‘So you picked her up.’
‘If only it had been that simple. I hadn’t done anything like that in thirty years, Diz. When you’re a judge…’
Hardy drank his porter, waited. ‘So what happened?’
‘She left, said it was nice meeting me but she had to go. I stayed around a little longer and thought that was that.’ He paused. ‘But it wasn’t. I found I couldn’t get her out of my mind, kept picturing her in some of the positions. Sorry, I know it’s not my image.’
Hardy shrugged. ‘Everybody needs love, Andy.’
‘That sounds good enough when you say it. Try denying it, though, try burying it under your work and your image and your public life until you really believe you don’t need it anymore.’
‘I did it after Michael, and Jane.’
‘So you know. You tell yourself your life is just as good, just as full. It’s not like you don’t do things, but you’re so alone. Nothing resonates.’ Andy got quiet and stared outside at the empty street. ‘So a couple of days later,’ the judge went on, ‘I came back to the gallery and asked the owner if she remembered the woman I’d spoken with. She said she was a regular client.’
‘So she does deal in art?’
‘Who, May? No, she collects some, but I wouldn’t say she deals in it. Anyway, the owner knew her, but she wouldn’t tell me her name, even after I told her who I was. Not that I blame her. As we know, there are a lot of nuts out there, even among my colleagues. So I gave her my card, asked her to have this lady call me. She said she would.’
‘So you got together.’
‘No. Not yet. She didn’t call.’ He swirled his rum, put it back on the table untouched. ‘But I wanted her, I didn’t know her at all and I didn’t care. I had to see her again. I don’t know what it was.’
The vision of Celine Nash danced up before Hardy’s eyes and he drowned it in porter. ‘Okay, what?’
‘I gave it a week, then I went back in and bought one of the wood-cuts, forty-five hundred dollars, and told the owner to send it to May.’
‘That’ll eliminate the riffraff element.’
‘The money wasn’t important. I’ve got money. In any event it got her to call and thank me, and I told her I wanted to see her and she still said no, she couldn’t do that.
‘I asked her why, was she married, engaged, not interested in men? No? At least tell me why. So she agreed to meet me for dinner. And she told me.’
‘Her profession?’
‘What she did, yes. She was scared, me being a judge, that I’d bust her.’ He laughed, clipped and short. ‘I had to promise her immunity up front. I did want her, Diz. What she had done made no difference to me. I told her I wasn’t interested in that kind of relationship, paying her -I liked her, I wanted to see her, take her out legitimately. She laughed. She didn’t do that. So I asked if I could see her at all, under any conditions.’
‘Jesus, Andy…“
‘No, it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t groveling. It was more good-natured negotiating.’
‘So what’d the negotiating get to?’
The judge focused across the room. ‘Three thousand dollars.’
Hardy swallowed, took a long drink, swallowed again. ‘Three thousand dollars? For one time?’
‘No, per month.’
‘You paid May Shinn three thousand dollars a month?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lord, Lord, Lord.’
‘After the first couple of months I would have paid anything. Don’t laugh. I fell in love with her, Diz. I still love her.’
‘Andy, you don’t pay somebody you love.’
‘The money was never discussed after that first night. I thought she was coming around.’
‘To what? What could she be coming around to?’
‘To loving me.’
It was so simple, so basic, so incredibly misguided, Hardy didn’t know what to say. ‘What about her other clients?’
‘She dropped them all, almost immediately. That was one of the things that gave me some hope…’
‘That she would love you?’
‘I suppose.’
‘And then what? You marry her and have a happy little family?’
Fowler shook his head. ‘No, I never thought we’d get married. She made me happy, that was all. She was there for me. She filled up that space. I thought I was doing the same for her.’
‘But you weren’t.’
‘For a while I’m sure I was. She started cooking me meals, making special dishes, giving me presents – the paperweight, for example – things like that. Then four or five months ago it just ended. She called and said we couldn’t go on.’
‘Owen Nash?’
‘I assume so. I didn’t know it then. She said to just make believe she had died. But she was happy, I shouldn’t worry. I shouldn’t worry…’
Hardy sat back into the leather of the booth. All this tracked with Andy’s malaise over the past months, his explanation to Jane about a friend dying. Frannie and Jane had both, independently, been right. A woman had broken a man’s heart, the oldest story in the world.
But now, that story told, the judge had to move on. He took a gulp of his rum. ‘So that’s it, Diz, now you know.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘That’s what Eve said after she ate the apple. It was too late then, too.’
Hardy leaned forward again, arms on the table. ‘You can’t be on the case, Andy. I just don’t understand how it could have gotten this far.’
The answer – the same one that Fowler had given Freeman earlier in the day – was that it had come a step at a time: the Muni-Court arraignment with no chance of getting to Fowler’s courtroom anyway, then the grand-jury indictment leaving only one chance in six it would come to him, then his decision not to go and beg off privately to Leo Chomorro because that Hispanic Nazi would use the Fowler/Shinn relationship as political ammunition against Fowler. Andy didn’t mention the ace-in-the-hole that hadn’t worked – Freeman challenging out of his courtroom. He didn’t have any intention of opening that can of worms. So far, no one else knew he had hired Freeman, and he intended to keep things that way.
‘So then I figured if, after all that, it dropped in my lap, well then, it was fate. You know there’s going to be prejudice against her being Japanese, her profession. At least I could give her an even playing field. I could have helped her. She might have come back to me. There was no reason it had to come out. There isn’t now. I wouldn’t obstruct justice, Diz. I just wouldn’t do it.’
Hardy wanted to tell him he already had. Instead he said, ‘The rationalization maybe moves it out of disbarment range, Andy, but you and I both know it’s still unethical. You know the defendant – hell, you’ve been intimate with the defendant. If that’s not a conflict…’
What could he say? Andy knew this as well as he did. ‘You’ve got to take yourself off the case.’
‘If I did, I’d have to give a reason and I can’t do that.’
Hardy’s drink was gone. He picked up the glass, tried it, put it down. ‘You could retire.’
‘Right now, without notice?’
‘The trial isn’t tomorrow, Andy. There’s plenty of time. It’ll get reassigned. The phone records in the file aren’t strictly relevant to the murder. The police only asked for June twentieth. The rest doesn’t have to be there.’
This was not ethical either, and Hardy wasn’t sure he could do it. The file was the public record. Tampering with it, suppressing potential evidence – even if its relevance hadn’t been demonstrated – was a felony. Still, he wasn’t telling Andy he’d take the earlier phone records out, not in so many words. And if he didn’t say it explicitly, he didn’t say it at all. That was this game, and Andy Fowler played it, too.