The Oath (9 page)

At that moment, a woman from the CSI team appeared in the doorway, carrying the rag doll body of the Markhams’ dog, a large and beautiful golden retriever. Glitsky watched as, sagging under the weight, she crossed the flagstone stoop. Langtry took a step toward her, said, “Carol,” and got stopped by her glare. Crying silently, she didn’t want any help. At the curb, she placed the lifeless form in the back of one of the ambulances still parked there, then walked over to one of the patrol cars and sat down inside, closing the door behind her.

Glitsky laid a quick fraternal hand on Langtry’s shoulder as he passed him, then went up across the lawn and through the front door.

Inside, he found Lennard Faro, the crime scene lab specialist, standing by the sink in the kitchen. Dark and wiry, with a thin mustache and a tiny gold cross in his earlobe, he had his arms and legs crossed in an attitude of casual impatience. The photographer was taking pictures and he seemed to be waiting until he finished up.

Glitsky stopped for a second at the entrance to the kitchen, took another glance at Mrs. Markham’s body, then joined Faro at the sink. “Jack Langtry tells me she shot the gun,” he said.

Faro turned his head sideways. “Maybe. There it is. Close enough.”

The gun lay on the floor, about a foot from Carla’s right hand. “She right-handed?” Glitsky asked.

A mirthless chuckle. “You’ll have to ask her.”

Glitsky thought he deserved that. “Why don’t you tell me what you know? Keep me from asking more stupid questions.”

Faro took a beat, then straightened up. “You mind if we get out of here? The view pales after an hour or two.” He crossed the kitchen, back out to the grand dining room, then into the foyer, where the front door was still open, fresh air coming in. “Okay. The gun’s a twenty-two revolver, holds six slugs, although we’ve recovered only five casings, which fits. As I see it, she started upstairs with her son.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s the only one she tried to silence. The shot was through the pillow.”

“Okay. Then what?”

Faro pointed upstairs. The dining room was expansive and open, its ceiling over twenty feet high, with a large skylight at the roof. Midway up, around the sides of the room, a banister marked the walkway to the rooms on the second story. “The next room over, at the end,” Faro said, “is where the girls slept. Twins. It looks like she went in there next. No point in trying to silence the first shot, so she probably just did it quick.”

“Then went downstairs and killed herself?”

Faro corrected him. “The dog first.”

Suddenly the niggling detail he couldn’t place earlier when he’d been talking with Langtry struck Glitsky. Even if Carla Markham thought the world too cruel for herself and her children, why would she shoot her dog? Certainly not to spare it the pain of going on. Much more typical would have been a note leaving the pet in the care of a relative or close friend.

“Sir?” Faro asked. “Did you say something?”

“Just talking to myself, Len. How about her own wound?”

“Back of the ear, right side, which fits again. But no exit wound, so I can’t hypothesize about the trajectory. Strout ought to get all that.”

“I’m sure he will,” Abe said. “But let me ask you this, Len. You’re going with Jack on murder/suicide, I take it?”

But the analyst shook his head. “We’re not done here by a long shot, sir. I don’t see anything that rules it out, let’s put it like that. It looks like she fired the gun. No sign of any struggle anywhere.” He raised his shoulders, let them down. “But I don’t know. You got a better idea, I’ll look anyplace you want.”

“I don’t know if it’s a better idea,” Glitsky said, “but I’d ask Strout to double-check for the trajectory and find out if she was right-handed.” With his own right hand, Glitsky pointed to a spot at the back of his right ear. “It seems a little awkward, don’t you think?”

Harlen Fisk had been dispatched out from downtown and had joined his partner here at the house, where Glitsky had assigned to them the task of interviewing Anita Tong. Now the lieutenant joined the three of them, who had gathered around the table in the breakfast nook.

The maid was still visibly shaken. When Glitsky had first come outside after discovering the bodies, she’d all but collapsed onto the stoop upon hearing the news, which had seemed incomprehensible to her. For the first several minutes, she kept returning to the same questions, then arguing with the answers.

What did he mean,
dead
? Glitsky must have been wrong. He didn’t mean that they were
all
dead, did he? They couldn’t all be dead, that wouldn’t be possible. Not Ian, at seventeen the eldest child. He was too big, too strong and competent, almost a man now. Certainly, he would have heard someone coming into his room and woken up, wouldn’t he? Was Glitsky sure he saw
both
of the girls, Chloe and Siggy? Maybe he hadn’t. He might want to go back up and check again. Someone could still be alive.

