Dismas Hardy: Nothing But The Truth Part 22

Glitsky shrugged. 'It's the number-one snack food in Hawaii.'

'There's a strong recommendation. You're talking the same Hawaii where they actually eat poi? You ever eat poi? I wonder how they feel about Spam in Alaska, where they eat blubber?'

But Glitsky wasn't to be denied. 'They make it with seaweed and rice. It's a sus.h.i.+ dish, called spam musabi or something.'

Hardy turned around in his best announcer's voice. 'Ladies and gentlemen, in tonight's entry on "Bad Food Ideas," we're hearing that perennial favorite Spam and - are you ready for this? - seaweed linked as a gourmet treat. We're waiting for your calls to vote on whether this is, as it appears to be, a... Bad Food Idea.' He focused on Glitsky. 'Are you out of your mind?'

'I didn't make it up.' He got off his chair, though, and crossed the small room in a couple of steps. 'Come to think of it, though, I could eat something. What did you pull down?'

Hardy had selected two large Spaghettios with franks, an extra-large Chef Boyardee Ravioli. He was going to mix them, and was opening the cans. 'You got anything green in the refrigerator that's supposed to be?'

Glitsky went to check.

But now the dishes were in the sink and there wasn't much good-natured anything going down in the kitchen.

Hardy had gotten the short version of the immensely relevant Caloco doc.u.ment from Glitsky and now was leafing through it on his own. It was a 'Separated Employee's Audited Statement' and it did not make pretty reading.

While Bree worked for Caloco, it seemed she had a Platinum-Plus company Visa card with a credit limit of a hundred thousand dollars. When she quit the company, they had of course closed that account. But an auditor's review of Bree's records - routine after a certain level employee's termination or resignation - had subsequently revealed the existence of a second name authorized to sign on the account - Ron Beaumont.

Ron didn't work for Caloco and so this was unusual, but if it had stopped there, that would have probably been the end of it. According to the audit, Ron had never used the card and so the presence of his name on the account made no obvious financial difference to Caloco.

(Hardy couldn't help but recall the object lesson in Caloco's corporate culture that he'd learned earlier in the day when Jim Pierce, straight-faced, told him that some clerk in some department might notice a missing three billion dollars, but the corporate ent.i.ty would never miss it. If three billion was a drop in Caloco's bucket, a mere hundred grand was a molecule - invisible to the naked eye.) But the audit had turned up something else that was very disturbing. The electronic superhighway created its own version of a paper trail, and Bree Beaumont's card was linked going forward as the security instrument to another, Mellon Bank, Visa account. That account, with a credit limit of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, did show a regular history of purchases in San Francisco, all of them paid every month. The monthly accounts were sent to a Ronald Brewster at a post-office box. And n.o.body at Caloco had ever heard of Ron Brewster.

Hardy got to here and his stomach went hollow. He looked up. 'Didn't Caloco try to close the second account, the Brewster account?'

Glitsky had been sitting quietly, arms crossed, waiting for this. He shook his head. 'That's page three. The Mellon account had only used the Caloco account for security to open it. Far as Mellon was concerned, Ron Brewster was a great client with a five-year history of regular payments. No way are they closing the account. Plus the Mellon account, it's not using any of Caloco's money. So Ron's got himself a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar line of credit.' Glitsky leaned forward, elbows on the table. 'You'll also notice that the Mellon account doesn't include Bree as a signatory, only Ron. And guess what? Ron Brewster's signature looks a whole lot like Ron Beaumont's writing. We're dealing with a white-collar whiz kid here, Diz, on the run with a phony ID.'

Even for Hardy, familiar with the purported excuse for Ron's duplicity, it was difficult to remain neutral in the face of this. And he figured it would be impossible for Glitsky.

Which proved to be true. 'I'm going to throw Coleman and Batavia on to him first thing in the morning.'

'They working Sunday?'

'They are now.' A look. 'Are you telling me this doesn't make you sit up around Ron?'

'No,' Hardy agreed, 'I'll admit it makes him look a little weak.'

If Glitsky had a smile, he was wearing it now. 'A little weak, that's good. Weaker than a signed murder confession at any rate, but not by much. And that's not all. Check out page five.'

