The Motive

by John Lescroart

  Five minutes later, she was covered up in their darkened bedroom. Glitsky closed the door to the hallway and returned to the living room. There he took a few steps toward his paper, but stopped as though some physical force had restrained his movement. He stood in the center of the room, hands at his sides. Closing his eyes, he let out a stream of air and realized that he’d been holding his breath. He wasn’t aware of any noise, even from the street through the open windows. He drew another deep breath. Another. Closed his eyes again.

  Perhaps a minute passed. In the house, all was Sunday-afternoon stillness.

  When he opened his eyes, the rectangle of sunlight had grown and it now covered the whole love seat and a few inches of floor. He realized that, incredibly for San Francisco, it was almost uncomfortably warm in the room. He walked to the front door and opened it for some cross-ventilation, then went to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of iced tea and drank half of it down in a gulp.

  What had been his sons’ rooms when they’d lived with him were down a hall behind the kitchen on the opposite side of the duplex from his own bedroom. Now his youngest boy Orel’s old room was Rachel’s, and at her door Glitsky turned the knob gently and went to stand over her bed—still a crib, really, with the bars up. She was sleeping soundly, sprawled on her back, her breathing regular and deep, and he couldn’t resist putting his palm down flat over her chest. She didn’t stir. He felt a vibration at his belt, someone paging him. The number wasn’t immediately familiar and his initial reaction was to ignore it, go finish reading the Sunday paper, maybe let himself doze off like the rest of the world.

  Instead, in the kitchen, he picked up the wall phone’s receiver and punched in the number.

  “Hello.”

  “This is Abe Glitsky. You just paged me. Who is this?”

  “Dan Cuneo. We need to talk about Catherine Hanover.”

  Assistant DA Chris Rosen didn’t mind being bothered about work at home on a Sunday night, least of all by a homicide inspector with a big case. He lived in a small, stand-alone bungalow in the flats of Emeryville, across the bay from San Francisco, not more than six miles from Cuneo’s place in Alameda. The inspector’s long day in the city had come to an end, and the two men decided they’d meet up at the bar of Spenger’s Fish Grotto, just off the freeway in Berkeley.

  They arrived almost simultaneously. By the time they got their drinks—the place was packed and it took a while —Cuneo had brought him pretty much up-to-date. Three witnesses had definitively identified CatherineHanover from her picture as the woman who’d 1) purchased the Valero gasoline in a portable container and 2) left the Hanover house about a half hour before the fire. Cuneo had taken the rug sample from the back of Catherine Hanover’s car directly to Arnie Becker, since the regular police lab probably wouldn’t be able to get to it within a week. Becker had ready access to the fire department’s own mass spectrometer, and yes, in fact, the gasoline in her trunk was Valero, the same brand that had started the fire. He’d luminoled the pants from her closet himself, and though he’d found no evidence of blood spatter, he’d dropped the clothes at the police lab and was hoping they’d find something useful.

  Throughout this recital, Rosen sipped his Scotch and said nothing. After Cuneo stopped, he signaled the waitress for another round for both of them and said, “Don’t get me wrong, Dan. There’s nothing I’d like more than to be able to move on this. But you’ve got to admit that you don’t have much in the way of evidence.”

  Cuneo was ready for this. “I didn’t expect much. The fire burned it all up. But she denies being near Hanover’s house when one of my witnesses put her there. Same day she got the gas around the corner. She did it, Chris. I swear to God.”

  “I’m not saying I don’t believe you.” He centered his empty glass on his napkin. “Last time you mentioned a motive, but we didn’t get to it.”

  Cuneo spent a little time spinning it out. Aside from his work on the warrant and this morning’s identifications,in the past two days, he’d spoken to all the other members of Paul Hanover’s nuclear family except Catherine’s husband, and no one denied that his coming marriage to Missy D’Amiens and the possible change to the inheritance was a very big concern to all of them.

