“Okay,” Glitsky said. “What’s the second thing?”
“I’m afraid it’s another non-PC moment.”
“I can handle it,” Glitsky said. “What?”
“Women don’t shoot themselves very often to begin with. And if they do, it’s not in the head. They won’t disfigure themselves. It just doesn’t happen.”
Suddenly Glitsky thought back to the suicide of Loretta Wager, the former senator from California who had been his lover and the mother of his daughter Elaine. She had shot herself in the heart. Becker was right, he thought. These were both indefensible sexist generalizations that no doubt would collapse under rigorous debate. That did not stop them, however, from being potentially—even probably—true.
“So you think it was Hanover?”
“I don’t know. Cuneo seemed to take it as a working theory. The gun was kind of under him.”
“What do you mean, kind of?”
“Well, here, you can see.” Becker reached into his inside pocket and withdrew a stack of photographs. “My partner brought these over to the photo lab as soon as they opened. They made two copies and I gave Cuneo the other, but I’ve still got the negatives if you want a set.” Shuffling through them, he got the one he wanted. “Here you go.”
Glitsky studied the grainy picture—shadows in darkness. It was a close-up of something he couldn’t recognize at first glance.
Becker helped him out, reaching over. “That’s the body there along the top, and the end of the arm—the hand became disattached. But you can see there, up against the body, that’s the gun.”
“So not exactly under him?”
“No. Just like you see there. Kind of against the side and tucked in a little.”
“And he was the one in the back here, by the hall? Beyond where the woman was?”
“Yeah,” Becker said. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m just wondering, if they had hoses going in here . . .”
“For a while.”
“Okay. I’m just thinking maybe the gun was on the rug and the force of the hose hitting it pushed it back against him. Tucked under, as you say.”
Becker didn’t seem offended by the suggestion. “No, I don’t suppose we can rule that out. But it’s not the most obvious explanation for how the gun got there.”
Glitsky scratched at his cheek. Becker had been up front with him about his and Cuneo’s investigation. Although it hadn’t been his original plan, he saw no reason now to try and conceal his motive. “Well, as I said, Hanover was a friend of the mayor. She doesn’t like the idea that he killed himself, to say nothing of his girlfriend. She asked me to take a look.”
Bemused, Becker stood still a moment, shaking his head. Finally: “If that’s what you’ve got to do, I wouldn’t want to have your job.”
Nodding, Glitsky said, “Sometimes I’m not too sure I want it either.”
3
Dismas Hardy, managing partner of the law firm of Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, had his feet up on his desk. His suit coat hung over the back of his chair. His shoes were off, his tie was undone, the collar of his shirt unbuttoned. He was taking an after-lunch break from a not-very-strenuous day and reading randomly from a book he’d recently purchased, called Schott’s Original Miscellany.
Being a fact freak, Hardy considered it one of the most fascinating books he’d come across in recent years, containing as it did all sorts of nonessential but critical information, such as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria), the ten-point Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness (from talc to diamond), the names of the Apostles, and 154 pages of other very cool stuff. He was somewhat disappointed to see that for some obscure reason it didn’t include St. Dismas as the Patron Saint of Thieves and Murderers, but otherwise the diminutive tome was a pure delight, and certainly worthy of his nonbillable time.
He was poring over the Degrees of Freemasonry when the phone buzzed at his elbow. He marked his place, sighed and lifted the receiver, knowing from the blinking line button that it was his receptionist/secretary, Phyllis, the superefficient, loyal, hardworking and absolutely trying human being who viewed her role as gatekeeper to his office as a vocation decreed by God. She’d filled the same position for Hardy’s predecessor, David Freeman, and was no more replaceable as a fixture in the Sutter Street law offices than the phones themselves.
“Phyllis,” he said. “Did I ask you to hold my calls?”
He loved that he could make her pause. Mostly he did this by answering with a nonlawyerly “Yo,” but sometimes, for variety’s sake, he’d come at her from another angle. Yahoo, living large.
