Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  “I know.”

  But the newspaper kept drawing them both back. Frannie reached down and turned it back to the front page.

  “What’s going to happen to him now, Diz?”

  “I don’t know. Since May Shinn didn’t kill Nash, the whole thing might just blow over. Couple of days of bad press. You were right, by the way. Remember his paperweight?”

  “She gave it to him.”

  Hardy nodded. “Reminded him of his broken heart, so he gave it to me. She dumped him for Owen Nash.”

  “So they weren’t together anymore, Andy Fowler and Shinn?”

  “No, I mean that was kind of the point.”

  “So then why would he put up her bail? Why would he be the judge on her trial?”

  “I don’t know. If he helped her out, maybe he could get her back eventually.”

  “That never happens,” Frannie said.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “You don’t dump somebody for someone else, then go back to the first one. If you’re the one dumped, okay, you might. But if your heart goes cold on somebody . . .” She shrugged. “It just doesn’t happen.”

  “I don’t know if it was May’s heart that went cold, Frannie. The woman is a hooker. Maybe she really fell for Nash, but it was probably just a better financial deal with him. So Andy helping her out with the bail . . . it might have just been him putting out the word that he had money, too, and he’d spend it on her. Hell, half a million, that’s serious good-faith money.”

  “And he’d be satisfied with that?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. Anyway, that’s what he had before.”

  She was rubbing his back, rocking back and forth against him. “Nope,” she said. “He loved her, and however she felt about him, he had to believe she loved him too. The paperweight, remember? That’s a special gift. That’s a message.”

  “So?”

  “So what was it? After she left him I don’t believe he really thought he was buying her back. By then he had to realize she didn’t love him, even if he’d made himself believe it before. So there must have been another reason.”

  Hardy shook his head and leaned back into Frannie’s body. “Well, until you get it figured out, at least you’ll know why this thing has kept me up nights.” He stood and shifted the Beck over his shoulder. “But it’s not going to anymore.”

  “I just feel sorry for Andy. I mean, if the Shinn woman really is innocent, then he just gave up everything for nothing.”

  “That’s right,” Hardy said. “People do that all the time.”

  He stopped by Glitsky’s before going to his own office, but the sergeant wasn’t in. He wrote him a short note about the discrepancy in Ken Farris’s recollection of when Nash had last been seen, and figured that was the end of his active involvement with Owen Nash.

  Then, taped to the center of his desk, he read the summons from Drysdale to see him as soon as he got in and to bring all of his binders on the Nash matter.

  It was getting to be a habit, the walk down to Locke’s office, although this time with the bulging, special “lawyer’s briefcase.” Hardy sat in the anteroom, listening to muffled sounds through the closed door. The secretary seemed unusually preoccupied, typing away, filing. The intercom buzzed and she punched it and said yes, he was out here.

  Another few minutes and Hardy sat back, relaxed, crossed his legs and picked up the sports page from the low end table next to his chair.

  In the day’s latest, Bob Lurie was trying to move the Giants to either Sacramento, San Jose, or Portland, although he mentioned Honolulu—the great baseball tradition in Hawaii. Talk about a homelessness problem, he thought. This is the team nobody wants to take home. He turned to the standings. Halfway through the year— nine games out, third place. Not terrible, not great. How could they have traded Kevin Mitchell?

  The door opened and Elizabeth Pullios came out. She didn’t appear to be in any particular hurry, yet she walked by Hardy, ignoring his greeting as if she’d never seen him before. “Have a nice day,” he said to her back.

  Drysdale was at the door, gesturing with his forefinger.

  “Why do I get the feeling this isn’t a hundred-percent social?” Hardy asked.

  Locke got down to it immediately. “Did you tell this reporter Elliot that our office subpoenaed Andy Fowler’s financial records?”

  “No. Somebody tell you I did?”

  “We’ve had a discussion about leaks and so on before, right?”

  “Yes, sir. Somebody tell you I was the leak? Did we subpoena his records?”

  “I want you to tell me everything you know about Andy Fowler.”

  “Was it Pullios? If it was, she’s a liar.”

  Drysdale, who’d been standing halfway behind Hardy, hands in his pockets, stepped forward. “We’ve got a problem, Diz. A real problem. You’ve got a problem.”

  “Fowler.” Locke didn’t want to leave the issue.

  “How is Fowler my problem?”

  “You were seen entering the witness waiting room the other day with Jeff Elliot.”

  “Can I ask who saw me? Or rather, who thought it was important to tell you?”

  “It’s irrelevant,” Locke said. “What’s relevant is that you knew something critical to a murder case and withheld it from us.”

  Hardy found himself getting pretty hot. “Like hell it’s irrelevant! You accuse me of something and you don’t let me face my accuser. I thought perhaps in an office practicing law we’d give a nod to the niceties of getting to the truth.”

  “We already know the truth. Fowler was your father-in-law, wasn’t he?”

  “That came from Pullios. Deny it.”

  “I don’t have to deny anything. Pullios, unlike you, is a damn good lawyer.”

  “Oh, that’s right. She really did a great job with May Shinn, locked her up tight.”

  Drysdale tried to slow it down. “Guys . . .”

