John Lescroart - Hard Evidence

Farris sipped his gin. ‘Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed May too. I don’t care what they say.’

‘No. May killed herself. If they had found anything that connected to Fowler he’d have been long since charged with it. And they were looking.’ But Hardy didn’t like it, because if Farris still genuinely entertained the thought, maybe the jury did, too, in spite of Chomorro’s instructions. He’d better not forget that. ‘About May… when we first talked, you told me Owen had been paying her?’

‘Right. He paid all of them. So?’

‘Do you know for a fact that he was paying her? Did he specifically tell you he was?’ Farris appeared to be giving it thought. Hardy continued, ‘You told me Nash had changed the last few months. I was wondering, might that have been one of the changes.’

Farris seemed somewhere inside himself. Finally he said, scarcely loud enough to be heard over the din, ‘Owen went with call girls, prostitutes, call them what you will. It was just his nature. It was who he was. And that’s who, what, May was.’

‘Well, maybe not,’ Hardy said, ‘that’s what I’m getting at.’

Which seemed to anger Farris. ‘Goddamn it, that’s never been in dispute.’

Hardy sipped his ale. ‘It’s in dispute now. May’s lawyer – you’ve met him, Freeman – he says the two of them actually loved each other.’

Farris was shaking his head. ‘That’s got to be bullshit.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he just didn’t, that’s why. This is Owen Nash we’re talking about. He wasn’t going to marry some whore. Why are you digging all this up?’

‘Because I don’t believe Andy Fowler killed anybody. Why is it so upsetting to you if Owen loved May Shinn?’

‘Because I knew Owen and that wasn’t him!’

Hardy stepped back, taking a beat. Both men went to their drinks. Hardy leaned forward again. ‘Listen, Ken, you’ve just spent six months contesting the validity of the will. It’s no wonder you’re committed to your position. I’m just asking if you’ve got any proof Owen was paying her – his own admission to you, canceled checks, whatever. You’re the one who’d told me he’d changed with her. Was a for-hire deal with a whore going to change him? Wasn’t he wearing her ring when he was shot?’

‘We don’t know that. Someone could have put it on him.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

Hardy kept at it. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. He put it on himself. He was planning on telling you sometime, possibly soon. I think he had decided to marry the woman, just as he had said.’

Ken Farris was down to an olive. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I just…’ He shook his head.

‘You just assumed, didn’t you?’

‘Why wouldn’t he have told me? He told me everything.’

‘Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe it snuck up on him. But it’s all pretty consistent if you put it together – we’ve got the change in behavior, the settling down, leaving her number with you for emergencies, the will, the ring. If you buy the premise, then May wasn’t lying about anything. Which is why I called you. I needed to verify that.’

Lou, unasked, had slid another round under their elbows. Farris didn’t seem to notice. He picked up the new drink and knocked off a third of it. ‘There were no checks ,’ he said finally. ‘Of course, cash… You know, I don’t think we ever talked about whether he paid her – it never came up.’ A retreat? A cover?

The bad news, Hardy thought, was that Farris maybe, probably hadn’t been lying… maybe he’d honestly believed an untruth and passed it along as a fact, which wasn’t nearly the same thing, and it left a hole where there had at least been the chance of another suspect besides Hardy’s client.

Large drops of rain fell in sheets, splattering on his windshield. He found a parking place half a block down the street from his house and turned off the engine, thinking he would wait for a break in the storm. Could this be the beginning of the end of the drought? Now in its seventh year, and Hardy knew a lot of people in San Francisco who believed it would never end, that this was the new California of the greenhouse effect, the precursor of a future world of ozone depletion, skin cancers, AIDS and acid rain.

This cleansing Pacific downpour soothed him somehow. He sat back in his seat, eyes closed, listening to the steady tattoo of the drops on the roof.

There was still an unanswered question with May -the coat – maybe it would lead somewhere. And then on Monday Chomorro might decide to grant his 1118.1 motion and that would be the end of the trial, and he felt sure, the end of his relationship with both his ex-wife and her father. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Whatever, if he got Andy off on the murder charge, which is what he’d been hired to do, he’d take whatever fallout developed.

But he also knew the trial coming to an early end was a very long shot. And it still nagged that the truth, if there was a truth, continued to elude him. He could get Andy off, he could flap his arms and fly to the moon if he wanted, but until he found out who did put two bullets into Owen Nash, he knew he wouldn’t feel he’d accomplished what he’d really set out to do.

If nothing else, he would still have to live with the fact that he was only ninety-seven-percent certain that Nash’s killer had not been the man he had labored to set free.

It had rained hard all night, awakening Hardy and Frannie several times with peals of thunder, a sound almost unknown in San Francisco. Sometime in the middle of the night Hardy got up to Rebecca’s cries and brought her to sleep between them in their bed.

Up alone at dawn, he put on his running shoes, shorts and a t-shirt, and headed out around the park in the rain. After a shower he made himself a breakfast of hash, eggs, toast and coffee, and ate reading the paper, occasionally looking up into the gray clouds through the kitchen skylight.

Jeff Elliot was not featured on the front page or anywhere else. The day-to-day workings of the trial were not exactly grist for the media mill. He knew Jeff would be around when the jury retired to deliberate, maybe sit in for the closing arguments, but that the mundane world of the courtroom was no match for the exploits of Arnold Mousenegger. Journalistic priorities. Mice over men.

After breakfast he leaned over to kiss his wife and baby. He wore jeans and work boots, his old Greek sailor’s hat over a heavy white fisherman’s sweater. He hoped that this day, of all days, José decided to get to work on time.

It was still steadily pouring as Hardy turned into the Marina parking lot on a day possibly much like the one on which Owen Nash had gone out for the last time. There were only two other cars in the lot; Hardy got within fifty feet of the guard station, opened his car door, grabbed his smaller briefcase and sprinted.

José, at the desk beyond the counter, put down his issue of Sports Illustrated and stood up. He recognized Hardy right away.

‘I bet you’re getting a little bored with this, but I’ve got a couple of questions for you,’ Hardy said. He took off his hat and put it on the counter next to the briefcase.

José seemed to be an easygoing guy. It was a miserable morning with no one else around. He was happy with the interruption.

‘I was going over your statement yesterday, José.’ Hardy snapped open the briefcase and was getting out some of the paper. ‘And there’s something I didn’t understand.’

José nodded, leaning over the counter, looking at the inch-thick pile of type. He grinned. ‘I say all that?’

‘Well, between your interview with Sergeant Glitsky and your trial testimony -’