Nothing but the Truth

by John Lescroart

  Eventually, Hardy got up and wandered out over to Glitsky’s office. During the course of the morning he’d been tangentially aware of activity in the main room, the odd homicide inspector moseying on in for Sunday duty, maybe write up some reports.

  Hardy stopped in Glitsky’s doorway. The lieutenant was at his desk, hunched over paperwork. He knocked and Glitsky looked up, waved him in. “Budgets,” he said, and threw his pencil down on the desk. “Utilization percentage. Field efficiency ratios. Unit integration coefficient. I’ve been filling out these things for five years and I still don’t know what a unit integration coefficient is.”

  “Give it an eighty-seven,” Hardy said. “That’s usually good for a coefficient.” He sat down across from the desk. “I wanted to thank you for bringing her up here,” he said.

  Glitsky nodded. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it sooner. But with the crowds passing through here every other day of the week, somebody’d leak it to Sharron Pratt, who tells Marian Braun, who goes ballistic and takes it to Rigby. Then I’m fired and I hate it when that happens.”

  “Well, you did it today,” Hardy said sincerely. “And I wanted to thank you.”

  “Thanks accepted.” Glitsky leaned back, hooked his hands behind his head. “In other news, you’ll be delighted to hear that I’ve put Batavia and Coleman on alibis for the time of Griffin’s death.” A short pause. “Also for early this morning. Maybe eliminate somebody.”

  “Maybe find somebody.”

  “Maybe that, too. Also, I put in some calls—if Ron Beaumont used one of his credit cards, we know where he is.”

  “Or was.”

  “Close enough. Anyway, last thing is, I took your glass to the lab, but nobody was on. It might be a day or two.”

  “Utilization coefficient difficulties?” Hardy asked.

  Glitsky shook his head in mock disgust. “I can’t teach you anything. It’s not utilization coefficient—it’s unit integration coefficient, but yeah, that’s probably it. Anyway,meanwhile I thought it was time I got a look at the crime scene myself When the party’s over in there, I thought you might like to come along.” He looked at his watch, made a gesture of apology, lowered his voice. “Speaking of which . . .”

  He still had the key to the penthouse, but Hardy couldn’t very well pull it out with Glitsky next to him. So they had to ring the building superintendent, David Glenn.

  Glenn was in his early forties, handsome in a no-nonsense way. He wore a tonsure of buzz-cut blond hair around a lot of clean scalp. His body was trim and well defined in shorts and a Gold’s Gym T-shirt and he projected an easy and friendly can-do competence.

  “You guys getting any closer?” he inquired as the elevator brought them up.

  “Any day now,” Glitsky replied.

  This seemed to satisfy Glenn somehow. “So it’s not Ron, after all?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Glitsky replied.

  “Yeah, I read it was, but if you’re still looking . . .”

  Glitsky was firm. “That’s where it is, Mr. Glenn. We’re still looking. It might be Ron when we stop.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I hope not.”

  “Why not?” Hardy put in.

  Glenn shook his head. “Ah, you know.”

  “Nope,” Hardy said, playing cop. “Why don’t you tell us?”

  “Well, most tenants here, I couldn’t pick ’em out of a lineup. They park down below underneath, ride the elevator to their places, I never see ’em. Ron, I got to know a little, that’s all.”

  The elevator door opened and they were on the small landing in front of the Beaumonts’ door, although the view today through the one window was a gray blanket. Glenn stepped out with them, pulled a key from the ring he was carrying, fitted it to the door. “You get a take on people, that’s all.”

  “And Ron . . . ?”

  The key worked, but Glenn just stood there a minute, thinking about the question. “The guy’s a miracle with his kids. I suppose that’s it.”

  “A miracle?” Glitsky asked. Hardy didn’t ask because he knew what was coming.

  Glenn shrugged. “You guys got kids?”

  Hardy answered. “A handful between us.”

  “All right, then you know. I’m divorced myself, but I got a couple, and even the good ones try the patience of a saint, am I right?” He waited, then answered himself. “I’m right. But Ron? Every day out to school, every day pick ’em up. Weekends with soccer and horses and who knows what else, and I’ve never seen him lose his patience with them. I mean, me, I get mine twice a month and I’m biting their heads off. Couple of times, me and Ron would take all of them to the park or something, and I’m pulling my hair—” A smile, acknowledging the baldness. “Ron’s just cool. Always.”

