Dismas Hardy: Nothing But The Truth Part 5

The machine kept talking. A woman with an Asian name - Kogee Sasaka? - called to remind Ron about their appointment, although she neglected to leave her number or the time or place of it, or what it was about.

James Pierce from Caloco. Asking Ron to call him back. There were some questions about Bree's effects and he'd like to come up sometime and...

Another woman: Marie. Just calling to say hi.

Moving through Tuesday afternoon. Al Valens. Something about Bree's files, some new data she had been working on.

'Both sides of the fence.'

Hardy pushed the pause b.u.t.ton. 'What's that?'

'The first guy, Pierce, and this new one, Valens. He works with Damon Kerry.' The candidate for governor. 'His campaign manager.'

Hardy turned back to Canetta. 'For a station cop, you've got a pretty good handle on this case, don't you?'

A defensive shrug. 'I read the papers. Whatever they say downtown, there's no rule says we're not allowed to think.'

'So what do you think about these guys, sergeant - Pierce and Valens?'

A moment of hesitation, seeing if Hardy was playing with him, then deciding he wasn't. 'Something with Bree's work, I'd guess. They're on opposite sides in these gas additive wars.'

'So what would they both want with Ron?'

A moment's consideration. 'He must know something.'

'About her work?'

'I don't know. Maybe. That's what I read. It was her work.'

'That got her killed? That means it probably wasn't Ron.'

'I don't know. Maybe not.' Canetta shrugged with what Hardy thought was an exaggerated nonchalance. 'Which brings us back. Maybe Ron knows something.'

'I wonder if he knows what it is.'

Canetta nodded. 'Or finally figured something out. If it was her work. Maybe that's why he ran, if he did.'

Hardy knew next to nothing about gas additives or the wars related to them. His concern was limited to his wife at the moment. But if Canetta needed to air his theories, it wouldn't hurt to listen. He pushed the play b.u.t.ton again.

They'd gotten to Wednesday morning now, yesterday. Dej vu as Hardy heard Theresa Wilson's voice again, from Merryvale. The Beaumont children hadn't yet arrived at school and she was calling Ron to find out why, where they might be.

Hardy hit pause. 'So if we a.s.sume the kids were at school and got picked up Tuesday, he left right after that.'

Next up was Marie for the second time.

Then the last voice. 'Hi Ron. You know I told you about this subpoena I got? I'm worried. I'm sure they're going to want me to talk about you and Bree. We need to get together to keep our stories straight. But don't call here after about six thirty. I'll try to reach you again when I can talk. Are you there? Ron?' The tape went silent.

' "Keep our stories straight," ' Canetta said into the vacuum. 'That doesn't sound very good, does it?'

Hardy turned to him, his voice flat. 'That was my wife.'

Canetta fixated on Frannie telling Ron that they had to keep their stories straight. To Hardy, the most telling line had been when she told him not to call after six thirty - not to call, that is, after Hardy might be home. Again the truth jolted him - it had been no simple oversight that had kept her from mentioning the subpoena to him. She wanted to keep her relations.h.i.+p with Ron hidden and this realization, though maybe predictable, hit him like a jab to the solar plexus.

But it wouldn't be smart to share his reaction with Canetta. The point was that there were no hints about Ron's disappearance on the answering machine. Hardy wasn't going to locate him, not tonight, and that meant he wasn't getting Frannie out of jail.

To Hardy, it was obvious that Canetta was consciously resisting the urge to talk about Frannie's involvement. The sergeant cursorily rearranged a few items on the desk. When he'd stalled long enough, he straightened up, turned around, and cleared his throat. 'Well, since we're here, we might as well make sure n.o.body's dead in the other rooms. What do you say?'

They walked down the hallway and turned into the first of the bedrooms, a child's room with a twin bed made up neatly with a white lace bedspread. There was a collection of dolls on the bed and a decent-sized pile of beanie babies in the corner. On the wall, stenciled roses in half-a-dozen colors bloomed on the powder-blue sponge-painted wall.