“Sir?”
“I’m not accusing you. I’m just asking.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, then. What’s up?”
“Deputy Chief Glitsky is here to see you.”
“In person?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Make a note, Phyllis. I need a back door to sneak out of here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That was a pleasantry, Phyllis, a bit of a joke. You can send him in.”
He mouthed “Yes, sir,” as she said it, then hung up smiling. Sometimes it worried him that Phyllis was among the top sources of humor in his life. It seemed to say something truly pathetic about the person he’d become, but he couldn’t deny it. Leaving his stockinged feet on the desk where they would appall his friend Abe almost as much as the sight would scandalize Phyllis, he waited for the turn of the knob and Glitsky’s appearance.
One step into Hardy’s office, Glitsky stopped. His expression grew pained at the socks on the desk. Hardy left his feet where they were and started right in. “I’m glad you came by. We’ve really got to join the Masons,” he said. “You know that?”
Glitsky closed the door behind him. “You’re going to wait until I ask you why, aren’t you?”
“No.” Hardy closed the book. “No, if you don’t want to know, that’s okay with me. Although I know you pretty well, and it’s definitely something you’d be totally into. But I don’t push my brilliant ideas. It was just a thought.”
Glitsky hesitated another second or two, then sighed audibly. “What are the Masons anyway?”
“A secret organization. George Washington was in it, I think. But if it was that secret, how would anybody know?”
“I was just thinking the same thing.”
“See? Great minds.”
Glitsky moved over to the wet-bar area and felt the side of the water-heating pot that Hardy kept there. He grabbed his usual mug, picked up a tea bag from an open bowl of them and poured hot water over it. Turning, blowing over the drink, he took in the spacious office. “I should go into some kind of private business. Here you are, the middle of the afternoon, feet up, reading, no work in sight. Your life is far better than mine.”
“That’s because I’m a better person than you are. But I might point out that you are here, too, in the very same place as me, working about as hard, and drinking my good tea for free on top of it all. Qualitatively, there isn’t much between our relative experiences at this particular moment, and one could argue that your life is in some respects as good as mine.”
“If one lived to argue.” Glitsky got to the armchair in front of Hardy’s desk and settled in. “I still want a better office.” He blew on the tea again. “Okay,” he said, “why do we need to be Masons?”
“Ha!” Hardy’s feet flew off the desk as he came forward. “I knew you’d ask.”
Glitsky gave him the dead eye. “If I didn’t ask, we’d never leave it. So why?”
Hardy opened the book to the place he’d marked. “Because if we stayed at it long enough, you could get to be the Sovereign Grand Inspector General, and I could be either Prince of the Tabernacle or Chevalier of the Brazen Serpent.” H
e paused a moment, frowned. “Eitherway, though, you’d outrank me, so that couldn’t be right.”
“How long would all this take?” Glitsky asked.
Hardy nodded ambiguously. “You’re right,” he said, and closed the book with a flourish. “So what brings your sunny personality here today? What did the mayor want?”
Glitsky brought him up-to-date, keeping the punch line for last. “The original inspecting officer—the one I’m supposed to work with or replace—is Dan Cuneo.”
Hardy’s expression hardened, his head canted to one side. “So replace him.”
“That’s not a good idea. He’d see something personal in it.”
“He’d be right.”
“My point, exactly. Can’t replace him.”
Hardy drew in a breath, then let it out. “These past couple of years, I kept hoping to hear he’d been busted out of homicide.”
“Not happening. If you’re a certain type of cop, homicide’s a terminal appointment.”
“Not for you it wasn’t.”
“No. But unlike Cuneo, I’m born for greatness.” The banter fell flat, though, and Glitsky’s face reassumed its natural scowl.
“I don’t like him anywhere near either of us,” Hardy said after a short silence.
“Do tell. Me? I’m thrilled.”
