The Keeper

by John Lescroart

  “I like the Superman thing, but I have a better idea,” Hardy said. “I’ve talked to Wes Farrell. If you want it, you’re his newest investigator. And guess what your first three cases are.”

  Glitsky still balked. “This is way more than I signed up for. It’s exactly what Treya didn’t want me to do: get involved with dead people and the very bad people who made them dead. Anyway, I’m working for you. How can I work for the prosecution and the defense on the same case?”

  “Simple,” Hardy said. “Hal and I will waive confidentiality. You follow the evidence where it leads. The chips fall.”

  “You’re still out of your mind,” Glitsky said.

  • • •

  “YOUR FRIEND MR. Glitsky still thinks it might have been me.” Patti Orosco sat on one of the dozen hard wooden chairs in the jail’s public visiting room, looking through the booth’s window at Hal, talking through the speaker in the glass. Correctly guessing that she would be conspicuous among the other visitors in her black Japanese suit, she had changed into jeans with a white collared shirt and a green pullover sweater.

  “He’s not my friend,” Hal said. “He finds something that gets me out of here, he can be my friend. Till then, he’s just a guy working for my lawyer.”

  “What about your lawyer?” she asked. “What’s he doing?”

  “Hardy? Same as Glitsky, I suppose. Trying to get traction with another theory. Any other theory.”

  “Even me? Do they really think it could have been me?”

  “We haven’t talked about it, Patti. I know it wasn’t you, if that’s any consolation. If they’re bothering you, I could tell them to back off.”

  “I don’t know if you’ll need to do that, but it’s just so frustrating. Wasting time talking to me when there’s somebody else . . .”

  “What do they want from you?”

  “To come up with something that proves I was where I said I was that night. It makes me wish I’d done something else, some little thing, but I just went to the movies, watched the movie, probably bought popcorn, since I always do. Nothing memorable at all.”

  “I’m in the same boat,” Hal said. “I tell myself, if I’d just talked to the bartender, if I’d just stopped for gas. If, if, if . . . but here I am.”

  They stared at each other through the glass.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  “I miss you, too.”

  “What are we going to do about us, Hal? Is there even going to be an us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want there to be?”

  Hal scanned the area around them. Bleak and bleaker. “As long as I’m here, that seems a little moot, doesn’t it?”

  “Not to me. Do you have any sense of how long they’re going to keep you?”

  Hal started to give her the short version of what Hardy had told him. He’d stay under arrest, no bail, until the trial, which might be coming up sooner rather than later, since that gave the prosecution less time to assemble its case, which appeared to be fatally flawed for lack of physical evidence. “But maybe not so fatally that they won’t convict me anyway.”

  “Have they gotten anything at all? Hardy, I mean, and Glitsky.”

  “If they’re still questioning you, I’ve got to think not. Except, oh . . .” Hal’s effort at a wry smile crumbled under its own weight. “I don’t know if this is good or bad or neither, but it seems they’ve dug up something that ought to make you and me feel a little better, at least.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Evidently, Katie was fooling around, too.”

  Patti sat back. “You’re kidding me. When?”

  “A couple of years ago, just after Ellen was born.”

  Patti was silent for a few seconds. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Other than I can stop beating myself up so badly over us. So can you.”

  “I haven’t been,” she said. “I’d do it again. Wouldn’t you, too, if you were honest?”

  He nodded. “It just makes me look so guilty. Of killing her, I mean.”

  “But you didn’t, so . . .”

  “So without you and me as a couple, I’m not in here, not yet, at least. If we hadn’t admitted it . . .” He met her eyes, then lowered his gaze. “I don’t know.”

  “It would have come out, Hal. Just like Katie’s has come out. Then you’re a liar on top of all the other suspicion.”

  “Better than a killer.” He waved away the thought. “It doesn’t matter. It’s done.”

  Patti looked down, her hands in her lap. “Do you know who it was? With Katie? Might it matter?”

  “Hardy’s got an idea who it is, and it might matter,” he said. “It’s probably better if we don’t talk about it until we’re sure.”

  “So he, this guy, might have still been seeing her?”

  “Not impossible.”

  “If he was,” she said, “that could be important.”

  “Yes. Hardy doesn’t want to say it and get my hopes up, but it could be the ball game.” He leaned in toward the speaker. “But we don’t know anything for sure, and in any event, we need to nail it down. At least it’s something.”

  “You’ll tell me the minute you know something? Promise?”

  He nodded. “The minute,” he said.

  • • •

  TO THE CASUAL observer, Nat Glitsky was an old white man with wispy white hair, iceberg-blue eyes, and a somewhat shuffling gait. His clothes didn’t fit him because he bought the sizes that had always worked, even though he’d shortened up and thinned out considerably over the past few years. Now he checked in at five-eight or -nine, one-forty-five. Even a short conversation with this octogenarian, however, revealed a feisty and opinionated personality, a wide-ranging intellect (he’d all but memorized the Torah), and a soft-spoken gentleness that seemed to belie his other attributes.

