“It means you might have a better idea of what really happened. With luck, you’ll get some kind of a motive. Frannie stands to collect some insurance.”
“That’s good. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“It’s the reason I took this job in the first place. But, as you say, none of it is going to bring Eddie back. Nobody’s pretending it will. It’s just a place to move on from, that’s all.”
“Where to?” she said all but to herself.
The coffee had gotten cold. The shade had moved enough so that Hardy’s head was now in the sun. He shaded his eyes briefly with his left hand. “That’s everybody’s question.”
She lowered her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m still all inside myself.”
As they took in the coffee stuff, she started talking about Steven. Though he remained on the pain drugs and was sleeping a lot, he’d sat up for the first time the previous night, talking to Jim and Big Ed. He acted sulky to her, or toward her, she couldn’t tell which. “It’s like the more I try to do for him, the more he withdraws,” she said.
Dismas carried the mugs and rinsed them before putting them upside down on the drain.
She felt guilty, subjecting him and everybody else to this eating, horrible pain. It wasn’t his business. She was becoming a talking junkie, where as long as someone was there to talk to, it kept it at a bearable distance. It shamed her, feeling that way, talking intimately to near-strangers, but she couldn’t help herself.
She heard a faint “Mom” from the back of the house. “Would you like to see him?” she asked. “It’s pretty lonely for him in there.”
Steven had pushed himself up again, crookedly. She reached behind him to straighten the pillow.
“Come on, Mom.”
It was hopeless. He nearly cringed at her touch. She turned with a half-broken smile. “Do you remember Mr. Hardy?”
He nodded. “You find the guy that killed Eddie?”
“We think so.”
It was too dark in the room for such a beautiful day. Erin pulled up the shade. “Would you like the window open?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Then to Dismas: “Father Jim said you were sure.”
Dismas came up and sat at the foot of the bed. “We ought to be sure by tonight.” He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet, then extracted a blue card and held it out to Steven. “Last one got pretty bent up,” he said. “You want it?”
To her surprise, he took it.
“Thank you,” he said. Just like that, formally. Not “Thanks” or “Sure,” but “Thank you.” Then: “What’s keeping you from being sure?”
Dismas kind of laughed and shrugged at the same time.
“Can you tell me? I mean, all about it?”
Dismas looked at her, and she nodded. It was good he was starting to come out of the pain, show some interest in living.
But she wasn’t sure whether she could handle hearing it all gone over again. “Are you hungry, Steven? Would you like some lunch?”
He paid no attention to her, all his concentration on Dismas.
“You’re not too tired?” he asked Steven, catching her eye with a question. She nodded that it would be okay.
“No. I do nothing ’cept sleep anyway.”
“Well, I’ll go make a sandwich,” she said. Dismas was already talking before she was out of the room.
Hardy sat at the Cliff House waiting for Pico to arrive for lunch. He was able to see clear to the Farallones. In front of him about a hundred sea lions cavorted on and around Seal Rock.
The place, jammed on weekends, was not too bad here on a Tuesday afternoon. He got a table by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows without any wait; his waitress was friendly but not too, and didn’t even blink when he’d ordered his two Anchor Steams at once. He was halfway through the first.
His instinct had been to go back to the Shamrock, maybe take on his regular shift again or at least crow a little to Moses. But driving toward the place from the Cochrans’, he decided not to jinx himself. One more day, or-more likely-a few hours, would be worth it to make sure the thing was nailed down.
He couldn’t tell Moses he’d almost cracked the case, that almost surely Eddie had been murdered, that it was likely Fran would get some insurance, and oh, by the way, there was a chance that Moses owed him a quarter of the bar.
So he’d called Pico and turned west on Lincoln toward the Cliff House instead of east to the Shamrock. He’d told Pico he wanted to celebrate, but perhaps he’d been premature even in that. Everything with Jane seemed to be going so well, the case had just about concluded. So what was wrong with him that he couldn’t be happy? Was he so much out of practice?
He sipped at his beer, watching the waves break against the rocks below him, and tried to figure it out. The feeling-the old gut “something is really wrong” feeling-started while he was talking to Steven. He’d started in with that just to loosen things up over there, because Steven so obviously needed to feel involved. He knew the kid couldn’t really help him at this stage. There was nothing left to do.
Out on the ocean a couple of tugs were pulling a ship toward the Golden Gate. Hardy watched it for a while, then looked beyond it, up the Marin coast, seemingly all the way to Oregon. It was still a postcard day-a cloudless sky, the blue-green benign sea.
All right, so it seemed he’d finished the case, at least as far as he was concerned. He was spending all this time wondering why he wasn’t happy, when really, why should he be happy? It wasn’t like it had been a laugh riot. Maybe there would be some small sense of accomplishment down the line about the money he’d helped Frannie get or something like that, but he couldn’t escape the basic ugliness he’d been mucking around in.
But it wasn’t just that. Talking to Steven, trying to get it all straight for the boy, it had gone a little crooked on him. Almost every move he’d made had followed from a basic set of assumptions he had developed in the first day or two of looking at it. What if all those assumptions, or even one of them, had been wrong?
He shook his head. It was a police matter now. The proof would come out-possibly was coming out right now downtown -and then it would be over. It wasn’t his problem anymore.
So what that someone had called in about the body from a phone booth three miles away from the Cruz lot? What did it matter if Alphonse killed Linda with a knife and Eddie was shot? And couldn’t Cruz really have lied out of pure fear, not necessarily to cover up a murder?
Sure. Sure, and sure.
But there was one other thing. It had occurred to him-like a remembered taste-while he was talking to Steven, some vague feeling that he had said something that he had overlooked before about Eddie’s murder, and didn’t have shit-all to do with either Arturo Cruz or Alphonse Page.
He stared at the ship as it continued its slow progress toward the Bridge, sipping Anchor Steam, damned if he could put his finger on what the hell it was.
Chapter Twenty-nine
DICK WILLIS of the Drug Enforcement Agency was sure it was one of those situations where the guy’s name had absolutely determined what he was going to be in life. Bargen had probably been called Plea since the first grade.
Willis, sitting across from him in his cubicle in the D.A.’s office, looked at the nameplate on his cluttered desk, the one that said “P. Bargen,” and wondered if in fact that might be his real name. He didn’t know him as anything else.
Plea leaned back, balancing his wooden chair on its hind legs. His feet were on the corner of his desk, crossed, and he appeared to be sleeping soundly, arms crossed behind his head. His tie was undone, his few hairs uncombed. Still, he wasn’t a slob. His body was trim, his pants still had a crease in them and the shirt was ironed. He was paying attention.