Treasure Hunt

by John Lescroart

  “Assuming that Devin and Sarah are going to want to talk to me.”

  “I am assuming that.”

  “Well, sad to say, that’s not too likely going to happen either.” Hunt pushed off from the wall behind him. “I’ve tried to keep a low profile around this, but Dev and I kind of stopped hanging out together after Gina ate him on the stand on the Gorman case.”

  “Yeah, I remember. But didn’t he eventually get the collar on the real killer in that one? Because of you and Gina?”

  “He did.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, I agree. He should have been overcome with gratitude at how we burnished his flagging career. But somehow he didn’t see it that way. He kind of thinks I set him up and Gina screwed him. And she did make him look bad at the trial. No, worse than bad. Incompetent and stupid. And I helped her.” He shook his head. “So, no is the answer. No to pretty much anything I’ve asked him since.”

  “But this is something new. And it will save him time and effort, maybe lots of both. He’s got to see that. And if he doesn’t, Russo will.”

  “Maybe.” Hunt, now back at the stoop, lowered himself down again, finished his lemonade in a long swig, and placed the beaded glass on the cement between his legs. “I’ll think about it. And I do appreciate you trying to keep us alive here, Mick, but I’m not sure this is the way. We need more than one case.”

  “Well, maybe not. We do good on one case, people might start remembering we do good work in general. What I’m just trying to do is get us back on the street. Get you back on the street, instead of sitting in the office waiting for the phone to ring.”

  Hunt let out a frustrated sigh. “Not to be defensive, Mick, but I’ve been doing a little more than that. A lot more. The way it usually works is your clients come to you. And nobody seems hot to let us play.”

  “So we make our own game. We can bring these people in, I know we can.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Mickey took a breath, hesitating. Alicia Thorpe was the other foci in the elliptical orbit they needed to enter, and so far he’d left her out of it entirely. “There’s a woman who may already be a suspect who knew Como and most of what he was working on. She can put us in touch with the people we need to talk to.”

  Hunt looked across at him. “She’s a suspect?”

  “She might be a suspect. Juhle and Russo talked to her.”

  “She got an alibi?”

  “For when? Nobody’s got a clue when Como actually died.”

  “So that answer would be no, no alibi,” Hunt said. “And otherwise we know she’s not guilty because . . . ?”

  Mickey let out a breath. “She’s not guilty, Wyatt. Originally, she wanted to hire us to find out who killed Como. She wouldn’t have done that if she did it.”

  “There’s so many arguments against that one that I don’t know where to start.” Still, Hunt held up his hand again and sucked on his cheek for a minute. “She good- looking enough to be affecting your judgment?”

  “I hope not.” Mickey turned to him, met his eye, nodded. “Possibly, but I don’t think so. For the record, though, I would marry her tomorrow if she’d have me.”

  “Good to know. And she was involved with Como? Intimately?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe.”

  “But she didn’t kill him?”

  Again, Mickey hesitated. “Let’s say that I think we can choose to believe she didn’t and not have it come back and bite us. It’s a calculated risk and also pretty much the only game in town. And meanwhile, she can put us in touch with people who will pay you to be back in that game. Maybe that’s short-term, but guess what?”

  “Tell me.”

  “No. You told me about ten minutes ago. If you’re in the game, you’re gonna win it. Or die or kill somebody trying.”

  Hunt chuckled. “That’s flattering, Mick, it really is. But that was basketball.”

  Mickey Dade shook his head, truly amused that his boss didn’t seem to realize this fundamental truth about himself. “Don’t kid yourself, Wyatt. That’s any game you get yourself into.”

