John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

Hardy at his heels, Glitsky checked in with his household – letting them know that he was home now, sorry he’d been out most of the day, glad to see everybody was doing fine. Rita looked up from her book and told him she’d heated up some tortilla pie for a snack and it was probably still warm in the oven. Glitsky got Orel’s attention finally, and asked his son how his day had gone. He got a nod, though his boy’s eyes never left the TV ‘OK.’

‘What time did your grandfather go home?’

A shrug. ‘I don’t know.’

‘A little after twelve,’ Rita said. ‘When I got here.’

No one was trying to hide any displeasure about Glitsky’s working on a Sunday after having dumped Orel on his grandfather the day before.

‘So… anything neat happen today? You guys do anything fun?’

Rita just looked at him.

‘Orel?’

The boy shrugged. ‘Not much.’

Glitsky stood a moment longer in the doorway, then sighed heavily and headed back down the hallway. ‘So glad I asked,’ he muttered.

It was only a few steps to the kitchen, where they closed the door behind them against the competing sounds. Glitsky pulled around a chair and straddled it backwards. ‘They think I want to be gone working all weekend? They think going to murder scenes is my idea of a good time?’

Hardy let him stew, since there was no answer anyway. Sometimes people had to work – a bitch, but there it was. His kids hadn’t understood that he couldn’t go trick or treating last night. Now it was Abe’s turn to deal with it.

He grabbed a kitchen towel, opened the oven, and pulled out the flat pan that held the remains of the pie. Hardy grabbed plates from a cupboard, put them down on the table, and started serving himself.

‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is how they can sit there and read and study and listen to music and watch TV all at once. I can’t think with all that other noise going on.’

Glitsky turned his chair around the normal way, and pulled the pan over. ‘That’s because you’re over forty. Nowadays they teach that stuff in school. Multi-tasking. Makes you a better person, more productive.’ He spooned out some food on to his plate and pushed it around a little. ‘It’s just one of the reasons the world is so much better now than it was when we were kids.’ He forked a bite and popped it. ‘So. You want to just start or would you prefer that I ask questions?’

Dark slammed down like a trap door.

An hour later, Hardy was in the tramped-down mud behind his house. Out here closer to the ocean, a fine drizzle had started to condense out of the fog. In the brisk, chill wind, he was impressed by how much the moisture added to the already substantial pleasures of the evening.

Up the backyard stairway, still outside, he turned his key in the back door and, somewhat to his surprise, it opened. He fully expected that the fire department’s security team would have provided their own locks for the various entrances, but though they’d tightly boarded up the front and posted the property with ‘No Trespassing’ signs, that seemed to be the extent of it.

So he was inside. From the lower shelf on his workbench, he grabbed a flashlight and passed on into his kitchen. He didn’t need the flashlight yet – the distances and angles were all second nature. He checked around – there was no dial tone on the wall telephone, no light in the refrigerator when he pulled it open. The neatly folded, heavy brown-paper shopping bags were where they always were, in the drawer at the bottom of the pantry. He grabbed one off the top.

In his bedroom, he risked a short beam. His tropical fish – seventeen of them, a collection that he’d nurtured through various permutations over twenty years – were all belly up on the surface of his aquarium.

A muscle worked in his jaw. He turned off the flashlight and crossed the room. The answering machine was on a small reading table. He unplugged it from the wall, disconnected the telephone jack, and placed it in the bottom of the paper bag on a corner of the bed. Next was his dresser – he threw in underwear and a couple of sweaters on top of the answering machine. In his closet, he gathered up a heavy jacket, a business suit, and some shirts, all of them smelling of smoke. A complete change of clothes for his wife, too. For when he got her out.

Something in him wished he didn’t need to do it, but he knew he had to. Leaving everything on the bed, he walked back up through the kitchen into the burnt-out front of the house and stood in the middle of what used to be his dining room.

He’d once represented a plaintiff who had suffered severe burns in an industrial accident. He remembered preparing the expert he was going to put on, who’d defined the various degrees of burn – first, a sunburn; second, a blister; or the worst, third-degree burns, causing irreparable loss of skin and terrible disfigurement. Any serious percentage of third-degree burns over the body was most often fatal.

But what he felt now seemed even worse – a fourth-degree burn to the core of him, one that charred the edges of his soul.

After a time he moved again – back through the kitchen, to the bedroom for the things he’d left there. He picked up the bag by its paper handles, the clothes by their hangers. At his workbench, he carefully replaced the flashlight, then let himself back out into the awful, awful night.

Hardy left his bag of clothes in the car, but brought the answering machine up to his office, where he plugged it in and found that Al Valens was, at least, not lying all the time. He was the first message – just what he’d said.

The second one stunned him.

No name, but immediately recognizable. ‘I’m sorry to have moved out of the hotel. I hope I haven’t caused you too much inconvenience.’

Hardy almost laughed out loud – not too much inconvenience indeed.

‘The only answer is that I’ve got to be very cautious. I know you will understand. If you could get to me so easily, so could the police. They might have been following you the next time you came down. I don’t know. The point is, I felt like I had to relocate. But I wanted you to know I’m still near by and appreciate what you’re doing, but very nervous about you coming to me. I hope you’re having some luck. Thanks.’

‘Sure, no problem,’ Hardy said, then punched at the answering machine’s button, sat back in his chair and tried to gather some thoughts.

But it was all a jumble. Just today his house had been burned, Canetta had been killed. He’d been running since first light and had one day left to discover any useful truth. He glanced up at his dart board on the wall around his desk. He didn’t remember throwing them, but his three custom-made darts were stuck haphazardly around the board.

He forced himself up, around the desk, and flicked on the bright room overheads. The darts were his worry beads, and he pulled them from the board, walked back to the tape line he’d marked on the floor at eight feet, turned and threw the first one. Triple twenty – a good start.

He threw the second dart, then the third. Walked to the board, pulled them down, and returned to his mark.

If Ron hadn’t left town, what did that mean?

The kind reading was to take him at his word. He was cautious, nervous, paranoid, all of these things certainly understandable. He wanted to be near by in case – as did not appear very likely now – Hardy succeeded in exposing Bree’s killer. If that happened, he and his children could return to their lives. And from what had already happened to the other principles in this drama, Ron was right to be worried.

But as Hardy threw his darts, a more sinister interpretation kept wanting to surface, and he had a difficult time keeping it down. Ron was still near by. Close enough to set fire to Hardy’s house. Close enough to kill Canetta.