John Lescroart (28 page)

Hardy shook his head, spoke with a weary tone. “I don't know. That's what I can't figure out. It's making me crazy.”

“Why was she there?”

Hardy briefed him on Elaine's special master duties, the Russian insurance scams, Logan's lack of cooperation on the earlier search at his place. When he finished, Jeff was still interested, but saw no point of connection. “So these insurance scam cases, did they have drugs around them? Am I missing something?”

“We've got to be,” Hardy said. “There's too much Logan.”

“But maybe not enough.” He sat back in his wheelchair and looked over the desk that separated them. “You know, Diz, we run into this all the time in journalism. You're on a story, and if this one last little piece falls into place, they can start printing up the Pulitzer citation for you. I mean you want it so bad. And then guess what? What you want to write didn't happen. It's not true, just coincidence. Good story, no facts.”

Hardy considered a second. His jaw was set. “That's not this. At least I don't think so.”

“Okay.”

“How about Gabe Torrey?”

“How about him? In what sense?”

“David Freeman has a theory about a connection between Torrey and Logan. What I want to know is, are they old friends? Did they go to school together? Maybe they're gay, having an affair?”

Here Jeff stopped him. “They're not gay. Logan's a notorious cocksman, in fact. And Torrey's sleeping with Pratt.”

This intelligence nearly knocked Hardy off his chair. “What?”

Jeff laughed. “You didn't know that? We're off the record now—they try to keep it quiet 'cause Pratt's happy to let the feminists think she's a lesbian, but the Shadow knows.”

“My God. See? You do know everything. You ought to print that.”

“In due time, say nearer the election, when it might do a little more good.”

“I can't believe it.” San Francisco was a small town, but apparently not so small that there were no secrets. “Okay, so they're not gay. Maybe they're bi. Maybe their mothers were pen pals? I don't know, Jeff. You're the ace reporter, finger on the pulse of the city.”

“And if there was something, I would have heard it, right?”

“Right.” Hardy came forward expectantly.

Jeff met his gaze, a hint of humor in his eyes. “As far as I know, they have no personal relationship.”

Hardy sat back. “That's the wrong answer.”

“I thought it might be.”

 

Cole was the first person in Hardy's experience whose looks and demeanor had actually improved while he was held in the county jail. He'd asked for and received a short haircut. Some of the scrapes and bruises from his life on the street, to say nothing of the night of his arrest, had begun to clear up. He'd shaved off the wispy, downy growth of beard. Three squares a day for only these few days had already added a visible overlay of flesh to the bones of his face, eradicating the intimations of skull. He wasn't yet anyone's idea of robust, but neither was he heroin chic.

Hardy sat across the table from him in the attorneys' visiting area, the light room with the glass block walls. Cole's speech would lapse into hazy around the edges from time to time, but today it seemed more a habit than an impediment. That he spoke clearly for long periods of time meant, to Hardy, that he could do it anytime he
thought about it. He had simply gotten into the habit of mumbling to fit in on the street, where he had grown used to a numb mouth and no reason to enunciate words, to communicate anything beyond his most basic needs.

Well, Hardy thought, he had a reason now and he was rising to the occasion. “Glitsky? Are you kidding me?” His eyes were clear as well. He was on methadone and had, in fact, asked for an accelerated detoxification. All to the good if he stuck with it. But at the moment, he wasn't on that page—he was mostly angry. “We're talking the same Glitsky that dropped me on my head.”

“He couldn't catch you in time is what I heard.”

A snort. “He tell you that? 'Cause it's a lie.”

Hardy had a haunch on the edge of the table in the attorneys' room, and now he leaned forward, hovering over where his client sat. “How do you know what happened? You were unconscious.”

“Well . . .” Cole's hard gaze gradually gave way. “But there's no way he's trying to help me.”

“No,” Hardy agreed. “I don't think he is. Not for your sake anyway. The thing is, Cole, he's a good cop. An honorable person.”

Another dismissive grunt, the concept for him obviously difficult to believe. “I'll tell you what it is. He's worried we'll decide to charge him with brutality after all. He's trying to cut you off on that. Figures if he pretends to be on our team, it'll all go away.”

Hardy sat back. “You got it all worked out, huh?”

“It's not rocket science.”

“No. You're right. So we don't want his help, is that your position?”

For an instant, Cole's expression sharpened. “He's not offering any help. He's covering his ass.”

Hardy nodded, stood up, cricked his back. When he spoke, his tone was harsh. “See if you can wrap your brain around something, Cole. There's nobody else in the entire police department who's looking for anything about this case, let alone anybody else who might have
been involved in Elaine's death. But Glitsky is. He's doing it on his own for his own reasons, and you'd be smart not to care too much about what they are. You want to know the truth, yeah, he's covering himself.” He felt his voice getting away from him, his anger building. “Glitsky doesn't want your conviction overturned because you made a stupid, stupid confession. That's where he's coming from, Cole. He wants to nail you on righteous evidence. That's what he's about—he doesn't give a shit about your poor sorry ass.” He almost added that he didn't much either. If it wasn't a death penalty case, he'd have been long gone.

“But anything he does find is going to be against us.”

Hardy, still wound up, whirled on the boy. “What he's trying to find, Cole, is the truth. Which, correct me if I'm wrong, is supposed to help us.”

Cole's eyes bounced around the corners of the room.

Getting his tone back under control, Hardy sat on the edge of the table again. “Look,” he said. “I don't care at all really what Glitsky's motives are. If he wants to convict you, that's fine by me, and it ought to be by you. He doesn't want the confession in because as soon as that happens, we've got grounds for appeal.”

