The Motive

by John Lescroart

  Hardy asked with a mild curiosity, “Who else is worked up? Are you?”

  “Well . . . no. But Will was.”

  “Will wasn’t paying me, Mary. I didn’t want to have to abandon Catherine, so I—”

  “You wouldn’t have done that!”

  “Maybe not, but let’s let that be our secret, all right?”

  She flashed a weary smile. “I think he’s being horrible—Will, I mean—playing the kids off her. She was always a good mother.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to think anymore. I never thought they would arrest her, and then when they did, it just didn’t seem real that she would . . . I mean that it would get to a trial. With all this incredibly weak evidence against her . . . it just doesn’t seem like Catherine could have done . . .” She trailed off.

  Though depressing, it was good for Hardy to hear this from someone who’d been at the trial the whole time. If she was thinking this way, it was a litmus for the jury. “The evidence seems bad to you, then, does it?”

  “Well, I know you said that there wasn’t any physical evidence, and maybe there isn’t too much of that, but the rest of it . . .”

  “The circumstantial evidence?”

  “That’s it. I mean, that might seem to some people that it points to her, doesn’t it?”

  “But it doesn’t to you.” Not a question. “You know Catherine better than that, don’t you? She says the two of you are pretty close.”

  “Why else do you think I’m there in court every day? She’s got to know that the whole family hasn’t abandoned her.” She bit her lip. “I mean, Will and my mother . . . it just seems so cruel. I don’t know why he’s doing that.”

  “Their marriage was on the rocks before,” he said. “Now, with this, with her accusations against him, it’s a war.”

  “I don’t know why Catherine said all that about Will’s secretary and him. She could have just, I don’t know, kept it between them. That’s one of the reasons Mom is so mad.”

  “So you don’t think Will was having the affair?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just all so sordid, don’t you think? I don’t want to believe he’d lie to his kids, though. I mean, people have affairs and get divorced all the time.”

  “Sure, but he doesn’t want his kids to think he’s the reason for it. He’d rather they think it’s her. And especially with this thing now at trial this morning, Cuneo saying she came on to him.”

  Now the dark eyes flashed. “That was horrible! That man’s creepy. You see the way he’s always moving, bouncing, jittering, like he’s on drugs or something? There’s no way Catherine is going to . . . I mean, just no. But with all these accusations flying, I can see where people might not know what to think anymore.”

  “Do you believe Catherine?”

  “Yes, but I believe Will, too. He’s my brother. He’s my blood. Thicker than water, you know.” She sighed deeply. “It’s like this terrible nightmare. I just wish we could all wake up.”

  “It is like that. I know.” Hardy took his opening. “But listen, I’ve taken enough of your time. I’ve got a specific question I wanted to ask you if you don’t mind.”

  “No, of course, I don’t. I mean, if it will help Catherine . . .”

  “Great.” Hardy didn’t want to let her think about it.

  “Do you remember back on the afternoon of the fire, after Catherine had gone to see your dad and found out his plans about Missy and the family? I was reviewing all of my talks with her the other day, all the details she’d told me, and I came upon the fact that right after she’d left your dad’s house—this was long before the fire—she said she called you. Do you remember that?”

  Mary nodded. “Sure, I remember that very well. She was really upset.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I was upset, too, I suppose, but we’re doing okay here, Carlos and I. I mean, I didn’t like what Dad was doing, but didn’t see any way that we could stop it.” Then, perhaps realizing what she’d said, she put her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Nobody was going to try to stop anybody. It was just a shame, that’s all. Dad being so gullible.”

  “With Missy, you mean?”

  Nodding, she said, “But he’d made his own money and I guess he could spend it however he wanted. The minority opinion in the family.”

  “But you didn’t believe Missy loved your father?”

  “Not for a minute.”

  “Okay, let’s go back to the phone call for a minute. Why did Catherine call you?”

  “Well, I guess because we’re friends. We talked all the time. Our boys are about the same age, too, so there’s that. And after she left Dad’s, she wanted everybody to know, the whole family, so we could decide what we were going to do. But she and Beth aren’t all that close—Beth’s really serious and not much of a chatterer, like me—and there was no way Catherine was going to call Mom.”

  “So did you call them then?”

  “Yeah. Mom right away, I remember, but not Beth. She hates being bothered at work. I should have called Catherine back, too, I realize now, and maybe invited her to come out to Pablo’s soccer game and we could have just talked and gotten everything calmed down. If I’d have done that . . .” She shook her head. “Anyway, I didn’t. Is that all you wanted to ask me about? That phone call?”

  “Pretty much,” he said. “It’s part of Catherine’s alibi and I wanted to make sure I had the chronology straight before I put her on the stand.” This was not even close to true, but it sounded plausible and, more important, Mary bought it. “There is one other thing, though.”

  “Sure.”

  “What can you tell me about the ring?”

  She shook her head. “That stupid ring. What do you want to know?”

  “Anything you can think of.”

