Dismas Hardy: Nothing But The Truth Part 35

'You say it, but I don't know if you really want to do that. What it might take.'

'And what is that?'

Now Frannie paused, took a deep breath, and let it out. 'Being each other's lives again.'

'But we are...'

Holding up a hand, she stopped him. 'Dismas. Remember when we were first together. Remember that? You were working just as hard then. You had your trials and your cases and your career. But mostly you had us, remember?

'And you'd come home as early as you could every day and I'd be on the front stoop with the Beck and Vincent, all of us waiting for you. And they'd come running to greet you, hugging your legs, so happy to have Daddy home again. And you so happy to see them, too. Remember that? And then you and I would go in and feed them and put them to bed and then go talk and laugh and wind up making love more often than not. Didn't that used to happen? I'm not making that up in my memory, am I?'

'No,' he said quietly. 'No, that's how it was.'

'So what happened?'

He had come around on the chair now, hunched over. Elbows on his knees, his hands together. His shoulders slumped. 'I don't know, Frannie. Everybody got too busy. Certainly n.o.body cared what time I came home. n.o.body even says hi anymore when I walk in the house. You're doing so many kid things you're always exhausted, and if it's not about kids, you're not interested. We don't have date night anymore. Where's any of our life together?' He looked up at her. 'Take your pick, Frannie. And OK, it was a lot me, all the things you say. But it was a two-way street.'

'And you say you really want to go back to that?'

He thought for a beat. 'No, maybe not to what we had a week ago,' he said. 'Something better than that, closer to what we used to have. But still with you and the kids.'

After a long, silent moment, she slid off the table and walked over to the door where the guard waited. For a second, Hardy was afraid she was simply going to ask to be escorted out. But she turned to face him. 'The best thing,' she said, 'would be if I didn't have to tell.'

Then she knocked for the guard.

Glitsky wasn't in his office. n.o.body was in homicide at all, which seemed a bit strange at ten o'clock on a Monday morning. Hardy sat himself at one of the inspector's desks and opened his briefcase.

He thought he'd done pretty well with Griffin's notes this morning, and now he was going to pull out his own notes and take a minute to go over what he'd written about Canetta's findings. He stopped before he'd really begun.

He knew.

Marie Dempsey. Canetta had told him that he'd discovered she had been the secretary of the insurance guy, Tilton. That she'd actually been laid off in the wake of the claims adjuster's decision to hold off payment on Bree's life insurance until Ron had been cleared of any implication in the death.

So here was this woman without a job with the insurance company, calling Ron Beaumont twice - or was it three times? - in a two-day period. She wasn't calling him to walk him through processing his claim. It seemed weeks ago now, though in fact it was days, and Hardy had been concentrating on Frannie when he had heard those calls at the penthouse, but he remembered coming away with the impression that Marie was personal, not business.

He reached for the telephone on the desk and punched for information.

'This is Let.i.tia. What city please?'

'Yes. In San Francisco. The phone number please of a Marie Dempsey.'

'How would you spell that, sir?'

He spelled it out, his patience all but eroded. Dempsey, after all, wasn't exactly Albuquerque, spelling-wise. But Let.i.tia eventually got it. 'I don't show any Marie Dempsey, sir. Do you know what street she lives on?'

'No. How about just the initial?'

'M?'

Hardy ground his teeth. 'That would be the one, yes.'

'I show ten, no eleven M. Dempseys.'

'OK,' Hardy said. 'I'll take them all.'

'I'm sorry, sir. I'm only allowed to give out two numbers at a time.'

'Please, Let.i.tia, this is important. There may be lives at stake. I'm not kidding. Could you please just give me the numbers?'

'I'm sorry, sir. I'm really not allowed to give out that information. Would you like to speak to a supervisor?'

'Can your supervisor read me the eleven numbers?'

'No, sir. I don't believe so. If you have access to a telephone directory, they should all be listed in there, though.'

'Yes, well, you see, I don't have a phone book handy, which is kind of why I called you.'

