The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  “And what, then? Visser killed her?” Abe had his arms crossed again. He was at full length in the chrome-and-weave kitchen chair, his legs outstretched. A muscle in his jaw clenched and unclenched.

  “I don’t know,” Hardy said. Then added somberly, “Maybe he killed Ridley, too.”

  “We don’t know that Ridley’s dead yet,” Treya said hopefully.

  Hardy looked at her levelly. “Yes we do,” he said softly. “Abe?”

  Glitsky nodded. “Probably.”

  “Well, then . . .” She looked from one to the other. “We should . . .”

  “Same problem,” Glitsky said. “We need evidence. And Visser used to be a homicide inspector. He knows the tricks. He isn’t going to leave much.”

  Hardy stood, went over to the refrigerator and opened it up, then stopped and turned. “I’ve got one for you, Treya. Are any of the musketeers on the special master list?”

  She rubbed her eyes. “All of them, I think. We were talking about it. Why?”

  “Because the case Elaine was working on in Logan’s office is still open. I checked with Thomasino. It might be worth taking a look.”

  “Do it!” Glitsky came forward excitedly, up on his feet.

  Hardy gave him a baleful look. “I’ve got to check for sure, but I think I’ve got other commitments over the next day or two.” Then, to Treya: “But I’m thinking one of the kids . . .”

  Hardy was gone at last and Rita kicked Abe and Treya out of the kitchen so she could do the dinner dishes. Together in the cramped living room with barely room to turn around without touching one another, they cast about for the better part of five minutes, looking for ways to ignore the sexual tension that hummed like a guy wire between them. Since the first night, they hadn’t even kissed, and in those first moments, that is all they had done.

  Treya found her purse and pulled out the two sheets of folded paper she’d torn from the yellow legal pad she’d been using at lunch. “You were talking to Diz about evidence, Abe, and you really haven’t even looked at the box that Curtis brought back from Tiburon. There might be something there.”

  “I already looked in it.”

  “He said defensively.”

  “I’m not being defensive.”

  She gave him an expression he’d already come to think of as the thousand-year-old look, as though she’d known him that long.

  “I did go through it, Trey,” he insisted.

  “And got to Loretta’s picture and stopped, didn’t you?”

  In fact, he had taken it entirely out of the box in Hardy’s building and laid it facedown on the Solarium table. He didn’t want to see Loretta’s face, to be reminded of Elaine’s mother, especially now that he was beginning to be involved with Treya. For the truth was, Loretta had been in his life more recently than a quarter century before. Only four years ago, she had waltzed back in and from his perspective tried to restake her ancient claim to his heart. And, starving for contact after Flo’s death, he’d almost let her have it. It shamed him still—he didn’t need the reminder of how close he’d come, how weak he’d been.

  How for Loretta it had all been a calculated lie.

  Treya was altogether different, he told himself. Nothing about her was the same. And she was right—he was being foolishly defensive. He held out his hand, the corners of his mouth up fractionally. “Okay, let me see the darn list.” He opened the pages and stopped immediately. “What’s this first thing? Empty drawer?”

  Their legs happened to be close enough to touch when she sat on the couch. “I didn’t want to forget that, so I just wrote it first.” She told him about the discussion when Curtis had first mentioned it.

  “But what does it mean?” Abe asked.

  “We couldn’t figure it out, but all new theories are welcome.”

  Giving it a minute, he finally shrugged and went back to her list. She got up then, saying she was going in to check on the kids, maybe help Rita with the dishes. Treya wasn’t comfortable with somebody else waiting on her. So she was in the kitchen, an apron around her, speaking reasonable Spanish to Glitsky’s housekeeper and drying a serving platter, when Glitsky appeared back in the kitchen doorway. “At the bottom of the first page,” he said. “What’s this unknown key?” He crossed the kitchen and showed her what she’d written.

  “Oh, I’ve got that,” she said. “It’s in my purse.”

