“Something totally unrelated to Brittany?”
“I don’t know. I’ll keep saying I don’t know as long as I don’t know. All I do know is that I didn’t kill him. You can believe me or not, I don’t care. But it’s the truth.”
“Really, this time, huh?”
Moses met his gaze. “Yep.”
“Well, thanks for sharing,” Hardy said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Absolutely unconvinced, although believing with all his heart that Moses had at last come up with the explanation—weak and in many ways indefensible as it was—that his client was going to live with from now on, Hardy stood up, walked across to the admitting door, and knocked to call the bailiff.
BY MID-JUNE, THE conspiracy racketeering charges against Tony Solaia, his fellow bartender Rona Ranken, and their boss, Tom Hedtke, had fallen apart. Their Ukrainian accusers, Igor Povaliy and Vadim Gnatyuk, hoping to parlay their testimony into a couple of special work permits, had woven a web of fraudulent detail that they weren’t able to keep up with. The cases against the Burning Rome defendants were settled with light fines. Povaliy and Gnatyuk were deported back to the Ukraine. Burning Rome reopened, although its prime-time mixologist had moved on to the full-time position at the Little Shamrock once held by its owner, Moses McGuire.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that Tony changed the entire ethic of the place—after all, the Shamrock was a tiny and unassuming Irish dart bar that had been at its current location since 1893—but on the weekends, the crowds picked up dramatically, while the average age of the clientele dropped by about ten years. Tony was pouring drinks whose names McGuire wouldn’t have known if he’d been there to see them. New ingredients—infusions of herbs, fruits, homemade bitters, and digestifs—lined the bottom shelf behind the bar. Wheat beer appeared on tap for the first time. They went from the old jukebox to a downloadable stream of music controlled from behind the bar and ten decibels louder.
Stuck in his jail cell, McGuire saw no reason to stay involved. Whatever happened to him with this trial, Moses was in his sixties. Maybe it was time for him to pass along the day-to-day bar duties to someone with more energy and even, dare he think it, more charisma. There was no arguing with the bottom line, and gross sales at the bar in Tony’s first six weeks were up 22 percent.
What recession?
They still had the back dart room, wide with low ceilings, and it was packed to the seams. Brittany was back there now, ten-thirty on Saturday night, playing darts on a team with her mother—by no means a regular before McGuire’s arrest—against a team of her cousin and Rebecca’s new boyfriend, Ben Feinstein. With the encroachments of unwanted celebrity, Brittany had retreated to her family—making amends with the Beck and Ben, then matchmaking and watching things between them start to develop nicely, albeit slowly. Susan was riding the rush, believing her husband innocent for the first time. She’d called Brittany to share the news, see if they might celebrate in some way, and the bar was where they’d all wound up.
Susan had just retrieved her darts and was turning around when she was blinded by a flashbulb in the hall leading back to the main bar; at the same time, a woman screamed out in the front, and a tremendous crash seemed to shake the whole building.
The room they were in contained four dartboards and comfortably held about twenty people, about half the number trying to push into the narrow opening to the hall.
“Brittany!” a male voice called out as another flash exploded. “Brittany McGuire!” Another flash.
Susan reached for her daughter, got hold of her arm, then yelled, “Ben, grab the Beck! Back this way.”
Someone had started turning the lights on and off, but Susan didn’t need them. Although the mob was pushing in the opposite direction—toward the hallway that led to the main bar—she held on to Brittany and kept moving steadily toward the door at the back, always locked while the bar was open, that led outside to a covered, fenced-in storage area where they kept kegs and cases of beer, snacks, liquor.
Susan had her master set of keys and got the door open. Another eight or ten customers followed them outside as Susan switched on the floodlight.
“What’s going on?”
“Is everybody all right?”
“What happened up front?”
More screams, the sounds of panic, too many bodies in too small a space. And somewhere, off in the night, the sound of sirens.