  “What about with his wife?” Glitsky asked. “The word is they were having problems.”

  A nod. “Maybe. Maybe disagreeing, who doesn’t? But I don’t see Ron fighting. He’d walk away.”

  “Did Bree walk all over him, Mr. Glenn?” Hardy asked.

  The superintendent hesitated. “I didn’t know her so well. She worked long hours. I’d almost never see her. Sometimes in the elevator . . .” He stopped again.

  Glitsky. “What?”

  Glenn shrugged. “I got the impression she was like an absentminded genius, you know what I mean? Real inside herself with all this brilliant stuff, and then like she’d forget what floor she lived on. Sometimes she’d be just sitting in the lobby, like she was trying to decide what floor to get off on.” He shook his head. “Too smart, really. Unconnected.”

  Hardy had a hunch. “To the kids, too?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know I ever saw her go out with them. She kind of had a life of her own, I think.”

  Glitsky pushed it. “And yet you got the impression that she and Ron were happy together?”

  “I don’t know happy. But times you’d see them together, they were . . . comfortable, I guess.” He shrugged. “A family, you know. Comfortable.”

  “Phil Canetta?” Glitsky’s face betrayed no trace of recognition. “Can’t say it rings a bell.”

  “The guy you sent over from Central Station the first time I came here,” Hardy explained.

  But Glitsky was still shaking his head, perplexed. “I called the desk, was all. Said they might want to dispatch a body to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself, or more likely that you didn’t hurt Ron Beaumont if he turned out to be home. Did this guy Canetta say he’d talked to me?”

  Hardy hesitated. Even though Glitsky was his friend, this was not a casual moment. “Not really. I just assumed it.”

  “And you were both inside here?” Glitsky didn’t like this one bit. “How did that special moment come about?”

  “The door was open.”

  “Open?”

  Hardy made a face. “Picky, picky. You’re too literal sometimes. Anybody ever tell you that?”

  If Hardy thought this was going to sidetrack Glitsky, he was mistaken. “Was the door open?”

  A shrug. “It wasn’t locked. I knocked, tried the knob, it turned. I walked in.”

  “You walked in? Had Canetta arrived yet?”

  “No. That was later. But if you’re wondering, I had plenty of time to plant evidence or steal anything I wanted, neither of which I did. You’re just going to have to believe me. Now how about if we talk about something else?”

  Glitsky sighed heavily. “Someday, you pull stuff like this, I’m not going to be able to help you, you know that?”

  Hardy kept a straight face. “It’s a constant worry. But you wanted to come here today, and here we are inside, legally and all with your warrant. What did you want to see?”

  They’d already looked out over the balcony and now stood in the middle of the open kitchen, where Glitsky had been casually opening drawers, the cupboards, the refrigerator. “The usual,” he said distractedly. “Everything.”

  They began in the back, in the children’s bedroom. The room was ju
st as Hardy had last seen it.

  Across the hall, they moved to the master bedroom. Two steps in, Glitsky stopped so abruptly that Hardy nearly walked into him. “What?” he asked.

  “You tell me.”

  Hardy cast his gaze around the room. It was nearly a perfect square and quite large, perhaps twenty feet on a side. To his left, a door was open to a blue-tiled bathroom. Next along the wall were three paneled sliding doors, a long closet. On the back wall, a couple of high windows presided over a king-size bed neatly made up with blankets, no comforter or bedspread, with a reading table on Hardy’s right side. A darkwood chest of drawers with several pictures of Ron, Ron with the kids, Bree with the kids. None of Ron and Bree.

  Along the right wall, some hunting prints hung over an exercise area—a stationary bike and some barbells. Then another doorway, leading to another bathroom, was slightly ajar. Finally, coming back around to where they stood, there was a comfortable-looking stuffed leather chair with matching ottoman, another reading lamp. A Bombay & Company lion’s-claw table seemed to double as a writing desk, with its brass lamp, large green blotter, ship-in-a-bottle.

