The Ophelia Cut (54 page)

“No,” Hardy said. “You’re supposed to say that it’s none of anybody’s business. Let them wonder and speculate all they want. It’s a family matter, and you and Mose and you girls are dealing with it as best you can, and you’d appreciate a little respect for your privacy. But even better would be if you just said ‘No comment’ to everybody. If they’re your really close friends, then I can give you a special dispensation to say, ‘I’m sorry, but really, no comment.’ But don’t even feel like you have to do that. Privacy, I realize, is a little out of fashion, but it’s a real concept.”

“But what’s the truth?” Brittany asked.

“Let’s say that the truth is what Gina told your mom. She and your dad never had the affair she told the court about.”

“If that isn’t true,” Erica said, fighting back tears, “then that makes my daddy a murderer.”

Hardy took a moment to reply. “Your father fought in Vietnam, sweetie, where he killed people, and so did I. That doesn’t make us murderers. Homicides aren’t always murders. Sometimes they’re justified.”

“Do you think,” Brittany asked, “if he did it, this one was?”

“Nobody can answer that except your father, Brit.”

A long silence settled. At last Brittany let out a heavy breath and said, “I’ve got one that maybe you can answer, Uncle Diz. Do you know what happened to Tony?”

Again, Hardy paused. “We know he packed up and left town.”

“But why? Do you know?”

“I do know.” And he told them. “He was a charming guy, Brit,” he concluded, “but he was basically in hiding, so when his cover got blown by that picture of the two of you, he had to go. If it’s any consolation, he wasn’t what he seemed to be. To any of us.”

“I could have helped. If he’d trusted me more.”

“Some people,” Hardy said, “maybe most people, you can’t change. I truly believe you can’t save anybody. So it’s probably a better idea to choose to hang around people who don’t need changing or saving.”

Susan laughed with a bitter edge. “Except all these years,” she said to her daughters, “you’ve seen me putting up with your father, who often needed changing or saving, and loving him through most of it. But still.”

“You picked good, Susan,” Hardy said. “You girls are in pretty damn good shape, too. We get over this last hump, things will straighten out. You just wait.”

He’d barely finished speaking when there was a quick knock at the door. Amy Wu pushed it open, breathless, her eyes shining with excitement. “The court just called,” she told them. “They’re coming in!”

A
T 3:22, THE
jury filed back into a courtroom overflowing with reporters, spectators, various denizens of the Hall of Justice. Out in the gallery, Hardy saw Wes Farrell, whose visage remained stern and unyielding.
Also from Farrell’s office, Treya had come down, although she was sitting with Abe in another row on the defense side. Wyatt Hunt was there, too, along with some of his staff, all the McGuire women, and much to Hardy’s surprise, his wife (who, unbeknownst to him, had made her “be aware and stay quiet” pitch to Moses in the jail an hour before) and their daughter, Rebecca. Gina Roake was nowhere to be found. All four eyewitnesses and Jessup’s mother sat in the second row directly behind Stier and Gunderson’s table. On that same side, right in front of the eyewitnesses, sat Lapeer, Brady and Sher, and the crime scene supervisor, Lennard Faro.

Hardy, Amy, and Moses sat at their table, the tension almost unbearable as the jurors took their seats—far too slowly, it seemed to Hardy.

So slowly.

Hardy’s hands were sweating, his stomach in a knot. He loosened his tie, which had begun to choke him. Picking up his glass of water, he realized that the water’s surface telegraphed the tremor in his hands, and he put it back down.

The stone-faced jurors were taking their seats one at a time. Not one of them met his eyes or even glanced in the direction of their table.

Next to Hardy, Moses seemed drained of blood except for his eyes, which were deeply bloodshot. His breathing was audible. Amy Wu sat on his left, holding his hand and rubbing it.

At last the bailiff came to his feet. “Department Twenty-four of the Superior Court of the State of California is now in session, Judge Carol Gomez presiding. All rise.”

Gomez appeared through the courtroom’s rear door and, in a swirl of robes, took her place at the bench. “Please be seated.”

Blessedly, Hardy thought, at least she appeared ready to move things along. He found himself putting a hand on Moses’s arm.

