Nothing but the Truth (62 page)
“So she went back to it?”
“Not right away. Not for a while.”
“Why not?”
“I’d like to believe that it was my strength of will.” A dry chuckle. “I didn’t give in. But she really couldn’t stand being at home, and I wasn’t putting the kids in full-time day care, so we switched. Big mistake on my part, as it turned out.”
“Why was that?”
“Because she was then the good working mother, and I was the nearly unemployable dad. The courts like mothers best anyway for custody, and when the dad doesn’t have a real career . . .” He shrugged. “He’s dead meat.”
“So she went to work?” Hardy had to know what had happened.
Ron nodded. “Some office job, which of course was incredibly boring and didn’t pay anything like she was used to. She wanted out, but I kept wanting to make the family thing work.” He sighed. “Anyway, we made it a couple more years with me not working—bad, bad mistake—but finally I had to get another job, too.” Ron’s eyes grew hard. He was sitting on the front inch of the couch again, his hands clenched so hard the knuckles were white. “Which is when,” he said, “she started selling the kids.”
Marie and the children finally arrived back at the duplex, which, truth to tell, was a great relief to Hardy. Belief in Ron Beaumont and his idealistic, over-the-top, melodramatic, perhaps heroic story had grown in him like a tumor over the past days. To have it revealed now as malignant just when he’d come to accept it as benign would have seemed a joke almost too cruel to endure.
They spent a few moments explaining Hardy’s presence and involvement to a skeptical Marie. But Ron and the kids—Cassandra particularly—sold her. Hardy was on their side. He could be trusted absolutely. He was Cassandra’s hero. Clearly, she was thrilled to see him again, and so glad it was she who’d finally convinced him to help them. He told her he’d made a lot of progress. He’d give her a final report tomorrow. She loved that.
Otherwise, they were the well-mannered children they’d been at the hotel, although Hardy was delighted when Ron had to tell them to stop bickering over whose turn it was to get to choose the video. They were regular kids, after all. Much like his own. It continued to be a relief.
Marie—a handsome, physically confident yet soft-spoken woman in her late twenties—put on a brave front, but Ron’s situation with the children here was precarious enough without the added bonus of a stranger. Even if that stranger was presented as their savior.
But after the kids had retired to the television, Ron and Marie unpacked the groceries with the practiced efficiency of a long-term couple. When they’d finished, Marie broke out a beer for each of the men and said she’d be with the children if they needed her.
Hardy stopped her. His tone was relaxed, but he wasn’t fooling anybody. “So have you guys been here all weekend?”
Marie looked to Ron. “Except just now.”
“But yesterday? The day before?”
“What is this?” Ron asked. Hardy backed him off with a palm.
“Marie? Were all of you here all weekend?”
She met his gaze frankly. “Yes. Ron got here midday Saturday and we all got settled. Then Sunday you remember was so bad, the weather. We just stayed inside and played games and watched videos.”
“What about Saturday night?”
“What about it? Did we go out? Why would we go out?”
“Halloween,” he said.
She sighed heavily, threw a quick glance at Ron. “We tried to make it up to them here, bobbed for apples, let them watch scary stuff on TV.”
Ron amplified. “And it gave Max night terrors. We were up half the night.”
Marie crossed her arms, impatient with Hardy’s cross-examination. “Ron tells me tomorrow he’ll be able to go home. We’ve kind of been making a game out of this. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“Exactly,” Hardy said.
Marie nodded, the worry back on her face. She spoke to Ron. “If you need anything, just yell, all right?” She closed the door to the kitchen on her way out, telling Hardy it was nice to have met him.
He didn’t completely believe her.
Although he did tend to believe what she’d said about Saturday night. And if Ron had been here with her, he hadn’t been out shooting Phil Canetta.
But the questions had ruffled Ron’s feathers. “What was all that about?”
Hardy was matter-of-fact. “That was about proving you didn’t kill Bree, which is an issue to more people than you’d like to believe. By the way, do you now or have you ever owned a Movado watch? You know, the museum timepiece, little dot at twelve o’clock?”
Ron was getting sick to death of all the questions. “By the way, isn’t this getting a bit much?” Hardy didn’t respond, waiting him out, wearing him down. “No,” he answered finally.
“Did Inspector Griffin ever ask you the same thing? About a Movado watch?”
“No. Why?”
“No reason,” Hardy said. “Now, the day of Bree’s funeral—tell me about that.”
“Jesus Christ, I don’t see . . .”
“Ron.” Hardy was firm. “Humor me.”
Frustration showed in his face, but resolve must have shown more clearly in Hardy’s. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know what you did, what the kids did, where you were.”
