from the city. It becomes part of their general operating income. Then, like any other set payment, Parnassus starts using it to cover overhead and salaries and so on. So if Parnassus winds up having to provide an expensive service for somebody in the HMO—like chemotherapy or heart surgery—it feels like it’s not getting paid for it.”

“But everybody agreed up front—”

He wagged a finger. “Not the point. The point is there are other patients, whether they are city employees or not, who have chosen a more expensive provider option. For these folks, Parnassus gets real live money for the services it provides.”

“But it gets real money every month from the city, anyway. Right? I’m still not seeing the difference.”

“Okay, let’s say a city employee enrolled in the HMO spends five days in intensive care. The city doesn’t send an extra check. Parnassus gets its hundred and fifty a month and that’s all. However, if a person enrolled in a preferred provider program, for example, spends the same five days in the ICU, Parnassus gets about five grand a day. So it can be argued than an HMO city employee in an ICU bed is costing Parnassus maybe as much as five grand per day.”

“Per day?”

“Every day, my dear. You don’t watch it pretty close, it’ll add right on up. So now let’s take our own Marjorie Loring, who happens to be a pretty good example of what we’re talking about. She was a city employee insured through the Parnassus HMO. So if she happens to defy the odds and hangs on for six months, she’s going to cost Portola what? At least a hundred grand, maybe more.

“Now if you were running Portola, would you rather have Marjorie Loring in that bed or someone else who’s insured with a preferred provider program that paid a full dollar for every dollar billed, all other things being equal?”

Sam didn’t have to think very long. “All other things being equal,” she said, “it sounds to me like Dismas Hardy might be on to something.”

I
t was getting on to midafternoon and Glitsky couldn’t eat another bite of rice cake.

A little-used and semienclosed staircase ran along the Hall of Justice on the Seventh Street side, and he took it down to the ground. Out on the corner, he was waiting at the light to cross and go get some peanuts at Lou’s, even if they gave him an instant heart attack that felled him at the bar. Suddenly he found himself facing his two new homicide inspectors, coming his way in the crosswalk. Fisk was dressed like a fashion model and even Bracco looked pretty sharp. “Where’s the party?” he asked. “You feel like a handful of peanuts?”

Coming from their boss, this wasn’t really a social request. The light changed and the three men walked.

The bar at Lou’s didn’t have any empty stools, so Glitsky stood while he ordered three small bags of cocktail peanuts and a pint of iced tea. Following his nonalcoholic lead, Bracco and Fisk bought cups of acidic coffee, after which they all repaired to a booth and got settled. The lieutenant sat on one side and the two inspectors on the other. Glitsky threw a bag of peanuts at each of them, tore at his own. “So what’s got you two boys so duded up?”

Since the lunch with Nancy Ross and Kathy West had been Harlen’s idea, Bracco thought he’d let him explain it.

He was surprised when the lieutenant seemed to approve. When the narrative ended, Glitsky was nodding. “So we now know what we’ve always suspected. You can’t make too much money, and nobody thinks they got enough. Anything else?”

Bracco decided he needed to speak up. “Couple of things,” he said. “One, it might be interesting to compare Ross’s tax returns the last few years with what they’ve spent. Mrs. Ross might not have realized it, but she basically said they were living on more than they were making.”

“So am I,” Glitsky said. “Who isn’t?” He chewed his ice for a moment. “So they’ve extended themselves on credit cards, so what? And what would that prove anyway? How’s it relate to Markham?”

“If Ross was taking money from Parnassus in some way and Markham found out—”

“You mean embezzling? Something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Bracco admitted.

Glitsky didn’t like it. “Anything obvious or proven and he would have fired him on the spot, don’t you think?” He drank some more tea, frowning. “My problem with this whole line of thought,” he said at last, “is that I’ve got to go on the assumption that whoever killed Markham in the hospital probably wasn’t planning to kill him until he showed up there after the accident. That’s why I like Kensing so much. He didn’t just have a motive. He had several long-standing motives, where he might see the opportunity and just go, ‘At last.’

“On the other hand—just hear me out—if Ross was somehow threatened by Markham to the degree that he actually planned to kill him, doesn’t it make more sense to think that he would have done something proactive, like actually try to run him over, for example, rather than just wait for fate to put him in his path? What if it didn’t happen? And ten out of ten times it wouldn’t.”

“If I may, sir?” Harlen said.

Glitsky’s face relaxed a degree. “You may.”

“They’ve worked together a long time, Ross and Markham, so there could have been the same buildup of motives that we know about with Kensing, couldn’t there? The point we made this afternoon was that Ross needed his job. But something was making him want to leave Parnassus.”

