Betrayal dh-12

by John Lescroart

  Glitsky shrugged. "Just getting used to the new world order. I actually had a possibly productive talk with Darrel Bracco today."

  "I like Darrel. And possibly productive? Wow. The man gushes."

  Sipping his tea, Glitsky gave her a sideways look. "Maybe saved him some hours of slog, that's all."

  "Okay, retract the gush." She squeezed his leg. "And next you were probably going to tell me what Darrel talked to you about. If you were going to keep on talking, I mean. Not that you have to. No pressure."

  This time his smile broke clear. "He was going to be spending half of forever looking into the case files of this lawyer who disappeared last summer because some poor heartbroken girl thinks maybe he didn't run away and desert her and her mother after all. Maybe he was killed instead."

  "Is there any reason she thinks that?"

  "Not that Darrel knows. But the thing that makes it so sad is that her mother killed herself over it a couple of months ago, and the girl just can't accept it."

  Treya took a beat and sipped her tea. "And people say you're not really all that fun. How can that be?" She turned to him. "That heartening, upbeat story was what's made you feel better about the job?"

  "Talking to Darrel," Glitsky said.

  "Ah. The silver lining."

  "I mean, first, you've got to believe Charlie Bowen was a homicide, which there's no sign of, so why are you even looking?"

  "Charlie Bowen," Treya said. "Where do I know that name?"

  "He's the father. The missing person."

  "The lawyer? I knew him, Abe. He's the guy, Diz got all his files."

  "Our own Diz?"

  "Our own Diz." Treya gave his leg another squeeze. "Maybe Darrel ought to talk to him."

  31

  The next morning, Friday, May 4, Glitsky and Treya drove in to work together. Through the largesse of Clarence Jackman, Treya had a dedicated parking spot behind the jail that she considered perhaps the job's single greatest perk.

  Yesterday's high pressure front had scoured the sky clean and banished the marine layer halfway out to the Farallones, so the sun packed an unseasonable warmth. Though there was no breeze at all, some fluke of nature had delivered a fragrant and powerful olfactory blast from the city's main flower market around the corner. Treya, getting out on the passenger side, looked over the car's hood at her husband and said, "This day is too beautiful. Do you smell that? If we were truly evolved spirits, no way would we go in to work today."

  "No? What would we do instead?"

  "Whatever we wanted. Dance, sing, take the ferry to Sausalito."

  Glitsky met her in front of the car and took her hand as they started toward the Hall of Justice. "If we were truly evolved," he said, "we'd probably get fired. So, luckily, we're not."

  "Well, maybe you're not." She ceased walking, effectively stopping them both, and sniffed the air aggressively. "But I'm at least taking one extra minute here to enjoy this."

  "Smelling the roses, as it were."

  "You should try it. Close your eyes a second, breathe it in."

  Glitsky did as instructed, then opened his eyes. "Yep, roses," he said, "and then all that other stuff."

  When Glitsky opened the door to homicide's reception area, he was looking at Dismas Hardy, who was dressed for work in his suit and tie and looking at his watch. "Two minutes late," Hardy said. "What kind of example is that to set for your team?"

  "Treya held me up," he said. "We stopped in the parking lot to smell the flowers."

  "How were they?"

  "Really great. Flowerlike." Glitsky greeted the two clerks that sat at their desks and then swung open the door to the counter that divided the room, indicating that Hardy follow him in. Opening the door to his office, Glitsky asked, "Did we have an appointment?"

  "No."

  "I didn't think so."

  "But you called me last night, if you remember, which I bet you do. I didn't get in till too late to call you back. Something about Charlie Bowen?" Hardy took one of the chairs from against the back wall and pulled it up to sit on it.

  Glitsky got himself seated behind his desk. "His name got you down here first thing in the morning?"

  "Not really. I've got a hearing downstairs at ten anyway." Hardy crossed a leg. "So you're going to tell me they found his body?"

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Let's see. You're homicide. You call me about a guy who went missing ten months ago. Call me crazy, but I figure maybe he's suddenly become a homicide."