27
THE FIGHT EVIDENTLY started with one of the drunk photographers hassling a cluster of attractive women for pictures. The eventual recipe for the melee included lots of inebriated young adults, an overcrowded, overheated, overloud bar, and several chivalrous testosterone-laden boyfriends. No one seemed to remember who threw the first punch, and things got out of hand in a hurry. The cops came and helped restore order and sent a bunch of people home.
“That guy is the kiss of death,” Hardy said.
In bright warm sunlight the next morning, he stood on the sidewalk in front of the Shamrock, hands on hips, staring with disbelief at the plywood where the front window used to be. The Beck had called the Hardys at nine-thirty and given them the short version. Hardy, as the unjailed partner in the Shamrock, felt they ought to go over and check out the damage, the makeshift repair.
“He works at Burning Rome,” Hardy went on, “the ABC busts the place. He works here, they have a riot and break the damn window. And that’s a hard window. I’ve thrown people up against that window and it didn’t break.”
“Well, it did last night. But it wasn’t Tony,” Frannie said. “The Beck said it was the photographers.”
“Now you’re going to bat for him.”
“Just correcting the record.”
“Okay. But who’s the lawyer here?”
She took his hand. “You are. Seen enough?”
He stepped forward, knocked at the plywood a couple of times. It seemed to be holding. “If he’s trying to open at noon, he’ll be here soon enough, and I don’t think I want to see him. I’ve had enough drama for one weekend.”
She started leading him back to their car. “I’m just afraid this is going to start another round.”
“Of what?”
“ ‘Of what,’ he asks. You’d think they’d just leave her alone.”
“Actually, no, I wouldn’t think so. Beautiful rape victim. Father on trial for killing her assailant. Now provoking a range war among the paparazzi. Who even knew there were paparazzi here? Or that many of them?”
“Well, there are going to be more now. And she hasn’t even testified yet. Imagine if they found out she was dating a protected witness? It would be a free-for-all. She’d have to go into hiding.”
“To say nothing of Tony, whose cover would be blown. That might not be such a bad thing. At least for Brittany, maybe for all concerned.” Hardy shook his head. “You know what I don’t understand?”
“Quantum physics?”
“Besides that. And don’t say string theory.”
“You don’t understand string theory?”
“Not so much. But what I really don’t understand is the frenzy. I mean, Brittany’s a pretty girl, okay, but a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of pretty?”
“That’s naked. In Playboy.”
“They think all normal pretty young women want to be in Playboy?”
“A lot of them do.”
“Am I a prude because I’m glad Brittany doesn’t?”
“You’re not a prude, period. It’s not about that, anyway. It’s about privacy. All that’s happened to her, did she ask for any of it? She’s going along with her life, and suddenly, everybody wants to take her picture, all her ex-boyfriends want to talk about how promiscuous she is, what a slut she was in college. Next thing you know, somebody’s going to turn up with a sex tape.”
“Please, God, no. For Susan’s sake, at least, not to mention Mose’s.”
A shrug. “Beck said she couldn’t rule it out.”
“Could Brittany have been that du
mb?”
Frannie shot him an arch look. “Have you checked out Facebook lately?”
“Not exactly my thing. Is she on that?”
“Everybody’s on that, Diz. Everybody’s stalking everybody else. Hopefully, Brittany’s posts aren’t too extreme. Probably not, or they would have come out already, but there’s no sense of anybody’s private business. And not just there. Why wouldn’t you want to be naked in Playboy for money if you’re already naked on the Web for free?”
“How about if you just don’t want to be naked in public?”
Frannie smiled, stopped, and kissed his cheek. “You are such a sweet little Victorian,” she said.
AFTER THE RIOT, Susan and Brittany stayed at the bar to help clean up. They found the plywood—used many years before on the same front window, so a perfect fit—in the back storage area. When they finished, they went home to Susan’s together.
