“I’m with you so far. Did Larry buy or not buy?”
“Larry smelled a rat.”
“And then?”
“And then he threatened to blow the whistle on this multimillion-dollar scam. That was the call to LA.”
Fingers pressed to his eyes, Freeman sighed. “I was afraid that’s where you were going.”
Hardy had been talked out of enough good ideas by David Freeman over the past weeks. He was not in his most receptive mode. “David, the managing partner in the LA firm handling this was shot to death within a month of Larry Witt.”
Freeman tipped his glass. “You said that. I fail to see, though, how any of this is going to mitigate Jennifer’s sentence, even if you could get Villars to listen to it, which you can’t. You’re saying now, I take it, that there was in fact some mysterious hit man, the existence of whom, by the way, the defense—that’s us—never hinted at during the trial, and of whom there is no physical evidence.”
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist.”
“Do you think he does? You think Jennifer is telling the truth?”
Hardy said he still didn’t entirely think that, but the jury might. “I’ll let them decide.”
“Villars won’t let you introduce the theory. And if she’d be inclined to, which she won’t, Powell will object and win unless you’ve got some shred of evidence, which doesn’t exist, no doubt because this didn’t happen this way.”
“Which leaves Jennifer hanging,” Hardy said.
Freeman noisily sipped the rest of his wine. “It always has,” he muttered.
But he wasn’t going to take any more of Freeman’s advice, even if it was right. He still had four days, and he thought if he did succeed in finding that shred of evidence Freeman had talked about, he could get Villars at least to listen.
After all, this was a capital case. This was life and death, not some moot-court discussion, not petty politics. If he got something real, he had to believe she would listen to it.
Of course, this did leave the question of whether or not anything real in fact existed, but Hardy had nothing else—he had to assume it did. Somewhere.
43
The next day he interviewed three doctors at YBMG, two of whom had not invested and one who had. The first two felt understandably snakebit, but neither one saw a grand conspiracy at work in his bad fortune. The Group had done well and they both wished they had been more a part of it, but it was like the lottery. Who would have predicted the windfall? It was a fluke, and they’d been given their chance.
The lucky one, Dr. Seidl, was a younger member of the Group, only entitled to ninety-two shares. Paying his monthly bills in December, he had sent in his $4.60 and promptly forgot about it. Last month, when he received his payout of $13,143.12, he thought it was very nice, but after taxes it was a little under ten grand, and after paying off all his credit cards he was back to square one. It sure beat a swan dive into a dry swimming pool, but it wasn’t really going to change his life.
Hardy was starting to think it was going to be hard to sustain his conspiracy theory, even to himself, if he didn’t find somebody who had made a bundle, and theoretically, at least, would have had reason to shut up a whistleblower if that’s what Larry Witt had been.
In the afternoon he went to the library and looked up the members of the YBMG Board in the business reference section, but the names were all unfamiliar. He did learn that the corporation as an entity was scheduled to hold fifty-one percent of the stock, and the doctors forty-nine percent, if all of them bought in. He wondered if there was a provision for outstanding, unbought doctor stock, some kind of secondary buy-in, but he saw no mention of it in the published prospectus.
He did some figuring, realizing that if only ten percent of the doctors bought their stock, then there appeared to be a little over 125,000 shares out there somewhere—unclaimed—with a value of something like $17 million.
On Friday morning, he was in his office, talking on the phone to the Los Angeles Police Department. He still had discovered no evidentiary connection between YBMG’s business dealings and Dr. Larry Witt. He had talked to Jennifer again last night, pressing her, but she could recall nothing Larry said or might have said regarding the proposed buyout. Hardy was tempted to tell her to make something up just so he could get it in front of somebody, but he restrained himself.
Then it struck him—there had been two homicides in Los Angeles, and there must have been an investigation. He knew that policemen got sensitive about their unsolved backlogs—their skull cases, they called them—but he might be able to drum up a little enthusiasm—tie the old crime to another one?
“Restoffer. Homicide.”
It was an older voice but not a tired one. And Hardy had gotten through the huge bureaucracy faster than he’d have thought possible. Maybe it meant something.
Hardy introduced himself, trying to talk fast and still be as clear as he could be—he was a defense attorney in San Francisco and maybe had discovered a possible link between his client and the murder of Simpson Crane.
There was a longish pause. “What’d you say your name was?”
Hardy told him. Another pause. “Just a minute. Hang on, would you?”
When Restoffer came back on, there was less background noise. “You said you were in San Francisco?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m listening.”
Hardy went through it, more slowly this time, filling in the blanks. When he’d finished, Restoffer said, “That’s pretty tenuous, Mr. Hardy.”
The inspector was right, of course, and Hardy admitted it. Simpson Crane ran the law firm that represented the medical group of which Larry Witt had been a member. Crane himself hadn’t been YBMG’s lawyer, or Witt’s. For that matter, even Jody Bachman hadn’t been Witt’s lawyer.
