Okay, it wasn’t certain that it hadn’t been May. Remember that. Keeping up about the trial on her own, May could have realized the implications of José’s testimony—she’d been seen in her coat—and then gotten rid of it, trying to scam with Struler to cover where it had gone.
He didn’t think so.
What he thought, was at least beginning to consider, to realize it had been perking for a while, was that someone else—the person who had really killed Owen Nash—had returned to the Eloise on Thursday morning. Maybe she—it had to be a she now, even in May’s coat José wasn’t going to mistake Andy Fowler for May Shinn—maybe she had left something incriminating on the boat, and seeing the Eloise in the morning paper, realized she’d have to work fast. Helped by José’s tardiness, she had gone aboard, taken out whatever it was, stolen May’s coat so that in case she was seen (which she was), identification would be confusing.
But wait . . . she couldn’t have gotten aboard. Tom had locked up the boat in Hardy’s presence the night before, and José had rechecked it on his shift the next day.
Unless, of course the person had a key to the Eloise.
Or how about if she wasn’t going to remove something from the boat but was going to put something back in? For the twentieth time, Hardy tried to picture that drawer in the rolltop desk—the drawer where Abe had discovered the murder weapon, the same drawer he’d looked in on Wednesday night and seen nothing.
Maybe, as they were so fond of saying about baseball, it was a game of inches.
“This is ridiculous.”
Abe hadn’t been thrilled to get his call before nine on a Saturday morning, but Hardy sweetly reminded him of his own call at six the day before. Besides, Glitsky was a cop first, and he was dressed and going out for another interview anyway. He might grumble, but Hardy knew that the murder of Owen Nash would get Abe’s attention until it was solved. As it was, Abe made it down to the Marina in less than a half hour and he, Hardy and José walked together in the steady rain out to where the Eloise still rested at her slip.
“I know it is.” Hardy agreed, but the implications of his what-ifs were staggering. He wouldn’t have to consider them—in fact he couldn’t—if he didn’t get this fact nailed down.
The police tape had been removed, and José unlocked the door and stepped aside so Glitsky could lead the way down.
The generators were off. It was dark inside. The rain thrummed above as the three of them stood a minute, letting their eyes adjust.
“Looks about the same,” Hardy said.
Glitsky wasn’t here to take inventory. “All right, what?”
Hardy went forward through the galley, the short hall, the master suite. The police might have removed May’s belongings but the room seemed eerily the same—the exercycle, desks, as though someone still lived aboard. Glitsky pulled back one of the curtains to let in a little more light, and Hardy walked to the rolltop desk. He opened the drawer.
“Okay, humor me, would you? Take your time, close your eyes and visualize it. Show me exactly where you found the gun.”
Glitsky came around the bed and looked in at the open drawer. He took a small knife out of his pocket— “This is about the same length, right?”—and placed it on top of the maps that were still in the drawer, back maybe three inches from the front.
Hardy nodded. “Did you jerk the drawer open?” Which would have caused the gun to slip forward or backward on the maps.
Glitsky was patient. “No. I was my usual wonderful methodical self. You want to tell me what this is about?”
Hardy looked down again at the knife in the drawer, doing his own visualizing, making sure. He picked up the knife and gave it back to Glitsky. “The gun wasn’t there Wednesday night, Abe. I looked in this drawer.”
A new onslaught of rain raked the boat. In the room, it sounded like they were inside a tin drum. Hardy stood there in his hat and peacoat; Glitsky and José wore slickers. All the men had their hands in their pockets. The boat bumped the slip.
Glitsky thought on it. “So May came and brought the gun back Thursday morning.”
“Making her the stupidest person in America.”
“Maybe not. Maybe she saw her name in the paper and didn’t want it in her house.”
“The gun hadn’t been in her house. It was here, remember. Besides, she didn’t have a key.”