Anita Tong was a petite and well-spoken woman. She’d been part of the Markhams’ household for seven and a half years. They were her only employers. She lived a couple of miles south in the Sunset District, and worked in the house five days a week—Mondays and Tuesdays off—from 8:00
A.M.
until 6:00
P.M.

Now, pulling up a chair, Glitsky straddled it backward. He picked up on Ms. Tong’s story as she was telling the inspectors that she’d offered to stay on for the night—he assumed she meant last night—and thank God she hadn’t. “But Carla—Mrs. Markham—said she and the kids could handle things, I should go. They didn’t expect many more people.”

“How many were there when you left?” Bracco asked.

Ms. Tong considered a moment. “Her coffee group, mostly. Which is six other women. They meet every Friday morning. I think when they heard about Mr. Markham…anyway, they brought some casseroles and things like that, so I thought she might have wanted me to stay and heat them up and serve them. But no.”

Fisk was nodding as though this was all somehow relevant. Bracco was taking notes on a yellow legal pad. At least, Glitsky noted with some surprise and relief, his new guys had put a tape recorder on the table. But he could see how they hadn’t gotten very far if all of Tong’s answers had gone this way. He decided to speak up, keep things on point, maybe give a little instruction while he was at it. “So, Ms. Tong,” he said gently, “what time did you wind up leaving?”

“
Mrs
. Tong,” she corrected him. “A little before seven.”

“And there were only Mrs. Markham and her six friends in the house when you left? Nobody else?”

She turned to face him. “Well, the kids and a couple of their friends, too. Ian’s, really, not the girls’.”

“Two of them?”

“I think so. Teenagers. They sat in here.”

“Two of Ian’s friends, then,” Glitsky said. “Do you know their names?”

“One was Joel Burrill. He’s here all the time. The other one, I think Mark, but…” She shook her head.

“How about the names of the coffee group women?” Glitsky asked.

This was more promising, and Mrs. Tong brightened up slightly. “Well, there’s Ruth Fitzpatrick, I know. And Jamie Rath. Oh, her daughter Lexi was here, too. She’s in Siggy and Chloe’s grade. Jamie lives right around the corner. I could show you.”

Glitsky made a little writing motion, signaling Bracco that he should be jotting down these names. To Mrs. Tong, he continued, “That would be good when we’re finished here, if you don’t mind. Now, as to the rest of the guests, was anyone else here when you left, or just the coffee group and Ian’s friends? And Siggy and Chloe’s classmate.”

“Well, of course Mr. Markham’s assistant was here the whole time. Brendan, just crying and crying, worse than Mrs. Markham sometimes. Then there was Frank Husic next door. He’s a very nice man. He heard about Mr. Markham on the radio and came right over to see if there was any way he could help.” Mrs. Tong closed her eyes for a moment, then nodded to herself. “That’s all when I was still here. After that I don’t know.”

“So you didn’t see Dr. Kensing?” Glitsky asked.

Mrs. Tong’s expression was instructive. She reacted visibly with recognition and, Glitsky thought, shock. “Dr. Kensing coming here surprises you?”

It took her a moment to phrase one syllable. “Well…” She stopped. The inspectors waited. Finally she shrugged. “Yes, I guess,” she said.

“And why is that?”

Mrs. Tong was starting to close up. She drew her head down slightly between her shoulders.

Glitsky kept at her. “Did you know Dr. Kensing, Mrs. Tong? Was he a friend of the family?”

“Not exactly a friend, no. I didn’t know him, but the name…the name is familiar.”

Glitsky hadn’t moved his chair, but he somehow seemed to have gotten closer to her. “And you wouldn’t have expected him to come by? Why is that?”

Before Mrs. Tong could frame an answer, one of the inspectors interrupted. Bracco, eager to show off what he’d learned, pumped in, “He was on call at the ICU when Markham died. He probably felt he should.”

Glitsky’s gaze would have frozen flame. He turned mildly, though, back to his subject. “Mrs. Tong, I’m sorry. What were you going to say? Why you wouldn’t have expected Dr. Kensing to come and visit?”

