Dismas Hardy: Nothing But The Truth Part 30

In his bedroom, he risked a short beam. His tropical fish - seventeen of them, a collection that he'd nurtured through various permutations over twenty years - were all belly up on the surface of his aquarium.

A muscle worked in his jaw. He turned off the flashlight and crossed the room. The answering machine was on a small reading table. He unplugged it from the wall, disconnected the telephone jack, and placed it in the bottom of the paper bag on a corner of the bed. Next was his dresser - he threw in underwear and a couple of sweaters on top of the answering machine. In his closet, he gathered up a heavy jacket, a business suit, and some s.h.i.+rts, all of them smelling of smoke. A complete change of clothes for his wife, too. For when he got her out.

Something in him wished he didn't need to do it, but he knew he had to. Leaving everything on the bed, he walked back up through the kitchen into the burnt-out front of the house and stood in the middle of what used to be his dining room.

He'd once represented a plaintiff who had suffered severe burns in an industrial accident. He remembered preparing the expert he was going to put on, who'd defined the various degrees of burn - first, a sunburn; second, a blister; or the worst, third-degree burns, causing irreparable loss of skin and terrible disfigurement. Any serious percentage of third-degree burns over the body was most often fatal.

But what he felt now seemed even worse - a fourth-degree burn to the core of him, one that charred the edges of his soul.

After a time he moved again - back through the kitchen, to the bedroom for the things he'd left there. He picked up the bag by its paper handles, the clothes by their hangers. At his workbench, he carefully replaced the flashlight, then let himself back out into the awful, awful night.

Hardy left his bag of clothes in the car, but brought the answering machine up to his office, where he plugged it in and found that Al Valens was, at least, not lying all the time. He was the first message - just what he'd said.

The second one stunned him.

No name, but immediately recognizable. 'I'm sorry to have moved out of the hotel. I hope I haven't caused you too much inconvenience.'

Hardy almost laughed out loud - not too much inconvenience indeed.

'The only answer is that I've got to be very cautious. I know you will understand. If you could get to me so easily, so could the police. They might have been following you the next time you came down. I don't know. The point is, I felt like I had to relocate. But I wanted you to know I'm still near by and appreciate what you're doing, but very nervous about you coming to me. I hope you're having some luck. Thanks.'

'Sure, no problem,' Hardy said, then punched at the answering machine's b.u.t.ton, sat back in his chair and tried to gather some thoughts.

But it was all a jumble. Just today his house had been burned, Canetta had been killed. He'd been running since first light and had one day left to discover any useful truth. He glanced up at his dart board on the wall around his desk. He didn't remember throwing them, but his three custom-made darts were stuck haphazardly around the board.

He forced himself up, around the desk, and flicked on the bright room overheads. The darts were his worry beads, and he pulled them from the board, walked back to the tape line he'd marked on the floor at eight feet, turned and threw the first one. Triple twenty - a good start.

He threw the second dart, then the third. Walked to the board, pulled them down, and returned to his mark.

If Ron hadn't left town, what did that mean?

The kind reading was to take him at his word. He was cautious, nervous, paranoid, all of these things certainly understandable. He wanted to be near by in case - as did not appear very likely now - Hardy succeeded in exposing Bree's killer. If that happened, he and his children could return to their lives. And from what had already happened to the other principles in this drama, Ron was right to be worried.

But as Hardy threw his darts, a more sinister interpretation kept wanting to surface, and he had a difficult time keeping it down. Ron was still near by. Close enough to set fire to Hardy's house. Close enough to kill Canetta.

If he'd only left a phone number on Hardy's machine. Surely there was no danger in that. Then he could answer some of the questions that were fogging Hardy's consciousness.

What was the truth, for example, about Ron and Bree's marriage? The separate bedrooms, the infidelity? Ron might be a 'miracle' of a father, but he wasn't the same as a husband. This was not the happy couple they pretended to be. At the very least, Bree was having an affair with Damon Kerry. And she had become pregnant, apparently by him. Although Hardy felt he couldn't rule out Canetta, or even Pierce.

And if the father was anyone but Ron, this was a motive for murder. For Ron to kill.

Beyond that, if Bree were habitually unfaithful, might that mean... with Ron...

Hardy tried to shut out the thought, but finally it couldn't be dismissed any longer. Of course it could mean Frannie. Although, finally, today, she had told him no, it hadn't been like that. Or had she? Like what, exactly? He hadn't cross-examined her. He hadn't had the heart.

And why would he be fool enough to believe her in any event?

Freeman's words from last night's conversation echoed and picked at him - Hardy and Glitsky believing that Carl Griffin had gone to interview a snitch because he had said so. When in fact that's not what he'd done. In fact, Griffin had lied.

To his boss. And for a lot less reason than Frannie had.

Nothing but the truth was a n.o.ble courtroom concept, but Hardy knew from a lifetime of trials that even there it was systematically abused. And in life it was much worse.

But he stopped himself before going too far down this road. Frannie wasn't just another random person. She was the mother of his children, the wife he'd promised to love, honor, and respect. And if those three did not include trust, a basic belief not only in her honesty but in who she was, he was lost anyway.