  Abe had left Hardy’s office not knowing whether to be amused or outraged by his friend’s apparently serious suggestion that he join the district attorney’s Investigations Division as an inspector. The irony was that he would have taken that job in a heartbeat if Wes had offered it only a few weeks ago. Maybe, because it was Hardy’s idea, he felt pressured, even coerced. But he could not deny that he was starting to care a lot about this case, following his own rhythm. It had somehow gotten into his bloodstream. He had something to prove about himself: He was still a more than competent investigator. After he’d spent a lifetime following strict procedures and protocols, he found the freedom to investigate in his own way more than appealing.

  But in a larger sense, Glitsky had to admit that Hardy’s proposed strategy might produce the evidence that would free Hal Chase. It was bold and unorthodox, and it might bring down a corrupt sheriff and his henchmen in the bargain.

  By the time he’d turned onto his father’s block in the inner Richmond, Glitsky found that the idea appealed to him. For the better part of the last two weeks, he’d been working on this elusive murder case. He was in his element, he knew: what he was born to do. And now his own efforts—the jail connection with Katie’s lover—had unearthed what appeared to be the first legitimate clue that might lead him to the killer, or at least to a new line of questioning. Was he ready to abandon his search right when it appeared that it was getting him someplace? Right now it looked as though deciding not to pursue Burt Cushing would amount to just that, and he might as well drop out of the investigation altogether.

  “So,” Abe said when he’d finished laying out his situation, “there you have it.”

  Father and son were sitting in Nat’s small sun-dappled living room, Abe in a rocker and Nat in a lounger across from him. Sadie, Nat’s wife for nearly a decade, was out visiting some girlfriends.

  “Got it. What’s your question?”

  “I don’t think Hardy has any right to
put me in that position.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Does he have that right? Sure, you two go way back. He can ask you anything. Then you can answer however you want.”

  “Of course. But you know what bothers me most? I have a hunch that if I’d come up with the idea, I’d think it was brilliant.”

  “So the idea itself is good?”

  “The idea is the only place the sheriff and our client intersect. Hardy’s theory is that the sheriff had this other investigator killed last night, made it look like a robbery gone wrong. He’s also covering up at least one other murder in the jail. That’s two people we’re almost certain he’s had killed. Maybe several more. It’s not that great a stretch to think he might have had Hal’s wife killed as well.”

  “Why would he have done that?”

  “Because she’d called to threaten him with what she knew.”

  “Why would she do that? Wouldn’t she have known that he’d come to shut her up?”

  “Maybe she thought she had influence over him, that he was still in love with her. Maybe she called to warn him that it had to stop. That if it didn’t, she’d have to tell somebody.”

  “A busybody, this woman?”

  Abe shrugged. “Mostly confused and unhappy. A buttinsky, we used to say.”

  “And she butted in at the wrong time to the wrong guy?”

  “That’s the theory. Here’s the problem. We have no proof the sheriff did anything. Katie’s murder has virtually no trail. So we’re stuck. Unless we connect him to Hal, which now it looks like we might be able to do. The thing is, if he sees anybody coming, he smells it a million miles away. The only way investigating him works is if it looks like I am—or somebody in the same position is—investigating something else entirely. Of course, a little slip and . . . it might be fatal.”

  “So what’s your problem?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. Something about having a wife and two kids at home.”

  “What? You didn’t have them before? I seem to remember you worked in the Homicide Department.”

  “Treya thought I was done with that.”

  “What were you doing these last two weeks?”

  Abe made a face. “You think I should do it, then?”

  Nat held up his hand. “God forbid I tell you what you should do, Abraham. Nobody can make this decision but you.”

  “I know,” Abe said. “I hate that part.”

  45

  SINCE HE WAS almost out to Frannie’s office anyway, Abe decided to try his luck and see if she was in. He got her answering machine when he called, but he hadn’t gotten far into the drive home when she called him back, saying she’d been with a client but was free for the next couple of hours if he wanted to come by.

  “Diz fired me,” he told her as he came into her office. “The good news is that Wes Farrell wants to hire me.”

  “Diz fired you? Really?”

  “No. I’d be doing the same job for Wes. Diz just found a way to have somebody else pay me.”

  “What brought that about?”

  Glitsky gave it to her in broad strokes: the likelihood that Burt Cushing had been Katie’s lover, the connection between Hal, Cushing and the cover-up on the murder of Alanos Tussaint, Hal telling Katie about it, the shooting of Maria Solis-Martinez.

  By the time he was done, Frannie was sitting on the love seat with her hand over her mouth. “You’re telling me somebody shot this poor girl just last night? Because she was looking into this inmate getting killed in the jail?”

