The Ophelia Cut (27 page)

“I’m listening.”

“Of course there was an investigation at the time. You could look it up. There’d be files on it, all the details. Glitsky was ruled out because he had an airtight alibi. You want to guess what it was?”

“I don’t believe my imagination is up to it.”

“He was with Gina Roake at David Freeman’s apartment all afternoon, picking out a suit for Freeman’s funeral. You’ll notice how nicely this dovetails into Roake’s alibi. How ’bout them apples?”

A
FTER
S
HER AND
Brady left, Moses pondered his situation while he set up the back bar, loaded up the condiment bins, peeled the lemons, whipped the cream for the Irish coffee, rolled in a new keg of Bass. Somewhere around one o’clock, he made the decision that a little hair of the dog wouldn’t kill him.

He’d monitor the alcohol intake more carefully this time, that’s all.

By four o’clock, when Sher and Brady showed up again, he’d had three carefully measured shots—well, double shots—of vodka. Scotch was really his drink, but if he drank Scotch, Susan would smell it on him.

Vodka, maybe not so much.

So it was only Moses and Dave and two couples on the couches under the Tiffany lamps in the back when the front door opened and the two inspectors trooped in with a sense of urgency they hadn’t displayed before.

He greeted them with weary tolerance. “You guys, you guys. Don’t you ever take a break?”

Neither of them was in the mood for casual repartee. Brady got up to
the bar in a couple of steps, Sher staying back by the door. Her arms were crossed over her chest, but one hand was tucked inside her jacket, no doubt on her service weapon. Looking over at her, next to the front windows, Moses saw a couple of black-and-white patrol cars on the street outside.

“Mr. McGuire,” Brady said, “I’d like to ask you to come around the bar, please.”

Moses, still trying to brazen things out, flashed some teeth and said, “It would be easier to pour you a drink from back here. What are you having?”

“I’m asking you again, and for the last time, to come around the bar.”

Brady’s tone alerted Dave, seated where he always was at the front of the bar by the window, who raised his head and tried to focus on Brady. “How’s he going to get you a drink from out in front of the bar?” he asked.

Sher, wound tightly, took a quick couple of steps over to Dave’s side and flipped her badge in front of him. “Drink up, pal. San Francisco police. This bar’s closing right now.”

Dave gave her an uncertain glance. “Bullshit,” he said. “It’s the middle of the day.”

Brady patted his hand firmly on the bar. “McGuire. Now.”

Unloading a heavy breath, Moses wiped his hands on his bar towel. “All right, all right, I’m coming.”

Dave didn’t like this much and took the opportunity to pop his beer bottle down on the bar. “Mose, what is this bullshit? Give ’em what for. Whack ’em one with the shillelagh.”

Moses had already pulled up the hinged part of the bar on his way out from behind it. He stopped, turning abruptly. “Shut up, Dave. Just shut up.”

“What shillelagh?” Sher asked.

“He’s got a big ol’ shillelagh hanging down under the bar. Been there forever. That’s what.”

One of the mid-twenties men in the back was on his feet. “Is there a problem up here?”

Brady held up the wallet with his badge, slapped the bar again, raised his voice, moving back toward where the young man and Moses stood in close proximity. “Everybody, listen up. We are San Francisco police on
official business. Please, everybody stay where you are.” He advanced on the younger man. “Except you! Back up! More! Now sit down!” Brady didn’t want the well-meaning but stupid interloper anywhere near McGuire, where, in a heartbeat, he might find himself held hostage by his friendly local bartender.

Brady never got all the way past McGuire; he didn’t want to show the man any part of his back. Suddenly, the plan had gotten unscripted, out of hand. Brady knew they had backup units parked all along the street, hand-picked teams planning to search the premises—along with McGuire’s car and his apartment—and he almost yelled at Sher to open the door and call in the troops.

Then McGuire took a small step toward him, holding up both hands. “Easy, easy, easy,” he said. He looked over and down at his customers. “Nothing to worry about. No problem.” Back to Brady. “Here I am, as ordered. What can I do for you?”

“Moses McGuire,” Brady said, holding up a piece of paper, letting out a sigh of relief. “I have here a warrant for your arrest for the murder of Richard Jessup. You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, anything you do say can and will . . .”

