The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  Q: I don’t think we know yet that he killed Mr. Markham.

  A: Well, I do. And I think he almost expected Carla to thank him for getting rid of him. Except what Dr. Kensing didn’t know is that they’d patched it up.

  Q: You’re saying that prior to his death, Mr. and Mrs. Markham hadn’t been getting along, is that it?

  A: That’s fair to say. But then, just this last weekend,

  Carla told me that they patched things up. Tim bared his poor little psyche—told her all about his affairs, his job problems, the incredible stress, the creep. So she was hopeful. Again. That’s where they were on Tuesday, and it’s why she couldn’t believe he was gone, so suddenly. It was like whiplash.

  Q: Did she appear depressed to you? Any suggestion she might commit suicide?

  A: No way. I’ve known Carla for nine years, Inspector.

  For the last two of those, she’s been getting used to the idea of living without Tim. Why? Because she was going to leave him someday anyway. She knew that.

  Q: But you just said they’d patched things up.

  A: This time. But who knew for how long? Tim would fail again eventually—that’s just who he was—and she’d wind up leaving him. She knew that, I’m sure, deep down. So it might have filled her with disappointment that he died, or even broken her heart at some level, but there had to be some relief there, too. And no way in the world would she kill herself over it.

  Kensing walked up the six steps and pushed at the button next to the door of his old house on Anza Street. He still thought of it as his house and it made him sick to see how far Ann had let the place go. The once bright and appealing yellow paint had faded to a jaundiced pallor and was peeling everywhere. The white trim had gone gray. The shutter by the window nearest him hung at a cockeyed angle. The window boxes themselves had somehow misplaced even their dirt, to say nothing of the flowers he’d labored to establish in them. Back when he and Ann were good, they’d always kept the house up, even with all the hours they spent at their jobs. They’d found the time.

  Now he looked down and saw that the corners of the stoop had collected six months’ worth of debris—flattened soda cans, old newspapers and advertising supplements still soaked from the recent storm, candy wrappers, and enough dirt, he thought, to make a start of refilling the window boxes.

  Where was Ann? Dammit, if she was still asleep, he was going to have to do something, although what that might be he didn’t know. She should be awake at least to feed the kids. He pushed at the bell again, figured it must have stopped working, so he knocked. Hard. Three more times with his fist, shaking the door. He was turning to leave when he heard her voice.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Eric, Ann. Open up.”

  “Didn’t you get my call?” she asked. “I called two hours ago.”

  “Hi, Dad,” his nine-year-old yelled from inside.

  “Terry, you be quiet!”

  “Hi, Ter. Hi, girls. You there?”

  He heard sounds from both of them, Amber and Caitlin.

  “Stop that!” his wife yelled at the girls, then talked again through the door. “I left a message telling you not to come.” This was one of Ann’s favorite tricks. Although she knew that Eric had a cell phone and beeper, she’d only call at his condo and leave a message he wouldn’t get. Then she could be mad at him for being unreachable.

  “Well, I never got it. Did you try the cell?”

  “I didn’t think of it. I thought you’d be home.”

  “Well, it was a nice morning. I went out for breakfast.”

  “With your girlfriend, I suppose.”

  He didn’t feel the need to answer that. Instead, he tried the knob. “Come on, Ann. You want to open the door?”

  “I don’t think so. No.”

  “Well, that’s going to make it a little tough for me to take the kids out to the ball game, isn’t it?” His schedule allowed him only rare visits with his children during the week, so he made it a point to take them on weekends. Ann, burdened by her life, as well, had always before been happy to pass them off to him. Until now.

  “Ann? What’s this about?”

  “You can’t see them.”

  He kept his voice under control. “You want to open the door and we can talk about it?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. You go away or I swear to God, Eric, I’ll call the police.”

  “Ann, let’s not do this in front of the kids. Just open up.”

  “No! You’re not coming in. I’m not letting a murderer take my children.”