  She thought a minute. “Well, it was the dumbest thing Dad ever did, buying that for her. Then telling us, of course, what he paid for it. Six figures, he said, like he’d finally gotten into some exclusive club. But that’s really what started all the . . . I mean that’s when everybody started taking Missy seriously. And Mom! I thought she’d die. ‘He spent over a hundred thousand dollars on a rock for her finger?’ He never even gave her, my mom I mean, an engagement ring at all. They could only afford a couple of gold bands in those days. But then, when Dad got this, this monstrosity for her . . .” She shook her head at the memory, blew out a sharp breath. “Anyway, that’s the ring. Why?”

  “It’s come up a couple of times lately. No one seems to know where it’s gone to.”

  The fact seemed to strike Mary as odd, and her face clouded briefly, but by then Hardy was getting to his feet. Two minutes later, the two of them shook hands outside in the cold night at her front door, she closed it behind him, and Hardy jogged down to where he’d parked.

  In his living room, at his reading chair, the lone light in the house on over his shoulder, Hardy reviewed his notes on talks he’d had long ago with Catherine’s family. He was happy to see that his memory hadn’t completely deserted him. From the outset of this case, he’d realized that every member of the Hanover family had the same motive to kill the patriarch, so he’d questioned Mary, Beth and Will as to their whereabouts at the time of the fire.

  Will, of course, had been out on the ocean somewhere off the coast of California, with or without Karyn Harris. Beth, a consultant with an environmental insurance firm, stayed at her office crunching numbers with a team of four other colleagues until nearly eight thirty. Mary worked in investment banking downtown, where she’d taken Catherine’s call. She’d checked her calendar and found that her husband had picked her up from work at quarter past five, and the two of them had gone together out to Golden Gate Park to take in their son’s six o’clock soccer game.

  At the time he’d done these interviews—early in the process, late last summer—Hardy hadn’t fully appreciated the degree to which Theresa remained involved with her offspring and with the lives and fu
tures of their kids, her grandchildren. Still, to date, he hadn’t ever talked to Theresa about what she’d been doing on the night of May 12. Among the various other dudes he’d considered, she’d somehow never made the list. She was merely Paul Hanover’s ex-wife, long estranged from him. But evidently still connected enough, either to him or to his memory, to become enraged about the size and expense of his new fiancée’s engagement ring. And what Hardy did finally know, now, again thanks to his conversation with Mary tonight, was that Mary had called her mother right after she’d heard from Catherine, in the late afternoon of the day Paul and Missy had been killed, about three hours before the fire started.

  Hardy closed up his notes binder, turned off the back light and walked to his little tool room behind the kitchen where he kept his maps. There, he looked up Theresa Hanover’s address, which was on Washington Street at Scott, in Pacific Heights.

  Fifteen blocks in a straight line from Alamo Square.

  23

  Hardy was up at five o’clock, showered, shaved and dressed in a half hour. Opening the door to his upstairs bedroom, he was surprised to see light from the kitchen, more surprised to see his daughter, Rebecca, up and dressed for school. She sat writing at the dining room table with her schoolbooks spread around her. Looking up at him, she smiled. “Howdy, stranger.”

  “Not you, too.”

  “What?”

  “You know what. I’m in trial. It’s how I support us financially, and unfortunately it involves putting in long hours once in a while, which is not something I enjoy as much as everyone here at home seems to believe. Have you eaten?”

  “No.”

  “Plan to?”

  She shrugged.

  “I could make you something.”

  “What are you having?”

  “Just some coffee.”

  “I’ll have that, too.”

  “No food? You know, protein to see you through those grueling school hours.”

  She stopped writing, smiled up at him again. “Are you having any?”

  “I’m an adult,” he said. “I have no needs.”

  “Well, I’m eighteen.”

  “I’m vaguely aware of that. I was there for your birth. But what’s your point?”

  “Just that I’m an adult, too. In many states.”

  “But here, as a full-time student with energy needs, you still need food.”

  “But not breakfast.”

  “It’s the most important meal of the day.”

  “That’s what everybody says, but if I eat it every morning, I’ll get fat.”

  “You’ll never get fat. You work out every day.”

  “I might stop.”

  “When you do, you can stop eating.”

  A pause. “Okay, I’ll have something if you do.”

  Hardy felt his shoulders relax. He walked over and planted a kiss on the top of his daughter’s head. “The way you argue, you ought to be a lawyer. I’d hate to face you in court.”

  Abstractedly, she reached an arm up and put it around his neck. “I love you, you know, even when you’re gone a lot. But I do miss you.”

  “I love and miss you, too. But it can’t be helped. I’m going to make hash and eggs.”

  She gave him her arch look, held up three fingers, then turned her hand sideways. Still three fingers out.

  Hardy, translating the sign language, effortlessly picked up the “W” and the “E” and, proud of himself, said, “Whatever.”

  An approving glance. “Not bad,” she said.

  Hardy shrugged. “For an adult.”

  While breakfast cooked in his black pan, he went out to the front porch, down the front steps and out into a steady dark rain. He picked up the Chronicle out by the gate, then hurried to get back inside. In the kitchen, he shook the paper out of its plastic wrap and checked under the lid of his pan, where the eggs hadn’t quite set.

