The Motive

by John Lescroart

  “You mean Missy’s bank records?”

  Glitsky nodded. “I thought you could help me get ’em as essential to this case. Tie it into Hanover’s estate and missing money. You sign a subpoena, the records just come to court. Rosen won’t care that we’ve got them.”

  “I’ve got one for you,” Hardy said. “How’d you get on this in the first place? Missy.”

  “You got me on it,” Glitsky said. “The car.” Mirroring Hardy, boosting himself on the counter by the stove, he told him about the series of unusual findings he’d happened upon as he had followed up leads on Missy, from the address he’d gotten at the DMV site, to Ruth Guthrie her landlady, to the bed and bath store where she hadn’t worked, which had led to the checking and other accounts and the bank.

  “Wait a minute,” Hardy said when Glitsky had finished. “So you’re telling me that before she showed up here in San Francisco when? Three years ago? You still don’t know anything about where she came from?”

  “No. She came from somewhere they speak French, apparently. But how she got here? She dropped out of the sky. Although there’s a social”—a Social Security number—“on her Bank of America accounts, and I was going to run that, too. If you’ll sign off on the subpoenas.” In fact, it was no big deal for Hardy to request Missy’s bank records, and both men knew it. Preparing the subpoena wouldn’t take Hardy five minutes. “I’m just saying it might help, Diz.”

  Hardy felt a wash of fatigue—the coffee wasn’t kicking in quickly enough. He brought his hands to his eyes, then grabbed his mug and tipped it up. “I know it might,” he said. “Sorry. I’m thinking about eyewitnesses. If I could just see how I can use this D’Amiens thing. If she had all that cash on her, plus the ring, and Catherine knew about it . . . but if anything that only strengthens her motive.”

  “I’m not guaranteeing any of this is going to help your case,” Glitsky said. “I’d just like to know more.”

  “So would I,” Hardy said, “perennially. Sometimes it’s just not in the cards.”

  “True, but it’d be dumb not to look.”

  “Not if it doesn’t help my client, which is pretty much all I’m thinking about right now.”

  Glitsky shrugged. “Your call. I’m going to do what I can anyway.”

  Hardy threw a veiled and vaguely malevolent glance over his coffee mug. “There’s a surprise,” he said.

  When Hardy came around the corner in the hallway and saw Catherine in the holding cell behind the courtroom, she was sitting hunched over almost as if she’d been beaten, as though huddled against further blows. When he got to the cell door, she looked over quickly but, smoothing her hands down over her face, didn’t get up, didn’t change position. When the bailiff let Hardy in, he went and sat beside her. Her face hadn’t completely dried. Putting an arm around her, he drew her in next to him, and she broke down.

  He let it go on until it ended, just allowing her to lean against him until she’d sobbed it all out. When her breathing finally slowed, he gave her the handkerchief he’d learned always to have with him, then gave her a last buck-up squeeze with his arm and stood up. He walked over and stood by the bars, giving her some space while she got herself back together. He consulted his watch. They weren’t due in court for another twenty minutes, plenty of time. Finally, he went back to her and sat.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what . . .”

  “It’s all right.”

  She nodded. “I’ve been trying to keep myself from thinking about my kids, but today’s Polly’s birthday.” She took a shaky breath. “Now I’ve missed every one of them since I’ve been in here.”

  “I know.”

  “I still don’t know where to put any of this. How this can be happening to me.” She gestured at the surroundings. “None of this is in my life, Dismas. Even after all this time, I can’t understand how I’ve gotten here. I keep telling myself to just be strong and bear up and don’t give them anything they can use. But then I think, so what? It’s already been too long. I’m not their mom anymore.”

  “You’re still their mom, Catherine. They visit here every chance they get.”

  “But I can’t . . . I mean . . .” Again, she bowed her head, shaking it slowly side to side, side to side. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. I’m sorry.”

  “First, one more apology and I start pulling out your fingernails. You’ve got every right to be miserable and lonely and afraid and have all of this get to you. Second, we don’t always have to be getting anywhere. That’s for in there.” He indicated the courtroom. “Here we can just sit if we want.”

  She nodded again, then reached over and took his hand. “Can we do this for a minute?”

  “I’m timing it,” he said.

  Seconds ticked by. At last her shoulders settled in a long sigh. “I’ve been wondering if I could have seen the seeds of all this back when Will and I first started, if that wasn’t my original mistake. And everything followed from that.”

  “You got your kids out of it,” Hardy said, “so maybe it wasn’t all a mistake.”

  “I know. That’s true. But I also knew it was a differentthing with him than I had with you. You know what I’m saying?”

  Hardy nodded. He knew.

  “But I’d finished college and worked almost ten years and pretty much given up on dating because of all the losers, and then suddenly here was this kind of cute guy who could be fun in those days. But I knew, I knew, Diz, in my heart, that it wasn’t . . . well, the same as I’d always wanted. But I also thought there wouldn’t ever be anything better. So I settled. I settled. So, so stupid.”

  “You did what you did, Catherine. You made a life that worked for almost twenty years. That’s not failing.”