Hardy knew better than to push. It was the quickest way to turn a cop off—a citizen, especially a defense lawyer, lobbying for an unsupported theory. The facts were either going to intrigue Restoffer or not. “Well,” Hardy said, “I just thought I should report it to somebody, get it off my chest.”
It was Restoffer’s cue to hang up if he was going to, but he stayed on. “We’re pretty sure it was union muscle but we couldn’t find any kind of trail. They did it right . . . ”
“Same up here. Except they’ve convicted my client—Witt’s wife—of killing him for the insurance.”
“They’ve convicted her already?”
“Last week. My problem is she’s got no defense, other than saying she didn’t do it. She says she saw somebody walking up the street. Maybe it was some kind of hit man, so I’ve been trying to find a reason for a hit man to want to kill Witt. This might be it.”
There was a long silence. “I’ve got four months before I retire,” Restoffer said. “I’d love to close out these two. Crane was a prominent guy. So was his wife. But I’ve got five live cases right now. When am I supposed to fit this in?”
That was his problem, and Hardy let him wrestle with it.
“You got a paper trail, anything at all?”
All Hardy had was the offering circular and the prospectus from the library, which he’d fax down if Restoffer needed it.
“How much money we talking about?”
“I figure about seventeen million dollars.”
“Seventeen million.”
“You think that could motivate somebody to do something serious?”
Restoffer grunted. “Seventeen dollars does it down here, sometimes seventeen cents.” The line hummed, empty and open. “Okay,” he said, “why don’t you send your stuff down? I’ll take a look at it.”
Now it was Hardy’s turn to hang up, but much as he wanted Restoffer’s help, he didn’t want to mislead him. It was full-disclosure time. “Inspector . . . ” he began.
“Floyd,” Restoffer said.
“Okay, Floyd, there is one other thing you ought to know that argues against this hit man theory. It might make the whole exercise
not worth your time.”
“I’m listening.”
“I don’t know what the practice is with professional killers—if they do this. But Witt was shot with his own gun.”
The silence hung. Hardy thought he heard Restoffer let out a deep breath. “So was Crane,” he said. “Send down your stuff.”
At least some things seemed to be falling together, even the details that did not appear to have particular relevance. For example, the FedEx package.
While Hardy was filling out his subpoena form to call Ali Singh as a witness for the defense, it had come back to him that the FedEx invoice had been entered as an exhibit, and all he had to do was look up who had sent the package.
He had done that, and seeing that it had come from Nancy DiStephano, he had remembered—putting things together—that Tom had gone over to Jennifer’s house the week before the killings to deliver his own present, but that Nancy was going to wait to deliver hers in person when the Witts came to visit on Christmas. So what had happened was that after the Witts had blown off the family visit, Nancy had sent her present to her grandson Matt by Federal Express. What the gift had been didn’t matter—it had obviously vanished into the gaping and insatiable mouth of Christmas presents, into the mountain of Matt’s new toys.
But, like Restoffer’s cooperation, and though it was not what he’d call hot evidence, the information gave Hardy some small consolation. The unanswered questions had been distracting, and there weren’t many left now.
There seemed something fishy in the YBMG takeover. Hardy’s theory was a long way from completely developed and even further from proven, but what he was beginning to suspect drew him like a moth to a candle. Hell, any possibility did. Suppose that both Larry Witt and Simpson Crane had, for different reasons and by differing paths, somehow threatened to expose and undermine an extremely lucrative and shady business transaction. So whoever was behind it had these two obstacles to eliminate—Simpson and Larry—before the deal could proceed. Someone was hired to do the dirty work, and the murder of Simpson Crane (and his wife, who just happened to be there) looked like some kind of radical union hit, while the murder of Larry Witt (and his son, who also just happened to be there) got laid off on his wife. It was at least a tantalizing parallel.
Sunday morning, frying eggs and bacon in his cast iron pan. Frannie in her bathrobe reading the paper in the sunny kitchen. Rebecca and Vincent enjoying the special treat of sitting next to each other, Rebecca the big girl helping her mommy, feeding the baby, getting fully twenty percent of the squashed banana into Vincent’s mouth.
Hardy taking it all in out of the corner of his eye, one of the life moments that he’d committed himself to recognizing, savoring. From the front of the house came the strains of the Grand Canyon Suite—more Freeman influence. He walked a couple of steps across the kitchen and planted a kiss on Frannie’s forehead.
“Um,” she said, kissing the air distractedly near his face.
And the telephone rang. It always did.
“Don’t get it,” Hardy said. He was standing right next to it and was fighting the temptation pretty well.
But Frannie was already up. “I know it’s Susan. She said she’d call me. She might be pregnant.” She picked it up, listened, then frowned. “Just a minute, he’s right here.”
He gave her a look, but what could he do?
It was Floyd Restoffer. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said, getting right to it. “The bad news is I’m off the case.”
“You’re off the case?” Hardy had gone around the corner to the workroom off the kitchen. “What happened?”