  6

  At six o’clock that night, Mickey checked the coals in his Weber kettle cooker and then came back into his purple kitchen. He walked over and opened the refrigerator, atypically loaded with food. After leaving Hunt’s, he’d gone down to the Ferry Building, and though it was by then late in the day, the various stores there still had a selection of foodstuffs that put to shame most of the other, regular grocery stores in the city. Now he pulled out the paper-wrapped leg of lamb he was going to butterfly and barbecue after smearing it with garlic, rosemary, salt, pepper, soy sauce, and lemon juice. He brought it over to his cutting board, where he’d piled up the ingredients you really didn’t want to refrigerate if you didn’t have to: heirloom tomatoes—green, purple, yellow—bunches of Thai basil, thyme and rosemary, two heads of garlic, a lemon.

  He opened a bottle of Chianti and poured himself half a juice glass full.

  Grabbing his favorite six- inch carbon-steel Sabatier knife off the magnetic holder on the wall, he honed it to a razor’s edge with his sharpening steel. Then, whistling, he pulled the leg of lamb toward him and started cutting.

  Five minutes later, Mickey laid the lamb out flat on the grill and covered it. Then, back in the kitchen, he took a saucepan down from its rung on the wall. He put it on the stove over high heat, throwing in half a stick of butter and some olive oil. In another minute, he’d added chopped shallots, garlic, thyme and rosemary, some allspice, and three cups of the chicken stock that he made from scratch whenever he started to get low. Some things you simply couldn’t cut corners on.

  He stirred a minute more, added a cup and a half of Arborio rice and some orzo, then turned the heat all the way down to the lowest simmer and covered the pan. This was his own personal version of Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat, a simple pilaf, but he liked his strategy of first making the kitchen so fragrant that it drew his roommates to the feast whether they were inclined to eat or not.

  And sure enough, here was Jim following his nose through the doorway from the living room. “That smells edible.”

  “Should be,” Mick said, pouring wine into another juice glass and holding it out for him. “You ready yet for some hair of the dog?”

  “That was one ugly fucking dog,” Jim said, taking the glass, “but salut.” He and Mickey clicked their thick glasses and both sipped.

  And then Tamara appeared in the doorway. “I’m not really hungry, but I might have a little of whatever that is.”

  “We call that a side dish, Tam. It goes with the other stuff that’ll be ready in a half hour.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I’ll have much, but I’ll sit with you guys.”

  Mickey handed her a half glass of wine. “Whatever,” he said.

  Tamara and Jim sat on the green benches on either side of the table, dipping the still-warm sourdough bread into a small bowl of extra virgin olive oil. The finished, medium- rare lamb rested under foil on the cutting board as Mickey finished cutting the tomatoes for “Donna’s famous salad” (named after an old girlfriend and early cooking influence), which was going into his big wooden bowl and was composed only of tomatoes, basil, salt, and balsamic vinegar, no oil.

  When the doorbell rang, Mickey turned away from the cutting board. “Tam,” Mickey said, “you want to get that?”

  She turned the knob and pulled the door open and just stood there. “Wyatt?”

  “Hey, Tam.”

  “I don’t . . .” She inhaled, then let out the breath. “I . . .”

  “Mick didn’t tell you I was coming over?”

  “No.” Another long exhale. “He knew if I’d known, I might have left.”

  “Why would you have done that?”

  “Because . . . because I don’t know. I didn’t want to face you.”

  “You want,” Hunt said, “I can go now.”

  “No. Don’t be stupid. You’re here.”
<
br />   “I can just as easily be gone, Tam. I don’t want to cause you any pain.” He hesitated. “Mickey should have told you he asked me.”

  “No,” she said. “He was right not to. He’s trying to force me to change the way I’ve been lately.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Look at me.”

  “You look fine.”

  “No, I don’t. I look like death.”

  “Death should look so good.”

  She snapped at him. “Don’t bullshit me, Wyatt. If you’re going to patronize me, then maybe you really ought to get out of here.”

  Hunt’s gaze went hard. “And then what? I mean between you and me. That’s just it?”

  “Even if it is, what does it matter?”

  “I hope you don’t mean that.” He took a breath. “It matters because, like it or not, you’re family, and I don’t have so much of it that I can afford to lose any of it. I love you, Tam. I’m always going to love you. Don’t you know that?”

