John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

Coleman heard him out. He really couldn’t blame him for being angry and frustrated, but he wasn’t going to give away anything that his boss had told him to withhold. ‘It’s a routine investigation,’ he said. ‘That’s all it is. Thanks for your time.’

‘That is a coincidence,’ Baxter Thorne was telling Glitsky, ‘but these little elephants are widely available. You can buy one at any quality gift store. It’s my lucky charm. I’ve carried it with me for years.’

Another question, another simple answer. ‘As I have already told you, Dismas Hardy was, I believe, the name of the gentleman who came by my office this morning and made some threatening remarks.’ Glitsky still hadn’t let Thorne enter the apartment proper. He sat on one of the chairs in the alcove and the lieutenant hovered above him. ‘Beyond that, I can’t say I know anything about him.’

Thorne was completely unruffled, going on again, answering Glitsky’s next question in his maddeningly even voice. He even produced a reasonable facsimile of a heartfelt chuckle. ‘I filled my tank, lieutenant, then I’m afraid I committed the cardinal sin of topping off. It got on my coat.’

Glitsky was coming around to a profound appreciation of just how slick this bastard might be when the telephone rang behind him. Batavia picked it up, listened for a moment, then held it out to Glitsky. ‘It’s for you. Vince.’

Glitsky told Thorne to stay where he was and crossed to the desk.

‘Pierce is clean at last,’ Coleman began and went on to explain what he’d learned at Caloco. Then he lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Can you still hear me?’

‘Barely.’

‘That’ll have to be good enough. We got people here.’

‘OK.’

‘OK, so I’m writing up this Pierce thing at my desk and guess who drops by? He just left like five ago. Ranzetti.’

Glitsky frowned. Jerry Ranzetti was with the office of management and control, a department which used to go by the name of internal affairs. If Ranzetti had come to homicide, he was on the scent of a bad cop, and this wasn’t good news for Glitsky. The homicide unit was small – thirteen men and one woman – and Abe felt he could personally vouch for the integrity of each one of them. ‘I gather it wasn’t a social call.’

‘Well, he pretends. I pretend back. Then he says, oh yeah, maybe there is something, maybe I heard something about it, maybe I could tell him something.’

‘Maybe,’ Glitsky said. ‘About who?’

Coleman paused and the voice when it picked up again was nearly inaudible. ‘That’s why I called, Abe. The guy he’s sniffing around? It was you.’

‘When did you know?’ Ron asked.

‘I had a pretty good idea by the time I saw your bedrooms, but I really didn’t put it all together until I realized you must be having a sexual relationship with Marie. Bree’s having an affair. You’re having an affair. But somehow you were a happy couple, comfortable together? Contented? It didn’t make sense. The only thing I don’t understand is why you went to all the trouble? Why couldn’t she just have remained Aunt Bree?’

‘At the time, that option just seemed to leave us with a lot more to explain to everybody we met. Nobody questions a man and his children and his new wife. But a man, his sister, and the man’s kids? That’s different – it’s a weird set-up, with a way better chance of striking somebody as funny, and we couldn’t have that. You’ve got to understand – I’m wanted for kidnapping, maybe child pornography. This is serious shit. They are on me. We had to look exactly like a normal couple. Not mostly, exactly. And for a long time, we did.’

‘Except for the affairs.’

Ron shook his head. ‘OK, we had to keep the affairs secret. But since that’s generally the nature of affairs with people who are really married, it’s worked out all right.’

‘So you and Marie. How long has that been going on?’

‘A couple of years.’

‘And she’s OK with that? She didn’t push you to get married?’

He sat back on the couch, crossing one leg over the other. ‘No. To get divorced from Bree – we’ve had a few discussions about that, let me tell you. But that was before Bree died. Since then, I think she’s waiting for an appropriate time to pass. My mourning period,’ he added uncomfortably. ‘So marriage hasn’t come up yet.’

‘Are you telling me she didn’t know about Bree?’

‘She still doesn’t. Nobody does.’

Hardy sat back himself, giving that a minute to sink in. ‘The kids?’

Ron Beaumont shook his head no. ‘They were two and three when we moved out here. Maybe they’d heard of Bree as their aunt but they didn’t remember. So after awhile, she was just Bree, their step-mom. A far better life than what they were used to.’

‘So what about Dawn?’

This brought Ron’s defenses up. Suddenly, he was all the way forward on the couch, by his body language ready to spring at this threat to his children, even if it was at a man with a gun. ‘What about her?’

‘That’s my question.’

He stayed forward, tensed, his hands clenched in front of him. Hardy waited him out. Gradually, the words started to come. ‘I had never met anyone like her, even remotely like her. I was a junior at Wisconsin. I met her in the library of all places – she was working on her master’s thesis. Sociology.’

‘So she was an academic, too?’

Ron laughed. ‘No. Although she was smart, I suppose. No, I know . Very smart. Too smart.’

‘What does that mean?’

He drew in a breath and blew it out heavily. ‘She didn’t feel anything, or – no, that’s not precisely it – more like she decided what feelings were rationally defensible and the others she just didn’t acknowledge. She wasn’t going to live a pawn to her weaker emotions.’

‘Which ones were those?’

‘Oh, you know. The conventional ones that hold us all back, but especially women. At least according to Dawn. Love, need, compassion. Anything that stood in the way of her getting what she wanted.’

‘Which was?’

A shrug. ‘Pretty simple really. The usual. Money, power, excitement.’

Hardy almost laughed at the absurdity he was hearing. ‘And she was getting all this as a sociology major?’

Ron shook his head. ‘No. She started as a topless dancer. By the time I met her,’ he paused, ‘she called herself an actress.’ He sighed. ‘When I think back on it, what drew me to her was this sense of… I guess I’d have to call it danger.’ He fell silent again.

‘Go on,’ Hardy prompted him. ‘Do you mean physical danger?’

Another empty laugh. ‘Yeah, I suppose, even that. Or at least it seemed that way to a sheltered kid from suburban Illinois. She was four years older than me and really nothing was off-limits physically.

‘At the time, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I mean, here’s this totally unconventional free spirit in an unbelievable body and she’s in love with me and of course, we’re both invincible, immortal. Nothing can touch us. We can mix and match with other couples, do every drug known to man, hang out in places I wouldn’t go near today.’

He stopped, and seemed again almost to ask Hardy’s permission to continue. ‘I look back on that now and it seems impossible, like I was another person.’

‘How long ago was all this?’ Hardy asked. ‘Twenty years?’

‘Something like that.’

A nod. ‘You were another person.’

This seemed to soothe Ron somewhat, and he went on. ‘I think what I regret most is that both my parents died during this time, in the first phase when Dawn and I were together.’