Hardy turned the pages quickly, glancing over the information, and as he scanned, Glitsky kept up the color commentary. 'That electronic linkage Caloco can access finds four other accounts connected to the Mellon Visa.' Hardy read the names. Ron Black. Ron Blake. Ron Burns. Ron Blanda. 'Guy's got a million dollars in credit. Five phony ident.i.ties. You gotta believe he's got pa.s.sports for all five.'

No argument there. 'It wouldn't surprise me at all. And you know how I hate to say this, but-'

Now Glitsky was smiling. 'But that doesn't make him a murderer. But I'll tell you something. It doesn't make him a boy scout either.'

Hardy had to agree. 'No. But why would any of this make him want to kill his wife? You got a theory on that?'

Clearly, this was still unsettled water for Glitsky. The scar through his lips went white as he thought about it. 'She must have been ignorant of the accounts. When she found out he was using them on her collateral from Caloco, she busted him for it, they fought, and it got out of hand.'

'So it was just a fight?' Hardy wasn't grinding any ax, but he did have a point to make. 'That's not murder one. It's not usually murder anything. At the most it's manslaughter, maybe even self-defense, which is no crime at all.'

'I don't care what the lawyers call it. It gets me the guy who killed Bree.'

'Maybe.' In the longish silence Hardy was aware of Abe's father's regular breathing in the living room. 'Maybe,' he repeated. 'But what about the guy who killed Carl Griffin?'

This brought Glitsky up short. 'What guy is that?'

'You're homicide. You tell me.'

'Are you telling me they're related, Bree and Carl?'

Low-key, Hardy shrugged. 'Are you telling me they're not? Seems likely they could be, unless you've got a suspect with Carl.' It was a question.

Glitsky took a moment before answering. 'We've got nothing on Carl. I've told you this. He was going out to the Western Addition to talk to one of his snitches, who apparently got some kind of drop on him.'

'And what?' Hardy ladled on the sarcasm. 'He asked the snitch to hold his gun a minute while they talked, and it went off accidentally? Is that what happened?'

'Must have been,' Glitsky replied sardonically. But Hardy had something and Glitsky, perhaps for the first time, was seeing it. 'He was sitting in his car, Diz. Even Carl wasn't that dumb.'

'OK. So what do you think happened? You remember where the car was found?'

A nod. 'A little cul-de-sac called Raycliff Terrace, just off Divisadero.'

Well, Hardy was thinking, strike that idea. Divisadero ran right through the heart of the Western Addition, so Griffin was where he was supposed to have been. But, being thorough, he asked his next question anyway. 'What's the cross street?'

Glitsky didn't know offhand and in a minute they had a map spread out on the table between them. A loud silence ensued. Raycliff Terrace was off Divisadero all right, and on the map it looked close enough to the ghetto, but to anyone who knew the city at all, it was so far economically from the low-income housing units of the Western Addition that it may as well have been in Beverly Hills.

The cross street was Pacific, the eponymous artery of Pacific Heights, one of San Francisco's most aristocratic neighborhoods. And, more tellingly, one block from Broadway.

Hardy spent an instant leaning over, making sure. With a kind of pang about his own incompetence, he realized that this had been David Freeman's idea - his comment that Griffin had been the first horse at the trough. Was the old fart ever wrong?

Hardy straightened up and walked over to the refrigerator, where he pulled a magnetized pen off the door. Back at the map, he marked an X. Then another one. After a moment's reflection, a final thought struck him, and he scratched out a third one. 'Bree Beaumont,' he said, putting the tip of the pen on the first mark, two blocks from Raycliff Terrace. 'Broadway and Steiner. Damon Kerry, Broadway and Baker.' Three blocks west of Bree, one block from Raycliff. He put the pen on the third X. 'Jim Pierce. Divisadero and North Point.' Eleven blocks north. Griffin had been killed surrounded by the players in the Beaumont case. Which, to Hardy, argued that he wasn't killed in a drug sting gone wrong. His death was related to Bree's.

Frowning, Glitsky was silent. Finally he put a finger on Hardy's first mark. 'Ron Beaumont, too.'

