Dead Irish

by John Lescroart

  Pico had first gotten the bug maybe two years before, and he’d explained it to Hardy: “To breathe, sharks need to move through water, Diz. Time they get here they’ve usually been badly mangled, sometimes just kept on deck while the boat limits out, then rolls in from the Farallones. So they’re wasted when they get here. I figure if we can keep one moving long enough . . .” He shrugged. “So I need volunteers to walk around with ’em, and you, a true aficionado of things nautical, to say nothing of the underdog, or undershark in this case, seem to be the perfect candidate.”

  Hardy couldn’t say why, after the long hiatus, suddenly the endeavor was bearable once again—more, it was appealing. Pico had never given up on him, kept calling every two or three weeks, whenever they got one. And Hardy’d kept saying no thanks until this morning.

  It was now three o’clock, though if any place were timeless, it was this enclosed green room within the bowels of the Aquarium, surrounded by its vague bubblings and hums, its shiny wet windowless walls.

  Hardy was on his third one-hour walk. The other volunteers were as unlikely as he was—a retired car salesman named Waverly and a Japanese kid named Nao who worked mostly as a porter at the Miyako Hotel, and of course Pico. There were other eccentrics in Pico’s stable, but today it was Waverly and Nao. Hardy had gotten in at seven a.m.

  He hadn’t been planning on doing anything about Cochran today anyway, and he’d just as soon avoid thinking about Jane.

  Pico arrived to spell him. In his clothes, Pico appeared to be moderately overweight. In his wet suit, Hardy thought he most resembled a sea lion heavy with calf.

  He stood at the side of the tank, smoking. His mustache drooped to his jawline, his thick black hair was uncombed. Under his arm he held a newspaper.

  “How’s Orville?”

  He’d taken to naming his sharks. Helped them with the will to live, he said, although the theory hadn’t proved itself out. At least not yet.

  Hardy didn’t stop walking. “Orville”—he goosed the shark under its belly—“is lethargic.”

  Pico walked into his office and reappeared a second later without either the cigarette or the newspaper. Vaulting the side of the tank with an agility that belied his size, he fell in next to Hardy. He put a hand on the huge dorsal fin and, walking sideways, tested for reflexes in the tail.

  “Lethargic? You call this lethargic? He’s in the pink. Orville”—he petted the shark’s head—“forgive him. That was just some poorly timed sarcasm.” He gave Hardy the bad eye. “Try to be a little sensitive, would you?”

  Hardy let Pico take over, hoisted himself out of the tank and went into the office to change. When he came out in a couple of minutes, Pico’s newspaper was in his hand. Pico was coming around with the shark and Hardy started walking outside the pool along with him.

  “You read this?” Hardy asked. “La Hora?”

  “Sí. Keeps me up on my ethnic heritage.”

  “You know anything about the publisher?”

  “About as much as you know about William Randolph Hearst.”

  Hardy opened the paper, scanning the front page as he kept walking. The water slushed behind Pico and the shark.

  “I talked to the guy. He lied to me.”

  “Who?”

  “Who are we talking about, Pico?”

  “William Randolph Hearst. What, did Patty get kidnapped again?”

  Hardy pressed on. “Cruz.” He tapped the paper. “The publisher.”

  “He lied about what?”

  That question stopped Hardy. It was one he hadn’t asked himself, and should have. Cruz had lied about knowing Eddie—at least Hardy had felt pretty sure about that—but maybe that hadn’t been all. Pico had gotten to the other side of the pool.

  “What’d he lie about?”

  But Hardy was already at the door, headed out. “Thanks, Peek.”

  Pico tightened his grip on the shark. “Don’t let it get you down, Orville. He’s just like that. Sometimes he forgets to say good-bye.”

  Hardy hit the twenty on the first throw, then the nineteen, eighteen, seventeen. The sixteen took him two. Fifteen through twelve he nailed, but eleven, his “in and out” number in 301, hung him up for four throws. That was really abysmal. He prided himself on never using up an entire round of three darts on one number—and especially on eleven, hanging out there at nine o’clock—for a lefty, the easiest angle on the board.

