The Motive (49 page)

“Okay.” Treya, now up on an elbow, interested. Even
cloistered as she’d been, she’d been aware of the latest news stories, the conspiracy theory. The Hanover case, like it or not, was part of their lives, and probably would be for some time. “What?”

“She had a checking account and a safe-deposit box, a big one.” He drew a breath. “She closed the account and the box on May seventh, five days before she was killed.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” He looked over at her. “Eighty-eight hundred dollars, plus whatever was in the box.”

H
ardy was in his kitchen with Glitsky. The overhead light was on—it was still black out through the window over the sink, though the rain seemed to have stopped. The clock on the stove read 6:24. From the back of the ground floor came the muted sounds of Hardy’s children knocking around, using the bathroom, getting ready for school. From upstairs, the shower. The house waking up.

Hardy, awakened by Glitsky’s call forty-five minutes earlier, was in one of his dark gray courtroom suits, white shirt, muted tie. He blew over his mug of coffee, took a sip. “Missy signed it out herself?” he asked.

“There’s no other way to get it.”

“Wire transfer.”

“She’d still have to sign something.”

“Yeah, but she could have done that months ago.”

“But somebody would have had to place the order, right? Either way, it doesn’t matter. She signed the withdrawal form, took it in cash. They had the hard copies still there.”

“How’d you get a look at them without a subpoena?”

Glitsky considered, hesitated for a second. “That’s a state secret that could get the manager fired. I know her. But forget the logistics for a minute. She got her hands on more than eight grand. Maybe a lot more. No way to tell. Five days before she got killed.”

Hardy put his mug on the counter, boosted himself up next to it and picked it up again. “Where’d she get that much money?”

“Hanover. She inflated the remodel costs and skimmed. I’m thinking she might have had as much as a few hundred thousand dollars in her safe-deposit box.”

“A few
hundred
thousand? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No.”

“If that’s true, she was leaving him.” Not a question.

“Had to be.”

“He didn’t have a clue, though.”

“You know that?”

“According to Catherine. They’d evidently been arguing about this cabinet appointment, and that’s why she was gone during that last day, but Paul told Catherine it would blow over. Missy wasn’t leaving him. No way.”

Glitsky’s frown was pronounced. “So he didn’t know.”

“I hope it’s true and he didn’t just lie to Catherine to rile up the family. That might have been what got them both killed.” Suddenly Hardy brought himself up short, a palm against his forehead. “Lord, what am I thinking? I’m sorry, Abe, trial time. The focus is a little narrow. How’s your boy?”

“He’s all right,” Glitsky said evenly. “Top one percent of kids in his boat.”

“There’s a relief.”

“A bit.” But Glitsky didn’t trust himself with optimism too long if they kept talking about Zachary’s health, so he went right back to business. “I thought I’d do it legal today. Get your sorry signature on a subpoena so we can have copies of the records by next week.”

“You mean Missy’s bank records?”

Glitsky nodded. “I thought you could help me get ’em as essential to this case. Tie it into Hanover’s estate and missing money. You sign a subpoena, the records just come to court. Rosen won’t care that we’ve got them.”

“I’ve got one for you,” Hardy said. “How’d you get on this in the first place? Missy.”

“
You
got me on it,” Glitsky said. “The car.” Mirroring Hardy, boosting himself on the counter by the stove, he told him about the series of unusual findings he’d happened upon as he had followed up leads on Missy, from the address he’d gotten at the DMV site, to Ruth Guthrie her landlady, to the bed and bath store where she hadn’t worked, which had led to the checking and other accounts and the bank.

“Wait a minute,” Hardy said when Glitsky had finished.
“So you’re telling me that before she showed up here in San Francisco when? Three years ago? You still don’t know anything about where she came from?”

“No. She came from somewhere they speak French, apparently. But how she got here? She dropped out of the sky. Although there’s a social”—a Social Security number—“on her Bank of America accounts, and I was going to run that, too. If you’ll sign off on the subpoenas.” In fact, it was no big deal for Hardy to request Missy’s bank records, and both men knew it. Preparing the subpoena wouldn’t take Hardy five minutes. “I’m just saying it might help, Diz.”

Hardy felt a wash of fatigue—the coffee wasn’t kicking in quickly enough. He brought his hands to his eyes, then grabbed his mug and tipped it up. “I know it might,” he said. “Sorry. I’m thinking about eyewitnesses. If I could just see how I can use this D’Amiens thing. If she had all that cash on her, plus the ring, and Catherine knew about it…but if anything that only strengthens her motive.”

“I’m not guaranteeing any of this is going to help your case,” Glitsky said. “I’d just like to know more.”

“So would I,” Hardy said, “perennially. Sometimes it’s just not in the cards.”

“True, but it’d be dumb not to look.”

“Not if it doesn’t help my client, which is pretty much all I’m thinking about right now.”

Glitsky shrugged. “Your call. I’m going to do what I can anyway.”

Hardy threw a veiled and vaguely malevolent glance over his coffee mug. “There’s a surprise,” he said.

When Hardy came around the corner in the hallway and saw Catherine in the holding cell behind the courtroom, she was sitting hunched over almost as if she’d been beaten, as though huddled against further blows. When he got to the cell door, she looked over quickly but, smoothing her hands down over her face, didn’t get up, didn’t change position. When the bailiff let Hardy in, he went and sat beside her. Her face hadn’t completely dried. Putting an arm around her, he drew her in next to him, and she broke down.