“My guess would be politics. After I got your stuff on Friday I talked to the younger Crane, Simpson’s kid, Todd. Asked him if he didn’t mind, which he didn’t, if I interviewed some of his partners, although he had no idea what I wanted from him. Anyway, I didn’t tell him much—just following up a new lead on his parents’ deaths. I asked if his dad did any work with Yerba Buena.”
“And?”
“No. It was this guy Bachman and a couple of associates.”
“Okay.”
“So Bachman and I have a chat. He seems like a nice guy, cooperative.” Hardy remembered that had been his take on Bachman, too. “I ask him if he knows Witt. He says he’s heard the name. Then he remembers—you’d called him, Bachman, I mean. He says he forgot to call you back, the message got lost. He writes himself a note this time—I’d expect a call from him if I were you. So we talk for a while about the deal, if Simpson had been involved somehow. Bachman can’t think how, and I don’t have any more questions, so that’s that. I get the impression he doesn’t know Witt from Whinola.”
“Did you mention the seventeen million?”
“Yeah, he said he thought that figure might be pretty exaggerated but he’d look into it. There might have been some slush, as he called it, given as bonuses and so on, and he was pretty sure the members of the Board had a buyback option, but none of this was a secret.”
“So why are you off the case? Somebody took you off?”
“Somebody asked, that’s all. Yesterday, called me at home.”
“Who?”
“My deputy chief. But there wasn’t any pressure, more like a suggestion—what am I doing messing with a ten-month-old murder when I’m counting four months to pension city? Clear my plate and get out, that’s what I ought to do.”
Hardy was staring out at the city’s famous skyline across the rooftops in the Avenues. The thought occurred to him: “How did he know you were on it to begin with? Did you tell him?”
“I asked him the same thing. Evidently it came down from the chief himself, who in turn got an earful from Mr. Kelso.”
“Who’s Mr. Kelso?”
“Oh, that’s right. You’re not a local. Frank Kelso is one of our illustrious supervisors. Called the chief and wanted to know why we were hassling—that was the word—why we were hassling the pillars of our legal community, and grief-stricken ones at that. I took it he meant the son, Todd.”
A Los Angeles supervisor! My, Hardy thought, but this is heating up. Whatever else he might be doing, he had touched a nerve here. It pumped him up. “So where do we go from here?”
“Me? I’m afraid I don’t go anywhere. I’m in don’t-rock-the-boat mode, Hardy. The brass wants me to leave it, I leave it.”
“They just tell you to forget about a murder?”
“Every few years, yeah.” After a beat, he said seriously, “I asked the same question. You know what the answer was? Did I have anything solid to go on or was I just fishing? So I told him a little about your client, what you’d told me—just the high spots but enough—and he said it sounded like I was fishing. I told him sometimes it pays to fish and he said it wasn’t one of those times.” Restoffer sighed. “It’s all a numbers game here, and I do have five live ones they want cleared by the time I’m gone.”
Hardy took a moment, then tried again. “You’re okay going out with unfinished business like this?” It was a lame attempt at a guilt trip, but Hardy didn’t want to let it go.
Restoffer laughed. “You know how many open cases I’m leaving? You don’t want to know, but one more isn’t going to make any difference, I can tell you that. There’s just no percentage in it for me. You might have some luck with a private eye. I could recommend a couple of guys down here.”
“Floyd, I need a pro. Someone inside.” Maybe sugar would work. Restoffer had access and a history no private detective could approach.
“Can’t do it, Hardy. Sorry.”
“Okay, Floyd. Thanks for your help anyway.”
He was about to hang up, waiting for Restoffer to say good-bye. Instead, the inspector said, “Aren’t you going to ask me about the good news?”
“Okay.” Hardy played along, although even the bad news was good in a sense—the involvement of supervisors and police chiefs was corroboration that it wasn’t all a chimera. Something was getting covered up. “What’s the good news?”
“You found one.”
Hardy could almost see him nod. “Margaret Morency. San Marino old money and lots of it.”
“She called Kelso?”
“I can’t prove it, but it’s a safe bet.”
“Can you go to your deputy chief and tell him about it? Seems like this takes it out of the fishing department.”
“Not enough, Hardy.” Restoffer was off the case and he was clear about that—he wasn’t going to jeopardize his retirement with his last months on the job. Hardy was grateful, taking what he could get—at least the man was helping. “This only looks like something if you’re already disposed to see it,” Restoffer was saying. “I’ve got nothing hard at all, nothing to connect the dots.”
“Do you know anything about this Morency woman?”
“Nothing. She’s probably on ten boards—that’s what these people do, isn’t it? Sit on boards, keep the money in the family, take a small stipend—say, my salary—for their efforts. And the rich stay rich. Hey, listen to me. I’m four months from life by a lake in Montana in a cabin that’s paid for. Get out of this zoo for good, so what am I bitching about?”
“Sounds great.”
“It will be, believe me. The first year I don’t think I’ll do anything but paint. I haven’t painted since I was a kid. I used to love it, then I ran out of time to do it.”
“I used to make things out of wood,” Hardy said. “No nails.”
The 13th Juror Page 41