John Lescroart - Hard Evidence

‘Fame’s an elusive thing,’ Hardy admitted.

‘Okay, laugh at me.’ Pico consoled himself with a mouthful of pie. ‘But you wait – somebody’s going to make a fortune off this somehow and then where will we be?’

‘We’ll be right here,’ Frannie said. ‘I’m kind of immobilized for a while anyway.’

‘Don’t you like where you are, Peek? I mean, curator of the Steinhart Aquarium is not exactly an entry-level position.’

‘I just feel like we’re all missing an opportunity here.’

‘Probably,’ Hardy said. Angela agreed. So did Frannie.

Pico ate some more pie.

May Shinn’s apartment was on Hyde, directly across the street from a boutique French deli. The cable-car tracks passed under the window, but this time of night, the cars weren’t running.

There was hardwood in the foyer, an immediate sense of almost ascetic order – a hint of sandalwood? The streetlights outside threw into gauzy relief the one room where she sat in front of her corner shrine, across the room from a low couch with a modern end table and a coffee table. Hardwood glistened around the sides of the throw rug. Along one wall was a high cabinet – thin and elegant lines, glass fronted. Another wall held Japanese prints above a low chair and a futon.

The entranceway itself was an eight-foot circle. Older San Francisco apartments often had turrets, alcoves, arches and moldings that no modern unit could afford. Another rug, two feet wide, was in the center of the circle. A hand-carved cherry bench, the wood warm, highly polished but not over-lacquered, hugged the side. Close to ten feet long, it was built to the curve of the wall, apparently and impossibly seamless. It would cost a fortune, and that’s if you knew the artist, if he could get the matched cherry, if there was the time.

The wall in the foyer had an ivory rice-paper finish. Three John Lennon lithographs, which didn’t look like prints, hung at viewer’s height. The light itself came in five-track beams from a central point overhead. Three of the beams were directed at the Lennons, the other two at ancient Japanese woodcuts on either side of the door leading to the kitchen.

There was another longish block of cherry with a slight ridge down its middle on the floor by the open entrance to the living room.

May had bathed after forcing herself to eat some rice with cold fish left over from Friday night. She had combed back her long black hair and pinned it, then sat on her hard, low platform bed for a long while, still undressed, unaware of time’s passing.

When it was dark, she began picking out what she would take with her. Not much. Two suitcases perhaps. She had to decide. Would too little cause someone to notice? What did business people take on a trip to Japan? On the other hand, she didn’t want to tip her hand that she was not coming back by taking too much. She walked around the apartment, taking things down, then putting them back up, unable to decide. Everything was expensive, hard to replace, precious to her. She’d designed her living space that way.

She went to her shrine and lit a candle. It was not a shrine to any god particularly, just a raised block of polished cherry with a pillow in front of it. There was a white candle, a soapstone incense burner, a knife and, tonight, a plain white piece of bond paper, five by seven inches, with a man’s scrawl on one side of it.

She had gotten out the piece of paper after reading the Chronicle article about Owen Nash that mentioned her, already tying her to him. The paper was a further tie – a handwritten addendum to Owen’s will leaving $2 million to May Shintaka.

She didn’t know if it was legal or not. It was dated a month ago, May 23, and was written in ink and signed. Owen had told her that’s all she needed.

‘Maybe I’ll die on the way home,’ he’d told her, ‘before I get the Wheel to get it done right. This way, even if it’s disputed, after taxes you ought to get at least half a million.’

She’d told him she didn’t want it, and he’d laughed his big laugh and said that’s what was so great about it. He knew she didn’t want it. But he’d folded it once and put it in her jewelry box. Every time he came by, he checked to make sure it was still there.

She wondered if he had told Ken Farris – the mysterious Wheel – about it. Sometimes she wondered if the Wheel really existed, but there he was in the Chronicle article today. She wondered why Owen had never had them meet.

No, she didn’t. She knew why. It came with her profession. You didn’t meet friends of your clients. In fact, what you did together couldn’t survive outside of its strict boundaries, although Owen had promised her it could.

But it never had. And now, could she go and present this little scribbling to the Wheel, Owen’s financial protector? He would laugh at her, or worse. Perhaps she would do it later. But later might be too late. All the money might be gone, and none left for her.

But she had never expected the money, had never wanted to believe any of Owen’s promises. He’d even told her, in other contexts, ‘A promise is just a tool, Shinn. You need to promise something, you promise. Later you need to not remember your promise, you don’t remember.’

He’d said that before he’d changed, of course, before something had really happened between them. And yet…

It broke her heart, that heart she’d hardened and decided to keep to herself forever. She was kneeling back on the pillow, and a tear fell and landed on her polished thigh. Should she pick up the knife? Should she burn the piece of paper? What could she take with her to Japan and where would she stay when she got there?

Elizabeth Pullios found out about it first in Jeff Elliot’s Chronicle story. Owen Nash was a righteous homicide, and probably, she thought, a murder. Also, its position there on the front page changed her opinion about the case.

While Dismas Hardy was stirring up the kettle she had been all for him – it never hurt for a rookie to get some heavy trial experience, and there were only a few ways a new person ever got to try a homicide. One was getting what they called a skull case – an old murder with some new evidence. Another way was when one of the regulars, like Pullios herself, would hand off a slam-dunk conviction to one of the rising stars, leaving herself time to try a more challenging case. Once in a while one of the regulars would go on vacation and everyone else would be full up, so a case would fall to the next level. But that was about it.

She had thought that Hardy’s interest in the mystery hand fell more or less under the umbrella of skull cases. Interesting stuff maybe, but not grist for her. There were four, and only four, homicide assistant district attorneys in the City and County of San Francisco. None of these people would hand off a publicity case. If Hardy had hit the jackpot, Pullios felt as though he’d done it by playing what was rightfully her dollar.

She dressed in her red power suit and sauntered into the Homicide Detail on the Fourth Floor at seven-forty-five on Friday morning. No one sat at the outside desk, and she walked through into the open area for the inspectors’ desks, all twelve of them. The lieutenant’s office was closed up, dark inside. Over by the windows, Martin Branstetter was doing some paperwork. Carl Griffin and Jerry Block were having coffee and some donuts at Griffin’s desk, talking sports.

‘Hi, guys.’ All the homicide cops liked Pullios. They liked her because when they went to the trouble to arrest a suspect and provide her with witnesses she generally saw to it the person went away, and often for a long time. ‘Anybody got a fuck for me?’ Her smile lit up the office. Branstetter looked up from his report.