Hardy had to admit this unwelcome fact. But it wasn't his point and in a minute he was fairly sure it wouldn't be Glitsky's. 'Can you see Griffin coming up here with his snitch, Abe? I can't. You see the snitch letting himself get driven this far out of the 'hood?'

Glitsky shook his head. 'You're right. It didn't happen. Not up here.'

Hardy ran with it. 'It was somebody Griffin wasn't afraid of, maybe even trusted.'

'Enough to let him hold his piece? It's hard to imagine.' He had his fist balled over the Xs and he lifted it an inch, then brought it down with a great deal of force. 'd.a.m.n,' he said. He slammed the fist down again. 'G.o.d d.a.m.n it, Carl.'

From Glitsky, this was a violent explosion. He raised his eyes, the whites shot now with red. 'Anybody else I'd say no chance. Carl? I've got to say maybe.' He ran his palm over the entire top of his head. 'Lord, Diz, how is it n.o.body saw this?'

But that wasn't what Glitsky really wanted to know, so Hardy thought he'd spare him. Hardy had his own problems with this new information - there was another X, Hardy knew, that he hadn't put on the map.

Phil Canetta had his own weapon. Griffin wouldn't have had to voluntarily pa.s.s over his gun - the situation that Glitsky had found so untenable. Canetta could have simply hopped into the pa.s.senger seat of Griffin's car, pulled his own piece, and moved things along right smartly from there. Relieved Carl of his gun, and had him drive to a secluded and quiet dead-end street. Made him dead.

But then, the more he thought about it, if any of his other suspects owned a weapon, they could just as easily have done the same thing.

The good news was that he had gotten Glitsky thinking, and not exclusively about Ron. It wasn't a certainty, of course, and nowhere near proven, but suddenly now to Hardy the overwhelming probability was that Griffin's murder was in fact linked to Bree's.

'When was he killed?' Hardy asked. 'Carl.'

Glitsky was still getting used to it, and Hardy couldn't blame him. If this was what had happened, the proximity of Griffin's murder scene to the homes of the suspects in Bree's murder was an egregious oversight for homicide to have missed. Glitsky was back sitting down at the table. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and blew on them. 'It was a Monday. Somebody reported the body mid-afternoon, say two thirty. Forensics had him dead an hour, an hour and a half.'

'So. Lunchtime.'

Glitsky made a face. 'He hadn't eaten. Except some chocolate.'

Abe's son Orel was just getting back from trick or treating, if that's what he'd been doing, as Hardy was at the door on his way out. Glitsky had been on the phone for the past twenty minutes leaving messages with his inspectors to make it to the hall the next day, and with the crime scene unit to make sure that Griffin's car got another careful going-over in light of what might be these new developments. If Hardy knew Abe, and he did, all of this was going to go on awhile, with the coroner, the various labs, and so on. He didn't feel any great need to hang around. It was after ten by now and he was exhausted.

But he couldn't go home yet - he really had to go by Erin's and at least kiss the kids goodnight. So now he was in the Cochrans' living room and his own son Vincent was asleep with his head on Hardy's lap. Rebecca was curled up on his other side, still awake - Hardy was going to do an experiment someday and see how many days his daughter could go without any sleep, but for now he was contented enough with her quiet form snuggled next to him. At least she'd know he'd come by on Hallowe'en after all.

Both the kids had gone out in Erin's sheets as ghosts. The elaborate costumes Frannie had made for both of them - Cinderella for the Beck and Piglet for Vincent were lost to the insanity of the past couple of days.

But at least they'd had their holiday night. Their respective caches of candy were already sorted in piles on the rug. The wonderful Erin had made it all work, and for this Hardy was more than grateful.

She'd also mixed a shaker of manhattans - it had been a long day for everybody, and they'd spent the last twenty minutes having a nightcap and catching up on Hardy's progress, ending with the potentially blockbusting discovery about Carl Griffin's death.

But Erin had a clear focus on her priorities - this might be a fascinating turn of events, but if it wasn't about Frannie and getting everyone's life back to normal, she wasn't interested. 'This policeman was before anything happened that involved Frannie, wasn't it, Dismas?'

'By a couple of weeks.'

