Nothing but the Truth (59 page)
“Were they awake at three-thirty?”
“Yeah,” Hardy replied crisply. “We were all sitting up telling yarns around the campfire.”
“There’s an interesting choice of words,” Wilkes said.
“Oh yeah,” Hardy replied. “Very telling.” He came forward in his seat. “Look, guys, I thought I was coming down here to get the lowdown on your progress, maybe get my house turned back over to me so I could get to work rebuilding it.”
“You got insurance?” Wilkes asked.
He sighed wearily. “Yes, sir. I’ve got insurance. Thank God.”
Predeaux piped in. “Replacement value or loss value?”
Another aborted chuckle. “You know, you may be surprised to learn that I haven’t checked the policy lately. I don’t have any idea.” He shook his head. “This is ridiculous. If we’re going to continue in this vein, I suggest we make another appointment and I’ll bring a lawyer.”
“You think you need a lawyer?” Lopez asked.
Hardy assayed a cold smile. “Here’s a tip, Sergeant. Everybody needs a lawyer.” He pushed his chair back and stood up, squared off at Predeaux. “Am I under arrest? Are you seriously thinking of charging me with this, ’cause if you are I could use the money the false-arrest lawsuit will bring in.”
“Funny you should bring that up.” Predeaux pulled a chair around and straddled it backward. He transferred his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “You a little short on money?”
“Who isn’t?” Hardy shot back. “What’s the matter with you people? I’m the one who got his house burned down. I’ve got at least two reliable witnesses who’ll swear I wasn’t anywhere near the place and guess what? I wasn’t.”
“We’re looking into it, as you say,” Predeaux responded.
“Well, good luck with that. Or with finding any evidence, which by the way, guys, is generally one of the traditional steps in a criminal investigation.”
“He’s pretty confident, isn’t he?” Lopez asked.
“Confident enough.” Hardy had had all he could take of this.
They had no grounds and no evidence and he had other places to be. “So Sergeant Predeaux, am I under arrest or not?” The other three men started holding a silent conversation. Hardy butted into it. “Sergeant Wilkes, when do I get my house back?”
“That hasn’t been determined.”
“Well,” Hardy snapped, “when you get finished wasting your time and do determine it, you know where to reach me. Sergeant Predeaux,” he repeated, “am I under arrest or not?” He stood by the door for a moment, waiting. “I’m taking your silence as a ‘not.’ That makes this your lucky day.”
Marie Dempsey’s place was on Church Street about a block from Hans Speckmann’s, an authentic
bierstube
that Hardy considered to be on a par with Schroeder’s downtown, which in turn had a reputation as the best German restaurant in the city. The neighborhood had a certain friendly charm in spite of the overwhelming preponderance of pavement and stucco, the lack of trees, lawns, shrubbery. Maybe it was the scale of the buildings, or the trolley that passed every half hour or so.
bierstube
that Hardy considered to be on a par with Schroeder’s downtown, which in turn had a reputation as the best German restaurant in the city. The neighborhood had a certain friendly charm in spite of the overwhelming preponderance of pavement and stucco, the lack of trees, lawns, shrubbery. Maybe it was the scale of the buildings, or the trolley that passed every half hour or so.
Today, though, a wet and heavy cloud still hugged the earth, and Hardy felt at one with it.
The address was the upper unit of a duplex in a square gray two-story building with an internal stairway. From his experience at the Airport Hilton, Hardy thought there was little to no chance that Ron would open the door to a knock or a ring. This was the reason he’d finally opted not to try to call the various numbers he’d collected on the M. Dempseys of the city, but rather to discover the address on his own. He didn’t want to give Ron any warning that he’d be dropping by.
So he walked up the stairs and stood by the door and listened. A man’s voice, singing quietly to himself, was barely discernible inside. There was definite movement, footsteps.
He pushed the doorbell, gave it very little time, then pushed it again. The footsteps had stopped. So had the concert. Whoever was in there was alone. He’d be very surprised if there were children. After another short wait, he knocked desultorily.
Walking back down a few of the steps, making his footfalls as heavy as he could, he then crept back up to the landing and waited. About two minutes later, the doorknob turned and Hardy hit the door hard, leading with his shoulder. There was a satisfying bit of resistance and then he was inside, hovering over the man he’d knocked to the ground.
“Hi, Ron. How’ve you been?”
Struggling to get up. “Mr. Hardy.”
“Dismas, please. After all we’ve been through together, I think we’re on first names by now.”
Ron was on his feet again and broke a nervous smile. “All right, Dismas.” He let out a long breath. “You may not believe this, but it’s good to see you.”
Hardy was brusque. “It’s better to see you. Where are the kids?”
“They just went to the store for a minute.”
“With Marie?”
After a beat, Ron offered a resigned shrug, another attempt at an ingratiating smile. “You’re pretty good,” he conceded.
“I have my days,” Hardy admitted. Closing the door behind him, when he turned back again to Ron—this time he was glad he had it—he’d taken his gun out from his waistband, held it so Ron could see.
“You don’t need anything like that.”