  The crying started. It sounded like Amber, the middle one, first. But the others immediately took the cue from her. Ann’s voice, shrill and loud, cut through them all, though. “Stop that! Shut up, all of you! Stop it right now!”

  “Ann!” Kensing pleaded through the door.

  “Mom!” His son, Terry, hysterical. “I’m going out with Dad! You can’t stop me.”

  “Oh, yes I can!”

  Something slammed into the door.

  “God, Ann! What are you…?”

  More sounds of manhandling. Then, “Terry, get upstairs, you hear me! You girls, too!”

  Kensing grabbed the doorknob, shook it with both hands. “Ann, let me in! Now! Open up!”

  She was herding all of them upstairs, to their rooms. He stood for another moment on the stoop, then ran down the steps and up the overgrown driveway on the side of the house. The back door was locked, too.

  But unlike the front, it had six small glass panes in its upper panel.

  Kensing wished it was the usual cold day and he had a jacket he could wrap around his hand, but all he wore was a collared golf shirt. Still, he had his fist clenched. He had to do it, padding or not. But then he remembered the man last year who’d died after slashing his arteries trying to do the same thing—bled out in six minutes. The instant’s hesitation gave him time for another flash of insight that stopped him cold.

  He was already a murder suspect. Even if he had every reason in the world, he’d better not break into his wife’s house. But the kids—Ann had lost control, and though she’d never hit any of them before, she might be capable of anything right now.

  He pulled out his cell phone and punched 911, then ran back up front. The dispatcher answered and he gave the address and briefly described the situation. “I’m outside now. I need some help immediately.”

  Back up on the stoop, he heard Ann, upstairs, still screaming at the kids. A door slammed up there. Finally, he heard her footsteps on the stairs inside, coming down. Now she was at the door. “Eric,” she said. “Eric, are you still there?”

  He didn’t say anything. He was pressed against the wall, scrunched down under the sill of the stoop. He knew she wouldn’t be able to see him even if she leaned out the front windows. His heart thrummed in his ears. In the distance, he heard the wail of a siren.

  Then he heard the lock tumble, saw the doorknob begin to move. He grabbed and gave it a quick turn, then hit the door with his shoulder. Ann screamed as the force of it threw her backward.

  But she didn’t go down.

  Instead, she gathered herself and charged at him. “Get out of here! Get out of my house!”

  He held her arms, but she kept kicking at him—at his legs, his groin. She connected and knocked the wind out of him. His grip went slack for a second. She ripped a hand free and swiped it across his face. He felt the hot flush of the impact and knew she’d scratched him. Raising his hand, he pulled it away and saw blood. “Jesus,” he said.

  “Daddy! Mommy!” From up the stairs.

  “Don’t!” Ann screamed. “Stay up there!” She never turned around, though, and came again at him. She kept coming, driving him back to the door, then out it onto the stoop. She kicked again at his groin, barely missing, but the kick spun him to one side. Now she charged full force, her fingernails out for his face.

  Blocking her hands, he stepped back defensively. Her forward motion carried her by him. Her foot lan
ded on one of the wet newspapers, which slipped out from under her. With another yell of anguish, she fell. Her head hit the concrete as her momentum carried her forward. She rolled down the steps all the way to the sidewalk, where she lay still.

  The children flashed by Kensing and down the steps. They had just gotten to her, kneeling and keening around her, when a police car, its siren blaring, pulled up and skidded to a stop. Two patrolmen came out with their weapons drawn and leveled at Kensing.

  “Don’t make a move! Put your hands up!”

  Glitsky and Treya had gotten out of bed late, got a sense of the incredible day outside, and decided on the spur of the moment to drive up to Dillon’s Beach, about forty miles north of the city. On the way up, they detoured over to Hog Island for an hour or so and ate oysters every way they could think of—raw, grilled on the barby with three different sauces, breaded and deep fried with tartar sauce. Fortified, even sated and happy, they took the long way north along the ocean—switchback one-lane roads that wound through the dairy farms, the redwood and eucalyptus groves, the timeless and seemingly forgotten settlements of western Marin county.

