Dead Irish (6 page)

7

FRANNIE AND ED’S PLACE was a large corner flat with a rounded window jutting out from the living room over the steep street.

Hardy knocked at the door, straight in from the sidewalk without a stoop of any kind. It was four p.m., already a long day, and by far the hottest one of the year.

He barely heard the “Who is it?”

Frannie hugged him for a long time in the doorway. She was barefoot, wearing a white nightgown. She’d obviously been taking a nap. Her long red hair was a wreck, the skin around her eyes nearly black, her lips puffed like a wound.

She led the way to the living room and left Hardy there. The first thing he did was open two windows to let in some air. It didn’t make much difference.

He heard Frannie somewhere behind him.

The room was a friendly mixture of Goodwill and teak. A stereo and some small but, Hardy knew, excellent Blaupunkt speakers, two mismatched, upholstered chairs, a couch, and two bentwoods, on one of which Hardy sat.

Hardwood floors reflected the late-afternoon sun onto clean painted walls. There were three framed works of art on the walls: one of Hockney’s “Pools,” a view of San Francisco from the Marin side of the Bay, and one of Goines’s Chez Panisse posters. A coffee table was pushed into another corner, and on it was a small television set. Homemade bookshelves held an impressive collection of books and some records.

He sensed more than heard her approach. Still barefoot, barely five feet tall and ninety pounds tops, Frannie had tried to comb her hair and put some red in her cheeks, but she needn’t have bothered. Dressed now in jeans and a T-shirt, what she really wore most noticeably was the loss.

He stood. She stopped in the doorway, not moving. “Sorry for the . . .” she whispered. “I’m just . . .” She tried again. “Would you like something? Beer? Coffee?”

To give her something to do, Hardy said a beer would be good.

She came back a minute later with two cans of Bud and a chilled mug. “Ed always liked me to keep a mug in the freezer.” She poured expertly. “But you know that.”

“You ought to work for Moses.”

She tried to smile, but it didn’t work.

Hardy took a drink. “You feel like you can talk? I know the police have probably gone over—”

“And over and over . . . I’m okay.”

“Did Moses tell you why I . . . ?”

She nodded, and he decided to plunge right in. “Ed left the house when, roughly?”

“About seven-thirty. We finished dinner and talked for a while.”

“And he just decided to go out for a drive?”

She hesitated, perhaps remembering, perhaps hiding. “No, not exactly.” She looked at her lap, biting her lip. “Not exactly.”

“Frannie, look at me.”

The green eyes were wet.

“What did you talk about?”

“Nothing, just household stuff, you know.”

“Did you fight?”

She didn’t answer.

“Frannie?”

“No, not really.” All strength seemed to leave her. Her hands went slack and the can of beer fell to the floor. Hardy jumped up and grabbed it, righting it and letting the foam overflow.

“I’ll get a sponge,” Frannie said.

Hardy put a hand on the tiny, bony shoulder to keep her from rising. “Forget the beer, Frannie. Did you have a fight or not?”

She slumped back, staring at Hardy as though she wanted to ask him a question. She looked about fifteen years old. Then she started crying, just tear after tear rolling silently down her made-up cheeks. Hardy, his hand still on her shoulder, felt the suppressed sobs.

“What about?” he finally asked.

The voice, now husky and nearly inaudible, came. “I’m pregnant. I told him I was pregnant.”

Her eyes held on the floor between her feet. She whispered. “Ed always just said to go ahead when I was ready. That was the way he was. He said we’d deal with it when it came up, and if we waited ’til he was ready in advance, he might never be.”

“And you’d just found out?”

“That day. I thought he’d be happy.”

She looked up at Hardy, the tears still flowing. “But it really wasn’t a fight or anything. I just wanted him to stay. I was all emotional, you know.”

“But he went out?”

She shook her head, slowly, back and forth. “He went out.”

“Do you know where?”

“That’s the thing,” she said. “That’s the thing I hate.”

“What?”

“Just seeing him go off, not even talking, and then”—she swallowed—“now he’s gone.”

The thing Hardy hated, he told himself, was being in this position, the inquisitor. After a minute he told her as much.

