Dismas Hardy: Nothing But The Truth Part 28

Hardy found some humor in the felicitous phrase that McGuire had been struggling to conjure. The pickin's were so slim in the rest of his life that he actually chuckled.

McGuire's countenance took on a familiar dark tone - the Irish temper had always flared with the slightest friction. 'It wasn't a joke.'

Hardy realized he must be on his third Macallan after all, not his second. Well, he thought, it had been stressful couple of days for him, too.

'I didn't think it was a joke, Mose. It's so true I wanted to cry, so I laughed. You hear what I'm saying?'

Moses sipped, nodded, an apology. 'I mean, one day she's taking the kids to school and baking cookies, and next day, bam!' - he slapped the bar with his palm - 'all of a sudden next day she's in jail and her house is burned down. How does s.h.i.+t like this happen?'

What could Hardy say? That Frannie had taken a series of little steps, secret steps? That it wasn't really anything at all like 'all of a sudden?'

And it wasn't only Frannie, either. Hardy had taken them, too, the tiny incremental steps away from intimacy. More, he'd felt the s.h.i.+ft in the bedrock of their marriage, the first cracks in the faultline. They'd allowed things to change with the pressures of raising the children - the communication eroded, their respective daily lives on different planets.

This is where it had gone wrong, what had led them to here, but he wasn't going to air all that now. He lifted his gla.s.s and killed another inch of Guinness. 'I don't know, Mose. I don't know.'

McGuire leaned over the bar. Whispered. 'Tell me she isn't sleeping with him.'

'She says no.' Hardy made eye contact. 'She wouldn't do that.'

'She wouldn't,' he agreed quickly, but the relief showed. Her brother, at least, believed it. 'She'd tell you first, before anything happened, even if she was only thinking about it. That's who she is.'

'OK.' Talking about it wasn't going to make it better or worse. It was just going to invite other people to partic.i.p.ate in the discussion, and Hardy wasn't doing that, even with Moses. He and Frannie might have their serious differences, but they were as one in a way that made them aliens in the modern world - they believed that their private lives were private.

'But your house... ?' Moses asked. 'This morning you were saying it was part of this, too.'

'Part of who killed Bree, Mose. Not part of me and Frannie.'

'And you're close to finding that? Who did that?'

'If I am I don't know it, but somebody must think so. I've got to believe hitting my house was a warning to back off.'

Moses sipped his Scotch, then put it down carefully. 'Unless whoever it was thought you were home, in which case it wasn't just a warning.'

Hardy considered for a beat. 'No. I doubt that. I'm not that much of a threat.' He shook his head, the idea rattling around. 'I don't think so,' he repeated, more to himself than to Moses.

'Well you don't have to think it for it to be true. If I were you, I'd put it in the mix.'

'What, exactly?'

'That somebody's trying to kill you.'

On that cheery note, the front door banged open and a mixed six-pack of humanity flowed in, talking football, calling for beer. Moses shrugged at Hardy, gave them a welcome, and headed down the rail for the taps.

It was a signal for Hardy that he didn't want to waste any more time philosophizing with his brother-in-law. Moses was right - there was far too much he didn't know. He was vulnerable and couldn't allow himself the luxury of letting his guard down.

So with neither plan nor destination, Hardy left two-thirds of his Guinness. He'd parked around the corner on 10th Avenue and pushed himself through the fog, hunched against the wind. Getting in behind the wheel, he hesitated before turning the key, then broke a thin smile as the engine turned over. See? No bomb. Flicking the heater up to high, he pulled out, got to the corner, and turned right. He had no idea where he was going.

All he knew was that the Little Shamrock wasn't anywhere he needed to be just now. He needed to work. Time was running out. He couldn't go back to his house - the fire department owned it. There were still his children, and Frannie. But he'd already seen them today. That would have to be enough.

Where the h.e.l.l was Ron Beaumont? Or Phil Canetta?

What did he have? What could he work with?

The only thing that came remotely to mind was his paperwork, the lawyer's constant companion and last refuge. At his office he had his copies of pages from Carl Griffin's file, the notes he'd taken last night with Canetta, the propaganda he'd liberated from Bree's office, and the letters from her high school yearbook. At some point, he reasoned, some part of all of that might intersect.

