The Keeper

by John Lescroart

  Turning the hidden one on, he pushed the doorbell.

  A deep gong resounded through the house, and through the panes, he made out a woman’s shapely figure as she emerged into the entryway. The door swung open, and she greeted him with an easy smile. He’d called, and she’d been expecting him.

  “Good morning.”

  “Good morning, Ruth.” He kept his tone cordial, low-key. “May I come in?”

  “Of course. It’s a little brisk for conversation out here, wouldn’t you agree?” She stepped back, holding the door open, and Abe stepped over the threshold into the house, a seemingly casual but legally critical moment—no assertion of authority, no sign of coercion, a “consensual encounter.” He could ask her anything he wanted, and her answers would be admissible. “I’ve got a little fire going in the library, come this way,” she said.

  She turned and walked in front of him. Her above-the-knee skirt and low heels showcased her legs, and the clinging sweater, with three buttons undone, her cleavage—the package much more put together than he’d seen at Hal’s with the kids. Chattering easily over her shoulder, she went on, “I know they don’t want us to burn real fires anymore, but really, how silly, don’t you think? Why have fireplaces if you can’t burn wood? It doesn’t make any sense. In any event”—she turned and led him into a cozy book-lined room on their left—“here we are.” Two nicely upholstered wing chairs sat before the low fire, a small coffee table between them, and she motioned Abe into one. “Can I get you anything?”

  “Thanks. I’m fine.” He motioned for her to take the other chair.

  As she sat, she said, “I must confess, I’m a little bit curious as to what could be so important that you had to see me today. I was under the impression that you’d pretty much cleared everything up. Of course, I’m completely at your disposal if it will help Hal in any way, but I did wonder.”

  Looking over at her, Glitsky had a moment of doubt. Not about what Ruth Chase had done but about his own personal strategy, his decision to confront her alone. He knew it was possible that Abby and Jambo had already completed some of the searches he’d outlined for them that morning, and that they might even have enough evidence and a cooperative judge to sign off on an arrest warrant. They could be here as his backup, ensure everyone’s safety, and formally take her into custody.

  Abe also knew that if the inspectors came with their warrant, any chance to talk to this woman would be gone. Once she knew the game was up, she’d go quiet, far too cunning to waive her rights and talk to police. It had to be now, informal, a voluntary chat. Though Abe had no doubt about her guilt, there lurked in his mind an uneasy concern that she might find a way to escape. He had to keep that from happening.

  He had to get her talking.

  He took out his tape recorder. “Do you mind?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Of course.” He gave her his closest approximation of an apologetic smile. “Just to keep the record straight. And I’m a lousy stenographer.” He began by saying in as casual a tone as he could muster, “As it turns out, there are a few outstanding and unanswered questions I was hoping you could help me out with.”

  “If I’m able to. Of course.”

  “Do you remember at Katie’s funeral, you and I had a discussion about Hal, and I told you I didn’t think he was guilty after all?”

  She nodded. “That was one of the first hopeful moments I’d had since his arrest. I was so grateful for it.”

  “I remember. I also remember you told me in some detail that you couldn’t imagine Hal walking up that path behind her with the gun at her head. You said you couldn’t imagine him pushing her onto that path off to the right through the bushes and shooting her. Do you remember saying that?”

  Ruth smiled uncertainly, her brow furrowing slightly. “I do, yes. As I said, I was grateful you were being so open-minded about Hal. I remember it distinctly.”

  “So do I.” Abe let a silence build. “I’d pretty much forgotten about it until last night. Then it came back to me and got me wondering how you knew about that right turn.”

  Ruth shot him another questioning smile. “I . . . I don’t really know. I think maybe Hal must have told me about it when he found her.”

  “I don’t think that was it,” Abe said. “I talked to Hal this morning and asked if he remembered telling you about him being taken to see Katie’s body, and he said you wouldn’t even let him start. You told him it made you sick just thinking about it. You didn’t want to hear any details at all. Do you remember telling him that?”

