Nothing but the Truth

by John Lescroart

  “Are you familiar with the name?”

  “I don’t know. It’s common enough. I may have heard it.”

  Elliot seemed to be watching for some giveaway reaction, but if there was one, Hardy didn’t see it. “His wife is in jail now for refusing to testify before the grand jury about the death of Bree Beaumont. Have you heard of her? Bree Beaumont?”

  Thorne’s face put his impatience on display. “What is this? Twenty questions? Who do I know? You’ve asked me about press releases on the Pulgas water poisoning. I’ve told you that you may check with my staff. The releases were not ours. They were not prepared here.”

  “One of my colleagues found them outside in the hallway on Saturday, bound for distribution.”

  Thorne shrugged. “So what? I didn’t write them. I didn’t put them there. Obviously, someone is trying to make us look bad, connected to these people, as they tried with Mr. Kerry over the weekend. There’s a pattern here, all right, but it’s not of my making.” Disappointed in humanity, he shook his head. “If this is your smoking gun, Mr. Elliot . . . well, there’s no story here.”

  Spreading his hands, he assayed a cold smile. “My clients are good people, Mr. Elliot. They’re not terrorists. They’re concerned with exposing the endless lies that the oil companies have foisted upon an ignorant public, lies that polluted our air for years and now threaten—”

  “How about Ellis Jackson? What’s your relationship with him?”

  Having established what he thought was a plausible deniability, Thorne softened slightly, the voice become nearly avuncular. “What about him?”

  “Is he your client?”

  A sad shake of the head. “I’ve told you I’m not at liberty to disclose the identities of my clients. I of course knew Ellis Jackson when I worked for SKO.” Another reasonable smile. “The last time I checked, there was no crime in that. He’s a great man. Now, if you’re—”

  “Not quite.” Hardy spoke up for the first time. “You never answered Jeff’s question about knowing Bree Beaumont. Did you talk with a Sergeant Griffin about her death?”

  “Yes, I believe that was his name.”

  “Then how could you not have heard of her?”

  “I never said I hadn’t heard of her. Of course I know who she was. She’s been one of the most vocal and recognizable names in the field over the last decade. She was extremely courageous to change sides and go up against Goliath as she did.” He paused for emphasis, added matter-of-factly. “And of course they killed her for it.”

  “The oil companies?”

  “Can you doubt it?”

  Hardy snorted in exasperation. “I don’t think so.”

  But Thorne remained infuriatingly unruffled. “I can’t really tell you what to think, Mr. Hardy. But if you think people, individuals, don’t die over Big Oil, don’t get killed, I recommend that you catch up on your research. Have you been following events in Nigeria recently? There are literally millions of other examples. And that’s leaving out most of our wars from Kuwait going all the way back to World War II. Oil and market share.”

  The small, quiet, powerful man stood behind his desk. “Now, really, I’m afraid that’s all I have time for. I think you’ll be able to find your way out. Oh, and Mr. Elliot”—a rictus smile—“the libel laws in this state are quite severe, as I’m sure you know. It’s one way my clients can combat an unscrupulous enemy. They have been quite aggressive in pursuing legal redress for unsubstantiated news stories.”

  On the way out, Hardy pushing Jeff’s wheelchair, the sweet young thing at the reception desk wished them a good morning, and gave Hardy a little wave.

  30

  Frannie sat on the table in the attorneys’ room at the jail, swinging her legs. She looked like a schoolgirl, the impression reinforced by the fact that she’d put her hair into pigtails. To Hardy, the jail’s jumpsuit was still jarring to see on her. But after yesterday’s two visits up in the homicide detail, he found the jail garb easier to accept. Soon, he told himself, it would all be behind them. Today was the last full day. He prayed.

  First, though, there was Ron’s note.

  And like everything else, this wasn’t going smoothly. “What do you mean?” he asked. “You’re not sure you’re going to be okay with this? With telling about Ron?”

  Her face took on a stubborn set that Hardy didn’t like to see. He forced himself to speak in a calm tone.

