John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

‘You mind if I stay behind a few minutes?’ Hardy asked.

‘Sure, no sweat. Just lock up when you leave.’ Glitsky shook his head. ‘Get real, Diz. We’re out of here. We’re not arguing about it, either, OK? Or making one of our clever remarks.’ He let out a long breath. ‘Somebody just shot another cop.’

The two-man arson team was still at his house when Hardy drove up. He parked semi-legally and came up on to where the lawn had been before stopping to get their attention. They were huddled over an area near what had been the front bay window. ‘How you guys doing?’

They both looked over at him with no interest, then held a quiet conference before one of them straightened up, and jumped down on to the porch’s foundation. ‘Your friend said to tell you he went to work. Otherwise, we’re going to be here a while.’

‘You got any idea what a while is?’

A flat glare. ‘Hours, not minutes.’

This was pulling teeth, but Hardy needed to get some information. ‘You finding anything?’ At this, the arson investigator spread his hands in a futile gesture, and Hardy cut him off. ‘You can’t tell me anything, can you? I might have done it, right? Set fire to my own house.’

‘People do it all the time.’

Hardy knew this was true. The man was doing his job, actually protecting Hardy’s interests. ‘OK,’ he managed to say mildly. ‘I was wondering, though, if I could go into the back and get a few things – clothes, toiletries, like that? Check my phone messages.’

In spite of what he’d told Valens, Hardy didn’t think the answering machine in the kitchen had been destroyed. Driving over here, it had occurred to him that it might be instructive to see what the tape held.

But to this inspector, whether or not Hardy had friends on the police force, he was a righteous suspect. He remained all business. ‘No, sir. I’m afraid not. There’s no electricity in any case. I don’t know if the captain made it clear to you, but this house is fire department property until we clear it to you.’

There was nothing to be gained from antagonizing the man, although maintaining his demeanor took a serious coefficient of his resources. He forced a patient smile. ‘No, I understand that. But I’d like to be able to make some plans. Can you give me any estimate how long that will be?’

Maybe Hardy had worn the inspector down, but it seemed for an instant as if there was a tiny thaw. ‘Safest guess will be tomorrow morning sometime.’ He paused. ‘Maybe about the time your reporter friend runs his column.’

No, Hardy realized. It wasn’t a thaw after all. It was a way to tell him that Jeff Elliot had been by, another unwelcome interruption to their task. Jeff had probably bothered them to distraction. ‘If we get done by dark, we’ll get it boarded up for the night. Somebody’ll be here tomorrow to let you back in… if we’re ready.’ It was a dismissal.

There wasn’t anything he could do.

On his private stool, right up by the front window, behind the bar at the Little Shamrock, Moses McGuire was nursing his Sunday Macallan on his private stool. He allowed none of the other bartenders either to drink or to sit, even for an instant, when they were working. His belief was that professional bartenders got paid to stand while they waited on customers – it showed respect. If they wanted to sit, he invited them to come around to the bar side and take a short break at some risk to their job security, but if they were behind the rail, they stood. And on either side of it, during their hours of employ, they were dry.

McGuire himself, though, as the owner, could do any damn thing he wanted. When he and Hardy argued about the unfairness of how he applied his rules, he would explode. ‘I’m a noble publican, not some goddammed wage-slave bartender.’ And since McGuire owned three-quarters of the place, his word was the law.

He’d carefully drawn Hardy a tap Guinness and brought it to the bar after the foam had settled out to a perfect head. Now Hardy was down an inch or two into it. The time was a bit after two and the fog wasn’t going to burn off – not today, maybe not until Christmas. The trees at the edge of Golden Gate Park, no more than a hundred feet away directly across Lincoln Boulevard, were barely visible.

Three other customers quietly took up space in the oldest bar in San Francisco. On a couch in the dark far back, an obviously smitten young couple was possibly engaging in some kind of discreet sex. They had ordered Old Fashioneds – the most frou-frou drink that the purist McGuire allowed at the Shamrock. In the tiny side alcove, a lone, silent mid-thirties dart player with a shaved head and a camouflage jacket was working on his game, drinking Bushmills Irish, Bass Ale, and a raw egg for protein out of a pint glass.

A year before, Moses had picked up some recently released recordings done in the thirties – Stephanie Grappelli on violin and Django Reinhardt on guitar just swinging their brains out with the Quintet of the Hot Club de France – and whenever things were slow as they were today, he’d run them on the juke box.

McGuire twirled his glass around on the condensation ring that had formed on the bar. ‘You’re welcome to come stay with us, you know. The lot of you.’

‘Thanks, Mose, but Erin’s already got the kids. She’s got a bigger place.’

He twirled his glass some more. ‘And when is Frannie out?’

This was treacherous territory. Hardy couldn’t tell Moses that Ron had released Frannie from her promise without revealing that he’d talked to him. And that would, in turn, lead to the minefield of secrets, none of which Hardy could disclose.

And some of which he still, after everything, didn’t know if he believed.

So he sipped Guinness, taking a minute. ‘My bet is that Sharron Pratt lets her go Tuesday morning. She’s taking too much political flack.’

‘Why Tuesday?’

Hardy explained a little about the difference between the judge’s contempt ruling and the grand jury contempt citation. Two different animals with similar names. Fortunately, this seemed to satisfy Moses. But he twirled his glass a few more times and Hardy knew him well enough – he might have bought the latest explanation, but there was more he needed to talk about. ‘So what are you thinking?’ Hardy prompted.

‘How to say it.’

‘Just say it, that’s all.’

Moses drank Scotch, put the glass down, and looked his brother-in-law in the eye. ‘OK. How’s it all turn to shit so fast?’

Hardy found some humor in the felicitous phrase that McGuire had been struggling to conjure. The pickin’s were so slim in the rest of his life that he actually chuckled.

McGuire’s countenance took on a familiar dark tone – the Irish temper had always flared with the slightest friction. ‘It wasn’t a joke.’

Hardy realized he must be on his third Macallan after all, not his second. Well, he thought, it had been stressful couple of days for him, too.

‘I didn’t think it was a joke, Mose. It’s so true I wanted to cry, so I laughed. You hear what I’m saying?’

Moses sipped, nodded, an apology. ‘I mean, one day she’s taking the kids to school and baking cookies, and next day, bam!’ – he slapped the bar with his palm – ‘all of a sudden next day she’s in jail and her house is burned down. How does shit like this happen?’

What could Hardy say? That Frannie had taken a series of little steps, secret steps? That it wasn’t really anything at all like ‘all of a sudden?’

And it wasn’t only Frannie, either. Hardy had taken them, too, the tiny incremental steps away from intimacy. More, he’d felt the shift in the bedrock of their marriage, the first cracks in the faultline. They’d allowed things to change with the pressures of raising the children – the communication eroded, their respective daily lives on different planets.