John Lescroart - Hard Evidence

Nobody moved. The assistant coroner looked at Glitsky, who nodded, and the sheet came off, revealing Owen Nash, naked and blue, on the gurney.

First, of course, was the hand, or the lack of hand. The ragged stump without any cauterizing or sutures – one pink tendon extending two inches beyond the rest.

Jeff had seen pictures of the damage a shark bite could do to, for example, a surfboard, but he found that it did not prepare him for the sight of Nash’s ribs opened by the slashing teeth, the wedge taken out of his lower leg.

Celine walked up to the body. Her eyes, he noticed, were dry in spite of the sob. Perhaps they glistened with shock. The coroner’s assistant made a motion to come and steady her, but something in her bearing stopped him. The room became for an instant as silent and colorless as an old black-and-white snapshot – all the life, not just Owen’s – leached out by the tension.

Celine put a hand on the body’s chest, another on the thigh. It might have only been five seconds, but it seemed she stood there forever, unmoving, taking it in. Now a tear did fall. She leaned over and placed her lips against the center of his stomach.

Suddenly it was over. She nodded at the inspector, then turned around and walked past them all to the door and on out without looking back.

In the lobby, Ken and Betty thanked Glitsky. Celine was already in the limo. The evening light was startling -Jeff remembered walking out of matinees as a child, how the Saturday-afternoon light after the dark theater was so jarring, so unexpected. He’d felt that way, squinting against the setting sun.

He knew he should have asked someone more questions – the assistant, Glitsky, Ken or Betty – but he’d been too shaken. By the time he recovered, the limo had driven off. Glitsky had gone into the Hall of Justice. He couldn’t bring himself to go back into the morgue.

He shook himself, pulling out of the memory. The orange screen still hummed in front of him. He looked at his watch and saw that he’d wasted twenty minutes. He had to get down to work.

There was, first, the business side. In 1953, Owen had borrowed $1,500 from a G.I. loan program and put a down payment on a near-bankrupt television repair shop in South San Francisco. He began tinkering with used parts, and within two years had perfected and patented an improved insulation technique for the hot tubes of early TV. General Electric picked it up, and Owen was on his way. He diddled with vacuum tubes, invested in copper wiring, got into simple components before the microchip came along. By the time Silicon Valley exploded, he was ready for it.

Shares of Owen Industries, Inc., were trading on the New York Exchange for $17 a share, and Nash himself had controlled eight hundred thousand shares when he took the corporation public in 1974. Figuring three or four stock splits minimum, Nash’s personal worth on stocks alone, at the time of the Business Week cover story, was close to $70 million.

His other assets were also substantial. Besides the $250,000 Eloise and his Seacliff mansion, he owned a house and more than a thousand acres of land in New Mexico, pied-a-terres in Hong Kong and Tokyo, a condominium in New York. According to Business Week he also held part or controlling interest in three hotels, ski resorts in Lake Tahoe and Utah, a restaurant on St. Bart’s in the Caribbean. His one failure, as of five years ago, had been an airline, the Waikiki Express, which had made two round trips daily between Oahu and Los Angeles for sixteen months before it went bankrupt.

But the man hadn’t spent all his time in boardrooms. The first mention of Owen Nash in any publication had nothing to do with business. In 1955 he was the first non-Oriental to break more than six one-inch pine boards on top of one another in a sanctioned karate exhibition. Jeff was tempted to get up from his chair and see if Archives had the picture referenced in the display, but decided against it. Time was getting short.

In 1958 Nash’s house in Burlingame had burned to the ground. He managed to rescue his six-year-old daughter, Celine, but had nearly died himself trying to get back inside to pull his wife, Eloise, to safety.

After his wife’s death, he bought his first sailboat and took it around the world, accompanied only by Celine. The papers picked up on the rugged outdoorsman life now – for a year in the 1960s he held the all-tackle world record for a black marlin he’d taken off the Australian Barrier Reef. As recently as last year he and Celine and a crew of three college kids had sailed a rented ketch to runner-up in the Newport-Cabo San Lucas race.

His forays into big-game hunting stirred more and more controversy over the years. Jeff Elliot thought the change of tone of the articles was interesting: when Nash bagged a polar bear in 1963 he was a man’s man featured in Field & Stream; by 1978, taking a zebra in the Congo got him onto the Sierra Club’s public-enemy list.

He didn’t ‘give a good goddamn’ (Forbes , Ten CEOs Comment on Image,‘ Sept. ’86) about the public. He was one of the only western industrialists to attend the coronation of Bokassa; the Shah of Iran reportedly stayed aboard the Eloise in the Caribbean while the U.S. government was deciding how to handle him after he was deposed; Nash appalled the Chronicle reporter covering his trip to China in ‘83 by feasting, with his hosts, on the brains of monkeys who were brought live to the table.

He made Who’s Who for the first time in 1975. He never remarried.

‘I wish I made more money,’ Pico Morales said. ‘I wish I had more money. Anybody else, they would have more money.’

His wife, Angela, put her hand over his. ‘English isn’t even his first language,’ she said, ‘but he sure can conjugate the dickens out of “to have money.” ’

They were in the Hardys’ dining room, sitting around the cherry table. After the spaghetti and a jug of red wine, Frannie had brought out an apple pie, and Pico had put away half of it.

‘He is a man of many talents,’ Hardy said.

‘Is there anything special about today and money?’ Frannie asked.

‘See? That’s what I mean.’ Pico had a knife in his hand and was reaching again for the pie. ‘We don’t think – I don’t think – like a rich person. I think it’s genetic.’

‘He thought sharks dying was genetic, too,’ Hardy said.

‘No, that was lack of family structure.’

‘What would you do if you had money,’ Angela asked, ‘besides maybe eat more?’

Pico had no guilt about his size. He patted his stomach and smiled at his wife. ‘What I would do, given this news tonight about Owen Nash that the rest of the world doesn’t know yet, is go out and invest everything I owned in stock in his company.’

Hardy shook his head. ‘That stock is going to dive, Peek.’

‘I know . So you sell short, make a short-term bundle, buy back in.’

‘How do you know when it’s going to turn around so you buy back at the right time?’ Frannie asked.

‘You don’t for sure,’ Pico said, ‘but that’s the nature of stocks.’

‘Either that, hon, or they go the other way tomorrow and take off because Nash was mismanaging his company and now they can fly. Then you lose everything.’ Angela patted his hand again. ‘Like every other time we have had hot tips on the stock market. Have another piece of pie.’

‘I’m interested in what you meant when you said anybody else would have had more money. When?’ Hardy had pushed his chair onto its back legs and was leaning into them, thumbs hooked in his front pockets.

‘Today. The last few days. We should already have an agent, be cooking up a book deal, movie rights, something. We’re the ones who found the hand. We should be famous by now.’