The Motive (41 page)

But the unusually rapid pace of the actual trial—as opposed to the glacially slow movement of the endless pretrial motions and accretion of evidence over the past months—was outstripping his efforts to keep a step ahead of the proceedings. Now, merely to keep up, he had to effectively utilize every single possible working second in this and the coming days. Even under that pressure, he’d felt he needed to see Abe and Treya tonight, to be there if they needed his support. But now that mission had been accomplished, that message delivered, and he was back on the clock, on his client’s time.

He’d made the original appointment, for seven thirty, from his office as soon as he’d come in from his day in court, before he’d even checked his messages. When he got the call from Frannie about meeting at Abe’s for dinner, he’d called Mary again and asked if he could change the time to nine o’clock, and at precisely that hour, he rang her doorbell.

The Rodmans lived in a well-kept, brick-fronted house on upper Masonic. Hanover’s youngest daughter, Mary,
like seemingly every other woman involved in this case, was gourmet arm-candy of a high order. Over the course of his involvement in this case, Hardy had come to realize that Hanover was one of those men who had an enviable penchant for pulchritude. His first wife, Theresa—Catherine’s mother-in-law—although in her seventies and with the personality of a domineering tyrant, was still very easy on the eyes, a latter-day Nefertiti. Both of Paul’s daughters, Beth and Mary, had carried those genes into the next generation. Catherine, perhaps the best-looking of all of them, had married into the family. And Missy D’Amiens had been about to join it. Beauty everywhere you looked.

After introducing Hardy, again, to her husband, Carlos, and her son, Pablo, she led him back out to a tiny sunken living room, hardly the size of Glitsky’s. But what the room, and the house for that matter, lacked in size, it made up for in charm. Comfortable burgundy leather wing chairs and highly placed narrow windows bracketed a functional and working fireplace. In front of it, a dark wine Persian rug covered parquet floors. They’d artfully framed and tastefully hung several original watercolors.

Mary indicated the couch at the far end of the room from the fireplace and sat at the opposite end of it from Hardy. Like the other Hanover women, she wore her dark hair long, a few inches below her shoulders. Unlike Theresa, her mother, though—and Catherine, for that matter—Mary was physically petite, fragile-looking, with somber eyes. She wore the same sweater and slacks that she’d had on in the courtroom today, and little makeup. Catherine had told Hardy that she was the most emotional of the siblings, and the most sympathetic. Somewhat to his surprise, she spoke first. “I have to say, you managed to upset my brother pretty badly at lunch. Is that your approach now that you’re in trial? To get everybody all worked up?”

Hardy asked with a mild curiosity, “Who else is worked up? Are you?”

“Well…no. But Will was.”

“Will wasn’t paying me, Mary. I didn’t want to have to abandon Catherine, so I—”

“You wouldn’t have done that!”

“Maybe not, but let’s let that be our secret, all right?”

She flashed a weary smile. “I think he’s being horrible—Will, I mean—playing the kids off her. She was always a good mother.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to think anymore. I never thought they would arrest her, and then when they did, it just didn’t seem real that she would…I mean that it would get to a trial. With all this incredibly weak evidence against her…it just doesn’t seem like Catherine could have done…” She trailed off.

Though depressing, it was good for Hardy to hear this from someone who’d been at the trial the whole time. If she was thinking this way, it was a litmus for the jury. “The evidence seems bad to you, then, does it?”

“Well, I know you said that there wasn’t any physical evidence, and maybe there isn’t too much of that, but the rest of it…”

“The circumstantial evidence?”

“That’s it. I mean, that might seem to some people that it points to her, doesn’t it?”

“But it doesn’t to you.” Not a question. “You know Catherine better than that, don’t you? She says the two of you are pretty close.”

“Why else do you think I’m there in court every day? She’s got to know that the whole family hasn’t abandoned her.” She bit her lip. “I mean, Will and my mother…it just seems so cruel. I don’t know why he’s doing that.”

“Their marriage was on the rocks before,” he said. “Now, with this, with her accusations against him, it’s a war.”

“I don’t know why Catherine said all that about Will’s secretary and him. She could have just, I don’t know, kept it between them. That’s one of the reasons Mom is so mad.”

“So you don’t think Will was having the affair?”

“I don’t know. It’s just all so sordid, don’t you think? I don’t want to believe he’d lie to his kids, though. I mean, people have affairs and get divorced all the time.”

“Sure, but he doesn’t want his kids to think he’s the reason for it. He’d rather they think it’s her. And especially with this thing now at trial this morning, Cuneo saying she came on to him.”

Now the dark eyes flashed. “That was horrible! That man’s creepy. You see the way he’s always moving, bouncing, jittering, like he’s on drugs or something? There’s
no way
Catherine is going to…I mean, just no. But with all these accusations flying, I can see where people might not know what to think anymore.”

“Do you believe Catherine?”

“Yes, but I believe Will, too. He’s my brother. He’s my blood. Thicker than water, you know.” She sighed deeply. “It’s like this terrible nightmare. I just wish we could all wake up.”

“It is like that. I know.” Hardy took his opening. “But listen, I’ve taken enough of your time. I’ve got a specific question I wanted to ask you if you don’t mind.”

