Hard Evidence (8 page)

Frannie was glaring at Hardy, who was looking down at his plate.

‘I hate it when you guys fight,’ Moses said. ‘Here I am talking about cultural issues, without which we would all soon be savages and —’

‘Why don’t you tell your friend Dismas that we had an understanding about telephones and being late.’ She stood up and threw down her napkin. ‘Excuse me, I’m going to the bathroom.’

Hardy picked up his chopsticks. ‘I think I’ve already said I was sorry four times, now five. I’m sorry. Six. Sorry sorry sorry sorry.’ Hardy put down his chopsticks. ‘Ten.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Moses said. ‘She thought you were dead.’

‘She always thinks I’m dead, or going to die.’

‘There is some justification there.’

‘There is no justification at all. I have not come close to dying. Being late doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily died.’

Moses rubbed his crab claw around in the sauce. ‘It did for Eddie.’ He held up his hand, stopping Hardy’s response. ‘Uh uh uh. Here’s an area where we could increase our sensitivity.’

‘Moses…’

‘You could have called. Phones are nearly ubiquitous in our society.’ McGuire was the majority owner in the Shamrock Bar, but he also had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cal Berkeley.

‘You, too, huh?’

‘She’s my sister. I’m allowed to be on her side from time to time.’

‘I was working on a case. I’m a lawyer now, remember. I wasn’t out running around with loose women. I wasn’t narrowly avoiding death. I was working.’

‘You had an appointment with me and Frannie. A simple one-minute phone call and all would have been well.’

‘Okay, all
right
, next time I’ll call. Big deal.’

‘Frannie’s worried it’s going to start happening all the time. As you say, you’re a lawyer now. Well, that’s the way lawyers are.’

‘Lawyers aren’t any one way…’

Moses stabbed the last pot sticker and popped it into his mouth. ‘Excuse the generalization, but yes they are. Frannie wants you to be a daddy, not to work all the time. That’s why the job looked so good, remember. Regular hours, interesting work. I can hear your words in my memory even as we speak.’

‘How late was I?’

Moses chewed. ‘One hour and forty-five minutes, which is plenty of time to work up a good head of worry. It’s not Frannie’s fault she worries. She loves you, Diz. She’s carrying your baby. It’s pretty natural, don’t you think?’

‘Well, I love her too.’

‘I am sure you do.’

‘Well… ?’

‘Well,’ Moses repeated. ‘There you are.’

*     *     *     *     *

Their white frame house was bracketed by two apartment buildings. Back in the mid-‘80s, Hardy had been offered a sinful amount of money to sell to a developer so that a third five-story anonymous unit could rise where now his sixty-foot-deep green lawn was bisected by a stone walkway, a low picket fence, and a doll house with a small front porch and a bay window.

Before their marriage they had talked about moving —starting over with a place they could equally call their own. The problem was that although the house had been Hardy’s for a decade, Frannie already loved it. One of Hardy’s first actions after the wedding was to transfer half the title to Frannie’s name — they didn’t have a prenuptial agreement. Frannie’s quarter-million-dollar insurance policy was both of theirs; Hardy figured the house put them on relatively equal footing.

Street parking was often a problem. With no garage, driveway, or back alley, you either got your spot by six o’clock or you had to walk. Now, at ten-fifteen, they couldn’t find a space within three blocks. It was a mild, still night with no fog, and they strolled east on Clement, under the trees of Lincoln Park, back toward their house. Frannie leaned into her husband, her arm around his waist.

‘Pinch me,’ she said.

‘I know.’ Hardy tightened his arm across her shoulders.

‘Would you have thought this?’

‘I guess so. It’s why I thought we ought to be married. But still…’

She stopped. Hardy took the cue and leaned over and kissed her. ‘What is it?’ Frannie asked.

‘Nothing. A little shiver. How often do you notice when everything is perfect? It’s a little scary. I used to believe that’s when things were most likely to go wrong.’

‘I think that’s why I was so upset tonight. I’m just getting so I can accept that all this is happening, that it’s not some dream I’m going to wake up from.’ She looked up into Hardy’s face and pulled herself close against him. ‘I don’t want to wake up from this,’ she said. ‘I want this to keep going on.’

‘It’s going to, Frannie. I’m not going to let anything get in the way of this, promise.’

Frannie nudged him with her hip. ‘Let’s get home.’

*     *     *     *     *

They paid the sitter, looked in on the slumbering baby. Hardy fed his fish while Frannie got ready for bed. In his office, his answering machine had calls from Jane and from Pico Morales, both of whom he could call in the morning.

He could hear the shower running in their bathroom. He picked up his telephone and hit the numbers he’d memorized earlier that night — May Shinn’s. The phone rang four times, then picked up.

