Guilt

by John Lescroart

  'What was a reasonable rule?' Larry, returning from the bathroom, didn't want to be left out.

  Wes shortened it up. 'My best friend happens to be the managing partner of Joe's law firm,' he said. 'We were talking about how he got to be such a hardass to work for. And the answer is Vietnam. He didn't exert his authority, didn't take charge. So when his troops went out on patrol, it turned out they were stoned to the eyeballs and got themselves ambushed and most of ' em died. I don't think he's ever forgiven himself for that.'

  'Jesus.' Joe clearly wasn't used to stories like this one. 'You get used to thinking in business terms, how maybe somebody beat him in a deal or something, but this…'

  'No, this wasn't like that. This was real. So now he's more careful. He's got to be. Problem is – and I've known him my whole life – underneath he really does want to give people a break, but people, you cut 'em some slack once and next time they expect it again, so they don't perform as well as they might and that doesn't help anybody. So he's a bastard at the firm.'

  'He is not.' Christina didn't like the language at all. 'He is nothing like a bastard.'

  Wes held up his hands. 'He's my best friend, Christina. We're a little free with what we call each other. He's been known to be less than flattering to me.'

  'Who has?'

  Sam was coming back in with a large plate of cut fruit and cheeses. Wes rolled his eyes. They weren't going over this whole thing again. Enough Mark Dooher, already. 'Nothing,' Wes said. Then: 'I've got five dollars that says Neptune is the last planet in our solar system.' He winked at Sam.

  'No, it's Pluto,' Joe said.

  'It is Pluto.' Christina was sure, too. Larry and Sally were nodding in agreement.

  Wes extended his hand out over the table. 'Five bucks,' he said. 'Just slap my palm.'

  'That was cruel,' Sam said.

  The guests had all gone home. She and Wes were having some Port, sitting on the loveseat they'd pulled in front of the wood-burning stove. Quayle was curled over her feet.

  'Cruel but cool,' Wes said, 'and we did make fifteen dollars; it could have been twenty if Sally had ponied up her own five.'

  'They're married,' Sam said. 'Married people never do that.'

  'I remember.'

  A piece of wood popped in the grate. Wes raised his glass to his mouth and realized he'd had enough tonight – gin, wine, Port. Maybe for tomorrow, too. The silence lengthened.

  'You all right, Wes?'

  He brought her in closer against him. 'I'm fine.'

  '"Fine" isn't the strongest word in the dictionary.'

  'Okay, I'm ecstatic.'

  'This wasn't too much tonight – the family stuff, dinner at home?'

  He had to chuckle. 'I assure you, this wasn't anything like any dinner I've ever had with Lydia, at home or anywhere else. In the first place, you can cook.'

  'I'm not pushing anything,' she said.

  'I know, not that I couldn't handle a little of that, even. But it was fun. I had a great time. I enjoyed your brother and sister and thought your friend Christina was charming and lovely and I think you are fantastic, although I'm not absolutely sure I'm going to respect you in the morning.'

  She put her own glass down, took his hand from where it rested on her shoulder and placed it on her breast. 'I hope not,' she said.

  'Let's go find out.'

  At about the same moment that Wes Farrell was enjoying his first martini that evening, Mark and Sheila entered St Emydius church to attend Saturday-night Mass.

  They walked together down the center aisle and chose a pew about ten rows from the front. There were more than fifty people in the church, a good showing. The congregation had come early to take part in the Reconciliation Service, which had for most Catholics replaced the old, often-humiliating sacrament of Confession. Now, sinners were offered an opportunity to reflect on their weakness, privately resolve to do good, and then be communally absolved of any guilt without having to confront another human being or suffer the minor indignity of a formal penance.

  Today, though, before the priest had come on to the altar to begin the Reconciliation Service, Mark leaned over and whispered to Sheila that he was going to use the real confessional, which was still an option. 'I'm old fashioned,' he said. 'It does me more good.'

  He didn't know what priest would be sitting in the confessional, but there was a good chance he'd know Dooher, and vice versa. All the priests at St Emydius knew him. Maybe not, though. Often a visiting priest would get the chore of Saturday Confession.

