Nothing but the Truth (42 page)
Hardy had a hunch. “To the kids, too?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know I ever saw her go out with them. She kind of had a life of her own, I think.”
Glitsky pushed it. “And yet you got the impression that she and Ron were happy together?”
“I don’t know happy. But times you’d see them together, they were . . . comfortable, I guess.” He shrugged. “A family, you know. Comfortable.”
“Phil Canetta?” Glitsky’s face betrayed no trace of recognition. “Can’t say it rings a bell.”
“The guy you sent over from Central Station the first time I came here,” Hardy explained.
But Glitsky was still shaking his head, perplexed. “I called the desk, was all. Said they might want to dispatch a body to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself, or more likely that you didn’t hurt Ron Beaumont if he turned out to be home. Did this guy Canetta say he’d talked to me?”
Hardy hesitated. Even though Glitsky was his friend, this was not a casual moment. “Not really. I just assumed it.”
“And you were both
inside
here?” Glitsky didn’t like this one bit. “How did that special moment come about?”
inside
here?” Glitsky didn’t like this one bit. “How did that special moment come about?”
“The door was open.”
“Open?”
Hardy made a face. “Picky, picky. You’re too literal sometimes. Anybody ever tell you that?”
If Hardy thought this was going to sidetrack Glitsky, he was mistaken. “Was the door open?”
A shrug. “It wasn’t locked. I knocked, tried the knob, it turned. I walked in.”
“You walked in? Had Canetta arrived yet?”
“No. That was later. But if you’re wondering, I had plenty of time to plant evidence or steal anything I wanted, neither of which I did. You’re just going to have to believe me. Now how about if we talk about something else?”
Glitsky sighed heavily. “Someday, you pull stuff like this, I’m not going to be able to help you, you know that?”
Hardy kept a straight face. “It’s a constant worry. But you wanted to come here today, and here we are inside, legally and all with your warrant. What did you want to see?”
They’d already looked out over the balcony and now stood in the middle of the open kitchen, where Glitsky had been casually opening drawers, the cupboards, the refrigerator. “The usual,” he said distractedly. “Everything.”
They began in the back, in the children’s bedroom. The room was just as Hardy had last seen it.
Across the hall, they moved to the master bedroom. Two steps in, Glitsky stopped so abruptly that Hardy nearly walked into him. “What?” he asked.
“You tell me.”
Hardy cast his gaze around the room. It was nearly a perfect square and quite large, perhaps twenty feet on a side. To his left, a door was open to a blue-tiled bathroom. Next along the wall were three paneled sliding doors, a long closet. On the back wall, a couple of high windows presided over a king-size bed neatly made up with blankets, no comforter or bedspread, with a reading table on Hardy’s right side. A darkwood chest of drawers with several pictures of Ron, Ron with the kids, Bree with the kids. None of Ron and Bree.
Along the right wall, some hunting prints hung over an exercise area—a stationary bike and some barbells. Then another doorway, leading to another bathroom, was slightly ajar. Finally, coming back around to where they stood, there was a comfortable-looking stuffed leather chair with matching ottoman, another reading lamp. A Bombay & Company lion’s-claw table seemed to double as a writing desk, with its brass lamp, large green blotter, ship-in-a-bottle.
“I like it,” Hardy said. “I could use a room like this.”
“You don’t feel it?”
Hardy took another second or two. “I don’t feel anything, Abe, except that this is a great room. I want a room like this.”
“That’s my point,” Glitsky said. “Every guy wants a room like this. You know why? This is a guy’s room.”
He crossed to the closet and pulled aside one of the paneled doors. Hardy was a step behind him and found himself looking at several suits, coats, shirts, a tie rack. On the floor were a dozen or more pairs of shoes, neatly arranged—dress, tennis, sandals, slippers. Glitsky nodded as though he’d found what he expected.
He walked to the other end of the closet and slid that door back. It was far less crowded. Glitsky started flicking the few hanging items aside. “Two dresses, three skirts, and four sweaters,” he said, then went into a squat, reached around on the floor, arranging. “Three and a half pairs of women’s shoes, not to mention three more dresses on the floor. How in the world did even Carl miss this?”
“Maybe he found something else that caught his attention and got him killed first.”
Glitsky stood slowly, grimacing, a hand on his back. “How do you get this old?”
“Stubbornly refuse to die?”
Glitsky broke a small smile. “Words to live by. Bathroom?”
“No, thanks, I just went.”
The smile vanished as mysteriously as it had come. “Hopeless,” Abe said, and pushed open the bathroom door. Compared to the spaciousness of the master bedroom, it wasn’t much more than a utilitarian closet—six by eight feet with a double-hung window over a blue tiled sink, a towel rack with one orange towel, a toilet with the seat up. Significantly, Hardy thought, there was no tub, only a glassed-in shower.
Hardy reached around and opened the medicine cabinet, which was nearly empty—bottles of Tylenol, NyQuil, some Band-Aids, razor blades. “Lots of couples have different bathrooms.”
“Happy ones don’t have different bedrooms, though,” Glitsky replied. “I’ve done research. It’s a true fact.”