  With apologies to Rita, she put down her towel and reappeared a minute later. “It was in the glove compartment of Elaine’s car, which was parked down under R&J in the garage. Jon found it, I think, and threw it in the box. Do you know what it is?”

  “Yeah,” Glitsky said. “I think I do.”

  “We shouldn’t be doing this anymore, Abe. It’s almost eleven-thirty. You need to get some rest.”

  “I doubt it. I’m not going to get any rest anyway. Not until we find where this key goes.”

  “Are you sure it’s a locker?”

  A brisk nod. “Yep.” Then he looked over at her, reached a hand across the seat to touch her thigh. “I’m sorry,” he said, and added in a reasonable tone, “I can take you home and come back and do this myself.”

  She gave him the thousand-year look again, the long smile. “In your dreams, Lieutenant.”

  “That’s not what I dream.” He looked at her. “Besides, we can blame Rita. She kicked us out. It’s her fault.”

  “She only kicked us as far as the living room.”

  “Where you had me look at your list, which brings us here.”

  “But the kids . . . ?”

  “The kids are fine. If this turns out to be something, Trey, we need it yesterday, you know.”

  She nodded, accepting it. “I know.”

  “Well, then . . .”

  The bus station was closest to his home and had by far the largest bank of lockers downtown, but Glitsky thought a better first bet might be the Union Square garage, a hundred yards from where Elaine had been killed. But the key fit none of the lockers there. Then, since they were so close, they walked a block to the Downtown Center Garage, with the same lack of result.

  Glitsky knew this search was quite possibly futile and even stupid. It was the kind of thing that, as a lieutenant, if it was important enough, he would assign to three or four teams of officers, and give them a week. The city must have a couple of thousand rental lockers, maybe more, and it wasn’t even certain that this key was from a San Francisco locker. But he felt he had to try. They might get lucky at the bus station as they swung by on the way home.

  Close to midnight on a Wednesday night and the area around the bus station, he noted as he illegally parked, was in its usual gala finery. He hadn’t had occasion to visit the place in five years, but it looked, smelled and felt now as it had back then.

  He took Treya’s hand against the vagrants and the noise, the pervasive loneliness and desperation. The loudspeaker cut through the Snoop Doggy Dogg rap to announce the arrival of a bus from Bakersfield, and a baby started crying on one of the plastic chairs over to his left. He and Treya shared a look, and decided that this was it. They would try again tomorrow. He could probably just go to Paul Thieu first thing, who would take one look at the key and tell him it was obvious from the distinctive red plastic top, upon which was printed the number 1138.

  Which was there in front of them on the bottom row in the third bank back from the entrance. And suddenly the rap music and the crying and the smell of loneliness was gone.

  He put the key in and turned.

  Inside was a small, black, anonymous flight bag of the kind used by flight attendants. On top of that was a sheaf of stuff bound by a thick rubber band. Glitsky reached in and took it out into the light, stripping off the rubber band. On top was a passport, and under that a rather thick booklet of hundred-dollar traveler’s checks. Then documents in an airline ticket pouch from Alitalia Airlines. “Did she mention going to Italy?”

  Treya was counting the money, but she looked up from that, thought a moment,
shook her head. “No.”

  Glitsky paused in his search. “You know what this is, don’t you? This is the empty drawer.” He began to flip through the rest of the pile, which seemed to consist mostly of envelopes—bills mostly—to the phone company, PG&E, a couple of credit cards, Macy’s.

  And then at the bottom, one last envelope, stamped, addressed in a firm hand, to Abraham Glitsky, at his home address.

  Dear Lieutenant Glitsky (Abe?) (Dad?)—

  Funny, isn’t it? You know what I’m talking about although we’ve never talked about it. Isn’t that funny? Or perhaps it isn’t. Not really.

  There is no return address on this letter because by the time you get it I’ll be gone and where it came from will have no meaning. But now that I am gone, I wanted you to know that I don’t plan to return. At least not soon. Maybe never.