Frannie had told him clearly. She had been attracted to Ron but had remained faithful to him. Ron was a good friend, but that's all she'd let it be. Hardy really had no choice but to believe her, to take it on faith. She was telling him the truth.

And that was the only truth he could let himself act on. To do less would betray both of them.

26.

Itwas Sunday night and Glitsky hadn't spent enough time at home this weekend. He had a feeling he wasn't going to anytime soon, either.

In his job, once in a very great while he called in a favor. Three years before, Glitsky had spoken up in defense of Paul Ghattas on one of the dozens of EEO lawsuits that were forever being filed among and between workers in the Hall of Justice. Ghattas, a lab tech whose first language was Tagalog, had made a comment to one of his female co-workers that she had interpreted as s.e.xual hara.s.sment. The two had been discussing the location of a stab wound, and Ghattas had fumbled with language for a moment, then used the word t.i.t, rather than breast.

Glitsky had been in the lab at the time, waiting for results on another case, and had been the only witness, hearing the whole thing, including Ghattas' abject apology afterward.

The woman had screamed, 'Don't you p.i.s.s on my leg and tell me it's raining,' and run out of the room.

Before Ghattas' comment, the lab setting had been professional and neutral. But the woman had been offended to the point of being unable to continue coming to work for the following ten days. Then she'd filed her suit which, it turned out, had not been her first. She wanted Paul Ghattas - a ten-year veteran and father of four - dismissed. She wanted full pay for days missed. She wanted disability for the six months she estimated it would take her to get over the emotional trauma she'd had to endure.

Glitsky had worked with Ghattas many times. The man's English was poor, but he was a competent workhorse in the lab. So, realizing even at the time that he was wading into troubled waters, Glitsky had stood up for him at the hearing, where - against all odds in an environment where to be accused was to be guilty - Ghattas was exonerated.

So Paul was happy to accompany Abe to the Hall at seven this Sunday night. Glitsky left him downstairs at the lab, then went up to his office. Checking Damon Kerry's fingerprints against all the others found at Bree's apartment was going to take Ghattas some time and Glitsky had a slew of his own work now to move on.

The litany of information that Hardy had recited earlier in the evening had been deeply disturbing, mostly because Glitsky hadn't known any of it. And as head of homicide, to say nothing of being Hardy's best friend, he should have. Batavia and Coleman weren't brain dead by any means, and yet somehow between them they'd missed getting any kind of a toehold in this case.

He was half tempted to arrest Hardy for what he'd withheld from him just on general principles, for not mentioning diddly squat about what he'd found, what he had been doing. Like, he had been working with Canetta. He'd made the connection to Griffin. He'd talked with Valens this morning when neither of Glitsky's inspectors could locate the campaign manager. Now he had Baxter Thorne, who had possibly been at least the brains behind dumping the MTBE into the Crystal Springs Reservoir and, more relevantly, had killed a man in Glitsky's jurisdiction in the process.

But for all Hardy did know, Glitsky realized, he had a blind spot, and that was Ron Beaumont. It was a common truth in homicide that the spouse did it, and in spite of all the activity surrounding Bree's oil interests, Ron still looked pretty good to Glitsky. He had fled the scene, using multiple ident.i.ties. Judging from the bedrooms in the penthouse, he and Bree hadn't been intimate recently, and since she was pregnant, this provided a pretty solid motive.

Glitsky hated to give the DA the satisfaction, but he could no longer ignore Ron as a suspect. In fact, from his perspective, the best suspect.

Abruptly, he sat up in his chair, coming to the unpleasant realization that his friend was still holding out on him - otherwise Ron would be on Hardy's own short list, too. He would have to be. Therefore, Hardy knew something more and he wasn't telling. He hadn't told Glitsky even as he had pretended to bare his soul a couple of hours before, when they'd planned to meet again down here when Hardy got his belongings together.

Now Glitsky was in a slow burn, thinking that by G.o.d, friend or no friend he should arrest the duplicitous b.a.s.t.a.r.d when he got back down here after all. He started punching Hardy's office number into his desk phone, give him an earful if he was still there, but he heard footsteps out in the hallway and stopped, replacing the receiver.

A minute later, Inspector Leon Timms, the crime scene specialist from Canetta's murder, was in his doorway. 'You asked me to put a rush on the ballistics check, Abe. Can you believe it? There's somebody in at the lab.'

'Paul Ghattas,' Abe replied. 'I dragged him down from his house. Fingerprints.'

'Fingerprints?' In spite of their exalted presence in books and movies, Timms knew that in real life, fingerprints were rarely a factor in police work. But he merely shrugged - if the lieutenant wanted to check prints, he was welcome to. 'He ran the ballistics for me. The guy's a one-man shop down there.'

This was good to hear about a man whose job he had saved, but Glitsky had his sights elsewhere. 'So what did he find?'

Timms nodded. 'Same shooter. Griffin's gun. For sure.'

When Hardy arrived, he was happy but not surprised to learn that Glitsky's surmise about Griffin's gun was correct. He wasn't as happy when his friend got up, closed the door to his office, and asked him what he knew about Ron Beaumont that he wasn't telling.

