The Ophelia Cut

by John Lescroart

  “You didn’t specifically ask about the rape?”

  “No, sir,” Brady said. “I was afraid if I started with that, it might end the conversation. There’s a lot she might be able to tell us that doesn’t have anything to do with the rape.”

  “I’m with you on that. Keep her talking. Maybe she’ll get loose enough to tell us everything, and this whole privilege thing goes away.”

  “But,” Sher said, “if she doesn’t admit she was raped . . .”

  “Then it never happened.”

  Brady straightened up and slapped his palms on his thighs. “I think it was this girl, Abe. Both of us do.”

  “You haven’t asked her?”

  “If she was raped on Saturday night?” Sher asked. “No. But she did tell us she’d seen him recently.”

  “And she said?”

  “She went quiet for about an hour,” Brady said. “Well, a minute that seemed like an hour. And then she said she had a drink with him at Perry’s on Saturday. He wanted to get back together, and she went there to try and let him down easy. That’s the last time she saw him.”

  “No mention of rape?”

  Brady shook his head. “None.”

  Glitsky chewed at his cheek. “What are the odds she killed him?”

  “Essentially zero,” Sher said.

  “She is not remotely a guy,” Brady said. “And I like our guy with the club.”

  “So maybe the rape the night before had nothing to do with the murder?”

  Sher made a face. “Do you believe that, Abe?”

  “No. Not really. But if it was this woman you talked to yesterday, and she won’t acknowledge it, I think we’re stuck.”

  Brady sat back, frustration all over him. “I realize I’m a Neanderthal, but I really don’t understand why they won’t acknowledge it. I mean, they’re the victims. They’re not going to get in trouble, saying what happened to them.”

  “They might,” Sher replied, “if their rapist decides to shut them up before they testify.”

  “Or,” Glitsky added, “if their rapist turns up murdered. Then they’ve got a motive to have killed him.”

  “While we’re at it,” Sher said, “it gives somebody else a motive. Like her boyfriend, for example, or her father, who already went down and beat up on Jessup after he assaulted the daughter the first time. But that all goes away—the motive, I mean—if the rape is never acknowledged.”

  “You’re saying you think it’s the father?” Glitsky asked.

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far. But if it is, it would give her a reason to deny the rape.”

  Brady said, “Then why’d she go to the center in the first place?”

  Sher shrugged. “Maybe that was her first reaction, all freaked out, not knowing what to do, and remember, that was before Jessup was killed . . . But then she finds out he’s dead, and it’s a brand-new ball game.”

  “Still,” Glitsky said, “let’s not forget that we don’t have the rape. Period. So all this is pure conjecture. What’s the father look like?”

  Brady, who’d started bobbing his head in agreement about halfway through Sher’s hypotheticals, said, “Not to get all excited about things, but he pretty much fits the description of our guy with the club.”

  Glitsky narrowed his eyes. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Not really,” Brady said. “Not even a little.”

  “What’s this guy’s name?” Glitsky asked.

  “McGuire,” Sher replied. “Moses McGuire. He runs a bar out in the Avenues.”

  GLITSKY DIDN’T EVEN trust himself to talk to Treya.

  After Sher and Brady left his office, he gave it five minutes and then, his stomach churning, moseyed out toward the general area of the restroom and kept on going, first to the world’s slowest elevator, then down to the lobby and out the Hall of Justice’s back door, past the morgue and the jail and into the parking lot.

  Fifteen minutes later, going on instinct alone because rational thought felt too dangerous, he drove almost all the way back to his duplex, but after getting to Third Avenue on Geary, he realized where he’d been heading and turned right and drove the short block up to Clement. Here, a small duplex building, typical in this part of town, sat a couple of doorways down from the corner. At this time of the morning, parking turned out to be no problem, a sign of if not actual divine intervention then at least some kind of cosmic approbation.

