The Motive

by John Lescroart

  Bellarios, who didn’t know Hardy very well, wasn’t the most forthcoming man on the planet. He told Hardy that he couldn’t predict what the grand jury would do, and that it was always wise to be prepared for any eventuality. Thanking him for nothing, Hardy asked and did learn the name of the presenting prosecutor—Chris Rosen—and called him next, but he was out.

  He sensed a stonewall and it tightened his stomach. If things had gotten to this juncture already, he had no choice but to tell Catherine to plead the Fifth Amendment before the grand jury and to refuse to talk anymore to the police. And in the terrible catch-22 of the legal game, once she adopted that strategy, though technically she’d still be a witness, in the eyes of the prosecution she would have moved a long way toward becoming the target of the investigation.

  Now, with his legal pad and another cup of coffee on the table in front of him, Hardy was cramming with a single-minded attention, reviewing all the notes he’d taken at Catherine’s on Saturday night. Feeling her presence as soon as she entered the lobby, he looked up, stood and walked over to the Solarium door. “Catherine.”

  If she’d been crying, there was no sign of it anymore, other than maybe an added luminosity to her eyes. She wore a well-tailored khaki-colored pantsuit. Hardy was thinking that he was glad she’d chosen demure even as she turned toward him to reveal a light tangerine garment with a lace top, a sweep of décolletage underneath the jacket. An elegant chain of malachite beads encircled her neck and rested in the deep hollow of her chest. He realized that she’d had her breasts enlarged.

  But he’d hardly digested these impressions when she stepped into his arms. Vaguely aware of the stares of Phyllis and Norma, the office manager, and a pair of paralegals who had stopped at the reception area for something, Hardy held her against him for the briefest of seconds, then turned to the gathered multitudes and introduced her, all business, as an old friend and new client.

  A new client.

  Back in the Solarium, they got seated and Hardy asked if he could see the subpoena. “You got this this morning?”

  “Seven o’clock. I was hardly out of bed.”

  “They’re still hassling you.”

  “I thought so, too. And they’re doing another search. Is that unusual?”

  He didn’t answer that one. Instead, he asked, “When did they do this, the search? At seven, too?”

  “No. Nine or so. They were separate. Cuneo was with the second bunch. I called you again.”

  “I had business this morning,” Hardy said. “I called back as soon as I got in. Was Glitsky with the search team this time?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve never met him, but I’m sure that wasn’t the other name. I would have remembered.”

  “So what were they looking for this time?”

  “I don’t know. Everything, I think. They went upstairs and just started in.”

  Hiding his exasperation, Hardy smiled helpfully. “They list specifics on the warrant. Did they show that to you?”

  “No.”

  “What about your husband? Wasn’t he there? Did he ask to see the warrant, by any chance?”

  She looked down, scratched at the fabric of her pants. “Will’s taken a . . .” She stopped. “He’s not home right now.”

  Hardy waited.

  After a minute, she wiped an eye with her finger, then the other one. Reaching down, she opened her purse and removed a small package of Kleenex, brought one of the tissues up to her face. “This is anger, not sadness.” She dabbed at her eyes some more, sniffed once, clenched the Kleenex in her fist. “He started having another affair,” she said without looking at him. “The son of a bitch.”

  Hardy said the first thing that came to his mind. “So he wasn’t fishing last Wednesday?”

  She kept her eyes straight in front of her. “He was in Southern California, though. That’s where they met up. On the same goddamn boat as the last one.” Finally, she cast a sidelong glance at him. “I’m sorry about the language, and I didn’t mean to lie to you about Will and me the other night.” Again, a labored breath. “Anyway, after you left on Saturday, it blew up. He made some smart-ass remark about you and me. . . .”

  “You and me?”

  “All the time we spent talking, just making it sound sleazy.”

  “I was there as your lawyer, Catherine.” Hardy didn’t like being cast as the wedge between wife and husband, but he immediately regretted referring to himself as her lawyer. It seemed to be another irrevocable step.

  “Of course you were. What else could you be? But you have to know Will. As though he needed a real reason to pick a fight. Anyway, he was slandering you, too, and I just thought, ‘How dare he?’ and lost it. I threw him out.”

