The Motive (20 page)

“The appointment?”

She nodded. “This wasn’t public yet, but the administration had gotten in touch with him and told him he’d been short-listed for assistant secretary of the interior, a reward for all the fund-raising he’d done for the president. But Missy wasn’t happy about it. She didn’t want to move to Washington, uproot her life again, especially after all the work she’d done on the house.” Cho’s face clouded over. “But even so, so what? Didn’t I read that it wasn’t murder and suicide? Even if they were fighting, somebody killed them. So would it even matter if they’d been fighting about something?”

“No, you’re right, it wouldn’t,” Glitsky said. “I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time. I’m just trying to get a handle on this whole thing. Who might’ve wanted to kill them.”

“Well, I hate to say this…”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, just…have you talked to his family? They were really unhappy about him and her. And he was unhappy about them.”

“His kids, you mean?”

She nodded. “All the time on him. Missy wanted his money. He should be careful, make sure she signed a prenup, some worse things about her. He said he might change his will before the wedding if they kept it up.”

“Did he tell them that?”

“I don’t know. I think so. Told them, I mean—maybe not actually done it.”

Before Glitsky left Cho, just being thorough and believing that at this early stage in the investigation he needed facts even if they later proved to be irrelevant, he found out that before he’d handed the build phase of the remodel over to Missy, Hanover had paid the first few contractor bills himself during the design phase. The company, James Leymar Construction, was in the phone book, and so was Mr. Leymar himself. Glitsky called, and the man being home made his hat trick for the day.

A half hour later, he pulled up in front of a good-size two-story stucco house on Quintara Street, out in the residential avenues of the Sunset District. A shirtless man was working with lengths of PVC pipe in the earth up close against the house, the sweat on his broad back glinting in the sun. At the sound of Glitsky’s car door closing, he looked around and stood up, slapping his hands together, then wiping them on his well-worn blue jeans. “Glitsky?”

“Yes, sir.”

Leymar was a big, handsome balding man with a well-developed torso, big arms and a shoulder tattoo of a heart and the word “Maggie.” Squinting against the brightness, he took a few steps over the torn-up landscape of his front yard and stuck out his dirty hand. “Jim Leymar. How you doin’?”

“Good. You’re putting in a sprinkler system?”

“I know. Ridiculous, isn’t it?” He turned back to survey the trenches he’d dug. “Like the foggiest damn real estate in America needs more water. But the wife decided for God knows what reason, so that’s the end of that discussion.” He swiped at his forehead, leaving a streak of dirt. “But you said you had some questions about the Hanover job?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t mind, but I’ve got to say it breaks my heart to think about the work we put in on that house only to have it all go up in smoke. It was a beautiful job. And the people, too, of course. A tragedy.”

“You knew them pretty well?”

“Well, they were clients, you know. I’d done some work for him before, rebuilt his kitchen, maybe three years ago, and it went okay. So we got together again.”

“But this time was mostly her?”

“More than mostly. She wrote the checks, so she was the client.”

Glitsky filed that bit of information. “And how was she to work with?” he asked.

“Uncompromising, but without a personal edge to it. She wanted things a certain way, and if you didn’t give her what she wanted, she’d have us do it again, down to the floorboards if need be. But she was just firm, that was all. Give me that anytime over somebody who changes her mind seventeen times.”

Something about Leymar’s phrase stopped Glitsky. “So you’re saying she did not make lots of changes as you went along?”

“No.” He thought about it for another minute. “If you want to see, I’ve got all the change orders…”

“That’s all right. I’d just heard somewhere that she kept adding to the job.”

“No more than anybody else. Less than some folks. No, what happened was we got a good design and went ahead and built it.”

“So the initial bid was for a million dollars?”

Leymar laughed out loud. “
A million dollars?
You think I make a million dollars a job and I’m laying my own sprinkler system?” He shook his head, still chuckling. “A million dollars. Jesus Christ. A million is nearly the gross on my best year ever. The gross. Hanover was a good job—hell, a great job, I’ll give you that—but it went out for five hundred, maybe a little less. And that’s what we brought it in for, too. Give or take. Where did you ever hear a million?”

“Several sources,” he said.

“Well, I’d go back to them and tell ’em they’ve got
their heads up their asses. You want, I’ll show you my books on it.”

