by The Hearing
Slack hair, shuffling gait, flat expression. The orange jumpsuit again. Always.
She tried to conjure an image of when he’d been younger—she still had his high school graduation picture on the dresser next to her bed at home. His hair was shorter then, neatly combed. Freckles and a wide-open smile.
Where had that boy gone? Although she knew. She knew.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Hey, Cole.” She waited to see if he had something to say, but evidently not. She leaned forward, her mouth close to the speaker. “Are you all right?”
His first answer was a humorless chuckle, but he didn’t want his mom getting upset, so softened it. “Better,” he said. “Yeah. Fine.”
“Really?”
“Well, the massage girl didn’t show up last night, but other than that . . .”
“But they’re taking care of you? You’re eating?”
He leaned back and patted his stomach. “They’re fattening me up for the kill.”
Jody frowned. “That’s not funny. Don’t say that.”
He came forward again, serious. “It’s really not so bad. You just stay out of people’s way.”
“But you’re getting your . . . medicine.”
“So far.” His flat gaze challenged. “And it’s not medicine, Mom. It’s methadone.”
“I know that,” she answered quickly. “I know what it is. And you’re doing okay with it?”
“It’s all right.” He brought his own mouth closer to the glass. “I’m thinking . . .” Nervously, he ran his hand along his jawline.
“What?”
He considered it for another long moment. “Well, I don’t know. You know my lawyer?”
“Yes, Cole, I know your lawyer. Mr. Hardy.”
“Yeah, well, he suggested maybe I ought to think about asking them to cut back on the dose. If I wind up being in here awhile, it might . . . I don’t know.”
Jody did not dare succumb to hope, but it was the first time she’d been tempted in years. She was careful to try to phrase the reply in neutral terms. Too much enthusiasm from Mom might kill the impulse. “It might be worth a try, Cole, but you’ve got a lot of other issues you’re dealing with through this.”
He leaned back, folded his arms across his chest. A deep sigh escaped. “I’m thinking it might be the only issue.”
She nodded carefully.
“I really do,” he said after a minute. “I mean, it’d be easy enough to try here. If it didn’t work, I could just go back to where I am now.”
“Well.” Jody’s voice was resigned, low-key. “It’s worth thinking about.”
“They’ve got a program.” Then he added quickly, “I’m not sure.”
She was happy to leave it there. “If you think you could handle it.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.” He came forward again. “You don’t have to come here every day, you know.”
“I know that. But I want to. I like seeing you, after all.” This admission seemed to make him uncomfortable, though, and she changed the subject. “You should know that I’m meeting with Mr. Hardy today to talk about money and things. You don’t have to worry. That’s all under control.” She glossed over it and kept on talking. “Has he mentioned anything to you yet about what he plans to do? In terms of your defense?”
“Not really. We haven’t really talked.”
Jody frowned. “Well, I’ll get something on that today, too. But did you see . . . do you get the paper in here?”
He shook his head. “No mints on the pillows before bedtime either. In fact, no pillows. But why?”
She scratched at the counter. “Because there was an article this morning about Cullen.”
“What about him?”
“Well, evidently he’s saying he gave you the gun.”
Cole came forward, sat up straight. “What gun?”
“The gun that was used to kill Elaine Wager. The murder weapon.”
“Cullen?”
She nodded.
“He never gave me any gun.”
“Well, in the paper today, there’s a story about Cullen giving you the gun.”
“When did he do that? Did it say?”
“Friday or Saturday.”
“Friday or Saturday?” He was trying to dredge it up. “That didn’t happen.”
Jody leaned up to the glass, her mouth all but flush up against the talk box. She whispered, “Are you telling me the truth here, Cole? I want to be able to tell Mr. Hardy . . .”
Cole was glaring, his mind engaged. “I’ll tell him myself, Mom. Cullen didn’t give me any gun on Friday or Saturday or any other time. I picked that gun up out of the street. It was such a little thing, at first I didn’t even know what it was, just sitting in the gutter down next to her and . . .” He stopped. His mouth was open, his eyes searching somewhere within himself.