  “He thought you didn’t know about the affair?”

  “He must have thought I was an idiot. He even wanted to . . . to have sex with me when he got home, maybe so I wouldn’t suspect he’d been rutting around for four days. The bastard.” A bitter little sound escaped. “I thought if I could avoid bringing it up, it might stay hidden from the kids. I used to hope I could hold out until Heather went to college, then I could file for divorce. The kids wouldn’t really be in our lives as much, so it would be easier. This last time, though, last week, I realized I couldn’t do that anymore. I couldn’t go on that way. But I still hadn’t really decided, you know?”

  “Decided what, exactly?”

  “When I’d call him on it. Move out or have him do it. Bring it to a head. I didn’t want it to just happen the way it did. I wanted to control the timing, at least. Now I’m just feeling so ashamed of myself.”

  “For what?”

  She turned in her chair and faced him. “Don’t you see? For ruining our home life. Bringing it out into the open.” She shrugged. “But something just snapped. Maybe it’s all this being a suspect.”

  “If your husband was having an affair, how was it that you ruined your home life?”

  “I know, it’s stupid, but it’s how I feel. If I were a stronger person, I could have kept pretending”—she motioned around the room ambiguously—“except for all this. And seeing you, in some way. Remembering how good you were, how sweet a relationship could be. It all broke me down.”

  “I’m sorry if I had a role in it. I wouldn’t have come over if . . .”

  “No, no. It was going to happen sometime.”

  Hardy let a moment pass, then said, “So that’s why you went to your father-in-law’s? To talk about this? Will’s affair.”

  She couldn’t hide her startled expression. “Why do you assume that?”

  “Because that’s what changed, Catherine. You’re going about your normal life and your husband goes off with another woman. You’re going to do something. I’m glad you didn’t decide to follow him down and kill him.”

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  “Let’s keep that between us, okay?”

  She found half a smile. “I wouldn’t have killed him, Dismas. Or his father, either.”

  Hardy’s antennae were all the way up. Without a conscious thought, he noted her use of the subjunctive and wondered if she’d done it on purpose. She wouldn’t have killed Paul, except for . . .

  And then something happened, and she’d had to. It was only a small feat of mental legerdemain. A child, Hardy thought, could do it. And they often did.

  At the same time, part of him hated himself for realizing the fundamental truth that while what she’d just said sounded like an absolute denial of her guilt, in fact it was not. As a good, Jesuit-trained former Catholic, Hardy was often able to argue himself into a state of tolerable comfort in the outer reaches of moral ambiguity, and he knew that Catherine’s education with the Mercy nuns had trained her in the same way. Hell, she’d been the acknowledged master—it was the thing he could never beat her at. And so now he also knew enough not to ask her for clarification; it would only complicate things down the line.

  All this in the blink of an eye.

  He as
ked her, “So what did you want to ask him? Paul, I mean?”

  “The same thing I said last time, Dismas. I wanted to know what was going to happen to the money.” She threw him a glance that he couldn’t read. “He was going to marry Missy in the fall and change his will to make her his beneficiary. Maybe he’d leave a few thousand dollars to each of his grandchildren. That was it. They weren’t doing a prenup.”

  “Why not? Did he say?”

  “Because Missy wasn’t out for his money, and Paul resented the hell out of his family for implying that she was. In fact, before the family had started the campaign, as he called it, he’d been inclined to set up trusts for the kids and all that. But then Will and Beth and Theresa, especially, wouldn’t let it go. And the blind greed of it, he said, made him sick. His kids and their families were getting along just fine. And Missy had had a tremendously difficult life, we had no idea. Now it was her turn for comfort and security and he was going to give it to her. And too bad if we didn’t like it.”

  “That sounds harsh.”

  She lifted her shoulders. “It didn’t when he said it, though. He was a straight shooter. He’d worked hard to get his kids set on their way. Now they should do the same with theirs.”

  “So where did that leave you? Did you tell him about Will?”

  “I didn’t need to.” She looked away. “He seemed to know, yes. To have known.”

  “You mean about Will’s other affairs?”

