After taking the expected grief from Jackman about the merits of the deal they’d made about his client, Hardy listened with growing interest as Glitsky went on about the second proven Portola victim, Shirley Watrous, and Rajan Bhutan. The consensus seemed to be that the two series of multiple murders were unrelated, and that Bhutan remained the prime suspect for the people on Kensing’s list. They’d talked to him at length this afternoon, and Glitsky had sent two inspectors over to his home shortly after that with a search warrant.
The inspectors sent up a rousing huzzah when the rookies arrived. Glitsky turned and glared at the world in general, then motioned Fisk and Bracco over to talk with the big boys.
Darrel and Harlen, in Hardy’s estimation, had accomplished quite a lot in a very short time. Since they’d just arrived from Markham’s old neighborhood and their investigations about the car, Glitsky let Fisk expound on that topic, although his skepticism was evident. He proudly showed off to the assemblage a composite sketch of the car’s driver. Hardy was glad to note that the woman bore no resemblance to Judith Cohn except for a halo of unkempt dark hair.
As the composite went from hand to hand around the room, Fisk then announced that their witness, a teenage girl named Lexi Rath, had tentatively identified the make and model of the car that had nearly hit her, and presumably hit Tim Markham. It was a Dodge Dart, probably a model from the last year of the sixties or the early seventies. Fisk had already contacted the DMV and discovered that there were only twenty-three such cars registered in all of San Francisco County. When he’d told Motor Vehicles that they were investigating a homicide, they faxed him the names right away. He now had addresses and registered owners for each of the cars, and with luck, by tomorrow he’d have seen most of them.
“Any of the names look familiar, Harlen?” Glitsky asked. “Related to Parnassus or Markham in any way?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, good try anyway. If we get the car, that’s something all by itself. Keep looking.”
Hardy knew Glitsky well enough to see that he was humoring Fisk about his supposed detective work, but he didn’t want to ruin his inspector’s day, or dampen his enthusiasm. The man had put in a decent amount of effort, and perhaps it still might all lead someplace. Hardy thought a show of interest on his own part wouldn’t be out of place. “Could I get a copy of that list, Inspector?”
Fisk looked the question over to Glitsky, who nodded. But it was clear the lieutenant’s real area of concern lay elsewhere, in the alibis for the time of Carla’s death. “Darrel,” he said, turning to Bracco, “did you get anything more on Driscoll?”
“I don’t think Harlen was quite done, sir.”
His patience straining, Glitsky yielded the floor back to Fisk. “I thought I’d try to make amends for my giveaway to Dr. Ross. So I called my aunt Kathy—Kathy West,” he explained to the rest of the room, “and told her what I’d done and what had happened.”
“Which was what, Harlen?” Glitsky prompted him, much to Hardy’s satisfaction.
He outlined the story briefly—Ross and his wife and his alibi. Then he went on. “I asked her—Aunt Kathy—if she could get in touch with Nancy Ross, just as a friend, and find out if her husband had called her and asked her to change her memory.”
“But it doesn’t matter. The wife would never testify any way,” Marlene Ash objected, repeating Glitsky’s earlier argument.
Jackman added to that. “Your aunt’s testimony would be hearsay anyway, and probably inadmissible in any event. Isn’t that right, Diz?”
But Hardy was no longer interested in parsing the law. He wanted answers and information. He saw that Fisk had begun to wilt under the heat of the lawyer’s questions. He wanted to keep him talking, to find out what had happened. “So what did she say anyway, Inspector? Your aunt.”
“That Ross had called his wife and told her she was mistaken about that night. He’d been home by ten. She had to remember that. It was important.” He looked around the room again. “But Nancy told Aunt Kathy that in fact he hadn’t been home by ten, although of course she’d back him up if it was important to Malachi. It was probably some big hush-hush business deal. But she was sure that he hadn’t gotten home until way after midnight, which is when she’d gone to sleep.”