“What?” For a terrifying moment, Jody thought that her son might have had something like a stroke. “Cole? What’s wrong?”
The recovery was as abrupt as its onset. His eyes snapped back into focus, and if his mother wanted to see a greater clarity in them, perhaps she wasn’t entirely mistaken. “I didn’t kill her,” he whispered in something like awe. “She was already dead.”
17
After his dawn meeting with Rich McNeil on the Embarcadero, Hardy had turned around and driven back out to St. Mary’s Hospital, which was halfway back to his home from downtown. Now he was next to Glitsky’s bed in the ICU. On the other side of the bed, a green heart monitor beeped steadily and repeatedly drew a jagged line across a small video screen.
“So,” he was saying, “there’s these two guys and the one goes, ‘That’s how I want to die, just like my grandfather, where he’s just sitting there talking, enjoying life, and suddenly his jaw drops down on his chest and his eyes close and he’s gone. Yep, that’s the way I want to go—’ ” Hardy paused. “ ‘Not kicking and screaming like the other guys in the car.’ ”
“Dying jokes?” Glitsky shifted under the sheets. “You’re telling me dying jokes?” The patient blew out a long and slow breath and closed his eyes.
Hardy thought he looked like hell. His pallor was pronounced. An oxygen tube wrapped around his face and settled under his nose. Some IVs were set up and apparently dripping into him. He opened his eyes again. “I’ve got one.”
Hardy took it as a good sign. “Hit me.”
“This rich guy is near death, fretting that he can’t take his money with him when he goes.” Glitsky took another deep breath, adjusted the oxygen tube into his nose. “So he asks God if he can. ‘Please, I’ve been good.’And God finally gives in and says okay, he can take one suitcase full of anything he wants to heaven. So he decides that gold is always good and fills his suitcase with bricks of the stuff.”
“How’d he do that if he was near death?” Hardy asked. “Gold weighs a ton. He’d have to get out of bed, go to the bank, if they even keep gold in a bank. How sick was he, anyway? What did he have?”
Glitsky glared at him. “A heart attack. I don’t know. Suspend your disbelief for a minute.”
“Yeah, but a detail like that—”
“Anyway, sure enough, the guy dies . . .”
“And about time, too.”
Glitsky collapsed back into his pillows. “Never mind.”
“What?”
“You want to hear this or not?”
Hardy acquiesced. “Okay, the guy is dead . . .”
“Right. He gets to the pearly gates. St. Peter says, ‘Hold it, no luggage allowed,’ and the guy tells Peter that in his case God made an exception. Peter should check with the boss.”
“This is a long joke,” Hardy said.
Glitsky ignored him, forging ahead. “So God says our guy isn’t lying. He’s allowed to bring one suitcase. And Peter says, ‘You know, I’ve been here a long time and nobody’s ever brought anything with them before. I’d be curious to know what it is.’ So the guy proudly opens his suitcase. And Pete
r looks at him and goes, ‘Pavement? You brought pavement?’ ”
Hardy crossed a leg and sat back. A smile played at the corners of his mouth. “That’s not really a dying joke.”
Glitsky pushed the button to raise his bed, his eyes now with some life in them. “What are you talking about? A guy dies in it, so it’s a dying joke, okay? It’s not like there’s a formal definition.”
A partition sheet hung from the ceiling and set off Abe’s bed from the others in the room. Someone was pulling it back and Hardy turned to see Abe’s spry and spunky seventy-something father, a yarmulke over his white hair, plaid pants, baggy polo shirt. “Definition of what?” he asked.
“A dying joke,” Hardy said. “Hi, Nat.”
“I got a good one of those,” Nat replied. “How you feeling today, Abe?”
“Abused.”
Hardy smiled, translating. “Normal.”
Nat went around to the monitor side, leaned over the bed and kissed his son on the face. “They have toothbrushes here? Maybe you want to use one.”
