Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  She nodded, without any time for him, or simply lost inside herself.

  “Well, I’m keeping you.” He took a step and she touched the sleeve of his jacket, leaving her hand there, her eyes following an instant later.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s all this keeping up appearances.”

  Her hand was like a brand on his lower arm—he felt it through the sleeve of his coat, a grip like steel. He caught her eyes, still distant; her face a mask. He wondered if she might be in some kind of shock.

  “Are you all right?”

  She took a deep breath, then seemed to realize she had his arm. A flush began at the top of her leotard. She let go of Hardy and brought her hand to her neck, embarrassed. “It’s one of the main traumas, death of a parent,” she said. “I guess I’m not prepared for it.”

  “I don’t think we get prepared for it,” Hardy said. “That’s the point.”

  “I do things . . . I don’t know why.” Letting go of her neck, she brought the palm of her hand down across her breasts. The flush was still on her chest. “Like I’m just going through motions, you know? Doing what has to be done, but all this other stuff is going on inside me.”

  “Would you like to take a break? Come up to the office? Go get a drink somewhere?”

  “I don’t drink, but it would be nice if . . .”

  “We can go to my office then.”

  “No, you go ahead. I’ll just . . . well, we could go to a bar, thanks. I could use the company.”

  Lou the Greek’s would not have been an inspired choice under these conditions.

  They were sitting on high stools around a small raised table at the front window of Sophie’s, which after eight turned into a dinner club for the young and hip. But two blocks north of the Hall, if you wanted a quiet short one after work it wasn’t a bad spot before the scene came alive.

  Celine wore expensive Italian sandals and no socks. She crossed her legs on the high stool, showing off the pedicure, the toenails a light pink, the skin between her ankle and her jeans honey-toned—warm and smooth. She watched Hardy take the first sip of his Irish whiskey.

  On the way over, in the warm dusk, she had again taken his arm. They hadn’t said ten words. Now she said, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For taking this time, that’s all.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He lifted his drink, clicked it against her glass of club soda and brought it to his lips. He found it hard to believe that two days before he’d been around this woman and had no reaction. He felt pretty sure it wasn’t anything she was doing purposely, but he was acutely conscious of everywhere her skin showed—at her feet, above the leotard on her chest, her arms and neck. But why not? It had been a broiling day. He kind of wished he could be sitting there wearing a tank top, instead of his shirt and tie. He’d folded his coat over another stool at the table. “I’ve got time,” he said at last.

  “That’s all I’ve got now, it seems.”

  “It’s rough, isn’t it?”

  Now her eyes met his. “What I was saying before— that’s the hardest part. The stuff going on inside.”

  “I know,” Hardy said. He couldn’t exactly say why, but he found himself telling her how after his son Michael had died by falling out of his crib, Hardy had made the decision that he would be strong and deal with it, the way adults dealt with things, right?

  “It didn’t work?”

  “Oh, I made it maybe two months. You know, go to work, come home, eat, drink, wake up, do it again.” Hardy paused, remembering. “You’re not married, are you?”

  “No. I was once.”

  “I don’t know if it’s better or not, having someone there. It broke me and my wife up.”

  Celine didn’t say anything for a long time. The music in Sophie’s changed, or at least Hardy became aware of it—some automatic stuff that he hated. The sun was almost down, hitting the tops of the taller buildings north of Market and a few up on Nob Hill.

  “I almost wish there was somebody to break up with,” she said at last. “Take it out on somebody else. But Daddy was my only family, so now what?” She tipped her glass and found it empty. “Do you think I could have a drink now? Something with gin in it?”

  At the bar, Hardy ordered himself a second Bushmills and Celine a Bombay on the rocks. The bartender poured a three and a half count, a solid shot, close to a double. Hardy tipped him two bucks and asked him if he could lose the noise on the speakers.

  Celine sipped at the gin and made a face. “I haven’t had a drink in a couple of years,” she said. “Daddy didn’t like me to drink too much.”

