Unless, of course, the person had a key to the Eloise. Or how about if she wasn’t going to remove something from the boat but was going to put something back in? For the twentieth time, Hardy tried to picture that drawer in the rolltop desk – the drawer where Abe had discovered the murder weapon, the same drawer he’d looked in on Wednesday night and seen nothing.
Maybe, as they were so fond of saying about baseball, it was a game of inches.
‘This is ridiculous.’
Abe hadn’t been thrilled to get his call before nine on a Saturday morning, but Hardy sweetly reminded him of his own call at six the day before. Besides, Glitsky was a cop first, and he was dressed and going out for another interview anyway. He might grumble, but Hardy knew that the murder of Owen Nash would get Abe’s attention until it was solved. As it was, Abe made it down to the Marina in less than a half hour and he, Hardy and José walked together in the steady rain out to where the Eloise still rested at her slip.
‘I know it is.’ Hardy agreed, but the implications of his what-ifs were staggering. He wouldn’t have to consider them – in fact he couldn’t – if he didn’t get this fact nailed down.
The police tape had been removed, and José unlocked the door and stepped aside so Glitsky could lead the way down.
The generators were off. It was dark inside. The rain thrummed above as the three of them stood a minute, letting their eyes adjust.
‘Looks about the same,’ Hardy said.
Glitsky wasn’t here to take inventory. ‘All right, what?’
Hardy went forward through the galley, the short hall, the master suite. The police might have removed May’s belongings but the room seemed eerily the same – the exercycle, desks, as though someone still lived aboard. Glitsky pulled back one of the curtains to let in a little more light, and Hardy walked to the rolltop desk. He opened the drawer.
‘Okay, humor me, would you? Take your time, close your eyes and visualize it. Show me exactly where you found the gun.’
Glitsky came around the bed and looked in at the open drawer. He took a small knife out of his pocket – ‘This is about the same length, right?’ – and placed it on top of the maps that were still in the drawer, back maybe three inches from the front.
Hardy nodded. ‘Did you jerk the drawer open?’ Which would have caused the gun to slip forward or backward on the maps.
Glitsky was patient. ‘No. I was my usual wonderful methodical self. You want to tell me what this is about?’
Hardy looked down again at the knife in the drawer, doing his own visualizing, making sure. He picked up the knife and gave it back to Glitsky. ‘The gun wasn’t there Wednesday night, Abe. I looked in this drawer.’
A new onslaught of rain raked the boat. In the room, it sounded like they were inside a tin drum. Hardy stood there in his hat and pea coat; Glitsky and José wore slickers. All the men had their hands in their pockets. The boat bumped the slip.
Glitsky thought on it. ‘So May came and brought the gun back Thursday morning.’
‘Making her the stupidest person in America.’
‘Maybe not. Maybe she saw her name in the paper and didn’t want it in her house.’
‘The gun hadn’t been in her house. It was here, remember. Besides, she didn’t have a key.’
‘You know, that’s probably worth double-checking at her apartment.’ Abe wrote himself a note. ‘Let me get this straight. You’re saying the shooter took the gun off this boat on Saturday. So who’s going to bring the gun back?’
‘Someone who wants to, and almost did, frame May.’
Glitsky looked around another minute. ‘You’d swear on this, about the gun?’
Hardy nodded. ‘It wasn’t here, Abe. Somebody came by here Thursday morning, unlocked the boat and put it in this drawer. Then they took May’s fancy coat from the closet along with a babushka or something like that, locked up and waltzed away.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they hated May.’ Hardy felt like he was on a roll. ‘Owen dumped somebody for May. So this person, the perp, killed Owen out of jealousy, then when they saw May linked to the Eloise, figured this was a good chance to get her too.’
Glitsky sucked at his teeth. ‘What time was this, when this person came back?’
Hardy glanced at José, making a little face. ‘It must have been pretty early.’
‘Then it doesn’t really let off your man Fowler, does it?’
‘Well, I was thinking it couldn’t very well have been a man at all. José here recognized the coat -’
The guard piped in, ‘It was a woman, sir. There’s no doubt of that.’
‘It was a woman wearing the coat, okay. It could have been a man who let himself onto the boat. It could have been two separate incidents.’
‘Andy didn’t have a key.’
‘You can’t prove a negative.’
Hardy was getting frustrated that Glitsky didn’t see this. ‘Abe, the coat was aboard here.’
‘How do we know that, Diz?’
‘May said it was here,’ he said. ‘Our perp took it, which was why it wasn’t in your inventory.’
Glitsky patiently answered. ‘I’m not saying it didn’t happen your way, Diz. I’m saying it also very well could have happened at least one other way. May could have worn the coat down here, seen Andy – hell, if he was framing her he could’ve invited her down for just that reason, so she’d be seen in her unique coat. After she realized what was happening she dumped the coat, then saw her chance to get it back by hassling us.’
‘That just didn’t happen, Abe.’
‘So prove it.’
‘It was a woman, Abe -’
Glitsky was not convinced. ‘I’d make pretty sure what your client was doing that morning before I brought it up to the jury. Besides, the only woman alive related to this case is Celine Nash. Aside from having no motive, she was in Santa Cruz. I checked.’
Hardy stood his ground. ‘I still think it was a woman.’
Glitsky shrugged. ‘Well, neither of us think May did it, so who…?’
Hardy’s mind was wrestling with the incomprehensible -Jane, his ex-wife, Andy Fowler’s daughter. She hadn’t told him the whole truth about her relationship with Owen Nash. It was understandable, why should she have, a one-time thing, he’d told himself. But what if…? All right, what if. Get tough, face the possible, however impossible. Jane had continued seeing Nash, he had dumped her for May Shinn… he had totally worked her, and she had killed him and either confided in her father or, somehow, he had found out on his own. No wonder he was acting genial, passive. Cover for his daughter… Would he have done everything he’d done with that motivation? Sure, he would have hated Nash. And this torch he was supposedly carrying for Shinn -didn’t it make more sense that he’d be angry at her for dropping him? There would be a sweetness in making her pay for his daughter’s crime. As pay she certainly had.
He parked in front of Jane’s house – once it had belonged to both of them – on Jackson in Pacific Heights. He had heard on the radio coming over that more than two inches of rain had already fallen since midnight. Going up the steps, he knocked at the custom door with its molded glass inlay. He saw a man’s form appear through the door. ‘Perfect,’ he thought, thinking he was about to meet Chuck Chuck Bo-Buck or whoever else was the man of the month.
The door opened and he was looking at his client.
‘Andy, we’ve got to talk,’ he said.
‘You are such a bastard.’ Jane was crying, her legs curled up under her on her bed.
‘Jane, I’m trying to save your father’s life here. It’s not been the best time I’ve ever had either.’
Hardy felt terrible seeing his ex-wife in tears. He could be glib – or pretend to be – about the men in her life after him, but he wasn’t blind to the fact that she was looking for the right one, that what she wanted was a man steady and strong who would love her and stay true and she wasn’t finding him. He supposed, perhaps wrongly, that he’d at least come the closest to that ideal, but something – their own history? – had made the commitment impossible.