  It didn’t escape Glitsky’s notice that the relationship between his eighty-five-year-old father, Nat, and his wife, Sadie, was a direct consequence of the events that had led to the Dockside Massacre. Six years before, the thugs killed by Glitsky, Hardy, Moses, Gina, and John Holiday at Pier 70 had robbed Sam Silverman’s pawnshop, shooting him to death, leaving Sadie widowed. That a loving second marriage for both had bloomed from this barren soil was a blessing neither had anticipated and both treasured.

  Abe touched the mezuzah on their doorpost, then pressed the bell.

  “Abraham.” Nat’s iceberg-blue eyes—which Glitsky had inherited—sparkled at the sight of his son in the doorway.

  “Nathaniel.”

  The old man stepped forward and reached up with both hands, then brought his son’s face down for a kiss. “It is so good to see you.”

  “You, too, Pops. Sadie okay?”

  “Still a wonder of the world. Are you staying more than a minute? Come on up and find out.”

  Nat and Sadie had a nice-sized, east-facing outdoor patio off the kitchen at the back of their flat, which, because of the weather, they could enjoy only about thirty days out of the year. Today was one of those days. They had a large Cinzano umbrella open and tilted for some shade, and the three of them sat at the mesh-metal picnic table, sipping tea in dainty cups. They fell into discussing plans for Passover, coming up in two days, which they’d be celebrating at Abe’s place.

  Treya and Sadie had already worked out most of those logistics, and at last Nat said, “I’m sure it will be a seder to end all seders. Moses himself may never have had such a seder. But I’m not sure that’s what brought Abraham over here this morning.” He leveled a piercing look at his son.

  Abe put down his cup. “I can’t believe you just brought up Moses.”

  “I should bring up somebody else? Passover, the Exodus, Moses. They all go together.”

  “No, it’s not— Never mind that. It’s just a problem I’m having. The guy’s name is Moses.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  Abe laid out the basics, omitting his involvement—or anyone else’s—in the Dockside Massacre. “The point is, I know this guy pretty well. We’ve done things together. He’s Dismas Hardy’s brother-in-law, and though he’s not my favorite person, he’s not a bad guy. And now, with no proof at all, I’m ninety percent certain that he’s committed this homicide. So for personal reasons, I don’t want him to be arrested.”

  “Do you think he was justified?” Sadie asked. “After all, if the man he killed raped his daughter . . .”

  “You may want to,” Abe said, “but you can’t just go murdering people who hurt your children.”

  Sadie clucked and sighed. “I understand wanting to, though.”

  “Everybody understands it,” Abe said. “But it’s against the law.”

  “If that’s so clear,” Nat asked, “what’s your problem?”

  “I’ve got a few of them, Pops. First is, I’m more or less sworn to uphold the law. If I don’t do that, what have I been thinking all these years? More immediately, there are my inspectors.”

  “What about them?”

  Abe paused, twirling his teacup. “It might seem straightforward enough. But this is very hard.”

  “We’ve got time, Abraham. Take all you need.”

  Abe let out another breath. “I find myself wanting them to go slow on the pursuit of this rape. If the victim—that’s Moses’s daughter—doesn’t admit it, then it never officially happened. Needless to say, once they really pick up the scent and see
it as a motive for the homicide, my inspectors will be pushing her hard to admit it. Talk to her friends, go to her work, pull her phone records, the whole shebang. On the other hand, if I tell them to back off . . .” He stopped, sighed again. “If my role is to tell them not to do their job—which is identifying this killer—then what am I doing in my job?”

  “Could you just,” his father asked, “what is the word—recuse yourself from this one case?”

  “And not say why? Not give a reason?”

  “If he’s your friend . . .”

  Abe was shaking his head. “Then I’d really be saying, ‘I know who you’re looking for, but I can’t tell you.’ I don’t think that would fly on gilded wings, Pops.”

  “No. Probably not.”

  “Besides, if I back off this case because he’s my friend, whoever takes over will have to lean over the other way and arrest McGuire, just to prove he’s being impartial and not doing me a favor.”

  “Would it be so bad to let Moses get to trial?” Nat asked.