  He shook his head in disgust.

  The Shamrock hummed slowly in the late afternoon. Bruce Hornsby was on the jukebox, allowing as “that’s just the way it is, some things they never change.” Lynne was behind the bar.

  Hardy had the dartboard to himself, a fine time for emptying the brain, just letting things happen. A Guinness, his first of the day, was half finished on the table next to him.

  He began the next round, shooting for the ten, and when two out of three of the darts missed, what he felt wasn’t disgust anymore. Something had worked its way up, ruining his concentration.

  He picked his darts from the board. In the back, by the bathrooms where he’d had his talk with Cavanaugh under the stained glass, he made himself sit still in one of the deep chairs. He put the Guinness on the low table in front of him, then leaned forward and removed the flights from his darts—light blue with an embossed gold dart, just like his business card—folding them up carefully and putting them in their slot in his case. He laid his tungsten darts, one at a time, into the worn velvet grooves. The case went into his jacket pocket.

  Okay.

  He sipped the stout and leaned back in the chair. If he wasn’t going to be getting any official help, he was going to have to start paying more attention to details. He resolved to start a written report when he got home that night. For now, something was bothering him. What else had Cruz said?

  Almost nothing. It had been the most superficial of meetings—if he hadn’t lied about Eddie, Hardy would never have thought of him again.

  He went over everything they’d said. First, the kid who’d freely admitted he knew Eddie. But then Cruz had gotten rid of him pronto. Then there was the vandalism with the fence, which had apparently caught Cruz by surprise. Hardy remembered him standing at the fence after he’d gone to his car, just staring at it, hands on hips, shaking his head. Kids must have done it, he’d said, but again Hardy came up with a question: What kids?

  And what about the car Eddie had driven to the lot? Had the department checked it out for prints? Hairs? Fabrics? Had Griffin? Maybe it was still in the city garage.

  He got up and went to the bar. Lynne gave him a pen and some paper and he scribbled a few notes while he waited for the next Guinness to settle out.

  He looked at his watch. It was nearly six o’clock. He’d put it off long enough, getting out of the house early to walk Orville. Maybe that’s why he’d said yes to Pico this time, without even thinking about it too much.

  He asked Lynne to hand him the phone over the bar, dialed information, got the number and called it. She answered on the first ring.

  “Please don’t hang up,” he said.

  A long silence, then: “Why not?” she asked.

  He struggled through an explanation.

  “I don’t know why,” she said when he’d finished, “but that upset me more than I can remember.” He sat biting his lip, not knowing what to say, hoping she’d stay on the line. “I thought you were just getting back into character, running away,” she said.

  “I’m not doing that anymore.” He’d let her get her jabs in—he owed her at least that much. “I called now, didn’t I? We’re talking.”

  “Please, Dismas, don’t do this if you just can’t. I don’t think I could take it.”

  He thought about it long enough that she repeated his name.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay what?”

  “How about we try again tonight. I swear to God I’ll show up.”

  “Why don’t you give me your phone number? That way if you don’t, I
can do something about it.”

  “You got a pencil?”

  They went to a place on upper Fillmore that specialized in Cajun food. They sat in a booth, next to each other on a bench as though they expected another couple. A maroon cloth was pulled across the front of the booth between visits from the waiter. Jane sat closest to the wall, Hardy on the outside.

  They had oysters with Cajun martinis while Hardy talked in a little more detail about the events of the day before. For entrées, Jane ordered catfish cut into strips and tossed with peppers, onions and baby shrimp. Hardy had a blackened filet, extra rare, with a tamale. They shared a bottle of white wine and found out a little more about each other.