He let it go on until it ended, just allowing her to lean against him until she’d sobbed it all out. When her breathing
finally slowed, he gave her the handkerchief he’d learned always to have with him, then gave her a last buck-up squeeze with his arm and stood up. He walked over and stood by the bars, giving her some space while she got herself back together. He consulted his watch. They weren’t due in court for another twenty minutes, plenty of time. Finally, he went back to her and sat.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what…”

“It’s all right.”

She nodded. “I’ve been trying to keep myself from thinking about my kids, but today’s Polly’s birthday.” She took a shaky breath. “Now I’ve missed every one of them since I’ve been in here.”

“I know.”

“I still don’t know where to put any of this. How this can be happening to me.” She gestured at the surroundings. “None of this is in my life, Dismas. Even after all this time, I can’t understand how I’ve gotten here. I keep telling myself to just be strong and bear up and don’t give them anything they can use. But then I think, so what? It’s already been too long. I’m not their mom anymore.”

“You’re still their mom, Catherine. They visit here every chance they get.”

“But I can’t…I mean…” Again, she bowed her head, shaking it slowly side to side, side to side. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. I’m sorry.”

“First, one more apology and I start pulling out your fin-gernails. You’ve got every right to be miserable and lonely and afraid and have all of this get to you. Second, we don’t always have to be getting anywhere. That’s for in there.” He indicated the courtroom. “Here we can just sit if we want.”

She nodded again, then reached over and took his hand. “Can we do this for a minute?”

“I’m timing it,” he said.

Seconds ticked by. At last her shoulders settled in a long sigh. “I’ve been wondering if I could have seen the seeds of all this back when Will and I first started, if that wasn’t my original mistake. And everything followed from that.”

“You got your kids out of it,” Hardy said, “so maybe it wasn’t all a mistake.”

“I know. That’s true. But I also knew it was a different thing with him than I had with you. You know what I’m saying?”

Hardy nodded. He knew.

“But I’d finished college and worked almost ten years and pretty much given up on dating because of all the losers, and then suddenly here was this kind of cute guy who could be fun in those days. But I knew,
I knew
, Diz, in my heart, that it wasn’t…well, the same as I’d always wanted. But I also thought there wouldn’t ever be anything better. So I settled. I settled. So, so stupid.”

“You did what you did, Catherine. You made a life that worked for almost twenty years. That’s not failing.”

A bitter chuckle. “Look around you. Getting to here isn’t failing?”

“It’s not over yet.”

“It isn’t? It feels like it is. Even if they let me go. That’s what I’m saying.”

“I understand what you’re saying. But I can’t have you bail on me now. The first job is to get you acquitted. After that, when you’re back outside…”

She was shaking her head and let go of his hand. “Dismas. Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t give me the standard pep talk. We both know I might not get back outside.”

“I don’t know that!” Hardy’s tone was firm, nearly harsh. He turned on the bench to face her directly. “Listen to me.” Taking her hand back almost angrily, holding it tight with both of his. “I believe you’re innocent, and because of that the jury will not convict you. I’ll make them see it. And you need to hold on to that thought. I need you to do that for me.”

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and let it out all at once. “All right,” she whispered, nodding her head. “All right. I can try.”

Moving on to news and strategy, he told her of Farrell’s interview with her mother-in-law, the remote but ar-guable possibilities presented by the missing ring, com-bined with Theresa’s purchase of a new car for cash. While
acknowledging without much enthusiasm that it might be something Hardy could introduce to the jury, she really didn’t show much interest until he got to what Glitsky had told him about this morning. “You mean Missy was stealing from Paul? When she was going to get all the money anyway?”

On the slab concrete bench, the two of them might have been coaches huddled on the sidelines, conferring in intimate tones. “She wouldn’t have gotten any if she left him,” Hardy said.

“No, I know. But that much…I mean, if that’s true, she must have been planning to leave for quite a while, and I don’t understand that at all. They only got formally engaged six months or so before they died, and the remodel had already been going on long before that.”

Hardy’s shoulders went up an inch. “Maybe she wasn’t sure they’d ever really get married and she wanted to make sure she got something out of him for the time invested. Then, by the time they actually started making plans, she’d already socked all this money away.”

“Maybe. But I don’t know what it means. Why did she take it out?”

“You said it. They were arguing. Paul might have thought it wasn’t a major issue, but maybe she didn’t agree. She was leaving him.”

Catherine sat straight up. “Maybe I’m stupid, Dismas, but that doesn’t make any sense. She wasn’t going to leave him over some possible minor sub-cabinet appointment. Paul told me. That day. Remember? That’s what the fight was about. He was going to tell them to go ahead and start the vetting process. But beyond that, there were other candidates. He might not have even gotten the nomination, and if he had, he still would have had to be confirmed. The whole thing was months away at least, if it happened at all. I can’t see Missy deciding to leave last May over it.”

“I’m not arguing with you. But the fact remains that she did take out the money. If she wasn’t leaving him, what was she doing?”

“Maybe giving it back to him?”

Hardy tossed her a get-real look. “Maybe not.” In the hallway in front of them, two bailiffs led eight jailhouse
residents in their orange jumpsuits to another holding cell down the long corridor. The chains that bound them together rattled and echoed, then died, and Hardy said, “Now if somebody was blackmailing her…”