The Motive

by John Lescroart

  Who was trying to lecture his son. “Abraham, listen to what you say yourself, and you have your answer. You are the deputy chief of inspectors. This Cuneo putz is an inspector, which puts him under you. Am I right?”

  “Technically.”

  Nat was closing in on eighty years old, but his mind was sharp enough that already this morning he had completedthe Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. He gave Treya a conspiratorial glance. “So ‘technically’ he gives me.” Then, to Abe. “What’s to be technical about? Take him off the case.”

  “How am I supposed to do that, Dad?”

  “What, this is a mystery? You’ve got rank and the mayor on your side. You just do it.”

  “And why? Because I don’t like him?”

  A shrug. “There’s worse reasons, I can tell you. If all else fails . . .”

  Treya jumped in to her husband’s defense. “But Abe can’t do it without cause, Nat,” she said. “He’d have to bring charges of obstruction or even of insubordination against him. . . .”

  “Or the sex stuff. How about that?”

  “That, too,” she said, “if he had any proof.”

  “Although since our witness—or should I now say suspect?—declined to file a complaint,” Glitsky put in, “proof is not forthcoming.” He took a bite of quiche and washed it down. “Anyway, even saying that I do show cause and try to get him busted off the case, he’ll just grieve it with the P.O.A.”—the policemen’s union—“and probably win, seeing that it was his case to begin with and I’m the interloper. That’s how the union’s going to see it, I guarantee. Here’s a good cop minding his own business, doing his job according to the book, and suddenly the brass shows up, no doubt going political . . .” He shrugged. “You see where this is going.”

  “But it makes no sense,” Nat said.

  “Okay,” Treya said, “and your point is?”

  “That was my point. It’s all backwards.”

  “Dad, you’ve got to catch up with the times. Making sense is a low-priority item. The city’s got way more important things to worry about than making sense.”

  Nat came back at his son. “So you’re saying you’ve got to work with him? Cuneo.”

  “No, not really. I’ve tried that. He seems to have rejected it.”

  “So what’s that leave? You quit the case?”

  “Can’t do that either.”

  “So?”

  “So I play his game.”

  “Which is?”

  “Ignore the other guy. I go about my business. I gather evidence, pursue leads. I investigate. Maybe find something he missed.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Treya said, “if he’s missing the boat entirely.”

  Glitsky drank tea and nodded. “That would be sweet and wouldn’t shock me either. But he obviously got a warrant pulled, so he got enough to convince a judge. In any event, he’s in a hurry to cut me out, moving fast and maybe loose, and the evidence might not back him up.

  “As far as I know, he’s not even aware of Tow/Hold or Hanover’s other business. Or even the other family members. There’s just a lot out there and Cuneo’s only looking at one part of it, and one that just more or less fell into his hands on top of that. Usually, it doesn’t work that way.”

  It was Glitsky’s first time in the mayor’s private residence, an East Coast-style four-story brownstone a few blocks down from the crest of Nob Hill, in the neighborhood of Grace Cathedral, the Fairmont and Mark Hopkins hotels.

  He’d called Kathy West and asked if he could drop by for a few minutes, so she was expecting him and answered the door herself. She wore a light yellow no-nonsense blouse and a skirt of stylish brown tweed and low heels, and Glitsky had the impression that she was planning to go out shortly to another of the endless appearances that seemed to make up her life. After greeting him cordially, she led him through the house and outside to a nice-sized garden and patio of red brick, with a circular table and umbrella, a small fountain bubbling up out of a well-tended flower bed, a hot tub and a large, built-in barbecue. Surrounding homes, the same height as the mayor’s, lent to the place a refined feeling of privacy, while a corridor through the adjacent backyards let the sunshine in.

  The mayor took a chair at the table and motioned for Glitsky to do the same, which he’d barely accomplished before she flashed a professional smile and began. “I must say, Abe, I was surprised and impressed to get your call on a Sunday morning. You’re not taking a day of rest?”