  Looking down, she shook her head. “Sometimes I feel I don’t know anything anymore. I thought you hated me.”

  “I could never hate you. Why would I hate you?”

  “Because I left.” She met his eyes. “I’m so so sorry. I just couldn’t handle”—a tear broke and trickled down her cheek—“any of it.”

  “That was all right. I understood. It was fine.” Hunt brushed the tear away with a finger. “You handled what you could and did what you had to do, Tam. You’ve got nothing to be sorry about.”

  “No? Then why do I feel like if I’d stayed on . . . maybe things with the business wouldn’t have gotten so bad?”

  “That was nothing to do with you. You in the office wouldn’t have made any difference, wouldn’t have brought in any clients. That’s all on me and nobody else. What’s gone wrong is because of me and the decisions I made.”

  Hunt stepped toward her. “Whatever you want to do, Tam, whenever you want to do it, I’m with you. I’m on your side. Really,” he said. “Really and always.”

  She dropped her head and shook it one last time before bringing her gaze up to look at him, as something seemed to break in her. “Oh, Wyatt. I’m so sorry. I’m such a mess.” And then suddenly she was in his embrace. Her shoulders let go, deep sobs racked her body, and she held on to him with all of her might.

  Hunt brought his arms up tightly around her.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered.

  Her visible loss of weight had shocked Hunt when she’d first opened the door, and now, holding her, he couldn’t help but be aware of how fragile she’d become. He would let her cry it out.

  Gradually he brought a hand up to stroke her hair gently. “Shh,” he comforted her after a time, as the sobbing abated and she was starting to settle. “Shh. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  While Tamara went into the bathroom for a minute to get the swelling out of her eyes, Hunt came into the kitchen, nodded a hello at Mickey, and slid in next to Parr. “What’s a man got to do to get a drink around here?” he asked.

  Parr nodded in commiseration. “He can be mighty light with a pour, that grandson of mine. I don’t know where he could have picked up that bad habit.”

  Mickey, coming over with a fresh glass and the bottle of Chianti, said, “Yeah, well, what Jim here’s not telling you is that he’s still recovering from a few too many nonlight pours yesterday.”

  “A rare anomaly for which I’ve already endured too much abuse from my offspring.” Parr picked up the wine and filled Wyatt’s glass, then poured a little more into his own. The two men clicked their glasses. “Mr. Hunt, it’s good to see you.”

  “You, too, James. You too.” Hunt put his arm around Parr’s shoulders and drew him toward him. “You been keeping out of trouble?”

  “Hah!” Mickey said.

  “I had a few drinks yesterday in mourning for my friend, Dominic Como,” Parr said. “And the boy here decided he had to come drive me home from the Shamrock.”

  Mickey turned from slicing the meat. “He’s leaving out the part about the bartender calling me at work, saying it was either going to be me or the cops.”

  “That would never have happened.”

  “Well, luckily, we didn’t have to find that out, did we?” Mickey popped a slice of lamb into his mouth. “And this is all the gratitude I get.”

  “It’s a heartless world,” Hunt said. “I guess I shouldn’t have talked Jim into taking in you and Tam all those years ago. You wouldn’t have had all this aggravation.”

  “He wouldn’t have had all the aggravation?” Parr said. “You want to talk aggravation, try living with two teenagers for any given week, much less the six or eight years it actually takes.”

  “Seven,” Mickey said without missing a beat.

  Parr turned on him. “Seven what?”

  “Seven years. People are teenagers for seven years.”

  “If you want to grant that teenagers are people at all and not an entirely different species. And where do you get seven?”

  Mickey held up fingers as he counted. “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Seven.”

  Parr turned to Hunt. “The boy is such a literalist.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Hunt said.

  Astonishingly, the warm weather was holding. After the dinner and its attendant accolades for the chef, Mickey suggested they take his bottle of homemade limoncello up to the roof, where there was a mellow dim light from a Japanese lantern, more room, a better view, and more comfortable chairs than the kitchen benches. So the three males walked up the outdoor stairway and out onto the deck that got used on every single one of the nineteen days a year that the nights were pleasant.