Canetta walked directly across the room and opened the top dresser drawer. 'Look at this.' Hardy came up behind him. Except for a couple of pairs of socks, there wasn't anything to see. 'They're gone,' Canetta observed. 'We'd better be, too.'

On the way out, Hardy made sure the front door was locked behind them. The two men rode down the elevator in an awkward silence, then crossed the lobby and stepped outside.

'What's your plan now?' Canetta asked.

Hardy didn't know. It was late and nothing had worked. He shrugged. 'Try to find him. See if his kids are in school. If not, tell Glitsky, I suppose. If he's on the run...'

A silence fell and Hardy sighed.

'Your wife?'

A nod. 'They've got her locked up at the county jail. The two of them, Frannie and Ron, he told her some secret...' Again, he just trailed off. It sounded so lame. 'She told me he'd never let her stay down there if he knew she was in jail, but it was his secret to tell, not hers. She promised him.'

Canetta had no solace to offer. Hardy could see what he was thinking and, worse, didn't blame him. 'Well, good luck.'

He drove around for a while, trying to decide whether to visit the jail again, go home and sleep, or wake up a judge. Everything felt wrong. Finally he wound up on Sutter Street, in front of David Freeman's building, where he worked.

Upstairs in his office, Hardy called and woke up Glitsky at home. The lieutenant agreed that Ron Beaumont's disappearance - if that's what it was - increased his profile as a murder suspect. It didn't help Frannie either. Finally, Glitsky promised that he would get in early tomorrow and talk to Scott Randall, maybe try to pull a string or two at the jail, but he didn't hold out much hope.

After he hung up, Hardy thought a moment and seriously considered a night raid on Braun's house, maybe getting David Freeman to accompany him, to make his case to the judge. But he knew he'd only make things worse with any kind of spontaneous act in the mood he was in.

He had to think, develop a plan, stay rational. But the thought of his wife lying on one of the jail cots, surrounded by sc.u.m, terrified and unprotected, made this a tall order.

It took very little imagination to see her there, curled under the thin fabric of the inst.i.tutional blanket. Smells of disinfectant, sounds of desperation. Wide-eyed and sleepless on the unyielding mattress, wondering what she'd done, how it had happened. What tomorrow would bring.

Four days! Hardy suddenly sat upright with the realization. Braun had given her four days. She couldn't do four days, even in AdSeg. He knew his wife, or thought he did. Four days in jail would cause a lot of damage that would be a long time healing.

He sat trying to come up with something, anything. But it was the middle of the night, and the world was asleep. At a little after one o'clock, he accepted that he'd failed. He wasn't getting his wife out of jail today. If he didn't get at least a little rest, he wouldn't be any good for her tomorrow either.

There was nothing to do but go home.

But his night wasn't over yet.

His house was a railroad-style Victorian - a long hallway down one side with rooms coming off to the right - about fifteen blocks from the beach, well within San Francisco's belt of nearly perennial fog. He'd run into the wall of it, and by the time he'd reached his street, his winds.h.i.+eld wipers were beating a steady rhythm. Of course there was no available street parking, but tonight he decided to take the risk and left his car in a no-parking zone right around the corner on Clement. He figured he'd be up and out before dawn anyway - most days the parking enforcers didn't get rolling until well after that.

The house sat between a brace of four-story apartment buildings and was set back maybe forty feet from the curb. Hardy couldn't see it until he was right in front. As he opened the gate through the white picket fence, he couldn't see Moses, either, sitting on the darkened porch with his back against the front door. 'Where is she?'

The surprise of the voice out of the dead night fog almost knocked him backwards. When he got moving again, he didn't waste any words. 'Still locked up. Let's go inside.'

Erin sat in her bathrobe, her feet up under her in the window seat, the blinds closed against the night and the fog. Moses paced in front of the fire's embers. Ed Cochran snored gently in Hardy's favorite recliner, so Hardy had pulled in one of the dining-room chairs and now straddled it backwards. After twenty minutes of regaling them with the highlights of his frustrating night, he'd just asked if either one of them had heard Frannie talk about Ron Beaumont, his kids, Bree's death, or anything that might relate.

