"And I wanted to take out Barry Gerson, too?" Glitsky allowed a trace of asperity. "And I wanted to do all of this with the help of John Holiday, who was wanted for murder? Are you saying you believe I could have been part of that, Marcel?" He leaned back, softened his tone. "I was trying to find a way to do this kosher." He sighed. "All right. I might as well tell you. You know Bill Schuyler, FBI? Talk to him."
"So what was Hardy doing?"
"Hardy thought these guys were trying to frame Holiday. He was calling judges. You can ask around on that, too. Look, Marcel, I don't know what got Barry down there to the pier, or Holiday for that matter, but these guys are bad people. I'm not surprised they got themselves killed. But if you think I was there or had anything to do with it…" He let the words hang in the room.
Marcel put down his empty glass and sighed heavily. "If you weren't there, you weren't there, Abe. I've just got to touch all the bases. Tell your wife I'm sorry I upset her, would you? And you, too."
When Lanier got to the door, Glitsky held it for him, stopped him for a second. "So, Panos aside, Marcel, how many people are they saying were down there?"
Lanier's eyes were drawn with fatigue. "CSFs saying at least six, maybe as many as ten. Lots of hardware, different calibers, but people might have been doubled up. At least one shotgun. Could have been seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array." He shrugged wearily. "You ask me, Abe, nobody's got a clue."
"That was Norma," Hardy said, "from the office."
Frannie was at the dining room table, studying. She looked up. "How is she?"
"Okay, considering."
She put the book down. "What?"
"She just got a call from Lieutenant Lanier, homicide. One of the associates was working late and gave him her home number. He wanted to know where I'd been all afternoon. She'd never had anyone from the police call and ask her that before. She hoped it was okay with me that she just went ahead and told them without checking with me first. I told her sure, why not? She gave him Phyllis's number, too. Wanted to know what it was all about."
"What did you tell her?"
"That I had no idea."
Frannie pushed her chair back, brushed a rogue hair from her forehead. She rested her hand over her heart. "And what did she tell him? Lanier."
"That I'd been in my office."
"The whole afternoon?"
"Until a little after three. Working."
Hardy had changed out of the Kevlar in the truck and asked McGuire, on his way to Ghirardelli Square and the Municipal Pier where he was going to ditch the guns and, if he could, the vests, to drop him back at Sutter Street. He had come in through the garage, up the inside elevator all the way to the third floor. In his office, he changed into the business suit he kept hanging in his closet. Then-it had been just three o'clock-he'd walked back by the staircase into the lobby, carrying his old clothes, hiking boots and all, in a laundry bag that he'd dropped at St. Vincent de Paul on the way home. In the lobby, he'd said hello to Phyllis and shared a moment of commiseration. After that, he looked in on Norma and said he wasn't able to concentrate at all after the news about David. He been trying for a couple of hours to do some simple admin stuff but he really couldn't work at all and was going home. Maybe she should do the same. Tomorrow they could start picking up the pieces if they could. She'd gotten up and hugged him again. He'd nearly passed out from the pain where the bullet had smashed into the vest, but she probably thought the tears were for Freeman. And in some sense, maybe they were.
"She was positive. I was there all day. She hoped that was the right thing to say."
"What did you tell her?"
"That it was the truth. How could it be wrong?"
Overtime was being had by all.
At 10:30, Lanier was out at his desk in the detail. He might have just been named the provisional and nominal head of the unit, but he wasn't going into Gerson's office for a good long while, even if it got announced officially. Cuneo and Russell both wore hangdog looks as they sat there, and Lanier couldn't say he blamed them. Something about their investigations must have gotten seriously out of whack early on, and now in the wake of today's slaughter they both seemed lost and confused.
Cuneo had it all going tonight, playing the whole invisible drum kit-snare and kick drum, riding the high hat, the occasional crash of cymbal. Lanier wondered what track he was using in his brain, because part of him obviously had no idea that any of this percussion was going on. "What I can't figure out is why Thieu would have even thought to look at Holiday's. I mean, what did he know that we didn't know?"
"The question is, Dan, what do we know now?"
"About what?"
"About the fingerprints at Holiday's house, for example. What do they mean? Were these guys friends, or what?"
"They played poker together at Silverman's," Cuneo said. "But otherwise, did they hang out together? No, I'd say not."
"But they'd both been to Holiday's place."
"I doubt it." Cuneo was upping the tempo. "No. I can't see that."
"Wait a minute, Dan, wait a minute," Lanier said. "I wasn't asking if they'd been to Holiday's. We know they went there. The prints were there. The question is why."
"Maybe they played poker there, too, once or twice."
"But why, if they weren't friends?" Lanier focused on each of them in turn. "I don't know anything more than you do, okay? In fact, I know way less on these cases. I'm asking you both to think why these fingerprints might have been enough to get Paul killed, if somebody killed him. What they might mean."
Blanks, until Cuneo suddenly stopped all his frenetic movement. It was like a vacuum in the room. When he first spoke, it was almost inaudible.
"What's that, Dan?" Lanier asked.
Cuneo looked up, let out a long sigh. "It means they did plant the evidence," he said. "It's like Mrs. Silverman thought… if they did plant…" He stopped again, stared across Lanier's desk.
"If they did plant what, Dan?" Marcel said.
"The evidence at Holiday's," Cuneo said. He gripped his temples and squeezed so that his ringers went white. "Man oh man oh man."
Michelle sat in the big chair by her picture window that afforded no view of the black night outside. The reading light glared next to her and reflected the room back at her, her own pitiful image in the glass of the window. She'd cocooned herself into a comforter that offered little comfort, huddled into as small a position as she could get herself. Next to her on the light table there was an untouched glass of white wine and an envelope. In her hand, she held what had been the contents of the envelope, two pages of her own personal stationery-no letterhead, no border, just five-by-seven heavy rag, not quite white, bits of pulp throughout.
She'd been sitting, empty now, unmoving, for the twenty minutes since she'd finished reading the letter for the second time, and now her eyes had cleared enough to read it yet again.
Dear Michelle: (she read)
As you know better than anyone, it's been my tendency to want to come across as the world's most easygoing guy. It keeps the expectations low, both mine for myself, and my friends' for me. I don't ever promise anything other than perhaps a good time in the here and now, and since I don't pretend to have any depth or seriousness, no one can be disappointed in me when I don't deliver, when I flake out, when I get drunk or loaded and do any one of the many stupid and embarrassing things that have cost me friends and self-esteem.
When I think back on the time that I was married to Emma, especially the few months after we had Jolie, I sometimes wonder what happened to the person I was then. Where suddenly for that short time it was okay to feel like things mattered.