John Lescroart - Dead Irish

“He said he needed me over here.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ten, fifteen minutes ago.”

“Over here? At the rectory?”

“Yes, is something wrong?”

Still in the doorway, Hardy frowned. “I hope not.”

They started back through the house. “Rose is dead, you know,” Hardy said.

Erin touched Hardy’s arm the way she did. They faced each other in the hallway. “Jim said she killed herself too.”

“What do you mean, ‘too’?”

Erin looked down. Hardy picked up her chin with his finger. “Eddie didn’t .”

He could tell it was hard for her to hear it, but she had to know.

“Steven just said the same thing. He said he’d figured out how it happened. He was just talking to Jim about it.”

Hardy felt the blood draining from his face.

“What’s the matter?”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When was he talking to Jim about it?”

Erin had taken his hand, as though to steady him. “Just before I left, just before he asked me to come over, I think.”

Hardy was frozen for a few seconds, letting the coins drop. “Jesus Christ!” He looked behind her. The front door was still closed. “Give me your keys.”

“What?”

“Your keys. Give me your keys!”

Obediently, she opened her purse. Then he had the keys and was running for the door. “Come on, come on!” he said. “Your car. Let’s go!”

THE FRONT door was locked.

He was just about to call out for Steven again, then realized it would be better not to draw more attention to himself. He looked both ways down the street. It was a slow Tuesday, still before lunchtime. There was no one outside on the entire block. And Cavanaugh knew Steven couldn’t get up-so what good would calling him do?

He tried the door again. No, it was locked. Probably deadbolted, too, if he knew Erin.

He went past the Honda again, along the side of the house on the driveway. All the windows were closed. In the backyard he went up onto the deck and tried the sliding glass doors. They, too, were locked, with a sawed-off broom handle wedged into the runner on the floor to make sure the door wouldn’t open.

Cavanaugh looked at his watch, sweating now. Too much time was passing. He had to get inside, and it must not look like forced entry.

Walking off the deck, he rounded the corner and started up to the front again, along the other side of the house where there was just a strip of grass and a fence.

It was so vivid it could not have been a dream, but if it wasn’t a dream, then where was Father Jim? Steven was sure he’d heard him call out from the front door. He’d even called back that he couldn’t move, that he should just come in.

But had he heard him? He hadn’t come.

His eyes were heavy, and he really couldn’t remember if he’d dozed off or not before the bell rang. He knew he’d taken another dose of the pills before Mom had left. His foot didn’t hurt, so they must have already kicked in.

He closed his eyes. Maybe it was like when he thought he’d seen Eddie here in his room the other night. That had seemed so real it wasn’t until the next morning that he realized it couldn’t have happened. Okay, the doorbell had seemed real, and Father Jim’s voice… But it had happened right after the pills, too.

Besides, it made no sense. Mom had just gone to see Father Jim. What would he be doing here?

He had begun to figure it out just as he saw the fingers come around the bottom of the windowsill, open about four inches to let in some air. The hand pushed at the window and it slid up until Father’s arm had straightened-maybe another foot.

He heard his name again, quietly this time.

“Steven?”

Glitsky heard the follow-up call-in on his way to his appointment in the Projects. He was going to meet a steady source named Quicksand Barthelme that Dick Willis would love to get to know. But Glitsky didn’t work for the DEA, and Quicksand was too valuable an ally in the Projects to worry about how he made his money. Quicksand could operate safely forever, as far as Glitsky was concerned. He was small time, was grateful for the umbrella of Glitsky’s favor, and knew everybody. Willis no doubt had a few murderers among his sources, and it probably bothered him about as much as Quicksand’s drug activities bothered Abe.

But today Quicksand didn’t show. It happened. These guys, it wasn’t like you made an appointment with their secretary and did a power lunch. Sometimes-hell, all the time-the street had its own rhythm and you had to go with it.

So Abe was half listening to the squawk box, still furious with himself and Hardy and pissed at Quicksand and the heat when he heard that there was a suicide at St. Elizabeth’s. That decided what he was going to do with the rest of his morning.

One of the squad cars was pulling out as he turned into the driveway. He saw Hardy’s car over by the garage as soon as he passed the rectory. The guy was persistent-he gave him that. He parked in the thinning strip of shade along the side of the garage.

Coming around the building, he saw two priests, neither of them Cavanaugh. One of them was leaning up against a workbench in the garage, silent. The other stood by the gurney, covered by a sheet, under which, presumably, was a body.

“Hi, guys,” Abe said. Giometti and Griffin had drawn the call, he noticed, and somehow knew it wasn’t a coincidence. “Fancy meeting you here.”

They were dismissing the second squad car. The rest of the homicide team had arrived and there wasn’t any use for beat cops at this stage. Abe walked into the relatively cooler shade of the garage and lifted the sheet, surprised to see Rose the housekeeper.

“Bored Abe?” Giometti asked, challenging, coming over.

“Yeah, yeah, I can’t get enough.” Then he explained, “I was here last week on something. You mind?”

Giometti shrugged. “Knock yourself out. No mysteries here, though.”

“You don’t think?”

“ Nada. ”

“You tow Hardy over here with you?”

Griffin heard this as he came up to them. “Here and gone.”

“His car’s still here.”

Giometti smiled. “He’s probably inside, interrogating a suspect.”

Griffin added, “He thinks this was a murder too. Me, I’m leaning toward a gang hit.” Said with a straight face.

Abe went back to the gurney. They had loaded it into the van. He picked up the sheet. “Any sign of struggle?”

Giometti joined him there. “The lady started the car and went to sleep, but as you can see we’re running the usual.”

The photographer had already finished his work, but the print guy was still kneeling in the front seat, brushing.

Giometti, shaking his head, said, “Waste of time. We got nothing.”

Griffin kept playing. “Nothing? How could you forget? She sat on the passenger side.”

Glitsky said, “What?”

Giometti snorted. “Your friend Hardy noticed that she was sitting in the passenger’s seat.”

“Told us to make sure and dust the keys for her prints. Said we wouldn’t find any,” Griffin said.

“Very helpful guy,” Giometti said. “We probably would have forgot, right, Carl?”

“Yeah, probably.”

Glitsky, wondering where Hardy had gone and thinking it might in fact be a little unusual for someone who’d killed herself that way to be sitting in the passenger seat, walked back out into the sun.

He turned around and asked Giometti and Griffin would they mind if he checked out the house. He started across the asphalt.

Hardy could not believe he had forgotten his gun. Erin’s car was closer, and so he’d run for that. It would have only taken him another minute to get to his own car with the.38 in the glove box. He might even have been able to talk one of the cops into going over with them. But he hadn’t thought at all, he was in too much of a hurry, he might not have a minute.