“That’s okay,” she said. “At least you believe me.”

“Who didn’t believe you?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I got the impression the police had a hard time with it. I mean, me not knowing why Eddie had gone out, or where.”

“Maybe he just wanted . . . ,” Hardy began, then rephrased it. “Maybe he needed to think about being a father.”

“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced.

“Except what?”

“Except he’d been going out a few times lately. I think it had to do with his business.”

Uh-oh, Hardy thought. But he said, “Didn’t you talk, you and Ed?”

“We talked all the time, about everything. You know that!”

“But not this?”

She shook her head, then punched her little fist into her other palm. “It made me so mad, I could’ve killed him.” The hand went up to her mouth. “Oh, I mean, I didn’t mean that. But we always shared everything, and this was like he was protecting me or something, like I couldn’t handle what he was doing.”

Okay, that was possible, Hardy thought. “So this night, Monday, after you told him about being pregnant, did you have a fight?”

“Not a real fight. More a disagreement. I wanted to snuggle, have him tell me it was all right, that he wanted to have it.” She sighed. “But he said he had to go out.” Again, Frannie shook her head back and forth. Her knuckles were white, clamped on her lap.

Hardy watched the beer she’d spilled spread slowly over the hardwood.

“See?” she continued. “His job was almost over anyway. I thought it was stupid.”

“His job?”

She bit her lip, thinking. “I mean his concern with trying to save the business. I think he got tired of arguing with me about it, and just went ahead on his own, not wanting to bother me or fight anymore about it.”

Hardy drank some beer. “I’m afraid you’re losing me.”

“I’d better get a towel.”

She brought another beer back for both of them. “God, it’s hot,” she said. “Eddie always loved hot days, all two a year.”

She sat this time in the deep chair in front of the window. More composed now, getting used to it, she started talking on her own.

“You know we were going down . . . He’d gotten into the MBA program at Stanford and we were going down there in September. His job was so . . . arbitrary. It wasn’t a career. He just wanted to actually work a couple years so grad school wouldn’t all be book learning, you know? So he got this job after college with Mr. Polk over at Army, because he wanted to get into distribution eventually.” She looked out the window. “This seems so stupid now. Why am I talking about this?”

“Talk about anything,” Hardy said.

“Then last Thanksgiving or sometime there, Mr. Polk got married and at the same time they heard they might lose the
La Hora
account.”

“
La Hora?
That’s Cruz Publishing.”

Frannie nodded again. “I know, that’s where he . . .” She tightened her lips and continued. “Anyway, the police said they’d check that. If there was a connection.”

“If ? There’s gotta be.”

“It sounded crazy to me, but one of the policemen said it could have been like a protest, Eddie maybe killing himself in the parking lot as a protest against Polk, like a Buddhist burning himself or something. I don’t know if he was serious.”

Hardy swore at that, shook his head.

“I know,” she said, “but at least it does put him there—”

“So would a meeting with someone who wanted to kill him.”

She didn’t answer. Hardy felt a wisp of a breeze, and Frannie sat back in the deep chair. She turned her head to the window, away from him. He saw her wipe her face with the back of her hand, as a small child would.

“Oh, damn,” she said.

“Frannie,” he began, and she twisted to face him.

“I didn’t want him to go,” she said. “I didn’t even know he owned a gun.”

Now she sobbed, and Hardy got up, walking to the window, his back to her. The street fell away sharply outside. In the distance, the air shimmered over the rooftops.

“Did you tell the police about being pregnant?” he asked finally, turning around.

“No.” She sniffed, rubbed a hand over her eyes. “I didn’t see what difference it would make. I don’t want anybody to know until I know what I’m going to do. You won’t tell Moses, will you?”

“Not if you don’t want.”

“Because he wouldn’t understand. I mean, I might not have it now. I might . . .”

“Frannie . . .”

“But Eddie would
not
have killed himself over that.” She pounded a small fist against her leg. “He wouldn’t have. He would have been happy as soon as he got used to the idea. He was happy. He was!”

