John Lescroart: Hard Evidence

Drysdale and Glitsky huddled over an ancient Pong machine by the back door. Hardy pushed his way through the crowd. Drysdale was ahead, eight to six. Neither of the men looked up.

‘Boo,’ Hardy said.

Glitsky looked up for an instant, but it was long enough for the blip to get by him. ‘Damn.’

‘Nine six,’ Drysdale said. ‘Gotta pay attention.’

‘Just play,’ Glitsky growled.

Hardy watched the blip move back and forth. Both of these guys were good, playing at the master level, and the blip really moved. Hardy went to the bar, elbowed his way in and ordered a pint of cranberry juice, lots of ice.

Back at the Pong game, Glitsky glowered in defeat. Drysdale sat back in his chair, legs crossed, savoring a beer. Hardy squatted, checking out the final score of eleven to six. ‘You owe me five bucks,’ Glitsky told him.

Drysdale sipped his beer. ‘He never beats me anyway. I wouldn’t pay him.’

‘Can we talk about the hand?’

‘What hand?’

Hardy looked at Drysdale. ‘What hand, he says.’

Drysdale ran it down for Abe, who had spent the day interviewing family members of a murdered old man. The hand wasn’t the most compelling item of the day for him.

‘So who is it?’ Glitsky asked when he’d finished.

Drysdale shrugged. ‘Some guy,’ he said. Then, to Hardy, ‘What’s to talk about?’

‘How about if he was killed?’

‘How about it?’

‘You think he was killed?’ Glitsky asked.

‘I think he’s dead at least. How he got that way I don’t know. I wondered if you’d heard anything.’

‘I heard a good new song the other day,’ Glitsky said.

Hardy turned to Drysdale. ‘I thought the coroner might have come up with something.’

Drysdale frowned. ‘I doubt he’s even looked at it.’

‘It sounded like Garth Brooks, but it could have been Merle Haggard. A lot of these country guys sound the same to me.’

Hardy chewed some ice. ‘Yeah, well, if it does turn out to be a homicide, I wouldn’t mind drawing the case.’

‘Homicide’s a pretty long shot,’ Drysdale said. ‘Guy might have drowned, anything.’

‘I know. I just wanted to put the word in.’

Drysdale thought about the proposal. ‘You haven’t had a murder yet, have you, Diz?’

Hardy shook his head. ‘Not close.’

‘It could have been Randy Travis, though,’ Glitsky said. ‘Sometimes when he sings low he sounds a little like the Hag.’

Drysdale appeared to think hard a minute. Glitsky was humming the first few bars of his song. Finally Drysdale looked at the last inch of beer in his glass and finished it off. ‘Sounds fair,’ he said to Hardy. ‘You found it. If it’s a murder, it’s your case.’

Glitsky stopped humming. ‘Hardy makes the big time,’ he said, reining in his natural enthusiasm.

Hardy fished in his pocket and dropped a couple of quarters into the console in front of him. ‘Have another game,’ he said to Drysdale, ‘and this time let him win.’

Hardy sat on the Navajo rug on the floor of his living room, way up at the front of the house. His adopted daughter Rebecca was in his lap, her tiny hand picking at the buttons of his shirt. In the fireplace, some oak burned. Outside, the cocoon of fog that wrapped the house was darkening by degrees. Up in the kitchen, he heard Frannie humming, doing the dishes from their dinner.

The room, like the rest of the house, had changed with Frannie’s arrival. Previously, Hardy had lived almost exclusively in his back rooms – the kitchen, his bedroom, the office. His house was in the old Victorian ‘railroad’ style, living room up front, a dining room, then a small utility room, all of which opened to the right off a long hallway that ended at the kitchen.

While Hardy had designed and built the back room for Rebecca, Frannie had painted and redecorated the front rooms, brightening them up in white with dusty rose accents. Hardy’s nautical theme pieces, such as they were, were banished to his office. Now, on the mantel in place of the dusty old blowfish, was an exquisite caravan of Venetian blown-glass elephants. A framed DaVinci poster, a study of horses, graced the wall to the left of the fireplace. On the right, Frannie had filled the built-in bookshelves with hardcovers from Hardy’s office -Barbara Tuchman, Hardy’s complete Wambaugh collection, most of Steinbeck, Marquez, Jack London. Four new lamps filled the corners with light.

Hardy took it all in – the plants, the dark sheen of the cherry dining-room furniture, his baby girl. It seemed nearly impossible to him that all of this was so comfortable now, so right. Frannie came through the dining room and stood leaning against the doorpost. Her long red hair glinted in the light from the fire. She wore jeans and a Stanford sweatshirt, white Reeboks.

‘You were so quiet,’ she said.

Hardy rested a flat palm against Rebecca’s stomach, feeling the heart pumping. ‘I don’t think I was home once this time of night when I was bartending.’

‘You miss it?’

‘Bartending?’ He shook his head. ‘No. It’s funny. I used to think I was addicted to it – you know, the noise and the action. Now I’m sitting here, the fire pops and that’s plenty.’

She came over and sat down, Indian-style, across from him. She ran a finger up her daughter’s leg, left her hand there. ‘Aren’t you tired? Did you sleep at all last night?’

Hardy shrugged. ‘As Mr Zevon says, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’

Frannie didn’t like hearing that. Rebecca’s biological father, Eddie Cochran – Frannie’s husband – had been killed just about a year ago.

Hardy sensed it. He put his hand over hers. ‘In truth, I am severely fatigued.’

As Frannie got up to pull the curtains over the bay window, the doorbell rang. ‘We don’t want any,’ Hardy said.

‘I know.’ Frannie went to the door.

Jeff Elliot knew news when he saw it, and if a human hand turning up in a shark’s belly didn’t deserve more than a graph on the back page, he’d eat his press card.

He knew that a good percentage of all the great stories -Watergate, Lincoln Savings, Pete Rose – had begun as tiny drops in the vast pool of information that came to a paper every day. And what made those drops congeal to a trickle that became a flood had been the reporters who viewed the news as their canvas. News happened, sure, but what made the news a story was what excited him. You couldn’t make things up, but you could manufacture interest, an angle, a hook. That’s what made a good reporter. And Jeff knew he had the gift – his bosses just hadn’t seen it yet.

So things weren’t moving as quickly for him as he’d hoped. In college in Wisconsin, he’d been the editor of the paper, then three years at the Akron Clarion , and finally his big break, the San Francisco Chronicle . But now he’d been on the coast for seven months, and he was amazed that even here in the big city, so little came in via the police incidence reports – the IRs – that was even remotely sexy.

And that’s what he’d been doing – the lowest dog work, checking over the IRs, looking for a lead, a grabber, a story. And then, today, finally, the hand.

He balanced his crutches against the doorway to ring the bell. Almost immediately, the door opened to a very pretty red-haired woman in a Stanford sweatshirt. The house smelled of oak and baking bread. He gave his little waif grin.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he said, ‘but is this where Dismas Hardy lives? I’m Jeff Elliot with the Chronicle and I’d just like to ask him a few questions.’

‘It’s interesting you should ask that,’ Hardy said. ‘It came up just today downtown.’