John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

If he’d only left a phone number on Hardy’s machine. Surely there was no danger in that. Then he could answer some of the questions that were fogging Hardy’s consciousness.

What was the truth, for example, about Ron and Bree’s marriage? The separate bedrooms, the infidelity? Ron might be a ‘miracle’ of a father, but he wasn’t the same as a husband. This was not the happy couple they pretended to be. At the very least, Bree was having an affair with Damon Kerry. And she had become pregnant, apparently by him. Although Hardy felt he couldn’t rule out Canetta, or even Pierce.

And if the father was anyone but Ron, this was a motive for murder. For Ron to kill.

Beyond that, if Bree were habitually unfaithful, might that mean… with Ron…

Hardy tried to shut out the thought, but finally it couldn’t be dismissed any longer. Of course it could mean Frannie. Although, finally, today, she had told him no, it hadn’t been like that. Or had she? Like what, exactly? He hadn’t cross-examined her. He hadn’t had the heart.

And why would he be fool enough to believe her in any event?

Freeman’s words from last night’s conversation echoed and picked at him – Hardy and Glitsky believing that Carl Griffin had gone to interview a snitch because he had said so . When in fact that’s not what he’d done. In fact, Griffin had lied.

To his boss. And for a lot less reason than Frannie had.

Nothing but the truth was a noble courtroom concept, but Hardy knew from a lifetime of trials that even there it was systematically abused. And in life it was much worse.

But he stopped himself before going too far down this road. Frannie wasn’t just another random person. She was the mother of his children, the wife he’d promised to love, honor, and respect. And if those three did not include trust, a basic belief not only in her honesty but in who she was, he was lost anyway.

Frannie had told him clearly. She had been attracted to Ron but had remained faithful to him. Ron was a good friend, but that’s all she’d let it be. Hardy really had no choice but to believe her, to take it on faith. She was telling him the truth.

And that was the only truth he could let himself act on. To do less would betray both of them.

Itwas Sunday night and Glitsky hadn’t spent enough time at home this weekend. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to anytime soon, either.

In his job, once in a very great while he called in a favor. Three years before, Glitsky had spoken up in defense of Paul Ghattas on one of the dozens of EEO lawsuits that were forever being filed among and between workers in the Hall of Justice. Ghattas, a lab tech whose first language was Tagalog, had made a comment to one of his female co-workers that she had interpreted as sexual harassment. The two had been discussing the location of a stab wound, and Ghattas had fumbled with language for a moment, then used the word tit, rather than breast.

Glitsky had been in the lab at the time, waiting for results on another case, and had been the only witness, hearing the whole thing, including Ghattas’ abject apology afterward.

The woman had screamed, ‘Don’t you piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining,’ and run out of the room.

Before Ghattas’ comment, the lab setting had been professional and neutral. But the woman had been offended to the point of being unable to continue coming to work for the following ten days. Then she’d filed her suit which, it turned out, had not been her first. She wanted Paul Ghattas – a ten-year veteran and father of four – dismissed. She wanted full pay for days missed. She wanted disability for the six months she estimated it would take her to get over the emotional trauma she’d had to endure.

Glitsky had worked with Ghattas many times. The man’s English was poor, but he was a competent workhorse in the lab. So, realizing even at the time that he was wading into troubled waters, Glitsky had stood up for him at the hearing, where – against all odds in an environment where to be accused was to be guilty – Ghattas was exonerated.

So Paul was happy to accompany Abe to the Hall at seven this Sunday night. Glitsky left him downstairs at the lab, then went up to his office. Checking Damon Kerry’s fingerprints against all the others found at Bree’s apartment was going to take Ghattas some time and Glitsky had a slew of his own work now to move on.

The litany of information that Hardy had recited earlier in the evening had been deeply disturbing, mostly because Glitsky hadn’t known any of it. And as head of homicide, to say nothing of being Hardy’s best friend, he should have. Batavia and Coleman weren’t brain dead by any means, and yet somehow between them they’d missed getting any kind of a toehold in this case.

He was half tempted to arrest Hardy for what he’d withheld from him just on general principles, for not mentioning diddly squat about what he’d found, what he had been doing. Like, he had been working with Canetta. He’d made the connection to Griffin. He’d talked with Valens this morning when neither of Glitsky’s inspectors could locate the campaign manager. Now he had Baxter Thorne, who had possibly been at least the brains behind dumping the MTBE into the Crystal Springs Reservoir and, more relevantly, had killed a man in Glitsky’s jurisdiction in the process.

But for all Hardy did know, Glitsky realized, he had a blind spot, and that was Ron Beaumont. It was a common truth in homicide that the spouse did it, and in spite of all the activity surrounding Bree’s oil interests, Ron still looked pretty good to Glitsky. He had fled the scene, using multiple identities. Judging from the bedrooms in the penthouse, he and Bree hadn’t been intimate recently, and since she was pregnant, this provided a pretty solid motive.

Glitsky hated to give the DA the satisfaction, but he could no longer ignore Ron as a suspect. In fact, from his perspective, the best suspect.

Abruptly, he sat up in his chair, coming to the unpleasant realization that his friend was still holding out on him – otherwise Ron would be on Hardy’s own short list, too. He would have to be. Therefore, Hardy knew something more and he wasn’t telling. He hadn’t told Glitsky even as he had pretended to bare his soul a couple of hours before, when they’d planned to meet again down here when Hardy got his belongings together.

Now Glitsky was in a slow burn, thinking that by God, friend or no friend he should arrest the duplicitous bastard when he got back down here after all. He started punching Hardy’s office number into his desk phone, give him an earful if he was still there, but he heard footsteps out in the hallway and stopped, replacing the receiver.

A minute later, Inspector Leon Timms, the crime scene specialist from Canetta’s murder, was in his doorway. ‘You asked me to put a rush on the ballistics check, Abe. Can you believe it? There’s somebody in at the lab.’

‘Paul Ghattas,’ Abe replied. ‘I dragged him down from his house. Fingerprints.’

‘Fingerprints?’ In spite of their exalted presence in books and movies, Timms knew that in real life, fingerprints were rarely a factor in police work. But he merely shrugged – if the lieutenant wanted to check prints, he was welcome to. ‘He ran the ballistics for me. The guy’s a one-man shop down there.’

This was good to hear about a man whose job he had saved, but Glitsky had his sights elsewhere. ‘So what did he find?’

Timms nodded. ‘Same shooter. Griffin’s gun. For sure.’

When Hardy arrived, he was happy but not surprised to learn that Glitsky’s surmise about Griffin’s gun was correct. He wasn’t as happy when his friend got up, closed the door to his office, and asked him what he knew about Ron Beaumont that he wasn’t telling.