  Abe scratched at the table. Moses going to trial could in itself become a minefield. He could imagine any number of scenarios where a stressed-out or exhausted Moses might slip and say something incriminating about the massacre to a fellow inmate, an appointed attorney. He didn’t think it likely, but there was a remote possibility that Moses might be tempted to trade his terrible secret—their terrible secret—for leniency, some kind of a plea deal. Glitsky couldn’t mention any of this to his father. Instead, he said, “One thing, it might cost me a best friend.”

  “You don’t think Dismas would understand? If you were just doing your job? You’ve been on opposite sides other times and pulled through.”

  “Maybe, but this feels different. This is Frannie’s only brother.”

  Sadie joined in. “But you don’t know for sure that it was Moses’s daughter who was raped. Didn’t you say that?”

  “Right.”

  “And even if she was, that doesn’t mean Moses is the killer. I’m not trying to give you an excuse to do something you’re uncomfortable with,” she said, “but as long as you don’t know for sure that this rape occurred, then the real answer—the true answer, if anybody asks you—is ‘I don’t know.’ You’re not withholding a fact you know to be true.”

  Nat produced a dry chuckle. “Note the tortured Talmudic rationalization,” he said. “Where, supposedly, I am the scriptural scholar in this family.”

  Sadie smiled at her husband. “You’re around it enough, it rubs off. But Abe, what about that?”

  “It’s fine as far as it goes, Sadie. There’s also the point that if we got anything by abusing or even compromising a privileged communication, it would be inadmissible anyway. So I can tell myself I’m actually helping the case, if they can find a way to make it.”

  “I hear a ‘but,’ ” Nat said.

  “That’s the problem, Pops,” Glitsky said. “I hear a whole chorus of ’em.”

  GLITSKY FOUND A parking place on Tenth Avenue, around the corner from the Little Shamrock. As was the case when he’d dropped in on his father and Sadie, he wasn’t clear in his own head what had brought him here.

  Whatever it was, it was to no avail, since the front door was locked, the interior dark.

  Glitsky’s lips went tight in frustration. On the window, the hours of operation were listed as noon to two A.M. He checked his watch—eleven-twenty—and reasoned that somebody should be coming around to open the place any minute now.

  With his hands in his pockets and one foot propped against the wall, he watched the traffic in the glaring sunlight while he checked his watch five times in the space of three minutes.

  Ninth Avenue near Irving Street, just south of the Shamrock, held its own nicely amid the heady bazaar of available foodstuffs that you’d find in the Mission or on Clement Street. Following some vestigial memory of smell and taste—before Glitsky stopped drinking, before children, when they were young cops together, he and Hardy sometimes hung out at the Shamrock, went around the corner for food, and returned to the bar for darts and philosophy and nightcaps—Glitsky found himself strolling, an activity not in his usual repertoire, and enjoying himself in the unaccustomed warmth, the air redolent with exotic spices and great smells: Italian, Thai, Middle Eastern, American diners and delis, juiceries, a brew pub, and a coffee shop.

  And then there it was, almost exactly as he’d remembered it, the Russian bakery that sold piroshki—the savory, meat-filled, doughnut-like pastry that he hadn’t tasted in probably two decades. The woman behind the counter, who hadn’t mastered English in her own twenty-plus years of service, was nevertheless sweet and cooperative and understood enough of Glitsky’s pointing that he wound up with what he wanted: two of them and a bottle of sparkling water.

  He sat, the lone customer, on one of the three stools in front of an eating counter in the tiny front window. Gradually, the yawning emptiness of uncertainty in his gut gave way to the satisfaction of the peasant comfort food, and he found the urgency of Moses McGuire had receded to a bearable level.

  It was a simple equation. None of the privileged information from the Rape Crisis Counseling Center could be used in court. Therefore, the only responsible action, from Glitsky’s perspective, was to tell his inspectors to follow the evidence but evaluate the case on what they could prove. Which was what he was doing.

  The letter of the law.