“No, of course, I don’t. I mean, if it will help Catherine…”

“Great.” Hardy didn’t want to let her think about it. “Do you remember back on the afternoon of the fire, after Catherine had gone to see your dad and found out his plans about Missy and the family? I was reviewing all of my talks with her the other day, all the details she’d told me, and I came upon the fact that right after she’d left your dad’s house—this was long before the fire—she said she called you. Do you remember that?”

Mary nodded. “Sure, I remember that very well. She was really upset.”

“And what about you?”

“I was upset, too, I suppose, but we’re doing okay here, Carlos and I. I mean, I didn’t like what Dad was doing, but didn’t see any way that we could stop it.” Then, perhaps realizing what she’d said, she put her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Nobody was going to try to stop anybody. It was just a shame, that’s all. Dad being so gullible.”

“With Missy, you mean?”

Nodding, she said, “But he’d made his own money and I guess he could spend it however he wanted. The minority opinion in the family.”

“But you didn’t believe Missy loved your father?”

“Not for a minute.”

“Okay, let’s go back to the phone call for a minute. Why did Catherine call you?”

“Well, I guess because we’re friends. We talked all the time. Our boys are about the same age, too, so there’s that. And after she left Dad’s, she wanted everybody to know, the whole family, so we could decide what we were going to do. But she and Beth aren’t all that close—Beth’s really serious and not much of a chatterer, like me—and there was no way Catherine was going to call Mom.”

“So did you call them then?”

“Yeah. Mom right away, I remember, but not Beth. She hates being bothered at work. I should have called Catherine back, too, I realize now, and maybe invited her to come out to Pablo’s soccer game and we could have just talked and gotten everything calmed down. If I’d have done that…” She shook her head. “Anyway, I didn’t. Is that all you wanted to ask me about? That phone call?”

“Pretty much,” he said. “It’s part of Catherine’s alibi and I wanted to make sure I had the chronology straight before I put her on the stand.” This was not even close to true, but it sounded plausible and, more important, Mary bought it. “There is one other thing, though.”

“Sure.”

“What can you tell me about the ring?”

She shook her head. “That stupid ring. What do you want to know?”

“Anything you can think of.”

She thought a minute. “Well, it was the dumbest thing Dad ever did, buying that for her. Then telling us, of course, what he paid for it. Six figures, he said, like he’d finally gotten into some exclusive club. But that’s really what started all the…I mean that’s when everybody started taking Missy seriously. And Mom! I thought she’d die. ‘
He spent over a hundred thousand dollars on a rock for her finger?
’ He never even gave her, my mom I mean, an engagement ring at all. They could only afford a couple of gold bands in those days. But then, when Dad got this, this monstrosity for her…” She shook her head at the memory, blew out a sharp breath. “Anyway, that’s the ring. Why?”

“It’s come up a couple of times lately. No one seems to know where it’s gone to.”

The fact seemed to strike Mary as odd, and her face clouded briefly, but by then Hardy was getting to his feet.
Two minutes later, the two of them shook hands outside in the cold night at her front door, she closed it behind him, and Hardy jogged down to where he’d parked.

In his living room, at his reading chair, the lone light in the house on over his shoulder, Hardy reviewed his notes on talks he’d had long ago with Catherine’s family. He was happy to see that his memory hadn’t completely deserted him. From the outset of this case, he’d realized that every member of the Hanover family had the same motive to kill the patriarch, so he’d questioned Mary, Beth and Will as to their whereabouts at the time of the fire.

Will, of course, had been out on the ocean somewhere off the coast of California, with or without Karyn Harris. Beth, a consultant with an environmental insurance firm, stayed at her office crunching numbers with a team of four other colleagues until nearly eight thirty. Mary worked in investment banking downtown, where she’d taken Catherine’s call. She’d checked her calendar and found that her husband had picked her up from work at quarter past five, and the two of them had gone together out to Golden Gate Park to take in their son’s six o’clock soccer game.

At the time he’d done these interviews—early in the process, late last summer—Hardy hadn’t fully appreciated the degree to which Theresa remained involved with her offspring and with the lives and futures of their kids, her grandchildren. Still, to date, he hadn’t ever talked to Theresa about what she’d been doing on the night of May 12. Among the various other dudes he’d considered, she’d somehow never made the list. She was merely Paul Hanover’s ex-wife, long estranged from him. But evidently still connected enough, either to him or to his memory, to become enraged about the size and expense of his new fiancée’s engagement ring. And what Hardy did finally know, now, again thanks to his conversation with Mary tonight, was that Mary had called her mother right after she’d heard from Catherine, in the late afternoon of the day Paul and Missy had been killed, about three hours before the fire started.

Hardy closed up his notes binder, turned off the back
light and walked to his little tool room behind the kitchen where he kept his maps. There, he looked up Theresa Hanover’s address, which was on Washington Street at Scott, in Pacific Heights.

Fifteen blocks in a straight line from Alamo Square.

H
ardy was up at five o’clock, showered, shaved and dressed in a half hour. Opening the door to his upstairs bedroom, he was surprised to see light from the kitchen, more surprised to see his daughter, Rebecca, up and dressed for school. She sat writing at the dining room table with her schoolbooks spread around her. Looking up at him, she smiled. “Howdy, stranger.”

“Not you, too.”

“What?”

“You know what. I’m in trial. It’s how I support us financially, and unfortunately it involves putting in long hours once in a while, which is not something I enjoy as much as everyone here at home seems to believe. Have you eaten?”