John Lescroart - A Plague of Secrets

“I’ve already heard her answer to that. It was a point of contention between her and Joel. At first, she felt sorry for him and wanted to help him get back on his feet after he got out of prison, and then he did such a good job.”

“I’ve heard that one too.”

“You don’t think it’s true?”

“Maybe I would if he hadn’t treated her like the help. But he did.”

At this, Fisk went silent for a long beat. “So if and when we find out, assuming she’ll tell me, then what?”

“I don’t want her to tell you, Harlen. She can’t tell you. You’re not her lawyer. There’s no privilege. You’d have to repeat anything she told you in court if you got a subpeona. You have to get her to tell me or one of my investigators. Then at least we’ve got answers. We’re dealing with the reality of what was going on down there. Glass is going on the theory that the ninety grand was money laundering through the drug business. We need to explain away the high salary without any reference to the dope.”

“But, as you say, it also gives her a motive to have killed him.”

This, of course, remained a true source of concern, but Hardy spun it the best he could. “I’m hoping if we can somehow defuse Glass, Darrel and Schiff won’t get enough.”

“You’re saying you think she might actually have done it.”

“I’m her lawyer, Harlen. I’m trying to keep her out of jail. Jerry Glass is trying to make her a drug dealer. If she’s a drug dealer, she’s a much more likely killer to Darrel and Schiff. At this point it’s mostly a matter of perception, and admittedly it isn’t much, but it’s about all we got.”

The Hardys rented a double garage only a couple of blocks from their home, and most of the time this was an advantage over having to drive around the neighborhood for long minutes in search of a parking place. Tonight, however, the short walk through the ongoing monsoon had delivered Frannie, soaked and freezing, to her home about five minutes after her husband’s talk with Harlen Fisk.

He poured her a glass of wine to go with his second beer and suggested she go upstairs and run a hot bath while he made them one of his extemporaneous “black-frying-pan meals.” Since these were usually great-tasting and an absolute snap to clean, Frannie agreed, gave him a shivering kiss and a quick hug, and disappeared up the stairs.

The heavy, well-seasoned cast-iron pan was the one possession that Hardy retained from his childhood, and he treated it with great care. Normally it hung on a marlin hook behind the stove and now he took it down, and after admiring the look of it for a moment, he ran a finger over the cooking surface. As always, it was silken to the touch, shiny with a micron brush of oil from its last use, unmarred by any scratch or even the hint of residue.

Rummaging, Hardy started in the refrigerator-perennially bare now that the kids had gone-and after pulling out a half head of iceberg lettuce, he fixed his eyes upon a carton of eggs and a decent-sized half wedge of triple-crème d’Affinois cheese, which he knew would turn the blood in his arteries to the consistency of tar, but he cared about as much as he had a few days before when he and Frannie had split the first half of it, which is to say not at all. Something was going to get him someday, and if it happened to be the d’Affinois, he could think of lots of worse ways to go.

They had other only-in-San Francisco staples on hand-butter, truffle oil, sourdough bread in the freezer, some packaged dried mushrooms in the pantry. Hardy dumped the mushrooms in a bowl of warm water to reconstitute, carried his beer with him over to the family room, where he fed his tropical fish, and sat down on the couch to wait for Frannie to descend.

He was still wrestling with the idea of why he wasn’t asking Maya himself.

The reasons he’d given Wyatt Hunt had, at the time, seemed reasonable, but now he wondered. True, he didn’t want to get Maya defensive with him. And one of the main tenets of defense work is that no lawyer wants to put his client in a position where she has to lie to him. But he was dimly, naggingly aware of another motivation that made him feel morally uneasy-and that was that he didn’t want to lose her as a client because she represented perhaps a quarter of a million dollars in fees if she got arrested, which he was starting to consider at least as a possibility.

Hardy billed a hell of a lot of very expensive hours every year, as did his partners and their associates, but even so, a quarter million dollars or more wasn’t something to risk if you didn’t absolutely have to. To say nothing of the publicity surrounding a case with such a high-profile client. And if he got her off, it was probably worth another half million or more to the firm, plus the gratitude of the city’s mayor and one of its supervisors.

He was hyperaware of the money. That was it.

He didn’t like to think that he’d become strictly mercenary, not when for so long the law had been a passion for him-first as a beat cop and then a lawyer on the prosecution side, then for the next two and more decades as a defense attorney. Of course, it was also a business and had turned into a fairly lucrative one, but the business side alone had never been the point. And he didn’t want it to be now.

He wondered if for all the wrong reasons he had sent Wyatt Hunt and now Harlen Fisk off to do a job that should by all rights have fallen to Hardy himself. Or maybe should not be done at all. He knew that he could argue blackmail to Glass without revealing or even knowing the actual fact of it, and thus refute the money-laundering theory upon which the U.S. attorney was building his forfeiture case. But some instinct told him that there had in fact been blackmail, and that the nature of it might be at the crux of this case.

He sat sipping his beer and staring at his tropical fish, which didn’t provide him with any kind of answers by the time the telephone on his belt went off-Wyatt Hunt atypically calling him off-hours. He must have come up with something.

“Tell me you’ve got it already,” Hardy said.

“We got something, all right,” Hunt replied, “but it won’t make you too happy.”

“I’m listening.”

“The guy who did the robbery with Dylan Vogler? He was a friend of our client when she was in college, name of Levon Preslee.”

“Okay.”

“Well, not so okay, as it turns out. Levon’s dead.”

A gust of windpulled the door of Darrel Bracco’s car out of his hand and slammed it for him just as a fresh volley of rain peppered the blacktop all around him. Lowering his head, he pulled up the hood of his yellow parka and jogged at a good clip toward the obvious destination-the coroner’s van parked in front with a squad car, lights on at the porch and in the front windows. It was ten forty-three when Bracco flashed his badge at the two patrolmen standing by the door.

Debra Schiff was already there inside, clogging up the hall by the kitchen with some coroner and crime-scene people, including Lennard Faro, and the original team of inspectors who’d pulled the call-Benny Yung and Al Tallant. They were all trying to keep out of the way as the photographer finished her work.

Schiff, at a glance, was wet and, by the looks of her, none too happy either. Darrel looked around as he came in out of the rain-the murder had occurred in a ground-floor front unit on the right-hand side of a Victorian building on Potrero Hill. There weren’t any obvious signs of struggle in the living room to Bracco’s right. A distraught-looking young man was sitting on the couch with his hands clasped between his knees, while another patrolman sat across from him, unspeaking.

There was similarly not much sign of struggle as Bracco came and looked over Schiff’s shoulder, except for the one overturned kitchen chair and the body sprawled out on the floor, the puddle of blood underneath Levon’s head.