“Still,” Glitsky said, “all that means is that he didn’t go straight home.” Hardy was reminded of Eric Kensing and all the variables on that score. “Is there any sign that he went to Carla’s, though? Have you got any evidence or testimony or hint of anything putting him there?”
Fisk’s face fell. “No, sir.”
Glitsky threw him a bone. “I’m not saying it’s not something, Harlen. And it does make up for the morning, okay. Keep on it. Now, Darrel, how about Driscoll?”
“He did make that phone call, all right. I talked to Roger—the roommate—and got the phone bill. Forty-eight minutes, beginning at nine forty-six.”
Everybody worked it out in their heads. Glitsky said, “So he couldn’t have made it to Carla’s?”
Bracco seemed to agree. “He would have had to fly.”
It was the bottom of the fourth inning and Hardy was standing in the third base coach’s box at Pop Hicks Field in the Presidio. It was a great field in terrific condition in a city starved for playgrounds, but in typical San Francisco fashion, the Little League was probably going to get kicked off it before too long. They might be forced to relocate to a field on Treasure Island, in the middle of the bay. This was because someone had raised the issue that there might be toxins in the dirt. Though none had been found to date, every news story on the issue had pointed out that the Presidio had been a military base for years, after all, and who knew what those military types had dumped where. Probably there was poison everywhere—mustard gas, anthrax, battery acid. Hardy considered it foreordained that they’d shut the field down.
But tonight, it was still a wonderful venue for kids’ baseball and Vincent had just opened the Tigers’ half of the inning by doubling to the gap in left field—his second double of the night. He was now dancing down the baseline, trying to draw a throw from the pitcher.
Hardy’s mind was not as much on the game as it could have been. After the meeting in homicide had broken up and Fisk and Bracco had left, he’d stayed around jawing with Glitsky and Treya, Marlene and Clarence for a few minutes. Marlene seemed to be excited about the prospect of getting her hands on Brendan Driscoll’s computer disks, but since Hardy had spent a good portion of the afternoon reviewing those printouts to no avail, he didn’t quite share her enthusiasm. He still had copies of Markham’s cryptic notes in his briefcase—he thought he’d work on those puzzles over the next few days in his free time.
And in fact, he was doing it now, though still going mostly nowhere.
Clarence, obviously frustrated at the pace of the investigation so far, announced that he had heard from the mayor. His Honor had gotten wind of the second verified homicide from Kensing’s list and wasn’t much impressed with the DA’s subtle approach to Parnassus and its troubles. The HMO was a major contractor with the city and their business practices were seriously suspect. Clarence was now of a mind to go and seize all of its records for the grand jury’s perusal and forget about avoiding a possible panic among city workers. People were already beginning to panic—the mayor’s office was fielding about fifty calls a day. It was high time to put Parnassus in receivership and turn the grand jury and another team of homicide inspectors concurrently onto this second set of homicides. Whether or not there was any relation between them and the Markham deaths, they were a big deal in their own right.
The mayor was adamant that there had to at least be the appearance of progress—he mentioned creating a special task force if there weren’t some results soon. Everybody knew what that would mean. Meddling by amateurs, political deals, compromise, and quite probably no resolution ever. The message was clear: If Jackman wanted to get any credit for fixing this mess, this was his chance and he’d better tak
e it.
The next batter lined a sharp single on one hop to the left fielder and Vincent, running on the hit, was to third base and by him before Hardy got his head back into the game. The throw to home beat his son by fifteen feet. After the play, Mitch, the manager, came down to the end of the dugout. “Diz,” he said urgently, “you gotta tell him to hold up on that play. Give him a sign. Come on now. You’re coaching. Let’s get in the game.”
The Tigers won in spite of Hardy’s mental error, and the team went for pizza to a place on Clement. The whole family had attended the game and didn’t get home until 9:30. Frannie and Rebecca had become Survivor fanatics—they’d taped the evening’s show and went straight in to watch the replay while Vincent showered, did the last of his homework, made it for the last half of the program. Bedtime rituals consumed another hour, so it was almost midnight when Hardy and Frannie dragged themselves up the stairs to their bedroom.