  “Not really. He must’ve started and . . .” She stopped. “It might have been one of the other guards who was there.”

  “And how would they have known?”

  “Maybe Hal told one of them.”

  “He says he didn’t, though. Thinking about it made him sick, too. He says he didn’t tell anybody.”

  Ruth, her lips tight, let out a breath through her nose. “This has all been so upsetting. At this point, I’m not sure what I knew or how I knew it. Do you know what, Abe? It’s almost lunchtime. I’m going to make myself a drink. Can I get you something?”

  “No, thank you. I’m fine.”

  Abe watched her stand and then disappear into the hallway. In fact, it wasn’t almost lunchtime, and when she returned, she wasn’t drinking wine but a nearly full glass of clear liquid on ice.

  “So,” she began as soon as she’d sat back down, “about where they found Katie’s body. Maybe I saw or read something.”

  “You looked at pictures and articles even though you didn’t want to know any details because they made you sick?”

  “Maybe I did. I don’t really remember. What does it matter?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t, Ruth. Except that it led me to another question. About Pete’s death, Hal’s father, your second husband.”

  Ruth’s gentle smile vanished. “This is getting rather far afield, isn’t it, Lieutenant?”

  “I don’t think so. I know that Pete died of an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. You take barbiturates, don’t you?”

  “Not barbiturates. Just some amitriptyline to help me sleep.”

  “When they prescribe that kind of drug, they tell you not to mix it with alcohol, don’t they? And there was an awful lot of both in Pete’s system when he died, wasn’t there?”

  She waved that off. “Pete didn’t pay much attention to that kind of stuff. Besides, I already told you that while it was kind of the coroner and the investigators to help us by calling it an accident, I’ve always believed Pete killed himself.”

  “Well, however he died, you ended up with a million dollars.” He saw her straighten and decided to tone it down a bit—too much of a press might shut her up, and he needed to keep her talking. “Tell you what,” he said, “let’s get back to the matter at hand. Katie’s murder.”

  Ruth finished her drink with a gulp. “Mr. Glitsky . . . Abe,” she said, “I thought we were getting along so well together. Just tell me what it is you want to know.”

  “I want to know why Katie turned against you. Why she was keeping you from the kids. Katie got curious for some reason—maybe she noticed that Ellen acted different every time you babysat for her, suspected that maybe her little girl had been drugged—and sometime around the day, maybe the same day, she was killed, she looked you up on her computer, just like I did. But then she took it a step further, the step I should have taken when I first came upon it.”

  Shaking her head in apparent bewilderment, her voice dripping with disdain, Ruth asked, “And what, pray tell, was that?”

  “She found the article in the San Mateo County Times on Ron Johannson, your first husband, who also died in a tragic accident. He drowned, didn’t he? Another secret you chose not to share with Katie and Hal. You kept a lot from them, didn’t you?”

  “I kept what I needed
to keep,” she said.

  “I know,” Abe said. “Quite the keeper, aren’t you?”

  She shrugged. “Some secrets need to be kept. No one needs to know them.”

  “Except,” Abe said, “that Katie found out, didn’t she? And realized that coincidentally, in Ron’s case, there was also some question of accident versus suicide, but the death got ruled accidental, and once again you made almost a million dollars.”

  “Ron’s death was an accident. This is all ridiculous. You have no proof of anything you’re insinuating about me.” Again she got to her feet. “And I’m having another drink.”

  Again Glitsky waited patiently, and again, when Ruth returned, her glass was nearly full. “So?” she began almost brightly. “Where were we? Oh yes. You don’t have any proof of a single thing you’re saying.”

  “Katie didn’t need proof, did she?” Abe asked. “She just needed to know in her own mind that you were a sick and dangerous person. But I’m guessing there will be something in those files when we go through them again, as we’re already doing. Although I think we’re not really going to need it. Proof about your husbands, I mean.”

