Glitsky smiled, his scar white through his lips. ‘It’s a beautiful thought.’ He gave it a moment’s appreciation. ‘Now how about you give me my chair?’
Hardy rose. He took the folder he’d been holding and dropped it in the center of Glitsky’s desk. ‘While we’re giving things back,’ Hardy said.
Glitsky spun the folder around, facing him, ‘How’d you get this?’
‘I got a better one – how did Pullios get it?’
‘I gave it to her.’
‘You gave it to her.’
‘Sure. Happens all the time. She comes in, says “Hi, Abe, what you got?” and I give her a homicide.’
‘Did it occur to you this might be my case?’
‘I told her you’d been working on it, and she said she knew that and she’d take care of it.’
‘Well, she did that. She’s got the case.’
‘You got the folder, though, I notice.’
‘Yeah, I get to be her gofer. I follow up.’
Glitsky leaned back, his feet on his desk. He dug a LifeSaver from his coat pocket and put it in his mouth. ‘So what’s the problem?’
Hardy could continue bitching about internal strife in the D.A.‘s office, but it would be wasted breath and he knew it. The best thing would be to do his job and wait for another chance. He settled against the corner of Abe’s desk. ’There’s no problem,‘ he said, ’but I was going over the file and you say you found the gun in the rolltop desk.‘
‘Right.’
‘Top right drawer? Maps and stuff like that?’
That’s it, so?‘
‘So I looked in that drawer on Wednesday, and there wasn’t any gun there.’
Glitsky took a breath, chewed up his LifeSaver, then brought his feet down off his desk. ‘What?’
Hardy told him about his own search of the Eloise.
‘But Waddell, the guard, he was with you, right? Hurrying you up?’
‘A little, yeah, but I checked that drawer.’
‘How close?’
‘I opened it, I looked in. What do you want?’
‘The gun was back a ways, Diz. How far in did you look?’
Hardy remembered back, remembered feeling pressure from Tom, the guard, to stop going through things. He’d pulled that drawer out, had seen the maps. He was sure -almost certain – he would have seen a gun. But to be honest – he hadn’t looked or felt around anywhere near the back of the drawer.
‘So you missed it,’ Glitsky said. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it. It happens. That’s why we have a team go and look.’
The phone rang on the desk. Hardy got up, grabbed his file and walked to the back window, which overlooked the hole for the new jail and the freeway, on about the same level four stories up as Homicide. Traffic was stopped southbound. The sun was still out in a pure sky – day four of the hot spell.
Glitsky came up beside him. ‘That was Ken Farris,’ he said. This morning when I got in I faxed him a copy of the will, the alleged will – two million dollars, remember? I figured he’d be the quickest way to verify the handwriting.‘
‘And?’
‘And he says it looks like Nash’s writing, all right, but it can’t be real. Nash wouldn’t have done that.’
‘Why not?’
‘He just says he wouldn’t have. He let Farris handle all his legal stuff.’
‘But it’s his writing?’
‘Looks like. Could be forged, of course. No telling at this point. It’s also, if it is his, a legal form for a will. Blank paper, dated, nothing else on it. But legal or not, I’ll tell you something.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m glad I brought the Shinn woman in. She almost pulled it off.’
Hardy kept looking at the stalled traffic on the freeway, the glare of the reflected sun. He felt a stabbing pain behind his left eye and brought his hand up to rub it away. ‘Almost,’ he said, ‘almost.’
20
Hardy marveled at how busy Abe must have been. No wonder he’d been working through the weekend; smaller wonder still that he’d been so reluctant to arrest May without a warrant or indictment. On a no-warrant arrest, as May’s had been, the arresting officer has forty-eight hours to bring all the paperwork on a case to the district attorney’s office. Forty-eight hours was by Sunday night – last night. By then he had to have a complaint, any relevant incident reports, witness interviews, forensics, ballistics if available – enough evidence so the D.A. wouldn’t throw it out.
This morning a typist had worked like a dog to type up the complaint and transcripts, then two copies of the folder were prepared – the original stayed with the D.A., one copy went to the clerk for putting it on a docket and one copy was saved for the defense attorney.
Pullios not only had gotten to the folder first, she had evidently convinced the clerk to get it on a docket for that day, in the early afternoon.
Rebecca’s fever had broken at noon; spots were showing all over her skin. Otherwise, everything at home was fine. Frannie was planning on taking a nap, catching up if she could on the sleep she’d missed the night before.
Hardy was back from lunch – ribs at Lou’s. Club soda. He threw three games of Twenty Down at his dart board and by the third game was nailing two numbers a round, sometimes all three. For the tenth time he considered registering for the City Championship Tournament. Someday he really would.
He got a black three-ring binder and started filling in some tab labels. Police Report. Inspector’s Chronological. Inspector’s Notes. Coroner. Autopsy. Witnesses. The drill, except for Coroner and Autopsy, wasn’t all that different from his prelims – proof was proof. A trial was a trial.
There was one definitely new tab here, though, in Hardy’s own folder – Newspaper. He had gone back and cut out all of Jeff Elliot’s stories to date. Most crimes in the big city didn’t get any ink. This one was already on the front page. Hardy figured he’d see the name Pullios in the paper within a day or so and he wanted to have a record of it.
He hadn’t gotten far that morning on Glitsky’s reports, when the gun issue – that he hadn’t seen it on Wednesday – had stopped him cold. He’d been looking for an excuse to blow some steam anyway, get out of the office. Well, now he’d done that. He’d checked in on his baby, had a good lunch. It was time to go to work. He opened the folder again, turned to the first witness interview, the transcript unedited off the tape:
Three, two, one. This is Inspector Abraham Glitsky, Star number 1144. I am currently at the office of the Golden Gate Marina, 3567 Fort Point Drive. With me is a gentleman identifying himself as Thomas Waddell, Caucasian, male, 4/19/68. This interview is pursuant to an investigation of case number 921065882. Today’s date is June 27, 1992, Saturday, at 1415 hours in the P.M.
Hardy skimmed quickly through the preliminaries, down to where Abe had started talking about putting May at the crime scene.
Q: You remember locking up the Eloise with Mr Hardy?
A: That’s right. It wasn’t locked before then.
Q: It was just left open?
A: It happens all the time. We notice it, we lock ‘em, but we don’t do a regular check, like that.
Q: But you locked it, when, Wednesday night?
A: I’m not sure. When the D.A. guy came by, after that.
Q: That was Wednesday.
A: Okay.
Q: And did you see anybody else board the boat, the Eloise?
A: No, not exactly. You guys, you know, the police, were still here Friday when I came on. You mean besides that?
Q: Right. What do you mean not exactly?
A: Well, you know I remembered ‘cause of locking it up special, but Mr Nash’s lady friend came by.
Q: His lady friend?
A: You know, the Japanese lady? She was out here a few times. I recognized her all right.