He came up behind her and put his arms around her as she was brushing her teeth, put his lips against the side of her neck. “I will come straight to bed if you’re even remotely alive.” They’d been having a decent run of physical contact and he was telling her they could keep the string alive if she wanted, but he knew she was exhausted.
She leaned back into him, managed a goofy smile in the mirror through the toothpaste. “I don’t think I am. Aren’t you tired?”
“Not really. Evidently I slept during Vinnie’s game.”
“It wasn’t that bad. So what are you going to do?”
“I’ve got some reading material in my briefcase. Maybe if I blur my eyes just right, I can get it to make some sense.”
He was sitting at the desk in the bedroom, five of Driscoll’s purloined pages spread out before him. He wasn’t completely sure why these five had made his cut—none had more than a couple of lines. But something about each of them had seemed pregnant enough with some kind of hidden meaning to warrant one more round of conjecture.
“See MA re: recom. on SS. Compare MR memo 10/24.”
“Talk to MR—address complaints re: hands on at Port. PPG ult.”
“Medras/Biosynth/MR.”
“Foley. Invest. $$$. Saratoga. DA? Layoff? Disc. w/C.”
“See Coz. re: punitive layoffs—MR. Document all. Prep. rpt. to board. Severance?”
And then a little voice said, “Go to sleep. This is not happening.” He must have made it to the bed because that’s where he was when he woke up.
34
Glitsky kissed his wife good-bye at the front door.
“If I’m around for lunch, I’ll call.”
“If I’m around, I might go out with you.” Treya gave him a mock-sad moue. “A year ago the mere thought of lunch with me would have made your morning. You’d have planned your whole day around it.”
“I know, but we’re married now, and you’re pregnant and all. It’s pretty natural, the romance going away with all that day-to-day stuff.”
She put an arm around his neck and brought her mouth up to his ear. “What was last night, then?”
“Last night?” Glitsky scratched at his scar, pretended not to remember. “Last night?”
She swung a hard elbow and caught him in the gut. “Oh, sorry.” A smile, then, “Shoot for lunch.”
Rubbing his stomach, he closed the door and came back into his kitchen, where Hardy sat at the table. He’d called an hour before and offered to drive Glitsky in to work, though he usually drove in with his wife. But Hardy thought he might have something on Markham, although he didn’t know what it was, and maybe Abe, now pulling up his chair, could help.
Hardy drummed his fingers. After twenty seconds, Glitsky said, “You want to stop that?” Then, “Ross looks like he’s in some kind of trouble, doesn’t he?” A minute later, he pulled one page over in front of him. “This one, maybe, it could be Mike Andreotti.”
“New to me,” Hardy said.
“The administrator at Portola. He’ll talk to you if I ask him to. He’s all cooperation with these homicides. I might even go with you. Where’d you get this stuff?”
“Jeff Elliot couldn’t make heads or tails of it. He said if I could, I was welcome to it.”
“Yeah, but where did it come from originally?”
“It was Markham’s, through Driscoll, then through Elliot.”
“Not exactly Tinkers to Evers to Chance.”
“No, but I’ll take it.”
“At this point”—Glitsky was getting up—“I’ll take anything.”
If at Glitsky’s last meeting with him, Andreotti had been at the edge of physical and nervous exhaustion, now he was the walking dead. He didn’t even bother rising from the chair behind his desk, didn’t wonder that the new man, something Hardy, wasn’t a policeman or a DA or even a reporter. He just didn’t have any more energy to expend. He’d been at work all night, dealing with a sick-out of his nurses, scared off either by the rumors or sensing an opportunity for leverage in their struggle for higher wages. He didn’t know and really at this point didn’t care. The ship was going down anyway, and he saw no way to stop it.
And now these men had a puzzle for him. He got a perverted kick out of that. He was so beat he’d have trouble with the rules of tic-tac-toe, and they wanted him to decipher this puzzle. It was funny, really, if he had the strength to laugh.