  Dooher would let fate dictate it.

  He nodded his head, made the sign of the cross, stood up and opened the confessional door. The familiar smell of it – dust and beeswax – filled his soul, as did the comforting darkness. Then the window that separated him and the priest was sliding open. The man recognized him immediately.

  'Hello, Mark, how are you doing today?'

  It was Gene Gorman, the pastor, who'd been to the house fifty times for poker, for dinner, for fundraisers, who got a bottle of Canadian Club every Christmas, who'd baptized Jason, their youngest.

  Dooher paused. 'Not so good, I'm afraid,' he whispered. He let the silence gather. Then: 'I don't want to burden you, Gene.'

  'That's what the sacrament's for, Mark.'

  Dooher hesitated another moment. Hesitation heightened the gravity of things. 'Would you mind not using my name? Is there someone in the other stall?'

  The confessionals at St Emydius, as in most Catholic churches, had three compartments – one in the middle for the priest, and one on either side of him for the repentants. This time the hesitation came from Father Gorman. Dooher heard him slide open the window on the other side, then close it. 'No, we're alone. You can begin.'

  The old words, the ritual he so loved. Again he made the sign of the cross. 'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.'

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  John Strout, San Francisco's coroner, was a gangly Southern gentleman of the old school. He had a prominent Adam's apple, a perennially bad case of dandruff in his wispy gray hair, poor taste in clothes, and a pronounced Dixie accent. He was also, rube or not, one the country's most respected forensics experts, and now he was taking a morning walk with Glitsky through the debris and detritus of south-of-Market San Francisco.

  It was Monday morning – sunny, breezy, and cold. Strout was, of course, a medical doctor, and – after a lifetime of bad morning coffee and stale donuts – had recently been a convert to the theory that a healthy breakfast was the key to a long life and perhaps even more luxuriant hair growth. Like all good converts, he had found the truth and was going to spread the word around, goddamn it. Like it or not.

  So, whenever feasible, he'd taken to briefing cops and DAs about his forensics reports over breakfast in one of the city's eateries. It never occurred to him that discussing the finer points of often-gory violent death, complete with color photographs, might not be particularly conducive to stimulating the early-morning appetite.

  It did occur to Glitsky.

  Strout had finished the PM on Victor Trang on the previous Friday afternoon, and Glitsky had – atypically, in Strout's experience, probably because of his troubles at home – said he'd be free to discuss the results first thing Monday morning. Let the weekend intervene. Why not?

  'I'll just look at the pictures while we're walking here, if you don't mind, John.' With a show of reluctance, Strout handed over the folder, and put his now-empty hands into the pockets of his greatcoat against the chill. 'What do we have?' Abe went on. 'Any surprises?'

  'Well, as a matter of fact…'

  Glitsky closed the newly opened folder. 'What? I'll listen first.'

  'Surprises may be too strong a word, but the deceased here got himself gutted by a pig sticker of the first order.'

  'Pig sticker?'

  'Knife.'

  'A pig sticker is a certain kind of knife?'

  Strout's expression betrayed a certain intolerance. 'Damn, you Yankees… pig sticker me
ans knife. Genetically. Victor Trang got stabbed by a big knife, is that clearer? And not just any big knife, something like a Bowie or my own favorite guess, a bayonet. Y'all familiar with the term "bayonet"?'

  Glitsky played along. 'I've heard of it. Made by the Swiss Army people, right? Whittling tool.'

  'Yeah, that's it, 'cept the large version.' Strout put a hand on Glitsky's arm and stopped him as they walked. 'Open the file,' he said. The breeze gusted and they moved into the entrance of an office building, out of it. 'The photos.'

  Glitsky followed instructions, flipping over glossies of the murder scene, the body as he'd found it, then as it looked from various angles stripped on the morgue table. Finally Strout put his finger on one. 'There you go. That one.'

  It was a color close-up that Glitsky recognized all too soon: the wound itself, after the area had been washed – long and wider than most knife-wounds he'd been witness to.