Glitsky had been extraordinarily lucky, although that did not mean he was out of trouble yet. At the peak of Nob Hill, Grace Cathedral had seen more than its share of heart attacks, more even than the famous and appropriately named Cardiac Hill, the steep and lengthy grade upon which some genius architect had erected the main walkway into 3Com Park. Almost anyone walking any distance to Grace from any direction had to climb, and history had shown that many elderly hearts—and some not so elderly—weren’t up to it.
Accordingly, a well-attended event such as Elaine Wager’s memorial service usually featured an ambulance staffed with paramedics parked nearby. There had been one there on Monday morning when Glitsky’s heart had gone into ventricular fibrillation. They’d had the electrodes on him and shocked the muscle out of its spasm in—everyone agreed—a miraculously short time.
“So what are they saying now?” Hardy wanted the facts, but they were maddeningly inexact. “What’s the prognosis?”
“They’re saying it was moderate,” Glitsky told him.
“Which means what?” Nat put in.
Glitsky cast an eye over to his dad. “More or less it means they don’t have a clue what happens next.”
“Swell,” Hardy said. “That’s really swell.”
“I like it,” Abe said, agreeing with him. “It could be a dying joke, after all.”
“What are the options?” Nat asked. The boys liked to run with tough-guy irony, but Nat didn’t find any part of it funny. “What are they actually telling you?”
“Anything I ask. Although like everything else, if you know nothing about something, it’s hard to pick the right questions.” Glitsky drank from his water glass. He lifted his shoulders. “The only way they can figure actual damage to the heart muscle for now is the enzyme count, which, they say, is in the moderate increased range. Also, they’re doing an angiogram before they let me out of here to see if I’ve got blocked arteries, which looks like a good guess. Then they’ll either do a bypass or decide I don’t need one.”
“So what does moderate heart muscle damage mean?” Hardy asked.
“It means maybe not as much muscle died as could have, so I’ve got a chance to keep living.”
Nat needed to clarify. “You mean some of your heart could be dead right now—the muscle—and you wouldn’t know it?”
Glitsky nodded. “The part that didn’t get any oxygen for long enough, that’s my understanding. But they don’t think that was too much.”
“But if it was?” Nat persisted.
A shrug. “Then it ought to show up in a couple of days. And that would be a problem.”
“How big a problem?”
“A problem,” Glitsky repeated. His father’s hand was on the bed and he covered it with his own. “But I’m lucky so far, Dad. They’re saying these enzyme levels are okay. Let’s go with that. If nothing gets complicated, I’m out of here by the weekend. Dancing.”
Nat looked across at Hardy. “This I would like to see.”
Dr. Campion—mid-fifties, exuding competence—had come and gone. He’d shooed both Hardy and Nat out for the morning exam. When he came out, he told them he’d ordered the nurse to give Glitsky a light sedative. They could go back in to say good-bye—that was enough visiting for this morning. He cautioned both of them to refrain from talking about anything that might be upsetting. The feeling was that they were just going to give him another day to rest, then they’d evaluate the situation and make some decisions.
Hardy stood by the bed and waited while Nat talked domestic details. Abe’s youngest son, Orel, was in school today but would be back by visiting hours tonight. Nat hadn’t heard back from Isaac, the eldest, until late last night. He was driving up today from L.A. and he’d be by tonight as well. Nat hadn’t been able to reach Jacob in Milan, but he was still trying.
“Don’t do that.” Abe was appalled at the idea. “There’s no reason to bother him about this.”
“You don’t think he’d want to know his father had a heart attack? Wouldn’t you want to know if, God forbid, I ever have a heart attack?”
“You don’t have those genes. This,” he said, pointing to his chest, “was Mom.”
“Or forty years of junk food and no exercise.” Hardy smiled helpfully.
Glitsky glared at him and spoke back to his father. “Besides, what’s Jacob going to do about it over there?”
“How about fly home, make sure you’re okay?”
Abe was shaking his head. “He doesn’t have the money for that.”
“I’ll pay for it, Abraham.”
