John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

In his office, though, Glitsky did find a three-year-old phone book and it had seven M. Dempseys listed. The first one had the same number Hardy had written down from Letitia and he took that as a good sign.

He was copying and Glitsky was talking, shuffling through a pile of paper from his in-box. ‘So if Kerry ever called the mayor as he said he would, I haven’t heard about it, although as you’ve noticed, I haven’t exactly been waiting by the phone.’

Hardy looked up. ‘He’s not going to call the mayor. That would only raise the profile around him. He just wants this – and by “this” I mean “you” – to go away.’

‘You think I gave him the impression last night that I was going away? That he scared me off?’

‘If you did, it was real subtle. What?’

Glitsky had stopped at a faxed page. He tsked a couple of times. ‘Mr Kerry, Mr Kerry.’ He held the page out to Hardy.

‘AT &T Wireless for the morning of 29 September. Here’s a conversation beginning at seven ten a.m., duration twenty-two minutes. Somebody called him.’

‘The day he slept in?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘Maybe he only meant he slept in until seven and we just assumed he meant it was later.’

‘That’s probably it,’ Glitsky replied sarcastically. He was shoving paper around on his desk again. ‘You got Bree’s number anywhere on you?’

As it happened, Hardy still had it in his briefcase. It was the number from which Kerry had received his call. ‘Maybe I won’t vote for him after all,’ Glitsky said.

Hardy sat back, crossed his arms. ‘So they have a fight first thing in the morning-’

Glitsky sat up straight, snapped his fingers, truly excited now. ‘He’s the father. She told him she was pregnant. She was going to blackmail him.’

All right, Hardy thought with relief. He never had to break his vow of silence to Jeff Elliot. Glitsky had come to it on his own. ‘That’s a reasonable guess,’ he said mildly.

‘He waited till he knew Ron had taken the kids to school, strolled over…’

But Hardy was shaking his head.

‘Why not?’ Glitsky asked.

‘No. Not himself. He called Thorne. Thorne called one of his operatives.’

Glitsky glanced back down at the faxed page. ‘Not from his cell phone anyway.’

‘Damn,’ Hardy said. ‘Why is it never easy?’

‘It’s just one of the general rules. But why would Kerry calling Thorne make it easy?’

‘This is one slick bastard, Abe.’ Hardy explained about the leaflets that had been printed up before the MTBE dumping, and about Thorne’s explanation for it.

Glitsky was enjoying the recitation. He was paying attention, sitting back in his chair, his fingers templed at his lips. When Hardy finished, he spoke. ‘So these terrorists who were trying to lay the blame on Thorne, they somehow assumed that Jeff Elliot’s colleague would just happen to drop by on Saturday afternoon and find the flyers in the hallway?’ Glitsky was almost smiling. ‘Call me cynical, but that’s a stretch.’

‘We thought so, too. Jeff and I.’ Hardy moved forward, put his hands on the desk between them, and spoke urgently. ‘Abe, you connect Thorne to the MTBE gang and you win a prize.’

‘Really. Gee, that never occurred to me.’

‘I bet it did. But look, it gets better. Thorne wrote these leaflets, probably by himself at his apartment. So you get a warrant and have somebody search the place. You find a piece of paper, a computer file, and you solve a murder, maybe two or three.’

Glitsky cocked his head to one side, all interest. ‘I’m listening. What’s two or three?’

‘He talked to Griffin the morning he got killed. Griffin.’

‘Who did? Thorne?’

A nod.

‘Are you sure of this?’

Hardy explained his reading of Griffin’s notes – that the meeting with Thorne had been one of the last entries, 5 October, eight thirty a.m. ‘It was that day, Abe, count on it. And you’ll love this: Elliot thinks Thorne is bankrolling the good governor Damon Kerry through SKO. Somehow.’

‘How?’

‘Nobody knows, but if there’s anything to it at all, it connects dirty tricks to Damon Kerry, who we liked so much last night and maybe even more this morning.’

Glitsky was still sitting back, contemplating. ‘Thorne has erased any computer work, Diz. If not immediately, then for sure by now after talking with you and Elliot.’

‘OK. Still, there might be hard copy in the garbage cans? Some dumpster behind the building.’

‘I know, I know.’ Glitsky had come forward and was shuffling more pages on his desk. He spoke almost to himself. ‘But I’ve got no inspectors.’

Finally, he opened his desk and withdrew what Hardy recognized as a blank warrant form. He grabbed a pen from the middle drawer of his desk. ‘OK,’ he said, beginning to write. ‘We’ve got the leaflets. We’ve got Griffin on his last day. So. Help me here. What else are we looking for?’

Hardy considered for a moment. ‘The smoking gun connection to Kerry. Valens. Receipts, Thorne’s phone records, anything.’

‘I’m going to need some very serious physical evidence to get anywhere near Kerry. It’s going to take more than a phone call he forgot.’

‘Maybe get some DNA on him, and check it against Bree’s baby?’

‘That’ll take six weeks if he’s not elected, for ever if he is. And then, even if he is the father, nobody puts him at Bree’s place that morning.’ The scar between Abe’s lips stood out. He shook his head in frustration. ‘Even on a normal mortal, much less our popular politician, nothing remotely convictable.’

‘Not even indictable,’ Hardy agreed.

‘OK, then.’ Glitsky the strategist was back at it. ‘We go for Thorne and squeeze from that direction. You talked to him. Can you think of anything else on him?’

‘My house.’

The lieutenant met Hardy’s gaze and nodded somberly. As a salve to his friend, he made a pretense of writing that down. ‘I’ll check with the fire department. What else?’

Hardy wracked his brain but after nearly a minute still came up empty. ‘Nothing, Abe.’ He sighed. ‘Oh, except I did discover where Carl Griffin did his laundry.’

‘Are you kidding?’ Glitsky frowned. ‘Carl never went to a laundry in his whole life.’

After Glitsky left to go try and get his warrant signed, Hardy copied down the remaining numbers for M. Dempsey, then sat back pensively. Glitsky had closed the door when he’d gone, and now in the tiny cubicle, Hardy could work without distractions and he needed to concentrate.

It seemed that every answer he got raised another question. How wonderful, he’d thought, that Glitsky had found Bree’s lengthy call to Kerry on the morning of her murder. But something about the information had nagged at him, and now here it was again. On his copied pages of Griffin’s notes – the time 9:02. Or that had been his assumption, and it had led directly to Kerry’s phone records and his lie. But the phone call hadn’t been at 9:02. It had begun at seven ten.

So what was 902?

Then there was Heritage Cleaners, Griffin’s laundry. Hardy pulled the phone on Glitsky’s desk around and reached a woman who spoke English so poorly that he settled for what he hoped was the address of the place and politely thanked her, then hung up. He had no more strength this morning for disjointed conversations over that miracle of modern communication, the telephone. He would try to get time to stop by Heritage later in the day – when? when? – and maybe see what they did, why Griffin had put them in his notes.

It was all a mess.

He checked his watch. After eleven o’clock already.

And today was his last day to get it done. Frannie had told him that the best thing would be if she didn’t have to tell, and the only way that would happen was if Hardy provided some answers before they questioned Frannie tomorrow again in front of the grand jury.