Hardy reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He opened it to where he had his D.A.‘s badge pinned in across from his driver’s license. He was reaching across into the glove box to get his registration when he felt the cop’s hand on his arm.
‘Sorry to bother you, sir, but you ran a red light back there.’
Hardy half-turned. He must have. He didn’t even remember seeing it. He apologized. Besides, he had no intention of failing the attitude test.
The cop handed him his wallet. ‘Eyes on the road, huh.’
‘Gotcha.’
He waited until the cop was back in his car, then started up again, getting into the traffic with a nice signal, turning right off Geary at his first opportunity.
Hardy pulled up in front of his house still feeling foolish and a little guilty. It was the first time he’d experienced that particular professional courtesy – getting a break on a ticket – and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.
Rebecca was in her stroller next to Frannie, who was sitting on the front-porch steps, wearing sandals, Dolphin shorts and a tank top. The sun hit her hair just right, like a burning halo around her.
‘You ought to get prettier,’ Hardy said, coming through the gate. ‘It’s hell coming home to an ugly woman. And try to look a little younger while you’re at it.’
He was almost to her when she jumped with an animal growl. She hit him high, wrapping her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, kissing him, then biting his ear, hard. He held her, marveling at her tininess, her smell, her fit to him. ‘Okay, okay, I guess you don’t have to look younger.’
She clung to him. ‘Wet willie,’ she said.
Hardy bore up under the torture. ‘See, you’re making the baby cry.’ He took the last step to the porch and made a face at the baby. ‘It’s all right, Beck, your mother’s just a little bit insane. I’m sure it’s not hereditary.’ Rebecca kept crying and Hardy kissed Frannie, then let her down and reached into the stroller. ‘I’ll carry this neglected child,’ he said. ‘You push the stroller.’
They walked east on Clement, past the Safeway and the little Russian piroshki houses and Oriental restaurants, the antique shops, Rebecca now happy in the baby seat, Frannie’s arm through Hardy’s, his coat hung over the stroller’s handles.
They caught up on everything – Rebecca’s spots mostly gone now; the decision about the second car they were considering buying as soon as the Shamrock profit payment came in, which ought to be when the fiscal year closed this week; Pico’s weight, which led to Frannie’s own weight gain (monitored daily); the Fourth of July picnic this weekend. The pregnancy was going smoothly. Boys’ names. Girls’ names. The ticket Hardy almost got for running a red light.
They walked as far as Park Presidio – over a mile -before they turned around and started back home. Hardy told Frannie about Pullios and her decision to get an indictment before the grand jury, move the proceedings to Superior Court.
‘Why does she want to do that? What’s the problem with a delay? I thought all trials took forever.’
Hardy walked on a few steps, strolling really, relaxed, squinting into the sun. ‘This is a hot story. She’s not going to let it cool off.’
‘Jeff Elliot,’ Frannie said.
‘Exactly, but we’ve got a real problem.’ Hardy briefed her on it, moving on to what had concerned him when he’d gotten pulled over. ‘The thing is, once you start asking about the motive, you open another can of worms.’
‘If she did it for the money, why did she dump the body? But if she didn’t do it for the money, why didn’t she burn the will or something?’
‘Right.’
They walked along, pondering it. The sun had gotten behind the buildings. It was not cold, but there was a nip in the shade, and Hardy stopped and tucked his jacket around Rebecca. ‘Another thing, too,’ he said, ‘although I hate to mention it.’
‘What?’
‘The ring. May’s ring.’
‘What about it?’
‘He was wearing it. Owen was wearing it.’
‘Does that mean something?’
‘I don’t know what it means, but it could mean that he put it on, that he left it on, that they had a relationship, that he wasn’t leaving her. And if that’s the case, and if she wasn’t killing him for money, bye-bye motive.’
That’s a lot of ifs.‘
True, but they don’t start with an if. He was wearing the ring.‘
‘Couldn’t they just have had a fight, got to arguing, the gun was there…?’
‘If that was it, it’s not first-degree murder. It’s definitely not capital murder.’
Frannie hugged herself closer to Hardy. ‘I feel sorry for the woman. I’d hate to have you going after me.’
‘I did go after you.’
‘See?’ She beamed at him. That’s what I mean.‘
25
There were things about the job Glitsky would never love. One of them was the reality of subpoenas and arrests.
The way you got people where you wanted them was to go out to their houses early in the A.M. and knock on their doors. Astoundingly, nobody expected to get arrested in the morning. So it was the best time to make an arrest.
But he’d been out last night on this drive-by again. They had received a tip – probably from a rival gang, but you took your leads where you could – that the shooter’s car, with a cache of weapons in the trunk, was in a warehouse out in the Fillmore.
So Glitsky and a couple of stake-out officers had gone down there, letting the warm evening dissipate into a bitter, foggy cold as they sat drinking tea and eating pretzels in his unmarked car, and waited for someone to come and open the warehouse. Which had happened.
And they found the guns. Tonight’s suspect, coked out of his mind and scared to death, had admitted that he’d driven the car, but they’d forced him, man, and he hadn’t done any shooting. That was Tremaine Wilson. He was the shooter. Wilson. This witness, unlike Devon Latrice Wortherington, could actually put Wilson in the car with a gun in his hand, and if he didn’t go sideways, which he probably would when he straightened out, Glitsky might be able to make a case against Wilson.
So now, four hours of sleep later, the dark not yet completely gone and the fog just as cold as when he’d left it, Glitsky found himself once again in the projects. The path to the door was a cracked cement strip that bisected a littered and well-packed rectangle of earth that might as well have been concrete except for the stalk of a tree that had made it to about one foot before someone whacked it off. Now the bare twig struggling out of the ground, maybe an inch thick, struck Glitsky as an example of what happened to anything that dared to try to grow up here.
As always, they were going to try to do it neat and quick. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Just in case, though, three uniformed officers had gone to cover the back door of the duplex. Glitsky had two other guys, guns out, behind him on the walkway and another team in the street, out of their car and using it for cover on the not impossible chance that the frameless picture window would suddenly explode in gunfire.
It seemed a miracle that one of the streetlights still worked. The half-life of a streetlight in any of the projects could be measured in minutes after nightfall before some sharpshooter put it out. In the light from this one it was easy to make out the closed drapes in the front window. The screen door hung open, framed by a riot of graffiti.
Glitsky looked at his watch. The back entrance should be covered by now. He turned around and gestured at the guys huddled behind the car out in the street. They gave him the thumbs up – the place was, in theory, secured.
Now there was no fog and no cold and no darkness. There was only his pounding heart and dry mouth – it happened every time – and the door to be knocked on. Three light taps. He had his gun out and heard shuffling inside. The rattle of chains and he was looking at a four-year-old boy, shirt off, feet in his pyjama bottoms, rubbing his eyes with sleep.