The Ophelia Cut (23 page)

“He’s got an alibi?”

Sher raised her head. “Volunteered it first thing. He went fishing. Alone.”

“He knew somebody from Homicide would want to talk to him,” Brady added. “He told us that. He was ready. It was all thought out.”

“I’m thinking if we get an ID,” Sher said, “and it’s him—the guy with the club, I mean—we bring him downtown.”

“Still,” Glitsky said, “I’m not hearing any evidence.”

Brady stepped in. “At that time we get a warrant.”

“Good luck with that,” Glitsky said, although he knew Brady was right.

“Why not?”

“Where’s your probable cause? You think some judge is going to sign off without one tiny piece of actual evidence?” Glitsky didn’t know why he was continuing in this vein. He knew that an eyewitness ID, along with the motive evidence, would probably be enough for a judge to sign off on a warrant. Somehow, he realized he wanted to slow his inspectors down, buy a little more time. But for what? For whom? He couldn’t have said.

“It could happen,” Brady persisted. “With enough details. If he’s got a blue car or our witnesses pick him out of a lineup.”

“That’s still just the guy walking down the street.”

“Okay, so in a pinch, we mention the rape,” Sher said.

Glitsky shook his head. “The rape’s a nonstarter, guys. It might not be Brittany, and even if it was, we can’t prove it.”

“Same old song,” Brady said.

“I hear you,” Abe said, “but that’s what’s playing right now.”

After a short silence, Sher looked up again. “So what do you suggest, Abe? Clearly, the chief wants him brought in.”

And with good reason, Glitsky thought. His inspectors were calling him on his untenable objections. But let them believe he was playing devil’s advocate. Let Brady and Sher think he was being hypothetical, trying to keep them from procedural error. “Clearly,” he said. “But there’s no point bringing him in if we’re just going to have to let him go, now, is there? So my suggestion—not too groundbreaking, I know—is find something that’ll speak to a jury. Otherwise, you’re wasting everybody’s time, including your own. That’s just reality.”

“So what about the chief?” Brady asked.

“What about her?

Sher said, “She’s not going to be happy unless we come up with something pretty soon.”

“She’s making this bed,” Glitsky said. “She can lie in it.”

O
N A TIP
from his wife, Glitsky caught up with Farrell in the reporters’ room on the third floor. It was nearly twenty minutes after five, all the trial departments had closed for the day, and Farrell was alone with a can of Dr Pepper in the small room with its big pitted table, surrounded by vending machines that dispensed nearly every form of snack and nonalcoholic drink imaginable. The wrappers from two PayDay bars bore silent testimony to Farrell’s last few minutes.

Glitsky closed the door and slid in across the table from him. “Treya said she thought I’d find you here.”

“It was supposed to be a secret. I was going for a minute without interruption.”

“She knew you’d want to make an exception for me. She made me promise not to tell anybody else. What happened to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look in the mirror recently? Your eyes?”

“Oh, them?” Farrell didn’t laugh, though his shoulders rose and fell once. “It’s the next new thing. I call it the Beagle. Anybody can do it. Just don’t sleep.” He scrunched his eyes closed, then opened them. “Sam’s moving out. I think this time she means it. You know what it’s like being basically a left-wing kind of guy and your girlfriend dumps you because you’re too conservative? She thinks I’ve sold out to the prosecution side.”

“I don’t see how that breaks right or left. What? She wants bad guys to go free?”

“Most of the time, yeah. I think so. They need to be understood, you know, more than punished.”

“Again,” Glitsky said, “not mutually exclusive.”

“Don’t tell Sam.” He closed his eyes again. “She thinks I betrayed her on this Jessup thing.”

“How’d you do that? He was dead when you found out about him, wasn’t he?”

“Deader than hell, but that’s not the point.”

“What is?”

“I should have somehow known that giving his name up would eventually expose her victim. But this just in, Abe, I don’t even know her victim.
Shit.
Excuse me.”

Glitsky was famous for deploring the use of profanity, but this time he waved it off. “You want Sam to go? To leave?”

“Not at all. I love the damn woman, pain in the ass though she is.”

“I’ve got an argument for you, if you want to use it, maybe change her mind.”

“I’m listening.”