“Appeal is after I'm convicted. I don't want to talk about appeal.”

“Oh, okay, let's not then.” Hardy brought a palm down sharply on the table. “Get a clue here, Cole. You're in deep shit and Glitsky's the only one doing anything that might help you, whether helping you is his intention or not. That's assuming the truth helps you.” He'd challenged Cole a minute before with the same point, and now he waited again for a response—denial, outrage, something—but none came. He sighed. “Now, listen, Glitsky's a fact. We'll use him if we can. If you can't live with that, then I'm gone, too.”

Cole met his gaze. “I don't trust him.”

Hardy dropped his trump. “Well, he's been my best friend for like thirty years, so I'd have to say I do. Now
you've got two options. You can live with it, trust my instincts and talk strategy.” He threw a little edge into it. “Or you can tell your mother to hire another lawyer.”

This brought a rise. “It's not my mother.”

“Yeah, Cole. Yes it is. Don't kid yourself. Unless you want to take responsibility on your own. But that's not what you do, is it?” He waited, surprised that it had come to this. He hadn't intended to have any of this discussion, but now that they were in it, he'd follow it until it ended, even if it meant terminating his involvement with the case. Hardy thought that his client needed a dose of some hard life truths almost more than he needed a good attorney.

Cole swallowed rapidly, a couple of times in succession. He set his jaw, finally raised his eyes. For the first time, Hardy saw something like resolve in them. “All right,” Cole said. “I'm listening. We'll do it your way. What's the plan?”

Hardy felt the tension break in his shoulders. He was still angry and frustrated, he still didn't much care for his client. But for now at least they could work together. Maybe. He leaned back, arms folded over his chest. “The strategy is two-pronged. First, if you did it—”

“Wait a minute. I said I'm not sure if . . . I mean I didn't—”

“
You
wait a minute.” Hardy came forward, fed up to here with objections and interruptions. Here, in all probability, sat the man who had killed Elaine Wager. Maybe he didn't deserve the death penalty, but Hardy didn't have to endure his self-serving excuses. “I don't want you to tell me whether you did or didn't kill Elaine anymore. Do you understand me? I don't care about your denials or your admissions. That's not why I'm defending you. And right now I'm talking. You listen, that's the deal. Maybe you'll learn something.”

Cole's eyes narrowed. Any hint of his methadone lethargy had vanished. He slumped back in the chair, his arms crossed. Pissed, dissed and dismissed.

Hardy ignored it all. He picked up in a relaxed voice. “Our first line of defense is unconsciousness. The facts here are going to make it very difficult, if not impossible, to even get to reasonable doubt about whether you did it.”

“I—”

Hardy held up a palm. “Not interested. Of course we argue that you didn't do it. But what's really going to matter is if we can prove that even if you did, you were so drunk that you couldn't have realized what you were doing. With six or eight drinks in you, you're legally drunk. With twenty and in withdrawal, you're comatose.”

“What about the gun, though?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“I didn't get any gun from Cullen. He's lying.”

“Why would he lie? I thought he was your friend?”

“Yeah, right.” A shrug. “He's out on three separate probations for selling rock. He's got three or four strike convictions—robberies. They pull him in another time, he figures this time they've got to keep him. So he makes this up and they trade. Hey. You know this stuff happens all the time. And in this case, somebody wants to see me fall more than him, so they go for the trade.”

“Who would want that? And why?”

“I don't know. Somebody with the D.A. Some cop. Maybe your friend Glitsky. I don't know.”

Hardy felt his blood heating up again, but tried to ignore it. “You know anybody either place? Have you had any run-ins I ought to know about? Screwed around with some cop's daughter, anything like that?”

“No.” He shook his head, then decided the denial wasn't strong enough. “Hey, I swear to God, no. Nothing like that.”

Hardy was fairly sure that he was telling the truth. And the fact was, Cole didn't need to have a personal enemy in the D.A.'s office. There might be nothing personal in it—Pratt had to win this case, that was all. To fill a hole in the prosecution's theory of the crime, a witness needed
to appear to account for Cole's possession of the murder weapon.

And lo, it had come to pass.

Hardy knew he needed to have a few words with Cullen Leon Alsop, get a better feel for that situation before too long. But first he needed Cole to understand his strategy, to be on board with it. “So Plan A is unconsciousness. You don't remember.”

“But I
do
remember.” He pushed ahead over Hardy's warning expression. “Seeing the gun. I don't know why it's just that, like a snapshot. I didn't have the gun. It was in the gutter, next to her. She was already down, I swear.”

Hardy was almost tempted to believe him.

“I swear,” Cole repeated.

“All right, Cole, you swear. But moving along, I'd also like to address the point that if you didn't kill Elaine, someone else did.” Hardy didn't really think so, but mentioning it to Cole would serve as a pop quiz for his credibility. As he sat across the table from him now, he would have given about eighty percent odds that in the next few days his client would develop another “snapshot” of Monday night. And this one would feature the proverbial one-armed man.

“I'm surprised Jeff would even talk to you about me.” Hardy had told him about his visit to the
Chronicle
that morning.

“Why's that?”

“I haven't exactly been like the perfect relative to those guys.”

“So I hear.”

“So . . . why?”

Hardy started gathering his documents, his legal pad, his pens. He stood up and had an acute flashback of Cole's mother in his office yesterday, the later years of her life now reduced to pain and guilt because of Cole. Even if he hadn't killed Elaine. Hardy looked across the table at him. “Maybe with Jeff it's like your friend Cullen, Cole. Something else is going on. You're in it, but you're
not it. You know what I'm saying? There's a whole universe out there, and guess what?”