  A bitter chuckle. “Look around you. Getting to here isn’t failing?”

  “It’s not over yet.”

  “It isn’t? It feels like it is. Even if they let me go. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “I understand what you’re saying. But I can’t have you bail on me now. The first job is to get you acquitted. After that, when you’re back outside . . .”

  She was shaking her head and let go of his hand. “Dismas. Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t give me the standard pep talk. We both know I might not get back outside.”

  “I don’t know that!” Hardy’s tone was firm, nearly harsh. He turned on the bench to face her directly. “Listen to me.” Taking her hand back almost angrily, holding it tight with both of his. “I believe you’re innocent, and because of that the jury will not convict you. I’ll make them see it. And you need to hold on to that thought. I need you to do that for me.”

  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and let it out all at once. “All right,” she whispered, nodding her head. “All right. I can try.”

  Moving on to news and strategy, he told her of Farrell’s interview with her mother-in-law, the remote but arguable possibilities presented by the missing ring, combined with Theresa’s purchase of a new car for cash. While acknowledging without much enthusiasm that it might be something Hardy could introduce to the jury, she really didn’t show much interest until he got to what Glitsky had told him about this morning. “You mean Missy was stealing from Paul? When she was going to get all the money anyway?”

  On the slab concrete bench, the two of them might have been coaches huddled on the sidelines, conferring in intimate tones. “She wouldn’t have gotten any if she left him,” Hardy said.

  “No, I know. But that much . . . I mean, if that’s true, she must have been planning to leave for quite a while, and I don’t understand that at all. They only got formally engaged six months or so before they died, and the remodel had already been going on long before that.”

  Hardy’s shoulders went up an inch. “Maybe she wasn’t sure they’d ever really get married and she wanted to make sure she got something out of him for the time invested. Then, by the time they actually started making
plans, she’d already socked all this money away.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t know what it means. Why did she take it out?”

  “You said it. They were arguing. Paul might have thought it wasn’t a major issue, but maybe she didn’t agree. She was leaving him.”

  Catherine sat straight up. “Maybe I’m stupid, Dismas, but that doesn’t make any sense. She wasn’t going to leave him over some possible minor subcabinet appointment. Paul told me. That day. Remember? That’s what the fight was about. He was going to tell them to go ahead and start the vetting process. But beyond that, there were other candidates. He might not have even gotten the nomination, and if he had, he still would have had to be confirmed. The whole thing was months away at least, if it happened at all. I can’t see Missy deciding to leave last May over it.”

  “I’m not arguing with you. But the fact remains that she did take out the money. If she wasn’t leaving him, what was she doing?”

  “Maybe giving it back to him?”

  Hardy tossed her a get-real look. “Maybe not.” In the hallway in front of them, two bailiffs led eight jailhouse residents in their orange jumpsuits to another holding cell down the long corridor. The chains that bound them together rattled and echoed, then died, and Hardy said, “Now if somebody was blackmailing her . . .”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s kind of been the mantra around Missy, hasn’t it? Nobody knows anything about her. Even the tabloid guys never printed any dirt, and if they couldn’t find anything, I’ve got to believe that if something was there, it was well hidden. But now I wonder if somebody found some nasty secret of Missy’s and threatened to tell Paul. So Missy would have had to pay to keep it quiet.”

  Catherine barely dared say the words. “Are you thinking Theresa?”

  “She’s the ex-wife,” Hardy said. “She hated Missy more than anybody. She’d be motivated to look for dirt on her.” He didn’t add, though they both knew, that Theresa had no alibi, that she’d paid cash for a new car soon after Missy had withdrawn the money. Hardy didn’t want to overplay it, but the suddenly very real possibility that Theresa might have killed Paul and Missy was there in the cell between them. “Did anybody else in the family ever talk to Missy about her life?” Hardy asked. “Even when you all were first introduced to her?”

  “It wasn’t like we all got together and played parlor games, Diz. She and Paul ran in different circles than all of us. We’d see them both at holidays or sometimes at some social thing, but we weren’t doing sleepovers and trading intimate secrets, I promise you.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Hardy saw the bailiff appear in the small, wired-glass window to the courtroom door. They heard the keys, and the door swung open.

  Showtime.

  They were just back from the first morning recess, and so far Hardy felt he was doing very well on the eyewitness front. He was delighted with Rosen’s decision to call Jeffrey (Jeffie) Siddon, since the young gas station attendant’s demeanor was unsympathetic, to say the least. Flat of effect and subtly hostile to if not bored by the entire proceeding, his mumbling responses surely didn’t inspire any confidence in the jury.

  Further, his identification of Catherine was not exactly emphatic. Yes, he’d picked her out of a photograph, then out of her booking mug shot. Hardy had already made his point about IDs from a single photo, but the fact is that other people were saying they recognized Catherine, and this guy would be just one more. But facing her in person, he seemed to hesitate. Rosen had to ask him twice if he recognized in the courtroom the person who had bought the gasoline in the container from his station. Could he point out that person to the jury? Jeffie had raised his hand an inch or two, nodded, and pointed briefly at Catherine. Hardy thought, from the performance, that it was almost as if he had pantomimed the words “I think” afterward.