This wasn’t too conclusive for Glitsky. “He read the writing on the wall. The place was going down. He didn’t want to go with it.”

“Okay.” Fisk’s frustration with Glitsky’s objections was beginning to show. “But he couldn’t get any other jobs. His wife told us he’d gone looking and couldn’t get hired anywhere else. Why not? Finally, who benefits most immediately from Markham’s death? Dr. Ross, who took over the top job and gets another two hundred grand a year salary, just for starters.”

Glitsky upended his peanut bag, threw the last few into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully. “But we don’t know that there were in fact any serious—and I mean deadly serious—problems between him and Markham. Do we?”

Downcast, the two inspectors looked at each other, then back across the table. “No, sir,” Bracco said. “But it might be fun to keep looking.”

“You can look all you want,” Glitsky replied. “But as far as I know, the only person we’ve got in the room when Markham died was Kensing and the nurses who had no personal relationship with Mr. Markham at all. And that pretty severely limits the field, don’t you agree? Has that changed?”

“Actually, it might have,” Bracco said. “I went back up to the ICU station yesterday while Harlen was waiting for an interview downstairs.” He went on to describe his successful entry into intensive care unmolested and apparently unnoticed, and when he finished, Glitsky was frowning.

“What time was this?”

“About the same time Markham died. Early afternoon.”

“And what about the nurses’ station?”

“One nurse was at it, sitting at the computer.”

“How long were you in there?”

Bracco shrugged. “A minute, give or take. I walked around to each bed.”

“And nobody else…”

“Nobody. I just walked behind the nurse at the computer, opened the door, disappeared. Which means that anybody else could have done the same thing.”

Glitsky’s face had hardened down to granite. His cell phone rang and he picked it from his belt and growled out his name, then listened intently. The scar between his lips stood out in stark relief. He said, “Are you sure?” In less than a minute, he closed up the phone and stared out over the heads of his inspectors.

The town of Colma, just over San Francisco’s border with San Mateo County, has far more dead inhabitants than live ones.

Hardy stood at one of the thousands of gravesites. This one was near the end of a row of headstones, under a redwood tree. With the cemetery’s permission, he had planted the tree himself twenty-eight years before.

It was April 16, the day Hardy’s son Michael had been born. He’d died seven months later when he fell out of his crib. It probably had been the very first time he’d stood up. Certainly, neither Hardy nor Jane, his wife back then—the marriage was another casualty of the tragedy—had ever seen him get up on his feet. He’d only been crawling a few weeks, it seemed. A couple of film rolls’ worth.

So they left the sides down on his crib. Not all the way down. Halfway down. They’d childproofed the house, but neither one of them had ever given a thought to the sides of the crib. Michael wasn’t old enough for that yet. But he must have been able to stand all the way up. Otherwise, he would not have been able to pitch over and land wrong.

Hardy wasn’t thinking about that now, about that one long-ago moment that had forever modulated the course of his life, who he was, what he had become, into a minor key. He wasn’t conscious of any thought at all. He was simply standing here, by his infant son’s now-old grave. He had never faced this place before, though he’d always marked the date and had been to Colma many times. He had never before been able to find the courage.

But something had drawn him here today, something he either couldn’t define or didn’t want to examine too closely. He felt that too many of the important things in his life were slipping away. Maybe he hoped that a gradual slip—unlike an abrupt fall—could be stopped. Lives could be saved.

He had called Frannie and told her where he was going. He could tell the call worried her. Should she meet him there? she’d asked him. Was he all right?

He didn’t know the real answer to that, but he told her he was fine. That he loved her. He’d see her tonight, after Vincent’s Little League practice, when his normal life resumed.

Downtown, near his office, the day had been threatening to be nice again. Driving out, as far as the Shamrock, he had his windows down. But here, except for his lone redwood, the eucalyptus and the windswept, twisted cypress trees and the thriving endless lawn, it was all grays—everything from the sky down through the air itself. Gray and cold.

He wore his business suit and even with the coat buttoned, it wasn’t nearly enough to alleviate the chill. In the groves both close and far, the wind droned with a vibration he felt more than heard. Already in places the cloud cover had gone to ground and wisps of the fitful fog drifted and dissipated into the endless gray.

He had not prayed in thirty years. Perhaps he wasn’t praying now. But he went to a knee, then both knees, and remained in that position for several minutes. At last he stood up, took a final look at the name still sharply etched into the marble headstone—Michael Hardy.

Now so unfamiliar, so impossible.

He drew a breath, gathering himself. When he turned to walk back to his car, Glitsky was standing on the asphalt path thirty feet away.