Moses stopped walking, folded his arms, and scowled. He loved his sister, but between his work as owner of the Little Shamrock bar and his family, they didn't spend a lot of time sharing special moments.

Hardy's eyes went to Erin. She s.h.i.+fted where she sat and looked somewhere off into the middle distance. 'Erin?' he prompted her. 'What?'

She came back to him. 'I don't know. I'm not sure it's anything really. She never mentioned anybody by name.' She hesitated and Hardy forced himself to wait until she figured out how she was going to say it. 'From the way she talked, I a.s.sumed it was another woman, one of the mothers from Merryvale, but it could have been part of this.'

'What?'

Erin sighed, hating to betray her own confidences, if that's what this turned out to be. 'This is all nebulous, but one of her friends - it might not have been this Ron or Bree - evidently had had a marriage go bad a long time ago, years. Now they had a new life here and suddenly this person was afraid the old spouse was going to show up and start causing problems.'

'What kind of problems?'

Erin s.h.i.+fted again, and picked at some thread on her bathrobe for a few seconds. 'Custody problems, I think.'

'But how could that be? Divorces don't get final until all the custody issues are settled. How did this come up, anyway? If this is her giant secret, I don't know why-'

'I didn't say it was, Dismas. I don't know if it had anything to do with this. That's about as far as it went anyway, then suddenly she didn't want to talk about it, maybe as though she remembered she couldn't.'

'That could be it,' Moses said.

Hardy wasn't so sure, but at this point he'd take anything.

'How did the whole thing come up in the first place?'

Erin shook her head, as though she were unsure herself. 'We were just sitting watching Rebecca and Vincent in the backyard here - it couldn't have been more than a couple of weeks ago. They were having one of their great afternoons, just playing and laughing and being wonderful.

'Anyway, suddenly, really out of the blue, Frannie said she couldn't imagine maintaining any kind of normal life if she thought someone were going to try to take away her kids. I told her she didn't have to worry - why was she thinking about that? So she started to say something about this friend of hers, just what I've told you, not anything really. She didn't mention a name, but now tonight when you asked, it occurred to me it could be this Ron.'

Moses piped in. 'It might explain why he ran.'

Hardy was desperate for answers, but he didn't think this was one of them. 'We don't know that he did run, Mose. He might be staying at Grandma's house for all we know.'

'Well, how can we find that out?'

Hardy was done in. 'I'm working on that,' he said.

7.

On his best day, David Freeman would never qualify as debonair and charming, and this wasn't close to his best day. He sat now in the pre-dawn at his ancient kitchen table which was laden with yellow legal pads, pencils, wads of Kleenex, open and closed lawbooks, and a dozen or more unwashed (perhaps from the look of them never washed) coffee mugs. He wore the frayed remains of a maroon bathrobe that had been new during the Nixon years. Gray chest hairs peeked out the top of a similarly graying T-s.h.i.+rt. Of course he hadn't shaved - Hardy had buzzed him awake only five minutes before. His jowls hung, his hair rioted, and for good measure he was chewing the stub of last night's cigar.

'You know, David, if the law business ever fades out on you, I think you could go into the movies, become a leading man, maybe marry Julia Roberts-'

'Who?'

Hardy shook his head. 'Never mind.' If it didn't have to do with the law, Freeman probably didn't know about it and certainly wasn't interested.

And Hardy wasn't much in the mood for witty banter himself. He'd slept less than three hours before rolling out of his bed, which last night had been his front-room couch. He'd given his bed to Ed and Erin - and G.o.d bless Erin. She was taking care of the kids, getting them to school, covering all those essential bases. This was a great relief even though the situation filled him with guilt.

But Hardy couldn't waste energy thinking about the time he wasn't spending with his children. Frannie was still in jail. 'So I thought you'd talk to Braun.'