  “He didn’t too much like you to drink or he didn’t like you to drink too much?”

  She smiled, small and tentative, but there it was. “Both, I think.” Her eyes settled on him again. “Sometimes I’d get a little out of control. You couldn’t get a little out of control around Daddy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if the daughter of Owen Nash is not in control, that means he’s not in control of me.” She took another sip of the gin, and this time it went down smoothly. “And if Owen Nash is in the picture, he’s in control.”

  “He was that way?”

  “God, what am I saying? I loved my father. I just miss him. I’m so mad at him.”

  “It’s okay,” Hardy said. “It happens.”

  “He was just such a . . . I mean, I was his only family, too, so it made sense he wanted me to be a good reflection of him.”

  “He saw you as his reflection?”

  She shook her head, putting more movement in it. “No, not exactly, you know what I mean.” She put her hand over his on the small table. “He wanted what was best for me . . . always.”

  “And that got to be a burden?”

  “Sometimes,” she admitted. She took a drink. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t get so worked up.”

  Hardy found himself covering her hand now. “Celine, look. This is one time you should be allowed to get worked up. You can let it go once in a while or it’ll come out all at once, and you don’t want that.”

  “But it wasn’t so much of a burden. Look at all the good it’s done me. I’m serious. Stuff I never would have done without Daddy.”

  “I believe you.”

  She shook her head. “He was just always so hard. Even when he was good, he was hard. He pushed people—I’m surprised Ken Farris didn’t tell you. I mean, look at us, we’re perfect examples. But it was worth it for what you got out of it.”

  “What was that?”

  She took her hand away and Hardy thought he’d offended her. “The main thing was being close to him. You got to be close to Daddy, which was the most alive you could be.”

  Hardy swirled his drink in the bottom of his glass. Outside, it was full dusk. A couple more people had come into Sophie’s. “You know what I think?” he said. “I think you’re allowed to have some mixed feelings right now. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  Celine put her hand back over Hardy’s. “I’m sorry, I think I feel this gin already.”

  “You want some cheap advice? Go get a bottle of it, find somebody you can talk to and drink half of it. There’s nothing more natural than being mad at somebody close when they die.”

  “I can’t talk to anybody,” she said. “Not about Daddy.”

  “You’ve just been talking about him to me for a half hour.”

  She tightened her hand over his one last time, then released it. “You’re the D.A. This isn’t personal for you. It’s not the same thing.”

  “It’s personal enough for me. This is my job, my case.”

  “But that’s what it is, a case.”

  “It’s also that, Celine. Somebody killed your father.”

  “And maybe it was me, right?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “You’re investigating the murder, and now you get me to tell you I’m mad at him—”

  “Celine . . .”

  �
�Well, I was down in Santa Cruz the whole weekend. I was staying in a house with three of my friends. I couldn’t have been up here . . .”

  Hardy stood up and moved close in to her, pulling her head tight against him. The gin was hitting her, the panic on the rise as it loosened her up. “Stop it,” he whispered. “Stop.”

  He felt her breathing slow down. A bare arm came up to his shoulder and held him, pulled him down to her. A second passed. Five. Her grip relaxed and he lifted himself away from her. Her blue-gray eyes had teared up. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a mess.”

  “You’re okay,” he said. “Come on, let’s get out of here.” She waited meekly by the door while he grabbed his coat, then took her arm. They walked out into the warm early night.

  On the way back to the Hall, she told him about Owen’s Saturday appointment on the Eloise with May Shinn.

  “I know,” Hardy said. “We’re looking into that.” He considered telling her about everything they’d found on board, but there was still police work to be done there, and all of that could wait. What Celine needed was some understanding and a little time to get used to her father having been murdered. Hardy didn’t think an update on the investigation would do a thing for her peace of mind.

  They got to her car—a silver BMW 350i—and she hugged Hardy briefly, apologizing again for her “scene.” She told him he was a good man, then she was in her car, leaving him with the faint scent of gin, a memory of her body against his and the feeling that, without ever meaning to, he’d done something terribly wrong.