Gomez turned her head and spoke to the jury. “In the matter of the People of the State of California versus Moses McGuire, has the jury reached a verdict?”

The foreman, Philip Waxman, one of the fathers of a daughter on the jury, stood at his seat. “We have, Your Honor.”

“And is that verdict unanimous?”

“It is, Your Honor.”

“Please give all the verdict forms to the bailiff.”

The bailiff took the forms to the judge, who examined them to make sure they were appropriately filled out, signed, and dated. Gomez then gave them to the clerk. “Madam Clerk, would you please read the verdict?”

She began with the caption of the case, including the defendant’s name, case number, and what court they were in. And then at last.

“Count one. We, the jury in the above entitled cause, find the defendant, Moses McGuire . . .”

W
HEN
M
OSES FIRST
went on the wagon, he’d listened a lot to a Collin Raye song entitled “Little Rock,” whose lyrics referred to the fact that the singer hadn’t had a drink of alcohol in nineteen days. It hadn’t sounded like much of a deal, not such a long time, but Moses had found in the living of it that it was nearly an eternity.

I won’t have a drink today. I won’t have a drink today. I won’t have a drink today.

One day at a time. Forever. Or nineteen days, whichever came first.

In reality, he hadn’t had a drink in a lot longer than nineteen days, since the day of his arrest. In jail, they didn’t serve wine with the meals. But since the not-guilty verdict, since he’d been back behind the bar, he’d had easy access, and not drinking under those conditions made all the difference. So today was a kind of personal milestone, his nineteenth day back at the bar. He’d been crossing off dates on the calendar, and now that he’d made that magic number nineteen, he decided he could start to let himself think that this time he might just make it.

Now, on a relatively balmy late-summer Tuesday evening at 5:30, life was almost back to normal. The Little Shamrock had a good crowd going. Regular Dave was back in his usual spot, on his third beer since four o’clock. One of the dart leagues was having a tournament in the back room, and there were twenty or so players, whooping it up and spilling out into the hallway that led up to the bar area proper.

Four couples sat at eight of the ten stools at the bar. Back by the bathrooms, a group of six or eight college-age kids—legal, as Moses had made sure—was on the first round, and everybody was into drinks made with premium-call liquors. If Moses could keep them happy, that would turn out to be a nice profit center.

This, too, gave him some small hope for the future. Only small, because he was not as solvent as he once was. He had relinquished another 24 percent of the bar to his brother-in-law as payment for Hardy’s representation. He couldn’t really complain, since he was free again, and Hardy had made that happen. Despite a definite cooling in their friendship, Hardy was still a good guy, and their deal left Moses as the majority owner—51 percent to 49 percent. Further, when Hardy’s share of the profits reached the sum total of Moses’s legal fees in about a hundred years, Hardy insisted that he would return the 24 percent to McGuire. They shook on it.

On the home front, things were not so positive, although he held out hope that he and Susan would get back to where they once were. Clearly, she was—both of them were—trying. They would start formal counseling next week. In the meanwhile, Susan couldn’t come to grips with the person he was, with what he had done. Even though she thought she believed he was not an adulterer, Susan had never directly asked Moses to deny it, and he had never done so. Because to deny the truth of the affair all but admitted the alternative—that he had in all probability, as the evidence suggested, killed Rick Jessup. That, too, was unacceptable to her. So she was living—they both were living—in a no-man’s-land of ambiguity and distress.

In all, he’d come to the belief that, like everything else in life, it would take time, maybe a lot of time. All he could do was stay sober and faithful and hope that they would reconnect.

Down at the end of the bar, he brought Dave his fourth beer, refilled a couple of cocktail orders from the couples, pulled down a Guinness stout glass and added ice and a lime wedge and a good blast of club soda from the gun.

Turning around, he dialed up “Little Rock” and three other oldies on his playlist.

He checked his watch.

The song came on.

Tony’s backup person—Moses’s longtime Sunday/Monday bartender—Lynne had taken over most of the night shifts. She’d gotten used to making more money and was game for all the shifts Moses could throw her way. She was due in twenty minutes, after which he was going home to have a barbecue on the roof with his three girls.

When he got home, he’d also announce the nineteen days, the great psychic barrier that they all knew about. They’d know he was on his way, holding up, doing as well as anyone could hope.

