The First Law (22 page)

They’d told Roy Panos they’d meet him at John’s at 11:30, and ten minutes before that Cuneo turned on the ignition and put the car in gear. “How’s the guy make a living, he never opens his shop?”

“Maybe he’s not coming in at all,” Russell said. “Maybe he’s on the run.”

Cuneo looked across, pointed a finger at him, pulled the imaginary trigger.

John Holiday’s conquest stories to friends such as Dismas Hardy had lately been fabrications. The truth was that he had fallen in love and didn’t want to appear to have been a fool if it didn’t work out.

While Cuneo and Russell waited for him to show up at the Ark, he was in Michelle’s wonderful apartment—a modest but extremely well-kept one-bedroom unit on the back, nontourist straight side of the “crookedest street in the world,” Lombard. The place was only on the second floor of her building, but the street fell off in a cliff, so out the picture window she had a million dollar unimpeded view of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. She’d started living in these three rooms while she was in college, eighteen years ago, and rent control had kept her there—in today’s San Francisco, she couldn’t have found an unfurnished lean-to for what she was paying. A freelance writer, Michelle occasionally published in national magazines and regularly in some of the local neighborhood papers and advertising supplements. She also had a couple of very nice steady jobs doing restaurant reviews, and these helped bridge the income gap by providing dinners out for her and, often, a guest.

The first communication between Michelle and Holiday had been faceless, via email. In fact, because Michelle signed her pieces “M. Maier,” Holiday hadn’t even known he was writing to a woman. In early summer, in an ad rag called the
Russian Hill Caller,
she reviewed a small new place called Tapa the Bottom—a Spanish
tapas
restaurant located at the foot of Russian Hill. Michelle’s food pieces often had a kind of M.F.K. Fisher quality, where snatches of philosophy, cultural history, or personal experience would thicken the usual thin broth of menu and decor description, and this article had stirred up feelings in Holiday that he’d suppressed for a long time.

He’d spent his honeymoon with Emma on the Costa Brava in Spain, at a small fishing village called Tossa de Mar, about forty miles north of Barcelona. For Holiday, the very air there at that time had seemed imbued with promise, with a sense that everything in his life now was going to work out, that the emptiness of his early life was over forever. And that short season of hope had been steeped in saffron, garlic, oregano, onions.

As soon as Holiday finished the article, he’d beelined to Tapa the Bottom, where he felt himself transported by nearly every bite. Escargots in pepper sauce, baby octopus, the Spanish tortilla—really an omelette of onion, egg and potato—the crusty bread smeared with tomato and garlic. When he got back home, flushed with a full bottle of chilled rosé, he emailed M. Maier through the
Caller
to express his gratitude for the recommendation. He ended by adding, without much thought, “Happiness has been a bit elusive for a while, but while I was eating there, I was happy.”

She’d written him back the next day, and they’d started corresponding regularly, breaking ground. Eventually, since they knew they must be neighbors, they agreed to meet. Michelle showed up in what turned out to be her usual outdoor attire, an army-navy coat over loose-fitting paramilitary camo garb, combat boots and a weird hat, one of her misshapen collection of thrift store headwear. In her heavy black-rimmed eyeglasses, with the hat pulled low and her tousled dark hair falling over her face, and wearing no makeup of any kind, she had attracted no undue attention.

Holiday had enjoyed the lunch, and though Michelle was nice enough, she wasn’t the kind of woman he chose to pursue anymore. Clearly not a casual person, she brimmed with passion—thoughts and feelings, ideas, wit. Not his type, not since Emma. And certainly not the type he’d been taking lately to bed.

But he kept writing to her. She wrote back. They had another platonic lunch.

Gradually, as their relationship had slowly progressed, he began to appreciate her really magnificent beauty. Long-legged and deep-bosomed, with a sensuous wide mouth, an exotic cast to her eyes and strikingly perfect skin, she used the baggy clothes and funky headwear and army camouflage as a form of deception that allowed her, mostly, to pass through the world unmolested.