McG
UIRE WOULDN’T SHUT
up, and using their secret sign language, Brady and Sher decided they wouldn’t try to make him.

“I don’t see why you need these handcuffs,” he was saying. “They’re too goddamn small. They feel like shit. Come on, you guys, I wasn’t going anywhere. I came around from inside the bar on my own. Here I am, all cooperation, and the back of this car is locked up anyway. I couldn’t go anywhere if I wanted to. And you could pull over right here and take off the cuffs. Come on. Brady? Inspector Sher? Come on! Shit.”

After they had him locked in the backseat of their car on Lincoln Way with one of the patrolmen keeping an eye on him, they told the customers in the back of the Shamrock that they had to leave. They would be closing down the bar while officers executed a search warrant.

Sher went over to Dave, whom she’d told to shut up and finish his beer and wait for her. She got his full name, address, and phone number, since he would be a witness about the shillelagh, which by the way was nowhere to be found. Dave wasn’t too happy about this development, but
Sher thought it was more that he would have to find another local bar to drink away the day.

Moses was going on in the backseat: “Do you really think you’ve got anything at all on me? Where’s the murder weapon? I didn’t kill that little son of a bitch, although he needed killing, and I’m glad he’s dead.”

And: “I’m having a hard time believing that Glitsky let you get away with this. We’ve been buds for twenty years. There’s no way he’s going to let me get anywhere near a trial, trust me. I’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re both wasting all this time when you could be out looking for somebody to convict.”

And: “Either of you have kids? No? What do you think you’d do if you had a daughter and found out some little punk had first beat her and then raped her? You think you’d sit around wringing your hands? C’mon, you guys are cops. You’d go and handle things, wouldn’t you? Tell me you wouldn’t. Because sometimes the law doesn’t get it right. A little prison time for some fucking loser is nothing next to the time my girl’s going to take to get over what he did to her. You think that’s fair? You think that’s right?”

Downtown, while Brady walked McGuire into the Hall of Justice and upstairs to begin processing his arrest, Sher pulled the tape recorder out from under the backseat, checked to see that it had picked up everything McGuire said on the ride downtown, then double-checked that neither she nor Brady had said so much as one word to prompt him. Satisfied, she brought the tape to the transcripts pool office to be typed up for inclusion into the case record.

B
ECAUSE FOURTEEN YEARS
ago Sam Duncan and Wes Farrell had met and hooked up—although that wasn’t the term used in those days—at the Little Shamrock, Wes took it as a promising sign that she had asked to meet him there after work. On the other hand, the fact that it was a public place allowed the interpretation that she wanted to avoid a scene, which would surely ensue if she broke up with him. Indeed, such an event had come to pass at least once, even twice if one counted Sam’s abrupt departure over another argument whose subject was lost in the mists of time—something about Wes’s incorrigible lack of sensitivity, no doubt.

Since that’s what the arguments were always about.

Sam had been staying at her mother’s place since their rooftop discussion about Brittany McGuire had broken down so disastrously, and the thought that he would at least get to see her again and argue his position—bolstered by Glitsky’s comments that Sam should be mad at herself—gave him a modicum of hope, mitigated slightly by her saying that she didn’t want to talk on the phone. “Some things,” she had told him, “need to be done in person.”

At just short of six o’clock, Farrell came around the corner into the teeth of the gale at Ninth Avenue and, seeing the line of patrol cars parked at the curb on Lincoln, stopped as though getting his bearings.

What the hell?

Only then did he realize—so focused had he been on his girlfriend issue—that the long-familiar hangout was the workplace of the suspect in a murder investigation. And where, judging from the police presence, something major had transpired recently. His first thought was that Moses had killed himself, and sad to say, his first instinct was a wash of relief.

The door was locked, but he could see movement inside, and he knocked. Then knocked again, tried the door again, rattling it. Inside, a figure in uniform appeared and said through the glass of the door, “This establishment is closed until further notice. Police investigation.”

