Hardy 03 - Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  ‘Not yet, not yet…’ She was breathing hard, her teeth clenched. ‘Okay, okay.’ She pounded down against him, now straightening up, arching, her head thrown back. ‘Now. Now. Now.’ Grinding down into him as he let himself go, collapsing against his big chest, a low chuckle escaping from deep in her throat.

  12

  Turning south on Highway 1, Hardy was thinking that fate could be a beautiful thing.

  The dunes with their sedge grasses obscured the view of the ocean, but with the top down on the Suzuki, Hardy could hear and smell it. The afternoon, now well along, was still warm. Dwarf cypresses on the east side of the road attested to the near-constant wind off the ocean, the evergreen branches flattened where they faced the beach, as though giants walked the land, stomping them to one side.

  Where the highway turned inland at FortFunston near the Olympic Club golf course, hang-gliders filled the sky. Even on a windless, cloudless day, thermals up the cliffs at the shoreline provided decent lift. Hardy thought he might like to get into hang-gliding sometime. Take the wife and kids. Soar.

  The fate that had saved him from his files had come in the guise of a call from Abe Glitsky, who’d been called down to Pacifica to view a body that had washed ashore. Calls from the SFPD to other local jurisdictions over the past few days had gotten the word out, and when the call came in, Abe had been in the office and volunteered to go down and have a look. He’d called Hardy from his squawk box, patched in.

  The turnoff was just north of Devil’s Slide, a two-mile stretch of Highway 1 where the curving roadway’s shoulder disappeared at the edge of a three-hundred-foot cliff. Most of the time, the area was shrouded in fog, and it was the rare year that didn’t see another verification of the fact that automobiles could not fly.

  Hardy wound back on a rutted and unpaved roadway toward the city. Glitsky’s car was parked in the dirt area at the bottom, along with a couple of Pacifica police cars. As Hardy was getting out of his car, an ambulance appeared on the road he’d just used.

  The tide was out. Getting on four o’clock, there was still no wind at all, no fog. Maybe, Hardy thought, we’re going to have our three days of summer.

  He nodded to the ambulance guys, but was too anxious to wait for them. Crossing the soft sand, he got to harder ground and broke into a trot. The officials were knotted around a still green form about twenty yards from the line of surf.

  Hardy nodded to Glitsky, who introduced him around. ‘Here’s your victim,’ he said.

  The body lay covered with a tarp, on its back. Hardy asked permission to look, and one of the Pacifica cops said go ahead. He pulled the tarp away and involuntarily stepped back.

  Sand flies buzzed around the half-open mouth, the nose, the empty eye sockets, the thinning head of gray hair. Hardy was momentarily startled by the fact that the body wore jogging sweats identical to the pair he owned —except that the body’s green sweatsuit had a large crescent-shaped tear in the right torso. There was also a ragged break in the lower left leg, with flesh showing beneath it. Two small clean holes — one in the chest and one just over the crotch — spoke for themselves. Forcing himself to take it all in, Hardy noticed the wedding band on the left hand. But, by far, the most arresting detail was the end of the right arm, a jagged and torn mess of tendon, bone and sickly greenish white flesh. Hardy knew what had happened to the hand.

  The ambulance men had made their way across the beach with a stretcher. Hardy stepped away and let them move in.

  ‘You get an ID?’ he asked Glitsky. Glitsky had a scar that ran through his lips, top to bottom; when he got thoughtful or tense, it seemed sometimes to almost glow white in his dark face. It was glowing now. He wasn’t saying anything.

  ‘Looks about the right age for Owen Nash,’ Hardy said.

  Glitsky nodded, still thinking, looking off into the horizon. ‘That’s why you’re here,’ he said.

  ‘Shot twice?’ Hardy asked.

  Glitsky nodded again. ‘Before the sharks got him. Small caliber, one exit wound out of two.’ Like a dog shaking off water, he came back to where they were. ‘Once in the heart, and whoever it was tried to shoot his dick off.’ He thought another moment. ‘Probably not in that order.’

  Hardy felt his balls tighten. Suddenly Glitsky spoke to the ambulance attendants who had opened the stretcher and were preparing to lift the body. ‘Excuse me a minute.’ He went over to the body, got down on one knee and picked up the left hand. ‘I’m going to take off this ring,’ he told the Pacifica cops.

