John Lescroart - Dead Irish

Arturo Cruz stopped dictating and dismissed his secretary, then gave all his attention to the two men six floors below him in the parking lot. Immediately he knew it had been a mistake to send Jeffrey to get rid of the cop-it must be another cop. Jeffrey was too young, inexperienced. Loyal as a dog, a body to die for, but not by any stretch a jack-of-all-trades.

Jeffrey was having a conversation with the man, showing him around the long, narrow lot that was now filled with the cars of Cruz’s employees.

His publication was a newspaper called La Hora , which catered to the large Latino population of San Francisco. It was an intensely competitive market, and to make it you had to do things that maybe when you started out would have bothered you.

Now, the point was, you’d done them, and it wasn’t good luck to have too many policemen making themselves at home in your parking lot. The other night, then yesterday, had been bad enough.

Cruz turned from the window and decided to go down himself to see what was what.

The back of the lot was bounded by a cyclone fence eight feet high, but entrance by the front was wide open. The canal, now at medium tide, ran parallel to the back fence perhaps thirty feet from the buildings. Between the fence and the canal was a no-man’s-land of shrubbery and debris.

Hardy leaned against the fence, at the end of the ten-foot-wide corridor between the last row of cars and the building, squinting. He had brought his old badge-illegal but helpful-and was making what he thought was a little progress with a boy named Jeffrey.

Jeffrey had already admitted that he’d known Ed Cochran “just to talk to.” He had no doubt-and Hardy briefly wondered why-Eddie had killed himself. What stumped Jeffrey was why he had gotten out of his car with a loaded gun and walked forty or fifty feet to almost lean against the building and shoot himself. It was a point Hardy hadn’t considered. Hardy looked around, thinking for a fact it couldn’t have been for the view.

“Everything under control, Jeffrey?”

Hardy looked into the glare where the voice had come from. “You must be Mr. Cruz,” he said. “Sorry to keep having to inconvenience you, but there’s always this kind of thing in a violent death.” He kept talking. “Jeffrey was just showing me where the body was found. Pretty bad, was it?”

Cruz cocked his head, hesitating. He wasn’t older than thirty-five, and he radiated both authority and good health. Black, perfectly styled hair capped a face with a slightly Arabic cast. But his eyes, or perhaps his contact lenses, were light hazel and his skin, though tan, was fair. His mouth turned in disgust. “It was pretty bad,” he said.

Hardy smiled. “They probably covered this yesterday, but you know bureaucracies.”

Cruz, understanding, nodded to Hardy. He dismissed Jeffrey with a look. “Anything to help,” he said, though Hardy thought he appeared nervous.

“Jeffrey said it was near here, the body. But there’s no sign of it now at all.”

“It was right here,” he said. “They had it cleaned up by the time we got to work the next morning.”

“Was anyone still in the building?” Cruz was scrutinizing Hardy, his expression still wary, but he answered quickly enough. “No, I don’t believe so. We don’t encourage overtime. I know the lot was empty, except for my car, when I went home.”

“And when was that?”

“I don’t know for sure. I told the other inspector yesterday- maybe eight or eight-thirty. It was still light out.” At Hardy’s questioning glance, he volunteered: “I was the last one to leave. I always am. Bosses’ hours.”

Hardy grabbed at another straw. “Any chance that someone who didn’t drive to work was in the building?”

Cruz waited, as though he expected Hardy to say more. “Slim, I would say. Gossip being what it is, I imagine it would have gotten around by now. Still, if it will help, I’ll be glad to circulate a memo.”

Hardy had noticed that the corner of the cyclone mesh fence had a gaping hole in it. “Is this new?”

Again there was that pause. “No, we’ve been meaning to fix it for months. I assume some kids did it to get to the canal. Saves going the long way.”

Hardy dutifully noted on his pad, thinking, What kids?

The gravel and asphalt had been recently and carefully raked, obliterating any possible sign of struggle. Hardy walked to the edge of the building and peered along its mirrored surface. He squatted for a different angle, then walked along the length of the building, running his palm along the glass, to the side door. He turned to Cruz. “Well, we’ll try not to bother you again.”

Cruz’s first smile revealed a perfect set of teeth, too perfect to be real. He held out his hand. “If I can be of any more help…”

Hardy asked, “Did you, by any chance, know Ed?”

The pause, when it ended, was clipped. “Who?”

“Ed Cochran, the guy who died.”

“No,” Cruz said now without missing a beat. “No, I’m afraid not. Should I have?”

At his car, Hardy looked back and saw that Cruz had returned to the hole in the fence and was standing, hands in his pocket, shaking his head from side to side.

Hardy hadn’t gone to the Cruz building for any other reason than to see the site in daylight, and within a couple of minutes had found himself talking to the president of the company. No wonder his questions, he thought, had been so random.

At Blanche’s, a rickety canal-side café and art gallery, the Campari umbrella offered shade from the sun but couldn’t do much about the glare coming up off the canal. Hardy sipped at a club soda, not bothering to turn away from the canal’s glare, and thought about this guy Cruz’s obsessive concern over his parking lot and his obvious lie about not knowing Ed Cochran.

Hardy wiped the sweat and squinted into the city’s early-afternoon haze. A small breeze carried on it the smell of roasting coffee and burning engine oil, and Hardy wondered what the fuck he was doing.

Carl Griffin stood by the one window that afforded a view of the building across the way and, four flights down, of the alley that ran between the parking lot and Bryant. Yesterday, he and Giometti had dealt some more with the wife and the kid’s family, then Cruz, then driven down to Army Distributing, which looked like it was close to going out of business.

They didn’t have a locked-up reason for Cochran to have killed himself, but neither did anything much indicate a homicide. There had been two empty chambers in the gun, but he’d encountered that before-one shot where you jerk the gun away just as you fire before you get up the guts to go through with it the next time.

It was a drag-a young guy acing himself-especially dealing with the relatives. But it happened a lot. More often younger guys than anybody else.

He pushed some papers off to one side of his desk. Where the hell was Giometti now? He was hungry. He tried, but wasn’t having much luck getting himself motivated to think about this guy Cochran. What difference did it make? He could solve the Murder of the Century and all he’d get for it would be a “Good job, Carl. Want to do another one?”

He decided to fuck waiting on Giometti and go downstairs and have a hero sandwich. He grabbed for his windbreaker, which he wouldn’t need, out of habit, just as his phone rang. He picked it up.

“Carl,” Joe Frazelli said, “I got a friend of Glitsky’s here, got some questions about the Cochran thing. You got a minute for him?”

That’s what he needed, he thought. He needed to help out a friend of Glitsky’s on one of his cases. “I was just going down to get a sandwich.”

“Thanks, I’ll send him over,” Frazelli said, hanging up.