In their early lunches, she’d always looked barely thrown together. It came out that she’d been hurt a lot by men liking her only for her looks. She told him she’d always fantasized about marrying a blind man so that she could be sure he loved the person she was and not just because of, as she called it, the package.

The package fostered an odd mix of physical confidence and low self-esteem. As Holiday moved closer and closer to something resembling a commitment to Michelle, she had started to trust him less. If he let her know that he desired her body, too, it scared her. That’s what the other men had wanted. So Holiday must in some way be like them.

The irony of this—that the first person with whom he’d tried to be faithful since Emma doubted him—did not escape him. They’d had their worst-ever fight about it on Thursday night. Holiday in his cups stormed out of the Imperial Palace before they’d gotten their pot stickers. They hadn’t made up until Sunday, after a Friday night about which Holiday felt guilty. As well he should have.

It hadn’t all been lies to Hardy.

This morning, in bed with Michelle, Holiday reclined propped on his elbow. Looking up from the newspaper, he was drawn back to that first meeting with her and had to smile that his initial reaction to this woman had been so neutral. At this moment, he was entirely smitten with the view of her. In stylish reading glasses, she wore orchid-print white silk pajamas. Barely buttoned on top, they gapped open as she leaned over to read.

He reached over and cupped her breast and she moved her hand over his, holding him there, never stopping her reading. He went back to the paper and turned the page. Some tension must have translated over to her.

“What is it, John? Are you all right?”

His hand had left her breast. He read on for another few seconds, making sure it confirmed what the headline seemed to promise. It did. He looked up at her, concern etching his features into something very much older. He hesitated, knowing that his ownership and management of the Ark was not her favorite thing about him. When he’d gotten home from work last night, he had started to tell her about Clint and Panos’s people, to say nothing of the actual police. As usual, it hadn’t sparked her interest, and he’d let it drop in favor of her query letters to
Gourmet, Sunset
and
Bon Appetit
to see if any of them would be interested in a story on the glories of grilled fruit.

He’d already told her the story about how he’d come to own the Ark. He’d known the owner, Joey Lament, pretty well. Joey was pushing seventy and Holiday had had a pocketful of cash from the sale of the pharmacy, so they made a deal and the thing never even went on the open market. But now, like it or not, his bar was about to become the topic again.

“Somebody killed Matt Creed,” he said.

“Do you know him?”

“Yeah, I did. He’s the patrol guy. Kind of a cop. Private security.”

“And somebody killed him?”

“Shot him.” He was picking up details, scanning the small article. “Point blank, or close enough.”

She pulled some covers up around her shoulders. “Tell me this has nothing to do with you or your bar.”

He said nothing, eyes down on the printed page.

“John?”

Finally, a sigh. “He’s the kid who found Silverman. It was in the paper Saturday. The thing they came and talked to Clint about.”

“What do you mean, kid?”

“It says here he was twenty-two.”

Michelle pulled her blanket more closely around her and got out of the bed. She walked over to the picture window and stood before it, looking out. “I don’t want to have this in our life, if we’re going to have a life,” she said. “People you know getting killed. They’re related aren’t they?”

He sat up, his voice defensive. “It doesn’t say that here. There’s no sign of it.”

But he might as well not have spoken. “I guess I don’t understand why you don’t just sell the damn bar. Or if it’s really important to you, at least fix it up?”

“It’s not that important, really. It keeps my money working so I don’t have to, that’s all. I could sell it today for twice what I paid for it and then retire.” Trying to inject some lightness, he added, “But then what would I do?”

“I’ve got a wild idea.”

“What?”

“How about something worthwhile?”

A jolt of anger shot through him and he fought to control it. “I guess I don’t remember,” he said. “Were we having a fight?”

She lowered herself onto the ottoman by her reading chair. Her head went down so that he couldn’t see her face.

“Would you be happier if we broke up?” he asked. “The last thing I want to do is cause you pain.”

When she looked up, she was close to tears. “You know two people who have been shot to death in the last week. Do you know how scary that is to someone who loves you? And then you say—you apparently believe—that they’re not related, to you or each other.” She shook her head back and forth with great sadness. “Of course they are, John. Of course they are.”

Roy Panos was buying. He insisted.

