Hard Evidence (4 page)

Hardy reached over and picked up the paperweight again. ‘Deal,’ he said. Then, ‘Where’d you get this thing?’

Fowler turned. ‘What —?’ But seeing what, his face darkened, uncontrolled for a second. ‘Why don’t you take it?’ he said.

Hardy went to put it down. ‘No, I can’t —’

‘Diz, take the damn thing. Put it in your pocket. I don’t want to see it anymore.’

‘Andy —’

‘Come on, Diz, let’s pack it up. I’ve got a courtroom waiting for my august presence.’ He brushed by in
a
swish of robes. Stopping at the door, he held it open for Hardy. ‘I’ll call you when I get a court. For squash.’

*     *     *     *     *

True to his word, Locke saw that Hardy got more prelims. Five new special assignments were in his box when he got back from court. He sighed, pulled the paperweight from his pocket and picked up the telephone. The files could wait.

Jane Fowler worked as a buyer for I. Magnin. She was getting ready to go out to lunch, but she took his call. He hadn’t talked to her since his marriage to Frannie — which he thought was understandable. The idea of platonic friendship with an ex-spouse made them both uncomfortable, and the last time they’d seen each other, before Hardy and Frannie had gotten engaged, they slept together, which also didn’t make things easier.

Hardy and Jane had loved each other for several years. They had had a lot of good times, then had endured the death of their son together. But after that, Hardy had lost faith in everything, and if a marriage needed anything, it was faith.

So they’d gotten divorced. Then, after nearly a decade’s separation, they’d reconnected for a few months, long enough for them both to realize that another try at marriage wouldn’t work. They wanted different things out of life now, and if they were still attracted to one another, Hardy thought it would be bad luck to confuse that with what he had with Frannie.

Jane sounded as she always did — refined and composed. Shades of her father.

‘I’m glad you called,’ she said. ‘I’ve missed you. It’s okay to miss you a little, isn’t it? Are you all right? Is everything okay?’

Hardy laughed. ‘I’m fine, Jane. Everything’s peachy with me, but I just got out of a meeting with your dad. Have you seen him recently?’

‘I know,’ she said, ‘I almost called you about it last week, but I didn’t know how you’d feel about that. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.’

‘You can call me, Jane. What’s going on with Andy?’

‘I don’t really know. I’m really a little worried. He asked me over to his house for dinner last week and he was so distracted or depressed. Slower. I thought maybe he was just showing his age finally.’

‘He wasn’t any slower from the bench. It was only back in chambers, on his own time.’

‘I thought he might have had a small stroke or something.’

‘Did you ask him?’

Jane laughed. ‘You know Daddy. The Great Deny-er. He’s picking at his food, hardly talking, and I ask him if he’s all right, and of course he’s just fine, couldn’t be better. And then he got drunk.’

‘Andy got drunk?’

‘You remember the time you and Moses drank a watermelon full of gin? The answer is no, you don’t remember anything about it.’

‘I remember the hangover.’

‘Okay, that, but up till the last time I saw Daddy, I’d never seen anybody so drunk since then.’

Hardy whistled. The watermelon drunk had become part of Moses and Hardy lore. If Andy Fowler had gotten that drunk, he was not himself. Something was seriously wrong.

‘Did he give you any idea what was bothering him?’

‘No. He just said he deserved a little fun in his life. What was the matter with a judge being human too? Then he started drinking cognac, talking about Mom and when I was a baby and all the decisions he’d made not to have fun while he got to be a lawyer and a judge and now his life was almost over… Anyway, finally he just got all slurry and I put him to bed.’ The line was silent for a second. ‘I’m glad you noticed something, too. It wasn’t just me.’

‘No. I don’t think it was just you. Anyway, I’m here to help if something comes up. Just so you know. Maybe I’ll play some squash with him, feel him out a little.’

There was another pause. ‘Thanks for calling,’ she said. ‘We’re still friends?’

‘We’re still friends. We’re always friends, Jane.’

