John Lescroart - The Motive

Glitsky scratched at his cheek. Becker had been up front with him about his and Cuneo's investigation. Although it hadn't been his original plan, he saw no reason now to try and conceal his motive. "Well, as I said, Hanover was a friend of the mayor. She doesn't like the idea that he killed himself, to say nothing of his girlfriend. She asked me to take a look."

Bemused, Becker stood still a moment, shaking his head. Finally: "If that's what you've got to do, I wouldn't want to have your job."

Nodding, Glitsky said, "Sometimes I'm not too sure I want it either."

Dismas Hardy, managing partner of the law firm of Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, had his feet up on his desk. His suit coat hung over the back of his chair. His shoes were off, his tie was undone, the collar of his shirt unbuttoned. He was taking an after-lunch break from a not-very-strenuous day and reading randomly from a book he'd recently purchased, called Schott's Original Miscellany.

Being a fact freak, Hardy considered it one of the most fascinating books he'd come across in recent years, containing as it did all sorts of nonessential but critical information, such as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria), the ten-point Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness (from talc to diamond), the names of the Apostles, and 154 pages

of other very cool stuff. He was somewhat disappointed to see that for some obscure reason it didn't include St. Dismas as the Patron Saint of Thieves and Murderers, but otherwise the diminutive tome was a pure delight, and certainly worthy of his nonbillable time.

He was poring over the Degrees of Freemasonry when the phone buzzed at his elbow. He marked his place, sighed and lifted the receiver, knowing from the blinking line button that it was his receptionist/secretary, Phyllis, the superefficient, loyal, hardworking and absolutely trying human being who viewed her role as gatekeeper to his office as a vocation decreed by God. She'd filled the same position for Hardy's predecessor, David Freeman, and was no more replaceable as a fixture in the Sutter Street law offices than the phones themselves.

"Phyllis," he said. "Did I ask you to hold my calls?"

He loved that he could make her pause. Mostly he did this by answering with a nonlawyerly "Yo," but sometimes, for variety's sake, he'd come at her from another angle. Yahoo, living large.

"Sir?"

"I'm not accusing you. I'm just asking."

"I don't think so."

"Okay, then. What's up?"

"Deputy Chief Glitsky is here to see you."

"In person?"

"Yes, sir."

"Make a note, Phyllis. I need a back door to sneak out of here."

"Yes, sir."

"That was a pleasantry, Phyllis, a bit of a joke. You can send him in."

He mouthed "Yes, sir," as she said it, then hung up smiling. Sometimes it worried him that Phyllis was among the top sources of humor in his life. It seemed to say something truly pathetic about the person he'd become, but he couldn't deny it. Leaving his stockinged feet on the desk where they would appall his friend Abe almost as much as the sight would scandalize Phyllis, he waited for the turn of the knob and Glitsky's appearance.

One step into Hardy's office, Glitsky stopped. His expression grew pained at the socks on the desk. Hardy left his feet where they were and started right in. "I'm glad you came by. We've really got to join the Masons," he said. "You know that?"

Glitsky closed the door behind him. "You're going to wait until I ask you why, aren't you?"

"No." Hardy closed the book. "No, if you don't want to know, that's okay with me. Although I know you pretty well, and it's definitely something you'd be totally into. But I don't push my brilliant ideas. It was just a thought."

Glitsky hesitated another second or two, then sighed audibly. "What are the Masons anyway?"

"A secret organization. George Washington was in it, I think. But if it was that secret, how would anybody know?"

"I was just thinking the same thing."

"See? Great minds."

Glitsky moved over to the wet-bar area and felt the side of the water-heating pot that Hardy kept there. He grabbed his usual mug, picked up a tea bag from an open bowl of them and poured hot water over it. Turning, blowing over the drink, he took in the spacious office. "I should go into some kind of private business. Here you are, the middle of the afternoon, feet up, reading, no work in sight. Your life is far better than mine."

"That's because I'm a better person than you are. But I might point out that you are here, too, in the very same place as me, working about as hard, and drinking my good tea for free on top of it all. Qualitatively, there isn't much between our relative experiences at this particular moment, and one could argue that your life is in some respects as good as mine."

"If one lived to argue." Glitsky got to the armchair in front of Hardy's desk and settled in. "I still want a better office." He blew on the tea again. "Okay," he said, "why do we need to be Masons?"

"Ha!" Hardy's feet flew off the desk as he came forward. "I knew you'd ask."

Glitsky gave him the dead eye. "If I didn't ask, we'd never leave it. So why?"

Hardy opened the book to the place he'd marked. "Because if we stayed at it long enough, you could get to be the Sovereign Grand Inspector General, and I could be either Prince of the Tabernacle or Chevalier of the Brazen Serpent." He paused a moment, frowned. "Either way, though, you'd outrank me, so that couldn't be right."

"How long would all this take?" Glitsky asked.

Hardy nodded ambiguously. "You're right," he said, and closed the book with a flourish. "So what brings your sunny personality here today? What did the mayor want?"

Glitsky brought him up-to-date, keeping the punch line for last. "The original inspecting officer-the one I'm supposed to work with or replace-is Dan Cuneo."

Hardy's expression hardened, his head canted to one side. "So replace him."

"That's not a good idea. He'd see something personal in it."

"He'd be right."

"My point, exactly. Can't replace him."

Hardy drew in a breath, then let it out. "These past couple of years, I kept hoping to hear he'd been busted out of homicide."

"Not happening. If you're a certain type of cop, homicide's a terminal appointment."

"Not for you it wasn't."

"No. But unlike Cuneo, I'm born for greatness." The banter fell flat, though, and Glitsky's face reassumed its natural scowl.

"I don't like him anywhere near either of us," Hardy said after a short silence.

"Do tell. Me? I'm thrilled."

Getting up, crossing to the Sutter Street window,

Hardy pulled the shades apart and looked down through them. "And you've got to work with him?"

"I don't see how I can avoid it."

Hardy kept staring out, down at the street. "You can't say a word, Abe. Not one word."

"Oh really?" A hint of anger, or frustration, breaking through.

"Hey." Hardy, catching the tone, spun around. "You work with a guy every day, you know he suspects you of something-I don't care what it is-you might get so you want to get along, try to make him understand."

"Sure, that's what I'll do. I'll say, 'Uh, Dan, about the Gerson thing…' " Lieutenant Barry Gerson had been Cuneo's boss, and he'd been killed at a shoot-out in the course of trying to arrest one of Hardy's clients. In the aftermath, Cuneo pushed for an investigation into the role that Hardy and Glitsky had played in Gerson's death.

"I'm just saying…"

"I know. That I'll be tempted to reason with him, tell him Gerson was dirty and it was pure self-defense, we had no choice." He shook his head at the absurdity of the idea. "You have my word I won't go there."