  She nodded. “Anyway, he gave me what I’d come to find out.”

  “And what did that mean to you?”

  She worried her lower lip. “I wanted to know where I stood. I know it sounds mercenary, but I’d already endured more than a few rather difficult years with Will. If it looked like he was going to inherit several million dollars . . .” She stopped, unwilling to enunciate it.

  “You might try to endure a few more?”

  She scratched at her pants again. “I admit it sounds awful.” She raised her eyes to his. “But if there wasn’t ever going to be a windfall, if he signed it all over to her . . .”

  “You might as well leave him now.”

  She bowed her head in tacit agreement. “I needed to know my options, Dismas.” Then, “I hate him.”

  Outside the Solarium’s glass walls, a tiny parklike area, a hundred or so square feet of open space tucked between the buildings, held a concrete bench that the associates had chipped in for in memory of David Freeman. Hardy spent a minute watching a few sparrows pecking around in the decomposed granite. Finally, he came back to her. “Had he changed his will?”

  “He was going to . . . oh my God!” Her hand went to her mouth. “The will!”

  “What?”

  “That’s today!”

  Bob Townshend’s office was on the same twentieth floor as Paul Hanover’s in the Bank of America building. Its great windows afforded a stunning view of the city spread out below, with the sunlight glinting on the bay, far off the Golden Gate Bridge standing sentinel over the entrance to the harbor, and closer in the spires of the churches in North Beach. None of the Hanover relatives seated in front of Townshend’s ultramodern chrome-and-glass desk paid it the slightest attention.

  Theresa Hanover sat in the third chair from the right in the row of seven that Townshend had set up for the reading of the will. Will Hanover sat in the center chair, next to his mother. The chair next to him was empty, and beyond that to his left sat Mary and Carlos. On the other side of Theresa were Beth and her attorney husband, Aaron.

  Townshend had finally put down his coffee cup and saucer at the service table against the inside wall and had come around to claim his seat behind the desk. Florid and overweight, Townshend—unlike his partner Paul Hanover—had never been comfortable interacting with actual living people. He enjoyed numbers and games and legal puzzles. He was also an excellent legal writer and a whiz at business strategy, which made him an invaluable partner to Hanover, but dealing with humans in the flesh was for him always a bit of a strain.

  And never more than at a moment like this one, when things weren’t going according to protocol. He’d scheduled the reading of Paul Hanover’s will for one o’clock, and now it was nearly two, and still no sign—not even a phone call—from Catherine Hanover. Neither had she returned any of the several calls he’d made to her home, or to her cell phone. There was nothing absolutely critical about her attendance, of course. Her husband was here representing the family and that was enough, but even with his limited sensitivity to human emotions, Townshend sensed a tension in the group—especially between Will and his mother—that in turn made him nervous.

  Now he checked his watch for the twentieth time, ran a finger under his very tight shirt collar, cleared his throat. Over an hour ago, he’d gone to his safe and removed the sealed Last Will & Testament of Paul Hanover, and placed it exactly in the center of his desk. Now he pulled the package toward him. “Well, then, if we’re all in agreement . . .”

  “Lord, Bob, we’ve waited long enough,” Theresa said. “For some reason that I can’t fathom or imagine, Catherine has decided she isn’t coming. But her presence one way or the other doesn’t make any difference anyway, so let’s get this show on the road.”

  Mary, holding her silent Carlos’s hand, spoke up in her timid voice. “Isn’t anybody else worried about her?”

  Will shot a glance across his mother at his younger sister. “I’m sure it’s something with school and the kids,” he said easily. “It’s always school and the kids. You know that. More important than anything else.”

  “But you’d think this . . .” Aaron began.

  Will cut him off. “She knows it’s going to be what it’s going to be. Her being here isn’t going to change anything.”

  “Bob.” Theresa, at the end of patience, used her most dismissive tone. “Either you open that damned folder or I’m going to take it from you and read it myself.”

  “Mom!” Beth said. “You don’t have to be so difficult.”

