‘It’s probably going to be beautiful there tomorrow.’
‘Hardy, read the papers, will you? This is supposed to go on all weekend.’
‘Jeff, it’ll be an adventure. Take your girlfriend, go down there and have a little vacation, on me. What’s a little rain among lovers?’
He got himself a large can of Foster’s Lager and a handful of nuts and walked through the long and suddenly lonely house. Wind howled between the buildings, the rain fell without letup, the worst storm in years.
He turned on the Christmas-tree lights, planted his beer and nuts on the reading table next to his reclining chair and put a match under the kindling in the fire.
Sam Cooke played in his mind – Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody. Forget that. He had brought up his binders and was going to go through them again.
His own notes. He’d taken so many notes he thought his wrist was going to fall off. Every time he had spoken to Pullios, Drysdale, Glitsky, Farris, Celine (while it had still been strictly professional), he had jotted down at least the gist of the conversations if they concerned this case. Random thoughts, theories of Moses and Frannie, of Pico and his old officemates.
At a little after ten-thirty he got up for another beer, after which he was going to hang it up for the night and get some sleep. He had just gotten to the time Ken Farris had come downtown, ostensibly to verify Owen’s handwriting on the will. Hardy remembered that they had gotten into how the system worked too slowly – Farris knew May had been on the Eloise... Celine had told him. Hardy had dutifully noted it, then written ‘hearsay’ in the margin and had, if not forgotten it, at least dropped it from his active consideration.
Celine had also told Hardy that May had planned to go out on the Eloise with Owen. They’d been walking back from their first meeting; he remembered it, now, distinctly.
May, however, had denied it, and May, it turned out, was telling the truth.
So Celine had lied… except he still couldn’t prove it. Opening the refrigerator, he stopped. He slammed the door closed and nearly ran back up through the house to his binders.
It took only a minute. It had been when Pullios had him question Celine in front of the grand jury, trying for the indictment on May Shinn. Celine had testified that on Tuesday morning, June 16, she had called her father at his office, wanting to make sure he hadn’t made any plans for that weekend that included her. He had said no, that he and May were going out alone on the Eloise.
Okay, Celine’s version was in the record. But it was still hearsay. It was also a lie, but how to prove -?
Farris’s office.
Where there was a beep every twenty seconds and everything was on tape?
61
Hardy slept fitfully, waking before dawn.
Rain continued to fall, but more gently now, in a thick drizzle. He showered and dressed and sat drinking coffee, staring at the clock on the wall, wondering what would be a reasonable time to call Ken Farris again. Reasonable or not, he wanted to call him before he had time to leave the house.
He went back to the binders and read over the testimony, wanting to make sure – although he knew it – that it hadn’t been fatigue. He had asked Celine when she had called her father.
‘Sometime in the morning. It was the Tuesday, I believe.’
‘The sixteenth?’
‘If that was the Tuesday, yes. He was at his office down in South San Francisco…’
He held out until seven-fifteen, about the longest ninety minutes of his life. Farris didn’t appear to appreciate his restraint.
‘What the hell, Hardy? What time is it?’
He told him, apologizing, explaining, keeping him on the line. ‘I’ve got a real lead,’ he concluded. ‘I don’t want to put you through all this again, give you another suspect to worry about, but I think I’ve found a place to finally get some physical evidence.’ He told him his conjecture about the tapes. ‘Please tell me you’ve still got them.’
‘We should,’ he said, ‘we keep them for six months.’
‘So you’ve still got the ones for June?’
‘I don’t know. Is that six months? I’m not really awake yet, you know.’
‘What I’d like to do is review the last two weeks of June, all the calls Nash made or took at his office.’
Farris sounded like he yawned. At least he was waking up. ‘That’s all? How about a full-scale audit while you’re at it?’
Hardy could take a little abuse if he was going to get what he wanted. He waited.
‘Shit, why not? You looking for anything in particular?’
‘Something, yeah, but I’d rather not say exactly what just now.’
‘I mention it because we keep logs. You won’t have to listen to all the tapes if you know who you want.’ He went on, sounding more like himself now. ‘I know all this taping seems like excessive security, but we’re in a high-tech field. There really is espionage. People have claimed oral contracts with me or Owen on some things. We like to protect ourselves.’
‘You don’t have to justify a thing to me. Where do you keep the logs?’
‘They’re in South City at the plant. We’ve got a vault.’ Farris sighed. ‘I don’t imagine this is going to wait until, say, business hours tomorrow morning, is it?’
Dorothy took the exit and headed the car up the hill away from the ocean. The wipers clickety-clacked on the flat windshield of the old VW bug. The windows on both sides were down an inch to act as defrosters. Both she and Jeff wore parkas for warmth. The heater didn’t work. The drive to Santa Cruz down Highway 1 from San Francisco had taken them a little over an hour, and they probably should have been in sour moods. Dorothy rolled down her window further and put her hand out, catching raindrops.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever hate the rain again.’
‘Maybe we should move to Oregon.’
‘Tierra del Fuego,’ she said. ‘It rains all the time there, I hear.’ They had used yesterday’s storm as an excuse to stay inside for the whole day, nothing to do but curl up, stay warm, enjoy each other. When Hardy had called they were ready to go outside. Not dying for it, but it had some appeal. ‘I’ve got to meet this friend of yours, Hardy. What a great idea!’
‘Well, he’s not exactly a friend. He’s a source.’
‘If you remember, I was a source for your bail story.’
‘You’re prettier than he is. A little bit, anyway.’ She slapped him. The car swerved and she straightened it. They were driving through a heavily wooded pine section back up behind the UC campus. A brown slick of water ran down the center of the street. There was a house about every two hundred yards.
‘I think that was our street you just passed,’ Jeff said. ‘Plus you said you’d have an idea by now.’
She pulled the car over and stopped, looking behind her at the street sign. She started making a U-turn. ‘I do have an idea,’ she said, ‘although I don’t know why I have to think of everything.’
Jeff put his hand on her leg. ‘I think of some things.’ She smiled, looked down, and covered his hand with her own, driving now with one hand. She squeezed it. ‘Yes, you do.’
The idea was to get them talking.
Len and Karl weren’t home – they were down at the gym, pumping iron together. They did it every morning, Karl’s mother explained. They were religious about it. Both were very disciplined boys, very structured. Len was currently runner-up Mr Northern California and Karl was going down to Santa Monica right after New Year’s for the Gold’s Gym prelims.
The three of them, Jeff, Dorothy, Mrs Franck, sat in the kitchen nook – brand new hardwood floors, a custom oak table, curved glass in the windows. They were drinking herb tea and Mrs Franck had cut up some fiber bars into cookielike things. The old Victorian house was large, newly painted, immaculate. Everywhere there were new rugs, framed prints on the walls, antiques.