  What set Catherine apart from her other relatives was the fact that she’d gone to Paul’s that day to “have it out” with him. “Her own words from the first night I talked to her at the fire—‘have it out.’ One sister and the mother-in-law both had heard her say it. And now we know she was at the house not just in the afternoon when she admitted it, but later, just before the fire.”

  “Anybody see her walk in there, with the gas?”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “Or walk out with it?”

  “She left it in the house. Arnie Becker’s got the container with the other stuff from the house down at the station.” One of an arson inspector’s most tedious yet most important jobs after a fire was to go through the ash and debris in a three- or four-foot radius around a body and sort everything—the burned and destroyed remains of furniture, floors, walls, clothing, appliances, knickknacks, jewelry—until they had identified every item down to the size of a match head, to see if any of it might be relevant to their investigation. “No prints, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  “Hoping.” Rosen frowned. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. The day after the fire, after we’d had this talk at the scene . . .”

  “Wait a minute. She was at the fire itself? I’m not sure I realized that.”

  “That’s when I first talked to her.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “So she tells me—this is at the fire now—that she’d heard that Paul and Missy had been fighting, setting it up for the murder/suicide story. Then, next day, I go to talk to her at her house, and by now she realizes that we’ve ruled that out. Not only that, the other stuff she told me, she’s implicated herself and she knows I know it. So what does she do?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Calls Glitsky—you know Glitsky? Deputy chief?— anyway, she calls him and says I sexually harassed her.” He held up a hand. “The answer is no, not a chance. But she told Glitsky she didn’t want to talk to me anymore.”

  “So after Glitsky stopped laughing, what did he tell her?”

  “Well, wait, this is getting to the good part.” Their drinks arrived and both men lifted their glasses. “Glitsky comes and tells me that from now on, he’s on the case with me. . . .”

  “What, you mean personally?”

  “Personally. The mayor asked him.”

  Now Cuneo had Rosen’s complete attention. “What? Why?”

  A nod. “It gives one pause, doesn’t it? So he says from now on he’ll be questioning Catherine Hanover. He’s trying to protect me from the sex charge.”

  “So she filed?”

  “Funny thing. She decided not to.” Cuneo drank again. “Wait, it gets better. We’ve got Glitsky and Kathy West somehow connected to Catherine, right? So now I’m starting to wonder. They’re pulling me off when she looks good to me. I come to you on Friday, get the warrant this weekend, do some digging. Finally, couple of hours ago, I call Glitsky to keep him in the loop as he’s requested. I tell him what I got, the fucking gasoline, the motive, two positive IDs, Catherine’s lying about where she was and when. She’s it. I say we ought to bring it to you and get her in the grand jury before she blows town.”

  “And what was his response?”

  “Bad idea, he says. Too soon. We really don’t have anything on her. He says there’s still a lot of questions. We don’t want to rush to judgment. Plus, and we should know this, this is really my favorite . . .”

  “What?”

  “She hired herself a lawyer. You know Dismas Hardy?”

  “The name, yeah.”

  “Well, guess what? He’s Glitsky’s pal. They used to be cops together.” He finished his drink and leaned back in satisfaction, tapping his toes to beat the band. “What we’ve
got here, Chris, isn’t just a sweet little double murder. There’s some major conspiracy going on with these guys, going all the way up to the mayor. This city is lousy with politics, and these guys are smack-dab in the middle of it. And you want my opinion? Just between us. It doesn’t start here, with Hanover. I’m betting it started back before Barry Gerson got killed.”

  “You mean Lieutenant Gerson?”

  “My old boss, yeah. And a great guy.”

  “I thought . . . wasn’t he killed at some shoot-out? I thought it was some Russian gang thing.”

  “Maybe. That’s what they want you to believe. But the whole mess wasn’t ever really investigated, not carefully enough anyway. And here’s a factoid for you—one of the guys killed in the shoot-out with Gerson was a guy named John Holiday, wanted for murder at the time. And guess who his attorney was?”

  “Got to be Hardy.”