  When she and Hardy had been together, Jane had worked in the advertising department at I. Magnin, but after a couple of years had become more fascinated, she said, with the fashions than with the actual selling of them. She had become a buyer, starting over from the bottom, and liked it now very much, traveling to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, even to Europe and twice to Hong Kong.

  Hardy regaled her with tales of bartending, Moses, Pico and his sharks, a little about Eddie Cochran. Their desserts arrived—a couple of crème brûlées and some espresso. The talk wore down. Hardy looked at his watch. Jane half-turned on the bench to face him. She reached out and covered his near hand with hers. “Do you think,” she asked, “it’s time we talk about Michael?”

  Hardy looked straight ahead, across the booth, at the knotholes in the redwood-stained plywood. He lifted his espresso cup, then put it down without drinking. He moved his hand out from under hers.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “You’re pulling away from me again.”

  Hardy, trapped in the booth, said, “Maybe I am.”

  Jane again reached for his hand, putting it, as she had the other night, in her lap. She kneaded it slowly with both of hers. “Because what’s the point now? Is all this just social talking, catching up on each other?”

  “All what?”

  “Dinner. Clever repartee.”

  “Come on, Jane.”

  “You come on,” but gently. “Knowing what somebody’s doing isn’t knowing them.”

  “Maybe it’s enough.”

  “Well, then I wish you hadn’t called me.” She let go of Hardy’s hand with one of hers and quickly, with her index finger, wiped a tear from each eye, one after the other. “It wasn’t your fault, you know.”

  Hardy was a block of carved wood, unyielding, inert.

  “Have you ever talked about it?” She held his hand in hers again. A couple of tears had overflowed onto her cheeks, but she wasn’t sobbing. “Do you ever think about it even?”

  “I never don’t think about it.” But then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  “It doesn’t matter?” she asked quietly. “You think yelling at me is the problem? I’d rather have you yell at me any day than just disappear.”

  He barely trusted himself to breathe. “It won’t bring him back.” Hardy finally looked at her. Seeing the tears, he brushed Jane’s cheeks, turning on the bench to face her. “You didn’t kill him, Jane. I did.”

  “You didn’t. He’d never stood up before. How could you have known?”

  “I should have known.”

  Michael, the seven-month-old son, had stood up for the very first time in his crib. Dismas had put him down for the night with the sides lowered. The baby got to his feet, leaned over, and fell to the floor, headfirst. He had died by noon of the next day.

  “I should have known,” he repeated.

  “Dismas,” she said, “you didn’t know. That’s over. It’s long over. How long are you going to suffer for it? It was an accident. Accidents happen. It just wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

  He picked up his coffee cup, staring across the enclosed space, and put it to his mouth, tasting nothing.

  “Every time I looked at you I blamed myself again. What I put you through. Me and you.”

  “You didn’t put me through it. You didn’t cause it. Look at me now,” she said.

  She was beautiful to him. Her cheeks glistened with her tears. “I’m telling you I never thought it was you. It might as easily have been me. I should have known, too. All the books said he was getting ready to stand up, and I never thought of it.” She brought his hand to her lips and kissed it. “The worst was losing you both.”

  “I couldn’t face you.”

  “I know.”

  “And everything else just seemed, still seems”—he shook his head—“I don’t know . . . It stopped meaning anything.”

  “Me, too?”

  He closed his eyes, perhaps visualizing something, perhaps remembering. “No, you meant something. You’ve always meant something.” He hesitated. “All the other stuff . . . I couldn’t work up any interest.”

  They sat facing each other, turned together on the bench in the Cajun restaurant. They held each other’s hands, both of them, between themselves.

  “When you called me from in the bar, on the phone,” Jane began, “you said you weren’t running anymore.”

  He nodded.

  “You want to think about that?”

  He nodded again.

  There wasn’t anything else to say. He let go of her hands and pushed the button at the side of the booth, signaling the waiter to come and give them the check.

  Glitsky’s voice had said to call no matter what time Hardy got home.

