Nothing but the Truth (30 page)
Plus, Hardy was thinking, she was married, which meant she wasn’t on the market. Or did it?
But Kerry, obviously still in thrall to her memory, was going on. “The thing about her, and maybe it seems funny or contradictory or something because she was so smart, but the self-image stuff I think really slowed her down in how fast she grew up . . . I’m trying to think of the right word. She was just very naive, I’d say, insulated. Almost unaware of anything in life, anything except her studies, which translated into her job. I mean, until . . .” Now Kerry really was at a loss.
“Until you?” Hardy prompted.
Kerry lifted his shoulders, an admission. “It was starting to happen before we met. She was ready for it.”
“For what?”
“The change, the conversion. Well, it wasn’t really that.”
“Okay. What was it?” Hardy became fleetingly aware of a buzz out in the room, a rush of convivial laughter from a gaggle of young couples pulling tables together. Afternoon drinks after shopping in a different world than that inhabited by Hardy and Frannie. He came back to the candidate for governor, with whom he seemed to be having a genuine communication. It was almost surreal, but he was going to keep it going if he could. “What was the big conversion all about then?”
“It was her whole life, really.” He fixed Hardy with a thoughtful expression. “This may sound presumptuous . . .” Again, he stopped and Hardy waited. “It wasn’t so much that she grew up all at once as the fact that she realized she
had
grown up. She was a beautiful swan. She could fly.”
had
grown up. She was a beautiful swan. She could fly.”
“Okay.” This didn’t make all the sense in the world to Hardy, but he’d sort it out later. “But this conversion was public, right, on some radio show? And had to do with you?”
A shrug. “I don’t know how much of it had to do with me. But the debate we had seemed to mark a shift. She realized we had the same goals and we’d been set up to be on different sides. Actually, she’d been set up. She got bitter about her employers and I can’t say I blame her.”
“Jim Pierce?” It was a guess, but from Kerry’s reaction, a good one.
Kerry nodded. “He was the one who first recognized her for what she could do, I mean politically. He groomed her into a mouthpiece, but as I say she was naive. She bought his line because she bought him. He was big oil, but he cared about the world just like she did. Ha. But he was her father figure at the same time. He loved her when she was still the ugly duckling and that carried a lot of emotional weight.”
“He loved her? You just said he loved her.”
“I don’t know about that. What he did do was keep her nose to the grindstone, reward her handsomely for doing what he wanted, pat her on the head when she did good and told her not to worry about other things she might be hearing or thinking. She wanted to please him and she didn’t look up.” He hesitated. “I was really just the catalyst, I think. It would have happened without me eventually. She was ripe for it. She’d grown up.”
“And started seeing you.”
This suddenly brought Kerry back to where he was, what he was in fact doing, which was talking to a lawyer about a murder case. His public persona—always open and charming—was especially unnerving to Hardy as it fell like a shroud between them. “Not the way I think you mean, Mr. Hardy. She was married, after all.”
“But you’re not.”
Kerry favored him with the candidate smile, went back to his watch, decided that if reinforcements weren’t going to come and rescue him, he’d go to them. “Well, no. Never been married. Never found the right girl.”
He slapped his knees and stood up. “It’s been very nice talking to you, but I’ve got to get my campaign manager back out on the trail. This water poisoning today.” He scowled. “Terrible, just terrible.” Then the smile was back, the hand outstretched again. “Don’t forget to vote now. Take care.”
He walked over to his security retinue and Hardy sat back down on the couch, watching the party coalesce around Kerry as it began to drift down into the main lobby.
When they were good and gone, Hardy reached over and, using the cocktail napkin that the hotel had thoughtfully provided, lifted the water glass Kerry had been using. He poured the remaining water back into the pitcher and slipped the glass into the pocket of his nylon windbreaker. Take care yourself, he thought.
But, feeling smug about the glass with fingerprints, he suddenly realized he’d forgotten the main question he’d wanted to ask the Kerry camp. He nearly jumped up from the couch, and caught up to the candidate and his entourage as they arrived at where Al Valens had just finished up with a reporter.
“Excuse me, Mr. Kerry.”
The security detail moved to keep Hardy at his distance, but Kerry again told them it was okay. He was a candidate, it was election time, you talked to people.
“I had one last question, this time for Mr. Valens if you don’t mind. It won’t take a minute.”
Kerry broke a seemingly genuine smile. “Okay, Columbo, sure. We’ve always got a minute. Al. This is Mr. Hardy. He’s Ron Beaumont’s attorney.”
Valens cast a quick glance between Hardy and Kerry, then thrust his hand out. “Nice to meet you. What’s your question?”
“I was wondering why you called Ron Beaumont last week, something about Bree’s files?”
The smile flickered briefly. “I don’t think that was me,” he said. He looked at Kerry. “Did we call Ron?”
“Not that I remember.”
“You didn’t call Ron Beaumont and leave a message last Wednesday, Thursday, something like that?”
Valens made a little show of thinking about it for a moment, looked again at Kerry, then shook his head. “I think you must be mistaken. Isn’t he out of town? I heard he was out of town.”