  Why do I want to tell you any of this? Because you are my only blood relative? Does blood even mean anything anymore? I don’t know. There’s so much I don’t know. It makes me wonder what all the education was about, if it’s left me so ignorant on the important things. You didn’t have any part in raising me. The person I knew as my father, Dana, was older and distracted, but I think he must have suspected something and I can’t say we were terribly close. Maybe this explains some of my problems with men, mostly older men. Hoping to get the affection of the father I never had? Again, I don’t know.

  I’ve reread this to here and realize that it sounds a little like I’m attaching some blame to you about all this, but please, it’s not that. I know you had no idea about me until recently. I believe if you’d known you’d have taken some role—I just believe that. It seems to be who you are.

  After you found out, and I knew that you knew, at first I didn’t really understand why you didn’t come to me. That’s true. And it hurt me as I suppose you might imagine. But then eventually it came to feel right, that it was okay. We’d see each other at work from time to time and got along pretty well. I admired you, and think you felt the same about me. At least I hope you did.

  You had your own family, your boys. See? I know all about them, my half brothers. But I had my life—busy and public and personally a mess. You didn’t need any part of it, believe me. I think you made a wise decision. And with all the older men I was searching to connect with, who I’d try to please at work and then need to go further, make it personal—Chris Locke, then Gabe, Aaron Rand—well, I don’t have to give you the litany, but these and so many more. Half my clients. And all of them went nowhere. They couldn’t go anywhere. I was too needy and demanding and screwed up. I think that’s really why I never came to you, either. It was the one sacred thing.

  A part of me wishes that we could have talked, at least acknowledged what we were to each other, although something else tells me that this would have been a bad decision, too. Like so many of the rest of them.

  I could somehow just keep you best by not saying anything. I could watch how you kept your dignity and handled the losses over Mom, over your wife. All the losses. And maybe I could learn something from that. I came to see it as though you were talking to me that way. By example. And as long as we had no acknowledged relationship, I could keep you as mine and not make all my usual mistakes. Does this make any sense?

  The truth is, Abe, that I don’t really fit in my life here and I never have. Oh, I know it seems like I did. My mother the senator and her connections. It was all laid out for me, who I was and what role I’d play. The politics. Who I’d become. So I finished law school and went right to work here for the D.A. and Chris Locke and I . . . well, you knew about that.

  I thought he loved me. I know I did love him.

  But after that—after Chris and Mom were dead—the bottom just fell out. I’d done everything to please Mom, then to please Chris, and suddenly neither of them were there anymore and all the reasons I had for doing what I was doing just disappeared.

  And then the awful truth began to emerge that I wasn’t who they thought I was after all. I’d never been that person inside. But I’d also never taken any time for myself, to figure things out that if I wasn’t that, then what was I?

  The only thing I knew, the only reference I’d ever lived with, was Mom’s, and she was happy with it because it was who she was, this political animal. She got her identity and self-worth by her causes and issues, by keeping busy and connected. You volunteered, you did good works, you fought for the oppressed, and that was the secret to a happy life.

  But Abe, it wasn’t my life. It was Loretta’s, and then suddenly she was gone and I was the heir apparent, having to live it, to be it. To be the reincarnation of my mother, full-time, full-bore. Everybody wanted me to step in, fill her shoes, continue her work.

  It’s not the kind of thing you realize right away, that you’re living a lie, that the whole thing isn’t you. But you get enough headaches and cramps and you stop sleeping because you’re living two or three separate—no, contradictory—lives. And eventually, even if you’re not the most insightful person in the world, a few years go by and you start to get a clue.

  But what do you do? All the tapes are running. You can’t just drop everything at once. Especially if your entire personality is that you aim to please. You tell some school where you volunteer to teach or a neighborhood council you’re organizing or even your boss that you need to cut back on your workload and get some time and perspective, and it’s like you’re speaking a foreign language. Give us just one more class, Elaine, one more term on the board, one more high-profile client.