David Freeman believed that lawyers should work around the clock. He had had full bathrooms installed on each of the three floors of his building so that his a.s.sociates would not be able to use the lame excuse after an all-nighter that they had to go home to freshen up and get ready for court.

In twenty-five minutes, Hardy was in his office - showered, shaved, and changed into the s.h.i.+rt that he'd stashed in his file cabinet a couple of months before.

When he got seated at his desk, he retrieved the four messages he'd received since last night, hoping against hope that one of them would turn out to be from Canetta, or even Ron Beaumont. If Al Valens had left a message Hardy hadn't been able to get back at his home, then maybe either or both of the men he wanted to talk to had tried as well, or called here at his office afterwards.

But no such luck.

Three of the calls were from clients in various stages of feeling abandoned and the last was Jeff Elliot. When Hardy called him back, he was himself on fire over the blaze at Hardy's house, although he did pay a fleeting moment's lip service to sympathy for Hardy's loss. 'Is there anything I can do to help you, Diz? You got a place to stay?'

'Yeah, we're covered, Jeff. Thanks, though.'

But back to the scoop. 'And you think it was arson?'

'I'd bet a lot on it. In fact, I wouldn't rule out that it's the MTBE people, the Valdez Avengers, all those jerks.'

'If that's true,' Jeff said, his enthusiasm overflowing, 'it's a giant break in that story.'

'That's my goal,' Hardy said drily. 'Sacrifice my home for a good story. Maybe you'll win the Pulitzer and I'll be happy for you. We can have a party in my new house.'

Elliot apologized. 'I didn't mean it like that, Diz.' He paused. 'But don't you want to get whoever did this, take 'em down?'

'You don't know.'

'I bet I do. All I'm saying is here, maybe we've got a real connection.'

'Between who?'

'That's what I think I have, Diz. Do you want to hear it?'

'Talk,' Hardy said.

'OK. After you left yesterday, I went with what you said - the guy from Caloco-'

'Jim Pierce.'

'Yeah, all right, Pierce. He'd told you that SKO funded these cretins, right?'

'Right.'

'Well, what if that were true? Where was the connection? So I started poking through among all the c.r.a.p I showed you yesterday - that thick file of paper - and realized that a lot of the pro-ethanol stuff comes from this organization named the Fuels Management Consortium, FMC for short. It's here in town. Familiar?'

'No, but this stuff wasn't my major until a couple of days ago. I thought FMC made tanks and stuff, big equipment.'

'Same letters, different company.'

'OK. Go on.'

'Well, FMC produces pro-ethanol, anti-MTBE press releases. Tons of them. Sometimes the source of them is a little hard, like impossible, to recognize because they get picked up by intermediaries - syndicated as hard news stories in the dailies, also in industry publications, the Health Industry Newsletter, Environmental Health Monthly, like that. So I never put it together that it might be one source.'

'And then you did?'

'Right. Plus every time some more MTBE leaks into another well, we get the update before the ink's dry on the EPA report.'

'I'm listening.'

'OK, so a few months ago, we - the Chronicle - we decided to do a big spread on the dangers of MTBE. I mean, this was a four-day, front-page feature. Lots of scary stuff - cancer cl.u.s.ters, birth defects, the usual. Even a lay person such as yourself might remember it.'

'Vaguely.'

'Well, Kerry had just taken the primary and suddenly this was news, and we ran it. Anyway, the reporter who wrote the article, as it happens, is a friend of mine named Sherry Weir. She shows up in the office last night on this water temple poisoning as I'm thinking about our discussion, yours and mine. She tells me that FMC was the prime source for her feature - it's an impressive propaganda factory.

'So yesterday, when Sherry hears about the Pulgas Temple, her first stop on the way to the office is the FMC offices in the Embarcadero Buildings. OK, she knows it's Sat.u.r.day afternoon, they're probably closed up, but it's a shot. And what does she find?'

'An armed nuclear weapon?'

'She finds that n.o.body's there, all right, but out in the hallway for pickup is the day's press releases, bound and labeled for distribution, all about the water poisoning, doomsday in San Francisco, sidebars on the dangers of MTBE pollution, like that. Anyway, she pulls a few off the top of the pile and brings them back for her article.' A beat. 'Get it?'