“I won’t need to do that.” Glitsky wiped his own brow. The sun was directly overhead now, the temperature nearing eighty, about as hot as it ever got in San Francisco. “Okay, let’s leave the money. I’d like to eliminate the possibility that
she
was the target instead of him, so I’m hoping to find somebody who might have known her a little bit, see if she had enemies.”

“Who wanted to kill her?”

“Maybe.”

He shook his head. “That’d be a stretch, I’d say.” He thought another minute. “Except maybe if there was some other guy before Hanover.”

“Did you get a feeling that there had been?”

“No. It’s just that she was…”—he glanced over his shoulder—“I don’t want Maggie to hear me, but she was an unbelievably attractive hunk of woman. My crews would trade off with each other so they could work on her place and get a glimpse of her. If she’d dumped some guy for Hanover, I could see him maybe taking it out on both of them.”

“Did she or Hanover ever say anything to make you think that?”

“No. We didn’t talk personal. They were clients, that was all. We didn’t hang with the same social crowd.” He gestured around him. “As you probably figured anyway, huh?”

Dismas Hardy came down the stairs from a rare Saturday afternoon nap to find Abe Glitsky in his kitchen, helping Vincent cut up vegetables on a cutting board on the counter, the two of them working silently next to a rapidly diminishing pile of tomatoes, onions, peppers, okra. When he stopped in the doorway, Glitsky glanced his way and, just loud enough to be heard, said, “Here he is now, Vin, I’ll tell you later.”

Hardy crossed to his boy and put a hand on his shoulder. “Have I ever told you your Uncle Abe’s Indian name, Vin?”

“His Indian name?”

“You know, Dances with Wolves, like that? A phrase that captures a person’s essence. Abe’s is People Not
Laughing. Why? Because every time you see him he’s surrounded by people who are not laughing. But I do think that actually crying real tears is taking it a little far.”

“It’s the onions,” Vincent said.

“That’s what they all say.” Hardy threw a chunk of tomato into his mouth. “What are you guys making?”

“Gumbo,” Vin said. “I need it for school on Monday and wanted to make a test batch.”

Hardy squeezed his son’s shoulder. “I love this boy. Make it hot,” he said.

“I’m thinking of calling Treya, inviting her over, too,” Glitsky said.

“That would be swell, and I love your wife even more than I like you, but weren’t you guys just here? It seems like only yesterday.”

“It
was
yesterday. Maybe we should all just move in since we’re spending so much time here anyway. We’d save a bundle on rent. And Vin, you could get in time with that critical small-child experience you’re going to need when you have your own kids.”

“I’m not having kids.”

“Sure you are.”

“No, I’m not. I’m going to be a rich bachelor.”

“There’s a noble calling,” Hardy said. “How are you going to do the rich part?”

“I’m thinking the lottery.”

“He got that from you,” Hardy shot at Glitsky. “The adults in this house don’t play the lottery. And you know why? Because we’re good at numbers, and the lottery is the tax for the math-challenged. I believe I’ve even mentioned this to you before.”

“Don’t listen to your father, Vin. Somebody wins the lottery every few weeks, and you’ve got as good a chance as anybody else.”

Withering Glitsky with a glance, he said, “Pathetic,” and looked at his son. “You got a backup? Plan, I mean, to get rich.”

“I guess if things got tight I could always be a movie star for a while.”

“There you go,” Glitsky said proudly. “Plan B, ready to go.”

“Although traditionally,” Hardy said, “doesn’t the movie star come from within the ranks of the supremely attractive?”

Vin looked at Glitsky, sniffed theatrically. “He cuts me deep.”

“I heard it.”

“It happens all the time. My self-esteem’s in the toilet.”

Hardy stopped in the middle of a bite of red pepper. “You’ll live, I promise. I didn’t even
know
the word ‘self-esteem’ when I was a kid.”

“Isn’t it two words?” Glitsky asked.

“It’s hyphenated,” Vinnie said. “And Dad didn’t hear of it as a kid ’cause it wasn’t invented until after the Renaissance.”

Hardy deadpanned his son for a minute, said, “Too bad Abe’s Indian name is already taken.” He turned his attention to Glitsky. “But callously leaving for a moment the discussion of my son’s future plans for wealth and world domination, what really brings you here?”