‘Just leave a number, please, and I’ll get right back to you.’ That was the whole message. No trace of a Japanese accent. A deep, cultured voice. Hardy hung up after the beep.

His desk was cleared. The green-shaded banker’s lamp threw a soft pool of light around the room. The dried blowfish pouted on the mantel of the office fireplace. Absently, Hardy crossed from the desk to the mantel, straightened out the pipe rack — unused for over a year —and grabbed three darts from the bull’s-eye of the dart-board, where he’d left them. Back at the line near his desk, he began throwing.

His dart game was off. In his first round, none of the three darts landed in the 20, where he was aiming. A year before, that couldn’t have happened. If anyone had asked him, he would have said he was semi-serious about darts. He still carried his custom set of twenty-gram tungstens with him every day in his suit jacket’s inside pocket.

But the reality was that new priorities had taken over. As he retrieved his first round, he heard the water shut off in the bathroom. He was back at the line near his desk now: 20, 19, 18. There you go.

Then Frannie was in the doorway, barefoot, wearing the purple silk baby-dolls Hardy had bought her for Christmas, the ones she hadn’t been able to wear until after Rebecca was born. A tiny dark spot marked where a drop of her milk had leaked from her nipple.

Hardy crossed to her, went to his knees and lifted the hem of the pyjamas, burying his face against her.

10

FINANCIER MISSING IN ‘MYSTERY HAND’ CASE

by Jeffrey Elliot

Chronicle
Staff Writer

     The case of the mystery hand found Sunday in the stomach of a great white shark at the Steinhart Aquarium took on a new dimension today as Bay Area financier Owen Nash was reported missing by Ken Farris, counsel and chief operating officer of Owen Industries of South San Francisco.

     Mr Farris reported that Nash was last seen Thursday evening by members of his personal staff at his mansion in Seacliff. On Friday, Mr Nash failed to appear at a luncheon appointment. On Saturday, Nash reportedly was scheduled to go sailing with May Shinn, a friend. Neither Nash or Shinn has been heard from since then, although Nash’s sailboat, the
Eloise
, remains at its berth in the Marina. It is unclear at this writing whether or not the boat was taken out over the weekend.

     The police will not speculate on the possibility of foul play, although yesterday a representative of the district attorney’s office gave strong credence to that possibility.

     Farris reported that Nash’s life had been threatened ‘half a dozen’ times in the past five years over his mostly hostile takeover efforts of several Silicon Valley companies.

     Strengthening the bond between Nash and the mystery hand is the fact that Nash was a black belt in karate. The hand has several unusual characteristics that can be associated with karate, among them calcium deposits and a somewhat overdeveloped ‘heel,’ or pad, at the side of the hand. San Francisco coroner John Strout, however, had no comment on the likelihood of the hand being that of Owen Nash and dismissed any possible identification at this time as ‘decidedly premature.’

*     *     *     *     *

‘The boy bushwacked me,’ Farris said. ‘He was waiting at my houseboat when I got home, had already charmed the skirts off of my Betty.’

Hardy, in his office at home, was beginning to admire Jeff Elliot’s spunk. The reporter was nobody’s little lost boy. Hardy had thought he’d scared him into some controllable space yesterday, but evidently he’d read that wrong. Hardy wasn’t going to get Jeff Elliot off his story. It didn’t look like anybody was.

‘You never told me about the death threats.’

‘I never took them seriously anyway. People say things when they lose negotiations, you know.’

‘But you thought enough to mention them to Jeff.’

‘Not really.’ Hardy heard a rustling noise. ‘I’ve got the paper here in front of me, and I must admit it reads pretty dramatically, but all I did was answer a straight question —had anybody ever threatened Owen? I said, “Sure, half a dozen times,” but it wasn’t anything. At least, until I saw it here in print.’

‘You don’t think it could be related?’

‘I guess anything’s possible. But as I said, this was all settled a long time ago. I think the last man who got bitter — Owen took him and his wife to Hawaii for a couple of weeks, wined and dined them, bought her a Mercedes, made him president of some division somewhere. The man made out like a bandit. ’Course, Owen made out better.‘

‘Who was that?’

‘It wasn’t any real threat. I’ve told Owen I was gonna kill him twenty times myself, and half those times I meant it.’

‘Okay, but if Mr Nash turns up dead, somebody’s going to want that name.’

‘I still pray to God he’s not dead.’

Hardy sat still a moment, drumming his fingers on his desk, trying to decide whether or not to tell Farris what he knew. Hell, the man had been forthcoming with him. He said. ‘The
Eloise
did go out on Saturday.’ He told him about his visit to the Marina, his tour of the boat.