  And if you’re me, when it finally comes to it, you agree to stay on. Because you need their approval. All their approvals. In your deepest heart, you need them to like you. You’re nothing if you’re not pleasing someone. You need to be loved. So you tell yourself . . .

  No, not you,I.

  So I kept telling myself it would be soon. I’d stop for a while, step off the treadmill. Nothing so drastic as a complete change of career, but a long vacation to figure out a new plan, a different approach.

  And meanwhile, every single day, so miserably unhappy.

  I’m cheating on my fiancé; he’s cheating on me. My boss is betraying me. I find out that another one of my mentors, who in the past I trusted, confided in, worked with, depended on, even, of course, slept with—here’s another betrayal, more cheating. Now there was no integrity even in the system that I’d worked so hard on behalf of, that I still wanted to believe in. But no longer could. The whole thing—the career, my private life, the law itself, Abe—none of it was working.

  And suddenly I know I couldn’t take another hit. I was in the wrong place, doing the wrong things. It was going to kill me.

  I had to change it all.

  I couldn’t tell a soul, not even my dear paralegal, a woman named Treya Ghent—she’d be wise and tell me I could stay and change and work things out, but I don’t believe that’s true. Not anymore. I’ve lost all my faith in this life. There was so much I couldn’t even tell her. Cheating on Jonas. Other things. I couldn’t have borne her disapproval most of all.

  So I’m gone. It is the right thing and I am happy. A clean break, no explanations to anyone with their agendas for me.

  Except this to you.

  It isn’t anything to do with you.

  Love, your daughter,

  Elaine

  They both read it in the bus station, then took the packet and the suitcase out to the car. On the way home, they started to dissect the startling revelations. Elaine had been leaving the country anyway? The Alitalia ticket was for a 6:15 A.M. flight the morning after she’d been shot. Gabe Torrey? Aaron Rand, Clarence Jackman’s partner? Half her clients? But eventually, the weight of it all became too much and they both fell silent.

  The duplex was still. When they got in, they discovered that Raney had crashed on the sofa in front of the tube. Orel had gone into his room and now slept, fully clothed and openmouthed, on the top of his bed. Out in the dark living room, Rita snored lightly on her f
old-a-bed in the corner behind her Pier 1 Imports faux Japanese screen.

  They read it again, this time together, at Glitsky’s kitchen table, the one light on directly over their heads. When they got to the last line, Treya put a hand over Abe’s and squeezed it. She read it aloud. “It isn’t anything to do with you.”

  “I know that,” he said. “My mind knows that.” He let out a long breath. “Tell me it’s too late to call Diz, would you.”

  She looked behind him at the clock above the oven—12:20. “It’s too late to call Diz,” she said. “Do you think the other man, the betrayal of the system she talks about, was Gabe Torrey?”

  “Yep. I think she found something at Dash Logan’s.”

  “Just as Dismas said.”

  “Maybe. Parts of it.”

  She tapped the letter. “So what do you want to do with this?”

  Glitsky shook his head. It was a serious consideration. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it was addressed to you . . .”

  “I know. If she’d dropped it in a mailbox and it got delivered, it would be my property and I could keep it.” He sighed. “But she didn’t get to do that.”

  “So it’s got to be evidence?”

  “Oh, it’s evidence all right. If I was working as a cop right now . . .” He paused, pushed back his chair and turned toward her. “But forget the legalities, Trey. This is personal. I’d really like to know what you think.”

  She faced him and said, “If making it public would correct some of the problems she wrote about, she’d want you to show it.”

  The corners of his mouth lifted slightly. “I keep waiting for you to come up with a wrong answer.”

  “Raney does, too.” Her tired eyes sparked for an instant. “You’ll have to get in line. So meanwhile, what do we do?”