'I'm not sure.'

Jeff's voice went down to an excited whisper, but it rang with triumph. 'They had to be written and printed up before it happened.'

Hardy took a moment to let it sink in. If this were true, it appeared to link some of the eco-terrorist activity with FMC, but not necessarily to SKO, and certainly not to Valens or Kerry. How could it help him?

But Jeff thought he had the answer to that, too. 'Because FMC is run by this joker named Baxter Thorne...'

'Who works for SKO,' Hardy guessed.

'You're too smart, except not so fast, Red Rider. Back when she interviewed him, Sherry couldn't get Thorne to admit who paid him. He calls himself a public affairs consultant. According to him, he represents all kinds of environmental groups and other clients, but says his contracts demand confidentiality. She asks him specifically about some of these activist groups and he admits he's given them some advice.'

'Advice. That's a nice word.'

'I thought so, too. But even nicer is this. I call this buddy of mine, a colleague in Cincinnati, at the Sentinel-'

'You've been a busy boy, Jeff.'

'This could in fact be my Pulitzer, Diz. You'd be busy, too. Turns out that Baxter Thorne is not unknown in Cincinnati. It wasn't exactly common knowledge, but my buddy knew - for years Thorne was the dirty tricks guy for Ellis Jackson.'

'Who is... ?'

'You're going to love this - Jackson is the CEO of Spader Krutch Ohio.'

Hardy felt a little tingle along the back of his neck and knew it wasn't the cold outside leaking through his office window.

Jeff was going on. 'So we've possibly got SKO paying for dirty tricks in San Francisco. We've got somebody who might put MTBE in the water, might kill Bree Beaumont...'

'Might burn my house down,' Hardy added evenly.

'That, too,' Jeff agreed. 'But what we don't have and we do need is how, if we're on the right track, Baxter Thorne came to be worried about you.'

'Somebody told him.'

'I'm with you. But who?'

Hardy wracked his brain, trying to keep himself from the knee-jerk reaction for the second time today that it had to be Valens. But it might go higher - Hardy couldn't rule out that a directive could have come from Damon Kerry himself, although Jeff Elliot wasn't going to accept that.

But why stop with Kerry? The connection between SKO and him might even be Phil Canetta - cops who worked freelance security at conventions had also been known to provide muscle, to help with dirty tricks. Had Canetta ever done that kind of work with SKO, he wondered. Or with Baxter Thorne?

'I really don't have any ideas, Jeff,' he said, 'other than I'd like a few private moments with this Thorne fellow.'

'Did you talk to Al Valens this morning, by the way?' Jeff asked. 'At the Clift? Since you woke me up for it.'

'Didn't I tell you all about that?'

He heard Jeff sigh. 'No. I think you left it out.'

And suddenly, the morning's information clicked with what he had just learned from Jeff. Bree's report. She had changed her mind about ethanol and Valens had tried - successfully he said - to keep her from talking to Kerry about it. Who would this silence benefit even more than Kerry himself? SKO. And SKO's operative in San Francis...o...b..xter Thorne.

What if Valens' efforts to keep Bree quiet hadn't worked after all? What if someone needed to shut her up?

Valens again, once removed.

Maybe.

But Hardy didn't want to lead Jeff Elliot there. He had his own agenda and he figured he'd sure as h.e.l.l earned the right to pursue it now. 'I thought he'd told me a lie,' Hardy said mildly, 'and I wanted to talk to him about it.'

'And had he?'

'It was more a misunderstanding. It got straightened out.' Deflection time. 'You ever catch up with Kerry?'

'Today's agenda,' Jeff promised, 'if I get to it.'

'What would stop you?'

'One of the problems doing a daily column,' Jeff said, 'is you've got to write it. Kerry's going to be impossible until Tuesday. Tomorrow I'm going for Thorne.'

'How are you going to get to him?'

Hardy would bet Jeff's eyes weren't tired now - he was on a scent. 'A little cla.s.sic bait and switch. I've put in a call to FMC that I'd like an interview on the Pulgas story, which he'll want to talk about. Once I'm in the door, I'll ask different questions.' He changed his tone. 'I think we're very close, Diz, really.'

'I hope so,' Hardy said, 'but do me one favor, would you?'

'What's that?'