  Even beyond all that, though, and far more important, was the legal nicety that even if every word Siddon said were completely true in all respects, and if his identification of Catherine had been firm and convincing—even given all of that, his testimony did not put her at the crime scene at any time. There was simply no connection.

  Hardy had argued in a motion to exclude this testimony before the trial, but Braun had allowed it for God knew what reason. The inference that because Catherine may have bought gasoline in a container somehow implicated her in the arson was, Hardy thought, absurd. He could tell that the judge and most of the jury thought the same thing. Still, he rammed the point on cross-examination, reestablishing that Jeffie hadn’t picked Catherine out of a six-pack of photographs—Cuneo had only shown him one at a time; he hadn’t even seen Hardy’s client leave the station, hadn’t noticed the direction she’d driven in when she left, hadn’t ever seen her again afterward. And then Hardy had completely destroyed him on the question of what day, even what week, he had noticed the woman in the blue shirt. The station records showed that someone had purchased two gallons of gasoline on that Wednesday afternoon, and Jeffie had finally admitted—in his defensive manner—that he figured it must have been her. He remembered her, and therefore she was the one who had come by that day.

  Maxine Willis would be rougher, but still, Hardy thought, manageable.

  Unlike Jeffie Siddon, she had no trouble pointing out Catherine as the woman she’d seen leave the Hanover home a half hour before the discovery of the fire. Fortunately, though, Hardy had interviewed both her and her husband at some length. In the course of these talks, he had discovered a foothold from which he was confident he might pick his way through cross-examination.

  “Mrs. Willis,” he began. “Your initial identification of the woman who left the Hanover home a few houses down from yours on the night of the fire was made to an arson inspector on the night of the fire, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you tell the jury about that?”

  Cooperative, she turned to face the panel. “There really isn’t much to tell. My husband and I live three houses down from Mr. Hanover’s house and were evacuated the night of the fire when it looked as though our place might catch fire as well. We were all standing outside when a gentleman came up and identified himself as being an arson inspector with the fire department. He got our names and address and asked if we had anything we’d like to report about the fire.”

  “Did the man have identification?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did that identification say that his name was Sid Bosio?”

  “That was it, yes.”

  Hardy went back to his desk, pulled a sheet of paper from his open binder. He showed it to Rosen and the judge and had the clerk enter it as the next defense exhibit, then came back to the witness. “Mrs. Willis, do you recognize this document?”

  “I do.”

  “Would you tell the jury what it is, please?”

  “It’s a statement I wrote for the arson inspector after he talked to me on the night of the fire.”

  “All right. And is this your name and address on the top of the paper and your signature on the bottom of this piece of paper?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Indicating that the statements are true and correct?”

  “That’s right. As I knew them at the time.”

  No surprise, Mrs. Willis had been coached since the last time Hardy had spoken to her. Now she looked out into the courtroom, over to Rosen, finally back to Hardy. She knew what was coming, even gave him a confident smile.

  “Mrs. Willis, will you please read for the jury what you signed off on?”

  “Sure. The whole thing?”

  Hardy smiled back at her. “After your name and address. The highlighted area.”

  “All right.” She studied the document for a minute. “ ‘Saw occupant of house, Miss Damien, exit structure shortly before fire.’ ”

  “And by ‘Miss Damien,’ you actually meant one of the victims in this case, Missy D’Amiens, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. I got her
name a little bit wrong.”

  “Thank you. That’s fine.” Hardy took the paper back from her, placed it back on the evidence. “So, Mrs. Willis, just to make this absolutely clear, you gave this statement to arson inspector Bosio on the night of the fire?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then, moving along. The next time you had an opportunity to identify the person leaving the Hanover home a short while before the outbreak of the fire, it was by photograph, was it not?”

  “That’s right.”

  “A photograph shown to you by Inspector Cuneo, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Now, did you pick the photograph of the person you saw leaving the Hanover home that night out of a group of photographs?”

  “No, there was just the one.”

  “Inspector Cuneo showed you only one photograph and asked you to identify who it was, is that right?”

  “Correct.”

  Nodding amiably, Hardy cast a casual eye over to the jury. He strolled easily back to his table and took from it both the newspaper picture of Missy D’Amiens and the original he’d subpoenaed from the Chronicle’s files. After having them marked as the next defense exhibits, he showed the glossy of it to the witness. “Do you recognize this photograph?”

  “I sure do. That’s the picture I saw the first time Inspector Cuneo came by.”

  “All right. So Inspector Cuneo showed you this picture. Now Mrs. Willis, do you know who this is a picture of ?”

  “That’s my ex-neighbor, Missy.”

  “The same Missy D’Amiens who is one of the victims in this case, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the same Missy D’Amiens you identified to arson inspector Bosio as the woman who’d left the Hanover house just before the fire, is that right?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “And you identified her to Inspector Cuneo as well, is that correct?”