  “Frannie, listen. By the time it gets to the grand jury again, if it does, it won’t matter. He’ll be gone, if he isn’t already.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. He doesn’t want to move the kids, start over someplace else. He’ll wait. Just like he said he would.”

  “But either way, he’s released you from the confidence. ” Hardy didn’t want to push too hard trying to convince her, but he felt he had to nail this down. If it came to it, tomorrow Frannie would have to disclose Ron’s secret.

  It wasn’t sitting at all well with her. But she nodded. “I hate to give that creep Scott Randall the satisfaction. Besides, from all you’ve told me, it sounds like Ron isn’t anywhere near the best suspect anymore.”

  “No, I don’t think he is,” Hardy admitted. “But until they have another one dumped in their laps, they’re going to pretend.”

  “But really, it still comes down to me, doesn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you’re close. Abe’s close. Maybe it’ll only be another day . . .” The legs had stopped swinging. Her hands were folded in front of her now, her eyes cast downward. “What I’m saying is that if I still don’t tell, maybe Ron gets some more breathing room.”

  Hardy was sitting casually on one of the wooden chairs that surrounded the table. It was all he could do to remain in that posture. He felt the blood racing in his temples, willed himself to keep his voice even. “Ron doesn’t want you to do that, Frannie. I can’t imagine why you’d want to do that.”

  She raised her agonized eyes. “It’s not a matter of wanting, Dismas. It’s the last thing in the world I want to do. But I know what Max and Cassandra have already gone through, and as soon as I open my mouth, their world is over, don’t you see that? If I can give you or Abe more time to save them . . .”

  But Hardy was shaking his head. “That’s not what’s going to happen, Frannie. What’s going to happen is, even if you don’t talk on Tuesday, your friend Mr. Randall is going to get his indictment on Ron.”

  “But why? There’s still no evidence, is there? More than there was last week?”

  Hardy agreed. “Very little. But that doesn’t matter. There’s probably enough for a grand jury. Ron’s flight alone, if it comes to it. Phony credit cards, fake IDs, consciousness of guilt. And as soon as Ron is indicted, it’s over for him and the kids. He’ll be in the system and from there that’s what will take over—the system. Regardless of what you do. That’s the good news, Frannie. It’s out of your hands.”

  “So you’re saying I have to tell.”

  “I’m saying it wouldn’t do any good not to.” Suddenly his temper flared. “Jesus Christ, Frannie! It gets you out of here. What do you want?”

  “What I want,” she yelled back at him, “is to go to our home which isn’t there anymore.” She angrily shook away the beginning of tears. “And be able to hug our children.”

  Hardy longed to reach for her, to tell her it was okay, that they were still all right. But he wasn’t sure they were all right. He didn’t miss the omission of himself as among those she wanted to hug. “You can do that, Frannie,” he said evenly. “At Erin’s. We can all be there. Rebuild.” He added hesitantly. “The house and us.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  His stomach clutched at him, but he had to ask. “No what?”

  “You say it, but I don’t know if you really want to do that. What it might take.”

  “And what is that?”

  Now Frannie paused, took a deep breath, let it out. “Being each o
ther’s lives again.”

  “But we are . . .”

  Holding up a hand, she stopped him. “Dismas. Remember when we were first together? Remember that? You were working just as hard then. You had your trials and your cases and your career. But mostly you had us, remember?

  “And you’d come home as early as you could every day and I’d be on the front stoop with the Beck and Vincent, all of us waiting for you. And they’d come running to greet you, hugging your legs, so happy to have Daddy home again. And you so happy to see them, too. Remember that? And then you and I would go in and feed them and put them to bed and then go talk and laugh and wind up making love more often than not. Didn’t that used to happen? I’m not making that up in my memory, am I?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “No, that’s how it was.”

  “So what happened?”

