‘I know. There are problems with it.’
‘Like he wasn’t there? Would that be one of them?’ Low-key. But the last thing he needed now was to get homicide on Ron. Because they would have a good shot at finding him, which would put him and his kids back in the system. It would eliminate Hardy’s own private agenda – the only one, he believed, that could produce a satisfactory conclusion to this mess. So he asked, ‘What do you have on Bree? What did Griffin get?’
The mug stopped halfway to Glitsky’s mouth, then came back down. Glitsky’s normal expression was something between a frown and a scowl, and now it moved a few degrees south. ‘Carl might have had the case closed in two hours if he hadn’t died. Or he might have been nowhere. Either way, he didn’t get to writing up his reports. Paperwork wasn’t his strong point.’
‘What was?’
Glitsky narrowed his eyes. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘Well, he must have done something. Just because there’s not much in the file doesn’t mean there’s nothing.’ He had Glitsky’s interest now and he kept going. ‘Was Griffin married? Did he talk to his wife? Anybody in the office here? Who supervised at the crime scene? They must have gotten some kind of physical evidence at Bree’s place. I mean, Griffin was in this, right? He had to have something.’
Hardy found it a lot easier getting into the penthouse with the key that Ron had given him.
Once inside, he turned and locked the door behind him, then switched on the lights. Nothing obvious had changed since he and Canetta had walked out together last night, but Hardy felt a dim charge as he started for the office with the answering machine.
What was it?
Stopping completely, telling himself that it was probably the difference between being merely tired, which was last night, and semi-comatose, now, he still took a minute getting his bearings, casting his eyes around the periphery of the rooms.
While he’d been visiting downtown with Frannie and then Glitsky, he’d left his gun stowed in his trunk. When he got back to his car he’d tucked it back into his belt. Now, feeling stupid about it for the second time in five hours didn’t stop him from pulling it out again.
The paintings, the view, the dining area, all the same. It was nothing, he concluded. He was the walking dead at the moment, seeing ghosts, maybe playing with them.
But suddenly there it was.
He’d gone out to the balcony last night, and to do that he’d pulled the drapes aside a foot or two. He remembered it specifically because from the inside of the house, where he stood now, he hadn’t been able to see the French doors leading out to the balcony from which Bree had been thrown. He hadn’t known that the doors were there.
And now they were covered again, the drapes pulled closed.
He crossed the living room again, the dining area with its seating nook, trying to remember, growing more sure of it. Neither he nor Canetta had come anywhere near this area last night. And as Hardy was leaving, he’d glanced back at the room one last time – the French doors stuck in his mind, and that meant the drapes hadn’t been pulled closed.
Moving them aside again, he pushed open one of the doors and stepped back out on to the balcony, over to its edge. It still was a long way down. Fighting vertigo, he backed up a step. Nothing had been moved, nothing had changed.
So somebody had pulled the drapes against the unlikely event that he would be seen moving around twelve floors up at the scene of a murder.
A last glance and Hardy was inside, this time pulling the drapes behind him. He still had the gun in his hand. ‘Hello,’ he called out. ‘Anybody here?’
Silence.
Flicking the hall and room lights on before him, he took a tour of the back rooms, as he and Canetta had done last night. Nothing looked disturbed. Even the office, presumably the location of Bree’s important files, was as he’d last seen it.
Except for one thing. The counter on the answering machine, which last night had read ‘8,’ now was a zero.
All the messages had been erased.
PART TWO
14
Saturday morning in an empty house. Gradually over the past several years, but chronically it seemed in the last few months, Hardy wasn’t happy at home. Kids constantly underfoot, Frannie with her women friends, talking about kids mostly. Kids fighting, discipline. Kids’ sports, games, school, homework, lessons, meals they didn’t eat, pets they didn’t care for. Kids kids kids.
Whenever anyone asked him directly, he always said he loved his own kids, and he thought he did. But if he had it to do over, being honest with himself, he had doubts.
When they’d started out, Frannie and he had read all the books about marriages coping with the changes of a growing family. Hardy had often wondered since why somebody hadn’t written the real book, called ‘Children? Don’t!’ Because he’d come to believe that having a family didn’t simply change things – it ended that earlier existence. You might go into it thinking you were retaining the essentials of the old life, merely adding to its richness and variety. But in a few years you had a whole new life, and it felt as if none of it was really yours.
He’d come around to accepting as absolute fact that paradise would be sleeping in on a Saturday and waking up to an empty, quiet house. Maybe one that would stay that way.
Now, doing it, suddenly he wasn’t so sure.
The sun was in his eyes. He threw a forearm over them, then squinted out his bedroom window over the city. Where was he, anyway? It came back to him – he’d slept in his clothes, crashing on the bed. The gun was on his reading table, where the clock read eight thirty. He must have been a zombie on wheels. He didn’t remember anything about driving home, where he’d parked, letting himself in.
God, it was quiet.
Bones creaking, he forced himself to sit up, saw the gun and reached for it.
He got up and went into the bathroom, throwing cold water on his face, trying to wake all the way up. Through the rooms, then to the front door, which he’d locked, then back down the long hallway to the kitchen. The house felt hollow, as though the soul of it had been sucked out. The kids, he realized. Frannie.
It struck him forcibly – a revelation. Standing by his sturdy, rough-hewn table in a well-equipped and beautiful kitchen on a fantastic Indian summer morning, he felt nothing but an underlying sense of terror, a vast pervasive unease.
This was the alternative.
But he had work to do, and yesterday had been a reminder that the engine wouldn’t work without fuel. His black and ancient cast-iron pan was in its place on the back burner. No matter what he cooked in it, nothing ever stuck. He cleaned it only with salt and a wipe with a rag. Since Hardy had first cured it, the pan had never known detergent or water, and now its surface was a flat black pearl.
Turning the gas on under it, he threw down a thin layer of salt from the shaker, then crossed to the refrigerator. He grabbed a couple of eggs. Evidently Frannie had been marinating filet mignons for Thursday night when the grand jury session had intervened. Hardy picked one of the steaks from its ceramic bowl and dropped it into the pan, then broke an egg on either side of it.
There was a loaf of sourdough in its bag by the bread drawer and he sliced off about a third of it, cut it down the middle, poured some olive oil on to one of the cut sides, and placed it next to the sizzling steak.
While everything cooked on one side, he put on a pot of coffee, then turned the bread and the meat, laid the eggs on the toasted side, broke the yolks, turned off the pan, and went in to shower.
The day, when he hit the street outside, was impossibly bright, warm, and fragrant. He felt hopeful and motivated, a far cry from how he’d woken up, when he couldn’t figure out a move and then – unable to focus – hadn’t been able to locate his car for ten minutes.