“I just…” She’d picked up the tension between Glitsky and his inspectors, and it didn’t increase her comfort level. “I don’t know,” she said finally.

In some ways, Glitsky knew, this interview and their interruptions might someday prove instructive to Fisk and Bracco, but it wasn’t any solace at the moment, as a willing and cooperative witness was clamming up before his eyes because he couldn’t establish a rhythm, which was halfway to rapport.

But he wasn’t through trying yet. She’d opened a different door a crack, and maybe he could get her to open that one. “All right,” he said, “but you did say that Dr. Kensing wasn’t exactly a friend. I believe those were your words. Didn’t you say that?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Could you tell us what you meant by that?” He threw another, apparently benign look at his rookies, but it delivered the message loud and clear: Shut up and let her answer.

“Well, he worked for Mr. Markham.”

“So you meant he wasn’t exactly a friend because he was more an employee?” When she appeared to be considering that, Glitsky clarified it further. “As opposed to not exactly being a friend because he was more an enemy.”

They waited, and this time Mrs. Tong’s check around the table revealed a universal and hopeful expectation that prompted a more open response. “His name came up sometimes,” she began, “with Carla and her friends. I couldn’t help but hear, serving them, you know? Actually, not so much his name as his wife’s.” Suddenly another thought struck her, though. “Should I be saying any of this? Do I need to have a lawyer with me?”

Glitsky put his finger in that dike immediately. “I don’t think so, ma’am. You haven’t done anything wrong. You’re not in any trouble.” Having said that, he came right back at her, hoping a new question would trump the lawyer issue. “Why did Dr. Kensing’s wife come up at this coffee group?”

“She talked about divorcing him.”

The antecedents hung in the air in an unidentifiable jumble. “Dr. Kensing’s wife?” Glitsky asked. “Was divorcing him?”

“No.” Mrs. Tong shook her head impatiently. “Carla. Mrs. Kensing was…I think everybody knows this…Mr. Markham had an affair with her.”

Fisk brought his baby face forward. It was alight with excitement and possibility. “With Dr. Kensing’s wife?” he asked avidly.

No, Glitsky wanted to say with his deepest sarcasm, with the golden retriever. But he bit it back. One more time, though, and he really was going to have to tell them to leave. He kept his own voice uninflected. “Are you saying that Dr. Kensing’s wife—”

“Ann.”

“Okay, Ann. She and Mr. Markham were having an affair? You mean it wasn’t over?”

“It was supposed to be. When it all blew up—”

“When was that?”

“About five or six months ago, just before Thanksgiving. That’s when Carla found out. She kicked him out for a couple of weeks then. I didn’t think he was ever coming back. But he did. She asked him back. If it were me, I don’t think I’d have forgiven…well, but that’s me.”

“But Mr. Markham did come back?”

Mrs. Tong nodded. “Swearing it was over, of course.”

“But it wasn’t?”

“I don’t know.” Now, a shrug. “Carla wasn’t sure, I don’t think. But she thought…She told the coffee group she was getting a private investigator, and if he was seeing her again, she was leaving him.” A silence settled for a long moment, after which Mrs. Tong turned to Glitsky and picked up the thread. “So when I heard Dr. Kensing had been here last night, you’re right, I was surprised.”

Feigning a nonchalance he didn’t feel, Glitsky leaned back and folded his arms over his chest. The information about Ann Kensing and Tim Markham made him reconsider two contradictory possibilities: first, that Mrs. Markham might have been depressed for a long while before last night, which would strengthen the argument for murder/ suicide; but second, here was an apparent possible motive for a murder.

He would consider each more carefully when he got some time, but for now he had one more line of questioning for the maid. “As far as you know, Mrs. Tong, did Dr. Kensing know about the relationship between Mr. Markham and his wife?”

“I think so, yes. When Carla heard that they were getting divorced—”

“Kensing and Ann? They’re divorced now, too? Over this?”

“I don’t know if it’s final yet, but I understood that they’d separated. At least when Carla heard they’d started the proceedings, she tried to make sure Mr. Markham wouldn’t get named in any of the papers. So Dr. Kensing, he must have known, don’t you think?”

