‘So did you have a nice talk with Jane?’ Hardy asked.
‘Do you know she knew Owen Nash?’
Hardy was sitting on the couch beside Jeffs desk, drinking tepid coffee from a styrofoam cup. He tried to keep his voice calm. ‘What?’
‘Jane, the judge’s daughter.’ The reporter kept typing away. ‘Your ex-wife, right?’
‘She knew Owen Nash?’
‘Yeah. Just a sec.’ He finished whatever he was working on, then spun a quarter-turn in his chair. ‘Are you all right?’
Hardy was sitting back on the couch, his hand to his head. ‘How did she know Owen Nash?’
‘In Hong Kong, last year. She was over there on some buying thing. Just social stuff, a cocktail party for Americans abroad. But small world, huh?’
He remembered Jane’s trip to Hong Kong. It was before he and Frannie had gotten together, or, more precisely, it was during the time he and Frannie had connected.
When Jane had left for Hong Kong she and Hardy had been – more or less – together, trying it out again after the divorce and eight years of true separation where they had not so much as run into one another in the relatively small town that was San Francisco.
While she was over there, while Dismas and Frannie were falling in love, Jane had confessed to Hardy that she had had her own small infidelity. Hardy knew a lot about Jane and a few things about Owen Nash. Jane was right around May’s age. Both she and Nash liked excitement. Both were given to spontaneous action.
But Hong Kong was a crowded place. There was no reason to think that because Jane had met up with Owen Nash that she’d slept with him. But there was also no reason to think she couldn’t have.
And if she did…
Driving home, another truly perverse thought occurred to him. His friend Abe Glitsky was unhappy with Elizabeth Pullios for building a homicide case outside the framework of the police department. Abe had even mentioned considering bringing obstruction-of-justice charges against the district attorney’s office, and wouldn’t that be a wonder to behold. Of course, it would never happen, but it indicated Abe’s state of mind.
Now, Hardy thought, wouldn’t it be sweet if Abe discredited Pullios’s investigation by pursuing one of his own – teach her and her boss the D.A. a lesson in interdepartmental protocol… which would mean that Abe, in effect, would be doing police work for the defense. Smiling still hurt.
He sat with his arm around Frannie on the top deck of the ferry to Jack London Square in Oakland. There were still another two weeks of daylight savings time and the sun hadn’t yet set. The Bay was calm and as they approached Alameda it seemed to grow warmer. Though only twelve miles separated the cities, it wasn’t unknown to find twenty degrees of difference between the temperatures in Oakland and San Francisco.
This was a Wednesday, and headache or not, date night was a sacred tradition. He pulled her in closer to him. ‘You can hang in there?’ he said. ‘It might be a while.’
‘I can handle a while – even a long time. Just keep me included, will you? We’re on the same side.’
‘Promise,’ he said.
‘And while you’re making promises, I need one more.’
He nodded.
‘This baby is getting itself born in four months, and trial or no trial, I want you there with me, just like with Rebecca.’
‘Hopefully not just like Rebecca.’ Rebecca had been thirty hours of grueling labor.
‘You know what I mean.’ His wife was leaning into him. She looked up. God, she was beautiful. Hardy and Frannie had come together when she’d been about five months pregnant with Rebecca – five months like now. Hardy thought it had to be the most attractive time in a woman’s life.
After this morning, the agonies had been put aside for both of them. They were moving forward. They’d gotten through a bad time. That’s what ‘for better or worse’ meant, didn’t it – that you had some worse?
He kissed her. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said.
‘So you promise?’
‘Promise.’
43
They were back home by nine-thirty and Hardy began working on his conflict-of-interest brief in his office, typing it himself. Without a law library at hand, he had to make do in a couple of places, but he had several rows of lawbooks and periodicals on his shelves, and anyway, the gist of his argument was the one he had presented orally in court.
The closest thing to a precedent against him had been in a case where an assistant district attorney had been in the midst of trying a case against a Hell’s Angel when he’d been hired away from the district attorney’s office by the firm representing the defendant. There, the judge had prohibited the representation.
And Hardy agreed that there, clearly, a conflict existed. He was sure that Pullios would try to draw a parallel to this case, but Hardy was certain that the differences here far outweighed the similarities: he had not been the counsel of record for May Shinn. Andy Fowler hadn’t been the defendant. All they had was the same victim, and the evidence against May Shinn in that earlier case was part of the public record. Hardy believed he knew nothing – officially – that a concerned layman couldn’t have discovered.
Of course, he knew about the phone records, but that wasn’t official. Also, he didn’t know whether anyone in the D.A.‘s office knew about the phone records.
He finished at one A.M. and called an all-night messenger service. The brief would be at Judge Braun’s office when she arrived at her office in the morning.
There was nothing to do but wait for Braun to read both briefs and make her decision.
He slept in until nine-thirty and went for his first run in weeks, the four-mile circle. His ribs were unhappy with that decision but he ran through the stitch in both sides. If he was going to do this, he would be in shape for it.
Frannie went to visit her mother-in-law down in the Sunset, and Hardy got out his black cast-iron pan and turned the heat up to high under it.
Now he cut up half an onion, threw in a couple of cloves of garlic, diced a small potato, opened the refrigerator and found two leftover porkchops and cut them up. He was humming some Dire Straits and stirring when the telephone rang.
It was Marian Braun’s clerk saying the judge had ruled in his favor.
He would have to play it very close. He surely didn’t want Abe to think that he’d been obstructing justice himself. Abe’s fuse was getting justifiably short around that issue.
Hardy leaned across Glitsky’s desk. ‘You’ve still got them,’ he said, ‘and by “you” I mean the prosecution. They’re still in the file.’
‘What do you know about them?’ The phone records.
‘Almost nothing.’ Not true. ‘I checked Fowler’s calls to Shinn, but I just wonder if there might have been others, if she had other clients who might have had a motive.’
Glitsky took a minute. ‘Diz, the state’s got a defendant. It’s not like I’m bored in my job. This city’s got more murders than Cabot Cove, and I’m on five of them right now. The Nash homicide, from our perspective, is a closed case.’
Hardy shuffled through some papers on Glitsky’s desk. ‘Well, you do what you want, but I’m going to clear Fowler, and this case is going back to open status. And if Fowler’s not guilty, then someone else is, right? If you found something, it might be interesting to let Pullios know where it came from. We’re talking justice here, Abe.’
‘Also lots of “ifs,” Diz. Plus lots of legwork.’
‘Isn’t that what you do, Abe? Legwork?’
‘It’d have to be on my spare time.’
‘Whatever,’ Hardy said. ‘I’ve just got a feeling I’m going to find a few stones unturned here. Locke wants to get Fowler. That message comes down, people might start thinking they see things that aren’t there.’