John Lescroart - Damage

“Well, thank you,” Glitsky said. “Maybe I’ll just knock on a few doors. Would that be all right with you?”

“You go ahead,” she said. “Good luck to you.”

Starting at 201 on the opposite side of the hall, Glitsky worked his way quickly down to 215, then started up Janice Durbin’s side, which faced west over the back parking lot. As he’d been warned, there wasn’t much in the way of information. Six of the offices housed therapists or counselors of one kind or another, and two of those were in session on his first pass, but none of the other four, nor the people in the insurance office in 203, knew Janice any more than the first woman he’d met in the hallway.

It was the same on Janice’s side until he got to 208, a Pilates studio. Glitsky almost gave it a pass, figuring that it would be a room where people just showed up as they would at a gym, willynilly. He didn’t even know if a specific tenant ran the place. In the end, though, being thorough, he knocked.

Even with no discernible makeup and a light sheen from sweating, the woman who opened the door nearly tied his tongue in knots. Clad only in a red leotard, she wore her blond hair shoulder length, held back with a red headband. It showed off the broad, fair forehead over eyes of pure jade. Perhaps in her early forties, she had trace lines at the corners of those distinctive eyes, but otherwise her face might have belonged to a twenty-year-old. “Hi,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Holly.”

“Hello.” Glitsky shook her hand, showed his badge, kept it simple. “I’m Abe Glitsky, with San Francisco homicide. Can you answer a few questions?”

She cast a glance back over her shoulder at the obviously empty studio and shrugged. “Sure. This must be about Janice, right?” And then suddenly her incredible eyes flashed. “That fucker.”

The vehemence surprised Glitsky. “You mean Dr. Durbin?”

“No, no, no.” Hands waving in front of her face. “Of course I don’t mean Janice. I mean that fucker who killed her.”

“So you knew her?”

“Yes. I mean, not that we’d been friends a long time-I just started the studio here two months ago-but she was… I thought we were going to be friends forever, you know how that is. You meet somebody, wham, right?”

“Actually not too often,” Glitsky said.

“No. I know what you mean. Not too darned often.”

“So you felt you were getting to know her well?”

She nodded, now dead somber. “I thought she was starting to be my best friend. Some days she’d get an hour or two between appointments and she’d come down here, and as you can see, it gets a little slow here, too. So we’d just talk.”

“What about?”

“Everything. Kids, staying in shape, getting old, running your own business, books, movies. You name it, we talked about it.”

“Men?”

She cocked her head to one side. “Sure.”

“Not just her husband?”

“Not always, no.” Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, she added, “I guess what you want to know is was she seeing someone else. She was.”

“One of her patients, did she say?”

“No. I mean, yes, she did say. No, not one of her patients.”

“You’re sure?”

“Unless she was lying to me, which she wasn’t.”

“So who was he? Did you ever meet him? Or see him?”

“No.”

“Did she ever mention him by name?”

“No. She really wasn’t comfortable talking about it. It was like she didn’t want it to be happening, but she didn’t know how she could stop. She wasn’t really proud of it.”

“So she wanted it to stop?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, really. She was just mostly worried that she’d get caught. She didn’t want to lose her family life. And her husband. But she was infatuated with the guy, even though she was pretty sure he was a player.”

“A player?”

“You know. Lots of partners. A player.”

“Lots of partners? Where would he get lots of partners?”

The question clearly amused her. “Hello? A straight guy in San Francisco? Finding partners isn’t your problem, trust me. You look a little frustrated.”

Glitsky nodded. “I am. If this guy wasn’t one of her patients, I’ve got basically no place to start looking for him. He could be anywhere.”

“You think he’s the guy who killed her?”

“I think he might have a motive, or given her husband one. Either way, I’d like to find him. Do you know where they hooked up? Some motel, maybe? An apartment?”

“Why?”

“If he used a credit card, we got him. If he paid cash, he had to show an ID and they keep it on file. I’m grasping at straws here.”

After a small silence, she said, “If it’s any help, Janice told me he came by here a few times after hours. Maybe somebody would have seen him then.”

“I’ll be sure to ask,” Glitsky said. And then, berating himself for not getting to any of this much earlier, he thanked Holly and continued on his door-to-door down the hallway. In the end, he’d spoken to a living person in every one of the twenty-two businesses in the building, and except for Holly, no one had known Janice Durbin as other than a professional acquaintance.

Waiting for Michael Durbin to get back to the Novios’ after his day of work, Glitsky sat alone for the moment at the dining room table with a cup of tea that Kathy had brewed for him. Then she appeared in the doorway leading to the kitchen with a platter that held a plate of cookies and a china cup of coffee on a matching saucer. Glitsky watched her place the tray down on the table. Sitting across from him, she picked up her cup and saucer as though afraid that it would shatter.

“How are you holding up?” Glitsky asked her gently.

She gave him a weak smile. “Is it that obvious? Every minute I feel like I’m going to break. She wasn’t only my sister, you know. She was my best friend.”

“Have you thought about talking to somebody?”

“A grief counselor, you mean?” She shook her head. “I’ve had a couple of my other friends recommend that. Maybe I should look into it. Although something tells me that what it’s going to take, mostly, is time. Which right now seems to have stopped moving, so it feels kind of hard to depend on.”

“It can seem like that, I know.”

She lifted her cup, put it back down. “That sounds like experience talking.”

He nodded. “My first wife,” he said. “Cancer.”

“I’m sorry.”

Glitsky shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

“It sounds like it still hurts.”

“There are moments. Mostly, though, you remember the good times.”

“The good times. Sometimes you feel like they’re never going to come back. Like it’s completely impossible.”

“I know.”

“I mean, when I think of how it was even so recently. Here we are, me and Chuck and the girls, sitting here around this table, no more than a month ago. Everybody getting along, everybody laughing and loving one another. And here I am, about to turn forty next week, and Chuck made up this song they were all going to sing at my big old monster birthday party we were going to have. ‘Old, old, really old,’ or something like that, the chorus, you know. ‘Really, really, really old.’ Then the girls each wrote their own verse, just cruel and witty and funny as hell. We were all cracking up. And now I see the girls all just so sad, and me and Chuck in this awful funk.” She stared across at him. “The idea that we could ever have a time like that again, carefree and happy, it just doesn’t seem possible.” Suddenly she straightened up, dabbing at her eyes with her napkin. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t need to hear this.”