  Cuneo made a gun with his fingers, pointed it at Rosen and pulled the trigger. “He and Glitsky both were all over that Holiday case. It’s ugly as shit, Chris.”

  “So how does Catherine Hanover fit in? Or Paul?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I’ll tell you one thing. She did him.” He tipped up his glass and drank off the whole thing. Eyes shining, he came forward in his chair. “This is the biggest case you’re ever going to be part of, and we’ve got to get this damned woman locked up before the whole thing blows away in the dust. Because believe me, these people can make it happen.”

  14

  As soon as Hardy’s children were out the door to school on Monday morning, he and Frannie unplugged the main telephone jack, turned off their own cell phones and repaired upstairs to their bedroom.

  An hour later, Hardy climbed the stairs again, this time bearing two fresh cups of coffee. “It occurs to me,” he said, “that carrying hot coffee in a state of undress might not be wise.”

  “No risk, no reward,” Frannie said. “Besides, it’s a good fantasy moment. Being waited on by a naked slave and all.”

  He bowed from the waist. “Your servant, madam.” Handing her a mug, he slid in beside her, pulled a sheet over himself. “Your fantasy slave looks like me?”

  “Who else would he look like?”

  “I don’t know. Brad Pitt, maybe. Who’s that new guy Rebecca loves?”

  “Orlando Bloom?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “He’s not that new, but why would I want either of them?”

  “Well, we’re talking fantasy, right? Your average fifty-something lawyer isn’t exactly fantasy material.”

  “Who’s talking average?” She lifted the sheet away, looked him up and down. “Yep. Works for me. Just did, in fact. Plus, the coffee’s perfect, thank you. Brad and Orlando, those other guys, they’d probably burn it or something.” She took another sip. “So speaking of fantasies . . .”

  “What?”

  She gave him a don’t-kid-me look. “Have you decided what you’re going to do with Catherine?”

  “Well, first, Catherine is not my fantasy. You’re my fantasy.”

  “All right, but you have to say that.”

  “I don’t have to say anything like that.”

  “But I just did, so if you didn’t, you’d be in trouble.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t mean it. Seriously. You don’t think this is a fantasy? Monday morning, nobody home but us up here alone? Taking time out on a workday to make love? Do you know what we’d have done for this moment even a couple of years ago?”

  “Probably killed small, cute, furry animals.”

  “At least.”

  “But you still haven’t told me about Catherine.”

  “That’s because, truly, I haven’t decided. The main thing is, I don’t think it’s likely they’re going to charge her. Cuneo’s just rattling her cage.”

  “But if they do?”

  “Charge her?” He turned to her. “I wouldn’t take it if it would make you uncomfortable.”

  “It’s not just me. There’s this whole Cuneo thing. I know Abe’s definitely worried. . . .”

  “But Abe worries for a hobby.”

  “Okay, but he’s got a reason this time. Cuneo could make a big mess for both of you. If anything about that day ever comes out . . .”

  “Actually,” Hardy said, “that’s one of the reasons the nasty side of me is almost hoping they go ahead and charge her and try to make a case with this lousy evidence.”

  “What reason is that?”

  “Cuneo. Unless he strikes gold—or Hanover’s blood on Catherine’s stuff—he’s got a weak case he’s rushing in on. Abe says he’s a sloppy investigator. That’s just who he is. So depending on how fast and loose he decides to play, give me a chance to get him on a witness stand and I’ll bet I can do some serious damage to his basic credibility as a cop. At least enough so nobody would be inclined to go on a wild goose chase after me and Abe on his say-so. I’d almost look forward to the chance.”

  Frannie sipped at her coffee. “If you turned her down, how much would it cost the firm?”

  Hardy considered for a minute. “High-profile murder trial? Three to five hundred thousand, maybe more. Plus, maybe, referrals.”

  “So do you want to do it?”

  “We’re not there yet. Maybe we won’t get there. But really, as I said, if you’ve got a problem with it . . .”

  “Then I’m an insecure bitch.”

