Dismas Hardy: Nothing But The Truth Part 14

And now they were covered again, the drapes pulled closed.

He crossed the living room again, the dining area with its seating nook, trying to remember, growing more sure of it. Neither he nor Canetta had come anywhere near this area last night. And as Hardy was leaving, he'd glanced back at the room one last time - the French doors stuck in his mind, and that meant the drapes hadn't been pulled closed.

Moving them aside again, he pushed open one of the doors and stepped back out on to the balcony, over to its edge. It still was a long way down. Fighting vertigo, he backed up a step. Nothing had been moved, nothing had changed.

So somebody had pulled the drapes against the unlikely event that he would be seen moving around twelve floors up at the scene of a murder.

A last glance and Hardy was inside, this time pulling the drapes behind him. He still had the gun in his hand. 'h.e.l.lo,' he called out. 'Anybody here?'

Silence.

Flicking the hall and room lights on before him, he took a tour of the back rooms, as he and Canetta had done last night. Nothing looked disturbed. Even the office, presumably the location of Bree's important files, was as he'd last seen it.

Except for one thing. The counter on the answering machine, which last night had read '8,' now was a zero.

All the messages had been erased.

PART TWO.

14.

Sat.u.r.day morning in an empty house. Gradually over the past several years, but chronically it seemed in the last few months, Hardy wasn't happy at home. Kids constantly underfoot, Frannie with her women friends, talking about kids mostly. Kids fighting, discipline. Kids' sports, games, school, homework, lessons, meals they didn't eat, pets they didn't care for. Kids kids kids.

Whenever anyone asked him directly, he always said he loved his own kids, and he thought he did. But if he had it to do over, being honest with himself, he had doubts.

When they'd started out, Frannie and he had read all the books about marriages coping with the changes of a growing family. Hardy had often wondered since why somebody hadn't written the real book, called 'Children? Don't!' Because he'd come to believe that having a family didn't simply change things - it ended that earlier existence. You might go into it thinking you were retaining the essentials of the old life, merely adding to its richness and variety. But in a few years you had a whole new life, and it felt as if none of it was really yours.

He'd come around to accepting as absolute fact that paradise would be sleeping in on a Sat.u.r.day and waking up to an empty, quiet house. Maybe one that would stay that way.

Now, doing it, suddenly he wasn't so sure.

The sun was in his eyes. He threw a forearm over them, then squinted out his bedroom window over the city. Where was he, anyway? It came back to him - he'd slept in his clothes, cras.h.i.+ng on the bed. The gun was on his reading table, where the clock read eight thirty. He must have been a zombie on wheels. He didn't remember anything about driving home, where he'd parked, letting himself in.

G.o.d, it was quiet.

Bones creaking, he forced himself to sit up, saw the gun and reached for it.

He got up and went into the bathroom, throwing cold water on his face, trying to wake all the way up. Through the rooms, then to the front door, which he'd locked, then back down the long hallway to the kitchen. The house felt hollow, as though the soul of it had been sucked out. The kids, he realized. Frannie.

It struck him forcibly - a revelation. Standing by his st.u.r.dy, rough-hewn table in a well-equipped and beautiful kitchen on a fantastic Indian summer morning, he felt nothing but an underlying sense of terror, a vast pervasive unease.

This was the alternative.

But he had work to do, and yesterday had been a reminder that the engine wouldn't work without fuel. His black and ancient cast-iron pan was in its place on the back burner. No matter what he cooked in it, nothing ever stuck. He cleaned it only with salt and a wipe with a rag. Since Hardy had first cured it, the pan had never known detergent or water, and now its surface was a flat black pearl.

Turning the gas on under it, he threw down a thin layer of salt from the shaker, then crossed to the refrigerator. He grabbed a couple of eggs. Evidently Frannie had been marinating filet mignons for Thursday night when the grand jury session had intervened. Hardy picked one of the steaks from its ceramic bowl and dropped it into the pan, then broke an egg on either side of it.

There was a loaf of sourdough in its bag by the bread drawer and he sliced off about a third of it, cut it down the middle, poured some olive oil on to one of the cut sides, and placed it next to the sizzling steak.

While everything cooked on one side, he put on a pot of coffee, then turned the bread and the meat, laid the eggs on the toasted side, broke the yolks, turned off the pan, and went in to shower.

The day, when he hit the street outside, was impossibly bright, warm, and fragrant. He felt hopeful and motivated, a far cry from how he'd woken up, when he couldn't figure out a move and then - unable to focus - hadn't been able to locate his car for ten minutes.