  “If Elizabeth knew that Andy Fowler had gotten the bail for May Shinn, she would have come to me with it, not the newspaper.”

  “Well, isn’t she the nice little Gestapet.”

  Drysdale butted in. “When did you know about Fowler, Diz?”

  Hardy stopped and took a breath. “You know, Art, it’s funny, but I don’t believe we’ve established that I did know about Fowler yet. We have some unnamed source finking me into a room with Jeff Elliot. Although I’m beginning to suspect that in Mr. Locke’s little fiefdom here, if you’re accused, you’re guilty.”

  The district attorney was on his feet. “Don’t get any smarter with me, Hardy.”

  “It’s too late for that.” He paused, then added, “Chris. From what I’ve seen, I’m already smarter than you.”

  “What you are, is out of a job.”

  “And what you are, Chris . . .” Hardy slowed down, pulling out of it. He looked him in the eye. “What you are, Chris, is a total flaming asshole.”

  He thought about it at Lou’s over his third black-and-tan. They’d planned to fire him all along. They didn’t want any new information out of him, anything incriminating. That had been a front.

  Figure it out—before they’d asked him question one they’d told him to bring all the Nash files down to the office. They were planning on taking them from him. Which they’d done.

  Ha, guys. Guess what?

  The funny thing was he had withheld information from them. But he really hadn’t leaked the news about Fowler and the bail. He’d only found that out this morning when he’d read the newspaper. Jeff Elliot had discovered it and used the information Hardy had given him about subpoena policy to make it appear it had been a D.A. leak. He was a clever guy, Jeff Elliot, and he’d cost Hardy his job, though at the moment Hardy was thinking that fell more into the category of a favor.

  So maybe Locke and Drysdale had had grounds to fire him after all—he had known about Andy Fowler’s relationship with May Shinn and hadn’t come forward with it immediately. That wasn’t being a team player.
But, he told himself, even if they had reasons they didn’t have the right reasons.

  It still wasn’t noon. He thought he’d call Frannie, see if she was home, take her and the Beck out for a nice lunch.

  37

  Of the three men A.D.A. Elizabeth Pullios slept with on a fairly regular basis, two were married and two worked in the district attorney’s office.

  There was District Attorney Chris Locke, who called her Pullios. She had him for the rush and the control— intimacy with your superior might be a double-edged sword, but so far it had cut only one way. Actually, in this case, Locke was the one who had the most to lose if it came out. She knew not only the law on workplace harassment but the implications, if played right, and she knew how to play them. If a strong man who happened to be your boss had a relationship with you, it was his problem. You were the employee, he was the boss. And he could— and often did—fire you if you weren’t cooperative. The true vulnerability of many women in the workplace was something that played into the hands of someone like Pullios. Further, the odds of a backlash were long in her favor. For example, the way she had pushed and manipulated to get May Shinn indicted after lifting the file from another prosecutor . . . most any other assistant D.A. would have been stripped and flayed by Locke. Instead, since Locke knew Pullios was a damn good prosecutor, as well as “one helluva squeeze,” diverting his gaze and rage to a junior scapegoat like Hardy had been so easy it was almost unfair. Except that nothing was unfair. If you won, fairness was a concept that didn’t apply.

  Her second lover was Brian Powell, to whom she was Elizabeth. Brian had been her “boyfriend” for three years. Forty-five, handsome, politically correct, he was a divorced, childless stockbroker who made six figures and did not hassle her. He understood when she was busy. She considered getting engaged to him (he hadn’t asked yet but she could lead him to it if she wanted) when it was time to run for D.A. and a mate would be helpful; until then he was someone pleasant to be with and be seen with.

  The other man in the office—and in some ways the only one personally dangerous to her, called her Molly. That was Peter Struler, married and the father of three. He gave her the impression that he could take her or leave her, though he’d been taking her with some regularity for the past four or five months. With a law degree from Duke and three years in the FBI, Struler was both brain-smart and street-smart. He was also irreverent and funny. As an investigator for the district attorney’s office he worked under a separate jurisdiction from both the SFPD and the sheriff’s department. It was the private police arm of the district attorney’s office and was used to protect attorneys going out to see witnesses in bad areas, to deliver subpoenas and, occasionally, to carry on its own investigations.

  The danger of Peter Struler was that Elizabeth Pullios liked him a lot. She had met him when he had escorted her, in his official capacity, on an interview with some lowlifes she needed to put away even lower life-forms. After she had been her very efficient self, talking to witnesses hiding behind their drawn curtains, she had come out into the sunlight to see Struler playing basketball, shirt off, with eight black high-school dudes on a glass-strewn court—a little boy having the time of his life. She had fallen for him, gotten uncharacteristically shy and made excuses for them to get together officially until he called her on it and she told him, driving out to another site, that she thought maybe she was in love with him. He didn’t have to worry about it, though, she added quickly. She would get over it. And she didn’t want to hurt his marriage.

  “My marriage is solid,” he had said, pulling the car over. “Nothing is going to threaten my marriage. But I think we ought to get something straight between us.”

  And they did, right there in the car.