  Thinking he’d give them another minute or two, he dropped the paper on the counter and opened it up. Though the trial had provided a great deal of sleazoid fodder for the tabloid press, as well as a steady if less-than-sensational flow of ink as local hard news, it hadn’t been getting front-page play to date in the local newspaper, so the headline on the front page stopped him cold: CONSPIRACY ALLEGED IN HANOVER TRIAL. Then, in smaller but still bold type: MAYOR’S TIES TO DEFENSE TEAM QUESTIONED.

  Leaning on the counter with his hands on either side of the paper, Hardy read: “The double homicide trial of Catherine Hanover took an unexpected turn yesterday when one of the prosecution’s chief witnesses and the lead inspector on the case, homicide sergeant Dan Cuneo, testified that Mayor Kathy West personally enlisted the aid of Deputy Chief of Inspectors Abraham Glitsky to direct and perhaps obstruct the police department’s investigation of the murders of lobbyist/socialite Paul Hanover and his fiancée, Missy D’Amiens.

  “Questioned after his appearance in the courtroom yesterday, Sergeant Cuneo expanded on the conspiracy theme, saying that Glitsky and, by extension, Mayor West herself had repeatedly undermined his efforts to apprehend his chief suspect, Catherine Hanover, in the slayings last May. ‘They cooked up sexual harassment charges against me, they told me to keep away from her, told me not to do any more interviews, tried to direct me to other potential suspects. It was a full-court press.’

  “Several groups in the city have already expressed outrage over the allegation, although the mayor herself has thus far declined to comment. Marvin Allred, spokesperson for the Urban Justice Project, a police watchdog group, has called for a full-scale investigation into the mayor’s relations with senior police officials. ‘The mayor’s arrogance and sense of entitlement undermine the very basis of our system of justice. This peddling and trading of influence in our political leaders is a cancer on the body politic of this city and has to stop,’ he said.”

  Another half dozen quotes spun the story the same way. It wasn’t just an accusation anymore. Strongly implied was proof of a conspiracy.

  “Cuneo’s allegations also implicate Catherine Hanover’s defense attorney Dismas Hardy, whose cozy relationship with top cop Glitsky and the mayor has long been a subject of conjecture and discussion among Hall of Justice regulars. Cuneo went on to say that ‘Everybody knows that he dated Catherine Hanover when they were both in high school. They’ve been friends since they were kids. When it was obvious that she would be my chief suspect, he went to his friend the mayor and asked her and their friend Glitsky to use all of her influence to keep me away from her. Luckily, it didn’t work.’

  “Deputy Chief Glitsky has not been at work for two days and did not return calls to his office, and Hardy, likewise, could not be reached for comment.”

  “Dad? Are you all right?”

  Still leaning on his hands, the paper spread open under him, Hardy stood immobile. “If any of the jury saw this or heard about it, we’re going to ask for a mistrial. I’ve got to or I’m incompetent.” Now he straightened up, pressed a hand to his eyes. “I’m going to have to do this all over again. And Catherine in jail all that time. Lord.”

  His daughter moved up next to him, put an arm around his waist. He turned back to the front page so she could read the article from the top. When she finished,she rested her head against him. “But none of it is remotely true.”

  “No. What makes it so effective is that most of it is true. The mayor and Abe and I are friends. She asked Abe to look into the investigation. I used to date Catherine. The facts are fine. It’s just all twisted. I especially love where it says that Abe hasn’t been in the office for two days, implying that he’s ducking questions, when in fact he had a baby born with a hole in his heart. You think that might account for it?”

  “How about your relationship with Uncle Abe being a source of discussion . . .”

  “My cozy relationship. And it’s discussion and conjecture. Don’t forget conjecture.”

  “I never would. But what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means we’re somehow up to n
o good.”

  They both stood over the paper, staring down at it. “So what are you going to do?” Rebecca finally asked.

  “Well, first, let’s see if I can get the judge to ask if any of the jurors saw this or heard about it.”

  “Do you really want that?”

  “I don’t have a choice. It’s too big to ignore. I think I can convince Braun.”

  “To declare a mistrial?”

  He nodded. “If any of the jurors read this, and I’m almost certain at least three of them can read, then it’s extremely prejudicial. They get kicked off just for ignoring Braun’s instructions. If they discussed it with the other jurors, the whole panel goes.” Suddenly, he let out a little yelp of alarm and reached over to uncover his black pan and flick the heat off under it.

  “I like a nice crust on hash.” Rebecca squeezed his waist. “Don’t worry about that.”

  But Hardy’s lapse in timing bothered him. “I’ve never ruined anything I cooked in this pan before,” he said miserably.

  “And still haven’t,” his daughter responded. “Besides, it’s not ruined. It’s well done.”

  “Same thing. It’s got to be an omen.”

  “No, it’s a sign. Besides, I hate runny eggs.”

  Hardy stuck the corner of his spatula into one of the hard yolks. “Well, they’re not that. And what would it be a sign of?”

  She gave it a second. “Perseverance. Staying in the frying pan even when it’s too hot.”

  The lighthearted, feel-good words resonated on some level, although Hardy couldn’t put his finger on it. “You think?” he asked.