  'You see there?' Strout was saying. 'Right at the top?'

  Glitsky squinted, not clear what he was supposed to be seeing. Strout moved in closer, put his finger on the area over the top of the gash. 'Right here. You see that half-moon? The little circle under it? Know what that is?'

  Glitsky took a second, then guessed. 'It's an imprint from the haft of the knife.'

  The coroner was pleased. 'I must say, it is a pure pleasure to work with a professional. That's exactly what it is. The perp stabbed him so hard and so far up, the haft left this little fingerprint, which is pretty damn distinctive, you ask me. Actually cut into the skin above the blade area. I wouldn't put my name on it as a definite,' – this was because he could never prove it for certain and some attorney might discredit his entire testimony if he wasn't one hundred percent positive and correct on every detail – 'but between us, this could be nothing but a bayonet.'

  Strout reached inside his greatcoat and extracted a folded brown paper shopping bag. 'As a matter of fact…'

  'You just happen to have one handy.'

  This wasn't as unusual as it might have appeared. Strout's office contained an impressive collection of murder weapons from throughout the ages – maces, crossbows, garrotting scarves, sabers, handguns and Uzis. And, apparently, bayonets.

  He withdrew it from the bag, hefted it affectionately, and handed it to Glitsky. 'I thought I'd cut my steak with this at breakfast. Make an impression on our waiter. But look.'

  Abe was already looking. It was, as Strout had noted, a pig sticker of the first order. Where the blade met the handle of the knife was an oversized steel haft with a half-inch circular hole through the metal.

  Strout was pointing again. 'That's where it connects to the mount of the rifle.' Then back to the picture. 'It's also why there's that kind of double circle – the top of the haft, then the punch-out area… couldn't really be any thing else.'

  'How common are these things, you think?'

  Strout shrugged. 'Well, they ain't exactly Carter's Pills, but anybody wants could get ahold of one. Army/Navy stores, gun clubs, mail order, good old paramilitary-type boys saving our country from the government… your guess is as good as mine. Round here they probably wouldn't be as common as, say, in Idaho or Oregon, but you'd find 'em.'

  'Also, ex-Army,' Glitsky said. Suddenly, he experienced a small jolt of connection. Mark Dooher. Vietnam and his dead troops. He closed his eyes, trying to re-visualize the photograph he'd seen in the attorney's office, whether there might have been a bayonet mounted on any of the many weapons displayed. He couldn't see it, couldn't bring it back.

  But Strout was going on. 'Actually, Abe, that might be a tougher nut. If memory serves, they take your weapons away when they muster you out. 'Course, you could smuggle 'em… people probably been known to.'

  Rubbing his thumb over the bayonet's blade, Glitsky nodded. 'I don't think so,' he said. 'That would be illegal.'

  After his Monday-morning breakfast meeting with John Strout, Glitsky had planned to get right on the Trang investigation – murders that didn't get solved in the first couple of days very often never did. But when he'd come back to the office, there had been another homicide. He had been on call last week, so normally this would have been someone else's problem, but this week's Inspector had called in sick and gone salmon fishing, and Glitsky appeared just as his Lieutenant, Frank Batiste, had despaired of finding an Inspector to assign.

  Apparently, a fry cooker who'd been fired from a Tastee Burger in the lower Mission had returned to the scene of his humiliation and gone Postal – a new expression Glitsky loved. The ex-employee naturally killed none of the people with whom he had a gripe. He did, though, by mistake before he killed himself, end the life of a seventeen-year-old high-school student who'd stopped in for a hot chocolate. This new homicide brought Glitsky's workload to seven active cases, and put him inside and around the Tastee Burger for the rest of the day.

  Now it was just before noon on Tuesday and finally he was at Mrs Trang's clean but cluttered apartment with Paul Thieu, his enthusiastic interpreter.

  Victor's mother had been Glitsky's first choice of where to begin asking questions, but like so many other of his plans lately, this one hadn't panned out. He had respected the fact that she had been too distraught to talk in the immediate aftermath of her son's death. Then there had been the wake and funeral. This morning was the earliest they could get together.