Glitsky was moving again, and Hardy tagged along. They passed back through Ron’s room and stopped at the dresser, which Glitsky opened with the same basic results—a few articles of women’s underclothes in two of the drawers. But four of the drawers out of six were packed, even overpacked, with Ron’s clothes—jeans, junk, polo shirts and T-shirts, sweaters, socks and underwear. When Glitsky closed the last drawer, he straightened up. “You know,” he said, “you could take a million pictures of this room, and I bet the scene guys did, and you wouldn’t see any evidence of a crime.”
“I don’t either. So they lived in different rooms, so what?”
“This, to you, isn’t some evidence of marital conflict?”
Hardy shrugged. “It doesn’t mean he killed her. Besides, Frannie said they were having troubles.”
“Don’t remind me. It does make me wonder, though,” he said, “just how she got pregnant.”
Immersed in paper at the desk in Bree’s office, Glitsky was going through the hard-copy file, folder by folder— propaganda by the armload on what Hardy thought must be every imaginable side of the additive issue. Legislative reports, news clippings, executive summaries from various think tanks, media alerts. MTBE, ethanol, reformulated gasoline. It ran the gamut from copies of faxed pages to four-color advertising pieces, from page fragments to small booklets.
“Fascinating stuff,” Glitsky said. He was going fast, to Hardy’s eye ignoring everything that wasn’t personal in Bree’s personal files, laying a slush pile of Bree’s professional work on the desk to his right, behind him. Hardy made some noise that might have sounded like asking for permission, got a grunt in reply, and grabbed a handful and walked out into the hallway, where he folded it all up and tucked it inside his jacket.
He then returned to Bree’s room.
Further evidence that Ron and Bree had lived separate lives, all right. Her bed was smaller, a double. It had a bright floral comforter and flounced pillows that matched. Even now, a month after her death, a woman’s scent of perfume and powder hung subtly in the air. Her bathroom was done in light salmon tones and was three times the size of Ron’s, with an oversized tub and makeup table, as much a woman’s bathroom as Ron’s was a man’s.
Back in the bedroom, Hardy stood at the bookshelves—floor-to-ceiling built-ins that covered half the back wall. Possibly it shouldn’t have surprised him after what he’d heard about Bree the ugly duckling from Damon Kerry, but the entire bottom shelf was filled with paperback romance novels. Next up was a half shelf of paperback commercial fiction, then a couple of shelves of hardbound literary fiction—almost entirely by modern women writers. Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver, Laurie Colwin, Amy Tan—a scientist with good literary taste, Hardy thought. Then a surprise—what looked to be a full set of Tony Hillerman. So Chee and Leaphorn had been in her consciousness, too. Maybe helping to spark the idealism that had driven her so strongly in her last months.
On the top shelf, though, at the end of the large section of travel books, next to a new copy of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting,
was the one Hardy thought he recognized and knew he wanted. He took the oversized book down and brought it over to the small reading chair next to the bed.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting,
was the one Hardy thought he recognized and knew he wanted. He took the oversized book down and brought it over to the small reading chair next to the bed.
Her high school yearbook.
Passages 81,
from Lincoln High in Evanston, Illinois.
Passages 81,
from Lincoln High in Evanston, Illinois.
There were the usual autographs: “To the smartest girl in the world.” “Chemistry would have beat me without you.” “Who needs boys when you’ve got brains?” “Lab rats rule!”
And then, from one of her teachers, the one Hardy needed: “To Bree Brunetta, my best student ever!”
He quickly turned through the seniors and found her—Bree Brunetta. Without the maiden name, he never would have been able to find, much less recognize, the ravishing Bree Beaumont from the uninspired and formal cap-and-gown photograph.
Bree Brunetta, at seventeen, had been slightly overweight with dark unkempt hair, bangs down over her eyes, braces, clunky glasses. The ugly duckling indeed, Hardy thought. There was a recent picture of Bree with the kids next to the bed and he looked at the smiling face with the shining blond hair, the cheekbones, the perfect mouth—it was hard to reconcile the two images.
He flipped through the rest of the book quickly. Bree had been an active and seemingly well-rounded student, a member of the Debating Society, the Science Club, the Chess Club. She played clarinet in the band and was the “features” editor of the student newspaper. She was voted the Smartest Girl.
Hardy happened to notice one other detail, one of those cruel high school moments that scar a kid for life. Bree was voted “least likely to get a date with Scott LePine,” the Most Popular Guy, Best-Looking Guy, and Most Likely to Succeed. Whichever kids dreamed up that category must have thought it was hysterical. Hardy guessed Bree wouldn’t have thought so.
There were some letters on three-ring binder paper folded over in the back, and he was just opening one when he heard Glitsky’s steps coming quickly down the hallway. He folded the letters back and put them with the literature into his inside pocket as well. Then he closed the book as Glitsky appeared at the door to Bree’s room. His eyes had a haunted look. “I just got beeped. I’ve got to go,” he said.
“You mind if I stay behind a few minutes?” Hardy asked.
“Sure, no sweat. Just lock up when you leave.” Glitsky shook his head. “Get real, Diz. We’re out of here. We’re not arguing about it, either, okay? Or making one of our clever remarks.” He let out a long breath. “Somebody just shot another cop.”
24
The two-man arson team was still at his house when Hardy drove up. He parked semilegally and came up onto where the lawn had been before stopping to get their attention. They were huddled over an area near what had been the front bay window. “How you guys doing?”
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