Freeman's lugubrious face didn't offer any solace. 'It's always a pleasure to chew the fat with Marian, Diz, but if you think she's going to let anybody out of jail on my personal say-so, you've got our relations.h.i.+p wrong. How did your sweet wife get herself in so deep?'

Hardy outlined it briefly. David s.h.i.+fted the cigar b.u.t.t to the other side of his mouth. Hardy started to say something, ready to stand up for Frannie's integrity, to explain away her insult to Marian Braun, but the old man held up his hand. 'It doesn't matter what she did, Diz, or why. You ought to know that by now. Just wait. Let me think a minute.'

Freeman was justly famous in San Francisco as much for his courtroom theatrics as for his knowledge of the law. The point was that he got results in an extraordinary number of cases and he didn't care how. As a defense attorney, his legal mandate was to provide the best defense the law allowed, and whether that included arguing some arcane legal point or standing on his head and spitting wooden nickels, that's what he'd do. He was d.a.m.n proud of the fact that he had no pride.

And now he was thinking strategy. Frannie might not be his client, yet, but he'd gotten lots of folks out from behind bars in his time, and at base that's really what Hardy was asking him to help with.

'It seems to me that we've got two separate contempt charges - the secret, then getting smart with the judge. Am I right?'

Hardy nodded.

'OK.' Freeman pondered. 'I don't think we've got a habeas on the secret. Randall's got every right to throw her in jail if she won't spill it. Talk to Susan McDougal.' Hardy thought it was typical of Freeman to show no interest in Ron Beaumont's secret. 'But if she'd apologize to Marian, say maybe they were both having a bad day - would she go there?'

Hardy wasn't sure - a lot of things involving Frannie were in doubt lately - and he said so.

'Well, if she would that might get us to first base. Then maybe we hit Randall, or Pratt, but that'll be a tough nut, too.'

'Glitsky's already working on that.'

Freeman shook his head. 'You think a police lieutenant is going to persuade Randall to let somebody out of jail? A lieutenant, I might add, who somehow got himself out of the loop on this particular homicide, and didn't even know the grand jury had convened over it? I think you're whistlin' Dixie. Obviously something's going on here between the DA and the police. Glitsky's not the way. Randall will stonewall him.'

'How do you know? You know Randall?'

'I caught a couple of his closing arguments for fun. He's a h.e.l.l of a trial lawyer, but I don't know what he's made of inside. I can't imagine jailing an otherwise good citizen over this unless he knows it's the key to a murder conviction. It wouldn't be trivial. It would help to know if he's got political ambitions.'

'Why's that?'

Freeman regarded Hardy as though he were a slow five-year-old. 'If he is, we use the media. Call a press conference and make him look like an unreasonable, detestable, miserable son of a b.i.t.c.h keeping a good mother from her loving family. But there's a flaw with that, too.'

'Which is?'

'Your typical prosecutor, it makes his day to keep mothers from their families. As you know.'

Hardy used to be a prosecutor and he remembered. It wasn't exactly that he had wanted to separate mothers and children, but he'd never shed a tear over sending someone he'd convicted off to jail, even if a relative or lover was sobbing horribly behind him in the courtroom, which happened quite frequently. So Freeman was right - Hardy shouldn't put any hope in a media campaign with Scott Randall. 'But Pratt might be different,' the old man said. 'She's got to care about public reaction, about votes, right? We've got an election here in a couple of weeks.'

'Unfortunately, not Pratt's. She's got two more years no matter what we do now. Still, we can try it,' Freeman conceded, though it was plain he considered it a long shot. 'Of course, after her night in jail, Frannie might have decided that this precious secret of hers isn't the hill she wants to die on. Especially when she learns her friend may have left town.'

Hardy was at the jail at six forty-five, and they let him inside at seven sharp. Freeman was going to talk to Marian Braun, and try to make some apology with which Frannie would go along. He hoped. He also knew that Glitsky would light a fire under the homicide inspectors working the Beaumont case to find Ron.