  It was truly a different world here than anywhere else in the greater Bay Area, all the more magical because of its proximity to the kitschy tourist mecca of Sausalito, the tony, crowded anthill of yuppies that was Mill Valley. On this side of Tamalpais, clapboard main streets with a half dozen century-old buildings called themselves towns. The single sign of life would be twenty Harleys parked outside the only saloon—there was always a saloon. Along the road, they passed handmade signs nailed to ancient oaks advertising live chickens, pigs, sheep. Fresh eggs and milk every few miles.

  Most of it looked slightly gone to seed, and Glitsky had been up here many times when, with the near-constant year-round fog and wind, it had seemed almost uninhabi-table, a true wasteland. Today, in the warm sunlight—it would hit eighty degrees at the beach before they headed back home—the ramshackle and run-down landscape suddenly struck him as deliberate. Lots of hippies from the sixties and drop-and burnouts from the seventies and eighties had settled out here and they didn’t want it to change. They didn’t want new cars and faux-mansions, but a slower pace, tolerant neighbors, privacy. Most of the time, Glitsky scoffed at that lifestyle—those people didn’t have a clue, they weren’t living in the real world.

  But today at the beach he was watching what he would have normally called a cliche´ of an aging hippy. A man about his own age, early fifties, was weaving some spring flowers into his little girl’s hair. Glitsky found himself almost envying him, the simplicity of this life. The woman with him—the girl’s mother?—was another cliche´. Her hair fell loose halfway down her back. She had let it go gray. She fingerpicked an acoustic guitar and would sing snippets of Joni Mitchell as the words occurred to her. It was possible, Glitsky the cop thought, that they were both stoned. But possibly not. Possibly they were blissed out on the day, very much like he and Treya.

  “A chocolate chip cookie for your thoughts.” She sat next to him, blocking the sun from his face.

  He was stretched out on his side on their blanket in the warm sand. “Cookie first.” He popped it whole into his mouth and chewed it up. “Thank you.”

  “Now thoughts,” she said. “That was the deal.”

  “You don’t want to hear my thoughts. They’re scary.”

  “You’re having scary thoughts here?”

  “I like it here. I’m almost completely happy. That’s scary.”

  “Comfort and happiness are scary?”

  “They don’t last. You don’t want to get used to them.”

  “No, God forbid that.” She reached a hand out and rubbed it over his arm. “Forgetting, of course, that you and I have had a pretty decent run together these past few months.”

  He put a hand over hers. “I haven’t forgotten that for a second. I didn’t mean us.”

  “Good. Because I’m planning on making this last a while.”

  “A while would be good. I’d vote for that.”

  “At least, say, another nineteen years.”

  “What’s ninet…?” Glitsky stopped and squinted a question up at her.

  “Nineteen years.” She spoke with an undertone of grave concern. With an age difference of nineteen years between them, the question of whether they should have their own child someday had nearly split them up before they’d gotten engaged. Glitsky had already done what he called “the kid thing” three times. He was finished with all that, he’d informed her.

  It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, but Treya told him if that were the case, they had to stop seeing each other. She wasn’t going to use the issue in a power play to get or keep him. If parenthood wasn’t something he wanted to go through again, she understood completely. He was still a fine man and she loved him, but she knew who she was, what she wanted.

  For some time Glitsky had lived with her decision, and his own. Then one day he woke up and realized that he had changed his mind. Her presence in his life was more important than anything else. He could not lose her—nothing could make that happen.

  But now that once-distant someday had arrived, and Treya was biting her lip with the tension of whether or not her husband would accept the reality. “I don’t think children have as good a chance if they’re raised in a home where the parents aren’t comfortable and happy, so I think we really ought to keep that going at least until the baby’s out of the house and on its own. Don’t you?” Trying to smile, she gripped his hand tightly in both of hers and met his eyes. “I was going to tell you last night when we got home, but then your inspectors were there, and by the time they left it was so late….” Her tremulous voice wound down to a stop.