  “I like it,” Hardy said. “I could use a room like this.”

  “You don’t feel it?”

  Hardy took another second or two. “I don’t feel anything, Abe, except that this is a great room. I want a room like this.”

  “That’s my point,” Glitsky said. “Every guy wants a room like this. You know why? This is a guy’s room.”

  He crossed to the closet and pulled aside one of the paneled doors. Hardy was a step behind him and found himself looking at several suits, coats, shirts, a tie rack. On the floor were a dozen or more pairs of shoes, neatly arranged—dress, tennis, sandals, slippers. Glitsky nodded as though he’d found what he expected.

  He walked to the other end of the closet and slid that door back. It was far less crowded. Glitsky started flicking the few hanging items aside. “Two dresses, three skirts, and four sweaters,” he said, then went into a squat, reached around on the floor, arranging. “Three and a half pairs of women’s shoes, not to mention three more dresses on the floor. How in the world did even Carl miss this?”

  “Maybe he found something else that caught his attention and got him killed first.”

  Glitsky stood slowly, grimacing, a hand on his back. “How do you get this old?”

  “Stubbornly refuse to die?”

  Glitsky broke a small smile. “Words to live by. Bathroom?”

  “No, thanks, I just went.”

  The smile vanished as mysteriously as it had come. “Hopeless,” Abe said, and pushed open the bathroom door. Compared to the spaciousness of the master bedroom, it wasn’t much more than a utilitarian closet—six by eight feet with a double-hung window over a blue tiled sink, a towel rack with one orange towel, a toilet with the seat up. Significantly, Hardy thought, there was no tub, only a glassed-in shower.

  Hardy reached around and opened the medicine cabinet, which was nearly empty—bottles of Tylenol, NyQuil, some Band-Aids, razor blades. “Lots of couples have different bathrooms.”

  “Happy ones don’t have different bedrooms, though,” Glitsky replied. “I’ve done research. It’s a true fact.”

  Glitsky was moving again, and Hardy tagged along. They passed back through Ron’s room and stopped at the dresser, which Glitsky opened with the same basic results—a few articles of women’s underclothes in two of the drawers. But four of the drawers out of six were packed, even overpacked, with Ron’s clothes—jeans, junk, polo shirts and T-shirts, sweaters, socks and underwear. When Glitsky closed the last drawer, he straightened up. “You know,” he said, “you could take a million pictures of this room, and I bet the scene guys did, and you wouldn’t see any evidence of a crime.”

  “I don’t either. So they lived in different rooms, so what?”

  “This, to you, isn’t some evidence of marital conflict?”

  Hardy shrugged. “It doesn’t mean he killed her. Besides, Frannie said they were having troubles.”

  “Don’t remind me. It does make me wonder, though,” he said, “just how she got pregnant.”

  Immersed in paper at the desk in Bree’s office, Glitsky was going through the hard-copy file, folder by folder— propaganda by the armload on what Hardy thought must be every imaginable side of the additive issue. Legislative reports, news clippings, executive summaries from various think tanks, media alerts. MTBE, ethanol, reformulated gasoline. It ran the gamut from copies of faxed pages to four-color advertising pieces, from page fragments to small booklets.

  “Fascinating stuff,” Glitsky said. He was going fast, to Hardy’s eye ignoring everything that wasn’t personal in Bree’s personal files, laying a slush pile of Bree’s professional work on the desk to his right, behind him. Hardy made some noise that might have sounded like asking for permission, got a grunt in reply, and grabbed a handful and walked out into the hallway, where he folded it all up and tucked it inside his jacket.

  He then returned to Bree’s room.

  Further evidence that Ron and Bree had lived separate lives, all right. Her bed was smaller, a double. It had a bright floral comforter and flounced pillows that matched. Even now, a month after her death, a woman’s scent of perfume and powder hung subtly in the air. Her bathroom was done in light salmon tones and was three times the size of Ron’s, with an oversized tub and makeup table, as much a woman’s bathroom as Ron’s was a man’s.