  “Well, some things have come up.” He started in with Cuneo, with Catherine Hanover’s allegation of his sexual harassment, the search warrant. When he finished, West came forward in her crisp manner, her legs crossed, her hands tightly clasped in her lap. “Why wouldn’t this woman file a complaint? Do you think he did harass her?”

  “I have no way of knowing. He’s been known to hit on witnesses in other cases, but that’s not necessarily proof of anything in this one.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “It isn’t?”

  “Unfortunately, technically, legally, no.”

  “That’s funny. A history like that seems somewhat . . . persuasive to me.”

  Glitsky allowed a ghost of a smile. “Well, the Hanover woman isn’t pursuing it, so it’s a nonissue. My concern, and what I wanted to talk to you about, is that I don’t step on his investigation if he is in fact on to something.”

  “And how would you do that?”

  “A dozen ways, really. Closing in on a suspect is kind of a carefully orchestrated ballet, and I don’t want to spook his witnesses if he’s already got them talking.”

  “So basically, what you’re saying is he’s cutting you out?”

  He nodded. “Of course I could make a stink, pull rank, all that nonsense. But all that would do is stop the investigation.” Now Glitsky shrugged. “It’s entirely possible he’s got her, and she did it, which is what you wanted. My question is: How hard do you want me to push to stay in?”

  West frowned, scratched at the fabric of her skirt. “I’d just like to be sure,” she said.

  Glitsky moved his chair slightly, into the shade of the umbrella, then sat back in a casual attitude, which was nothing like how he felt. It was time to call the mayor’s bluff. “Do you want to tell me why again? The real reason.”

  Her chin came up. She blinked rapidly three or four times. “What do you mean?”

  He held her gaze. “I think you know what I mean.” He used her name on purpose. “Kathy.”

  She looked away, staring into some empty space over his shoulder. “No, I don’t. Really, I don’t.”

  “Okay, maybe I can help you.” Glitsky spoke quietly, his face locked down. “You’re afraid that Paul Hanover might have been a warning to you. And if he was, you don’t want to misconstrue it.”

  She sat stock still for a long moment, then some tension went out of her. She almost seemed to smile. “Frank Batiste was right,” she said, “you are good.” She drew in a breath. “It started just after I got elected, with Harlan.” She didn’t have to explain to Glitsky whom she meant. Harlan Fisk was her nephew, an overweight, often jovial, supremely political animal who’d worked for a time as an inspector under Glitsky in homicide, and who now was one of the city’s eleven supervisors.

  “Harlan’s connected to this?”

  “No. Not directly, anyway. But when Tow/Hold saw how the wind was blowing with me, they offered him a job. Security director.”

  Glitsky almost laughed, but he didn’t think this was funny. “Because he’d been a cop?”

  “Partly. Mostly, I think, because we’re related and they thought he could influence me.”

  “What does the security director of Tow/Hold do, exactly?” Glitsky asked.

  This brought a prim smile to the mayor’s mouth. “In theory, he coordinates the off-duty regular city officers and the rent-a-cop staff that guard the lots. In practice, not much. In spite of which it pays pretty well.” The smile was gone. “In case you were wondering,
a hundred and forty thousand dollars. It was a bribe, plain and simple,” West went on. “Harlan turned them down flat, said he didn’t want any part of it.”

  “So then they went to Hanover?”

  West nodded. “He—I’m talking about Paul now— Paul told me he’d had threats, but that he didn’t put any stock in them. They came with the territory, he said. Happened all the time, nothing to worry about. Then when . . .” She wound down and stopped. “I didn’t know how to handle it, Abe. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be underhanded or duplicitous with you. But I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t. I’m afraid, if you must know the truth. And you know, a mayor—particularly a woman mayor—can’t appear to be afraid. Venal, petty, selfish, arrogant, anything else, but not that.”