'What do you mean?' But that effort at deflection went about as far as Hardy had imagined it would - nowhere.

Glitsky was propped on the corner of his own desk, hovering a foot or two over where Hardy sat in his hard chair, pressed back against the office wall. As Glitsky intended, this posture made Hardy uncomfortable. 'What do I mean?' he repeated with an edge. 'Let's see if I can explain it. You know the whereabouts and most of the life history of everybody who's even remotely involved in the death of Bree Beaumont. You discover that Carl Griffin's death is probably connected, too. And today Canetta makes that pretty much a certainty. We've got four or five suspects and no righteous alibis for any of them, but you don't appear to have any suspicion at all about the one I feel the best about. If you're keeping score here, that would be Ron.' Glitsky had his arms folded, his game face on, and it wasn't any kind of an act. The eyes were unyielding. He wasn't going to be breaking out the peanuts in his desk drawer for a little philosophical chat.

Hardy sucked air and held it in, then let it out in a rush. 'You won't like it.'

'I didn't expect I would.' Glitsky waited through another pause.

'I'm in this for his kids.'

The eyes, so lately flat, narrowed. Glitsky's nose flared and the scar in his lips went white. He took a breath or two and when he finally spoke, it was in a terrifyingly controlled voice. 'You've seen him? You're representing him?'

Hardy knew that any attempt to finesse this would only infuriate Abe more. 'I've seen him once. Friday night, before things had gotten anywhere near here.'

'So where was this?'

'The Airport Hilton.'

'So he was leaving town? Has he left?'

'No. Neither. He was ready to if he had to. That was all.'

'That was all. That's nice. And then somehow you decided it wasn't important to let me know about any of this?'

'No. I never made that decision. You were specifically not looking for Ron at that point.'

'Well, I am now. Where is he?'

'I don't know.'

'My a.s.s.'

Hardy shrugged. 'I'm not lying to you. I haven't ever lied to you, Abe. I've omitted what you didn't need to know.'

'Well thank you so much.' Glitsky made a face of disgust, his voice now rising in indignation. 'How about if that's not your decision to make? How about if it's my job to do this, not some hobby I can pick up and lay down when the mood strikes me? That ever occur to you, Diz? You ever think about any of this?'

But Hardy wasn't about to go begging for mercy or forgiveness. He'd done what he felt he'd had to do. He believed it was defensible. 'Look. Ron called me last night. The answering machine is still in my office with the message on it. You can come listen to it anytime you want. I don't know where he is. or how to reach him and it p.i.s.ses me off just a bit myself.'

'But it's not your job, Diz.'

'Don't kid yourself, Abe. It's a h.e.l.l of a lot more than my job. First it's my wife, then my house; next it's maybe me, my life. If I had even the smallest suspicion any of this was Ron, you think I'd gamble all of that? You don't think I'd give him up to you? h.e.l.l, I'd lead the parade.'

'Not if he was your client.'

Hardy lowered his own voice. 'He's not it, Abe. You've known that all along. You go after him, you're barking up the wrong tree.'

'Yeah, but that's what I do, bark up trees. Things fall out, I pick 'em up, and maybe it points me to another one.'

'Maybe it doesn't.' Hardy came forward in his chair. 'There isn't time, Abe.'

Glitsky glared, very little of the fury gone. After a couple of seconds, he stood up, walked back to the door, opened it, and left the room.

He was standing at the back windows of the homicide detail, arms folded, looking out through the black fog to the jail across the way.

Hardy came out of Abe's office and walked up behind his friend. 'I'll tell you everything I can,' he said to his back, 'but there's some things I can't.'

Glitsky didn't turn.

'Ron has a situation that makes it awkward for him to get formally involved with the law or the courts. If he gets in the system, his kids suffer. That's why Frannie couldn't give him up. It's what she couldn't talk about. You heard what the supe in his building said, Abe. The guy's a good father. Like you and me, right.'

Still no answer, but Hardy noticed that Glitsky's shoulders rose and fell. He was listening.

'I know, I know. Why didn't I tell you sooner? Why'd I do things with Canetta? I don't know. I didn't know. I was trying to figure it out. If it's any help, I paid my dues around it, wouldn't you say? And the bottom line is Ron didn't kill Bree.'

Finally, the lieutenant half turned. 'Except if he did,' he said.

'He didn't.'

Glitsky was a statue.

They both became aware of footfalls in the hallway, moving fast. Hardy turned just as an excited Asian man appeared in the doorway. He was slightly out of breath and tried to compose himself in the few steps over to them.

'One of last ones I try, Abe. Sorry. But it match up.'

'You got a match?'

'Yeah. Same as on gla.s.s, whoever that was.'

'From the prints in the penthouse?'

Ghattas nodded and nodded. 'Definite sure.'

Hardy spoke up. 'Kerry?'

Ghattas looked at him, then to Glitsky for permission. The lieutenant nodded. 'Looks like.'

'What is that?' Ghattas asked. 'The Damon Kerry?'

Glitsky nodded. 'If you're sure about the gla.s.s, he was at Bree Beaumont's and said he wasn't.'

'Oh, definite sure.'