  He stared back at her for a long beat, his expression softening by degrees into something akin to wonder. “Why do you think it took us so long?” He brought her hands to his mouth and kissed them. “It sure wasn’t for lack of trying.”

  21

  Four hours later, Glitsky was sitting on his kitchen counter, trying to maintain a professional tone when he felt like screaming. He was talking on the wall phone to one of the deputy sheriffs from San Francisco General Hospital. The deputy had called homicide about this lady who’d been arrested and brought to the hospital earlier in the day with a broken ankle and a concussion. She couldn’t seem to stop talking about her husband being the murderer in the family, so why was she the one who was in jail? The deputy figured that if anything about this woman involved murder, he ought to bring it to somebody’s attention. But when he’d called homicide, nobody had any idea what he was talking about, so they gave him Glitsky’s home number.

  “What do you mean, they arrested her? They didn’t arrest him?”

  “The husband? No, sir. Not that I can tell. They didn’t bring him here, but maybe he wasn’t hurt.” When healthy people got arrested in the city, they went to the jail behind the Hall of Justice. If they needed medical care of any kind, SFGH had a guarded lockup wing, and that’s where her arresting officers had taken Ann Kensing.

  In ten minutes, Glitsky had tracked down the home numbers for both of these guys, and one of them—Officer Rick Page—had the bad luck to answer the phone. Even over the wire and without benefit of his terrible face, Glitsky’s tone of voice, rank, and position conspired to reduce the young cop to a state of panic. He ran his words together staccato fashion, repeating half of what he was trying to say. “It was, it was a nine-one-one DD, domestic disturbance. When we got there, we got there and the woman was on the ground, surrounded by her kids. Her children.”

  “And the man?”

  “Well, he, he was bleeding from his face, pretty bad where she cut, cut him.”

  “Cut him? With what, a knife?”

  “No. Fingernails. Scratched, I meant scratched him, not cut. On his face. He was up some outside stairs when we got to the scene. Me and Jerry—my partner?—we pulled up and both drew down on him.”

  “On him?”

 
“Yes, sir.”

  “But then you arrested her? Even though she was the one more badly hurt, is that right? How did that happen?” Glitsky’s anger and frustration were still fresh, but he had calmed enough to realize that he wasn’t getting what he needed from Officer Page. He toned his voice down a notch or two. “You can slow down a little, Officer. Just tell me what happened.”

  “Yes, sir. First, he’s—the guy, Kensing—we checked back with the dispatcher when he told us and it was true, he’s the one who called in the nine-one-one. He was locked out of his house and was worried his wife was going to hurt his kids. He said he needed help.”

  “I’ll bet.” Glitsky was thinking that Ann Kensing was smart to lock him out. “But you got there and what?”

  “Well, the first thing, she was on the ground, on the sidewalk at the bottom of the stoop. There were steps, you know, going up to the house. The husband was still at the top, just standing there. Three kids were down with her, screaming bloody murder. We didn’t know—it could have gone any way from that situation, sir. So we both pulled our pieces and approached the suspect, who at that time we thought was the guy.”

  “And how was he?”

  “Cooperative, scared. He wanted to go and see how his wife was, but we had him freeze. He had his hands up and didn’t move a muscle, which was good. From what we see so far, we’re taking him downtown at that point.”

  “Okay,” Glitsky said. “What changed that?”

  After a short hesitation, Page started again. “The main thing was, I talked to him. The first thing he said, I mean he’s reaching for the sky and bleeding like a pig out of his face, and the first thing he does is thank me for getting there so fast.”

  “He thanked you?”

  “Yes, sir, which makes it like the first time I’ve ever had that in a DD. You know what I’m saying?”

  Glitsky did know. Usually, by the time the police got involved in a domestic dispute, the gentler social amenities, especially extended to the cops coming to break up the fight, weren’t in the equation anymore. “Go on.”