Glitsky had been sitting quietly, arms crossed, waiting for this. He shook his head. ‘That’s page three. The Mellon account had only used the Caloco account for security to open it. Far as Mellon was concerned, Ron Brewster was a great client with a five-year history of regular payments. No way are they closing the account. Plus the Mellon account, it’s not using any of Caloco’s money. So Ron’s got himself a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar line of credit.’ Glitsky leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘You’ll also notice that the Mellon account doesn’t include Bree as a signatory, only Ron. And guess what? Ron Brewster’s signature looks a whole lot like Ron Beaumont’s writing. We’re dealing with a white-collar whiz kid here, Diz, on the run with a phony ID.’
Even for Hardy, familiar with the purported excuse for Ron’s duplicity, it was difficult to remain neutral in the face of this. And he figured it would be impossible for Glitsky.
Which proved to be true. ‘I’m going to throw Coleman and Batavia on to him first thing in the morning.’
‘They working Sunday?’
‘They are now.’ A look. ‘Are you telling me this doesn’t make you sit up around Ron?’
‘No,’ Hardy agreed, ‘I’ll admit it makes him look a little weak.’
If Glitsky had a smile, he was wearing it now. ‘A little weak, that’s good. Weaker than a signed murder confession at any rate, but not by much. And that’s not all. Check out page five.’
Hardy turned the pages quickly, glancing over the information, and as he scanned, Glitsky kept up the color commentary. ‘That electronic linkage Caloco can access finds four other accounts connected to the Mellon Visa.’ Hardy read the names. Ron Black. Ron Blake. Ron Burns. Ron Blanda. ‘Guy’s got a million dollars in credit. Five phony identities. You gotta believe he’s got passports for all five.’
No argument there. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me at all. And you know how I hate to say this, but-’
Now Glitsky was smiling. ‘But that doesn’t make him a murderer. But I’ll tell you something. It doesn’t make him a boy scout either.’
Hardy had to agree. ‘No. But why would any of this make him want to kill his wife? You got a theory on that?’
Clearly, this was still unsettled water for Glitsky. The scar through his lips went white as he thought about it. ‘She must have been ignorant of the accounts. When she found out he was using them on her collateral from Caloco, she busted him for it, they fought, and it got out of hand.’
‘So it was just a fight?’ Hardy wasn’t grinding any ax, but he did have a point to make. ‘That’s not murder one. It’s not usually murder anything. At the most it’s manslaughter, maybe even self-defense, which is no crime at all.’
‘I don’t care what the lawyers call it. It gets me the guy who killed Bree.’
‘Maybe.’ In the longish silence Hardy was aware of Abe’s father’s regular breathing in the living room. ‘Maybe,’ he repeated. ‘But what about the guy who killed Carl Griffin?’
This brought Glitsky up short. ‘What guy is that?’
‘You’re homicide. You tell me.’
‘Are you telling me they’re related, Bree and Carl?’
Low-key, Hardy shrugged. ‘Are you telling me they’re not? Seems likely they could be, unless you’ve got a suspect with Carl.’ It was a question.
Glitsky took a moment before answering. ‘We’ve got nothing on Carl. I’ve told you this. He was going out to the Western Addition to talk to one of his snitches, who apparently got some kind of drop on him.’
‘And what?’ Hardy ladled on the sarcasm. ‘He asked the snitch to hold his gun a minute while they talked, and it went off accidentally? Is that what happened?’
‘Must have been,’ Glitsky replied sardonically. But Hardy had something and Glitsky, perhaps for the first time, was seeing it. ‘He was sitting in his car, Diz. Even Carl wasn’t that dumb.’
‘OK. So what do you think happened? You remember where the car was found?’
A nod. ‘A little cul-de-sac called Raycliff Terrace, just off Divisadero.’
Well, Hardy was thinking, strike that idea. Divisadero ran right through the heart of the Western Addition, so Griffin was where he was supposed to have been. But, being thorough, he asked his next question anyway. ‘What’s the cross street?’
Glitsky didn’t know offhand and in a minute they had a map spread out on the table between them. A loud silence ensued. Raycliff Terrace was off Divisadero all right, and on the map it looked close enough to the ghetto, but to anyone who knew the city at all, it was so far economically from the low-income housing units of the Western Addition that it may as well have been in Beverly Hills.
The cross street was Pacific, the eponymous artery of Pacific Heights, one of San Francisco’s most aristocratic neighborhoods. And, more tellingly, one block from Broadway.
Hardy spent an instant leaning over, making sure. With a kind of pang about his own incompetence, he realized that this had been David Freeman’s idea – his comment that Griffin had been the first horse at the trough. Was the old fart ever wrong?
Hardy straightened up and walked over to the refrigerator, where he pulled a magnetized pen off the door. Back at the map, he marked an X. Then another one. After a moment’s reflection, a final thought struck him, and he scratched out a third one. ‘Bree Beaumont,’ he said, putting the tip of the pen on the first mark, two blocks from Raycliff Terrace. ‘Broadway and Steiner. Damon Kerry, Broadway and Baker.’ Three blocks west of Bree, one block from Raycliff. He put the pen on the third X. ‘Jim Pierce. Divisadero and North Point.’ Eleven blocks north. Griffin had been killed surrounded by the players in the Beaumont case. Which, to Hardy, argued that he wasn’t killed in a drug sting gone wrong. His death was related to Bree’s.
Frowning, Glitsky was silent. Finally he put a finger on Hardy’s first mark. ‘Ron Beaumont, too.’
Hardy had to admit this unwelcome fact. But it wasn’t his point and in a minute he was fairly sure it wouldn’t be Glitsky’s. ‘Can you see Griffin coming up here with his snitch, Abe? I can’t. You see the snitch letting himself get driven this far out of the ’hood?‘
Glitsky shook his head. ‘You’re right. It didn’t happen. Not up here.’
Hardy ran with it. ‘It was somebody Griffin wasn’t afraid of, maybe even trusted.’
‘Enough to let him hold his piece? It’s hard to imagine.’ He had his fist balled over the Xs and he lifted it an inch, then brought it down with a great deal of force. ‘Damn,’ he said. He slammed the fist down again. ‘God damn it, Carl.’
From Glitsky, this was a violent explosion. He raised his eyes, the whites shot now with red. ‘Anybody else I’d say no chance. Carl? I’ve got to say maybe.’ He ran his palm over the entire top of his head. ‘Lord, Diz, how is it nobody saw this?’
But that wasn’t what Glitsky really wanted to know, so Hardy thought he’d spare him. Hardy had his own problems with this new information – there was another X, Hardy knew, that he hadn’t put on the map.
Phil Canetta had his own weapon. Griffin wouldn’t have had to voluntarily pass over his gun – the situation that Glitsky had found so untenable. Canetta could have simply hopped into the passenger seat of Griffin’s car, pulled his own piece, and moved things along right smartly from there. Relieved Carl of his gun, and had him drive to a secluded and quiet dead-end street. Made him dead.
But then, the more he thought about it, if any of his other suspects owned a weapon, they could just as easily have done the same thing.
The good news was that he had gotten Glitsky thinking, and not exclusively about Ron. It wasn’t a certainty, of course, and nowhere near proven, but suddenly now to Hardy the overwhelming probability was that Griffin’s murder was in fact linked to Bree’s.