  He had come around on the chair now, hunched over. Elbows on his knees, his hands together. His shoulders slumped. “I don’t know, Frannie. Everybody got too busy. Certainly nobody cared what time I came home. Nobody even says hi anymore when I walk in the house. You’re doing so many kid things you’re always exhausted, and if it’s not about kids, you’re not interested. We don’t have date night anymore. Where’s any of our life together? ” He looked up at her. “Take your pick, Frannie. And okay, it was a lot me, all the things you say. But it was a two-way street.”

  “And you say you really want to go back to that?”

  He thought for a beat. “No, maybe not to what we had a week ago,” he said. “Something better than that, closer to what we used to have. But still with you and the kids.”

  After a long, silent moment, she slid off the table and walked over to the door where the guard waited. For a second, Hardy was afraid she was simply going to ask to be escorted out. But she turned to face him. “The best thing,” she said, “would be if I didn’t have to tell.”

  Then she knocked for the guard.

  Glitsky wasn’t in his office. Nobody was in homicide at all, which seemed a bit strange at ten o’clock on a Monday morning. Hardy sat himself at one of the inspector’s desks and opened his briefcase.

  He thought he’d done pretty well with Griffin’s notes this morning, and now he was going to pull out his own notes and take a minute to go over what he’d written about Canetta’s findings. He stopped before he’d really begun.

  He knew.

  Marie Dempsey. Canetta had told him that he’d discovered she had been the secretary of the insurance guy, Tilton. That she’d actually quit in the wake of the claims adjuster’s decision to hold off payment on Bree’s life insurance until Ron had been cleared of any implication in the death.

  So here was this woman without a job with the insurance company, calling Ron Beaumont twice—or was it three times?—in a two-day period. She wasn’t calling him to walk him through processing his claim. It seemed weeks ago now, though in fact it was days, and Hardy had been concentrating on Frannie when he had heard those calls at the penthouse, but he remembered coming away with the impression that Marie was personal, not business.

  He reached for the telephone on the desk and punched for information.

  “This is Letitia. What city please?”

  “Yes. In San Francisco. The phone number please of a Marie Dempsey.”

  “How would you spell that, sir?”

  He spelled it out, his patience all but eroded. Dempsey, after all, wasn’t exactly Albuquerque, spelling-wise. But Letitia eventually got it. “I don’t show any Marie Dempsey, sir. Do you know what street she lives on?”

  “No. How about just the initial?”

  “ ‘M’?”

  Hardy ground his teeth. “That would be the one, yes.”

  “I show ten, no eleven M. Dempseys.”

  “Okay,” Hardy said. “I’ll take them all.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’m only allowed to give out two numbers at a time.”

  “Please, Letitia, this is important. There may be lives at stake. I’m not kidding. Could you please just give me the numbers?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’m really not allowed to give out that information. Would you like to speak to a supervisor?”

  “Can your supervisor read me the eleven numbers?”

  “No, sir. I don’t believe so. If you have access to a telephone directory, they should all be listed in there, though.”

  “Yes, well, you see, I don’t have a phone book handy, which is kind of why I called you.”

  “Well,” Letitia said brightly, cheerfully, “let me give you the first number. It’s . . .”

  Hardy wrote quickly, then found himself listening to a mechanical voice telling him that after he got his number, the phone company could dial his call direct for a charge of thirty-five cents. Press one if . . .

  He slammed the receiver down. Glitsky was in the doorway, pointing at the telephone. “That’s city property, ” he said. “You break it, you buy it.”

  “You got a phone book around here?” Hardy asked.

  “I doubt it,” Glitsky said. “They’re harder to find than a cop when you need one. You want to guess how many homicides we got this weekend, Halloween?”

  “Including Canetta?”

  “Sure, let’s include him.”

  “Three?”

  “More.”

  “Two hundred and sixteen?”

  “Seven. Average is one point five a week. And we get seven in two days. I’ve got no inspectors left.”

  Hardy nodded, looking around. “And this would also explain your mysterious absence from your office all morning. I thought you might have gotten tired, decided to take some time off.”

  “Nope.” Glitsky was terse. “The first part’s right, but that wasn’t it.”

