A Plague of Secrets (5 page)

Glitsky sat with his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes focused somewhere a foot or two above Hardy’s head. From time to time he’d draw a breath, but nothing so deep as a sigh. There was resignation in the wasted face, but no rage, usually Glitsky’s default emotion.

The lack of anger worried Hardy.

“Yesterday morning Treya said they’re keeping him unconscious for a few days,” he said at last. “You got any more than that?”

“No.”

“She said the operation was a success.”

“In the sense that he lived through it.”

“I thought it gave the brain room to swell.”

“Right. That’s what it does.”

“Then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what are you looking at? What’s the prognosis?”

Glitsky brought his eyes to Hardy’s. It seemed a long time before he spoke. “Either the swelling’s going to go down and he gets better to some degree, although we can’t know how much for a couple of months”-he hesitated-“either that, or one of the clots breaks up too much or any other random thing happens and he dies.”

The silence gathered.

“You know,” Glitsky said quietly at last, “I’m thinking it wouldn’t have been the worst result if the heart thing had killed him when he was born.” Zachary’s birth had been accompanied by the discovery of a heart murmur, which, though later found to be benign, had raised the specter of his early death from congenital heart failure. “At least that wouldn’t have been my fault.”

“This wasn’t your fault, Abe.”

Glitsky shook his head. “You weren’t there.”

“Treya told me what happened.”

“She wasn’t there either.”

“So tell me.”

Glitsky’s gaze went back to the ceiling. He unfolded his arms and put his palms flat on the desk. “He was right next to me. I mean, all I had to do was block him, one foot in front of that big fucking wheel.” Glitsky’s unaccustomed profanity hung in the room, a boundary crossed. “Instead I walked over to get his helmet, which should have been on him first.” He leveled his gaze. “Five seconds, Diz. Five stupid seconds.”

“You know why they call them accidents, Abe? They’re nobody’s fault.”

Glitsky lived with that for a minute. Then, “I think I’m going to quit.”

“Quit what?”

“This.” Glitsky gestured around at the office. “Here.”

“How would that help?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t.” He brought a hand to his forehead, rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “What were we saying?”

“I’ve got an idea,” Hardy said. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep? Take a few days off while this shakes out.”

“And what? Just wait?”

“What else are you doing here?”

Glitsky looked through him for about five seconds. Finally, he nodded and started to push himself back from the desk, then stopped and reached for his telephone. He punched a few numbers, then after a moment spoke into the receiver. “Hey,” he said. “No, nothing new. Diz is up here. He thinks I ought to go home and get some rest. Maybe you want to do the same thing.” He waited, listened for another second or two, then said, “I’ll swing by and pick you up on the way out.”

When Hardy got back
to his office on Sutter Street about twenty minutes after he’d left Glitsky, his receptionist/secretary, Phyllis, greeted him out in the lobby with a chilly smile and the comment that since she kept his calendar, it might be helpful if he shared his appointment schedule with her from time to time.

“But I do,” he said. “Religiously.” He put his hand over his heart. “Phyllis, I hope you know with an absolute certainty I would never, under any conditions, make an appointment without sharing every detail of it with you.”

Phyllis cast her eyes heavenward in her perpetual exasperation over her boss’s sarcasm. She threw a fast glance back over her shoulder, indicating a young woman sitting and perusing a magazine on the couch against the wall behind her circular workstation.

Hardy followed the glance. The woman turned a page in her magazine. “She’s here for me?” he whispered with a bit of theatricality. “It must be a trick to make me look bad in front of you. I swear I’ve never seen her before.”

Phyllis pursed her lips. “She says she has an appointment, referred by Harlen Fisk. A Mrs. Townshend.”

“Aha! She was supposed to call and make an appointment, Phyllis. Maybe she misunderstood. But the real good news is that this was not my fault.” At her skeptical expression he added, “Hey, it happens.”

Leaving his receptionist with a conciliatory pat on the arm, he breezed around her and in a couple of steps stood in front of his waiting guest. “Mrs. Townshend? Dismas Hardy. Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

She snapped the magazine closed and popped up to her feet, her mouth set in a prim line, her forehead creased with worry. Reaching out, she took Hardy’s hand in a firm grip, as though now that he’d finally arrived, she didn’t want to lose him.

“I asked Harlen to have you give me a call to make an appointment. I’m afraid I didn’t expect you to come right on down.”

She let go of his hand and brought her fingers up to her mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry. I just thought… I mean, he told me where you worked and that he’d talked to you and I was free and just gathered-”

Hardy held up his own hand, stopping her. “It’s okay,” he said. “Timing’s everything and yours couldn’t be better. I was looking at a long tedious afternoon of administration, and now instead I get to chat with Harlen’s sister.” He broke a welcoming grin and guided her toward his office with a hand under her elbow. “Does that also make you the mayor’s niece?”

“Yes.”

“Well”-Hardy led her into his office-“I’m a big fan of Kathy’s as well. Since back in her own supervisor days.” Closing the door behind them, he motioned to the more casual of the two seating areas, a couple of wing chairs by a magazine table. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Wine? Something a little stronger?”