D
ismas Hardy was standing on the sidewalk on Irving Street talking with another lawyer named Wes Farrell. The two men had only met once or twice before, but the most recent time had been at Glitsky’s wedding last September, where they’d independently and then together explored the limits of human tolerance for champagne. It was, it turned out for both of them, pretty high.

Last night, Frannie had eventually shown up at the Shamrock, and she and Hardy had gone on their date—Chinese food at the Purple Yet Wah. When they got home, he couldn’t get McGuire’s story about Shane Mackey out of his head. This morning, he’d called around and discovered that Mackey’s family had indeed hired an attorney—Farrell—to explore malpractice issues surrounding his death. After all the medical talk recently, then Tim Markham’s death yesterday, he was curious to know more. Farrell would be a good source of information. He could also, he knew, be a hell of a good time. So when Wes got to his office at a little after 8:30, Hardy was standing outside on the sidewalk, holding a bottle of bubbly with a ribbon around it.

Farrell greeted him like a long-lost brother, but then, seeing the offering, backed away in mock horror. “I don’t think I’ve had a sip of that stuff since Abe’s wedding, which is okay since I had about a year’s worth that day if I recall, which I’m not sure I do.”

“It’s like riding a horse,” Hardy said. “You’ve got to get right back on after it bucks you off. Churchill drank it every day, you know? For breakfast. And he won the Nobel Prize.”

“For champagne drinking?”

Hardy shook his head. “Peace, I think. No, wait a minute. Maybe literature.”

“It would have been good if it was peace.” Farrell turned to let Hardy in past him. “I love how they wind up giving the Peace Prize to these world-class warriors. Henry Kissinger. Le Duc Tho. Yasser Arafat. Churchill would have fit right in. These guys aren’t exactly Gandhi, you know.”

“Statesmen,” Hardy said. “If you’re a statesman you can kill as many people as you want as long as you’re in a war, and then when you stop, everybody in Sweden is so grateful they give you the Peace Prize.”

“Except for the fact that Sweden doesn’t give the Peace Prize.”

“It doesn’t? Who does?”

“Norway.”

“When did that start?”

“Pretty early on, I think. All the other Nobel’s come from Sweden, but Norway gives the Peace Prize. Don’t ask me why?”

“They’re probably better statesmen,” Hardy said.

“I could be a statesman,” Farrell said. “I’d like to kill lots of people.” He was sitting now, rearranging the pens on his blotter. “Maybe then I could defend myself, which would mean I had a client.”

Hardy sat back and crossed an ankle over his knee. “Things a little slow lately?”

Farrell waved a hand vaguely at their surroundings. “Barely worth opening the office every day.” He sighed. “If I didn’t care so much about a couple of my clients…”

“The Mackeys, for example?”

Farrell’s shoulders fell. He wagged his head back and forth a couple of times in despair, then looked up through bassett eyes. “Don’t tell me they came to you?”

Hardy barked a note of laughter, then checked it. Losing business wasn’t a laughing matter. “No,” he said. “I promise. I’m not stealing your clients, Wes. But it
is
about the Mackeys.”

“What about them, besides that they’ve not only lost a son, but are screwed to boot?”

“Screwed how?”

“Because our great Supreme Court recently ruled, as you may have heard, that individuals can’t sue their HMOs for medical malpractice because they don’t practice medicine. They’re business entities, not medical entities.” He spread his palms, lifted, then dropped them in frustration. “Unfortunately, Diz, this rejects more or less exactly the argument I’d filed in behalf of the Mackeys and my other five clients. And master of timing that I am, I hitched my wagon pretty much full-time to this issue, figuring it was the wave of the future. Anyway, so now I’ve got to rewrite all the pleading on some new cause of action. Failure to coordinate care, general negligence, the admin of the plan caused the P.I., like that. But meanwhile, there’s no billings.”

All the way back in his chair, Hardy sat with his arms crossed, halfway enjoying the rave. He knew the realities of billing. If you couldn’t handle them, you didn’t belong in the business. “So what happened with Shane?”

“Shane is like textbook.” Farrell shot up and went to his file cabinet, from which he pulled a thick folder. “Look at this. Check this out.”

