Hardy agreed. ‘It connects them.’
A nod. ‘Not only that, my guess is Canetta was shot with Griffin’s gun.’
Strout continued. ‘… time of death, but he’s loosened up enough, it had to be ten hours ago, maybe longer.’
‘So who found him?’
‘Couple of joggers.’
‘And Strout’s saying…?’
‘You just heard. Late night, early morning. The second shot’s in a closed car, pea soup outside. Nobody heard a thing.’
Before Hardy could ask, Glitsky expanded on it. ‘I know what you’re going to say, but don’t. This damn sure could’ve been Ron. We’ll get to that.’ He held up a hand, stopping Hardy’s reply. ‘But because I like to be thorough, I also put Batavia and Coleman out on alibis for all of your own personal heroes – Pierce, Valens, even Kerry. We’re talking between two and six a.m., but guess what?’
‘They weren’t all home in bed.’
Glitsky’s mouth turned up, but it wasn’t a smile. ‘Insight like that is what keeps us friends. Maybe they were, but we haven’t been able to reach any of them. Pierce wasn’t around today. His wife said he was out on his boat from early this morning. Also, we’ve got Kerry’s schedule but he’s not sticking to it – he and Valens didn’t make his first banquet. Two days from the election, he’s in flex mode, I guess. Valens-’
Hardy had to cut in. ‘Valens was at Kerry’s until nearly midnight. After that, Kerry left home.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Jeff Elliot.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘Only the shadow knows. But he lives like five blocks from here. And while we’re on it, Pierce isn’t much further and all of it’s downhill.’
Glitsky was silent for a couple of seconds. ‘I see you’ve done your homework. How do you know all this, hell, any of it?’
‘I’m motivated. I talked to Valens this morning…’
‘When was that? I was with you half the morning.’
‘Must have been the other half.’ He knew Glitsky wouldn’t let it go, so he continued. ‘It had to do with my house.’
‘Valens had something to do with your house?’
Strout finished his monologue and straightened up, looking over the car’s roof. ‘This boy’s been sittin’ here in the cold long enough, Abe. You needin‘ anything else here?’
Glitsky shifted his attention to the coroner. ‘Not me, John,’ he replied. ‘If crime scene’s done, you can tag him and bag him.’
Strout took a last look into the car, at the body of Phil Canetta, and clucked sympathetically. Again he straightened up. ‘Scene calls. I hate ’em, y’know that? They ain’t medicine out here, are they? It ain’t just a stripped body with something to tell you.‘
There wasn’t anything to say to that. Everybody there felt the same thing to a greater or lesser degree.
Glitsky gave Strout a gentle slap on the shoulders as he passed. Then he walked a few paces back to where the head of his crime scene unit was huddling with a couple of his team. Hardy heard him say, ‘If there’s enough lead left, get ballistics to check it against the slug that went through Griffin. I’m betting it’s the same gun.’
A short discussion ensued, after which Glitsky returned to Hardy. ‘Valens. This morning. Jeff Elliot. Bet you thought I’d get side-tracked, didn’t you?’
‘Never crossed my mind,’ Hardy said. ‘I know we’ve got to talk, but maybe someplace else.’
Hands in his pockets, the lieutenant took in the gloom around them. The body was on the coroner’s gurney and the tow truck started its mechanical cranking, getting ready to lift Canetta’s car and take it to the police lot.
Hunching his shoulders, Glitsky gave a last shudder against the cold. ‘Good call,’ he said.
In one of his brothers’ old rooms down the hall that led off the back of the kitchen, Orel Glitsky was sprawled on the floor, watching television and doing homework. Rita was with him, reading, her Spanish radio station playing softly on the end table next to where she sat on the sofa.
Hardy at his heels, Glitsky checked in with his household – letting them know that he was home now, sorry he’d been out most of the day, glad to see everybody was doing fine. Rita looked up from her book and told him she’d heated up some tortilla pie for a snack and it was probably still warm in the oven. Glitsky got Orel’s attention finally, and asked his son how his day had gone. He got a nod, though his boy’s eyes never left the TV ‘OK.’
‘What time did your grandfather go home?’
A shrug. ‘I don’t know.’
‘A little after twelve,’ Rita said. ‘When I got here.’
No one was trying to hide any displeasure about Glitsky’s working on a Sunday after having dumped Orel on his grandfather the day before.
‘So… anything neat happen today? You guys do anything fun?’
Rita just looked at him.
‘Orel?’
The boy shrugged. ‘Not much.’
Glitsky stood a moment longer in the doorway, then sighed heavily and headed back down the hallway. ‘So glad I asked,’ he muttered.
It was only a few steps to the kitchen, where they closed the door behind them against the competing sounds. Glitsky pulled around a chair and straddled it backwards. ‘They think I want to be gone working all weekend? They think going to murder scenes is my idea of a good time?’
Hardy let him stew, since there was no answer anyway. Sometimes people had to work – a bitch, but there it was. His kids hadn’t understood that he couldn’t go trick or treating last night. Now it was Abe’s turn to deal with it.
He grabbed a kitchen towel, opened the oven, and pulled out the flat pan that held the remains of the pie. Hardy grabbed plates from a cupboard, put them down on the table, and started serving himself.
‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is how they can sit there and read and study and listen to music and watch TV all at once. I can’t think with all that other noise going on.’
Glitsky turned his chair around the normal way, and pulled the pan over. ‘That’s because you’re over forty. Nowadays they teach that stuff in school. Multi-tasking. Makes you a better person, more productive.’ He spooned out some food on to his plate and pushed it around a little. ‘It’s just one of the reasons the world is so much better now than it was when we were kids.’ He forked a bite and popped it. ‘So. You want to just start or would you prefer that I ask questions?’
Dark slammed down like a trap door.
An hour later, Hardy was in the tramped-down mud behind his house. Out here closer to the ocean, a fine drizzle had started to condense out of the fog. In the brisk, chill wind, he was impressed by how much the moisture added to the already substantial pleasures of the evening.
Up the backyard stairway, still outside, he turned his key in the back door and, somewhat to his surprise, it opened. He fully expected that the fire department’s security team would have provided their own locks for the various entrances, but though they’d tightly boarded up the front and posted the property with ‘No Trespassing’ signs, that seemed to be the extent of it.
So he was inside. From the lower shelf on his workbench, he grabbed a flashlight and passed on into his kitchen. He didn’t need the flashlight yet – the distances and angles were all second nature. He checked around – there was no dial tone on the wall telephone, no light in the refrigerator when he pulled it open. The neatly folded, heavy brown-paper shopping bags were where they always were, in the drawer at the bottom of the pantry. He grabbed one off the top.
In his bedroom, he risked a short beam. His tropical fish – seventeen of them, a collection that he’d nurtured through various permutations over twenty years – were all belly up on the surface of his aquarium.
A muscle worked in his jaw. He turned off the flashlight and crossed the room. The answering machine was on a small reading table. He unplugged it from the wall, disconnected the telephone jack, and placed it in the bottom of the paper bag on a corner of the bed. Next was his dresser – he threw in underwear and a couple of sweaters on top of the answering machine. In his closet, he gathered up a heavy jacket, a business suit, and some shirts, all of them smelling of smoke. A complete change of clothes for his wife, too. For when he got her out.