'Well,' Let.i.tia said brightly, cheerfully, 'let me give you the first number. It's...'

Hardy wrote quickly, then found himself listening to a mechanical voice telling him that after he got his number, the phone company could dial his call direct for a charge of thirty-five cents. 'Press one if...'

He slammed the receiver down. Glitsky was in the doorway, pointing at the telephone. 'That's city property,' he said. 'You break it, you buy it.'

'You got a phone book around here?' Hardy asked.

'I doubt it,' Glitsky said. 'They're harder to find than a cop when you need one. You want to guess how many homicides we got this weekend, Hallowe'en?'

'Including Canetta?'

'Sure, let's include him.'

'Three?'

'More.'

'Two hundred and sixteen?'

'Seven. Average is one point five a week. And we get seven in two days. I've got no inspectors left.'

Hardy nodded, looking around. 'And this would also explain your mysterious absence from your office all morning. I thought you might have gotten tired and decided to take some time off.'

'Nope.' Glitsky was terse. 'The first part's right, but that wasn't it.'

In his office, though, Glitsky did find a three-year-old phone book and it had seven M. Dempseys listed. The first one had the same number Hardy had written down from Let.i.tia and he took that as a good sign.

He was copying and Glitsky was talking, shuffling through a pile of paper from his in-box. 'So if Kerry ever called the mayor as he said he would, I haven't heard about it, although as you've noticed, I haven't exactly been waiting by the phone.'

Hardy looked up. 'He's not going to call the mayor. That would only raise the profile around him. He just wants this - and by "this" I mean "you" - to go away.'

'You think I gave him the impression last night that I was going away? That he scared me off?'

'If you did, it was real subtle. What?'

Glitsky had stopped at a faxed page. He tsked a couple of times. 'Mr Kerry, Mr Kerry.' He held the page out to Hardy.

'AT&T Wireless for the morning of 29 September. Here's a conversation beginning at seven ten a.m., duration twenty-two minutes. Somebody called him.'

'The day he slept in?'

'That's what he said.'

'Maybe he only meant he slept in until seven and we just a.s.sumed he meant it was later.'

'That's probably it,' Glitsky replied sarcastically. He was shoving paper around on his desk again. 'You got Bree's number anywhere on you?'

As it happened, Hardy still had it in his briefcase. It was the number from which Kerry had received his call. 'Maybe I won't vote for him after all,' Glitsky said.

Hardy sat back, crossed his arms. 'So they have a fight first thing in the morning-'

Glitsky sat up straight, snapped his fingers, truly excited now. 'He's the father. She told him she was pregnant. She was going to blackmail him.'

All right, Hardy thought with relief. He never had to break his vow of silence to Jeff Elliot. Glitsky had come to it on his own. 'That's a reasonable guess,' he said mildly.

'He waited till he knew Ron had taken the kids to school, strolled over...'

But Hardy was shaking his head.

'Why not?' Glitsky asked.

'No. Not himself. He called Thorne. Thorne called one of his operatives.'

Glitsky glanced back down at the faxed page. 'Not from his cell phone anyway.'

'd.a.m.n,' Hardy said. 'Why is it never easy?'

'It's just one of the general rules. But why would Kerry calling Thorne make it easy?'

'This is one slick b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Abe.' Hardy explained about the leaflets that had been printed up before the MTBE dumping, and about Thorne's explanation for it.

Glitsky was enjoying the recitation. He was paying attention, sitting back in his chair, his fingers templed at his lips. When Hardy finished, he spoke. 'So these terrorists who were trying to lay the blame on Thorne, they somehow a.s.sumed that Jeff Elliot's colleague would just happen to drop by on Sat.u.r.day afternoon and find the flyers in the hallway?' Glitsky was almost smiling. 'Call me cynical, but that's a stretch.'

'We thought so, too. Jeff and I.' Hardy moved forward, put his hands on the desk between them, and spoke urgently. 'Abe, you connect Thorne to the MTBE gang and you win a prize.'