  "Nope. That's not it. Good guess, though."

  "Thank you. You want me to make another one?"

  "You could, or I could just tell you."

  "Okay. Let's go with that."

  Glitsky gave it to him in about ten sentences, at the end of which Hardy was frowning. "So your guy Bracco," he said, "wants to do what exactly?"

  "Find this diary."

  "Which may or may not exist?"

  "Right."

  "And then which may or may not have anything to do with Charlie's wife's death?"

  Glitsky shrugged his shoulders. "This isn't my idea, Diz. Treya just thought you might save Bracco some running around."

  "If I could, I'd be happy to. But we're talking like sixty large boxes of files, about a third of which we've already farmed out or returned to clients."

  "Right. I know."

  "Besides which," Hardy said, "the timing's wrong. If the wife died in February, I had the files in my office by mid-December. She couldn't have dropped the diary into any of them even if she wanted to. You want, though, I'll get one of my people to go through the boxes on everything we've got left, but I wouldn't get my hopes up."

  "That's what I told Darrel."

  "There you go," Hardy said, standing up. "Great minds. Oh, no, wait, that couldn't be it."

  Glitsky was picking up his telephone. "Get the door on your way out, would you?"

  Hardy had taken up the habit of his now-deceased mentor David Freeman and, whenever the opportunity presented itself, walked the fourteen blocks between his office on Sutter Street and the Hall of Justice. Today, his morning hearing having ended sooner than expected, he was making pretty good time-not that it was a race or an opportunity for exercise or anything like that-when he got to Mission Street. There, a well-dressed, elderly woman caught his eye and moved just a bit over to get in his path. She looked into his face, beamed at him, and said, "Pardon me."

  "Yes?"

  "Are you all right?"

  "I think so." She didn't look like it, but Hardy suddenly had no doubt that she was yet another in a city full of crazies.

  "Then you ought to smile."

  "Excuse me?"

  "A day like this, a handsome man like you ought to be smiling."

  "I wasn't?"

  "Not really, no. More like frowning. More like the whole world's on your shoulders."

  "Sorry," he stammered, trying to rearrange his expression. "Better?"

  "Much," the woman said. "You watch. It'll help. Have a nice day."

  After she disappeared into the crowd, Hardy stood for a long moment, unable to move. Catching his reflection in the store window next to him, he saw that the smile he'd dredged up had already faded completely away. Stepping all the way out of the foot traffic into the archway entrance to an ancient storefront, on an impulse he pulled his cell phone off his belt and punched in a number. "Hey," he said.

  "Hey yourself. This is a surprise. Is everything all right?"

  "Fine. Everything's fine. I just wondered what you were doing?"

  "When?"

  "Like, now."

  His wife's laugh tinkled through the phone. "Like now I'm about to get in my car and go eat a salad someplace. Why?"

  "Because I thought for a change of pace maybe you'd like to have some lunch with your husband."

  Hardy waited out the short pause.

  Then, "I would love to have some lunch with my husband. I think that's a great idea."

  "You're not too busy?"

>   "I've got two hours and change. Where were you thinking?"

  They decided on Tommy's Joynt, Hardy by cab and Frannie by car, since it was about midway between Frannie's office on Arguello and Hardy's downtown. Fifteen minutes after the phone call, they sat down in one of the booths, Hardy with a bowl of buffalo stew and a beer and Frannie with a French dip and Diet Coke.

  "You don't come to Tommy's Joynt and eat a salad," she said, biting into one of the place's homemade pickles. "I mean, it's legal and all, but it would be wrong."

  "It's not that I don't agree with you," Hardy said. "But if you really wanted a salad, we could have-"

  "Hey!" She put a hand over his. "We're here," she said. "This is the perfect spot right now. There couldn't be a better one."

  Hardy looked around and nodded. "No." He sighed. "You said it. It's perfect."

  Frannie cocked her head. "Dismas, are you all right?"

  "You're the second person who's asked me that in the last half hour, so apparently not."