“She’s mad at herself.”

“She is? Why?”

“Because she’s got it backward. She’s the one who betrayed the privilege, not you. And she knows it. That’s why she’s so angry. As soon as she said the name Jessup out loud to you, you had no choice. If his name let you bring us in to help find his killer, you had to use it. She’s the one who let it out. And once she did that, it was public.”

Farrell lifted his soda can, took a sip. “That might be worth saying.”

“For what it’s worth, it’s true.”

“If that’s really what’s bothering her. Sometimes I think it’s just me.”

“If it’s that, I can’t help you. But if it’s a fight over this one thing . . .”

“It’s an idea, anyway, Abe. I appreciate it. It’s something.” Farrell picked up one of the wrappers expectantly, went to the second one. Same result. He forced a tired smile. “But if memory serves, you came down here to talk to me. And probably not about Sam.”

“Probably not,” Glitsky said, “although it’s about Jessup.” He took a breath. “Chief Lapeer came by my office just now.”

“In person?”

“Very much so. She’d been talking to Liam Goodman, who had some information about somebody who’d beaten up Mr. Jessup a couple of months ago because Jessup had beaten up his daughter. You want to take a stab who that was?”

“You mean the guy who beat up Jessup? You’re saying I know him?”

Glitsky nodded, dropped the familiar name.

Farrell’s jaw went slack. “You’re shitting me.” The DA leaned back, his gaze off in the distance. “Wow,” he whispered. “Fuck. Is he a suspect? In Jessup’s murder?”

“Vi wants him to be, in the worst way.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s close at hand. It gets Goodman off her case before he goes running to the mayor. I’m coming to you because after the chief’s pep talk to my people, there will be pressure to move ahead, and I thought you’d want to be in the loop.”

Farrell met Glitsky’s eyes. “McGuire? What do you think?”

“It’s possible. Brittany saw Jessup not just two months ago but last week. They had a date the night before he got killed.”

“The night before?”

Glitsky nodded. “Saturday. Although when our guys went to see her yesterday, she wouldn’t admit anything about the rape, so we don’t know for sure that she was the victim, but if she was and she told McGuire about it . . .”

“Holy shit,” Farrell said. “Yes, we do know she was the victim. We do now.”

“What do you . . . ?”

“My fight with Sam. The real, actual rape victim—the one who had named Jessup as her assailant—called Sam yesterday, in hysterics that the cops had just come to visit, asking her about Saturday night. Now you’re telling me that your team went out and interviewed Brittany yesterday, which more or less brings it full circle and identifies her as our victim, doesn’t it?”

The two men went silent.

“Jesus Christ,” Farrell whispered. “You know what else? This is Sam, too.”

“What is Sam, too?”

“She told me about the call she got from Brittany, without which . . .”

“. . . we’d never know it was Brittany who got raped. And now we do.”

“Fuck,” Farrell said. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

F
ROM TIME TO
time, to keep his hand in as a bartender, which he didn’t really need to do, Dismas Hardy worked behind the bar that he co-owned.

Wednesday was usually date night, when Hardy and Frannie would leave the kids with a babysitter (when the kids were still home) or (now) go out alone and explore the restaurant subculture of San Francisco, one of the greatest food towns in the world. Often these excursions would begin with a drink at the Little Shamrock, some bons mots with Moses, a reaffirmation of the family connection.

But on this Wednesday night, there was no sign of Frannie, and of course none of Moses, still in bed nursing his monster of a hangover. Even though Frannie hadn’t gotten up as early as her husband this morning, she had basically pulled an all-nighter herself before getting dressed and off to work at seven
A.M.
The hour and a half of sleep she’d managed hadn’t been remotely restorative, and tonight, date night or no, she was crashing early at home.

Hardy, in some ways worse off in terms of fatigue, nevertheless felt a responsibility to his bar and—gallingly—even to his stupid eccentric genius of a brother-in-law who was the source of so much heartache and trouble.

What the hell had Moses done?

Hardy wasn’t going to work a full shift. Although nobody in the family, least of all Rebecca, was thrilled that Tony Solaia appeared to be hooking up with Brittany, Hardy had called him somewhat reluctantly, and Tony would be arriving shortly to take the late shift and close the place up. But Hardy wanted to open up and work awhile for reasons that were obscure even to him.