'Really. Gee, that never occurred to me.'

'I bet it did. But look, it gets better. Thorne wrote these leaflets, probably by himself at his apartment. So you get a warrant and have somebody search the place. You find a piece of paper, a computer file, and you solve a murder, maybe two or three.'

Glitsky c.o.c.ked his head to one side, all interest. 'I'm listening. What's two or three?'

'He talked to Griffin the morning he got killed. Griffin.'

'Who did? Thorne?'

A nod.

'Are you sure of this?'

Hardy explained his reading of Griffin's notes - that the meeting with Thorne had been one of the last entries, 5 October, eight thirty a.m. 'It was that day, Abe, count on it. And you'll love this: Elliot thinks Thorne is bankrolling the good governor Damon Kerry through SKO. Somehow.'

'How?'

'n.o.body knows, but if there's anything to it at all, it connects dirty tricks to Damon Kerry, who we liked so much last night and maybe even more this morning.'

Glitsky was still sitting back, contemplating. 'Thorne has erased any computer work, Diz. If not immediately, then for sure by now after talking with you and Elliot.'

'OK. Still, there might be hard copy in the garbage cans? Some dumpster behind the building.'

'I know, I know.' Glitsky had come forward and was shuffling more pages on his desk. He spoke almost to himself. 'But I've got no inspectors.'

Finally, he opened his desk and withdrew what Hardy recognized as a blank warrant form. He grabbed a pen from the middle drawer of his desk. 'OK,' he said, beginning to write. 'We've got the leaflets. We've got Griffin on his last day. So. Help me here. What else are we looking for?'

Hardy considered for a moment. 'The smoking gun connection to Kerry. Valens. Receipts, Thorne's phone records, anything.'

'I'm going to need some very serious physical evidence to get anywhere near Kerry. It's going to take more than a phone call he forgot.'

'Maybe get some DNA on him, and check it against Bree's baby?'

'That'll take six weeks if he's not elected, for ever if he is. And then, even if he is the father, n.o.body puts him at Bree's place that morning.' The scar between Abe's lips stood out. He shook his head in frustration. 'Even on a normal mortal, much less our popular politician, nothing remotely convictable.'

'Not even indictable,' Hardy agreed.

'OK, then.' Glitsky the strategist was back at it. 'We go for Thorne and squeeze from that direction. You talked to him. Can you think of anything else on him?'

'My house.'

The lieutenant met Hardy's gaze and nodded somberly. As a salve to his friend, he made a pretense of writing that down. 'I'll check with the fire department. What else?'

Hardy wracked his brain but after nearly a minute still came up empty. 'Nothing, Abe.' He sighed. 'Oh, except I did discover where Carl Griffin did his laundry.'

'Are you kidding?' Glitsky frowned. 'Carl never went to a laundry in his whole life.'

After Glitsky left to go try and get his warrant signed, Hardy copied down the remaining numbers for M. Dempsey, then sat back pensively. Glitsky had closed the door when he'd gone, and now in the tiny cubicle, Hardy could work without distractions and he needed to concentrate.

It seemed that every answer he got raised another question. How wonderful, he'd thought, that Glitsky had found Bree's lengthy call to Kerry on the morning of her murder. But something about the information had nagged at him, and now here it was again. On his copied pages of Griffin's notes - the time 9:02. Or that had been his a.s.sumption, and it had led directly to Kerry's phone records and his lie. But the phone call hadn't been at 9:02. It had begun at seven ten.

So what was 902?

Then there was Heritage Cleaners, Griffin's laundry. Hardy pulled the phone on Glitsky's desk around and reached a woman who spoke English so poorly that he settled for what he hoped was the address of the place and politely thanked her, then hung up. He had no more strength this morning for disjointed conversations over that miracle of modern communication, the telephone. He would try to get time to stop by Heritage later in the day - when? when? - and maybe see what they did, why Griffin had put them in his notes.