Hardy stood and came over to the desk. Farrell had the medical records of everything that Moses McGuire had described in the Shamrock the previous night, but they went over it in a lot more detail, and with a final twist that made Shane Mackey’s death even more tragic. One of Shane’s doctors suggested that he might, possibly, have “something” that could respond to a new treatment being performed at Cedars-Sinai in L.A. But Shane’s HMO had determined that this treatment was “experimental,” so they would not cover him. Which meant the cost to Shane would be about three hundred thousand dollars out of pocket. “And after months of agony, trying to decide if he should incur the cost, he went for it. He and his parents sold their houses, basically cashed out, and he went down to L.A., where guess what?”

“He died,” Hardy said soberly.

“He died,” Farrell repeated. “But I’ve got a witness down there who says that if he would have come in three months earlier, they might have saved him.”

Hardy whistled. “If he’s credible, that could be worth a lot of money for you.”

“Yeah, but it’s not coming in tomorrow, let me tell you.” Farrell closed the folder. “Anyway, the bad part for me is that it’s all omission, very hard to prove. Stuff somebody might have or should have done, but didn’t because Parnassus doesn’t allow—”

Hardy straightened up, nearly jumped at the word. “Parnassus? That’s the group here we’re talking about?”

A nod. “Sure. Shane worked for the city, so they covered him.”

“And what about your other clients? Were they with Parnassus, too?”

“Sure. They’re the biggest show in town, after all.”

“And with these other clients, somebody died every time?”

“Yep.”

“Were they all omission cases, like with Shane?”

“Not all. There was one little girl—Susan Magers. She was allergic to sulfa drugs and the doctor she saw forgot to ask. I mean, can you believe that? You’d think they’d have allergies flagged in the computer when they call the patient’s name up, but they elected not to load that software about five years ago, save a few bucks.” He shook his head in disgust. “But let me ask you, Diz. If you don’t have a client, what’s your interest in all this?”

Hardy sat on the corner of the desk. “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. I heard about Shane just last night and got to wondering if his fiance´e or his family needed any help, which brought me to you. But when I hear it’s all Parnassus…”

“What’s all Parnassus?”

Hardy frowned, reluctant by habit to disclose information he’d been given in relative confidence. Instead, he temporized. “The name’s just been coming up a lot lately. You heard about Tim Markham, didn’t you?”

“What about him?”

Hardy looked a question—was Wes putting him on?—but apparently not. “He got killed yesterday. Hit and run.”

“You’re kidding me!” Farrell’s face went slack. “I’ve really got to start watching some nighttime television, reading the paper, something. When did it happen?”

“Yesterday morning. They got him over to Portola, where he died.”

“God, in his own hospital. I love it. They must be shitting over there.” Farrell broke a smile. “Maybe I could call his wife and see if she wants to sue them. Wouldn’t that be sweet?”

“Sue who?”

“Portola, Parnassus, the usual suspects.”

“Except that they didn’t kill him, Wes. He got hit by a car.”

Farrell sat forward, still grinning, his elbows on his desk. “Listen to me, Diz. Did you know Tim Markham? Well, I did. He gets admitted to a hospital filled with the doctors he’s been screwing for fifteen years, he’s not getting out alive no matter what. I guarantee it.”

Hardy was smiling, too. “It’s a good theory, Wes, but I don’t think it happened.”

Farrell pointed a finger. “You wait,” he said.

Hardy sometimes wondered why he had a downtown office. He’d stopped in for an hour after seeing Farrell. Then he and Freeman had eaten a long lunch in Belden Alley. At a little after three o’clock, he had finally settled into the brief he was writing when he was interrupted by a call from his friend Pico Morales, who didn’t want to bother him, but it was an emergency, having to do with one of his friends. He needed a criminal lawyer. Could Hardy please come down to the Steinhart Aquarium and talk to him? The guy, Pico said, was one of his walkers. Hardy knew what that meant. When Pico went on to say that the friend was a doctor named Kensing with Parnassus, that clinched it. Hardy was going for another drive, back to the Avenues.

As the curator of the Steinhart, Pico’s long-standing ambition was to acquire a great white shark for the aquarium in Golden Gate Park. Four, six, nine times a year, some boat would haul up a shark and Pico would call his list of volunteers. A lifetime ago, Hardy had been one of the first. He would let himself in to the tanks in the bowels of the aquarium where, his mind a blank, he’d don a wetsuit and walk a shark for hours, round and round in the circular tank. In theory, the walking would keep water moving through the animals’ gills until they could breathe on their own. It had never worked yet.