He wore his leather flight jacket. His hands were in its pockets. He took a step forward at the same moment Hardy did. When they had closed the gap, both stopped. “I tried your office,” Glitsky said, “then the cell, then Frannie.” He hesitated. “You okay?”

He motioned vaguely back behind him. “He would have been twenty-eight today. I thought I owed him a visit.”

A gust shuddered by them. Glitsky waited it out. “That’s my greatest fear,” he said.

“It’s a good one.”

“I’ve got my three grown boys, Diz. I beat the odds. Why do I want to do this again?”

Hardy took some time before he answered. “Most of the time it doesn’t end up like this, that’s why. Most of the time they bury us.”

Glitsky was looking somewhere over Hardy’s shoulder. “I couldn’t put my finger on why I was so…” He couldn’t get the thought out. “It’s, what if they don’t bury us? What if it
is
like this?”

“Then you do what you have to do,” Hardy replied. “You suppose time goes by, but you’re not part of time anymore. And then one day something you eat has flavor again, or maybe the sun feels good on your back. Something. You start again.” He shrugged. “You did it with Flo, so you know.”

“Yeah, I do know. But the funny thing is, I’m more scared of it now. I’m not good with fear.”

“I’ve noticed that.” A ghost of a smile flitted around Hardy’s mouth. “I’d actually call that a good sign, especially compared to how you were before you met Treya, that long sleepwalk after Flo died. Now it all matters again, though, doesn’t it? And ain’t that a bitch?”

“No, it’s good, but…”

“No ‘but’ about it, Abe. It’s all good.” He motioned back toward the gravesite again. “The little guy had something he needed to tell me. I think that was it.”

Coming back at Glitsky, he realized that they’d been baring their souls to each other, and that this was, in fact, who they were. Without any need to acknowledge it, both of them knew that their fight, somehow, was over. They might still have serious professional issues between them, but the essential bond was secure.

They started walking together to where they’d parked their cars. “There was something else,” Glitsky said. “Why I was trying to get you in the first place.”

“What’s that?”

“Strout called. Marjorie Loring’s autopsy.”

“Done already?” This was very fast, but Hardy wasn’t really surprised. Jackman had made it clear that it was a high priority.

Glitsky nodded. “You were right. She didn’t die of cancer.”

A wash of relief ran over Hardy—he’d invested more than he’d realized in these results. “So what was it?” he asked. “Potassium?”

“No. Some muscle relaxers. Pavulon and something chloride. Both of them stop natural breathing. Both would have been administered in the hospital.”

“Kensing wasn’t anywhere near her, Abe. He was on vacation with his kids in Disneyland. And before you say it, I know this doesn’t mean he didn’t kill Markham. But it does mean something, doesn’t it?”

Glitsky didn’t need to go over it. “You and I have to talk. You said you got more of these people?”

Hardy nodded. “Ten more. And that’s just Kensing’s list. I know at least one nurse that has her own suspicions. She might have some names to go with them, although I’d agree with you that one homicide doesn’t mean there are ten of them.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah, I know. I read your mind. But it does mean there’s one of them, and it wasn’t Kensing. But it also wasn’t potassium, which I kind of wish it was.”

Glitsky looked questioningly at him. “Why is that?”

“Because if both Loring and Markham got killed the same way, it would be the same person doing it, wouldn’t it?”

“It might at that,” Glitsky admitted, “but as far as I’m concerned, this is good enough in terms of me and you.” They’d gotten to Glitsky’s car. He stopped by the front door. “I think I owe you an apology.”

“I agree with you. Was that it?”

A small chuckle. “As good as it gets.” But surprisingly, he went a little further. “All I can say is that you don’t work with as many defense attorneys as I do. You get a little cynical after a while, even with your friends.”

This was the sad truth and Hardy believed it. He could argue that he, Dismas Hardy, Abe’s best friend, wasn’t just another defense attorney given to pulling unethical tricks out of his hat just to protect his clients. But he knew that in the world of criminal law this in itself would be a rare and suspect guarantee. Hardy had won at least a couple of lesser cases on technicalities that Glitsky in his cop mode would probably consider some form of cheating.

Wes Farrell had gotten his boy off the other day when the arresting officer hadn’t made it to the courtroom. For all Hardy knew, Wes had taken the cop out the night before and got him plowed so he’d be too hungover to appear. Beyond that, a true eminence at the defense bar such as David Freeman wouldn’t even blush to do exactly what Glitsky had accused Hardy of. Squeeze a witness by bringing her children into play? Get the coroner to dig up half of Colma? Pretend you needed an emergency tooth extraction on the first day of jury selection? If it helped your client, if it even delayed proceedings for any substantial period of time, it was justifiable. Even, arguably, commendable. Ethically required.