So this morning, Susan had let her daughter sleep in. Now, closing in on noon, Brittany sat at the kitchen table in running shorts and a Cal T-shirt. Susan had opened the windows to let in the warm breeze, and Brittany was finishing a cheese quesadilla. “The only thing,” Susan was saying, “is if your father didn’t, who did? I want to believe him. I don’t think he’d lie to me. But if he really thought I was going to leave him . . .”
“Did you say you were going to?”
“Not in so many words. Maybe I gave him that impression. If he could do that in cold blood, I thought I might leave. I didn’t know. But if he didn’t . . .”
“Yesterday you absolutely believed it.”
“I know. But sometimes you can want something so badly that you make yourself believe it. I’ve thought a little more about it since then. How reasonable is it that somebody else was there at almost exactly the same time for the same reason?”
Brittany swallowed, lifted her coffee mug. “The same-time part is a little hard to believe,” she said, “but not impossible. Exactly what time he died is a real window. But why for the same reason? There could have been any number of reasons.”
“You mean reasons not having to do with you?”
Brittany nodded.
Susan said, “Wouldn’t that be wonderful. But how?”
“How could any of those reasons come up when we were all thinking it was Daddy, no matter what? When he told you it wasn’t, well if that were true, it changed everything, didn’t it? Do you want to know what Tony thinks?”
Susan sat back. “Sure.”
“Well, you know the bogus charge he’s had hanging over his head forever that they finally dropped? Needless to say, he got familiar with how the whole thing came about, the sting and everything. His lawyers, including Uncle Diz, were all over it from the beginning, but there was nothing they could do.”
“You mean about the sting?”
“Right. The sting was legal, as far as it went.”
Susan’s brow furrowed. “We’re still talking about your father?”
“Wait. You’ll see. The point is that the sting was pretty much the brainchild of guess who? Liam Goodman. Who was . . .”
Susan leaned forward, all interest, elbows on the table. “Rick Jessup’s boss.”
“Correct. And you know why Mr. Goodman wanted the sting to happen? To take the heat off one of his donors, maybe his main donor, Jon Lo, who is in the Korean massage parlor business, also known as sex slavery. The city was cracking down on him until it got knocked sideways by the whole underage-drinking issue.”
“Okay, but I don’t see how—”
“I’m getting there. Really. Anyway”—she took a breath—“Tony was a policeman in New York before he came out here. With the Vice team, and one of the things he dealt with was human trafficking and sexual slavery.”
“We’re getting a long way from your father.”
“Not really. It turns out that when these people have an enemy they need to get rid of, they fly somebody in from China or Korea or wherever. They land in Montreal, drive across the border, catch a flight down to New York, rent a car, drive to the address they’ve been given, kill whoever it is they’ve been contracted for, drive back to the airport, and catch the next plane out of New York back to Asia, sometimes by way of Vancouver.”
“This happens a lot?”
“Whenever it needs to. Often enough that Tony knows about it.”
“Did they ever catch any of these people?”
“Never in the act. Once in a while, the feds will burn down a whole gang, like the Flying Dragons and the New York Ghost Shadows.”
“How do you know these names?”
“Tony. That’s how they found out the way it worked. And you know the really interesting thing about this, at least as far as Daddy is concerned?”
“What’s that?”
“These men who fly in from Asia? They can’t bring guns or knives on the airplanes, right? So they tend to use other things. Their hands. Rope.” She paused. “Blunt objects.”
“And so Tony’s theory is . . . ?”
“It’s not exactly a theory. He doesn’t know any details. Maybe none of it relates. But here in the city, we’ve got Jon Lo into sexual slavery, connected to Liam Goodman and Rick Jessup. Maybe Rick did something to get on Lo’s wrong side. We know what kind of person Rick was. Maybe the timing was just really unlucky for Daddy.”
Susan pushed herself back from the table. She crossed her arms over her chest, let out a breath. “Do you think there could be something to that?”