“You know, that’s probably worth double-checking at her apartment.” Abe wrote himself a note. “Let me get this straight. You’re saying the shooter took the gun off this boat on Saturday. So who’s going to bring the gun back?”
“Someone who wants to, and almost did, frame May.”
Glitsky looked around another minute. “You’d swear on this, about the gun?”
Hardy nodded. “It wasn’t here, Abe. Somebody came by here Thursday morning, unlocked the boat and put it in this drawer. Then they took May’s fancy coat from the closet along with a babushka or something like that, locked up and waltzed away.”
“Why?”
“Because they hated May.” Hardy felt like he was on a roll. “Owen dumped somebody for May. So this person, the perp, killed Owen out of jealousy, then when they saw May linked to the Eloise, figured this was a good chance to get her too.”
Glitsky sucked at his teeth. “What time was this, when this person came back?”
Hardy glanced at José, making a little face. “It must have been pretty early.”
“Then it doesn’t really let off your man Fowler, does it?”
“Well, I was thinking it couldn’t very well have been a man at all. José here recognized the coat—”
The guard piped in, “It was a woman, sir. There’s no doubt of that.”
“It was a woman wearing the coat, okay. It could have been a man who let himself onto the boat. It could have been two separate incidents.”
“Andy didn’t have a key.”
“You can’t prove a negative.”
Hardy was getting frustrated that Glitsky didn’t see this. “Abe, the coat was aboard here.”
“How do we know that, Diz?”
“May said it was here,” he said. “Our perp took it, which was why it wasn’t in your inventory.”
Glitsky patiently answered. “I’m not saying it didn’t happen your way, Diz. I’m saying it also very well could have happened at least one other way. May could have worn the coat down here, seen Andy—hell, if he was framing her he could’ve invited her down for just that reason, so she’d be seen in her unique coat. After she realized what was happening she dumped the coat, then saw her chance to get it back by hassling us.”
“That just didn’t happen, Abe.”
“So prove it.”
“It was a woman, Abe—”
Glitsky was not convinced. “I’d make pretty sure what your client was doing that morning before I brought it up to the jury. Besides, the only woman alive related to this case is Celine Nash. Aside from having no motive, she was in Santa Cruz. I checked.”
Hardy stood his ground. “I still think it was a woman.”
Glitsky shrugged. “Well, neither of us think May did it, so who . . . ?”
Hardy’s mind was wrestling with the incomprehensible— Jane, his ex-wife, Andy Fowler’s daughter. She hadn’t told him the whole truth about her relationship with Owen Nash. It was understandable, why should she have, a one- time thing, he’d told himself. But what if . . . ? All right, what if. Get tough, face the possible, however impossible. Jane had continued seeing Nash; he had dumped her for May Shinn. . . . He had totally worked her, and she had killed him and either confided in her father or, somehow, he had found out on his own. No wonder he was acting genial, passive. Cover for his daughter . . . Would he have done everything he’d done with that motivation? Sure, he would have hated Nash. And this torch he was supposedly carrying for Shinn—didn’t it make more sense that he’d be angry at her for dropping him? There would be a sweetness in making her pay for his daughter’s crime. And pay she certainly
had.
He parked in front of Jane’s house—once it had belonged to both of them—on Jackson in Pacific Heights. He had heard on the radio coming over that more than two inches of rain had already fallen since midnight. Going up the steps, he knocked at the custom door with its molded glass inlay. He saw a man’s form appear through the door. “Perfect,” he thought, thinking he was about to meet Chuck Chuck Bo-Buck or whoever else was the man of the month.
The door opened and he was looking at his client.
“Andy, we’ve got to talk,” he said.
“You are such a bastard.” Jane was crying, her legs curled up under her on her bed.
“Jane, I’m trying to save your father’s life here. It’s not been the best time I’ve ever had either.”
