The Motive

by John Lescroart

  So Hardy was standing now and the judge was nodding, indicating with her hand that counsel should approach the bench.

  In the relative calm of Lou the Greek’s, Hardy and Glitsky sat in a darkened back booth about a half hour before the lunch crowd would arrive in earnest. Hardy was dipping pita bread into the Lou’s version of tsatsiki, which incorporated soy sauce and hot chili oil into the standard yogurt, garlic and cucumber mix, and somehow the resulting glop managed to work.

  “I blame you,” Hardy said. “If you hadn’t whined so much about having to testify . . .”

  “I wasn’t whining.”

  Hardy put on a voice. “If I testify against a cop, the other uniforms won’t like me anymore.” He popped some bread. “So if I wanted to save you all the embarrassment and worse, I figured I had to come up with something.”

  “All right, but how did you get it?”

  “The car.”

  “The car?”

  He nodded. “I always said that was the key. Now if you’d only have found it earlier . . . but I guess better late than never, huh? I’m sure you did the best you could.”

  Glitsky wasn’t going to rise to the bait. “What about the car, though?”

  “It was towed from in front of Missy’s apartment.”

  “Yes, it was. So?”

  “So she drove it there.”

  “Right. And?”

  “And if she died in the Steiner Street house, it would have still been somewhere near Alamo Square, where she had parked it, where the Willises had seen her get into it.”

  “No. They said it was Catherine.”

  “That’s what they said, but they were wrong. It was Missy all right. At least I assumed it had to be. It couldn’t have been anybody else, really. But I wasn’t completely sure until I talked to Yamashiru, then found Dr. Lee and went by his place last night and showed him the picture. Actually, I had some more family snapshots of Missy, too, and Yamashiru didn’t recognize any of them. I just wanted to pin Yamashiru down before Cuneo got him to ‘remember’ seeing Missy around the office.”

  “And if she wasn’t the one in the fire,” Glitsky said, “she couldn’t have been the one he identified from the dental records.”

  “Exactly right.”

  “So she did it. Missy.”

  “That’s the money bet,” Hardy said. “Then she split with the money.”

  “You have any idea why?”

  “I thought I’d leave something for you to figure out. That’s police work. As you are no doubt aware, I deal only in the realm of exalted and abstract thought.”

  Glitsky couldn’t fault him for crowing a little. He figured he’d earned the right. “So where’s it at now?” he asked. “The directed verdict?”

  “Braun’s deciding. Technically, she shouldn’t grant it. The motion only goes to the people’s case, and whether that evidence alone could support a verdict. Yamashiru has only said he doesn’t really know if the photo belongs with the records in his office. Those records are in the alleged victim’s name and Dr. Lee hasn’t testified yet. But everybody knows what’s coming, and Braun’s so pissed at Rosen and Cuneo she might just pull the trigger. And whether she grants the motion or not, the jury’s got to believe the police investigation was totally inept if not completely contrived.”

  CityTalk BY JEFFREY ELLIOT

  The big news around the Hall of Justice this week was the bombshell dropped by forensic odontologist (read “dentist”) Toshio Yamashiru in the double-murder trial of Catherine Hanover. Dr. Yamashiru had previously testified about the identityof the female victim in the case, whose body had been discovered burned beyond recognition with that of Paul Hanover at his Alamo Square mansion last May. Hanover’s girlfriend, Missy D’Amiens, had been one of the patients in Dr. Yamashiru’s practice, and he compared D’Amiens’s dental records with those of the deceased woman and pronounced them identical.

  On Thursday morning, however, defense attorney Dismas Hardy recalled the dentist to the witness stand for cross-examination. During the questioning, Hardy showed him a Chronicle file photograph of Missy D’Amiens and inquired if Dr. Yamashiru could identify the woman in the picture. He could not, stating that he’d had no real contact with the woman. His patient, who had called herself Missy D’Amiens as well, was still clearly the deceased, but evidently she was not the person who’d been engaged to Mr. Hanover.