‘But if the boat went out, and now is back, and the hand is Owen’s…’

‘Those are big ifs…’

‘But you see what that means? It means May —’

‘No… May or someone else. Maybe not May at all. Or May and some third party.’

Farris was collecting himself. ‘You’re right.’

‘A boat like that, it’s not unknown to get used once for drugs, then abandoned.’

‘Drugs?’

‘It’s more common in Florida, or down south in San Diego, but it’s happened here. Smugglers board the ship, kill whoever’s on it, throw them overboard, load up their cargo, deliver it, dump the boat.’

‘Back at its own slip?’

‘I’m not saying it’s likely, but the boat being back doesn’t say much about anything.’

‘I’ve got to find May,’ Farris said.

‘Why don’t you go by where she lives?’

‘I don’t know where she lives. Owen never told me that. Getting her phone number was a major concession.’

‘How about if they just ran away, like you were saying he might have done yesterday, except that it was Owen and May together, not just him?’

‘I hate to think we’re down to that.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, I really think the running off— it’s something Owen’s outgrown. I just don’t see him doing that anymore. If anything, he was more settled, less spontaneous, since he’s been with May. She really calmed him down. I mean, for Owen, he seemed relatively at peace for the first time in his life. Since Eloise, anyway. Besides, they’ve gone away together before — and told nobody except me. But he did tell me.’

‘And this time he didn’t.’

‘Nothing.’

Hardy looked up as Frannie walked by the door to his office, holding Rebecca, singing quietly to her. He missed Farris’s next sentence.

‘I’m sorry, what was that?’

‘I said it’s getting more unlikely every day anyhow.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Well, I’m Owen’s executor and I’ve also got power of attorney. It’s Thursday now and nobody’s seen him in a week. If he ran away, even with May, he’d need money, right? And he never carried much cash.’

‘So he’d use a credit card, and you’d have found out about that?’

‘Right. I checked all his accounts this morning — so far there’s been no activity.’

Hardy wished he could say something about not giving up hope until they had some more information, something definite.

Farris cut that thought off. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

The answer to that, a line from a comedy routine of the old, now-defunct Committee, a NorthBeach comedy troupe, was ‘Deader than hell, Bob.’

Hardy wasn’t even tempted.

*     *     *     *     *

Officer Patrick Resden was never going to make inspector. He was never going to make sergeant. He was fifty-one years old, a big, wheezy, friendly dog of a cop who was twenty years on the same beat.

Resden had taken the sergeant’s exam five times in the early ‘70s. Hardy had helped Glitsky study for the sergeant’s exam around the same time, but after a review of the first few chapters of the prep book, those ’study sessions’ had become the boys’ night out — Jane and Flo, respectively, staying home while their husbands improved their minds and careers. What they had really improved was their tolerance for alcohol. They knew they’d drunk enough on any given night when a question in the prep book — any question — stumped them.

Hardy had known plant life — and definitely some of his fish — that were smart enough to pass the sergeant’s exam on the second try, and Resden had flunked the thing five times.

But this did not mean he didn’t have a place on the police force. He could follow simple instructions. He did not abuse his gun or his badge. Resden was a good beat cop — his heart was in the right place and he had a lot of experience helping people out, pulling kittens out of trees, busting neighborhood bullies.

One of whom — the defendant in this case — was named Jesus Samosa. It seemed that about two months ago, Officer Resden had had occasion to reprimand Samosa when he caught him about to spraypaint a sidewalk in front of the Mission Street BART station. Instead of getting a hard-on for him, Resden had simply confiscated the can of paint and let the boy go — he was only eighteen — with a warning.

Two days later, in the street in front of the same BART station, Samosa failed to stop at the sign on Mission. His maroon ‘69 Chevy got pulled over and Resden was the citing officer. This time, Resden gave Samosa a ticket —this was evidently very funny to the passengers in the Chevy, but again, Resden simply warned everyone and let them go their way.

Now, it turned out that Jesus Samosa worked at the Doggie Diner three blocks from the BART station. About a week after the stop-sign incident, Resden and his partner, Felice Wong, decided to take their lunch at this same Doggie Diner. Resden ordered his usual couple of double burgers, double cheese — a special order. Felice was grabbing some napkins, with a clear view of the grill area, when Jesus, to the delight of his broiler mate, spit into the bun that he then placed on top of one of the double burgers.

Felice drew her gun, walked behind the counter, confiscated the burger for lab analysis and bagged Jesus Samosa on the spot.

Now
this
defendant, Hardy thought — this guy is going down. Hardy gave a moment’s thought to ordering an HIV test — if the guy tested positive they might be able to charge him with attempted murder. On reflection, though, that might be a little extreme, even if an Elizabeth Pullios might go for it.

