This cleansing Pacific downpour soothed him somehow. He sat back in his seat, eyes closed, listening to the steady tattoo of the drops on the roof.
There was still an unanswered question with May -the coat – maybe it would lead somewhere. And then on Monday Chomorro might decide to grant his 1118.1 motion and that would be the end of the trial, and he felt sure, the end of his relationship with both his ex-wife and her father. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
Whatever, if he got Andy off on the murder charge, which is what he’d been hired to do, he’d take whatever fallout developed.
But he also knew the trial coming to an early end was a very long shot. And it still nagged that the truth, if there was a truth, continued to elude him. He could get Andy off, he could flap his arms and fly to the moon if he wanted, but until he found out who did put two bullets into Owen Nash, he knew he wouldn’t feel he’d accomplished what he’d really set out to do.
If nothing else, he would still have to live with the fact that he was only ninety-seven-percent certain that Nash’s killer had not been the man he had labored to set free.
59
It had rained hard all night, awakening Hardy and Frannie several times with peals of thunder, a sound almost unknown in San Francisco. Sometime in the middle of the night Hardy got up to Rebecca’s cries and brought her to sleep between them in their bed.
Up alone at dawn, he put on his running shoes, shorts and a t-shirt, and headed out around the park in the rain. After a shower he made himself a breakfast of hash, eggs, toast and coffee, and ate reading the paper, occasionally looking up into the gray clouds through the kitchen skylight.
Jeff Elliot was not featured on the front page or anywhere else. The day-to-day workings of the trial were not exactly grist for the media mill. He knew Jeff would be around when the jury retired to deliberate, maybe sit in for the closing arguments, but that the mundane world of the courtroom was no match for the exploits of Arnold Mousenegger. Journalistic priorities. Mice over men.
After breakfast he leaned over to kiss his wife and baby. He wore jeans and work boots, his old Greek sailor’s hat over a heavy white fisherman’s sweater. He hoped that this day, of all days, José decided to get to work on time.
It was still steadily pouring as Hardy turned into the Marina parking lot on a day possibly much like the one on which Owen Nash had gone out for the last time. There were only two other cars in the lot; Hardy got within fifty feet of the guard station, opened his car door, grabbed his smaller briefcase and sprinted.
José, at the desk beyond the counter, put down his issue of Sports Illustrated and stood up. He recognized Hardy right away.
‘I bet you’re getting a little bored with this, but I’ve got a couple of questions for you,’ Hardy said. He took off his hat and put it on the counter next to the briefcase.
José seemed to be an easygoing guy. It was a miserable morning with no one else around. He was happy with the interruption.
‘I was going over your statement yesterday, José.’ Hardy snapped open the briefcase and was getting out some of the paper. ‘And there’s something I didn’t understand.’
José nodded, leaning over the counter, looking at the inch-thick pile of type. He grinned. ‘I say all that?’
‘Well, between your interview with Sergeant Glitsky and your trial testimony -’
‘My girlfriend, she say I’m too quiet, I never talk. I should show her these.’
‘I could make you a copy if you want,’ Hardy said. ‘Meanwhile, let me ask you, see here, when you were first talking to Sergeant Glitsky…’ Hardy opened the transcript to the page he had highlighted and turned it around for José to see. ‘At the end of the interview you said you’d seen May Shinn here at the Marina on Thursday morning.’
Jose was frowning, looking at the page. ‘Si,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Tom and me, we talk about that after we see she kill herself, right?’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘Well, you know after the trial, we talk about that day.’
‘The Thursday?’
‘Si. Only I see her in the morning, you know?’
‘I know, José. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.’ He pointed down to the transcript. ‘You see this part? Where you say she was going away from you?’
‘Si.’
‘So how could you be sure it was May?’
‘Well, I see her a lot. Tambien, that thing she wear on her head, and that coat. Nobody else with a coat like that one.’
Hardy tried to keep his voice flat. ‘What was the thing she was wearing on her head?’
‘I don’t know how you call it. Like a fur hat.’
‘And the coat?’
‘Well, you know, the coat like some,’ he searched for the word, ‘like some painting. Muchos colores.’
‘Okay, José, let me ask you this, and I’ve got all day if you want to think about it – did you at any time see May’s face?’
‘No. I don’t have to think. She was, like, way down there.’ He gestured down the street. ‘She don’t have a car, I think. Least I never see her drive a car. She always before come down with Seňor Nash.’
‘She never came down alone, maybe a little early to wait for him, let herself aboard?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Not that I remember. Maybe Tom, he know something else.’
‘Maybe.’ Hardy, trying different combinations, had to look back down at the questions he had prepared. This time he did not want to leave anything out. ‘José, do you remember what time you got into work that morning, that Thursday?’
José straightened up nervously. ‘The shift begin at six-thirty.’
Hardy gave him a conspiratorial look. ‘I know that, José. But I’m talking about that specific day. I won’t tell a soul, I promise.’ He was hoping he wouldn’t have to make José himself tell the world on the stand, but he wasn’t promising that.
José shrugged. ‘I think a little late. Tom talk to me about it that day, I remember. Somebody come by the day before, asking about it, too. So I stop after that.’
Hardy smiled at him. ‘You were safe,’ he said, ‘that was me. But that day…?’
José grinned back. ‘Pretty bad,’ he said. ‘Maybe eight, eight-thirty.’ The rain pounded at the glass all around them. ‘But I really stop being tarde back then, you know? This morning, even, no one going out, I’m here.’
He was close to Green’s, a place he favored for lunch for their breads and coffees and the sculpted wood and the view of the water. He had never been there this early in the morning, and they weren’t yet open for business, but they took pity on him standing out in the rain and let him sit at the bar and have a cup of coffee.
Okay, it wasn’t certain that it hadn’t been May. Remember that. Keeping up about the trial on her own, May could have realized the implications of José‘s testimony – she’d been seen in her coat – and then gotten rid of it, trying to scam with Struler to cover where it had gone.
He didn’t think so.
What he thought, was at least beginning to consider, to realize it had been perking for a while, was that someone else – the person who had really killed Owen Nash – had returned to the Eloise on Thursday morning. Maybe she -it had to be a she now, even in May’s coat José wasn’t going to mistake Andy Fowler for May Shinn – maybe she had left something incriminating on the boat, and seeing the Eloise in the morning paper, realized she’d have to work fast. Helped by José‘s tardiness, she had gone aboard, taken out whatever it was, stolen May’s coat so that in case she was seen (which she was), identification would be confusing.
But wait… she couldn’t have gotten aboard. Tom had locked up the boat in Hardy’s presence the night before, and José had rechecked it on his shift the next day.