“Actually… well, it’s a little early, but I’m… I think I must be a little nervous. Maybe a glass of wine wouldn’t be too bad.”

“You don’t need to be nervous,” Hardy said. “Nothing we say in this room leaves here if you don’t want it to. Red or white?”

“White.”

“White it is.” Hardy crossed over to the mirror-backed, granite-topped wet bar that took up most of one of his walls. The bar was a bit of a showcase piece, with a golden inlaid sink and gold faucet, one open shelf for the oversized wineglasses and another for the china cups, a large commercial espresso-making machine, and a selection of teas, mixers, and spirits arranged along the rest of the free wall space. Opening the half-sized refrigerator, he stopped and turned back to her again. “Chardonnay or other?”

“Other, I think.”

“I think so too. Maybe I’ll join you.” He pulled out a bottle of Groth Sauvignon Blanc. Serving her, he said, “If you think the bar service here is good, wait’ll you see our legal work.” He flashed what he knew was his professional disarming smile, sat down across from her, and took a sip of his wine, silently prompting her to do the same. “Now how can I help you?”

After her first small sip she held her wineglass on her lap with both hands. “I think I’m in trouble,” she began. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Let’s see if the first part’s true first, then see where that leads us. Why do you think you’re in trouble? Because the police came to see you about your manager’s death?”

“Partly that. I don’t know how much Harlen told you, but Dylan was selling dope-marijuana only, I hope-out of my store.”

“Harlen told me you didn’t know much about that.”

“I didn’t. Not really.”

“Then you shouldn’t be in trouble.” He broke a smile. “That was easy. Next problem?”

“Really?”

“You mean really you shouldn’t be in trouble?” He didn’t feel he needed to go into the low-probability scenario of a forfeiture. “Yes, really.”

“But… well, I mean, I own the place. I’m the legal owner. If somebody trips and falls there, I’m the one who gets sued.”

Hardy sat back, put an ankle on a knee, and took another sip of his wine. “That’s not the same situation. Nobody’s suffering recoverable harm because they bought marijuana at your place. Who’s going to sue you?”

But she shook her head again. “I’m not so worried, really, about getting sued. I’m worried about-about the police coming to talk to me again.”

Against all of his training, and possibly because of the casual nature of Harlen’s request that Hardy have a chat with his sister, Hardy was tempted for a moment to come right out and ask her if she had in fact killed her manager. Though he didn’t for a minute think that this was likely, it was a question you normally didn’t ask, an unspoken rule of the defense business. Because if you, the lawyer, didn’t know, you would always be acting in technical good faith in your client’s defense. And, of course, in theory it wasn’t supposed to matter anyway. You argued the evidence that could be proved in court. Not necessarily the facts.

So, instead, he said, “I’m guessing you really don’t have anything to worry about.”

“I don’t know if that’s true.” She saw her wine sitting there on her lap and brought the glass to her lips. “Why would that be true?”

“Because your inspector, Bracco, used to be Harlen’s partner in homicide. Did you know that?”

“Okay, but what does that mean?”

“Well, the first thing it means in the real world is that Bracco’s going to find out you’re Harlen’s sister. Knowing Harlen’s inherent shyness,” he said with irony, “he might even know by now. So unless Bracco’s got something close to a smoking gun in your hand, he’s going to be inclined to cut you some slack to begin with. You’re the one who’s lost your manager, so you’ve been victimized by this murder too. Plus, your connection to the mayor isn’t going to make Darrel Bracco want to cause you any problems. Was he a little hard on you?”

“A little bit.” She hesitated. “He seemed to think that there was something weird about how much I paid Dylan, or something about our relationship, I don’t know what. But it just made me uncomfortable.”

“It’s supposed to. It’s one of the things cops do when they interrogate people. They find a soft spot and go at it.”

“But why did he think it was a soft spot?”

“I don’t know. How much did you pay him? Dylan?”

When he heard the number, Hardy kept his face straight and took a quick breath to hide his surprise. “That’s a real salary.”

“I know. But he did a real job. He was good with the customers. I hardly ever had to be there. If ever. I felt he was worth it.”

“Well, then, who’s to argue? You own the place.”

“Right. But Inspector Bracco, he wanted to know if we socialized together, Dylan and I.”

“And?”

“And I told him no, which is true. But he seemed to think that was weird somehow. In spite of the fact that Dylan and Jansey had their own life and it’s nothing like mine and Joel’s.”

“Lots of business owners don’t socialize with their employees,” Hardy said. “I don’t see why Bracco would think it’s strange that you don’t.”

“Maybe because I told him Dylan and I had been friends in college. This was before he did his time in prison, of course.”

Hardy took a beat to let that settle. “I don’t believe I’ve heard about that yet.”

She shook her head. “It was a misunderstanding, a stupid juvenile mistake, call it what you will. He got involved somehow in a robbery and got caught. But long story short, when he got out, I was hoping to get the store up and going and… anyway, he started working for me.”

“So you were close friends in college?”