Glitsky raised his voice. “I’m not trying to get out of paying, Dad. I’m saying he doesn’t need to come. By the time he gets here, I’ll be home. I’m fine.”
Nat took his case to Hardy. “He’s fine. His heart muscle might be already dead inside his chest and he’s fine.”
Hardy decided he ought to step in. “Abe. Shut up. Your sons need to be here. All of ’em. End of story.”
“Thank you.” Nat touched his forehead in a gracious gesture. “Listen to your friend here, Abraham. He knows what’s good for you.”
Glitsky took in the two of them. “God help me,” he said.
Nat went away, muttering. Glitsky had motioned Hardy to stay back a minute.
Now he sat down again. “Dr. Campion said keep it short. And we’re not supposed to upset you.”
“Really?” Glitsky deadpanned. “Good going.”
“He also said the nurse gave you a sedative. I’m thinking you palmed it or something.”
“It must not have kicked in yet.” But to Hardy, it seemed that it was starting to. Glitsky laid his head back against his pillow and closed his eyes for a moment, then visibly seemed to gather his strength so that he could talk. “So what did I miss on Elaine’s case?”
Hardy shook his head. “That would go under the general topic of things that might upset you.”
“Not telling me will be worse. Was there something?”
Hardy sighed. He didn’t know about Treya Ghent’s verbal attack on Glitsky the day before, and therefore didn’t know that it had been a good bet as the proximate cause of the heart attack. He did know, however, that his friend had lost his daughter and his job in the same week—that could do it, too. And the doctor had warned about creating more stress.
Still, Glitsky was probably right. If he didn’t tell him, it might be worse. “Some snitch is saying he gave Cole the gun on Saturday.”
“What is Cole saying about that?”
“I wish I knew.” Hardy gestured. Frustration. “The story broke in the paper this morning. I haven’t had time to see him, what with you and all.”
Glitsky chewed on it for a long moment. “It was in the paper this morning?”
“Yep. Front page. The last unanswered question in the case, if memory serves. And it does.” Hardy ran down the details on Cullen Leon Alsop.
When he finished, Glitsky said, “So Pratt
leaked it.”
“How do you come to that?”
“Because a snitch would have drawn Ridley Banks. He’s the inspector of record and he doesn’t leak. It would be interesting to see the timing on the leak. If maybe it got to the paper before Ridley even found out about it.”
Hardy was intrigued. “Which would mean what?”
Again, though, Glitsky leaned back into his pillow and closed his eyes. Opening them, he lifted the corners of his mouth a fraction of an inch. “See, I’m not upset. I’m relaxed.”
“Good. But we were on—”
A restraining hand. “I know where we were. A couple of months ago, there was another little stink about a snitch—maybe you remember? Pratt denied it, but hey, that’s what she does.”
“What was it?”
“Same kind of leverage. This was a third-strike case, one of those drive-bys where nobody died, not even the usual three innocent bystanders, so it didn’t go high-profile. Still, it was a screwup.” Hardy waited through another hiatus, another recovery. “They couldn’t put a weapon together with the shooter, so there was this story in the paper that this snitch—”
“Okay, I do remember that now.” Suddenly, it came back to Hardy. “He knew where the gun was, in the shooter’s girl’s garage or someplace, but then after he talked to the police, he changed his mind.”
“Right. Decided three strikes and life in prison beat being dead, which would happen if he snitched. But he told us the D.A. had offered him a deal if he’d plant the gun with the guy they knew was the shooter. Of course Pratt denies this. But the story ran before he talked to any inspectors. And the snitch sure didn’t leak it on his own. No access to the press, right? So it was the D.A.”
“But why in the world would they do that?”
“What? Leak? Or create bogus evidence?”
“Either.”
“Second nature. They get something, they gotta tell some reporter. It makes it real—the headline is good PR and later, when it goes to hell, it’s old news and nobody pays attention.” Glitsky had closed his eyes again. “If it got to the paper before Ridley talked to this bozo . . .”