Glitsky laid his knife down. “This morning I talked to Nils Granat about the towing business. As I was in the neighborhood anyway, I thought I’d stop by since you seemed interested last night. He says nobody he knows would ever consider using strong-arm tactics to accomplish their business goals. Those may have been his exact words.”

“Well, what did you expect? He’s not going to tell you they’ve got a team of hit men out whacking people who get in their way. I still think it’s a pretty good theory.”

“Well, I’m going to have a few conversations with Tow/Hold management, see if any of them get nervous. Meanwhile, though, I also talked to Hanover’s secretary, who seems to think it’s probably somebody in the family who stood to lose the inheritance.”

“You already had that one. What was her name again, the daughter-in-law?”

“Catherine Hanover, but I don’t think so. I can’t believe she would have spelled her motive out so clearly if she’d had any part in it. Still, the family connection’s on the table. But you know the most interesting thing?”

“The uncertainty principle?”

“What?”

“The most interesting thing. The uncertainty principle. Actually, quantum mechanics in general, in fact. All of it damned interesting, although I’m not sure I get most of it.”

Glitsky picked up his knife again, went back to the cutting board, shaking his head. “Why do I talk to your father, Vinnie?”

“It feels so good when you stop?”

“That must be it.”

“Okay, okay,” Hardy said. “I’m sorry if I hurt all the dainty feelings in this kitchen. I give up, Abe. What’s the most interesting thing?”

He put his knife down again. “Missy D’Amiens didn’t spend a million dollars fixing up her house.”

Hardy leaned back against the counter, crossed his arms. “Few of us do, Abe. Why is that interesting?”

“Because everybody I talked to up ’til now said she had. Hanover’s secretary, the daughter-in-law, Cuneo. That was the number.”

“And this means?”

“If it’s true, it means half a million dollars cash has gone missing.”

“With who? Where’d it go?”

“That’s the question.”

The Beck was in the honor society at her high school, and one of the requirements of that organization was doing some nonschool community service, in this case cleaning up selected city parks and other public amenities in a “graffiti abatement” program, which had begun in a bit of controversy.

Hardy and Frannie both thought it was a nice “only in San Francisco” touch that the program—created to clean up the worst of the obscene tagging that desecrated nearly every square inch of wall space in certain neighborhoods—had been hotly debated and nearly disallowed by the school district on the grounds that the cleanup represented an authoritarian stifling of artistic expression among the city’s troubled youth. A number of adult San Francisco residents and parents, and nearly half of the school board, held to the belief that spraying “FUCK” and other such
creative epithets in Day-Glo on billboards and benches at bus stops and anywhere else the spirit moved one was apparently therapeutic and good for a child’s self-esteem. That word again.

With a growing sense of outrage, Frannie had eventually joined the debate and for the past few weekends, in support of the kids’ efforts, she had been going out with her daughter and her friends, all of them armed with buckets and detergent, to help with the cleanup. And now they were home.

The guys were still making the gumbo—Hardy, with a just-opened bottle of Anchor Steam next to him, peeling shrimp over the sink, Glitsky cutting up the andouille, Vincent seeding and chopping the jalapeños.

“What’s cooking?” Rebecca yelled from the front door. “It smells great!” Footsteps broke into a run in the hallway, and in a second, she burst into the kitchen. Hugs all around. “Uncle Abe! Two days in a row! Hey, Dad! What are you guys making?” She was at the stove, wooden spoon in hand. “What is this stuff?”

Vin flew across the room. “No, no, no, no, no! No tastes, no bites. That’s dinner.”

Frannie showed up a few steps behind her daughter. Her windblown red hair, which she’d been growing long for some months now, fell below her shoulders, and her color was high after all day in the sun. She was wearing khaki shorts and a pink tank top, and her green eyes were sparkling.

Hardy found himself struck by a sudden contentment so acute that it felt for a moment like a hot blade through his heart.

The sun was low enough in the late afternoon that it made it through the picture window in the front of the house, spraying the hardwood in the dining room with an amber glow that reflected all the way up and into the kitchen. Behind him, over the sink, the window was open and a still unseasonably warm breeze tickled the back of his neck. The smell of the gumbo was intoxicating, both of the women in his family were smiling and almost too lovely to believe, and his son and best friend were working with him to make something everybody would love to eat.
Everything dear to him was close, safe and protected in this room, on a perfect day.