  Dental records are often the only way to identify a body that is otherwise unidentifiable. Outside the courtroom after the stunning testimony, Dr. Yamashiru emphasized, however, that the forensic odontologist only verifies that the teeth of the victim match those of his sample dental records. “The actual identification of the individual is left to the detective in charge of the case,” Yamashiru explained, “Sergeant Dan Cuneo. And he got it wrong.”

  Judge Marian Braun called a halt to further proceedings today while she mulls over her ruling on Mr. Hardy’s motion to dismiss all charges against his client, who—because a double murder mandates the charge of special circumstances—is facing life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

  Which of course leaves two related questions: assuming Hardy is right and the dead woman is not Missy D’Amiens, who is the dead woman? And where is Missy D’Amiens?>

  In the end, the district attorney himself—Clarence Jackman—appeared before Braun could rule on the 1118.1 motion. “Your Honor,” he said, “in light of the new evidence we’ve seen in this case, the people move . . .”

  For Catherine, the ordeal was over.

  PART THREE

  31

  On a fogbound, windswept and blustery Thursday in early March, six weeks to the day after Jackman dismissed the charges against Catherine Hanover and Braun ordered her released from jail, Glitsky was doing his own driving. He was not in uniform. Instead he wore a pair of dark, heavy slacks and a blue dress shirt and his new Glock .40 automatic in his shoulder holster. When he got out of the car, he’d cover the weapon with his all-weather jacket.

  The night before, he’d checked out another city-issued Taurus, and this morning he’d gone against the traffic over the bridge to the East Bay and taken Interstate 80 east. Now, just beyond American Canyon Road outside of Vallejo, he encountered a blanket of some of California’s Central Valley fog—he’d heard of “tule fog” but hadn’t before experienced it. For his money, the stuff put its more notorious San Francisco counterpart to shame.

  Never mind the fog that rolled in over the city for six months out of the year off the Pacific. This, he thought, was the real deal. Every year, he knew, it was responsible for multivehicle wrecks and double-digit fatalities from Redding to Bakersfield, Fairfield to Auburn. Visibility was under a hundred yards, and Glitsky got into the slow lane and decreased his speed to thirty-five, which still felt too fast. But on his left, cars continued to fly by at twice his speed, each on the tail of the vehicle in front of it. Three times people in the slow lane had come up on him hell-bent for leather from nowhere out of the whiteness, disappearing back into it as they swerved to avoid him, honking all the way, flipping him off.

  Idiots.

  Glitsky wasn’t in a hurry and even if he was, this wasn’t the time or the place. He’d get where he was going when he got there, and that would be soon enough.

  The reason for his reluctance was that he wasn’t completely certain of the wisdom of his intended actions, and the more time he took before they became irrevocable, the more comfortable he’d remain. He might even give himself enough time to change his plan entirely. But he didn’t think so.

  On the D’Amiens matter, and the Hanover murder— they were one and the same—he’d decided to stay on in the role of prime mover in whatever events unfolded. The smart move, the professional approach, he knew, would take him out of the loop. He should leave it to the local jurisdiction in the valley now, or to the FBI. Each had an equally strong claim to supervise and carry out the apprehension of Missy D’Amiens.

  But almost a year ago Kathy West h
ad asked him to take a watchdog role in the case. He’d been unable to prevent Cuneo from end-running around him, getting an indictment on a woman who was almost undoubtedly innocent. Then the trial—with all of its tabloid stupidity, vulgarity and waste—had led to the renewed currency of the conspiracy theory. Cranks came out of the woodwork and insisted on involving him, Hardy and his client, the mayor, possibly even Chief Batiste and District Attorney Clarence Jackman as players in every problem plaguing the city, from potholes to a rise in the rate of auto theft. And for every one of his good “coconspirators,” the charges and innuendoes had been, and in some cases remained, a huge burden—always personally, always politically and sometimes in business terms as well.