He pulled a couple of Bass pints. The guy with the girl down to his right said, “Hey, Mose. What’s the only word in English that sounds the same when you take away its last four letters? I don’t think there is one.”

“Yeah, there is,” his girlfriend said.

The front door swung open, and a middle-aged, gray-haired woman came in alone. Though it was an unusually warm night, she wore a heavy coat that went to her knees. Standing still for a second, letting her eyes adjust to the slight dimness, she saw the free stool at the bar directly in front of him and walked over to claim it, then swung her large purse off her shoulder and laid it on the bar, nodding at Moses in a familiar way. There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t quite place what it was. Close up, she was a nice-looking woman, he thought, although at about his own age, maybe a little old for the Shamrock’s typical customer base.

“Moses McGuire,” she said.

Though the bar didn’t need it, McGuire out of habit was wiping down the area in front of her, never completely unaware of the divot he’d made with the shillelagh so many months before. He put down a napkin and said, “That’s me. What can I get you?”

Next to her, the girlfriend said, “Queue. Take away the last four letters, still ‘Q.’ ”

McGuire pointed at her, said, “Good one,” and held up his hand so they could high five each other.

In the split second while he was looking away, the gray-haired woman put her hand in her purse. Now, as he came back to her, she was withdrawing it.

She said, “I’m Penny Jessup.”

When her hand emerged, it was holding a large silver handgun, which, with no hesitation, she held in both hands as she fired three shots point-blank into McGuire’s chest.

A
FTER THE FUNERAL
at St. Ignatius and the burial in Colma the next Friday, the Hardys invited people over for an informal celebration of Moses’s
life. In spite of the crowd of perhaps two hundred that had attended the services, they expected only about thirty or forty people. But about double that number showed up—Wes and Sam, Abe and Treya, Gina, Wyatt Hunt, Amy Wu, and many Shamrock customers, as well as folks Hardy didn’t know from his brother-in-law’s A.A. meetings. More surprising were the several beat cops from the Shamrock’s neighborhood and two members of McGuire’s jury.

Hardy was surrounded by guests, pulling a cold Beck’s from one of the coolers in the kitchen, when Wes Farrell appeared beside him. “I’ll take one of those if you can spare it,” he said. When Hardy handed him the beer, he continued, “Quite a turnout.”

“Moses was a popular guy.”

“For the record, I’m just sick at what happened.”

Hardy nodded. “Somebody should have thought of it, kept an eye out, something. She was always out there. I should have thought of it.”

“Why would you have? Her son was already dead.” Farrell hesitated. “I guess she didn’t believe Gina’s story.”

“That’s a fair assumption.” Hardy sipped his beer. “For the record, since that seems to be the phrase of the day, nobody’s disproved it.”

“If you don’t mind,” Farrell replied, “I’d rather not talk about it in those terms. It was a fair trial, and you won it. By the way, Sam tells me you haven’t RSVP’d to the wedding.”

“We thought you might be regretting having sent us the invitation.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve only got like three real friends in this town. It would be nice if some of them came to my wedding.”

“I heard even Sam was pissed off at me.”

Farrell chuckled. “Treya finked.”

“She might have.”

“The funny thing about that? Remember how she was going to try to take my side on all of these moral arguments we get into? At least see things from my point of view, if she could? That was her first effort.”

“How’s it been going since then?”

“She’s kind of come around to thinking you did the right thing. Moses should have killed that guy, since rapists deserve to get killed. This from my liberal fiancée.”

“The jury said Moses didn’t kill him,” Hardy said. “But I’m impressed
with the way she’s thinking. The DA’s wife ought to be in favor of the death penalty, don’t you think?”

“She doesn’t like the ‘penalty’ part. Just go take out the rapist.”

“Your own little vigilante.”

“I know,” Farrell said, “it’s special.” He squinted into the crowd. “I don’t believe this.”

Hardy looked. “What’s that?” Then, “Wow.”

Farrell nudged him on the arm. “I’ll let you take care of this one on your own.” He moved off to the back door and outside.

In another moment, Paul Stier was shaking Hardy’s hand. “Sorry to barge in on your party, but you said everybody was invited.”