Hesitating, she tightened her mouth, checked out the windows behind Hardy. “We weren’t intimate, if that’s what you’re asking. We were friends.”

Hardy brought his glass to his mouth, sipped, waited. She had more to tell him and he wanted to give her the space. She scanned the corners of the room, telegraphing to Hardy the jumble of her thoughts. He sat, unmoving, giving her time.

Finally, with an intake of breath, she met his eyes. “I suppose I wasn’t exactly the same person then as I am now.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Hardy said. “That was what? About ten years ago?”

“Close enough.”

“So you’re saying that you and Dylan wouldn’t have been friends if you met him now?”

She shook her head. “Not the same type of friends, certainly.”

“And what type was that?”

“Well,” she said, “we were a little wild, I guess. This crowd of us who just kind of found each other and got into doing stuff together, partying. Drinking, pranks, you know.”

Hardy had an idea of what she was talking about. “Dope?”

“Mostly just weed,” she said, “but, yeah. Some cocaine, too, once in a while, when we could get it.” She picked up her wineglass and drank half of it down. “Hell, why am I sugarcoating this to you, Mr. Hardy?”

“Dismas, please.”

“All right. Dismas. We would try anything we could get our hands on. Weed, coke, Ecstasy, alcohol, mushroom, pills-uppers or downers or whatever. It was funny,” she went on, “it wasn’t like we were all stoned all the time. I mean, we had classes and most of us generally did okay in them, I think, but then we’d get together on weekends and just kind of blow it all out. It was really stupid.”

“And you’re afraid, now that the police have this dope connection to Dylan, that somehow all this you did way back then is going to come back and bite you?”

Her expression of gratitude and relief at his understanding made Hardy realize how seriously she was taking all of this. “I really didn’t want to know about him selling dope through the shop, but if they find out about the way we were in college, they’re not going to believe me, no matter what I say. I don’t know if
I’d
believe me.”

“Belief isn’t the point,” Hardy said. “Is there anything on your books from the shop that might make it look like you were somehow profiting from his dope business?”

“No. There couldn’t be. I wasn’t.”

Hardy sat back, consciously pausing. He had no intention of getting answers from his new client relating to the facts of her guilt or innocence, but that’s where this discussion seemed to be leading them. He put on what he hoped would be a neutral expression. “Well, as I said earlier, given your connection to Harlen and the mayor, Bracco isn’t going to be looking to open a can of worms investigating you.” And then, in spite of himself, in an effort to give her a touch of comfort, he broke his own lawyer’s rule and added, “Not unless he’s got something tying you to Dylan’s murder.”

She took this as a question and, evading it, swallowed, tried a smile, met his eyes, and quickly looked down.

Hardy, who’d been about to stand up and walk her out with a figurative pat on the head, checked himself and settled back into his chair. “Is there anything else?”

“Not really. But I’m just afraid it might look… I’d so really rather not talk to the police again. It’s Joel too.”

“Your husband?”

She bobbed her head. “He didn’t know me back then. I met him after that time was over. I haven’t been able to make myself tell him about too much of it. He thinks… well, he’d never think that I could have been the way I was. I don’t think he’d have an easy time accepting it. We’re the Townshends, after all. He’s got investors who count on that. So there’s a certain expected”-she sighed-“behavior. He’s always wanted me to sell the shop, you know.”

“Why was that?”

“It just wasn’t the kind of business he felt comfortable with. I think the bottom line was that he really just didn’t like Dylan, didn’t trust him, didn’t understand why I kept him on and wouldn’t let go of the place.”

“Why wouldn’t you? If you didn’t need the money, and I presume you didn’t.”

“No. It wasn’t the money.” She hesitated, then finally came out with it. “But the shop was my own. It made me feel like I was contributing. I just couldn’t ever convince myself that there was a good enough reason to give it up.” She let out a breath of pent-up frustration. “Anyway, Harlen told me you could be there with me if the police want to talk to me again, just to make sure I don’t say something wrong.”

“I could do that,” Hardy said, “and of course I will do that.” He leaned forward in his chair and leveled his gaze at her. “But you and I both know you don’t need a lawyer to keep the police from asking you about the hijinks of you and your friends in college. And practically speaking, no one’s really going to think you were skimming from Dylan’s dope business. If anything, people will feel sorry for you that he was abusing your confidence the way he was.”

“So you’re asking why I told Harlen I needed a lawyer.”

“Never that,” Hardy said with a small smile. “Everybody needs a lawyer all the time. That’s my motto. But in this case, from what you’ve told me, maybe not so much.”

“You don’t think I’m telling you the truth,” she said.

“It’s not what you’ve said. Maybe it’s what you haven’t.” He pointed down at her hands and added gently, “That’s a fragile glass. If you squeeze it any harder, I’ve got to warn you, it’s going to break.”

For a long moment, her eyes glazed over and she sat utterly still. Finally, a small tremor passed through her body, she blinked, and a tear spilled onto her cheek. “Dylan called me the night before and said he had to see me first thing the next morning. That it was an emergency. So I went down there.”