  Glitsky clipped off his words. “You could have just asked me directly.”

  “I didn’t know how to do that. You’re rather famously nonpolitical and I didn’t want to contaminate you.” She held a hand up. “I’m not flattering you. You wouldn’t have even started if you’d thought this was all just about politics. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t know myself exactly what I expected you to do.”

  He hesitated, then said, “You should know that I’ve already talked to Nils Granat.”

  Even in the warm morning, she suppressed a shiver. “It’s all so nebulous,” she said. “On the one hand, I can’t imagine it’s real, that someone would kill a wonderful man like Paul Hanover over a business deal. On the other, if they could do that . . .”

  Glitsky had spent a lot of time and energy on this already, all of it under false pretenses, and realizing that put him in a cold fury. His patience—always thin under the best conditions—was gone. He wasn’t in the mood for her conjectures. He cut off her. “Excuse me,” he said, “but what do you want me to do now? That’s the question. Leave it to Cuneo?”

  West’s eyes went up. She drew a quick breath. “That’s the other thing.”

  “What is?”

  “Inspector Cuneo. You know that hundred-and-forty-thousand-dollar job I told you about with Tow/Hold?”

  Hardly able to credit what he was hearing, Glitsky squinted into the sun. “Cuneo’s up for it,” he said. His voice rang hollow in his ears.

  West’s shoulders sagged. “It’s a lot more than cops make, even inspectors, as you know,” she said. “When Harlan turned it down, word got out that the position was there, and several policemen applied. I’ve seen the list and Cuneo’s one of them. Of course, there’ll be no job for anyone if Bayshore gets the contract, but . . .”

  “But Cuneo’s not going to investigate them for these murders, no matter what. That’s your point.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you want me to keep looking?”

  “I think it’s the only way we may get to the truth, don’t you think?”

  “Unless it comes out at the trial.”

  “What trial?”

  “Catherine Hanover’s.”

  West sighed again. “I don’t believe it will come to that, Abe, and certainly not if she’s innocent.”

  “Certainly not? Why not?”

  West’s expression of surprise was, he thought, like the MasterCard commercial—priceless. “Well, they’ll find out before they get that far, I’m sure.”

  There was no point in arguing. Glitsky stood up. “In the event they don’t, though?”

  West stood, too, moved a step toward him, put a hand on his arm. “Whatever you can do, Abe,” she said with great, if unintentional, ambiguity. “I’d really appreciate it if you stayed involved.”

  He bit back his first three responses, all inappropriate. This was, after all, the political leader of San Francisco.

  He mustered a salute. Unintentionally, if anything is truly unintentional, his words came out as ambiguous as hers had been. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

  The picture of Catherine Hanover that Cuneo had snapped when she’d gone out to get her newspaper on Saturday morning turned out to be a good likeness. He’d used his 35mm Canon with an excellent close-up lens and good color film and had snapped seven shots in rapid succession, then printed them out in eight-by-ten format. In the one he liked the most, she was looking directly at him, so much so that he wondered if she’d in fact seen him, but her reaction of absolute shock when he’d knocked at her door fifteen minutes later with the warrant had been, he was sure, completely genuine. She’d had no clue.

  What he liked about the picture wasn’t merely how good she looked—no surprise, since Catherine Hanover seemed to get more attractive with every sighting—but that the angle was so very close to the one in the newspaper picture of Missy D’Amiens that he’d been showing around. Not only that, Missy’s hair had been up in an elegant coif, and Catherine, obviously and recently post-shower, had hers wrapped in a towel. So nothing blocked the contours of either face. The biggest difference was that Missy was smiling, at a party, and Catherine’s expression was inward. She was nearly frowning.

  When he had first put the two pictures together, they confirmed what he’d noticed from the first time he’d seen the Missy photo. The two women weren’t close enough in looks to be identical twins, of course, but the similarity between them was marked. They could easily have been sisters. Both had high, broad foreheads, strong chins and noses, well-defined cheekbones. Both had a near-identical widow’s peak at the hairline.