  They were having pizza in the reporters’ room on the third floor of the Hall of Justice, the same floor that contained the offices of the district attorney.

  The room, befitting the esteem with which the police held the medium of print journalism, wasn’t much. There was a green blackboard that kept up a running total of murders in San Francisco thus far that year (sixty-eight). There was a bulletin board tacked three deep with Christmas cards the press guys had received from their friends in the building, as well as the jails some of them had gone to reside in. The surface area of all three desks combined did not equal the expanse of oak on Ken Farris’s desk in South San Francisco. There was also an old-fashioned school desk. Jeff Elliot sat in that one.

  It wasn’t bad pizza. Anchovies, pepperoni, sausage and mushrooms. Cass Weinberg, an attractive gay woman of about thirty, had ordered it. She was with the Bay Guardian and didn’t have much going on until later that Friday night, so she thought she’d bring in an extra large and schmooze with whoever might be hanging. Holding down the second “big” desk was Oscar Franco from the Spanish-language La Hora. Then there was Jim Blanchard from the Oakland Tribune, who’d been worried for the past eighteen months about his job ending when the paper went bankrupt.

  “My theory,” he was saying, “is that Elliot here did the guy himself. Otherwise how’s he gonna get a story this good.”

  Cass picked it up. “You used to be a sailor, didn’t you? Didn’t you tell me that? In college?”

  “He did,” Blanchard said. “At college, in Lake Superior.”

  This was true. Before the multiple sclerosis had kicked in, Elliot had loved to sail, spent his summers under the canvas. He’d covered the America’s Cup for his high-school newspaper as a special project. “Not in Lake Superior, on Lake Superior, anchovy breath,” he said.

  “In, on, doesn’t matter. He finds out where Nash keeps his boat, scams his way aboard and kills the guy.”

  “Then I jump overboard and hand-feed his hand to the shark.”

  Blanchard popped pizza. “Exactly. That’s the part that took guts.”

  Cass was judicious. “It could have happened. People nowadays do anything to get famous.”

  Jeff was in heaven. He would take all the razzing they were going to give him. He was one of them now.

  Oscar Franco rolled his bassett eyes around the room. “How long you guys been in the business an’ nobody even noticed the really big story today? Just me.”

  Cass looked at Blanchard. “That’s the longest sentence he’s ever said, isn’t it?”

  “You laugh,” Franco said. “The big story is in Department Twenty-seven on the Charles Hendrix sting. Fowler threw out the case.”

  “Oh boy.” Blanchard sat straight up.

  “That man is a mensch,” Cass said.

  “What?” Jeff Elliot didn’t like to miss a big story, no matter whose it was. “Judge Fowler? What did he do?”

  Oscar explained it to him. Cass and Blanchard sat listening for a moment, then both of them asked him to slow up and start again while they took a few notes. Owen Nash was a good story, but this thing with Fowler might be the opening sally in a protracted war.

  They were still into it when Jeff saw the cop—Glitsky, that was it—who’d been at the coroner’s the night before, going toward the elevator. He left his pizza on the small desk, grabbed his crutches and said he had to run, hoping he’d catch the guy before the elevator got to the third floor.

  Glitsky wasn’t happy in the first place about having to stay around late on a Friday night booking somebody for murder, writing up a report on his conversation with her, the reasons for his arrest when there wasn’t a hint of an indictment. But more, he’d finished all that, closing in on eight o’clock, still a chance to get out and have a nice dinner with Flo, when he went to his car downstairs and found out that, new tune-up or not, it wouldn’t start.

  “Officer.” Now there was this reporter again.

  The elevators weren’t setting any land speed records and the temperature in the hallway was over eighty degrees.

  Elliot came right up next to him. “Excuse me, Officer,” he repeated.

  Glitsky corrected him. “Sergeant,” he said. “I look like I’m wearing a uniform?”

  “Sorry. Sergeant. We met last night, briefly.” Jeff introduced himself again. “At the coroner’s. Owen Nash.”