After his usual Sunday and Monday off, Moses had been at the bar last
night, getting himself blasted nearly to death in the process, and the state of the place reflected his condition. When Hardy came in at four-thirty today, he’d locked the door before getting to work. The sinks were messes of skimming soap and cold water, dirty glasses sat on many of the tables, the back bar was in total disarray, the condiment trays—lemon peel, lime, cherries, cocktail onions, celery—obviously neglected. Moses had left the refrigerator open behind the bar, and needless to say, no one had noticed while negotiating him into the ambulance. The cream for the Irish coffees had gone sour. Hardy would have to send Tony out for supplies first thing.

Even more disturbingly, up near the beer and stout spigots, somebody had damaged the 108-year-old bar. It looked and felt to Hardy, as he rubbed his hand over the ancient wood, as though this had been an act of conscious vandalism—someone had smashed something heavy and solid into it, and it was now uneven, chipped, splintered at the edge. When could this have happened that Moses or one of the other bartenders wouldn’t have seen it? How could Hardy not have heard a word about it? He couldn’t imagine.

Maybe Tony would know.

Reaching under the bar for a towel, he automatically felt that something was different, although what it was didn’t register until he’d taken out a clean dry towel and tucked it into his belt. Suddenly he stopped dead still, a sense memory—or rather, the lack of it—tickling at the corners of his consciousness.

He leaned over and looked into the dark space above the stack of towels, where, for the whole time Hardy had worked here—well over thirty years—the shillelagh had hung from its leather thong down over the towels, within easy grabbing distance for when things got out of hand.

The shillelagh was gone.

“I’
M PRETTY SURE
it was here Saturday night,” Tony said. “That’s the last I worked. I think I would have noticed if it was gone.”

They had a dozen or more customers now, and Hardy had moved around to the front of the bar. He was sitting on a stool directly in front of the damaged area. It was still light outside, although a quick glance at the bending cypresses across the street in the park announced the return of normalcy in terms of weather.

It wouldn’t do to betray the degree of his concern regarding the latest intelligence from Tony—if the shillelagh had been here Saturday night, then its removal for another use on Sunday became so plausible as to be probable—so Hardy kept his tone even as he leaned back on the stool and indicated the cratered wood. “So what happened here?” he asked. “You know?”

Tony was drying glasses, standing behind the beer taps. “Moses said one of the customers went a little apeshit and started smashing his glass on the bar.”

“More than once, it looks like.”

“At least.”

“Except,” Hardy went on, “wouldn’t the glass have broken?”

Tony nodded at the logic. “You’d think. Maybe it was one of the Guinness pint glasses. They’re pretty solid.”

Hardy ran his hand over the pitted surface. “More solid than this wood?”

The question brought Tony up short. “Maybe not. There was some glass on the floor the next day, but I didn’t notice how thick it was, whether it was one of the pints. It could have broken after a few hits. It’s a damn shame, in any event. The bar was just about perfect. Before, I mean.”

“I’m surprised Moses didn’t kill the guy. Take out the shillelagh, break it over his head. I know he would have wanted to.”

“Maybe he did. Maybe that’s where the shillelagh’s gone.”

“But you said it was here Saturday.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I thought it was, but only because I figured I would have missed it.”

Hardy took a moment, sipped at his club soda. “Moses mention who it was? So we can keep an eye out for the guy. Eighty-six him before he gets in again.”

“No. Not to me. How is he, by the way?”

“Mose? Hungover, I’d imagine. The idiot.”

Tony turned his head both ways, then leaned in toward Hardy, lowered his voice conspiratorially. “You know what happened, don’t you?”

“I know about last night. Susan called us at home, and Frannie and I came down here in time for the ambulance. Good time had by all.”

“Not just last night.” Tony leaned in again and said, “I mean with Brittany.”

Hardy drew in a breath. So Tony knew, too, which was disconcerting
news. He turned the glass around in a full circle, then looked up. “We’re not going to mention anything about Brittany,” he said. “I may or may not know what you’re talking about, but whatever it is, it would be better if it never, ever came up again. In any context. Under any circumstances. How about that?”