In the next fifteen minutes, Hardy found out that the scar on Ed’s leg was from trying to hop a train when he was a kid. His guitar playing, Hardy should have remembered, explained the finger calluses, and also made him right-handed, which Frannie verified. Sometimes at work he got little bruises from moving and lifting things, but Frannie noticed no new ones the last few days. He’d never had a fight she knew of, and he drank, she said, “Way, way less than Moses, just a beer or two when he got home.”

Finally Hardy lost his heart for going into details. He looked at her for a long minute. “You really, deep down, can’t think of any reason for it? I know it’s a hard question, Frannie, but could there have been anything?”

Frannie walked over to the open window. She stood there for what seemed a very long time, occasionally brushing the hair away from her face. When she turned around, she shrugged. “He just didn’t. What can I tell you? He didn’t do it. The rest I don’t understand, I don’t . . .”

She hung her head and turned around to face the window again.

Hardy stood up. “I won’t tell Moses,” he said to her back. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t do anything too soon, about the pregnancy, about anything, okay? Let things settle a little.”

She turned around. “I think I know now how you got the way you are.”

At the door, she managed a last half-smile. Hardy thought of something. Awkwardly, he pulled his wallet from his back pocket and looked through it. “I know this might seem a little weird, but . . .”

Good. He still had a couple of cards he’d had made up for his dart playing—he thought they gave him a little psychological advantage when he passed them out at tournaments. Like, Whoa! This guy’s serious.

He gave one of them to Frannie. They were pale blue embossed with a gold dart. “If you need anything at all, even just to talk, call me, okay? And if you remember anything else, the smallest thing . . .”

“Okay.”

He wanted to hug her again, somehow ease things, but it would be useless. Nothing was going to ease things for Frannie for a very long time.

He left her standing on the sidewalk, the sun behind her, staring down at the shimmering city.

Down the block, some kids were playing on the street. It seemed odd to Hardy that anybody could be laughing in the whole world, but they were. Laughing and laughing. Life was a ball.

Well, there were a lot of motives, he thought. Enough to keep him thinking for a couple of days. Eddie wouldn’t have been the first man to be driven to despair by the thought of fatherhood, especially as he was preparing for three years of poverty and intellectual struggle. The business he ran was going bust—maybe he took that pretty seriously, too. It was possible, though Hardy hated to admit it, that he was having a love affair that had gone bad. Hardy guessed the police would be checking into that, as well as Frannie’s whereabouts that night.

He remembered Cruz’s lie about not having known Ed. But the relationship there was so obvious—the parking lot and all—that the cops would be all over Cruz. How far they pushed things, he figured, would be a function of Griffin’s gut feelings. If he smelled a murder, he’d dig in. If not, everything to do with Cruz and Frannie and Army would be essentially irrelevant.

Well, what Griffin did was out of Hardy’s hands.

He came over Twin Peaks, down Stanyan, then through the park out to 22nd. There was no sign of afternoon fog, and it gave his neighborhood an entirely different feel. People were outside playing Frisbee on the grass in the park, couples walked the streets hand in hand. The heat had let up somewhat, but it was still balmy.

He parked on the street in front of his house. He had to force the front door open again with his shoulder. This time, though, he walked directly down the hall to the kitchen, through it to the tool room, and pulled one of his planes off the wall.

In five minutes, he had taken the door off its hinges and was sitting on the front porch, planing. A stray cat came and sunned itself at his feet. Occasionally it would swat at one of the shavings.

When the door was rehung, Hardy changed the light in the hall, then went back to his study. He owned three guns—a 9-millimeter automatic, a .22 target pistol, and a regulation .38 Special that he’d used when he’d started in the police department. They were all in the lower drawer of the filing cabinet he’d made himself using no nails.

Eddie had been shot with a .38 revolver, so Hardy grabbed that. Double-checking to make sure it was unloaded, he clicked off a few rounds to make triple sure, then went into the living room and sat in his chair by the window.

The evening sun striped the room through the open blinds. Hardy put the gun on the reading table at his side, picked up a pipe and lit it. After a few puffs, he lifted the gun and aimed it at a few targets around the room. He passed the gun back from hand to hand, feeling the heft of it, checking its action.