  “That’s right.”

  Elliot pushed on. “Well, we’re on the third floor. I thought you might be seeing the D.A. about that, about something breaking?”

  The one elevator in service after business hours arrived with a small ding. Glitsky stepped in and Elliot stuck with him. “I just did an hour-and-a-half’s worth of IRs upstairs.”

  “So something’s happening?”

  Jeff thought this was a pretty scary man. “Something’s always happening,” he said. “That’s why there’s time—it keeps everything from happening at once.”

  The elevator doors closed—finally. “As to the third floor, that’s where they give out keys to city vehicles, and my goddamn Plymouth has quit on me again, and all the other cars are out for the weekend, so I’m taking a cab home.” Elliot didn’t know it, but Glitsky swore about as often as he laughed out loud, maybe twice a year.

  “Where do you live?” Jeff didn’t miss a beat, and though he’d been planning on stopping back in at his office, he said, “I’m heading home now, I could drop you off.”

  Glitsky said he lived out on Lake, and Jeff only fibbed slightly, saying it was right on his way. The sergeant thawed a little. “That’d be nice. Where are you parked?”

  They had reached the ground floor and the door opened, hitting them with a welcome shot of cooler air. “First slot out the back.”

  “You’re lucky,” Abe said.

  Jeff grinned his winning grin. “No,” he said. “Handicapped.”

  Except for the green gauzy glow of the fish tank, the lights were out. The bedroom window, facing east to the city’s skyline, was wide open, but no air moved.

  Hardy’s wife was curled against him spoon fashion, and he was inside her, holding her to him at the waist. They were both sweating, at it now a long time, Hardy wanting to prove something.

  “Diz.”

  He shushed her, trying not to hear her and break his own spell. He’d started with his eyes closed, she coming to him, feeling a distance there after the quiet dinner, the brooding in the living room.
/>   “Diz.”

  He didn’t want to hear her and buried his mouth into the back of her neck, under her hair. When he opened his eyes, he could make out the shape of her back in the dim light. Only her back. Any back. Anyone’s he wanted it to be.

  But he was closing in on it now, feeling the thrust of her—wanting to help him even if she was ready to quit, reaching down for him, arching herself backward. He pulled at her waist, up against him now, feeling the air now between them, closing the distance, hard up in her wetness. Harder then, pounding, losing her as he felt himself starting, finding it again and driving in again and again and again.

  It was Celine’s back. An angry Celine. And Hardy for some reason furious too, feeling her grip, the tight grip she had on him. And now he heard her, crying out, after she thought it was over, liking it rough, and the sound of her cry starting something at the base of his backbone, moving up.

  He slapped her against him, as hard as he could, knowing he wasn’t hurting her, crying out himself, his hands now up against Celine’s breasts that were somehow wet, crushing them to her, crushing himself against Frannie’s back, she pumping him, the sweet agony . . .

  Finished now, he lay on his back, breathing hard. He felt the sweat cooling, the lightest warm breeze through the window. Frannie was on her side, leaning on her elbow, all up against him. She kissed his cheek. “I love you,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “Sorry.”

  She kissed him again. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. I liked that.”

  He pulled her to him and kissed her. She put her head down against his shoulder and started breathing regularly. In one minute she was asleep. Hardy lay with his eyes open, listening to the gurgling of the fish tank for almost an hour.

  18

  He woke up refreshed, his devils exorcised by spent lust and deep sleep. In the light of day, he thought it hadn’t done him any harm to fantasize—it was natural once in a while. No need to whip himself over it.

  Now he wasn’t fantasizing. Frannie was in his here and now. He was cooking breakfast—french toast and sausages—in his black cast-iron pan, the only artifact he’d taken from his time with Jane. In the decade he’d lived alone, that pan had been one of the inviolate certainties in his world. He cleaned the pan with salt and paper towels, no water, no soap. After every use, he put a drop or two of oil in it and rubbed it in. No food stuck to that pan. It was a joy.