Half-hidden by shrubbery, the back entrance was all the way around behind the aquarium, down six concrete steps. In the dim hallway someone had left on a small industrial light. Hardy pushed at the wired glass door, which opened at his touch.

After all the years that had passed since he’d last been here, he was surprised at how familiar the place felt. The same green walls still sweated with, it seemed, the same humidity. The low concrete ceiling made him want to keep his head down, although he knew he had clearance. He heard muffled voices, sounding as if they came from the inside of an oil drum. His footfalls echoed, too, and he became aware of the constant, almost inaudible hum—maybe generators or pumps for the tanks, Hardy had never really learned what caused it.

The hall curved left, then straightened, then curved again right. At last it opened into a round chamber dominated by a large above-ground pool filled with seawater, against the side of which leaned the substantial bulk of Pico Morales. Under an unruly mop of black hair, Pico’s face was a weathered slab of dark granite, marginally softened by a large, drooping mustache and gentle eyes. He held an oversize, chipped coffee mug and wore the bottoms of a wetsuit, stretched to its limit by his protruding bare stomach.

In the tank itself, a man in a wetsuit was dealing with the shark, one of the largest Hardy had seen here—over six feet long. Its dorsal fin protruded from the water’s surface and its tail fanned the water behind him. But Hardy had pretty well used up his fascination with sharks over the years.

The man who was walking the shark, however, was another matter.

“Ah,” Pico said in greeting. “The cavalry arrives. Diz, Dr. Eric Kensing.”

The man in the tank looked up and nodded. He was still working hard, and nearly grunting with the exertion, step by laborious step. Nevertheless, he was close to the edge of the tank himself, and he nodded. “You’re Hardy?” he asked. “I’d shake hands, but…” Then, more seriously, “Thanks for coming.”

“Hey, when Pico calls. He says you’re in trouble.”

“Not yet, maybe, but…” At that moment, as Hardy and Pico watched, the fish twitched and broke himself free from the man’s grip, and he swore, then turned to go after it.

“Let it go,” Pico snapped.

The man turned back toward the side, but paused for another look behind him. It was only an instant, but in that time the shark had crossed the tank, turned, and was heading back toward him, picking up speed. Pico never took his eyes off the shark and didn’t miss the move. “Get out! Now! Look out!”

Kensing lunged for the side of the pool. Hardy and Pico had him, each by an arm, and hoisted him up, over, and out, just as the shark breached and took a snap at where he’d been.

“Offhand,” Hardy said, “I’m thinking that’s a healthy fish.”

“Hungry, too,” Kensing said. “Maybe he thought Pico was a walrus.”

Hardy nodded, deadpan and thoughtful. “Honest mistake.”

They were all standing at the edge of the tank, watching the shark swimming on its own.

Pico kept his eyes on the water, on the swimming fish. He’d had his hopes raised around the survival of one of his sharks before, and didn’t want to have them dashed again. “You guys need to talk anyway. Why don’t you get out of here?”

The Little Shamrock was less than a quarter mile from the aquarium. After the doctor had gotten into street clothes, they left Pico to his shark, still swimming on his own. Hardy drove the few hundred yards through a rapidly darkening afternoon. Now they had gotten something to drink—Hardy a black and tan and Kensing a plain coffee—and sat kitty-corner in front of the fire on some battered, sunken couches more suited to making out than strategizing legal defense.

“So,” Hardy began, “how’d you get with Pico?”

A shrug, a sip of coffee. “His son is one of my patients. We got to talking about what he did and eventually he told me about his sharks. I thought it sounded like a cool thing to do. He invited me down one night and now, when I really can’t spare the time, I still come when summoned. How about you? I heard you used to volunteer, too. I didn’t think Pico allowed people to quit.”

“I got a special dispensation.” The answer seemed inadequate, so he added, “I got so I couldn’t stand it when they all died.”

A bitter chuckle. “Don’t go into medicine.”

“No,” Hardy agreed. “I figured that one out a long time ago.” He killed a moment sipping his pint. “But rumor has it you need a lawyer now.” For the first time Hardy noticed a pallor under the ruddy complexion, the fatigue in the eyes.