After they hung up, Hardy took the jade paperweight out of his pocket and put it on his desk. Why would Andy have just given him — hell, not just given, demanded he take — such a beautiful piece?

Well, enough about Andy Fowler, he thought. Time to go to work. He reached for the new case folders and pulled them in front of him. He opened the first one — a DUI, driving under the influence, the influence in this case being alcohol. Eleventh offense. Level of point nine, which last year wasn’t illegal. Hardy closed the file, squared the small stack on the middle of his desk, put the paperweight on top of it and decided to go to lunch.

6

Art Drysdale was juggling baseballs in his office. In his youth, he’d played a couple of weeks as a utility man for the San Francisco Giants, capping a five-year career in professional baseball before turning to the law. Now he coached a Police Athletic League teenage baseball team and played a little B-League men’s softball at nights.

He liked juggling. He could do it blindfolded if he had to. It also tended to disarm anyone watching him, such as Dismas Hardy, who was standing in the doorway in the early afternoon.

‘Pretty great stuff you threw me there,’ Hardy said. ‘There’s even one guy who might have done something wrong, as opposed to illegal.’

Art kept juggling, not looking at the balls. ‘Illegal is wrong. D.A.’s Handbook, Chapter One.‘

‘I like the woman who didn’t use her pooper scooper. We ought to really throw the book at her.’

‘Doggy doo on the street.’ Drysdale gathered the balls in, held them in one huge hand. ‘Heck of a nuisance. We’ve got to enforce those leash laws. Next thing you know packs of wild hounds are destroying our society.’

Hardy came in and sat down. ‘But seriously, Art —’

‘No, but seriously, Diz.’ He moved forward in his chair. ‘You are not making friends here. Friends is how we like to do it. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. It’s a big office, what with the police and the D.A. and the Coroner all here in one big happy building. Now, in one swell foop you have pissed off Rigby, Strout and Locke. This is not good politics.’

‘Politics is not —’

Drysdale held up a hand and three baseballs. ‘I know you’ve been out of the desk-job environment a while now, but any office, I don’t care where, call it what you want, there is politics. Cooperation gets things done. You alienate the chiefs of three departments, I guaran-goddamn-tee you, you will not have job satisfaction.’

‘I don’t suppose it matters that everything the reporter said was taken out of context?’

‘Oh, that matters. You still got your job, so it matters that much. But it’s close. I’d go mend some fences if I were you. Work hard, impress people with your enthusiasm to get convictions on your cases, like that.’

Hardy stood up. ‘This gives a whole new meaning to helping clean up the streets, you know.’

Drysdale allowed himself a smile. ‘Maybe the hand’ll turn into something.’ The baseballs flew back up into the air.

Hardy stopped in the doorway. ‘Maybe the hand’ll turn into something.’

Drysdale nodded, his attention split at best. ‘Could happen,’ he said. ‘Could happen.’

*     *     *     *     *

At four o’clock, Hardy called it quits and went over to Lou the Greek’s.

It had been a long afternoon. John Strout, the coroner, was a courtly Southern gentleman who accepted Hardy’s apology with apparent sincerity, although Sixto’s clipped and formal greeting at the desk indicated that there had been some harsh feelings earlier in the day.

The chief of police, John Rigby, wasn’t available, so Hardy scheduled an appointment with him for the next afternoon. The police sergeant who served as Rigby’s secretary took the opportunity to gently remind Hardy that homicides were usually determined by police work, after which they were passed up to the D.A.‘s office.

Hardy tried to cheer himself with the argument that he had very quickly passed through the just-another-face-in-the-crowd stage at work. Everyone in the building seemed to know who he was. It wasn’t much consolation.

He wrote a memo to Locke that he threw in the wastebasket. There wasn’t any fence to mend with Locke. He figured he’d either get a good conviction record and move up, or not get one and move out. There was a fine line between kissing ass and mending fences.

At Lou’s, Hardy sat alone at the bar, spinning the jade paperweight. He was nursing a black and tan when a tall, very attractive woman pulled up the stool next to him. Hardy had never spoken to her before, but he knew who she was. She put a hand on his shoulder, leaned close and told him not to let the bastards get him down.