  PART

  THREE

  17

  AT A FEW minutes past noon, an exhausted Dismas Hardy stood on the front steps of the Hall of Justice, clogged as they often were with the dregs of humanity, talking to his sister-in-law on his cell phone. “How is he?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid he’s going to live.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “More than you’d think. Do you realize what this is doing to Brittany?”

  “What ‘what’ is doing to Brittany?”

  “Dismas, she feels like she killed this boy.”

  “Don’t say that. I mean it, Susan, don’t say it out loud, even to me. Or anybody else. Brittany had nothing to do with that.”

  “She thinks she did, if Moses in fact—”

  “Susan. Stop! Really. We’re not talking about that. You remember what I told you last night. It’s off-limits, period. And we do know what Moses did. You told me he said he’d gone fishing, so he went fishing.”

  “Brittany doesn’t believe that. And I’m not sure I do, either. You know the last time he went fishing before Sunday? Got to be a couple of years, at least.”

  “That’s the way fishing is. You go a year, two years off, then you go out again. Especially if something’s happened to your little girl and you need to cool off and think about things.”

  “Do you believe that’s what he did?”

  “I’m going to believe him, yes,” Hardy lied. “Brittany’s got to try to believe him, too.”

  “I don’t see how she’s going to get to that. After what Moses did to him when he hurt her last time. Now she wishes she’d never told us.”

  “As I recall, she didn’t tell you about that, either, did she?”

  “No.”

  “So how many times does he get to hurt her before she tells somebody and he gets stopped?”

  “She didn’t think her father would kill him.”

  “You don’t think he deserved it?”

  “I don’t know what he deserved. I can’t think about him being killed. It’s too confusing.”

  “It is? You’re not relieved that he can’t hurt your daughter anymore? She’s not okay with that?” Hardy drew a breath and lowered his voice. “Susan, listen to me. This guy was a plague upon the earth. And now he’s gone. For you or Brittany to feel bad about that is a waste of your time and energy. What you’ve got to remember now is that this is a strategic issue. Brittany must not tell anybody else—and I mean anybody—about what happened to her on Saturday night. If she needs to talk about it, she can go back down to the center, see a ps
ychologist, whatever it takes, so long as it’s privileged.”

  “You’re protecting her father.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “That sounds like you believe he did it.”

  “No, I said it’s strategic. In case he did, we don’t want to supply the DA with a reason.”

  In a different voice, Susan said, “Dismas, how am I going to keep living with him?”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Of course.” Then, “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. Whatever he did, I’m sure he thought he was justified.”

  “Justified like before? I mean the other thing.”

  “A little bit, yes.”

  “And that’s what matters? That you feel justified? That’s enough?”

  “No. Obviously not. The last time, we were out of options. We were going to be killed if we didn’t do something. This time, maybe, just maybe, Moses read this guy as a threat to Brittany’s life. He’d already beaten her and raped her. Moses didn’t want to find out what would happen next.”

  “What if he gets mad at me one day? Or one of the girls? What if all of a sudden I think he’s dangerous to us?”

  “Do you think that now?”

  “I don’t know. When he’s drinking, maybe. Which seems to have picked up right where it ended.”

  “Yes, well, I agree that the drinking has to stop.”

  “Even if it does,” Susan said.

  “What then?”

  He heard her sigh. “I just don’t know.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Back home. Both of us. He’s sleeping. The bar’s locked up.”

  “Don’t worry about the bar,” Hardy said.

  “I won’t. There’s a lot more to worry about than the damn bar.”

  BRITTANY OPENED HER eyes.

  Sunshine outdoors, the window open a crack, the breeze, without any nip, fluffing the bright yellow curtains in her bedroom. What day was it?

  Her head rested on a man’s chest, which was covered by a lightweight green sweater. In her sleep, she’d thrown an arm over him.

  “She moves,” his voice whispered.

  Leaving her head where it was, she closed her eyes again, aware that she was wearing all of her clothes from the day before. Or was it two days?