Getting up, crossing to the Sutter Street window, Hardy pulled the shades apart and looked down through them. “And you’ve got to work with him?”
“I don’t see how I can avoid it.”
Hardy kept staring out, down at the street. “You can’t say a word, Abe. Not one word.”
“Oh really?” A hint of anger, or frustration, breaking through.
“Hey.” Hardy, catching the tone, spun around. “You work with a guy every day, you know he suspects you of something—I don’t care what it is—you might get so you want to get along, try to make him understand.”
“Sure, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll say, ‘Uh, Dan, about the Gerson thing . . .’ ” Lieutenant Barry Gerson had been Cuneo’s boss, and he’d been killed at a shoot-out in the course of trying to arrest one of Hardy’s clients. In the aftermath, Cuneo pushed for an investigation into the role that Hardy and Glitsky had played in Gerson’s death.
“I’m just saying . . .”
“I know. That I’ll be tempted to reason with him, tell him Gerson was dirty and it was pure self-defense, we had no choice.” He shook his head at the absurdity of the idea. “You have my word I won’t go there.”
Hardy came back and boosted himself onto his desk. “Even if you don’t, though, you’re back on his radar. He might remember what he forgot to keep up on.”
“Forget nothing. There wasn’t any evidence, thank God, and he got ordered off.”
“I remember, but he needs to stay off. For both our sakes. And working with you is going to bring up old memories. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I was aware of that even before I came in here, believe it or not. If you have any ideas, I’m listening, but otherwise the mayor’s ordered me to work with the guy. What do you want me to do, quit?”
Hardy brightened. “It’s a thought.”
“Great. Let me just borrow your phone and I’ll call Treya and let her know.” He stood up and went to pull some darts from the board. Turning back with them, he shrugged. “I’ve kept a close eye on him, as you might guess. The plain fact—and good news for us—is that he’s careless and sloppy. This morning’s an example. He’s at Hanover’s fifteen minutes and tells the press it’s murder/suicide.”
“So it’s not?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got a couple of questions. I don’t see Hanover burning down his house, for one big one. He just shoots the woman, stands there a minute, then does himself, okay, that flies. But Becker, the arson inspector out there, he says it looks like he did her, then in no particular order after that poured gasoline on her, wadded up a bunch of newspapers, and opened the lower-floor windows and at least one in the back on the top floor for ventilation. After all that, he goes back to where she’s lying in the lobby, starts the fire, then shoots himself.”
“That does sound complicated,” Hardy said.
Glitsky nodded. “At least. Did you know him?”
“Hanover? Slightly, to look at. I met him a couple of times, but never faced him in court. I can’t say he made a huge impression.”
“Kathy West wouldn’t agree.”
Hardy broke a small grin. “He gave Kathy West a lot of money, Abe. If he gave me a lot of money, I’d remember him better, too.” Pushing himself off his desk, he took the darts from Glitsky, threw one of them. “You know, here’s a real idea, and you won’t have to quit. Use the opportunity to mend fences with Cuneo. He tells the media it looks like a murder/suicide, you back him up, say he did a fine job. Everybody wins.”
“Everybody but Kathy. But that’s what I will do if that’s what it turns out to be. In the meantime, Cuneo’s going to resent me being involved at all, I guarantee it. That’s my real problem. It’s going to look like I’m checking up on his work.”
“That’s what you are doing.”
Glitsky sat back down, elbows on his knees, hung his head and shook it from side to side. Finally, he looked back up. “I’ve got to talk to him,” he said.
4
Glitsky got Cuneo’s extension at work and, calling from his car phone, left a message that they needed to talk. He was going to make every effort to be both conciliatory and cooperative. They would be in this investigation together, and would share information both with each other and with the arson inspectors—a mini task force. But Cuneo wasn’t scheduled to be back on duty until six o’clock. And Glitsky, who preferred murder investigations to all other forms of police work, thought he might spend some useful time long before that with the city’s medical examiner.