  Back in the bedroom, Hardy stood at the bookshelves—floor-to-ceiling built-ins that covered half the back wall. Possibly it shouldn’t have surprised him after what he’d heard about Bree the ugly duckling from Damon Kerry, but the entire bottom shelf was filled with paperback romance novels. Next up was a half shelf of paperback commercial fiction, then a couple of shelves of hardbound literary fiction—almost entirely by modern women writers. Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver, Laurie Colwin, Amy Tan—a scientist with good literary taste, Hardy thought. Then a surprise—what looked to be a full set of Tony Hillerman. So Chee and Leaphorn had been in her consciousness, too. Maybe helping to spark the idealism that had driven her so strongly in her last months.

  On the top shelf, though, at the end of the large section of travel books, next to a new copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, was the one Hardy thought he recognized and knew he wanted. He took the oversized book down and brought it over to the small reading chair next to the bed.

  Her high school yearbook. Passages 81, from Lincoln High in Evanston, Illinois.

  There were the usual autographs: “To the smartest girl in the world.” “Chemistry would have beat me without you.” “Who needs boys when you’ve got brains?” “Lab rats rule!”

  And then, from one of her teachers, the one Hardy needed: “To Bree Brunetta, my best student ever!”

  He quickly turned through the seniors and found her—Bree Brunetta. Without the maiden name, he never would have been able to find, much less recognize, the ravishing Bree Beaumont from the uninspired and formal cap-and-gown photograph.

  Bree Brunetta, at seventeen, had been slightly overweight with dark unkempt hair, bangs down over her eyes, braces, clunky glasses. The ugly duckling indeed, Hardy thought. There was a recent picture of Bree with the kids next to the bed and he looked at the smiling face with the shining blond hair, the cheekbones, the perfect mouth—it was hard to reconcile the two images.

  He flipped through the rest of the book quickly. Bree had been an active and seemingly well-rounded student, a member of the Debating Society, the Science Club, the Chess Club. She played clarinet in the band and was the “features” editor of the student newspaper. She was voted the Smartest Girl.

  Hardy happened to notice one other detail, one of those cruel high school moments that scar a kid for life. Bree was voted “least likely to get a date with Scott LePine,” the Most Popular Guy, Best-Looking Guy, and Most Likely to Succeed. Whichever kids dreamed up that category must have thought it was
hysterical. Hardy guessed Bree wouldn’t have thought so.

  There were some letters on three-ring binder paper folded over in the back, and he was just opening one when he heard Glitsky’s steps coming quickly down the hallway. He folded the letters back and put them with the literature into his inside pocket as well. Then he closed the book as Glitsky appeared at the door to Bree’s room. His eyes had a haunted look. “I just got beeped. I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “You mind if I stay behind a few minutes?” Hardy asked.

  “Sure, no sweat. Just lock up when you leave.” Glitsky shook his head. “Get real, Diz. We’re out of here. We’re not arguing about it, either, okay? Or making one of our clever remarks.” He let out a long breath. “Somebody just shot another cop.”

  24

  The two-man arson team was still at his house when Hardy drove up. He parked semilegally and came up onto where the lawn had been before stopping to get their attention. They were huddled over an area near what had been the front bay window. “How you guys doing?”

  They both looked over at him with no interest, then held a quiet conference before one of them straightened up, jumped down onto the porch’s foundation. “Your friend said to tell you he went to work. Otherwise, we’re going to be here a while.”

  “You got any idea what a while is?”

  A flat glare. “Hours, not minutes.”

  This was pulling teeth, but Hardy needed to get some information. “You finding anything?” At this, the arson investigator spread his hands in a futile gesture, and Hardy cut him off. “You can’t tell me anything, can you? I might have done it, right? Set fire to my own house.”

  “People do it all the time.”

  Hardy knew this was true. The man was doing his job, actually protecting Hardy’s interests. “Okay,” he managed to say mildly. “I was wondering, though, if I could go into the back and get a few things—clothes, toiletries, like that? Check my phone messages.”

  In spite of what he’d told Valens, Hardy didn’t think the answering machine in the kitchen had been destroyed. Driving over here, it had occurred to him that it might be instructive to see what the tape held.