  In his office, though, Glitsky did find a three-year-old phone book and it had eleven M. Dempseys listed. The first one had the same number Hardy had written down from Letitia and he took that as a good sign.

  He was copying and Glitsky was talking, shuffling through a pile of paper from his in-box. “So if Kerry ever called the mayor as he said he would, I haven’t heard about it, although as you’ve noticed, I haven’t exactly been waiting by the phone.”

  Hardy looked up. “He’s not going to call the mayor. That would only raise the profile around him. He just wants this—and by ‘this’ I mean ‘you’—to go away.”

  “You think I gave him the impression last night that I was going away? That he scared me off?”

  “If you did, it was real subtle. What?”

  Glitsky had stopped at a faxed page. He tsked a couple of times. “Mr. Kerry, Mr. Kerry.” He held the page out to Hardy. “AT&T Wireless for the morning of September 29th. Here’s a conversation beginning at seven-ten a.m., duration twenty-two minutes. Somebody called him.”

  “The day he slept in?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Maybe he only meant he slept in until seven and we just assumed he meant it was later.”

  “That’s probably it,” Glitsky replied sarcastically. He was shoving paper around on his desk again. “You got Bree’s number anywhere on you?”

  As it happened, Hardy still had it in his briefcase. It was the number from which Kerry had received his call. “Maybe I won’t vote for him after all,” Glitsky said.

  Hardy sat back, crossed his arms. “So they have a fight first thing in the morning—”

  Glitsky sat up straight, snapped his fingers, truly excited now. “He’s the father. She told him she was pregnant. She was going to blackmail him.”

  All right, Hardy thought with relief. He’d never have to break his vow of silence to Jeff Elliot. Glitsky had come to it on his own. “That’s a reasonable guess,” he said mildly.

  “He waited till he knew Ron had taken the kids to school, strolled over . . .”

  But Hardy was shaking his head.

  “Why not?” Glitsky asked.

  “No. Not himself. He called Thorne. Thorne called one of his operatives.”
r />   Glitsky glanced back down at the faxed page. “Not from his cell phone anyway.”

  “Damn,” Hardy said. “Why is it never easy?”

  “It’s just one of the general rules. But why would Kerry’s calling Thorne make it easy?”

  “This is one slick bastard, Abe.” Hardy explained about the leaflets that had been printed up before the MTBE dumping, about Thorne’s explanation for it.

  Glitsky was enjoying the recitation. He was paying attention, sitting back in his chair, his fingers templed at his lips. When Hardy finished, he spoke. “So these terrorists who were trying to lay the blame on Thorne, they somehow assumed that Jeff Elliot’s colleague would just happen to drop by on Saturday afternoon and find the flyers in the hallway?” Glitsky was almost smiling. “Call me cynical, but that’s a stretch.”

  “We thought so, too. Jeff and I.” Hardy moved forward, put his hands on the desk between them, spoke urgently. “Abe, you connect Thorne to the MTBE gang and you win a prize.”

  “Really. Gee, that never occurred to me.”

  “I bet it did. But look, it gets better. Thorne wrote these leaflets, probably by himself at his apartment. So you get a warrant, have somebody search the place. You find a piece of paper, a computer file, you solve a murder, maybe two or three.”

  Glitsky cocked his head to one side, all interest. “I’m listening. What’s two or three?”

  “He talked to Griffin the morning he got killed. Griffin.”

  “Who did? Thorne?”

  A nod.

  “Are you sure of this?”

  Hardy explained his reading of Griffin’s notes—that the meeting with Thorne had been one of the last entries, October 5th, 8:30 a.m. “It was that day, Abe, count on it. And you’ll love this: Elliot thinks Thorne is bankrolling the good governor Damon Kerry through SKO. Somehow.”

  “How?”

  “Nobody knows, but if there’s anything to it at all, it connects dirty tricks to Damon Kerry, who we liked so much last night and maybe even more this morning.”

  Glitsky was still sitting back, contemplating. “Thorne has erased any computer work, Diz. If not immediately, then for sure by now after talking with you and Elliot.”