  But for Glitsky and Hardy, specifically, the charge held an even greater threat. For they both had conspired. Yes, there had been defensible reasons, even compelling ones. But they were conspirators, and while the word was bruited about, they were both in constant, if not to say imminent, danger of being discovered. Even at this remove in time.

  And all of it, Glitsky believed, on some level, was his fault. He’d been intimidated by Cuneo, who’d unwittingly played on Glitsky’s own deepest fear that someone would discover his role in the shoot-out that had killed a police lieutenant. He’d been outmaneuvered by both the inspector and Rosen; then during his investigation while the trial went on he’d been plain outthought by his best friend. At every turn of this case, at every opportunity to make a difference, Glitsky had failed.

  A murderer had killed in the jurisdiction for which he held the ultimate responsibility. And that person was still at large.

  After a lifetime of service, Glitsky was finally in a position of real authority as the Deputy Chief of Inspectors. But the entire Hanover affair had destroyed much of his own self-esteem. Far more importantly, he knew that it had sullied his reputation among the Police Department’s rank and file, and perhaps also at higher levels. He felt it every day in many ways large and small—a silence when he entered a room, a failure to meet his eyes, invitations for anniversaries and retirements that somehow never got delivered to him.

  He was afraid now that his ascension to upper management had turned him into what he swore he’d never become—a functionary, a bureaucrat, Peter-principled out at his position. If he didn’t get back the respect of his people—from below and from above—his tenure at the top would remain in a hollow holding pattern. He would achieve nothing great—neither revolutionary change for the better nor even simple efficiency. His earlier promise would forever be perceived as a chimera; his promotion a function of the conspiracy, nepotism and cronyism. His future only a slow slide into retirement, when he would become a forgotten and pitiful full-pensioner, a father of grandfather age, unable to keep up with his young children, or even his wife.

  The fog thinned somewhat and he punched it up to fifty, passing Vacaville now—enormous malls and outlet stores lining the freeway for miles on both sides. Housing developments all on top of each other. He didn’t get out here to the valley very often, but the growth seemed all out of proportion somehow. When his first set of kids had been younger, he’d driven this road many times on the way up to ski the Sierra, and it had all been farmland back then, really not too long ago. Fifteen, twenty years? And all of it gone now? Isn’t this where California was supposed to grow its crops? What were they going to use for land when the rest of it was all covered up and built over?

  Keeping his mind from confronting the real issue. Missy D’Amiens.

  The first glimpse. The Tuesday after the dismissal. Hardy picks him up at the Hall.

  Glitsky putting on his seat belt, Hardy greeting him. “You said we’re going somewhere?”

  “We are. Glide Memorial. I wouldn’t have bothered you except it’s Hanover and you might have questions of your own.”

  “I’m all over it. You gotta love a field trip.”

  “You will.”

  The soup-kitchen dinner was over by 5:30 most nights, but some people stay around making sandwiches to give out for the next day. Glitsky stands at the door a minute until an older gray-haired black man looks up, puts down his knife, wipes his hands and comes over.

  “Lieutenant Glitsky?” Using the civil service rank Glitsky had given him. He sticks out his hand. “Jesse Stuart.”

  “Rev. Stuart, thanks for meeting with me. This is Dismas Hardy. He’s interested because he defended the woman charged with killing Missy.”

  Rev. Stuart doesn’t much care—his life is feeding starving homeless people. White men in suits don’t figure much in the picture. But he’s polite. “So what can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to go over a little of what we talked about earlier today. About Missy.”

  “Sure. I looked it up in the meanwhile, and it was like I said. She started coming in to help out about four years ago now. She was a regular, couple of nights a week, for most of a year, then slowed down. Eventually stopped altogether. Some do.”

  “And Dorris? No last name?”

  The minister smiles. “None I ever knew. She was just Dorris.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hardy says, “but who’s she?”

  “A regular here ’til last year.”

  “Last May, right?” Glitsky says, throwing Hardy a pregnant look.

  “Right. I remember because she came in on my birthday and brought me a flower. So Dorris stopped on May tenth. Didn’t never come again.”