  Maxine and Joseph Willis sat with Cuneo at around noon at the back of their house, this time, under the strong light in the kitchen. They were looking at both of the pictures now, side by side, in silence. After a half minute or so, Maxine raised her head and said to Cuneo, “You’re bouncing the table, Inspector. If you’re impatient, maybe you’d like to walk around while we look.”

  The identification issue, and the couple’s disagreements over it, sat at the table with them all like an unwelcome guest. Cuneo was inclined to let them take whatever time they needed, but it was difficult for him not to move while he waited. After Maxine spoke to him, he asked if he could get a glass of water, and so he was over by the sink when Joseph turned in his chair and said, “If I had to swear, I’d say it was Missy.”

  This was not what Cuneo had been hoping to hear, but now Maxine—who’d at first been so certain that the woman she’d seen had been Missy—was shaking her head from side to side.

  “You don’t agree, Mrs. Willis?” Cuneo asked. He was back at the table with his glass of water, pulling up his chair again. She reached out and put her index finger on the color picture of Catherine. “I know I’ve seen this girl before,” she said. “You look again, Joseph!”

  The small man drew the photo back directly in front of him and stared down at it. Joseph clearly didn’t want to discuss this with his wife any longer. Now she was saying— wasn’t she?—that it had not been Missy D’Amiens on last Wednesday. And more, that the person they’d both seen had been the woman in this other picture.

  Joseph, in his heart, wasn’t completely certain that it had been either of them. If the truth be known, Joseph hadn’t been looking too carefully at the woman’s face at all. He’d assumed it was his attractive neighbor, whose walk he’d often admired, but this time he’d been more drawn to the woman’s generous bosom. That, and not her face at all, was the reason he’d entertained his doubts over whether the woman had been Missy D’Amiens. She’d just seemed, well, bigger. As for the face, he couldn’t swear that he’d even glanced at it.

  Now he looked up at Cuneo. “I’m going to let my bride here make the call on this one, Inspector. She knows very well who she saw. If she says it’s this woman in the color picture that we saw last Wednesday, then that’s who it was.”

  As advertised, Jeffie from the Valero station was working on Sunday, manning the cash register. Cuneo had learned from his earlier experience with the Willises and this time only brought the picture of Catherine Hanover in with him.

  Jeffie didn’t have to look for very long. “Yep,” he said. “She the one.”

>   Coming out to the living room from the back half of the duplex, Treya Glitsky sagged against the doorway to the kitchen. “Okay, she’s down.”

  Finally getting around to reading the Sunday Chronicle , Glitsky sat sideways in the leather love seat by their front windows, which he’d opened to let in the fresh air. It was early afternoon and sunlight spilled over him. The tone in his wife’s voice sparked concern, and he put his section down, started to rise. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded wearily, then barely lifted a hand, motioning for him to stay seated. “Thank God she still takes her nap.”

  “I hear you. But you don’t look too good.”

  “I don’t feel too good.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I know it’s unusual, but would you mind terribly if I just took a minute and lay down for a while? I don’t mean to be boring, but it’s like somebody suddenly just pulled the plug. I don’t know what it is.”

  “I can guess.”

  “You think? The pregnancy?”

  He shrugged. “It’s pretty normal, isn’t it?”

  She let out a deep breath, fatigue all over her. “Not for me. I never got any kind of morning sickness or anything with Raney or Rachel. Neither of them.”

  “So this one’s different.” He pointed. “Go, sleep.”

  She dropped her head and sighed, but didn’t move. “Wake me up when she does.”

  “No promises. Do you want me to carry you in?”

  “No, really. I just need a couple of minutes.”

  “Okay. Go, then.”

  He got up and walked across to her. She was standing with her eyes closed, all but asleep on her feet. Peeling her off the doorpost, he put his arm around her. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m just so tired.”