As it was, they had Jesus on a couple of health and safety-code violations, misdemeanor aggravated assault, profane language and resisting arrest. The maximum penalty if he got everything was forty-five days in the county jail and fines totaling $3,115.

If the defendant’s attorney wanted to bargain, Hardy figured he would be a sport and knock the fines down to an even three grand.

*     *     *     *     *

After he’d talked to Ken Farris, Hardy had taken his yellow legal pad from his top drawer and wrote notes on everything he could remember relating to Owen Nash. It took him almost twenty minutes, filling two pages.

He then called Art Drysdale at his home, making it clear that he had taken no part in supplying Jeff Elliot with any information used in the
Chronicle
story. ‘But just between you and me, Art, my bones tell me the victim is Owen Nash. And if May Shinn is still alive, we may be looking at my murder case.’

Once again, Drysdale counseled Hardy to cool his jets and wait for the police investigation to catch up. Hardy replied that of course he would do that.

He dialed Jane, but she hadn’t been home — either out working early or spending the night in a strange place. Well, Hardy didn’t know that and it was none of his business anyway. He’d left a message.

*     *     *     *     *

The morning light in Hardy’s office at the Hall of Justice was especially flattering to Elizabeth Pullios. She wore a blue leather miniskirt — far enough down her leg by about an inch to still be professional if the term were loosely applied— with a tailored robin’s-egg man’s shirt made less conservative by the three-button gap at the top. A raisin-sized ruby on a thin gold chain hung to where her cleavage began. Her chestnut hair was loosely tied at the back of her neck. She knocked demurely at Hardy’s door.

‘Good work,’ she said.

He invited her in and she closed the door behind her.

‘What is?’

She placed her rear end on the corner of Hardy’s desk and pushed herself back so she could sit back with her legs crossed, showing and showing. Hardy pushed his chair back almost to the window, put his own feet up on the desk, crossed his hands behind his head and leaned against the glass. ‘What is?’ he repeated.

‘The
Chronicle
thing. Keeping it alive.’

‘Believe it or not, that wasn’t me.’ But then he realized that it had in fact been him who had sent Elliot on the mission that took him to Missing Persons. ‘Not completely, anyway.’

She waved him off. ‘Well, whatever, it’s still on the burner. Who killed him?’

Hardy spent a couple of minutes on Owen Nash, Farris, May Shinn, the Silicon Valley connection. ‘The bottom line, though, is that we don’t have an identified victim yet, so there’s nowhere to go. I think we’re going to need a body.’

‘Well’ — she leaned toward Hardy, both palms resting flat on Hardy’s desk, the ruby swinging out from the gap in her shirt — ‘not necessarily. You remember the Billionaire Boys Club case down in L.A.? They never found the body in that one. And you’ve got part of a body. Get some good pathologist —’

Hardy laughed. ‘Whoa. I don’t think we’re there yet. What about the ring?’

Pullios shrugged, mercifully straightening up. ‘The ring’s a detail. Maybe his friend Farris was wrong, or lying. Maybe Nash only wore it sailing. Who knows?’

Hardy put his feet down and stood up. ‘That’s just it. If nobody knows —’

She shook her head. ‘Dismas, this is too good. You’ve got to grab these when they come around, which, believe me, isn’t often. Mega-rich victim, corporate intrigue, the paper’s already on it. This could make a career.’

Hardy remained casual, motioned to his stack of folders. ‘I think until I clear some of these, my career is on hold.’

She slid off the desk, adjusting her skirt, which entailed leaning over again. If body language talked, Hardy thought, this woman was yelling from the rooftops. He didn’t get it.

‘Well, it’s your decision,’ she said.

*     *     *     *     *

It was that rare San Francisco treasure, a truly warm day. Hardy had decided to walk down to Fifth and Mission without calling first. He wanted to be outside, and going to see Jeff Elliot was an excuse more than anything else.

Jane had reached Hardy during the morning, and the two of them were having lunch at noon at Il Fornaio. Hardy reasoned he could pass a pleasant hour until then, putting in some nonbillable time.

Now he stood in bright sunlight on the steps outside the
Chronicle
Building. Jeff Elliot hadn’t been at his desk, and the guy who sat next to him told Hardy he thought Jeff had said something about going down to the Marina and did Hardy want to leave a message. He did.

Walking down Howard toward the FerryBuilding and the Bay, hands in his pockets and tie loosened, Hardy drank in the smells of truck fumes and pork bao, of tar and roasting coffee. Whenever he passed an alley, about every half block, the heavy odors of urine and garbage would overlay the city smell, but even these were, in their own way, mnemonic and pleasant — Paris when he was in college, Saigon later. He found himself whistling, marveling at the new skyline with the Embarcadero torn down after the Big One, the World Series quake.