  “I don’t—”

  Glitsky held up a hand. “Let me ask you this, Ruth. Did you know that most cell phones today keep not only a record of whom you call but where the call was made?”

  “What does that have to—”

  Abe cut her off once more. “On Saturday morning, you told Warren and Patti that you were having a bad day, so they took Will and Ellen out to the playground in the park, where they stayed for about two hours, didn’t they?”

  Ruth sat back in her chair, hands clasped in her lap. “You tell me.”

  “I will. They did. This is when Patti discovered that she’d lost her cell phone. But she hadn’t lost it. You had taken it. And it was with you when you stayed back in the house, all alone. And where you placed two calls to Adam Foster while Patti and Warren were at the playground. No one else besides you could have placed those calls, Ruth. You called him and arranged to meet him that night.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Glitsky knew he might have been giving her answers to questions that, better prepared, she could counter later in a courtroom. He didn’t care. He wasn’t finished yet, not by a long shot, and he wanted her to know what he had come to understand about her, what he had uncovered that would bring her down.

  He leaned toward her again. “The other thing you thought you knew, Ruth, is that even with a serial number, Pete’s gun couldn’t be connected to him. But service weapons don’t belong to individual officers. They belong to the city and county. When you quit or retire, your gun comes back. If you die on the job, though, sometimes—especially back then—they forget to ask for it. If it’s an old revolver like Pete’s, it’s retired, but it’s still on the books.”

  This brought a bit of a rise. “Pete didn’t even have a service weapon,” Ruth said. “Guards can’t carry guns in the jail.”

  “That’s right, they can’t. So you thought that his gun was just something he acquired on the street, like a lot of cops do. An old throwaway with no history and a serial number that couldn’t be traced to him. But as we discovered this morning, it wasn’t an old throwaway. It was his service piece. You didn’t turn it in after Pete’s death. So maybe you’d like to try to explain to me how that gun, the gun that killed Katie and Adam Foster, with a serial number registered on the city and county books as belonging to your husband, Pete, got in Adam Foster’s hand.”

  Ruth Chase sat dead still for a long moment, unblinking. Finally, turning her head toward Abe, her voice impossibly calm, she said, “Maybe Pete gave it to Adam Foster.” Perhaps realizing how absurd that sounded, she relaxed back into the cushions. “That fool girl,” she said, her voice changing. “What did she want me to do? Go, ‘Oh, you’re right, it was so wrong of me to kill my husbands. Maybe I’ll just forget about the money and start over again somewhere else’? What did she think was going to happen? So she called that day, and I asked her to wait a little, give me a chance to explain in person. It wasn’t what it seemed to be.”

  “But it was exactly that, Ruth, wasn’t it?”

  She didn’t answer, staring into the empty space in front of her. “She actually thought I should get into counseling, tell somebody, and it would all be fine. And she couldn’t let me see the children anymore, but I’d understand that. I mean, with my history, she couldn’t let me near them, could she? That would be irresponsible. But she wasn’t going to turn me in. Although she told me she wouldn’t be surprised if I decided to do that on my own. I’d feel so much better. What a fool she was. What a complete and utter fool.”

  “So you killed her?”

  She looked him straight in the eye. “And the world is a better place for it.”

  “What about Hal?”

  “What about him?”

  “You were going to let him go down for killing Katie?”

  She shook her head. “It was never going to come to that. I knew he didn’t kill her, you see? There was no evidence. He had a good lawyer. He would walk. I never worried about it.” She took a breath and straightened her back. A bit unsteadily, she got to her feet. “What do we do now, me and you?” she asked. She broke an ice-cold smile. “Usually, it’s the guy who says it, but I suppose a blow job is out of the question.”

  Glitsky looked up at her. “You think this is funny?”

  “Fucking hysterical,” she said. “Really. So what now?”

  Glitsky stood up. “Now we are driving downtown.”

  “Oh, please, spare me this shit.”

