John Lescroart - Guilt

Batiste swallowed. 'You did say that unless we got some real evidence pretty soon, we ought to move along.'

'And did we get some real evidence? Physical evidence that would withstand the rigors of a jury trial?'

'No.'

'Okay. So much for the old news. Now what's this about his wife – Sheila, right?'

Glitsky took over again. 'I'd like to just run the whole thing down – it's a little complicated – and you tell me how you think it looks.'

'Excuse me, Abe.' Drysdale's gaze went to Jenkins. 'Amanda, you've heard this already?'

'Yes, sir. But you remember I heard Levon Copes, too, and you and I came to different conclusions.'

'This is like Copes?'

Glitsky butted in. 'It's one of those times – like Copes – where we know the perp, yeah. We know that first.'

Drysdale was shaking his head, his lips tight. 'And you know how uncomfortable that makes me?'

'Which is why we're here seeking your counsel and advice.'

Drysdale laughed out in the small room. 'Beautiful,' he said. 'Let the record reflect that I am truly snowed by this display of sincerity and trust.' He leaned forward, elbows on his desk. 'All right, tell me all about it. If I like it, we'll ask my wife. If she likes it, we'll go to the Grand Jury. I promise.'

Later, around 11:30, Drysdale poked his head into Homicide on the 4th floor, saw Glitsky at his desk, and walked over.

'I just called Lou's,' he said, referring to Lou the Greek's, 'and today's special is Kung Pao Chicken Greek Pizza.' Lou's wife was Chinese and the menu at the place often featured interesting culinary marriages such as this. 'I ordered a medium, enough for two, and it's going to be ready in,' Drysdale checked his watch, 'precisely seven minutes.'

'Sounds delicious,' Glitsky said, getting up, 'but I'm really only going because I want to see how they do it. I make that stuff at home, it almost never turns out.'

They were in a booth along a wall in the back of the darkened restaurant. The table was below street level. The wood-slatted windows began at their eyes, and outside the view of the alley included two garbage dumpsters, the barred back door of a bail bondsman's office, rainbows of graffiti on every surface.

At the big meeting in his small office, Drysdale had listened attentively and said he wanted to review the reports, but tentatively wasn't going to object to proceeding with the Grand Jury indictment on Mark Dooher.

But he and Glitsky had a bit of a longer personal history, which was why they were having lunch now.

Lou the Greek himself was hovering at the table, wondering how today's masterpiece was being received. 'It's good,' Drysdale was saying, 'but -you want my honest opinion, Lou? – I'd leave off the goat cheese.'

Lou was in his fifties and he'd lived underground in a cop bar for twenty-five years, so he looked closer to a hundred. But his eyes still sparkled in a long, lugubrious face. 'But the goat cheese is what makes it Greek.'

'Why does it have to be Greek?' Glitsky asked. 'How about just plain old Kung Pao Chicken pizza like everybody else makes?'

'You've had this before?' Lou asked. It bothered him. This was San Francisco, a major restaurant town, and Lou featured his wife's cuisine as cutting edge, which, in fact, it was. Not particularly good, but nobody else made anything like it.

'Lou, they got this at the Round Table, just without the goat cheese.'

The Greek turned to Drysdale. 'He's putting me on.'

'It's possible,' Art agreed. 'But here's an idea. The chicken. Why don't you just serve it over rice – forget the pizza altogether. Call it Kung Pao Chicken?'

'But then it's Chinese food.' The idea clearly distressed Lou. 'Everybody makes Kung Pao Chicken. People come here to eat, they expect Lou the Greek's, something Greek, am I right? I let my wife take over completely and pretty soon I'm Lou's Dragon Moon, a Chinese place. I'm fighting for my ethnic identity here.'

Glitsky took a bite of the pizza. 'On second thought, leave the goat cheese, maybe sprinkle on some grape leaves.'

Lou straightened up, struck by some merit in Glitsky's suggestion. 'Kung Pao dolmas,' he said. 'You think?'

