‘Let’s hope so. And meanwhile she’s out walking around.’
‘That’s how it works.’ Farris shook his head.
Hardy thought he’d get away from it. ‘So how are things down in South City? Getting any better?’
Farris didn’t look better. There were bags under his eyes. His shoulders slumped. He sat kitty-corner to Hardy at a gray-topped metal table, his arms half-cupped – protectively – around the original of Owen’s will. May’s gun was also bagged on the table. The snake ring.
Farris shrugged. ‘The stocks went down, then back up. We’ve got contracts. People have work and life goes on.’ He looked back down at the piece of paper in front of him. ‘This, though, this is unbelievable. What was he doing?’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Owen. Two million dollars. Christ. Celine told me she talked to you.’
The man was jumping around, trying to find a foothold. Hardy still wasn’t comfortable talking about Celine. He’d been able to put her out of his mind, but if something came up that put her back in, she tended to stay. He didn’t really understand it. ‘When did you see her?’
‘Sunday. The cremation.’
The cremation. Farris – and Celine – they were both coming off that, too. They’d had a rocky week. ‘How’s she holding up?’
Farris seemed to be studying the will some more. ‘What? Oh, she’s pretty fragile right now. A little fixated on May. I talked her out of going to court for the arraignment.’
‘Good idea. What’s she say about May?’
‘She wonders why we waste all the time with arraignments and hearings and trials. And then there’ll be appeals. Somebody ought to go and just kill her. Celine says she’d do it herself.’
‘Try to talk her out of that, too, would you? It would be frowned on… You’re sure she did it, huh?’
That woke Farris up. ‘You’re not?
‘Whoa, I didn’t say that. We just can’t put her on the Eloise. It’s kind of a major detail.’
‘Well, I’ve got her on the Eloise. Celine told me Owen was meeting her on the Eloise.’
Hardy nodded. ‘She told me that, too.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, what? It’s hearsay. Inadmissible.’
‘Bullshit. She was on the boat.’
‘I didn’t say she wasn’t. We’re trying her for murder.’
‘Okay. Sorry.’ Farris looked down again, tapped the paper. ‘This is definitely Owen. Why didn’t he tell me about it?’
‘Maybe he thought it would never come up.’
‘How couldn’t it come up?’
‘If he didn’t die, how’s that? Maybe it was a goof, maybe he wrote the thing drunk. She might have dared him or something. The point is, it’s here, and it’s a damn good reason to kill somebody.’
‘Another one,’ Farris said.
‘What do you mean, another one?’
Farris frowned, as though surprised he’d been caught saying anything out loud. He rose from the chair, pushing the physical evidence back toward Hardy. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Figure of speech.’
24
Jeff Elliot went blind in Maury Carter’s office.
It had started, he guessed, on the night after he’d gone to the morgue. The tension of those moments, coupled with his first front-page article and the background stuff, had produced too much stress, and there had always been – and his doctors agreed – a correlation between stress and the onset of his attacks.
But MS was a sneaky thing. It wasn’t like it came up and wopped you upside the head. With his legs, it had begun with pins and needles one morning. His left leg just felt a little bit like it was asleep, like a low-voltage current was passing through it. Then, over the course of a couple of weeks, the feeling not only didn’t go away, it got worse and his leg became a weight he dragged around. Which was when he’d gone to the doctor and the bomb dropped.
The right leg had gone two years later. But since then he’d had five good years, three on Prednisone and then, because he hated the steroid, trying to get along without it. And, he had come to think, successfully.
So successfully that he hadn’t really related it to the MS when he woke up with slightly blurred vision. He ignored it. If he wasn’t looking directly at something, it was nothing.
This morning, though, he’d noticed it a lot. The right eye didn’t seem to focus at all, and there was a brown smudge over half of what he could see through his left eye. He should go to the doctor, but this was the chance he’d worked so hard for. He was the man of the hour.
Once he got a few more things tied up here he’d go see about his vision.
Maury Carter did business out of a building about two blocks from the Hall. There was a black-and-white four-foot-square sign above the doorway outside, bolted up against the old brick, that read ‘Bail Bondsman.’ Inside, a desk for Maury’s secretary took up the big front window. Behind that desk were file cabinets and acoustic baffling that served to separate Maury’s private office from the street.
It was Tuesday afternoon. Jeff had spent most of the morning following up on what he’d missed the day before – May’s bail. It wasn’t a stop-the-presses story anyway -people, even murder suspects, made bail all the time – but it bothered him that he’d found it out on television. He had to keep concentrating on his story, not worry about his eyes.
And the real story now, if it existed and he could get it, was the Shinn/Freeman connection. Along with the fact that May had made bail, he’d discovered Freeman’s billing rates, so Hardy and Glitsky must have been right -there was a source of money somewhere.
But Dorothy, Maury’s secretary, said she wasn’t supposed to talk about their clients, ‘but we can talk about anything else. Maury’s over at the Hall. Do you want to wait? I can get you some coffee.’
Jeff thought she was about the nicest girl he’d met in San Francisco. She wore a print dress and her skin was fair with a few freckles. It occurred to Jeff that she might even think he was okay, in spite of his crutches.
She, too, was from the Midwest – Ohio – and had been out here for four months, living with a girlfriend in the Haight, which wasn’t anything like she’d expected it to be. She was going back to school to get her nursing degree; she’d already majored in bio, so it shouldn’t be too hard, but she was going to be doing it at night and until then this job paid the bills.
Jeff could have listened all day, was even starting to feel comfortable telling her a little about himself. He found himself looking around the growing brown smudge, willing it away in the vision of her, but then Maury came in, who’d actually put up the bond. And the reason Jeff was here came back.
Maury wasn’t going to tell him, though. It was confidential information. They were back in Maury’s part of the office now, behind the partition. ‘But we know how much the bail was.’
Maury had a shiny, deep forehead with white steel-wool for eyebrows. On the map of his face, his nose was a small continent. His ears stuck out and his jowls hung. He leaned back in his chair, feet on his desk, and brought his cigar to his purplish lips. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Blowing out a line of blue smoke, he chewed reflectively on his tongue. ‘Then what can I tell you?’
‘May Shinn put up fifty thousand dollars?’
‘As you say, you know how much the bail is.’
Jeff was fighting a kind of ringing panic attack. He looked down at his notepad and found he couldn’t make out what he’d written there.
‘Bail was half a million,’ he persisted. It was the stress, this circular discussion. He should end it and get out of here. The room was closing in – the cigar smoke, the funny light. ‘Let’s be hypothetical,’ he said. ‘Your normal fee – suppose I’m a client now – is ten percent, right?’