But running on automatic, he knew that whatever else he did he had to go to Erin's first, to check in and see Vincent and Rebecca, make sure they were getting along all right at their grandmother's. And that visit had provided him with a bonus as well as the usual territorial disputes.

Last night Ed and Erin had taken them to the Planetarium and they were telling him about all they had learned, and the cool way the night sky came up. Vincent didn't believe it was an optical illusion. He was sure it was the real night sky. 'It was. It was exactly the sky, Dad. They just opened the roof and there was the moon and the stars and everything.' Shooting a glare at Rebecca the literalist, daring her to contradict him.

But Hardy cut them off. 'I've seen it, too, Vin. It is the exact sky. I love that, too.' A warning eye at his girl - don't say anything. Let him have this one.

Finally he got to her. 'So, Beck, what'd you see?'

His daughter, always ready to show off a fact, no longer cared about the truth of the night sky. Her father had finessed Vincent and given her the floor and that was all that mattered. 'Well, the main thing was about, what's that moon, Vin?'

'I don't know, but around Jup-'

'Yeah, that's it. Around Jupiter, one of the moons has an atmosphere and water and everything you need for life.'

'What about heat?'

'Inside, Dad. Molten core and volcanoes. Just like a mile under the ocean here on earth. Where's the heat there? Inside. See?'

'Great. I bet it could happen.'

'Definitely. They even showed what could grow as if we were there. Some of them-'

'You know what I thought was the best thing?' Vincent had to get a word in.

'The Beck's not done, Vin. One more-'

'She'll never get done. She'll keep going till you have to go.'

Hardy thought of a new name for his 'don't have that child' book - The Endless Referee. But he sighed. 'Beck? Are you almost done?'

But she must have been truly happy to have her dad there, or else wanted nothing more than to please him, which did happen. She hesitated only a second before smiling. 'He can go.'

'OK, Vin, what did you think was the best thing?'

The boy was so thrilled with his good fortune - interrupting his sister and it worked! - that for a moment Hardy thought he'd forgotten what he was going to say. This happened all the time, and invariably made Vincent cry. But it was, suddenly, a morning for miracles. The fact had come back to him. 'How you can see a star when you can't see it?'

It must have been obvious that Hardy didn't understand.

Vincent tried it another way. 'When it's too dim, when you can't see it otherwise.'

'What is?'

'A star, or a planet, or anything in the sky. If it's really dim, the way you see it is you don't look right at it. You look to the side. We did it. It really works.'

So when Hardy left, his next stop wasn't Frannie or Abe or his reporter friend Jeff Elliot to catch up on the Beaumont case.

At his son's suggestion, he wasn't going to look directly at it for a while. He still had clients and phone messages and paperwork so he went to his office to attend to those.

And sure enough, somewhere in the middle of that, he remembered that Phil Canetta had stood behind him with his spiral pocket filing system, and he'd written down all the names on Ron's answering machine.

He had told Hardy he worked out of Central Station, so he looked up the number and made the call.

The Central Station, close to the border of Chinatown and North Beach, was where Hardy wanted to open his restaurant when he retired. Not that there weren't dozens of other fantastic dining establishments within a couple of blocks - Firenze by Night, Amelio's, Rose Pistola, the North Beach Restaurant, Caffe Sport, the Gold Spike - but the smells of coffee, breads, licorice, sesame, roasted duck, cheeses, fish, and sausages kept tourists in a near constant feeding frenzy.

Even the locals, such as Hardy, weren't immune. After his breakfast, he wasn't at all hungry, but as soon as he stepped out of his car and caught a whiff of it all, danged if he didn't think he could go for a little smackerel of something. It was a wonder, he thought, that the cops out of Central weren't the most overweight in the city.

Plus parking. The five-story public parking structure was directly across the street and would never under any conditions be approved by today's city planners because, after all, what kind of political statement could a parking structure make? Its only purpose would be functional, and the shakers in the city hadn't cared about that issue in years and years.

Hardy was walking out of its utilitarian perfection now, trying to figure whom he could bribe to condemn the station building so he and maybe David Freeman could open some hip new spot there. Somebody had done it recently with Mel Belli's old building and you couldn't get inside the place now. Freeman, another old lawyer, might react to the precedent, and certainly he'd know whom to bribe.

Canetta cut a completely different figure in his uniform. With the three stripes on his arm, his handcuffs, bullet belt, gun, and nightstick, he was definitely a cop through and through. He appeared more substantial than he'd been the other night - heavier, older, thicker in the chest.

Hardy had arrived at what might be considered early lunchtime, and Canetta obviously wanted to get away from the station if he was going to talk about any of this.