John Strout worked on the ground floor behind the Hall of Justice, in the morgue and its accompanying rooms. When Glitsky got there, somebody in the outer office buzzed him inside and he crossed through the clerical desks and knocked at Strout’s door. Getting no answer, he turned the knob, stuck his head in.
Behind him, one of the clerks said, “He’s probably in the cold room.”
Glitsky nodded his acknowledgment and kept going, closing the door behind him. The office was good-sized by city bureaucratic standards, perhaps twenty by thirty feet, with a large, wide window facing the freeway on the end behind Strout’s desk. During his dozen years as head of the homicide detail, Glitsky would have occasion to come down here several times a month—certainly at least once a week. But now, struck by an unfamiliar clutter, he stopped in the middle of the office and suddenly realized that it had probably been close to five years since he’d set foot down here. Or since he’d had any substantive discussion with the good doctor.
In the interim, he noticed, Strout had continued to indulge his proclivity for the bizarre, if not to say macabre. He’d always kept a couple of shelves of unusual murder weapons—a bayonet, two different fire pokers, a baseball bat, an impact shotgun intended for sharks—and medieval torture implements out on display. But now he’d acquired what looked to Glitsky like a small museum. The centerpiece was an ancient garroting chair—complete with its red silk scarf for ease of strangulation (or maximum pain) hanging from the beam in the back—that he’d given pride of place directly in front of his desk. A large glass-enclosed case featured an impressive collection of knives and other cutting and slashing implements, brass knuckles and spiked gloves. One whole side of his desk was covered with hand grenades and other apparent incendiary and explosive devices of different design and vintage. Strout had the obligatory skeleton, of course, but instead of its old place standing next to the morgue cold room entrance, the bones now sat in an easy chair, legs crossed comfortably, apparently enjoying a volume of the Compendium of Drug Therapy.
Suddenly the door to the cold room opened. Strout, long and lean, still in his white lab coat, albeit smudged with black and reddish
brown, broke a genuine smile. “Doctuh Glitsky.” He spoke with a familiar baritone drawl, bending from the waist in a courtly bow. “It’s been a hound’s age.”
Glitsky extended a hand. “How are you, John?”
“Old and in the way, if you must know. But if they’re fool enough to let me keep on doing what I do down here, I’m fool enough to let ’em.” Strout was a few years on the other side of retirement age, but showed little sign of slowing. He looked Glitsky up and down. “But God, man, y’all are looking fit. Anybody tell you you’re supposed to start showing your age sometime? It’s like to give the rest of us a bad name.”
“I’ve got a new young wife, John. If I get to looking old, she’ll leave me, and then I’d have to go and kill her.”
“Well, wouldn’t want that. So what can I do for you? I’m assuming this isn’t strictly a social visit.”
“I’m doing some work on the fire last night.”
“Paul Hanover?”
“It is him, then?”
Strout took a second, then nodded. “Odds are. Wallet says he was. I can’t tell from the body itself, and nobody else could neither, but I’ve already called his dentist and we’ll know for sure by the end of the day.” He went over to his desk, brushed some grenades out of the way and leaned against it.
Glitsky sat on the garrote.
“You want,” Strout said, “you can move Chester.” He pointed to the skeleton. “He’s got the comfortable seat.”
“This is fine,” Glitsky said. “What about the woman?”
Strout folded his arms, lifted his shoulders. “First, it definitely was a woman. I couldn’t be sure ’til I got her on the table. Crisped up terrible.”
“That’s what I heard. Gasoline?”
“Something hot. If they think it’s gas, I believe ’em. From the damage, my guess is she was on fire a good ten, fifteen minutes longer than Hanover.”
“And any ID on her?”
Strout shook his head. “Nothin’ on the body. Nothin’ under the body. Some witness said it might be Hanover’s girlfriend. . . .” He turned and started to sort through a wire basket full of paper on the desk next to him.
The Motive Page 4