  The apartment was a study in lace. Every smooth surface was covered with some type of crocheted thing – a doily or hankie or tablecloth. There was lace over the back of the overstuffed couch that Glitsky and Thieu were directed to, lace over the coffee table, on the end tables under the lamps and photographs, on the television set, under the phone on the little hall table. A feeble sunlight struggled to pierce a veil of web-like lace drapery covering the front windows.

  Trang's mother was petite and weathered, with flat gray hair and a shapeless tiny body, made more so by its enclosure in an oversized man's black business suit, over the shoulders of which she had thrown a crocheted white shawl. She offered them small flavorless cookies of some kind and coffee – near boiling, chicory-laced and appalling to Glitsky's taste, but Thieu sucked the first cup right up, black, and accepted a second. She sat still as a rock at the coffee table, responding to his opening expressions of regret in a patient and compliant way, without any interest. Her life, along with her son's, was apparently over.

  But now, finally, he was getting to it. 'And the last time you saw your son was?'

  He waited for Thieu to interpret, listened to the woman's inflection as she answered, trying to piece something in advance from sounds alone, but the tonality was too flat. Thieu nodded to Mrs Trang, then turned to him: 'She saw him the day before he was killed, but talked to him that night, that evening, after dinner sometime. She's not sure exactly what time.'

  Glitsky pretended to scribble on his pad and kept his face impassive, his voice low and conversational. 'Paul, would you please just say the words she says, exactly? Don't tell me what she says. Say what she says.'

  The younger man nodded, then swallowed, suitably chided. 'Sorry.'

  'It's okay.' He sat forward on the couch, spoke directly to the mother. 'Mrs Trang, how did Victor seem to you the last time you saw him?'

  Thieu translated. The wait. 'He was hopeful. We had a nice dinner. He tries to come over at least once a week, on Sunday, sometimes more. He…' She paused and Thieu waited. 'It saves him money to come here and eat, I think. He has taken a little while to start making money as a lawyer, and he felt that he was about to make a lot.'

  'And how was he going to do that?'

  'He had a client who was suing the Archdiocese, and he said they – the Archdiocese – had offered to…' Thieu listened, turned to Glitsky. 'She's apologizing to me,' he said. 'She doesn't know the jargon.'

  Glitsky pointedly ignored Thieu. 'That's all right, Mrs Trang, just do your best.'

  She came back to him, began talking again. Thieu picked it up: '… to settle it… before going to court. They we
re not going to go to court and he thought he would make a lot of money.'

  'He was pretty certain of that?'

  'Yes. He seemed very sure, very hopeful. But also worried.'

  'What about?'

  'That it wouldn't happen. That something would go wrong.' A pause. 'As it has.'

  'Did he say what might go wrong? What he was worried about?'

  'That this was a lot of money, and the Church might use… connections… in the court, perhaps, so that even though Victor was right, even if the law was on his side, they could stop him.'

  'Did you think he meant violently?'

  'No. Now, I don't know. Maybe so.'

  'How much money was he talking about?'

  'He didn't say exactly. Enough to pay off his loans. He thought he would move his office, get a secretary. He wanted to get me a new place.' She motioned around their cramped quarters. 'Buy me some new clothes.'

  'Okay, then, how about the next night, when he called? Did he call or did you call him?'

  'He called me. The attorney for the Archdiocese…'

  'MarkDooher?'

  'Yes, I think that was his name. He had called Victor and asked him to stay in the office to wait for a phone call, and they were going to offer more money that night.'

  'Did he say when he'd gotten that first call, from Dooher?'

  'I thought it was just then, just before he called me.'

  Glitsky made a note on his yellow pad. There would be a phone record of the precise time.

  Mrs Trang said a few more words, which Thieu related. 'It's why he stayed late.'

  'Would he have called anyone else about this, to tell them, perhaps, about the possible settlement?'

  'No. I wanted to call my sister and tell her and he told me to wait, that he was going to wait, too. Not to talk to anyone until it was done. He didn't want to…' Thieu frowned, trying to find the right word '… to bring it bad luck, to jinx it. He told me this.'