“See MA re: recom. on SS. Compare MR memo 10/24.”
“No idea,” he said.
The other fellow, Hardy, leaned forward slightly. “We believe the MR stands for Malachi Ross. Does that help?”
Glitsky had seen a lot of burnout in his job and read the signs here. He pulled the page around, facing him again. “See Mike Andreotti about his recommendations on SS. Compare with the Malachi Ross memo dated October twenty-fourth. Does that help? What’s SS?”
This time, there was no hesitation. “Sinustop.”
“And what was your recommendation?”
“Well, it wasn’t mine. I’m just the administrator, but the PPG recommended—”
“Excuse me,” Hardy said. “What’s the PPG?”
Andreotti blinked slowly, took a breath, and let it out. “The Parnassus Physicians’ Group. Basically, they’re the doctors that work here.”
“Okay.” Glitsky, staying with the program, continued, “And what did they recommend about Sinustop?”
“Just that we’d been inundated with samples, and that perhaps we should make it a policy for a while to go easy on giving the stuff out until more data got collected on it. Which now, in retrospect, was a smart suggestion.”
“But you didn’t implement it?” Hardy asked.
“No. Ross overrode it. He wrote a long memo justifying the position—I’ve got it somewhere here. I gather the stuff was medically pretty substandard. I’m not a doctor myself, but some of the senior staffers were appalled that our medical director would put his stamp on anything like that. So as usual, we compromised, and Malachi got what he wanted.”
“You don’t like him much.” Glitsky didn’t phrase it as a question.
But Andreotti merely raised his shoulders a centimeter. “People become pricks around money and money’s been so tight here for so long…” Another shrug. “If it wasn’t him, it would be somebody else.”
“Only a couple of weeks ago, it was Markham,” Hardy reminded him.
“No. It was still Ross. Ross has the passion for money. Markham just wanted to make a profit. There’s a difference.”
“What’s the difference?” Glitsky asked.
“Well, take Sinustop, for example. It didn’t have to be any issue at all, but Ross saw it saving us a million bucks a year, right to the bottom line. If there might be some downside, he was willing to risk it if it stemmed the bleeding.”
“And Markham wasn’t?”
“Sometimes, but nowhere near the way Ross did. You think it was Markham who made the call on Baby Emily? No chance.” He pointed at Hardy’s page again. “Anyway, I guess that’s why he wrote that note to himself. He t
hought Ross went too far there again.”
“What about you, Mr. Andreotti?” Glitsky asked. “What did you think?”
Another weary sigh. “I know this always sounds terrible, but I’m an administrator. I resist the temptation to play doctor. I follow orders.”
But Hardy had what he needed, and had already gotten a hint on something else. “If we may, sir,” he began, translating the second note as Glitsky had done. “Talk to Ross and address complaints about hands-on at Portola. Parnassus Physicians’ Group ult, which must be ultimatum.”
“It was.” This wasn’t any mystery to Andreotti. He actually almost seemed to perk up slightly. “Sometime last year, Ross started coming by the hospital all the time—drop-ins, he called them. Checking up on our physicians’ procedures on everything from birthing to surgeries to ER procedures first, making recommendations to save a buck here, a buck there. Later actually advising doctors what they ought to do right while they were treating their patients. Now, when you realize that even the lowliest GP has a self-image just a notch below God’s, you can imagine how popular these visits were. Finally, the PPG issued an ultimatum that he had to stop and, mostly, he did. At least enough to satisfy them.”
“But not completely?” Hardy wanted to be sure.
“No. But the drop-ins fell off from twenty a month to maybe five and he stopped giving orders disguised as advice.”
“Do you have any record of the days he came? The actual dates?” Hardy asked.
Andreotti pondered for a moment. “No, I doubt it. Why would we? He wasn’t on staff here, so there’d be no personnel record. He just dropped in. Why?”
The Dismas Hardy Novels Page 91