For Hardy, it was a fundamental recital. At eight o’clock, Ron and Father Bernardin had hosted a breakfast at the St. Catherine’s rectory for the pallbearers—four of the other soccer dads—and he’d of course kept the children out of school so that they could be with him. The funeral mass had been at ten. At around eleven-fifteen, accompanied by Marie, the children, the priest, the pall-bearers and a couple of other acquaintances from Ron and Bree’s limited social circle, he drove down to Colma, where she was buried.
Both Kerry and Pierce had been to the funeral. Neither had attended the burial.
There was a short graveside service, after which Ron took Marie, Bernardin, and the kids to lunch at the Cliff House. He dropped Max and Cassandra back at Merryvale at around two, about the time Carl Griffin’s body was discovered.
There could no longer be any doubt. Ron hadn’t shot Carl Griffin, which meant he hadn’t used the same gun to eliminate Canetta. And finally, at long last, it was a near certainty he hadn’t killed his sister. As he’d sworn all along, as Frannie had believed, as Hardy had hoped, Ron Beaumont was innocent.
It was a huge load off.
It was galling for Hardy to realize he could have known all this on Friday night, Saturday evening at the latest, if only Ron hadn’t felt the need to bolt. But there was nowhere to go with that. Ron had in fact called him on Saturday, had tried to cooperate. He hadn’t known what Hardy was going through. The only thing for Hardy to do now was get his remaining questions answered while he could.
He willed a neutral tone and began. “Tell me about Bree and Damon Kerry.”
“You’ve gotten to him, huh? I’m not surprised.” Ron sat back and tipped up his beer.
“Do you think he killed her?”
Ron had given this question a lot of thought, and he gave it some more now. “The problem I’ve always had is pure logistics. How could he have done it?”
“That’s not so hard. He comes by your place after you’ve taken the kids to school. They talked that morning, you know. Kerry and Bree.”
“I know.”
This was a surprise. “Do you know what they talked about?”
“No. Not specifically. I think they just talked. They did all the time. But look, the man’s running for governor.He doesn’t just stroll down the street and kill somebody.”
“Maybe he drove, parked in the basement . . .”
Ron was shaking his head. “And what if somebody sees him down there or in the elevator? And why?”
“She was pregnant.”
“No. They loved each other. They were talking about getting married. That’s what Bree and I were having our problems about.” Ron spun his bottle nervously on the Formica table. “This wasn’t my finest hour,” he said at last. “I was upset enough with her when she started hitting the newspapers in connection with Kerry.”
“Why was that, though, exactly?”
“Because Bree isn’t the most common name on earth. If Dawn ran across it . . .”
“How would she do that? Isn’t she back in Wisconsin?”
“Why wouldn’t she? She reads the paper. California news plays everywhere.”
“I thought she hated the kids.”
“When they were babies. After she saw how lucrative they could be . . .” He trailed off. “Certainly she fought like hell for the custody judgment. She thought they were her property.”
“And after she got the judgment? After you”—Hardy still had trouble with it—“took them? I’d think Bree would be the first place she’d look.”
“That’s right. But it wasn’t as though the court’s judgment came as a surprise. Bree and I had had months to prepare. When we got out here to California, I was Ron Beaumont, recently widowed. For over a year the kids and I lived in an apartment in Oakland, kept a low profile.”
“What did you do? For a living, I mean.”
“What I do now. Computer-based financial work.”
“So you stayed in Oakland until the investigators stopped coming around to Bree?”
“Right. Then we started ‘dating,’ had a small, private wedding.”
“And no one knew you?”
“Not as Bree’s brother, no. We’d lived completely separate lives since I went away to college. At that time, Bree was like fourteen. Then she came out here for grad school while I was living in Racine. None of her friends even knew of me, not that she had that many.” He shrugged. “It was a perfect fit.”
“It was also a hell of a risk.”
Another shrug. “High risk, high return. It was the best option. There was no way I was letting the kids go back to Dawn.” He struggled to try and make it clear. “See, she really believed there wasn’t anything wrong with what she wanted to do, what she did. Society’s just too puritanical. Sex is natural. If some people are uptight, that’s their problem.”
“Not kids, though. Nobody thinks it’s okay with kids.”
Ron appeared at a loss. If Hardy didn’t know this . . . “Well, check it out. Somebody’s taking ten million pictures a year.”
A short silence fell. Both men reached for their bottles.
“Anyway,” Ron continued, “back to it. Say Dawn sees Bree in the paper, something clicks. Same name, same field. She checks into it even a little and finds out Beaumont used to be Brunetta, my name. I’m dead. The kids are dead.” He sighed. “So, yeah, we had some words about it.”
“So what did she say? Bree?”
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