John Lescroart - Dead Irish

He was leaning over in anger. His own face was smooth, as though he hadn’t started shaving yet. His eyes were pale blue, hair light brown. He was impeccably dressed in an Italian suit.

What he was saying was, “It’s beyond me. Absolutely. You think you’re doing the right thing, you’re the nice guy, doing everybody a favor. It’s bullshit, man. What you’re doing is gambling with my future. And don’t reach for the goddamn bottle, please.”

Ging shrank back into his padded chair. “I don’t like you to use that tone of voice to me, Peter.”

“The hell with my tone of voice! Listen to what I’m saying, will you? We get blackballed by the Catholic Church and I am personally screwed. You understand that?”

“Of course, but we’re not going to be.”

Peter slammed the desk. “Yes, we are. Don’t you see that? Times are changed. Not changing, changed. Past tense. You don’t play straight, it ever comes out, you’re dead. And it doesn’t matter to you, you’re already finished. Me? I gave up being a doctor to get this place, continue the clean business of covering people with dirt, and now you put the whole thing on the line for what? For a favor to some asshole owns a bar? Jesus, it kills me.”

The telephone on the desk rang. The older man went to pick it up; his son put his hand on the receiver. “Let the machine get it, would you? It’s after hours.”

He looked down at the hand covering his father’s. “Jesus, Pop.”

The machine clicked. They heard the woman on the recorder, another voice struggling for control, calling for arrangements. It almost didn’t register for Peter anymore. He thought for the hundredth time maybe he’d made a mistake deciding to take over the business. The endless parade of grief still got to his dad. And look what it did to the guy. When he finally died, he’d already be pickled. Either that, or if they went to cremate him he’d go up like an alcohol lamp.

Charles reached for the bottle again, and Peter let him-even grabbed a couple of ice cubes from the refrigerator. Dilute it a little; maybe it would help. Then he sat down.

After the first sip, his father sighed. “What do you want me to do, Pete? Tell the guy, who I happen to know, that there’s nothing I can do? His brother-in-law apparently killed himself, and the Church says he can’t be buried in holy ground. You call that charity?”

“Fuck charity. This is business.” And Peter suddenly knew he couldn’t deal with the business on this level much longer. He had to get his dad out of it; the man didn’t see reality anymore.

“Look, Pop, you tell this guy- What’s his name?”

“McGuire.”

“Right, you tell McGuire there’s a chance it’s not a suicide, you think that’s the end of it?”

“There is a chance it’s not a suicide.”

“You saw the powder burns, the wound, the whole thing. The guy shot himself.”

“Still, there’s a chance he didn’t-”

“So you tell Cavanaugh there’s reasonable doubt…”

“I didn’t tell him that. Father Cavanaugh and I go back a long way. He told me he guaranteed it wasn’t a suicide. The boy was like a son to him. And Jim Cavanaugh and I, we understand each other.”

“And it’s all good old boy, isn’t it? You defraud the Church, Cavanaugh goes along with it, nobody loses, right?”

“I know you don’t agree, but right.”

The son looked at the father, shook his head.

The father lifted his glass and drained it.

Hardy, his shift over, back at home in early dusk, was looking at a picture of himself and Abe Glitsky in uniform. Glitsky’s broad unlined forehead, he decided, was the only part of his face that couldn’t terrify. The rest of it could keep small children awake with nightmares-hatchet nose, overlarge, sunken cheeks, eyes whose whites were perennially red, thin lips with a scar through them upper to lower, the result of a teenage parallel bars accident, although Glitsky told his fellow cops it was an old knife wound.

Abe chewed ice on the telephone. Sometimes he was easier to talk to when you weren’t looking at him. Hardy heard the ice crunching like rocks. Glitsky chewed some more, and Hardy pictured him tipping up a Styrofoam cup and hitting the bottom to loosen the last of the ice. He kept chewing.

Hardy blew again on a cup of espresso at his kitchen table. He waited, thinking Glitsky could make an ice cube last as long as a stick of Juicy Fruit.

“I’d just like to see the pm, check the file, see if I’m missing something,” Hardy said.

Glitsky must have flicked at the near-empty cup. “Yeah, I know what you want.”

“Come on, Abe. I’m not getting paid for this. It all comes down to insurance for the widow. I’d rather have you guys find it a homicide, and that’s what Moses wants me to check into. I have no interest beyond that.”

“You don’t think we’re competent to do that, to find that out? ’cause that’s what it sounds like you’re saying, and that kind of pisses me off.”

Hardy sighed. “Are we a little defensive here in our declining years, or what?”

Abe chewed on some more ice. “You don’t understand what it’s like here lately.”

“Yeah, but I’m not asking for much, either.”

“You’re asking to get in somebody’s face around their investigation. That’s pretty much.”

“Well, then you do it for me.”

Glitsky laughed. “Yeah, that’d work.” Hardy knew that the humor he heard wouldn’t ever get to his eyes. “Do you even know what we’ve got? Why don’t you wait a day or two? If it’s a homicide, we’ll likely decide it’s a homicide.”

“I know that.”

“And don’t brownnose me.”

Hardy had forgotten that he’d never been much good at getting things by Glitsky. He was beginning to remember. “Look, Abe,” he said, “it’s not like I’m a private investigator wanting to go around you guys. I’d just like a little information, that’s all.”

“That’s the line, huh?”

“It’s the line, but it’s also the goddamn truth.”

Glitsky flicked at his Styrofoam-rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat. “ Griffin and I aren’t exactly sleeping together,” he said. “You’ll have to play it very straight.”

“I just want to meet the guy,” Hardy said. “I’ll dazzle him with my Irish charm.”

THE SUN had come out. The morning was beginning to get warm. Hardy took off his sweater before he got to his car. He felt slightly nauseous. He had felt it was his duty to look at the body again.

He’d seen quite a lot of blood in Vietnam before he himself had been hit in the shoulder. As a cop, he’d run across his share. But he was far from hardened to the effects of metal passing through flesh at high speed.

They hadn’t yet dressed it. Hardy had started at the toes and worked up. Eddie had been five-ten, about 160 pounds. He had an old, healed moon-shaped scar about three inches long on his upper right thigh, calluses on the tips of the fingers of his left hand, a fairly new bruise on his left forearm, and a small scratch near his left ear, just under the hole the bullet had made going in.

He drove up Mission Street with the windows open. The radio in his Suzuki wasn’t working, but still Hardy tried to turn it on three times in the thirty blocks between Ging’s Mortuary and his destination. The damage done by the tiny piece of lead kept jumping up behind his eyes, short-circuiting other connections.

The parking lot was between a local office of the Pacific Telephone Company and the Cruz Publishing Company.

The lot was now filled with cars. Hardy had a hard time, for a moment, remembering what it had looked like empty. This was industrial wasteland, without a house around. Railroad tracks, train yards, glass, stone and cement. He parked along the curb, letting the site work itself into his consciousness. The sun was hot now and glared off the side of the Cruz Building.