  He looked at it briefly, showed it to them, then brought it over to Hardy. ‘You see anything?’ he asked.

  It was a plain gold band. On the flat inside surface, there was a tiny stamp in the gold that said IOK. Nothing else at first glance. Hardy faced away from the sun and held the ring up to catch the light, turning it slowly. ‘Here you go,’ he said. He brought it closer to his face. Worn down flush to the gold, invisible except at one angle, Hardy could make out some initials. ‘E.N. and some numbers — something looks like fifty-one.’

  ‘What was Nash’s wife’s name?’

  Hardy remembered mostly because of the boat. ‘Eloise. And fifty-one — sounds like a wedding date, doesn’t it?’

  Glitsky uttered an insincere ‘Absolutely brilliant’ and held out his hand. Hardy dropped the ring in it. He put the ring in a zip-loc evidence bag and stuck it in his pocket. ‘So I can either check the prints, have Strout do some DNA testing this month at a cost of ten grand or call his attorney again. How do you vote?’

  The body was on the stretcher, and the ambulance attendants began carrying it over the beach. Hardy, Glitsky and the other men fell into a rough line behind them, and the caravan trudged over the sand. Nobody said a word.

  * * * * *

  ‘The Eloise was out all day Saturday!’ Jeff Elliot was excited.

  ‘I knew that,’ Hardy said. He was at home, talking on the kitchen extension. He lived fifteen blocks from the beach, just north of Geary, and he’d seen no point in going downtown for ten minutes so that he could turn around and drive back home.

  Twenty minutes after leaving Devil’s Slide, he was cutting up some onions in his kitchen. When the spaghetti sauce was made, bubbling on the stove, he opened himself a beer and called Jeff Elliot.

  ‘I thought you were keeping me up on the breaks in the case,’ Elliot said. ‘If you knew the boat had gone out —’

  ‘We didn’t even know it was Owen Nash, so what difference could his boat make? In fact, I would tend to agree with our good Dr Strout,’ Hardy drawled, ‘that yo’ conclusions were de-sahded-ly prematuah. All we knew was that a man was missing and the hand might show that it was used in karate. That’s a long stretch for hard news.‘

  There was silence on the other end. Then, ‘You got something, don’t you?’

  ‘Turns out,’ Hardy said laconically, ‘odds on you were right.’

  He told him about the body, which was on its way, or had just arrived at, the morgue — the hand bitten off, and where the shots had gone.

  ‘He was shot? Somebody killed him you mean?’

  Hardy thought of where Glitsky thought the first bullet had gone. He felt he could rule out suicide. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Somebody killed him.’

  ‘God, that’s great!’ Elliot nearly shouted. ‘That is just great!’

  ‘The guy’s dead,’ Hardy reminded him. He took a sip of his beer. ‘That’s not so great.’

  ‘The story, I meant the story.’

  ‘I know what you meant. Listen, if you’ve got a file picture on Nash, you might bring it down with you, remove any doubt in case no one’s identified him yet.’

  ‘Good idea!’

  ‘Oh, and Jeff, if Mr Farris or Celine Nash — Owen’s daughter — is down at the morgue, try to rein in the enthusiasm a little, would you? I don’t think they’re going to be as happy about it as you are.’

  ‘No, I understand that. Of course.’

  Hardy rang off. ‘Of course,’ he said.
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  * * * * *

  It was going to the front page in tomorrow’s edition, Jeffs first front-page story. Not the main headline, but lower right, three columns, his byline — not too shabby.

  Not only that, but the lead graphs had already gone out on the wire that night, and Jeff had received a followup call from the L.A. Times, la-di-da, and from Drew Bates over at KRON-TV, who wondered if he — Jeff — had anything more to give out on the Owen Nash murder. Imagine, TV coming to him! The L.A. Timesl

  He had left his forwarding number at night reception and now sat in the bowels of the building where he worked, checking the Nexis listing on Owen Nash. It was nine-thirty at night, and he’d been up since six, but he felt completely fresh. Parker Whitelaw, his editor — Christ, THE EDITOR — said he’d give him a sidebar on Nash, they’d run with the pickup on the back page of the first section, but he had to have it done by eleven-thirty. Did Jeff think he could do it?