Drysdale nodded. 'Worth a try. Abe?'

Glitsky's attention had suddenly wavered. He was staring blankly out the window at the alley.

'Abe?' Drysdale repeated. 'You with us?'

'Yeah, sure.'

'I was telling Lou. King Pao dolmas? Good idea?'

Coming back from far away, Glitsky nodded. 'Yeah, good idea. Definitely.'

But the real purpose of the lunch.

'I'm just going to pretend to be a meddling, picky defense attorney here now for a couple of minutes,' Drysdale was saying. 'I can see you and Amanda want to run with this and my instinct tells me it's going to go high profile in about ten seconds, so I'd like to have answers for some questions that I predict will be asked by our ever-vigilant media, to say nothing of my boss.'

The pizza was done, the tray cleared away. Glitsky had his hands folded around a fresh steaming mug of green tea on the table in front of him. 'Okay, shoot.'

'All right. Dooher comes home from work, brings some champagne, into which he intends to put some chloral-hydrate, thereby to knock his wife out so that he can come back later and kill her. But when he gets home, she is already dead. This is the theory?'

'Right.' This was, of course, the nub of the problem. 'But he doesn't know she is dead. He's got his plan all worked out and he's moving fast, all nerves. He comes in, says thank God she's not awake, not moving, and he sticks her, rearranges the body to make it look like a struggle, gets back to the driving range before anybody notices he's gone.'

'But he was gone, Abe. He's been gone at least a half-hour. And nobody noticed? You talked to people there at the driving range, right? Anyway, forget that. Let's go back. You're saying he poisoned her with chloral-hydrate, is that it? How do we know she just didn't take the stuff? What if she was committing suicide?'

Glitsky spun his tea slowly. 'So your argument is that Dooher waits until his wife commits suicide and then comes in and stabs the body with a knife and makes it look like a burglary?' He shook his head. 'No, Art. The knife-wound is why it's not suicide. The drugs is why it's not a burglary. Besides, there wasn't enough chloral-hydrate to kill her.'

Drysdale spread his palms. 'I thought she was poisoned. Didn't you just say the chloral-hydrate…?'

'The chloral-hydrate is the drug Dooher gave her to knock her out, make her go to sleep. But what he didn't know was that she was evidently having a tough time with menopause and was already taking a drug called Nardil for depression. Also, just that day she had evidently dosed herself up with Benadryl. She had an allergy shot that morning. So she was already drugged to the gills. Then she drank the champagne. Add alcohol, mix and pour. The chloral-hydrate pushed her over. It did her in.'

'Okay.' Drysdale sighed. 'So what, exactly, does that leave us with? The stabbing is a crime, okay, but it's not Murder One. Hell, it's not Murder Anything to stab a dead body.'

'It is Murder One to poison somebody to death.'

Drysdale sat back in the booth, contemplating it.

A quiet edge crept into Glitsky's voice. He leaned in over the table. 'This works, Art, listen: Amanda's argument isn't going to be that he meant to kill her with chloral-hydrate, even though that was the result. He didn't intend to kill her until he stabbed her later, but he did intend to give her poison, and she died from that. And the beauty is that stabbing her is what proves it.'

'And, of course, we can prove that?'

'We know he stabbed her.'

'Not exactly my question.'

'Okay. This is what we've got. You tell me.' Glitsky outlined it all. It was Dooher's knife and contained only his fingerprints. He had left his house alarm system off and his next-door neighbor had seen him unscrewing his side-door light on the way out to the driving range. Another neighbor saw his car parked on the street around the corner from his house during the time he was supposedly hitting golf balls. Then there was wiping the blade on the victim's clothes, which Glitsky had never encountered before in all his years in Homicide – and now it had happened twice in cases implicating Mark Dooher, three times if you included Chas Brown's Vietnam story. Finally, there was the blood that had been contaminated with EDTA. 'And who else would have stabbed a dead woman and then faked a burglary?'