  Theresa whirled on her elder daughter, her tone sharp and angry. “Don’t you talk to me about difficult, young lady. I’m the one who knows how difficult it can be going it alone in this world. And I’m the one who wants to be sure that my grandchildren don’t have to find out what that’s like. That’s why I’m here, and that’s the only reason I’m here. I doubt if your father left me a dime.” She came back front to Townshend. “Bob? Now. Please.”

  With a last look at Catherine’s empty chair, he sighed and carefully unsealed the envelope.

  “She called from here,” Hardy said, “and they’d just read it.”

  “And he stops,” Glitsky grumbled, half to himself. “You’re going to make me guess?” He stood by one of the windows in Hardy’s office, studying the traffic patterns—unmoving—on Sutter Street below. It was five thirty, still light out, still sunny.

  “Of course not. I’ll tell you.” Hardy had his feet up on his desk. “If you just ask me politely, I’ll tell you.”

  “All right.” Glitsky took his hand off the window shade, half turned to face his friend. “I’m asking.”

  “Come on, Abe. Just say, ‘Tell me about the will.’ ”

  Glitsky threw his eyes to the ceiling, summoning all of his endurance. He sighed heavily. “Okay,” he said, “tell me about the will.”

  Hardy shot back. “Say ‘please.’ ”

  “I don’t think so.” Shaking his head in disgust, Glitsky started walking over to the cherry cabinet where Hardy kept his darts. Glitsky hadn’t stolen Hardy’s darts in nearly six months now, and when he’d come in he’d been thinking that it was getting to be about that time again. If his friend happened to leave the room.

  “If you just say ‘please’ ”—Hardy was grinning broadly—“I promise I’ll tell you.”

  Glitsky got to the cabinet and opened up the side doors to reveal the black, yellow, red and green “professional” dartboard within. Hardy’s three custom tungsten darts were hanging in their little holders, blue
flights attached. Glitsky pulled them and without a glance at Hardy walked to the dark-wood line in the light hardwood floor that had been inset seven feet, nine and one-quarter inches from the face of the board. Turning, he fired the first dart and hit a double bull’s-eye, smack in the center of the board. He turned around again and put the two other darts on Hardy’s desk.

  “All right,” Hardy said. “Bull’s-eye counts as a ‘please.’ ” He eyed the darts, looked up at Glitsky. “Hanover hadn’t changed the will. Missy wasn’t mentioned. All the money went to the family.”

  “How much?”

  “Well.” Hardy pulled his feet off the desk and grabbed the darts. “It’s complicated, with the property and investments and various other liquidatable assets . . .”

  “Liquidatable. Good word,” Abe said.

  “Thank you.” Hardy was now around the desk and standing at the throw line. “But the best ballpark estimate looks like it’s going to come out at something like seventeen, eighteen million.” He threw the dart, then the next one in rapid succession. Two twenties. He leaned back against his desk. “Which of course isn’t the best news in the world for Catherine.”

  “Or any of them,” Glitsky said, “if they didn’t all have alibis, which Cuneo says they do. Except the ex-wife, Theresa.”

  “Maybe it’s nobody in the family. Are you getting anything on Tow/Hold?”

  Glitsky shook his head. “I talked to a lot of people. Harlan Fisk, Granat again, went down to the corporate office in San Bruno. Swell group of folks. Nothing.” Now he pushed himself against the back cushion and ran both hands over his buzz cut. “I know I’m a cop and ought to be glad we’ve got a suspect, but I don’t want to think Cuneo has got this one right. Catherine doesn’t feel right. Hasn’t from the beginning.”

  “I love when you say that,” Hardy said. In truth, though, he was far from sanguine. He flatly didn’t believe, despite her low-key and self-effacing protestations to the contrary—“I am so scattered lately. I think all this stress must be eating my brain cells.”—that Catherine had simply forgotten that the reading of the will was going to be today. She could have told him she didn’t want to be in the same room as her husband, and okay, he could have possibly accepted that. But even with the distractions of a spouse’s affair, a subpoena to testify before the grand jury and a police search of her house in progress, Hardy had to believe that your average person would probably remember that this was the day you found out if you were a millionaire or not. Sitting on his desk, the darts stuck in the board and forgotten, Hardy laid all of this out. “She didn’t forget that today was the reading of the will, I promise you.”