John Lescroart - Dead Irish

She hung her head and turned around to face the window again.

Hardy stood up. “I won’t tell Moses,” he said to her back. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t do anything too soon, about the pregnancy, about anything, okay? Let things settle a little.”

She turned around. “I think I know now how you got the way you are.”

At the door, she managed a last half-smile. Hardy thought of something. Awkwardly, he pulled his wallet from his back pocket and looked through it. “I know this might seem a little weird, but…”

Good. He still had a couple of cards he’d had made up for his dart playing-he thought they gave him a little psychological advantage when he passed them out at tournaments. Like, Wo! This guy’s serious.

He gave one of them to Frannie. They were pale blue embossed with a gold dart. “If you need anything at all, even just to talk, call me, okay? And if you remember anything else, the smallest thing…”

“Okay.”

He wanted to hug her again, somehow ease things, but it would be useless. Nothing was going to ease things for Frannie for a very long time.

He left her standing on the sidewalk, the sun behind her, staring down at the shimmering city.

Down the block, some kids were playing on the street. It seemed odd to Hardy that anybody could be laughing in the whole world, but they were. Laughing and laughing. Life was a ball.

Well, there were a lot of motives, he thought. Enough to keep him thinking for a couple of days. Eddie wouldn’t have been the first man to be driven to despair by the thought of fatherhood, especially as he was preparing for three years of poverty and intellectual struggle. The business he ran was going bust-maybe he took that pretty seriously, too. It was possible, though Hardy hated to admit it, that he was having a love affair that had gone bad. Hardy guessed the police would be checking into that, as well as Frannie’s whereabouts that night.

He remembered Cruz’s lie about not having known Ed. But the relationship there was so obvious-the parking lot and all-that the cops would be all over Cruz. How far they pushed things, he figured, would be a function of Griffin ’s gut feelings. If he smelled a murder, he’d dig in. If not, everything to do with Cruz and Frannie and Army would be essentially irrelevant.

Well, what Griffin did was out of Hardy’s hands.

He came over Twin Peaks, down Stanyan, then through the Park out to 22nd. There was no sign of afternoon fog, and it gave his neighborhood an entirely different feel. People were outside playing Frisbee on the grass in the park, couples walked the streets hand in hand. The heat had let up somewhat, but it was still balmy.

He parked on the street in front of his house. He had to force the front door open again with his shoulder. This time, though, he walked directly down the hall to the kitchen, through it to the tool room, and pulled one of his planes off the wall.

In five minutes, he had taken the door off its hinges and was sitting on the front porch, planing. A stray cat came and sunned itself at his feet. Occasionally it would swat at one of the shavings.

When the door was rehung, Hardy changed the light in the hall, then went back to his study. He owned three guns-a 9-millimeter automatic, a.22 target pistol, and a regulation.38 Special that he’d used when he’d started in the police department. They were all in the lower drawer of the filing cabinet he’d made himself using no nails.

Eddie had been shot with a.38 revolver, so Hardy grabbed that. Double-checking to make sure it was unloaded, he clicked off a few rounds to make triple sure, then went into the living room and sat in his chair by the window.

The evening sun striped the room through the open bunds. Hardy put the gun on the reading table at his side, picked up a pipe and lit it. After a few puffs, he lifted the gun and aimed it at a few targets around the room. He passed the gun back from hand to hand, feeling the heft of it, checking its action.

He then aimed it point-blank at his head from several angles, using both hands. Finally, holding the gun in his right hand against his right temple, he closed his eyes, held his breath and squeezed the trigger, breathing out after the empty click.

He leaned back in the chair, still holding the gun in his right hand. Hardy was left-handed. Eddie was right-handed. The bullet had entered the left side of his head. So unless he picked it up wrong-handed, or somehow… No, it was ludicrous. “No way,” he said, “absolutely no way.”

THE TOWN of Colma is tucked into a pocket behind Daly City and Brisbane, its corpses far outnumbering its citizens. It was normally shrouded in fog, which seemed appropriate, but this day, for Eddie’s funeral, it basked in sunlight, bright and warm.

The Mass had been scheduled for ten, so Hardy timed his arrival at the cemetery for quarter to eleven, but no one else had made it yet.

Another group of mourners were gathered in a knot out over across the sloping lawn. A brace of eucalyptus at the front gate provided a feeble shade and a distinctive scent. Not at all deathlike. The sky was purplish blue. A warm breeze ruffled the high leaves.

Another hearse and its party appeared down the road, and Hardy, sitting on the fender of his Suzuki, waiched the line approach. He put his hands in his pockets and walked out to the street. McGuire’s pickup was visible midway down the line of cars.

It was a substantial group, which he had expected. Eddie Cochran, of course, had been well liked.

Hardy got into his car, waited, then pulled in behind McGuire. They went quite a ways back. Here the eucalyptus grew a bit thicker. Under the trees it was cool and pleasant. Picnic weather.

Father James Cavanaugh leaned down and glanced casually at his reflection in the car window. With his hair, still all black, flopping Kennedy-like over an unlined forehead and piercing gray-blue eyes, he was uncomfortably aware that he could be a walking advertisement for the glory of the priesthood. His body was trim, his movements graceful. The cleft in his chin was a constant temptation to vanity.

It was a glance, that’s all. He didn’t study himself, make any corrections to the look. He was, he knew, unworthy-of his gifts as well as his role, especially here, today.

And now here came Erin, Eddie’s mother. And again, the temptations, the haunting realization of his sinfulness. What a beauty she was.

And so strong. In spite of losing her eldest son, she seemed not to need his support, though as she stepped into his arms and he held her, he felt for a moment the pent-up grief as she sighed once deeply into the shoulder of his cassock.

Her hand lifted to his face. “Are you all right, James?”

He nodded. “How’s Big Ed?”

“He didn’t sleep much last night. I can’t say any of us did.”

Unbidden again, the thought came. What if we had married? What if, when they’d both been eighteen, he’d pushed just a little harder? He had never met anyone else with her joy in life, her sense of balance, her wisdom, her brain. And, as if that weren’t enough, even now, after four children, her body was rich, the perfect combination of curve and plane, of softness and tone. Her face was still smooth as a girl’s, the skin cream white. A touch of light coral lipstick highlighted the bow-shaped, sensuous mouth.

“You’re all right, though?” he asked gently.

She stared up at him, her eyes going dull. “I don’t think I’ll ever be all right again.”

She turned, planning to go join her husband.

But she couldn’t go to the grave just yet. She knew she should walk with Big Ed, be there for him, but the strength simply wasn’t there. Her husband was walking with Jodie, trying to comfort her. God, this was impossibly hard.