Farrell reached for his back pocket, knocked again on the window, and held up his wallet with its entirely bogus badge—after his election, he’d bought the badge at a police equipment store in Daly City; district attorneys aren’t cops and are not entitled to pretend they are, but the badge tended to work wonders with people who couldn’t read an official ID and knew generally what a badge meant. For most associate DAs, the badge’s primary function was to be flashed at traffic cops to get out of speeding tickets and DUI arrests.

Sure enough, the uniformed cop stepped closer, got a good look at the badge, and proceeded to unlock the door. “Sorry, sir,” he said, “we’ve had customers coming by all day. How can I help you?”

“Wes Farrell,” he said, getting to the point. “The district attorney. Who’s running the show here?”

The cop straightened up, decided he ought to salute, then said, “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Just a minute,” and disappeared into the bowels of the bar. Farrell took the opportunity to glance around and realized that he’d arrived in the midst of a fairly rigorous search. All the bottles from the shelves behind the bar were on the bar. So were most of the glasses. The pillows from the couches and upholstered chairs in the back had been removed and piled against the wall. Farrell crossed over to look behind the bar and saw that everything had been cleaned out—the refrigerators were open and empty, likewise the cash register. Someone had piled the bar towels on the counter. Most startling, the sixty or eighty photographs on the “Wall of Shame” corkboard—from women baring their breasts to men posing with yards of ale or whatever else they’d consumed—had been removed.

To Farrell, this struck deep, and not only because he had made the wall after breaking the record of five Long Island iced teas on what had been a memorable night that he couldn’t remember. His record six held, although he shared it with two other guys and one woman. Paul McCartney once stopped in for a pint of Bass and played somebody’s random right-handed guitar, by common consent, perfectly.

Farrell looked over at the sound of footsteps as another uniform came out of the hallway to the dart room. “Mr. Farrell,” he said before he’d gotten close, “Sergeant Dankers. What brings you out here?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing, Sergeant. I gather you’re searching this place. I presume you’ve got a warrant and affidavit.”

The implied rebuke brought confusion to the man’s face. “Well, yes, sir. Of course. This is on the Jessup homicide. A couple of inspectors arrested the suspect here, and we came in right after. Two, three hours ago.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Pretty much the usual. Clothing, shoes, weapons or objects that could be used as weapons, obvious signs of blood or other fluids, receipts, photographs, computer records if any.”

“They arrested a suspect?”

“Yes, sir. The bartender. The owner, I think. Moses McGuire.”

“Yes. He’s the owner. But I don’t understand. Was he fleeing? Did he try to break away when they were questioning him? Did he put up a fight?”

“I don’t think so, sir. I was outside waiting, and they went in, served the warrant, then came out with him in cuffs like five minutes later.”

“They had a warrant? An arrest warrant?”

“As far as I know. Yes, sir.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Sir?”

“I say it’s interesting because it’s my office that issues warrants. I’ve been following this case very closely, and I would have imagined I’d be told, since I specifically asked to be, if they’d gotten enough to make an arrest.”

Dankers shifted from one foot to the other. He reached over and picked up a folded document sitting on one of the tables. “Would you like to inspect my search warrant, sir? It looks like legitimately signed paper to me.”

“Who was the judge?”

Dankers unfolded the paper, glanced down. “Braun.”

That brought a deep frown. “She’s not this week’s magistrate. Why did she sign off on this?”

Dankers shrugged, mystified. “I don’t know, sir. Are you saying we should call off the search? We’re almost done as it is.”

“No. You finish up. I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation. I’m just somewhat confused as to why I wasn’t informed. But that isn’t your problem. Are you also searching McGuire’s home?”

“I’d assume somebody is. My team drew the bar.”

Farrell took a last long look around the room. It seemed to him that the team had done a thorough and relatively respectful legal search. Dankers clearly had no ax to grind; he was simply doing his job. Farrell saw no point in drawing more attention to his reservations. Obviously, they’d found evidence that Moses had killed Rick Jessup, although the reality of actual arrest struck Farrell as surreal. More disturbingly, he had been in his office until after five. The arrest warrant must have been signed (by Braun!) no later than two. What Homicide DA had authorized it? How had he not been told? Could it have been an oversight? That was hard to imagine, given his admitted level of interest. Had Glitsky somehow gone around him? If so, why?