  Jeff thought for a lead story and a sidebar he could stand on his head and spit nickels, dance with Nureyev, run a ten-flat hundred. He looked at the mute reminder, his crutches, leaning on his right against the table. Well, the hell with them. He could get this done. He had the raw data — now it was just putting it together. Piece of cake, though there was more than he would have thought — and he had to get it down to three hundred words maximum. Well, hit the high spots.

  Jeff had started the Nexis search at quarter to seven after getting back from the morgue. Almost three hours, close to two hundred articles — some merely a mention at a society event, a few substantial interviews, a cover story in ‘87 in Business Week. Owen Nash, from the evidence here, had been a very major player. He’d been mentioned in one U.S. publication or another on an average of once every six weeks or so for what seemed like the past twenty years.

  Jeff looked away from the orange-tinted screen. He was having a problem reconciling the Owen Nash in these articles to the body he’d witnessed at the morgue.

  He’d gotten there as a limo had been pulling up. Ken Farris and his wife had recognized him immediately from the previous night, and while they didn’t seem all that happy to see Jeff, they were also too distracted to make any real objection when the hawk-faced black inspector with the scar through his lips admitted them.

  The other woman in the limo was Celine Nash, Owen’s daughter. She was much older than Jeff, probably near forty, but something about her, even in grief, made him react. He didn’t know if it was posture, attitude or the shape of her, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  Stupid really. A cripple like him stood no chance with most women, much less a beauty of her class and caliber —if that powerful a sexual draw could be called beauty — but he thought there couldn’t be any harm in letting it wash over him.

  Until, of course, they saw Owen Nash. At the sight of him, everything else vanished. The assistant coroner had pulled back enough of the sheet to show the face, and there was no question of identification. Celine sobbed once. Farris hung his head and pulled his wife closer to him.

  The inspector — Glitsky — had asked the formal question and the assistant was pushing the body back, when Celine told him to stop. She wanted to see her father one last time.

  Nobody moved. The assistant coroner looked at Glitsky, who nodded, and the sheet came off, revealing Owen Nash, naked and blue, on the gurney.

  First, of course, was the hand, or the lack of hand. The ragged stump without any cauterizing or sutures — one pink tendon extending two inches beyond the rest.

  Jeff had seen pictures of the damage a shark bite could do to, for example, a surfboard, but he found that it did not prepare him for the sight of Nash’s ribs opened by the slashing teeth, the wedge taken out of his lower leg.

  Celine walked up to the body. Her eyes, he noticed, were dry in spite of the sob. Perhaps they glistened with shock. The coroner’s assistant made a motion to come and steady her, but something in her bearing stopped him. The room became for an instant as silent and colorless as an old black-and-white snapshot — all the life, not just Owen’s — leached out by the tension.

  Celine put a hand on the body’s chest, another on the thigh. It might have only been five seconds, but it seemed she stood there forever, unmoving, taking it in. Now a tear did fall. She leaned over and placed her lips against the center of his stomach.

  Suddenly it was over. She nodded at the inspector, then turned around and walked past them all to the door and on out without looking back.

  In the lobby, Ken and Betty thanked Glitsky. Celine was already in the limo. The evening light was startling —Jeff remembered walking out of matinees as a child, how the Saturday-afternoon light after the dark theater was so jarring, so unexpected. He’d felt that way, squinting against the setting sun.

  He knew he should have asked someone more questions — the assistant, Glitsky, Ken or Betty — but he’d been too shaken. By the time he recovered, the limo had driven off. Glitsky had gone into the Hall of Justice. He couldn’t bring himself to go back into the morgue.

  He shook himself, pulling out of the memory. The orange screen still hummed in front of him. He looked at his watch and saw that he’d wasted twenty minutes. He had to get down to work.