They stopped at Molinari's Deli so Canetta could get a sandwich - mortadella and Swiss with the waxy sharp pepperoncini Hardy loved and usually couldn't resist, although today he did. He bought a large Pellegrino water instead.

They walked up Columbus to Was.h.i.+ngton Square. A few minutes of small talk - an update on Frannie - brought them to an unoccupied bench directly across from the twin spires of Sts Peter and Paul. Coit Tower presided over the row of buildings to their right. In front of them, a bare-chested man with gray hair in a long pony tail was trying to train an Irish setter to fetch a frisbee.

Canetta unwrapped his sandwich and Hardy started talking. Somebody had been in the penthouse and at least erased the tape. Perhaps they'd taken something as well.

Canetta let a few seconds pa.s.s, looked sideways at Hardy, fiddled with his sandwich wrapper. 'That was me.'

Hardy tried not to show his surprise. 'You went back? After we left last night?'

A bite of sandwich. A long time chewing. Then a nod. 'I already had who'd called, right? Wrote 'em all down.' He patted his back pocket, where he kept his notebook. Then he went on, explaining, 'My answering machine at home, it only takes nine messages. I figured his might be the same. And if somebody else called him, I didn't want the machine full up.'

'Makes sense,' Hardy said, although that wasn't what he thought. But it was a done deed. And in any event, Canetta was going on. 'You know, they always say it's the husband.'

Hardy nodded. 'I used to hear that a lot when I was a cop. Now I'm not so sure it's true.'

'You were a cop?' Canetta looked him over with new eyes.

'It's been a few years, but just after 'Nam, before I went to law school, I walked a beat. Glitsky was my partner, matter of fact.'

A moment's reflection while this settled. Then a question. 'So the head of homicide's your old buddy, and you're coming to me?'

'I'm the one whose wife's in jail. Glitsky's got two guys on the investigation, but it's three weeks old now and they're don't have a thing.'

'And you think you can help them?'

'No. I think I can help me.'

Canetta liked that and smiled. 'Little slow for you are they, huh? The suits?'

And there it was again, the animosity between the street police and the inspectors. Hardy had picked up a trace of it the first night and, not looking directly at it, it had seemed he might be able to get something out of it.

But he had to play the hand close. 'The way I see it is this. They're holding my wife because of something she knows about Ron, right?'

'OK.'

'Because Ron's their suspect?' Another nod.

'So if I can give them somebody else, anybody but Ron, the heat's off Frannie. They'll let her go, since what she knows isn't part of a murder.'

He could see that the idea appealed to Canetta. The strategic considerations were provocative enough, but suddenly there was something more - the chance to show up the inspectors downtown. If Canetta was any part of the solution to a homicide, he'd get a h.e.l.l of a lot of print and even more prestige. 'I told you the other night and I'll say it again, I think it's Bree's work. And you're saying you'd start with the phone messages?'

Hardy nodded. 'Ron had calls from both of Bree's camps. So I'm asking myself why they'd call Ron. What was in those files one of them talked about?'

'You're saying that was why she was killed.' His sandwich now forgotten, Canetta was already digging for his notebook.

'Not exactly. I'm saying if it wasn't Ron - and for my own reasons I'd prefer it wasn't - then this is the next rock to look under.'

'Valens and Jim Pierce?'

'Yeah. What?'

Canetta's eyes had narrowed. He was staring out across the park. 'Nothing really, except I know Pierce a little - that freelance security work I told you about.'

'And?'

A shrug. 'I don't think I should talk to him about any of this. He knows I'm not in homicide and he'd bust my sorry a.s.s.'

This made sense, and Hardy agreed easily enough. 'But how about some of these others? You still in? This Marie, for example. Who's she?'

Canetta answered with a guarded enthusiasm. Clearly, he still wanted to be part of this, but he wasn't going to show how much. 'The insurance guy would probably be the easiest one to get a hold of,' he said. 'Bill Tilton. If he's local, he's probably listed.'

Hardy had his own notebook out now, and was copying the names. He planned to see Ron later today and get many of these answers, but Canetta could be useful - a badge in his service. 'OK, we've got one other person with a last name, this woman Sasaka, with the mystery appointment.'

A thought struck Canetta. 'Ron knew a lot of women, didn't he?'

Hardy didn't want to pursue that. Ron wasn't going to be his focus. Tapping his fingers on his pad, making a show of thinking, he finally looked up. 'What was the security work where you met Bree?'

'Hotel stuff. Bunch of suits down from Sacramento, lobbyists, politicians, one time the Vice President, secret service yada yada.'