  “Did you report her missing?” Hardy asks.

  Stuart doesn’t try to show that he thinks this is a dumb question, but a hint of it leaks out. “No, sir. We try to feed as many as we can, but we don’t keep tabs on ’em.”

  “But you didn’t think it a little strange that she just stopped?”

  “No. Happens all the time. People come and go.”

  Glitsky steps in. “Did you know anything about her? Where she lived? Who with?”

  “She didn’t live anywhere, or she lived anywhere. Say it any way you want. She usually came in alone, though. Sat by herself if she could. But didn’t make nothin’ out of it. She was friendly enough to me, and a good talker if you got her going. Actually pretty educated. Did some college one time.”

  “How old was she?” Glitsky asks.

  Stuart shrugs. “Thirty, fifty, somewhere in there. Mostly she was hungry.”

  “And she and Missy became friends?” Glitsky, getting to it.

  “I wouldn’t say that exactly. Sometimes they’d sit together, that’s all. Then one day she comes in, I’m talking Dorris now, and she’s all smiling, showing off her teeth all clean and fixed up. You know the clinics don’t generally do dental, so somebody asked and she said she had an angel. That was all. That’s really all I remember about it. Nothing connected to Missy herself. It was just another little miracle like happens all the time here.”

  Hardy’s is all game face. He’s got his own teeth clenched hard in his mouth, his lips set. Glitsky thanks the reverend and they walk outside together.

  “She paid Dorris to establish the dental records,” Hardy says. “She knew she was going to kill her.”

  “Maybe not when she made the deal to get Dorris’s teeth fixed,” Glitsky says. “Maybe just setting it up in case she ever needed to.”

  Glitsky knew that Davis, California, was the home of one of the campuses of the University of California, but that was about all he knew of it. He’d never before stopped in the more or less upscale college town, which was located about ten miles southwest of Sacramento. The fog had lifted and now a drizzle surrounded the car, steady enough to keep his windshield wipers on intermittent swipe.

  Leaving the freeway, deep in thought, he made an inadvertent wrong turn until a sign for a surgery clinic next to a sushi place struck him as so incongruous that it shook him out of his reverie, and he realized he’d come the wrong way and turned around. Heading back toward downtown, he waited in a surprisingly slow and lengthy line of traffic. Ten minutes later, the reason for the delay became clear. Some genius of a
small-town city planner had evidently decided it would be a good idea to have the five lanes of the freeway overpass funnel down into a narrow, two-lane tunnel/underpass beneath an old railway line. But Glitsky was a longtime resident of San Francisco to whom traffic delays were an everyday fact of life. If he let traffic bother him, he would have had a nervous breakdown or psychotic episode years ago. There was a light at an intersection up ahead of him, just in front of the tunnel, that had already cycled through red twice. It wouldn’t be long, another few minutes at most. He’d just wait it out.

  It’s one week after the dismissal, five weeks ago to the day, and FBI Special Agent Bill Schuyler sits with Glitsky downstairs in one of the half-hidden back booths across from the Hall at Lou the Greek’s. It’s way after hours, going on nine at night, and Glitsky hasn’t yet been home. Everything he is doing with the Hanover matter, and all week he’s been at it, has been transpiring outside the realm of his daily work.

  The two men have had a professional relationship for more than six years. But it’s never easy with overlapping jurisdictions, different procedures and priorities. Feds and locals weren’t like oil and water. More like oil and oranges. This is about to become clearer than ever. Schuyler says, “Yeah.”

  Glitsky, hands around his mug of hot tea, nods. He’s not surprised by the admission so much as by the sudden current of anger that courses through him. “You’re telling me you knew?”

  “I didn’t know, personally, myself, but yeah, somebody in the bureau knew.”

  “And whoever it was didn’t think it might be worth mentioning, say to the cops investigating a double murder?”

  Schuyler isn’t going to fight about it. “Nope. She was dead. We checked ourselves and she was gone. What difference would it make?”