  “Please turn around and place your hands behind your back.”

  “You’re going to handcuff me?”

  Glitsky already had his cuffs out. “Please do as I ask.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “Then I’d be required to use force. Neither of us wants that. Please turn around.”

  Ruth threw a glance toward the ceiling. “I need another drink,” she said. “And then I need to use the bathroom. Can we put off the handcuffs that long? You can come in with me if you’re so nervous about it.”

  Without another word, she headed for the door, got to the hallway, and turned left toward the back of the house. Abe, skittish, grabbed his tape recorder and turned it off before he drew his gun. Carrying it at his side, he followed a few steps behind her. In the kitchen, out of her arm’s reach, he stood in the doorway and watched while she poured more vodka into her glass and took one deep swallow, then a second.

  Abe took a step forward. “All right,” he said, “that’s enough.”

  She chortled, met his gaze, and lifted the glass again.

  “Ruth! Stop! Now!”

  She tipped the glass back, emptying it, then placed it on the counter. “Might as well make a party out of it,” she said. “And now the bathroom.”

  He was not going to let her dictate what she did next. She was a suspect, and he knew the protocol for an arrest, and that did not include either her taking that last drink or her using the bathroom. He knew that he needed to get her locked into the backseat of his car without any more compromise.

  “Turn around. Hands behind your back,” he said. “You can use the restrooms downtown.”

  She sighed, her shoulders sagged, and for an instant she looked like what she was—a pathetic old woman. There was no need for him to be gratuitously cruel to her. She raised her eyes and looked at him. “Really, Abe,” she said, “I have to pee. Please. I won’t be a problem. I promise.”

  “All right. Move,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  She passed by him again, and five or six steps later, she turned in to a door they’d passed on the way up the hallway. Abe closed the gap between them.

  She abruptly turned. “Should I leave the door open?”

  “Not neces
sary,” Abe said. “But don’t lock it.”

  She went in, closed the door. He heard her tinkle and the toilet flush. Then he heard a rinse in the sink, long enough for him to touch the door with the butt of his gun. “All right.”

  She came out drying her face. “Now I want to call my attorney. You tricked me into talking to you.”

  Glitsky realized that if his goal had been to break her spirit, he had failed. But he had wrung from her a confession, every word of which was recorded. Twice. He decided to let her make the call, then he stood five feet in front of her while she evidently spoke to a secretary, left a message, and hung up.

  “All right,” Glitsky said, “turn around, hands behind you.”

  When he had the handcuffs on her, Abe held her, truly unsteady by now, by the upper arm and walked with her out the front door, down the path to the sidewalk, and over to the city police vehicle that he’d driven down in. Opening the back door, without a word, he helped her get in, then closed the door behind her.

  He hit the ignition and turned to see her settled against the door, her eyes closed, to all appearances sound asleep. He put the car into gear and pulled out into the street.

  The fog remained impermeable, and thick traffic was backed up crossing Van Ness and then again at Market. In the next twenty minutes, Abe checked the rearview mirror continuously and asked Ruth several times how she was doing. She remained motionless, eyes closed, slumping against the door. She refused to answer or acknowledge him in any way. It took him nearly ten minutes more to cover the two blocks on Bryant from Fifth Street to Seventh Street, then another five to get to the parking lot.

  When he came around to open the door Ruth was leaning on, she collapsed, almost falling out on the pavement. As he grabbed at the deadweight and lifted her back inside, it occurred to him that she was faking it, but then he recognized the pallor and, hand to her forehead, felt the clammy coldness of her skin.

  He tapped at her cheek with his palm, spoke her name.

  Straightening, he pulled out his cell phone and punched 911. When he got through to the dispatcher, he said, “This is Lieutenant Abe Glitsky with the DA Investigations Division. I have a prisoner in custody in the back of the Bryant Street jail parking lot, and she is unconscious and unresponsive. I need paramedics immediately.”