  After leaving Jane, his mind a jumble, he had driven back down to China Basin to view the Cruz parking lot another time. He walked to the hole in the fence, now inexpertly patched with baling wire. The Cyclone fence hadn’t been pulled away by kids. It had been cleanly cut top to bottom.

  He’d called Pico from a pay phone to see how Orville was doing. The machine answered from Pico’s office. Hardy tried his friend at home and learned that the shark hadn’t made it.

  “I should have warned you about my luck lately,” Hardy had said, and told him about the baseball game. But then he had remembered that Steven Cochran hadn’t died yesterday. Maybe his luck was changing.

  Pico sounded depressed, and Hardy had asked if he wanted some company. Pico had said okay, and they’d sat up around the kitchen table, playing Pictionary with Angela and the two older kids for a couple of hours.

  So it was late when Hardy got home. He called Glitsky immediately. The sergeant wasn’t in high spirits, just asked Hardy if he could come see him first thing in the morning about the Cochran investigation.

  “Sure,” Hardy said. “Something happen?”

  “Yeah. Somebody else died, and it definitely wasn’t a suicide.”

  Glitsky hung up.

  20

  EMPTY. EMPTY EMPTY.

  The word kept replaying like a looping tape in Sam Polk’s head ever since he’d pulled his car into the driveway. Empty. The house, Nika gone now, completely empty.

  He had called her to tell her after the cops had been at the shop for a couple of hours. She’d expressed sympathy over Linda’s death, but by her voice, he could tell she wouldn’t be there when he got back home.

  Oddly, her absence was all right, preferable in some way. The note on the table in the hallway had read: “Sammy, I’m sorry, but I just can’t handle two funerals in one week. All this is getting so heavy, I thought you wouldn’t mind if I went to Janey’s (you know, in Cupertino) for a couple of days and try to get my head straight about all this. You can call if you want (the number’s in our book). Sorry about Linda.”

  Sorry about Linda. That was all. Sorry about Linda. The empty house seemed to echo more in the darkness. No point in turning on any more lights—the one in the kitchen above the stove was enough. All he had to see was the bottle.

  So this is where it all—all the work, all the planning and sweating and saving and effort—this was where it had gotten him. To a kitchen table at an empty hour
in an empty house, drinking alone at midnight.

  He wondered why it was he really didn’t drink so often—now it was the only thing he wanted to do. First it had hurt his stomach, but after a while that had stopped. He poured another splash into the glass, got up, stumbled a little, and grabbed a handful of ice from the automatic ice maker.

  Back at the table, he flipped the picture album open again, the one he hadn’t been able to find for nearly a half hour. Nika had put it in one of the drawers underneath the bookshelves, not even out in plain sight.

  There was Linda. He forced himself to look. She hadn’t been beautiful, but there was something about her, a willingness to please. People liked her. He hadn’t thought enough lately about how much he had liked her. Not that they’d talked all that much the last few years, but some people didn’t communicate that way. Especially since she’d grown up and started doing some of her own things—the drugs, guys and so on.

  But what could he have done about that? It wasn’t his business, really, after she got out of high school. He told himself she had been an adult.

  He poured again, clinking the bottle loudly. Why did Linda think he had become interested in his love life again anyway, gone looking for someone else to put in his life? Linda had made it clear that she had her own life. Okay, then, he’d go and have his. God knew, he’d earned it, raising a daughter alone and running a business by himself. She had had no right to begrudge him what he found with Nika.

  The telephone rang in the empty house and he felt his stomach tightening, cramping again. Even if it was Nika, he didn’t want to talk. He let it ring eleven times, then it stopped. He went upstairs to his bedroom, carrying the glass with him, his heart pumping now with fear. He realized who had been on the phone, probably, and it wasn’t Nika.

  But that was stupid. How could anybody know yet? Tomorrow, maybe—no, definitely—they would know, but not yet. He sat on the bed. He’d forgotten all about that. Or not forgotten, but put aside. He couldn’t afford to keep doing that, not for long.