“Maybe not,” Hardy said. “But then again, maybe I do. So I figured I’d be prepared either way.”
The gun had Ron’s attention, no doubt about it. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “So what are you going to do now?”
“Not me, us.” They were in a small foyer. Hardy motioned over to the living room, visible behind them. “Now we’re going to wait for a little while and you’d better hope your kids come back with Marie in a reasonable amount of time. Or else you and I are going to take a ride downtown.”
“And do what?”
“And tell a DA named Scott Randall anything he wants to know.”
Ron took a seat on a low leather couch. Hardy, still pumped up, remained standing. “My understanding,” Ron said, “was that you were going to wait until tomorrow.Then Frannie was free to tell anything, everything. And the children and I would be gone.”
He clipped out the words. “Yep. That was it.”
“But?”
“But now she’s not sure she can do it.”
“Why not? I’ve . . .”
Hardy raised his voice. “It’s not you, Goddamn it! It’s not anything you forbid or allow. It’s her.” He shook his head, reining in the emotion, got his voice under control. “The way she sees it, as soon as she tells them your situation, your kids suffer. They’ve got to move and start over.”
“But that’s not Frannie’s doing.”
It still galled Hardy to hear this man refer to his wife so familiarly, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He bore some of the responsibility for that himself. “No,” he said, “and as soon as they indict you, which is tomorrow, it’s going to happen anyway.”
“So what’s her problem with it?”
Hardy suddenly felt stupid holding the gun. Tucking it back into his belt, now invisible again under his jacket, he stepped across to a wing chair and sat on the edge of it, across from Ron. “She doesn’t see it as a problem,” he said. “She’s willing to trade a few more hours in jail, to give me a few more hours . . .” He stopped.
“To find who killed Bree?”
Hardy leaned forward and eyed him coldly. “Yes,” he said. “To find who killed your sister.”
Ron didn’t give it up right away. He put on a quizzicalexpression, as though he really didn’t understand what Hardy had just said. “You mean my wife. Bree.”
“I mean Bree all right,” Hardy replied. “But she wasn’t your wife. She was your sister.”
34
For the third time since Glitsky and Batavia had arrived at Thorne’s apartment, a cable car rattled by outside on Mason, shaking the floorboards. The shaking increased and for an instant the lieutenant thought it might be a real earthquake. The conductor had a heavy hand with the famous bells, too.
Ding ding ding ding ding!
Thorne’s work area was a desk in his living room, up against the front window overlooking the street. Glitsky had been going through a stack of computer printouts, and now pushed the ergonomic chair back a couple of inches, ready to bolt for a doorway if things began to fall around him. “It’s hard to believe that people pay real money to live with this experience.”
On the couch behind him, Jorge Batavia patiently lifted another page of printed matter from a suitcase he’d placed on the coffee table. He scanned it quickly, set it on the pile of rejected paper next to him. “It’s New Age therapy,” he said. “Every fifteen minutes you get to wonder if your building is going to fall down.” The sergeant put aside another page. “You think you’re going to die four times an hour, you squeeze what you can out of every minute. Your life experience is enriched.”
The shaking had stopped, punctuated by a last burst of clanging. “Good theory.” Glitsky pulled forward again, went back to his stack of paper.
There was also a computer on the table, but Glitsky didn’t dare even turn the thing on. He thought there was a reasonable likelihood that the thing was booby-trapped, so he had placed a call back to the Hall to have one of the cyber specialists come down and unplug it, then take it downtown for examination.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough to look at. Thorne put out a prodigious amount of paper, and Glitsky and Batavia had been at his hard-copy files for almost an hour.
Batavia and Coleman had been checking in at homicide after Glitsky had returned to the office with his newly signed warrant. He had asked Jorge to accompany him on the search of Thorne’s place while Coleman went to talk to Jim Pierce again about his activities on Saturday night.
While Glitsky and Hardy thought they might be closing in on Damon Kerry—perhaps through some agent of Baxter Thorne’s—Coleman and Batavia had moved Pierce up a notch or two on their possible suspect list. This was mostly because a review of the business calendar he’d provided for them had revealed another questionable alibi—a two-hour gap after Bree’s funeral, during which he’d had lunch alone at a crowded Chinese counter restaurant. This was when someone had killed Griffin, and made it three out of three for Pierce. That in turn piqued the inspectors’ curiosity.
But Glitsky had developed a personal hard-on for Thorne. As Hardy had pointed out, even a tenuous connection to the weekend’s water poisoning at Pulgas was going to make life very difficult for Mr. Thorne. If they found any tie-in to Bree Beaumont, it would even be worse.
Between him and Batavia, they’d already done a thorough job on the kitchen, the wastebaskets and garbage cans. In the bedroom, there was nothing in or taped under any of the drawers of the dresser or night table, nothing tucked between the box spring and the mattress.
Glitsky went to the computer table while Batavia checked the bedroom closet and found shoes and hanging clothes and the suitcase filled with propaganda. Batavia brought the suitcase into the living room, but thus far they’d found nothing at all—no longhand drafts or fragments of the damning press release, no final or proof copies, no printing or copying bills.
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