He dropped the jade into his pocket as she flashed him a mouthful of teeth and extended the hand that had been on his shoulder. ‘Elizabeth Pullios. You’re Dismas Hardy.’

‘Guilty.’ Hardy took the warm, fine hand. ‘Which seems to be today’s magic word.’

Pullios might not be the best-looking woman in the D.A.‘s office, Hardy thought, but she thought she was and so occasionally really could be. Perhaps five foot eight, with shoulder-length chestnut hair that shone even in the dim light at Lou’s, she had a big nose, a generous mouth, deep-set eyes and high cheekbones. She wore a brush of tasteful makeup, just enough to set off the angles and highlight the eyes.

‘Guilty is every day’s magic word,’ she said. She signaled Lou behind the bar for a drink, then came back to Hardy. ‘Ruffled the brass feathers, huh? Art told me about it.’

‘Art told me about it, too.’

‘You get reamed?’

Hardy managed a wry smile. ‘I can still sit down. But I think I’ll pass on talking to reporters for a while.’

‘No, don’t,’ she said. Her drink arrived, a double Scotch mist from the looks of it, and she drank half of it in a gulp. ‘Don’t stop talking to anybody. They’re just trying to bust your balls. Talk to anybody you can use.’

‘Who’s trying to bust my balls?’

‘Locke and Art. You’re new and that’s what they do. Find out what you’re made of. They play the bureaucrat game ’cause it’s their control mechanism. Which sometimes is good for some people, but if you want some kick-ass cases, don’t let ‘em stop you. If you’re good in front of a jury, everything’s forgiven, believe me.’

It was coming back to Hardy, the story on Elizabeth Pullios. She was known as a ballbreaker in her own right. She delighted in prosecuting — did it with a singular passion. It was said, more than half truthfully, that she favored the death penalty for car theft, pickpocketing, purse-snatching. She had been married during her first few years as a D.A. to a guy in the office, and when he accepted a better job in private practice on the
defense
side, she had divorced him. She couldn’t live with a defense attorney, she said. They were the scum of the earth — worse, almost, than defendants.

Now the word was she’d have you if you were good enough.

So Hardy was forewarned. He figured he could talk to her safely enough. He was, after all, in love with Frannie. ‘I’m afraid this reporter Elliot kind of used me instead of vice versa,’ he said.

She shrugged that off. ‘Look, that’s what reporters do. But they can also keep a case hot. A lot of us have been known to leak stuff— just don’t let your name out.’

‘That message was pretty clear.’

Pullios finished her drink and signaled Lou again. ‘Buy you another?’ she asked.

Hardy wasn’t half through his first, but an old-hand bartender like himself could nurse a couple of brews along for as long as he needed. ‘Did Art ask you to talk to me?’

‘No, but he told me you were frustrated about your work. I put a little together and I hate to see new guys get shafted. It’s bad for all of us.’ The round of drinks came. Hardy and Pullios clicked glasses. ‘To the good guys,’ she said. ‘That’s us, Hardy, remember that. That’s always us.’

*     *     *     *     *

Hardy was out of Lou’s before five. There was a steady cool breeze coming off the Bay and it threw some grit up into his face and eyes as he walked down the alley next to the Hall of Justice.

Detective Sergeant Abraham Glitsky was sitting on the hood of Hardy’s Suzuki Samurai. ‘If you’re going home I could use a drop-off,’ he said. ‘My city-owned vehicle is once again on the blink. Why is there never enough money to keep things working?’

‘I’ve got a better one — what accounts for your jolly high spirits lately?’

Glitsky slid off the car, letting out a breath. ‘I know,’ he said. Hardy passed by him and unlocked the passenger door. ‘Too many dead guys, I guess. You go see enough bodies a day, you smile less. It’s a proven fact.’