“I don’t know, Mom. But if Daddy didn’t kill him, somebody else did, and this is at least an alternative.”
“Have you mentioned it to Uncle Diz?”
Brittany let out a brittle laugh. “Mom, I barely finished telling you. And there isn’t much to tell him, is there? There’s no proof.”
“He doesn’t need proof,” Susan said. “The DA needs proof. All Uncle Diz needs, all your father needs, is doubt.”
IT TOOK TWO days for Hardy’s advice to sink in.
On Sunday, Glitsky looked in the mirror.
Now on this beautiful afternoon, clean-shaven, Glitsky sat on the landing that overlooked his small backyard while his wife buzzed his head. Hardy might have his own professional barber, but Treya worked just fine for Abe. Zach and Rachel and a couple of the neighbor kids had some kind of intrigue going around the play structure below. For the briefest of moments, and for the first time in about three months, he considered that all was right with the world.
“So you’re going to do it?” she asked him.
“I’m leaning in that direction, but I wanted to clear it with you, see how Wes would take it.”
“Wes will not be thrilled, but in that flinty heart of yours, you already know that. You also know you don’t have to clear things with me.”
“Okay, get your opinion, then.”
“Should you testify for the defense?”
“That’s the question.”
“How much trouble could you get in?”
Glitsky’s lips went up a fraction of an inch. “More than being fired, you mean?”
“You weren’t fired. Lapeer was going to demote you, so you retired.”
“Semantics.”
“Not really. Not exactly. If you’d been fired, they wouldn’t be throwing you a retirement dinner next month.”
“Those things are pretty sarcastic.”
“Just because they say sarcastic things about you doesn’t mean the event is ironic. You don’t get roasted if they don’t want to honor you. And your service.”
“Nice of you to say so, but it’s pretty pro forma. You put in your thirty-plus years, they got to do something.”
Treya switched off the clippers. “I’m not going to argue about whether you are held in high esteem by the great majority of your colleagues. You got caught in some political cross fire between Lapeer and Goodman and didn’t feel you could fight back because of Moses and your connection to him. But that does not negate your whole career, and it doesn’t say one damn
negative thing about your character, which is unimpeachable. Can you get that through your skull?”
Glitsky breathed in and out for a moment. “Are you mad at me?”
“Almost. I think if you have the chance, you ought to take the stand and say what really happened. They rushed to judgment. You didn’t go running to Diz. You didn’t alert Moses to anything. You never talked to either of them. Give them your phone records. You wanted to follow protocol, that’s all. The chief saw an opportunity to make some political hay, and your inspectors probably could have built a better case if they’d taken a few more days. If they’re more interested in politics than in getting it straight, why should the jury believe them? All that’s true, right? It’s true and it helps Moses, which is also in your best interest, isn’t it?”
“Except I’ve built a life around not letting murderers get off.”
“He’s not a murderer until he’s proven guilty.”
“Not really, Trey. He’s a murderer right after he murders somebody.”
“Maybe he didn’t.”
“Please. That’s not in any real dispute.” He reached back and patted her hand, resting on his shoulder. “Even if it’s somehow in my best interest for him to get off, and I’m not denying that, it goes against the grain to testify against my people.”
“Vi Lapeer is not your people. She’s a politician.”
“And Brady? And Sher?”
“You’re not saying one bad word against them. And you know our little semantic difference about whether you were fired or you retired?”
“Vaguely. It rings a bell.”
“Just have Diz ask you about that, straight out. ‘Mr. Glitsky, did you in fact resign after this egregious display of obstructionism and political cronyism by the chief of police?’ And your answer, of course, is yes, which is the literal truth. You were not fired. You quit after a distinguished career. Who’d have the high ground then?”
After a minute, Glitsky nodded thoughtfully. “I’d prefer it, I think,” he said, “if he addressed me as ‘Lieutenant.’ ”
28
MONDAY MORNING, 9:18. Twelve minutes until court convened.
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