Q: This is a snapshot of a woman named May Shintaka. Do you recognize her?
A: Yeah, that’s her. She was by, like, Thursday night, out on the float.
Q: What time was that?
A: Still light. Maybe seven, seven-thirty.
Q: What was she doing there? Did you talk to her?
A: No. I don’t know. She walked by the office when I was with some other people, went out onto Dock Two by the Eloise, stayed a minute, then when I got done and looked up, she was gone.
Q: Did she go aboard the boat?
A: It was locked up.
Q: I know it was. Maybe she had a key?
A: I don’t know, I guess she might’ve. I don’t know. I didn’t see her again, and later I went to check the boat, and it was still locked up. She wasn’t in it.
Q: How do you know that?
A: Well, the lock is outside. You can’t go in and lock the door from inside. So if she was still inside, it couldn’t have been locked.
Q: But you didn’t actually see her leave?
A: No, sir, but I wasn’t looking. People are going by all the time. I only put it together about Mr Nash after she was already out there.
Hardy couldn’t put his finger on it, but he wasn’t happy gathering these nails for May’s coffin. She wasn’t his anymore, maybe that was it. She was Elizabeth Pullios’s. And the more he looked at it, the more nails he seemed to find.
Glitsky’s theory – that May had gone back to the Eloise to pick up her gun because it was the only physical evidence tying her to the crime – was starting to look pretty good. And certainly her idea that she and Owen Nash were going to be married was ridiculous.
He went around his desk and absently grabbed his darts again. His door was closed and he threw, not aiming, not paying any attention. He used his darts like Greeks used worry beads.
Thursday, the twenty-fifth, had been the day of Elliot’s story linking Owen Nash, the Eloise and May. On that same day, she’d bought her ticket (without a return) to Japan and gone down, presumably, to get her gun back. And failed.
Why did he so badly want her not to have done it?
He thought it might be that so many of the people he’d been seeing on his other cases had been the kind you’d expect to be doing bad things. May Shinn, when he’d gone up to see her in jail, wasn’t that type at all. She’d talked to him openly, until Freeman had shown up, unconcerned about her rights, the way innocent people might be expected to start out until they found out how the system worked.
Hardy was willing to believe she was a liar, but if she was, she was very good at it. Hardy knew such people existed. He just hadn’t run across too many of them among the lowlifes – liars, sure, good liars not often.
There was a knock on his door, it opened and Pullios was in, watching him poised, dart in hand, ready to toss. She grinned her sexy, charming, I’m-your-best-friend grin and leaned against the door jamb. ‘Reviewing the Shinn case?’ she asked.
Hardy wanted to put a dart in her forehead, but thought he’d have a hard time pleading accident. It was one of the drawbacks of having talent.
‘As a matter of fact, I am,’ he said. He threw the dart and sat down.
‘You’re mad at me.’ She actually pouted.
‘I’m not much at games, Elizabeth. How do you want to play this?’
She sat herself down, the kitten disappearing as soon as it saw it wasn’t going to get petted. ‘Come on, Dismas, we’re on the same team.’
‘That’s what Locke said, so it must be true.’
‘Look, I know how you feel.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s a load off my mind. The thing is, I don’t know how you feel, so we’re not even. I don’t, for example, know why you let me jerk myself off on this case for most of a week before you showed any interest in it, other than encouraging me to push for my rights, beat the bureaucracy.’
‘I meant it.’
Hardy studied her face. Elizabeth Pullios, he was coming to understand, had a gift for sincerity. It probably played well in front of juries. ‘But then it was a skull case, and now it’s hot ink.’
‘No, what it is, is a homicide and I do homicides. I’ve worked my way up to there.’
Hardy looked longingly at his darts stuck in the board across the room. In lieu of them, he picked up his paperweight and leaned back in his chair, passing it from hand to hand. It might be unfair, and it might be manure, but it was a done deal, and he didn’t want to discuss it anymore. ‘Farris says the will was Nash’s handwriting,’ he said.
Pullios was right with him. ‘Definite?’
‘Until we get an expert, but it looks like it.’
‘That’s great, that’s what we need.’
‘What do we need?’
‘It’s a hell of a motive, don’t you think? Two million dollars?’
Hardy couldn’t help himself. Things were just falling too easily. If Pullios wanted this job, she ought to do a little work for it. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that if May were going to collect money on Nash’s death, she wouldn’t have dumped him in the ocean.’
‘Didn’t she?’
‘I mean it was pure luck he washed ashore. How could she have known that?’
‘So?’
‘So if you were going to kill somebody for two million dollars, wouldn’t you want to make sure they found the body? You don’t get the money until he’s dead, right? And he’s not dead till there’s a body, unless you want to wait seven years or so.’
‘But there is a body.’
‘But she couldn’t have known that.’
He enjoyed watching her stew over that, but it didn’t last long. ‘I’ll be prepared for that argument,’ she said. ‘It’s good you brought it up. The great thing is the money angle.’
‘The great thing?’
‘Murder for profit. Makes it a capital case.’
‘A capital case?’
‘Absolutely,’ Pullios declared. ‘We’re going to ask the State of California to put May Shinn to death.’
21
Hardy sat next to Pullios in the courtroom, randomly chosen by computer for Department 11 in Municipal Court, which was where the arraignment in a no-warrant arrest, even on a capital case, was scheduled.
Glitsky was there, sitting next to Jeff Elliot in the mostly empty gallery seats. David Freeman, looking more disheveled than he had on Saturday, came through the low gate and shook hands cordially with both Pullios and Hardy, which was some surprise. Hardy found himself liking the guy and warned himself to watch it. If he was good at trial, he was by definition – like Pullios – a good actor. You could admire the technique, but beware of the man.
The judge was Michael Barsotti, an old, gray, bland fixture in his robes behind the desk. Barsotti had been in Muni Court forever and he wasn’t known for moving things along.
The court reporter sat at a right angle to Hardy, midway between the defendant’s podium and the judge. Assorted functionaries milled about – two or three bailiffs, translators, public defenders waiting to get clients assigned.
Hardy leaned over the table, organizing his binder, now knowing what his role, if any, would be. He wasn’t prepared for his first sight of May Shinn.
She looked so much smaller, diminished. The yellow jumpsuit hung on her. He supposed she’d been in her jail garb on Saturday, but his focus had been talking to her, eye to eye, concentrating on her face.
She walked up with the bailiff, hands cuffed, and stood at the podium next to Pullios, giving no indication she’d ever seen Hardy before, or anyone else.
The gravity of a murder case was underscored by the judge’s first words. Even Barsotti gained a measure of authority, casting off his boredom, caught up in the drama of the formal indictment being pronounced, the courtroom getting still.
‘May Shintaka,’ Judge Barsotti intoned, ‘you are charged by a complaint filed herein with a felony, to wit, a violation of section 187 of the Penal Code in that you did, in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, on or about the twentieth day of June, 1992, willfully, unlawfully and with malice aforethought murder Owen Simpson Nash, a human being.’