After seeing her father led from his office wearing handcuffs – that was the drill – she didn’t care what he thought about it, she was going to see him, so she’d driven out to his house. Frannie, obviously pregnant again, had about six other infants and a few other women in their house. Had they opened a daycare center or what? No, this was their playgroup – other new mothers supporting each other. There was a pang. This hadn’t been a feature in Jane’s life during the months she and Hardy had been new parents.
Frannie had been, as always, polite, and had told her where she could find Dismas, who always left the house on Tuesday afternoons. She explained that Dismas was good around one infant or perhaps even two. But when the number got to four plus their mothers, he reached his critical mass and tended to want to disappear. He was undoubtedly playing darts at the Little Shamrock. She should try there.
Seeing Jane, Hardy lit up briefly, then frowned. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. She told him in about twenty seconds. Hardy’s dart opponent had finished his turn. ‘Hardy,’ he said.
He told Jane to give him a minute, went to the chalk line and threw three darts – a twenty, a seventeen and a double six. The other man swore and took out his wallet. Hardy was already pulling the flights from his darts, putting the shafts back in his leather case.
‘Double or nothing?’ the other man asked.
Hardy shook his head. ‘Can’t do it.’ He pocketed the man’s bill and led Jane up to the bar.
‘What do you want me to do, Jane?’
‘I want you to see him, I want you to help him.’
‘How?’
She didn’t know. Hardy had been unemployed for three months. He had put on thirteen pounds. Under the guise of improving his dart game and preparing to play in some big tournaments, he was drinking about six Guinnesses every day between one, when the Shamrock opened, and about five, when he went home. The latest Guinness arrived.
‘Daddy needs you,’ Jane said. ‘It’s ridiculous. He wouldn’t kill anybody, Dismas, you know that.’
Hardy said nothing. He didn’t know that, nobody knew that.
‘Come on,’ she said.
‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘You’ll think of something. You’re the lawyer.’
‘So’s he, so are all his friends.’ Hardy shook his head. He’d think of something; he liked that. ‘I’m sure he’s already got a lawyer.’
‘But he needs somebody he can count on, not just somebody he’s paying.’
‘I’m not a lawyer anymore, and even if I were, I’m not a defense lawyer. I’ve never defended anybody in my life.’
‘Look, I’m only asking you to see him. He’s done you favors, more than one. You owe him.’
In a way, maybe so. He still felt bad – justified but bad nonetheless – about Andy’s early retirement, guilty that he’d forced it so quickly when the whole thing had proved unnecessary. Since their meeting at the fern bar, Hardy and Andy hadn’t spoken. ‘I didn’t leak it, Jane.’
Jane narrowed her eyes. ‘But you were the only one who knew about him and May. It had to be you.’
Hardy shook his head. ‘From the phone records. I didn’t know anything about the bail. The Chronicle guy, the reporter, he’s the one that found the bail story.’
‘Daddy thought it was you.’
‘Well, it wasn’t. And if he did, why would he want to see me now?’
‘He didn’t exactly say he did. I’m saying it. I think it would be good for him, for both of you.’
Hardy sighed. Jane wasn’t going to go away. Besides, he wasn’t doing anything else. How could it hurt?
Hardy followed Jane in his own car.
It was a warm October day, Indian summer in San Francisco. The top was down and there was plenty of time to ponder. He found it nearly impossible to imagine that they had arrested Andy Fowler for the murder of Owen Nash. He knew that Locke personally disliked the man and that Pullios was capable of carrying a grudge of impressive proportions, but all that aside, you needed evidence to indict a man, a former judge, for murder, even more to convict. Hardy hadn’t heard about any new evidence turning up, and he was sure he would have.
He still saw Glitsky once a week or so, talked to him every few days. By the time he and Frannie had gotten back from Hawaii, the Nash case had faded from the newspapers, but Glitsky had come by the house, filling Hardy in.
Apparently Ken Farris had made an honest mistake about the last time he had seen Nash. In fact, it had been on Thursday. People made mistakes. He had flown to Taos on Friday, ate out in restaurants in Taos on both Friday and Saturday nights, flown back Monday morning.
Austin Brucker, Mr Silicon Valley, had vacated the presidency of the company Owen Nash had set him up in and started a new venture of his own – something to do with ceramic fibers – down in San José. With a staff of five engineers he’d been in his shop all day every day for the months of April, May and June, and according to all sources, would remain there until next Groundhog Day at the earliest.
Glitsky, being thorough, had even looked into Celine. Her fingerprints had been all over the Eloise, which was to be expected – she said that she had often gone sailing with her father. The friends she had visited in Santa Cruz were an unlikely trio of two gay bodybuilders and one of their mothers, all of whom verified that Celine had spent the weekend with them, helping with the remodeling of their old Victorian house.
The one surprise was that Celine’s fingerprints had shown up in the arrest database. If you had never been arrested, your fingerprints might be on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles, but by far the most accessible record to the police, and thus the first place they looked, was the database of people who had been arrested.
‘Celine was arrested?’
‘Twice. Shoplifting when she was twenty, reduced to reckless trespass, dismissed. And prostitution.’
‘Prostitution?’
‘I know, like she needed the money, right. Anyway, it was fifteen years ago. I questioned her on it. It’s not what you would call one of her favorite memories. She says it was a misunderstanding. She also says it was just after her first marriage ended, and she was having a bad time.’
‘Which was it, a bad time or a misunderstanding?’
‘I know, that was a little iffy. Either way, it never got charged. When your father’s Owen Nash…’
‘Money keeps talking, doesn’t it,’ Hardy had said, and Glitsky said he believed it did.
So with Farris, Brucker and Celine accounted for, only one righteous suspect was left, and that was Andy Fowler. But – and what had plagued this case from every angle since it began – Glitsky could find no evidence linking him to Owen Nash, or to the Eloise.
Andy had been out of town, hiking in the Sierras, though apparently he had seen no one. But he hadn’t known Owen Nash – there was no record of their having met. While Hardy was in Hawaii, it had come out that Andy Fowler had had a long-term relationship with May Shinn but that it had ended about the time she met Nash.
‘I don’t think that was a coincidence, Abe.’
‘No. I don’t either. So what? Fowler swears he never heard of Nash until he read about him in the papers.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘There’s nothing to contradict it. Nothing to put him on the boat. What’s the motive? Eliminate a rival, get her back. Oldest one in the world. You’ve got to understand, Diz. People do think Fowler might have done it. Locke wants his ass in a big way. But if he did do it, he did it right. There’s no way Locke or Rigby or anybody else is going to make a move until we’ve got more than we had with Shinn, which we sure as hell do not.’