Hardy was sincerely contrite. “I’m sorry. I must have been misinformed.” A broad smile. “Mr. Kerry, thanks again.”
Kerry waved him off. “Don’t worry about it. Anytime.”
“Shit.” Valens’s voice was unnaturally shrill in the telephone. “He knows something. This guy Hardy. Who is he? What’s that about?”
Baxter Thorne spoke to Valens in his calmest tones. “Al, it’s always better to tell the truth. Especially in front of Damon. Tell him you forgot. You’ve been consumed with these terrorist accusations against him today. Your head was spinning and you couldn’t recall for a minute. In fact, you remember now that you did call Ron—here, this is good—to see about some memorial words he wanted to include about Bree if, no when, Damon gets elected. In his acceptance speech, that is if Ron wouldn’t object, if it wouldn’t be too painful. That’s why you called.”
“But how did this guy Hardy know . . . ?”
Thorne was sweet reason. “You left a message. He must have heard the message.”
“But how?”
“Well, he must have been there then, mustn’t he? At Bree’s place?”
“Looking for the report?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps. Certainly looking for something. But you said he was Ron’s attorney, right? It might not have had anything to do with our problem. Don’t worry. I’ll look into it. You’ve got a campaign to run.”
“All right, all right. But it worries me.”
“Don’t worry about it, Al. It’s nothing. And if it’s not nothing, I’ll take care of it.”
18
The evening remained clear and warm with no fog and Hardy felt he’d picked up a scent. People were evading and lying, and this juiced him up.
He wished he had a set of Al Valens’s fingerprints as well as Damon Kerry’s. He had no explanation for why Valens would lie about calling Ron. Still, he did have Damon Kerry’s cleverly purloined water glass and he dropped it off on Abe Glitsky’s desk with a cryptic note that it contained crucial evidence in the Bree Beaumont case and should be dusted and checked against prints that had been found in the penthouse.
Hardy added that if Glitsky didn’t do this he’d be sorry, a statement Abe would enjoy. The note also mentioned that Kerry had denied ever having been there and this was a new development.
It was still early—Hardy had time before his scheduled seven o’clock meeting with Canetta at his office. He could zip down to see Ron and his well-behaved children, deliver his update, make everybody feel better.
He’d also filled a page of a legal pad with questions that Ron would be able to answer for him, mostly to do with the names Canetta had copied from Ron’s answering machine.
Who was Marie? Kogee Sasaka? Tilton? What did all these people want? What about Valens and Kerry and Pierce? How well had Ron known them? Or had Bree known them?
Then, the harder questions: Did Ron think or know that Bree was having an affair? If so, with whom? What about the baby she’d been carrying? Had she and Ron planned it? What had her last morning been like? What, if anything, had she been worried about? How involved, if at all, had Ron been with her professional life? Did he know what she was working on now?
And, most important, what was Ron’s explanation for the fact that of all the men Hardy had talked to—Pierce, Kerry, even Canetta—her own husband seemed the least affected by her death?
Driving south on the freeway, heading for the hotel where Ron and his children had holed up, Hardy almost let himself believe he was beginning to make some progress. He would get answers from Ron, maybe learn more about MTBE and ethanol and today’s reservoir poisoning, which, he reasoned, had to be related to Bree’s murder. He was really getting somewhere.
“Mr. Brewster has checked out.”
“Checked out?” Hardy repeated it as though it were a foreign phrase he didn’t understand.
The concierge was a pleasant-looking young woman with a brisk and efficient manner. “Yes, sir.” She punched a few keys at her computer. “Early this morning.”
“You’re sure?” An apologetic smile. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I thought we had an appointment and I’m a little surprised.”
She punched a few more keyboard buttons and, noticing his obvious concern, softened visibly. “Maybe you got the day wrong?”
Hardy nodded. “Must have,” he said.
So it was still early and he had no place to be for a couple of hours.
Ron Beaumont was beginning to remind him of several clients he’d had in the past—they tended to lie and, when not held in custody, to disappear. It made him crazy, but at the same time this behavior was predictable enough among suspects that it didn’t necessarily force him to believe they were guilty of anything. They were just scared, confused, misguided. Except for those who were, in fact, guilty and on the run.
As he drove by Candlestick Point, Hardy was trying his hardest to stick with the rationalization that Ron had his children to protect. There was the further point that if Hardy had been able to locate him at his hotel, others with less benign intents—the DA’s investigators, for example—might be just as successful. And Ron hadn’t promised Hardy that he’d stick around for continued consultation.
Nothing had changed, he kept telling himself. He had until Tuesday to find who had killed Bree. And Frannie would remain locked up until then anyway.
By the time he took the Seventh Street off-ramp by the Hall of Justice downtown, though, his pique had progressed into a fine fury. Ron Beaumont, the son of a bitch, had a million answers at his fingertips, and now Hardy was going to have to find them on his own, if he could. And meanwhile the clock kept ticking. He didn’t have the heart anymore for this cat and mouse nonsense. And especially not from someone who’d put Frannie where she was.
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