  Now they sat, again in his city car, eating Chinese take-out at a parking lot at the Presidio. There were whitecaps on the Bay and you could see halfway to Alaska.

  Struler was quoting from the front of his chopsticks wrapper. “ ‘Welcome to Chinese Restaurant. Please try your Nice Chinese Food with Chopsticks, the traditional and typical of Chinese glorious history and culture.’ ”

  She nodded. “It’s a wonderful view, too.”

  “Now look at this,” Struler said. “If this is true, why did they have to invent cranes.”

  “Cranes?”

  “You know, derricks, cranes.”

  “If what’s true?”

  Struler read: “ ‘Learn how to use your chopsticks Tuck under thumb and hold firmly Add second chopstick hold it as you hold a pencil Hold first chopstick in original position move the second one up and down Now you can pick up anything!’ ”

  He tried to lift the briefcase. “It’s just not true. How can they get by with that. I can’t even lift this thing. I bet there’s no way you could even pick up a dog.”

  “A dog?”

  He pointed at the paper. “It says ‘anything.’ ‘Now you can pick up anything!’ You’re missing a bet here, Molly. You’re the lawyer. I smell a major lawsuit. Class action, false advertising, big bucks.”

  She let him rave. It was one of the things she liked best about him, his capacity to run with essentially nothing. “Plus their punctuation is really weak. They don’t use periods. Did you ever notice that?”

  She reached over and grabbed the briefcase herself, placing it on her lap, snapping open the clasps.

  “Why do I sense you don’t share my fascination with the topic? The future is the Orient, mark my words.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “Business before pleasure.”

  He put his hand between her legs. “Who made that up? Some lawyer, I bet.”

  “You’re a lawyer, Mr. Struler.”

  “No, I just went to law school, I never took the class on business before pleasure. Come to think of it, that’s probably why I flunked the bar.” He moved his hand a little. “Actually, I never took the bar, did I?”

  “Peter.”

  He made a face. “Molly.” But he put his hands in his own lap. “Okay, what?”

  “This is a two-week-old murder . . .”

  “My favorite.”

  “My point is, the police have already embarrassed themselves over it—the Owen Nash thing. Abe Glitsky has been handling the case and he made the original bust.”

  “Lucky guy.”

  “Right. He’s not going to do it again. There’s very little evidence. Plus the guy who got fired today—Hardy— they’re at least pretty good friends. Anyway, the police cooperation is going to slow down for a while.”

  “And you turn to me. I am touched.”

  “I’d just like you to take a fresh look at it, that’s all. This is an important case and I don’t want it to go away. I made a big pitch for this one to Locke. Whoever killed this guy, they’ve made me look pretty bad.”

  Struler thought a moment, then took some papers out of the briefcase and glanced at them. “Is this all of it?”

  She nodded. “That’s all the paper. There’s some other evidence logged, the murder weapon, like that, but it’s been pretty well gone over.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Start over. We need a new theory and it’s in here somewhere. Somebody killed Owen Nash.”

  “If you tell me you don’t have any idea who, that would be a fib, wouldn’t it, and then I’d have to spank you.”

  She leaned toward him and licked his ear. “I don’t have any ideas.”

  In spite of Elizabeth Pullios’s belief that the police were going to let it lie, Glitsky jumped on Hardy’s discrepancy. There was nothing better than a suspect who told a lie. It opened up all the doors and windows, let some new air in. Of course, he didn’t know for a fact that Farris had lied—he could have simply made a mistake, remembered incorrectly. But he was on the record—Glitsky had been in on the conversation, he remembered it—as having said white was white one time and then white was black the next. It deserved reflection.

  Glitsky’s own reports revealed that Farris had been at
Taos during the weekend of the murder. What was at Taos? Hadn’t he said it was a place with no phones, no electricity? Had anyone else seen him there? Were there records of his plane flight? A hotel? Rental car?

  He took some notes, placed a call to the Albuquerque police, then reached Farris at his office at Owen Industries in South San Francisco.

  “Sergeant, what can I do for you?” A busy man, sounding like it.

  “You know we’ve got an open case again, sir. It looks like May Shinn wasn’t on the Eloise. And if that’s true she didn’t kill Mr. Nash.”

  “Of course, I read that. I’m not sure I think it’s true.”

  “Well, yes, sir, but the D.A. seems to think it is. And while that’s the case, we have to go on with the investigation.” There was one of those infernal beeps again. Glitsky had forgotten about them.

  “Just a minute, would you?”

  He sat on hold for twenty seconds, keeping time with a pencil on his blotter.

  “Sergeant? Sorry about that. It’s still crazy here. I know, I tried to call the D.A. this morning but they told me some nonsense that your man Hardy wasn’t working there anymore and nobody’s gotten back to me.”

  “They said Hardy didn’t work there anymore?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  Glitsky shook his head. “Well, that’s ridiculous. I’ll give him your message, but I’m calling to clear up a little inconsistency. We’re kind of starting over here, so I apologize.”

  “It’s all right, but what’s this story on this judge knowing May? That’s really a shock.”

  “We’re looking into that, too. But what I’m wondering is when you last saw Mr. Nash alive.” He did not explain about the apparent conflict in Farris’s testimony.