  “That’s our working assumption,” he said, “although you should know there is absolutely no sign that we’re right. It might have been what it was made to look like, a robbery. But why shoot somebody, and obviously shoot to kill, when you can just grab the purse and run? Not that it doesn’t happen, but . . .”

  “I don’t see why that would work, Abe. Killing her wouldn’t make whatever she was working on go away, would it? Why won’t they assign her cases, and this particular case, to somebody else?”

  “Because it’s not about who gets the case. It’s about what Luther Jones might have told her. Now, no matter who gets the case next, Luther is absolutely not talking, because he’s dead, too. The message is that they don’t control things just in the jail. If they can get to her, a cop, walking on the street, they can get to anybody.”

  “How do you think you’re going to get to him? The Luther Jones investigation? Is that the idea?”

  “Not exactly. We don’t do anything with Luther Jones. Diz and Wes seem to believe that we can hide behind the smokescreen of the Katie Chase investigation, stir the pot at the jail, and force Cushing and Foster to make a wrong step.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well, then it gets interesting. It depends on what they do when they find out they’re under active investigation. They’ll do something to obstruct it, and that’ll be our opening.”

  “Except if the something they do is decide to kill more investigators.”

  A corner of Glitsky’s mouth rose a quarter inch. “The consensus is that won’t happen. In any event, this seems like a reasonably good bet.”

  “And now you’re here.” It was a question.

  Abe nodded. “I thought we could talk a little more about Katie. You saw her every week for a couple of years. Maybe there’s something, some things, in her file. Maybe she told you something she didn’t know she knew. I thought if you didn’t mind, maybe you and I could spend some time and take a run at finding it.”

  • • •

  GLITSKY EXPECTED A fairly serious and wide-ranging discussion with Treya when she heard he would be going back to work in the DA’s Investigations Division. It would mean arranging the daily schedules the way they had been before he’d retired, among other things. Maybe their longtime nanny, Rita, would still be available; if not, they’d have to address that issue as well.

  When he got to Wes Farrell’s office at four-thirty, as requested, he realized he needn’t have worried. Farrell had already called Treya in and sounded her out on the idea, painting the new assignment in the rosiest light. Abe, he had told her, with all of his experience, blah blah blah. He’d be taking over Maria’s immediate caseload, but over time, he would move into his specialty, which was homicide. Abe had informally applied for the job before, and now he had it. It was a perfect fit, and Wes was glad Hardy had thought of it.

  What did Treya think?

  Treya had already aired most of her objections by the time Abe showed up, and she had discovered, to her surprise, that they weren’t nearly as substantial as she had been thinking. The plain fact was that Abe hadn’t been ready to quit when it had been decided that he needed to; he was bored spending all those hours reading and watching TV at home; he was ready for a new challenge.

  She stood up at her desk when he appeared at the office door, came around, and gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek. “You know what this is about?”

  “Generally,” he said.

  “And you want to do it?”

  “I wanted to see if you were good with it first.”

  “The short answer is yes. I’ve already called Rita, and she’s picking up the kids. We can talk about the long answer later tonight. Meanwhile, His Nibs is waiting.”

  She crossed to Farrell’s door, knocked, and opened it for her husband.

  • • •

  AFTER A SHORT congratulatory meeting with Wes Farrell, Abe was on his way down to the office of Dr. Strout, the medical examiner, his mind racing.

  He wasn’t entirely sure that it was a reasonable strategy, but he did like the fact that he once again would be working as a legitimate cop. He would have a badge and his gun. He could make arrests. And this time, without the caveat that he couldn’t pursue the most likely suspect, he could run a righte
ous murder investigation according to his own instincts, regardless of how Diz or Wes wanted him to proceed.

  He also knew that Hardy and Farrell could have all the fine theories in the world about who killed Katie or Maria or Luther, or Alanos Tussaint, for that matter, and all of those theories would amount to nothing if he could not find physical evidence to support them. In the case of Katie’s murder, he’d already put in a substantial amount of time and mental energy looking at people other than Hal who might have had means, motive, and opportunity. And he’d come up with nothing.

  Now he had another murder victim—Maria—whose death was arguably related to Katie’s. And Maria’s was a murder that Hal definitely had not committed. If Glitsky was assuming that one person was responsible for all four of these murders—and this seemed to him at least a reasonable theory—then Hal was off the hook for Katie and, by extension, for Alanos Tussaint. As a working theory, it meant that whoever killed Tussaint had done the same to Maria and Katie and Luther. If this were the case, all the murders were somehow the work of only one pair of suspects: Burt Cushing and Adam Foster.

  Glitsky thought it was a far more reasonable hypothesis than anything he’d been laboring under to date. It also might provide some new physical evidence, and that was what had him knocking on the medical examiner’s door, catching the old man when he was getting ready to punch out for the day. “Won’t take five minutes,” Glitsky assured him.

  “That’s what they all say.” But Strout ushered him in.

  “Alanos Tussaint,” Glitsky said without preamble.