  “Not at all. It’s completely legitimate that you’d be uncomfortable. Me and Catherine went together for three years. That’s a significant chunk of time. Obviously, as I’ve already told you, there’s still a connection. There’ll always be some connection.”

  “And she’s still attractive.” Not a question.

  He nodded. “She’s very good-looking. But, you know, we’ve already done the fantasy thing with you and me this morning. I’m yours, you’re mine. Like that.”

  “Yes, but here’s a case where you can help someone you care about who you think is probably innocent and make half a million or more dollars in the bargain, and at the same time you’d get to professionally destroy someone who’s out to get you and Abe. How can I ask you not to take it?”

  Hardy put his coffee cup down, reached over and pulled his wife close against him. “You say, ‘Diz, I’d just prefer you let someone else take this one.’ ”

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  “Well, that is your decision, Flaversham.” Hardy quoting a longtime household favorite line from Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective. “And I haven’t made my own decision yet, either.”

  “You can’t turn her down if she needs you.”

  “Somebody else could defend her.”

  “But who as well as you?”

  “Well . . .”

  “But between us,” Frannie added, cutting him off, “it is a little scary.”

  Just off the main lobby in Hardy’s Sutter Street offices, the Solarium conference room contained a profusion of greenery—rubber trees, ferns, dieffenbachia. One of the associates had even brought a redwood tree in a two-hundred-gallon pot; thriving, its trunk was a foot thick and its boughs scraped the glass ceiling.

  Now, after he and Frannie had continued their morning date with an early lunch, cell phones off, at Petit Robert, Hardy sat in one of the sixteen chairs that surrounded the immense mahogany table in the center of the room. Waiting for him on his arrival at the office were three urgent calls from Catherine Hanover—the first when the police had come early in the morning to serve a subpoena for her to appear tomorrow to testify in front of the grand jury, the second when Cuneo had arrived personally to deliver another search warrant at her house, and the third in a barely controlled, I need help right now hysteria, similar in tone to the first call he’d gotten from her on Saturday night. He called her right back and told her to get down to the office as soon as she could. She was barely coherent. Her voice had been choked and hoarse—“I’m sorry. I can’t seem to stop crying.”

  Hanging up, he put
in a call to Abe’s pager. He wondered what, if anything, had happened on Sunday, or maybe Saturday, with the results of the first search warrant. Had the lab in fact uncovered significant evidence?

  Clear on what he next wanted to do, Hardy forced himself to take a moment before he did it. Every action he took now as Catherine’s de facto lawyer moved him closer to the decision he hadn’t yet consciously made. But at each small incremental step, he didn’t seem to be able to stop himself. Of course he would call Catherine back after her three urgent calls. What else could he do? Of course he would page Glitsky and try to discover what the police had come up with. On some level, he felt he didn’t really have a choice. But up until now, his moves had been small and personal. What he contemplated next was larger and more public. He wanted more certainty about his commitment before he moved.

  Whether it was more hangover from the guilt he’d felt at the way he’d had to drop her so long ago or a testament to the bond they’d once forged together, he couldn’t deny that between him and Catherine there remained a strong personal connection. They’d come of age in the same culture—it had been immediately clear to Hardy on Saturday night at her house, when they’d easily fallen into a comfortable familiarity, even with the hard questions. The plain fact was that she’d been his first love, and the person he’d become could not bring himself to abandon her when she needed him so badly. Even as he recognized that she might—he told himself it was an infinitesimally small chance—even now be playing him.

  Because she knew she could.

  But that, he told himself, was her fate, her karma. Hardy himself had no choice but to be true to his own character, and to trust that she would not betray him.

  Finally, telling Phyllis to interrupt him if Glitsky called, he rang up the district attorney’s office, where he talked to the relatively new chief assistant district attorney, Craig Bellarios, about the grand jury subpoena. There was really only one question Hardy needed to have answered, and that was whether his client—his client!—was considered a “target” of the investigation, i.e., a suspect, as opposed to a witness.