John Lescroart - Dead Irish

Eddie Cochran and Jane Fowler were playing tag around in his mind.

If someone had told him he would make love to his ex-wife ever again in his lifetime, he would have bet the ranch against it.

So here he is last night, wandering this house from office at the back to living room up front, wondering how it could have happened. And at how he felt now.

That, he supposed, was the thing. How can someone who he’d been with so intimately seem like an entirely différent person? Had she changed that much? Had he? Or had they both just forgotten?

They’d met at a party her father had thrown for her graduation from Columbia, to celebrate her return to San Francisco. Hardy had been hired for the night as a rent-a-cop, moonlighting, finishing out his last few months on the force before starting law school.

There had been some good years, he admitted. Diz in law school, thinking he was coasting after Vietnam and police work, married to the beautiful daughter of a judge.

Yes, he remembered, thank you. The memories had kept him up until dawn, which was why, when he’d finally slept, it had been until noon.

Now sitting at the kitchen table, sipping espresso, when the telephone on the kitchen wall rang, he bolted up, knocking over his coffee cup. He hoped it was Jane, forgetting that his number was unlisted and he had, intentionally, not given it to her.

“I don’t know,” Glitsky was saying. “The more I think about it, the more it bothers me.”

“It bothered me the first time.”

“That’s ’cause you’re a genius, Diz. Me, I’m just a street cop.”

“So you are looking into it?” The pause was a little too long. “Hey, Abe. Yo!”

“Yeah, I’m here.” Glitsky let out a long breath. “I had a talk with Griffin this morning.”

“A rare pleasure.”

“All too.”

“And what did the talk encompass?”

Hardy could imagine Glitsky’s face, angles sharpened by intensity. “I don’t know, Diz. The more I think about it, the harder time I have with it. It’s like I’m being set up.”

“For what?”

“Remember the politics we talked about?”

“Is Griffin part of that?”

“We’re both up for lieutenant.” As though that might mean something to Hardy.

“So?”

“So it’s Griffin’s case, no matter how I feel about it.”

“But he’s wrong.”

“He’s not necessarily wrong. You don’t get to homicide being wrong a lot.”

Hardy waited.

“Maybe he wants me to make a wave, then wipe out on it.”

Hardy’s kitchen window faced across the Avenues in the direction of downtown. The top of the Pyramid and a couple of other skyscrapers floated over Pacific Heights like mirages, shimmering silver against the deep-blue sky. “So why are you calling me?” he finally asked.

“You got something at stake here. I don’t.”

“I got zip,” Hardy said. “This is mostly a favor I’m doing for Moses.” Even as he said it, it didn’t ring very true.

“Okay, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to get officially involved, be wrong, and look like a horse’s ass.”

Hardy played reasonable. “Abe, don’t you think the whole might of the force would have a better chance of finding something than me by myself?”

Glitsky snorted. “I’m a professional investigator. I’ll be around to bounce things off.”

“Okay.” Hardy took a breath. “How ”bout this-I found out why Cruz might have lied.“

He ran it down, though it, too, seemed somehow flimsier in the daylight. Glitsky evidently shared that feeling. “People lie, especially to cops. You know that. Doesn’t mean they kill.”

“I never said it did.”

Glitsky sighed again, loudly into Hardy’s ear. “You know Griffin’s report wasn’t completely worthless, don’t you?”

Hardy waited.

“I mean, we ran paraffin and Cochran did fire the gun. There weren’t anybody else’s latents on the weapon. No witnesses saw anybody else leave the area.”

“Yeah, he aced himself. I guess I’ll quit-”

“Hardy…”

“Motive, Glitz. I’ve got this old-fashioned idea that people don’t just yawn after dinner, get up and blow their brains out without some reason.”

“But in a week you haven’t found one?”

“Four days.”

“Okay.”

“Okay yourself.”

After he hung up he stared for another minute out the window. His job was simple. He didn’t have to find who’d killed Ed. He only had to come up with enough evidence to have the coroner conclude that there’d been a homicide-by person or persons unknown would be fine for his purposes.

He reached into his pocket, took a piece of yellow paper from his wallet and dialed again. No answer at Frannie’s. What he was lacking was a sense of the sequence of events. He wondered what time Ed and Frannie had finished dinner.

Glitsky’s call wasn’t any kind of help, but it made him feel better, as though he wasn’t in so much of a vacuum. Through Abe, he could (maybe) get his hands on lots of information if he could come up with the right questions. Just now, though, he didn’t have them.

His date with Jane was tomorrow night. He supposed that after most of a decade he ought to be able to wait another day to see her. So he went back to his office, sat at his desk, and started trying to figure out some areas where Glitsky might be able to help him. He then called the friend of Jane’s father-Matthew R. Brody, III, it turned out-and was told he could have an appointment on Monday morning.

He tried Arturo Cruz at his office and learned that the publisher had taken an early, and what was expected to be extended, lunch.

He listened to twelve rings at Army Distributing before deciding that Linda Polk probably wasn’t at her desk, and if she was, she was staring at the ringing thing there, either thinking it was really groovy or wondering what would make it stop.

Well, he thought, that killed fifteen minutes.

It was one-thirty. The Shamrock opened in a half hour. Maybe Moses and he could while away another few hours, so long as he was careful to omit any mention of Jane. The Mose had spent many hours reconciling Hardy to having put Jane out of his life. He might have a hard time accepting putting her back in.

“Well, wait, he’s here right now.”

Moses handed him the telephone and returned to preparing the bar for Friday night. He pulled the backup bottles from the cardboard boxes on the floor, humming off-key as he picked up the near-empties, dusted the shelf, and put the full new bottles behind him.

Hardy was the only customer and wasn’t yet halfway through his first Guinness in what seemed like a month. Although nobody knew for a fact that he was here, anyone who knew him at all knew they had a decent chance of finding him at the bar. He took the phone, spoke for a couple of minutes, and hung up.

Moses glanced over at him. “Getting born again doesn’t really make you younger, I don’t care what they say.”

“Just ’cause he’s a priest doesn’t mean he’s not a human being,” Hardy answered.

Cavanaugh drank Irish whiskey, but by the time he’d finished his first one, the bar had gotten crowded. Hardy suggested a walk, maybe through the park across the street.

“While we’re talking about reversing roles,” Hardy said, “you ought to be playing detective. How’d you locate me at the Shamrock?”

“I called Erin and she asked Frannie, who gave me your number at home, and then when you weren’t there she said to try calling her brother, that he might know where you’d gone. It was just luck you were there right then.”

“If you believe in luck.”

“Luck, faith, all those intangibles. They’re my stock in trade, Dismas.”

But something else struck Hardy. “How’d Erin get in touch with Frannie?”