Hardy felt terrible seeing his ex-wife in tears. He could be glib—or pretend to be—about the men in her life after him, but he wasn’t blind to the fact that she was looking for the right one, that what she wanted was a man steady and strong who would love her and stay true and she wasn’t finding him. He supposed, perhaps wrongly, that he’d at least come the closest to that ideal, but something—their own history?—had made the commitment impossible.
He could see her every day and not think about it, but now, confronted by it, it was very hard.
“How can you even think that, Dismas? What kind of person do you really think I am? I told you it was nothing. It was just a night.”
Andy was waiting in the living room. Hardy would get to him if he had to, but first he had to know about Jane and Owen Nash. “Just one night? And you never saw him again?”
“That’s right. It happens. What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t want you to say anything if that’s the truth.”
She hit the bed with a balled-up fist. “I told you it’s the truth. I saw Owen Nash one day, one night. One.”
“Okay, okay, Jane.”
“What are you saying? I killed him?” Reading his expression, she brought her hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God, you really think that.” She jumped up, sniffling, and went to her bureau, opening a wide black book and turning the pages. She turned to him, holding the book open for him to see. “June eighteenth to twenty-second. The I. Magnin Summer Fashions Exposition. All day every day I’m giving seminars and hosting teas. Check on it.”
Hardy looked down, hating this. “I believe you, Jane, I said I believe you.”
She pulled the bureau chair out and sat back down, crying again, silently, wiping at her eyes with a Kleenex. Hardy got up off the bed and left the room.
60
He told Andy they had to get together the next day to go over his testimony. They made an appointment for noon, and then Hardy left him to comfort his daughter.
He had written Frannie a note saying he would probably be gone all day and she had left one for him—she was at her late ex-husband’s mother’s, Rebecca’s grandmother’s, house, and would be back by six. She hoped to see him then.
He went to his office and threw darts for twenty minutes, now and then glancing at the window to watch the rain drop out of the gray.
This was the time he was supposed to be gearing up for his defense, for the legal battle between him and Pullios on the interpretation of the evidence that Andy Fowler had allegedly killed Owen Nash. But Hardy felt that somehow the essence was being lost. It reminded him of his high-school debates where he would argue both sides of something, sometimes three or four times, in the same afternoon. As though there was no correct answer.
Oh, and he knew it was the fashion, had been since he had gone to college—don’t make value judgments. Relativity was king. There was no absolute truth. But, like it or not, he had grown up to believe that there was truth, that right differed fundamentally from wrong.
And what he was supposed to do on Monday was continue the debate. He knew that. He would call Abe Glitsky and Art Drysdale, and possibly José, as witnesses, and wind up with Andy testifying in his own behalf. He had been preparing his summation almost since the trial had begun.
The problem was that now, so far as he could sort it out, little of what really had happened had found its way into this trial, the supposed crucible of truth.
On the one hand he didn’t want to divert his attention away from his defense of Andy—he knew he should be sitting at his desk, outlining, writing key phrases and arguments to win over the jury. But the other side of him felt that now that he was satisfied that he knew what had happened he should pursue that truth single-mindedly. Only that pursuit could take Andy Fowler’s fate out of the hands of the jury, remove it from debate.
The only thing that would ultimately clear his client was an alternate explanation of events. But the time he spent on that took away from his formal defense at trial.
He threw darts.
The inventories were no help. They listed sweatbands taken from the drawers in the desks next to the bed, some weightlifting gloves, leg warmers. Switching back to his formal trial preparation, Hardy pulled his legal pad in front of him. Should he call José as a witness and introduce everything he had found this morning? He wrote it down, looked at it and realized that nothing he had found out proved that Andy had not been on the boat Thursday morning. Prove a negative . . .
What about the significance and believability of the gun in the drawer? He could call Pullios and Chomorro right now and say that he, personally, had discovered a crucial bit of evidence that would demand a retrial because he could not be a witness for his own client. He would testify that the gun had not been in the drawer on Wednesday night. But proving it to a new jury would, again, be difficult. It was still possible, he had to admit, that the gun had slid forward or backward with every opening of the drawer. He could simply have overlooked it—missed it in his haste. And even if he did establish the gun’s absence, did that necessarily mean the prosecution would have the burden of proving that Andy Fowler had somehow acquired a key to the Eloise? Playing Glitsky, he came up with five reasons in five minutes why they wouldn’t.