  * * * * *

  There was, first, the business side. In 1953, Owen had borrowed $1,500 from a G.I. loan program and put a down payment on a near-bankrupt television repair shop in South San Francisco. He began tinkering with used parts, and within two years had perfected and patented an improved insulation technique for the hot tubes of early TV. General Electric picked it up, and Owen was on his way. He diddled with vacuum tubes, invested in copper wiring, got into simple components before the microchip came along. By the time Silicon Valley exploded, he was ready for it.

  Shares of Owen Industries, Inc., were trading on the New York Exchange for $17 a share, and Nash himself had controlled eight hundred thousand shares when he took the corporation public in 1974. Figuring three or four stock splits minimum, Nash’s personal worth on stocks alone, at the time of the Business Week cover story, was close to $70 million.

  His other assets were also substantial. Besides the $250,000 Eloise and his Seacliff mansion, he owned a house and more than a thousand acres of land in New Mexico, pied-a-terres in Hong Kong and Tokyo, a condominium in New York. According to Business Week he also held part or controlling interest in three hotels, ski resorts in Lake Tahoe and Utah, a restaurant on St. Bart’s in the Caribbean. His one failure, as of five years ago, had been an airline, the Waikiki Express, which had made two round trips daily between Oahu and Los Angeles for sixteen months before it went bankrupt.

  But the man hadn’t spent all his time in boardrooms. The first mention of Owen Nash in any publication had nothing to do with business. In 1955 he was the first non-Oriental to break more than six one-inch pine boards on top of one another in a sanctioned karate exhibition. Jeff was tempted to get up from his chair and see if Archives had the picture referenced in the display, but decided against it. Time was getting short.

  In 1958 Nash’s house in Burlingame had burned to the ground. He managed to rescue his six-year-old daughter, Celine, but had nearly died himself trying to get back inside to pull his wife, Eloise, to safety.

  After his wife’s death, he bought his first sailboat and took it around the world, accompanied only by Celine. The papers picked up on the rugged outdoorsman life now — for a year in the 1960s he held the all-tackle world record for a black marlin he’d taken off the Australian Barrier Reef. As recently as last year he and Celine and a crew of three college kids had sailed a rented ketch to runner-up in the Newport-Cabo San Lucas race.

  His forays into big-game hunting stirred more and more controversy over the years. Jeff Elliot thought the change of tone of the articles was interesting: when Nash bagged a polar bear in 1963 he was a man’s man featured in Field & Stream; by 1978, taking a zebra in the Congo got him onto the Sierra Club’s public-enemy list.

  He didn’t ‘give
a good goddamn’ (Forbes, Ten CEOs Comment on Image,‘ Sept. ’86) about the public. He was one of the only western industrialists to attend the coronation of Bokassa; the Shah of Iran reportedly stayed aboard the Eloise in the Caribbean while the U.S. government was deciding how to handle him after he was deposed; Nash appalled the Chronicle reporter covering his trip to China in ‘83 by feasting, with his hosts, on the brains of monkeys who were brought live to the table.

  He made Who’s Who for the first time in 1975. He never remarried.

  13

  ‘I wish I made more money,’ Pico Morales said. ‘I wish I had more money. Anybody else, they would have more money.’

  His wife, Angela, put her hand over his. ‘English isn’t even his first language,’ she said, ‘but he sure can conjugate the dickens out of “to have money.” ’

  They were in the Hardys’ dining room, sitting around the cherry table. After the spaghetti and a jug of red wine, Frannie had brought out an apple pie, and Pico had put away half of it.

  ‘He is a man of many talents,’ Hardy said.

  ‘Is there anything special about today and money?’ Frannie asked.

  ‘See? That’s what I mean.’ Pico had a knife in his hand and was reaching again for the pie. ‘We don’t think — I don’t think — like a rich person. I think it’s genetic.’

  ‘He thought sharks dying was genetic, too,’ Hardy said.

  ‘No, that was lack of family structure.’

  ‘What would you do if you had money,’ Angela asked, ‘besides maybe eat more?’

  Pico had no guilt about his size. He patted his stomach and smiled at his wife. ‘What I would do, given this news tonight about Owen Nash that the rest of the world doesn’t know yet, is go out and invest everything I owned in stock in his company.’

  Hardy shook his head. ‘That stock is going to dive, Peek.’

  ‘I know. So you sell short, make a short-term bundle, buy back in.’