  "The second one. Who else?"

  He told her about the lady at the corner of Mission.

  "You mean out of everybody walking down the street, she just stopped you and told you to smile?"

  "Right. But first she asked me if I was okay. That I looked like I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. Then after she left, I realized that that was pretty much the way I felt. I don't know why. I wasn't consciously down or anything. It's an absolutely glorious day…" He put down his fork, looked across at her. "Anyway, it hit me pretty good upside the head, almost like a message from on high."

  "Saying what?"

  "One thing, saying I ought to call you."

  "I'm glad you did."

  "Me too." He picked up his fork again, put it in the stew, stirred a minute. "I never thought I'd say this, but I think I'm having some trouble with this empty nest thing."

  She put her sandwich down and again covered his hand with hers. "Yeah."

  "And then I've been pretty pissed off at you for not being home when I get there, so I arrange not to be home when you are. Maybe I don't even consciously know I'm doing that, but I think that's what's been going on. It's wearing me down."

  "I know. It's wearing me down too." She brought a napkin up to her eye and dabbed at it. "I don't really miss them so much, you know. I mean, I don't want them living with us anymore, God knows. We did enough of that. I just don't seem to know what to do with myself, so I fill up all my time with work, and then when I come home and you're not there either…"

  Hardy finally got some of the great stew into his mouth, followed it with some Anchor Steam. "I'm thinking maybe we ought to reinstigate Date Night. Make it sacred again."

  "I think that's a great idea. Maybe even go wild and have two a week."

  "I would if you would."

  "Deal."

  She put her hand out over the table and Hardy shook it.

  An hour later, Hardy ascended the steps into the wide, marbled, circular foyer that marked the reception area of the law firm of Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, of which he was the managing partner. He marched up to the waist-high mahogany bullpen that demarked the territory of Phyllis, the firm's receptionist, and, obeying the finger she held up, waited while she placed a call to one of the other offices.

  When she finished her business, she turned to him with her usual expectant petulance. "I told an Inspector Bracco that you would be here at one o'clock," she said. "Which is when you told me that you would be here."

  "I know, Phyllis. I'm sorry. Something came up."

  "And your cell phone broke?"

  "You know, now that you mention it"-Hardy held his jacket down over the holster for his phone-"I've been looking all over for the damn thing. Have you seen it? Maybe I left it in my office somewhere. Or the car. I bet I left it charging in the car."

  She shook her head with an icy disdain. "He waited forty minutes."

  "I'm sure he did. Did he leave a number? We can get back to him."

  "Of course, but I wanted to be sure you were here."

  "As well you should, Phyllis. As well you should."

  "Would you like me to call him now? He may not be far away. It's only been twenty minutes, after all, since he left."

  Hardy considered that for a second. He had thought about driving down the Peninsula and getting some unscheduled time to ambush Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille on his Scholler appeal, but if Bracco was still close to the office, he was all but certain that it would be a short meeting. "Sure," he said, "call him back if he can make it."

  Phyllis started punching buttons. Hardy made it to the door of his office when his cell phone rang on his belt, stopping him in his tracks as he lifted the phone and looked at the display screen. The call was from his office's main number. His shoulders fell and he turned around to face her.

  Phyllis, her mouth set in disapproval, shook her head at him. "Maybe you left it charging in your car. Or maybe not."

  Busted.

  "I'll try to reach Inspector Bracco now," she said.

  Bracco could have been the poster child for the good homicide cop. He went about five foot ten, a hundred and seventy pounds of muscle. He wore a tailored camel-hair sport coat over a pair of brown slacks, a light tan dress shirt with a plain brown tie. Under a close-cropped head of straw-colored hair, gray eyes animated his square, ruddy, clean-shaven face.

  Now Bracco sipped a cup of freshly brewed coffee and sat comfortably in a leather chair by one of the windows that looked down on Sutter Street. This was in the more casual of the two seating areas that distinguished Hardy's office-the other, formal, more intimidating space with the Persian carpet, the Queen Anne chairs and lion's claw coffee table, complete with doily, claimed the area more or less in front of his large cherry desk.