It brought Hardy up short. His desire to get interesting cases — murders — tended in some way to reduce their horror especially after his chat with Elizabeth Pullios. But most of the time on his job he was in ‘suspect’ mode, where he had a perpetrator he was trying to convict. It was easy to forget that half of Glitsky’s job was concerned with victims — families, friends, mourning.

Hardy got in his seat and started the engine. Glitsky shook his head. ‘One of the weekend drive-bys was a kid about Isaac’s age.’ Isaac was the eldest of Glitsky’s three children, a twelve-year-old. ‘Even looked a little like him, except for the hole in his forehead.’

Even after a few months on the job, Hardy hadn’t developed a taste for cop humor. He didn’t know if he wanted to — it rarely made anyone laugh.

They rode in silence for a minute, heading west into the sun. Finally Hardy said, ‘I’m waiting.’

‘For what?’

‘Your two cents’ worth.’

Glitsky squinted into the sunset. ‘And I’d love to give it, as I know you’re often in need of my counsel and advice. But I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.’

‘The hand being a homicide.’

‘That was you, huh? I was afraid it was you.’

‘You didn’t see it?’

Glitsky shook his head. ‘I didn’t get to the paper today. But some guys were talking about this jerkoff D. A.’

‘Yeah. That was me.’

‘Well, look at the bright side like I always do. Maybe it was a homicide, maybe you’ll get the case, win it, get a big conviction, become D.A., run for governor, win that —’

‘Here’s your stop,’ Hardy said. ‘You need a lift in the morning?’

*     *     *     *     *

‘I’ll bet it’s a woman,’ Frannie said.

‘Not Andy Fowler.’

‘You wait and see. It’s a woman. The paperweight was a gift from a woman that he isn’t seeing. She broke up with him and suddenly he couldn’t bear to see it anymore. It reminded him too much of her and she’d broken his heart.’

‘I knew I shouldn’t let you stay home all day. You’ve gotten addicted to the soaps, haven’t you?’

‘Dismas.’

‘My finely honed prosecutorial skills have wheedled the truth from you at last.’

‘Jesus,’ Frannie said, ‘I have never watched a soap opera in my life and you know it.’

‘I’m not so sure anymore,’ Hardy said. ‘The soaring language — “Andy couldn’t bear it. She’d broken his heart.” And all that from a piece of jade.’ He looked across the table at his wife. Her green eyes looked nearly black in the candlelight.

They were in the dining room, finishing up a meal of filet mignon with bearnaise sauce, new potatoes, and string beans that Frannie had cooked in olive oil and garlic. Hardy was half through a bottle of good California cabernet.

‘Okay, Sherlock, but I’ve known Andy for fifteen years, and he doesn’t have girlfriends.’

‘That you have known about.’

‘You’d think I would have gotten some inkling once or twice.’

‘Maybe he just keeps that separate. Especially from Jane. Maybe Jane would be hurt.’

‘Why would Jane be hurt?’

‘I don’t know. Her mother’s memory.’

Hardy shook his head. ‘Not after all this time. I’m sure she’d want her dad to have some love life.’

Tm not so sure of that. Maybe he just thinks it’s better to be discreet. I mean, he is a public figure. If he went through a succession of women…‘

‘Now it’s a succession. The guy didn’t keep a harem, Frannie.’

‘He might have. How would you know?’

‘I know him.’

Frannie smiled. ‘You wait.’

Hardy moved the last morsel of his rare filet around in the remainder of the sauce. ‘I’ll wait,’ he said. ‘This is very bad for my cholesterol, you know.’

‘I notice you’re struggling with it. How did Jane sound?’

Hardy swallowed his food, took a sip of wine. ‘Jane was all right.’ He reached across and covered Frannie’s hand with his own. ‘Jane’s okay, and we don’t have any secrets, you and me, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Come around here.’

She pulled away, still smiling. ‘No.’

‘Would you please come around here?’ Hardy pushed his chair back, and Frannie came around the table and sat on his lap.

‘Since you asked so nice,’ she said. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him thoroughly for the better part of a minute.

Hardy stood up, carrying her, and walked through the kitchen into the bedroom.