John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

Moses stopped walking, folded his arms, and scowled. He loved his sister, but between his work as owner of the Little Shamrock bar and his family, they didn’t spend a lot of time sharing special moments.

Hardy’s eyes went to Erin. She shifted where she sat and looked somewhere off into the middle distance. ‘Erin?’ he prompted her. ‘What?’

She came back to him. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s anything really. She never mentioned anybody by name.’ She hesitated and Hardy forced himself to wait until she figured out how she was going to say it. ‘From the way she talked, I assumed it was another woman, one of the mothers from Merryvale, but it could have been part of this.’

‘What?’

Erin sighed, hating to betray her own confidences, if that’s what this turned out to be. ‘This is all nebulous, but one of her friends – it might not have been this Ron or Bree – evidently had had a marriage go bad a long time ago, years. Now they had a new life here and suddenly this person was afraid the old spouse was going to show up and start causing problems.’

‘What kind of problems?’

Erin shifted again, and picked at some thread on her bathrobe for a few seconds. ‘Custody problems, I think.’

‘But how could that be? Divorces don’t get final until all the custody issues are settled. How did this come up, anyway? If this is her giant secret, I don’t know why-’

‘I didn’t say it was, Dismas. I don’t know if it had anything to do with this. That’s about as far as it went anyway, then suddenly she didn’t want to talk about it, maybe as though she remembered she couldn’t.’

‘That could be it,’ Moses said.

Hardy wasn’t so sure, but at this point he’d take anything.

‘How did the whole thing come up in the first place?’

Erin shook her head, as though she were unsure herself. ‘We were just sitting watching Rebecca and Vincent in the backyard here – it couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks ago. They were having one of their great afternoons, just playing and laughing and being wonderful.

‘Anyway, suddenly, really out of the blue, Frannie said she couldn’t imagine maintaining any kind of normal life if she thought someone were going to try to take away her kids. I told her she didn’t have to worry – why was she thinking about that? So she started to say something about this friend of hers, just what I’ve told you, not anything really. She didn’t mention a name, but now tonight when you asked, it occurred to me it could be this Ron.’

Moses piped in. ‘It might explain why he ran.’

Hardy was desperate for answers, but he didn’t think this was one of them. ‘We don’t know that he did run, Mose. He might be staying at Grandma’s house for all we know.’

‘Well, how can we find that out?’

Hardy was done in. ‘I’m working on that,’ he said.

On his best day, David Freeman would never qualify as debonair and charming, and this wasn’t close to his best day. He sat now in the pre-dawn at his ancient kitchen table which was laden with yellow legal pads, pencils, wads of Kleenex, open and closed lawbooks, and a dozen or more unwashed (perhaps from the look of them never washed) coffee mugs. He wore the frayed remains of a maroon bathrobe that had been new during the Nixon years. Gray chest hairs peeked out the top of a similarly graying T-shirt. Of course he hadn’t shaved – Hardy had buzzed him awake only five minutes before. His jowls hung, his hair rioted, and for good measure he was chewing the stub of last night’s cigar.

‘You know, David, if the law business ever fades out on you, I think you could go into the movies, become a leading man, maybe marry Julia Roberts-’

‘Who?’

Hardy shook his head. ‘Never mind.’ If it didn’t have to do with the law, Freeman probably didn’t know about it and certainly wasn’t interested.

And Hardy wasn’t much in the mood for witty banter himself. He’d slept less than three hours before rolling out of his bed, which last night had been his front-room couch. He’d given his bed to Ed and Erin – and God bless Erin. She was taking care of the kids, getting them to school, covering all those essential bases. This was a great relief even though the situation filled him with guilt.

But Hardy couldn’t waste energy thinking about the time he wasn’t spending with his children. Frannie was still in jail. ‘So I thought you’d talk to Braun.’

Freeman’s lugubrious face didn’t offer any solace. ‘It’s always a pleasure to chew the fat with Marian, Diz, but if you think she’s going to let anybody out of jail on my personal say-so, you’ve got our relationship wrong. How did your sweet wife get herself in so deep?’

Hardy outlined it briefly. David shifted the cigar butt to the other side of his mouth. Hardy started to say something, ready to stand up for Frannie’s integrity, to explain away her insult to Marian Braun, but the old man held up his hand. ‘It doesn’t matter what she did, Diz, or why. You ought to know that by now. Just wait. Let me think a minute.’

Freeman was justly famous in San Francisco as much for his courtroom theatrics as for his knowledge of the law. The point was that he got results in an extraordinary number of cases and he didn’t care how. As a defense attorney, his legal mandate was to provide the best defense the law allowed, and whether that included arguing some arcane legal point or standing on his head and spitting wooden nickels, that’s what he’d do. He was damn proud of the fact that he had no pride.

And now he was thinking strategy. Frannie might not be his client, yet, but he’d gotten lots of folks out from behind bars in his time, and at base that’s really what Hardy was asking him to help with.

‘It seems to me that we’ve got two separate contempt charges – the secret, then getting smart with the judge. Am I right?’

Hardy nodded.

‘OK.’ Freeman pondered. ‘I don’t think we’ve got a habeas on the secret. Randall’s got every right to throw her in jail if she won’t spill it. Talk to Susan McDougal.’ Hardy thought it was typical of Freeman to show no interest in Ron Beaumont’s secret. ‘But if she’d apologize to Marian, say maybe they were both having a bad day – would she go there?’

Hardy wasn’t sure – a lot of things involving Frannie were in doubt lately – and he said so.

‘Well, if she would that might get us to first base. Then maybe we hit Randall, or Pratt, but that’ll be a tough nut, too.’

‘Glitsky’s already working on that.’

Freeman shook his head. ‘You think a police lieutenant is going to persuade Randall to let somebody out of jail? A lieutenant, I might add, who somehow got himself out of the loop on this particular homicide, and didn’t even know the grand jury had convened over it? I think you’re whistlin’ Dixie. Obviously something’s going on here between the DA and the police. Glitsky’s not the way. Randall will stonewall him.‘

‘How do you know? You know Randall?’

‘I caught a couple of his closing arguments for fun. He’s a hell of a trial lawyer, but I don’t know what he’s made of inside. I can’t imagine jailing an otherwise good citizen over this unless he knows it’s the key to a murder conviction. It wouldn’t be trivial. It would help to know if he’s got political ambitions.’

‘Why’s that?’

Freeman regarded Hardy as though he were a slow five-year-old. ‘If he is, we use the media. Call a press conference and make him look like an unreasonable, detestable, miserable son of a bitch keeping a good mother from her loving family. But there’s a flaw with that, too.’

‘Which is?’