He got up and fed his fish. He knew what he knew— the gun had been brought back to the Eloise on Thursday morning by the jealous woman who had killed her past lover, Owen Nash. She had done it to get it out of her own possession and to shift the blame to May, and on both counts the strategy had worked.
He had to hit and hit again the fact that the burden of proof was always on the prosecution. They had to prove Fowler had killed Nash—it wasn’t Hardy’s job to prove he hadn’t. What he had to do was keep the jury clear on that point. Pullios had to prove Andy’s guilt. Even if the jury thought Andy was guilty of something to some degree, he had to make the point to the jury that they weren’t to determine whether or not Andy was innocent, but rather whether the prosecution, by the evidence presented, had proved him guilty. And if not, then—although he might not be innocent—he was legally not guilty.
Innocent did not mean exactly the same thing as not guilty. It was, in this case, a crucial distinction.
Back at his desk, he pushed some buttons, then exchanged a few words with Ken Farris about the terrible weather. “You still at it?” Farris asked.
“No rest for the weary,” Hardy said. “A point occurs to me, if you don’t mind helping the defense.”
“I can go half a yard,” Farris said, “though I’d prefer not to think of it as assisting the defense.” He paused briefly. “Dismas, let me ask you something—I get the feeling this is more than just a job for you. You don’t think Fowler did it, do you? You wouldn’t do this as an exercise in the law.”
Hardy had been through it all before. “Fowler didn’t do it,” he said. “I’m also trying to find out who did.”
A pause, then, “Why do they keep putting us through this? Getting the wrong people?”
Hardy knew it was a long story—Nash’s fame, Pullios’s ambition, Fowler’s duplicity. Suspicion and prejudice and all of the above. But Farris had asked it rhetorically and Hardy passed it by. “Did Owen give the key to the Elois
e to any of his girlfriends?” he asked.
“I doubt it. The Eloise was his baby, you know. He’d have people aboard, but not without him.”
“Did he have any other long-standing girlfriends, mistresses, whatever—besides May?” He had to, Hardy was thinking.
“A few weeks, once in a while a month, that was about it. He paid them off, they went their way.”
“Do you remember him talking about any of them being bitter, angry, rejected, anything at all like that?”
“No. I’m sorry, but there just wasn’t that much made of it, or, I should say, them. They came and went like the seasons.” He laughed dryly. “No, scratch that, more like the courses of a meal. That was the big difference with May—she was around awhile.”
“And no one else was?”
“No. Except Celine, of course.”
Hardy sat riveted to his chair. He felt the blood draining out of his face. The rain beat on his window. Darkness was settling in. “Did Celine have a key to the Eloise?” he asked, keeping his voice calm.
“Hey, I was kidding about that. Really, a bad joke.”
“Does she have a key?”
“Well, I think she does, she used to. But she didn’t—”
“I know that.” Hardy forced himself to slow down, to speak calmly. “Just another something to think about. Keeping track of these keys, that’s all. But do me a favor, would you?”
“Sure.”
“She’s mad enough at me about all this, defending the man on trial for her father’s murder. Would you try not to mention this key business to her if you see her?”
“Yeah, okay, no problem.”
When he hung up, he didn’t move for several minutes. The house wasn’t there, nor was his office, nor the rain, nor the darkness outside.
The night Celine had come by for the first time she had quickly left after seeing him in his green jogging suit, the same kind Owen Nash had been wearing on the day he had been shot. Was seeing him like seeing her father’s ghost? She’d reacted, at least for a moment, as though she had . . . “You just suddenly reminded me so much of my father . . .”
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