  Everybody had helped bus the table, but at her insistence, Tamara stayed down to wash the dishes—she’d be up soon. So after they all got seated, Hunt checked behind him to make sure she was not coming up the stairs, then leaned in over the round deck table. “Is she seeing a doctor?”

  Mickey shook his head. “No. She won’t do that.”

  “Why not? How much has she lost?”

  “At least twenty pounds, though she says less.”

  At this, Parr coughed. “That much? Are you sure about that?”

  Mickey nodded. “I asked her yesterday. She said eighteen, maybe more, so I’m thinking probably twenty or twenty-five.”

  “That’s too much,” Parr said. “I knew she was losing some weight, but I should have seen it was that much.”

  “It’s been gradual, Jim. I didn’t see it myself until I happened to notice yesterday after all the time I’ve been staying away. So you don’t have to beat yourself up over it. But you’re right, Wyatt, it’s serious enough. She says nothing tastes like anything.”

  “Well,” Hunt said, “that lamb sure tasted like something, and so did the pilaf and that salad. Have you been making food like that every night?”

  “No.”

  “Good. ’Cause if she had that in front of her and didn’t eat it . . .”

  “Well,” Mickey said, “I haven’t been home here a lot the past few months.” He hunched his shoulders. “Without me, I think these guys live on macaroni and cheese, and not much of that.”

  “Hey!” Parr said. “I eat an egg every morning.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Mickey said. Then, to Hunt, “And Jim here has a whopping large egg every single day, which is why he’s so fit, relatively.”

  “Tam doesn’t make a big deal of it,” Parr said. “She just doesn’t put food in her mouth, or not much of it.” Then, again, “I should have noticed.”

  “Well,” Hunt said, “we’ve all noticed now.”

  And then Tamara was up there with them and everybody had their limoncello in front of them in matching little blue glasses.

  And, finally, Hunt got around to Mickey’s suggestion about Como. “I checked after you left, Mick, and you’re right. Nobody’s put up a reward yet.”

  “Are you working on th
at?” Tamara asked.

  “Not yet,” Mickey replied.

  Hunt went on. “Mickey got the idea that we could drum up some business, go to some of these charities. The good news is I called the PD hotline number this afternoon, and there’s nothing about Como. So, so far, at least, the PD doesn’t have anything special going on around his murder. It’s just an answering machine saying they’ll get back to you. So the door may be open. The bad news is that the door might not necessarily be open for us.”

  “Have you talked to Juhle?” Mickey asked.

  Hunt shook his head no. “I thought I’d hit him at home tomorrow. I think his wife still might like me, although Connie’s got that loyal-cop-wife gene and I can’t be positive. But she and I have been through a lot together too. So it’s a faint hope. Anyway, I’ll find out soon enough.”

  Parr cleared his throat. “Who’s Juhle?”

  “Friend of mine,” Hunt said. “Also the homicide cop who pulled the case.”

  “And why will you be talking to him, about this reward, I mean?”

  “Because if we do have any luck drumming up this business, we’ll have to coordinate anything we do with what they’re doing. Sometimes cops don’t like to share, maybe you’ve heard. Juhle might take some convincing that this could be helpful to him.” Seeing the questioning look on Parr’s face, he asked, “What?”

  “It just seems a little cart before the horse is all. I mean, if there’s no reward yet, what are you bringing to the party? Wouldn’t your position be a hell of a lot stronger if you had something tangible to offer?”

  “That’s a good call,” Mickey conceded. “Wait until we get some of these charities on board, then talk to Juhle.”

  “You could do that,” Parr said. “Or just save yourselves a lot of time and go straight to Len Turner.”

  Hunt spoke up. “Who’s he?”

  “He’s pretty much the Man around nonprofits in the city.”

  “In what way?” Hunt asked. “I’ve never heard of him.”