He cut into his steak and met the eyes of both inspectors across the table. He put a bite of meat into his face, then put his utensils down and held up his right hand. “I swear to God. Terry was off. I stopped in around eight . . .”

“I thought they’d quit paying you guys,” Russell said.

Roy nodded. “Yeah, but since Silverman, I figured it can’t hurt to keep up on ’em, am I right?”

“You’re right.” Cuneo was having petrale with capers and lemon sauce, humming as he chewed. “So Holiday worked the night shift last night?”

“Yep.”

“You talk to him?” Russell asked. He was having the special—lamb chops with asparagus and garlic mashed potatoes.

“Said hi when I looked in. I bought a coffee. He asked me where Mattie was.”

“Creed?” Cuneo put down his fork. “Why’d he ask that?”

Roy shrugged. “ ’Cause normally Mattie walked the north beat first. But last night I took it.”

“Why? “Russell asked.

“No reason, really. Change of pace.”

“He say anything else? Holiday?”

Panos had had a rye on the rocks before lunch. Now he finished his second glass of wine and started pouring the next. He drank some more, put the wineglass down, twisted the stem of it pensively. When he spoke, it was almost apologetically. “I didn’t want to spook him. I wanted to let you guys get him fresh.”

“So you didn’t mention anything about Creed?” Cuneo asked.

“Anything like what?”

“Like he pointed the finger in their direction.”

Roy gave this some more thought. “I didn’t go anywhere near there, but now you mention it, Holiday did say if I talked to Mattie, would I ask him to stop in? He wanted to ask him something.”

The two inspectors exchanged a look.

Suddenly, Roy’s heavy eyes lit up with the significance of what he’d revealed. “He wanted to make sure Mattie was on, didn’t he? Son of a bitch. And I told him. Shit.” For a moment, it looked as though Roy would cry.

Russell reached out and patted the table between them. “It would have been another night, that’s all. It’s nothing you did.”

“The sons of bitches,” Panos repeated. “And now, without Mattie’s ID . . .”

“Don’t worry about that,” Cuneo said. “They made some mistakes last night. We’re close.”

“How close?”

He was one of them, another cop, so the inspectors told him.

11

T
he night before, Hardy drove twice around the downtown neighborhood and could not find a place to park even quasilegally. Nearly out of his mind with frustration and worry, he had finally given up and driven the extra few blocks to his own office, where he had his own spot under the building. Back up on the street, he’d run back to the emergency room entrance of St. Francis Memorial Hospital, where Gina Roake had stood waiting by the admitting station.

“How is he?”

Her face was blotched, but she held it now under tight control. “Not good. He’s been in there for two hours. He’s still unconscious. They won’t let me in.”

“What happened?”

“Somebody beat him up, Dismas. I’d been home an hour and some policemen knocked at the door. He had his wallet on him, which had his driver’s license with the address, and . . .”

“He had his wallet? Was there still money in it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even . . .”

She caught Hardy’s shift of focus and turned. A young woman in green scrubs had come out into the waiting room. Roake touched his arm and went to her. He followed, noting with a sinking heart the grave look on her face.

“We’ve done all we can for the moment,” she was saying. “We’ll be bringing him to the ICU, where we can keep a close eye on him.”

“But how is he?” Gina asked.

The young doctor’s eyes quickly went to Hardy, came back to Gina. “He’s taken quite a beating. He’s got severe head trauma and internal bleeding and he hasn’t regained consciousness.” She took in a deep breath and let it out. “I’d have to call his condition critical.”

Roake closed her eyes. Her shoulders seemed to collapse. After a short moment, she opened her eyes and nodded. “Is there anything at all I can do?”

There wasn’t. The doctor said she had to go and supervise the transfer to the ICU, and she went back behind the door to the ER.

Without a word, Roake and Hardy sat down next to one another on the waiting room chairs. To his surprise, Hardy realized that they weren’t alone in the room—a young black woman rocked a baby across the room and stared into empty space in front of her. An elderly Asian man was reading a newspaper.

A young person let out an agonizing moan somewhere behind them, and sirens cried somewhere close in the night.