'Well, then, how can they keep her-' A glance at the Beck, who was hanging on every word. 'How can they keep her where she is?'

Hardy saw her point, but it wasn't any help. 'She's in for fighting with a judge, Erin. That's all it comes down to. My guess is whatever happens with the investigation, they'll let her go Tuesday morning.' He said it easily but harbored an uneasy fear that it might turn out not to be true. With Ron's disappearance, all bets might be off.

'She's OK, though, isn't she, Daddy?' See? The Beck might be quiet, but she never sleeps.

Arm around her, he patted his girl. 'She's fine, Beck. In fact, maybe I can see... do you want to talk to her?'

'Oh, Daddy, so much!'

Gently, he moved Vincent's head off him on to the couch. The long shot had just occurred to him, but the idea might work. 'Let's give it a try.'

He got the jail's number and called the desk, gently reminding the deputy about the deli lunch he'd provided for them that day - sure, the guy had heard about it. What could he do for Mr Hardy?

He could let his wife in Adseg use the phone and call out to talk for a minute to her kids. And after a brief hesitation, the deputy said he'd see what he could do.

Five minutes later, the phone rang at the Cochrans'. Hardy was nervous as he picked it up. 'Frannie?'

Hearing her voice, he realized he should have gone to see her again tonight when he'd pa.s.sed right by on the way to Jeff Elliot's. Twenty times a day wouldn't be too much. He should forget all this faux police work. Glitsky was on it now and it would move along on its own. 'How are you holding up?'

He heard her take in a breath, and knew she was summoning her strength to answer. 'Pretty good,' she said with a cheer so false it made him sick.

The Beck was unable to restrain herself, in her excitement pulling at his leg, the cord, whatever was near by. He figured it wouldn't be a good time to reprimand her for it. 'Listen, I've got somebody here who wants to talk to you.'

'OK, but come back, please.'

Hardy handed the phone to the Beck and stood there listening to the details of the past two days, the questions she'd had to endure at school, when was Mom coming home, what were they doing to her down at the jail - all his precious daughter's thoughts and worries that Hardy hadn't been able to take time for.

Vincent woke up and was groggily leaning against him, sucking his thumb although he'd stopped doing that six months before. 'Is that Mommy? I need to talk to Mommy.' Too sleepy to cry, but leaning in that direction.

So the kids both got to talk. Then Erin - was there anything Frannie needed her to do tomorrow, for school on Monday? She shouldn't worry, Grandma was on the job.

There wasn't any criticism of Hardy stated or implied, but he knew. He knew. He was good at some things, and at others hopeless. And now he felt keenly that the father role, the one that perplexed and frustrated him so often if not always lately, had become a victim to his need to figure things out, to keep busy, to win.

The priority was wrong - he felt it in every bone.

But what else could he do? He could give lip service to David Freeman's input, to Glitsky's machine, but he knew and cared more about this investigation than Freeman and Glitsky combined. Like it or not, he was the prime mover. Lives - and not just his family's - now depended upon him and what he did next.

Finally, his turn came again as Erin corraled both of the kids back to bedrooms, to bedtime.

He told Frannie that he loved her, but he couldn't leave it at that. He might hate himself for it, but he had to find out more. 'I've got to ask you, have you heard from Ron today?'

'No. How could I? They'd don't let anybody call me here.'

'No, I know that.'

'Well, then.'

Hardy told her. Ron had disappeared from his hotel.

He listened to her breathing for a minute. 'Why would he do that? I thought - didn't you say? - he asked you to help him. What does this mean?'

'I don't know. I was hoping maybe you could tell me.'

'No, unless he just got scared for the kids again.'

'But why wouldn't he have left some message with me?'

'I don't know that either. Maybe he will.'

'Maybe,' Hardy said flatly. 'I hope so.'

A silence hummed on the line. 'Dismas?'

'I'm here.'

'I've told you everything I know. Really. I don't know where he is, what he's doing.'

If he didn't completely believe it, he felt at least he had to accept it. 'OK.'

Another silence preceded the tremulous voice. 'Tell me you believe me, Dismas. Please. I need you to believe me.'

'Of course,' he said with deliberate ambiguity. 'I'll see you tomorrow, OK? Bright and early.'