  Hardy went to the twin of Bracco's chair and sat down. He began on a conciliatory note. "I'm sorry you had to wait last time you were here. There was some confusion about my schedule."

  Bracco turned up a palm, dismissing the apology. "You're doing me the favor, seeing me at all. I appreciate it."

  "Sure. But I told Abe it'd probably be pretty slim pickins."

  "That's what he said. He also said you offered to have one of your people go through Bowen's files, but that you didn't expect to find Mrs. Bowen's diary in them."

  "Only because she would have still been writing in it, I presume, when the files had already been removed here to our storage. Glitsky said you weren't even sure there actually was a diary."

  "No. Well, Jenna-Bowen's daughter-she's pretty sure there was a diary. Although I went through the house again this morning with a comb and nothing turned up."

  "Well." Hardy wasn't sure where he fit in this picture, but he didn't want to give Bracco the bum's rush after his wait earlier. Let the man at least finish his coffee. "I can't speak for the files we've already finished with, but if you want me to light a fire under this, we can probably get through the rest of them in a couple of days. I've just gotten back to the office, otherwise I would have had somebody on it already. Is there some kind of hurry I don't know about?"

  Bracco shook his head. "Just Jenna, to be honest with you. For the first few weeks after her mom's death, she was pretty much out of commission with grief. Now she's trying to process it, close the book one way or the other. If there's a diary and some clue…" He shrugged. "Anyway, so no, there's no real hurry, but I feel like a owe her another look if it's that important to her. And it is."

  Hardy sat back and crossed his legs. "So I take it you had the mom's case?"

  "Right."

  "And you were okay with the coroner's call?"

  "Pretty much."

  "Did you see anything or talk to anybody that made you think it wasn't a suicide?"

  "Generally, no. I mean, her husband had vanished a few months before. She'd made plans to go to Italy this summer, but the general feeling was that that was to try to put the desertion behind her, not to party. Most of her friends, and I talked
to a lot of them, described her as devastated and depressed."

  "So what's her daughter's take?"

  "I think pretty much the usual. Her mother just wouldn't have done that. That's not who she was. Then she points to the Europe trip. Hanna-the mom-was evidently pretty frugal. Tight as a drum, Jenna says. She would never have bought tickets to Italy and not used them. She would have killed herself afterward."

  Hardy allowed a small grin. "I know some people like that. Although putting off your own suicide until after you get your money's worth might be stretching it. And that's it? That's the daughter's reason she thinks it wasn't suicide?"

  "Originally, basically, yes." Bracco drank some coffee, stared out the window for a moment.

  Hardy had the impression he was trying to decide if he should say any more and thought he could help him along. "That's a lot of disclaimer you're throwing around. Originally. Basically. Do you have some doubts yourself? Is that why you're digging here?"

  Bracco's mouth pursed as he continued to wrestle with whatever it was. "It was their rope, she slung it over a beam in the garage, got up on a little step-up ladder, and dropped off."

  "But…?"

  Noticing that his coffee was finished, Bracco came forward in his chair and put the cup and saucer on the low table in front of him. Now he looked straight across at Hardy. "None of this worried me too much at the time, you understand. I had three other actives. This one went to the coroner and went away in a couple of days. It wasn't until Jenna called me back a few days ago that I looked at it again."

  "And?"

  "And her neck was broken." He paused, then made his point more clearly. "Regular slipknot, no hangman's noose, fifteen-inch fall."

  "You're thinking she should have strangled."

  "Most people, those same conditions, that's what happens."

  "But not always? Did you ask Strout?" This was the city's medical examiner, who'd ruled the death a suicide.

  "He says he's seen a few where the fall and the weight breaks the neck."

  "Well, there you go."

  "Nobody who weighed as little as she did, though. A hundred and five pounds." Hardy made no response; by itself this was interesting, certainly, but not conclusive. "And then," Bracco went on, "there was the other thing Jenna didn't think about originally, but remembers now."