The Hearing (37 page)

Rhodin smiled to himself. He had a similar stash himself, although his was a cigar box in which he kept twenty or thirty stupid items he just couldn’t bring himself to discard—a jade rock he got diving off Big Sur, a guitar pick from a B. B. King concert he’d gone to in college, his first pocketknife, a diamond tie tack in case they ever came back in style, a signed Willie Mays rookie year baseball card. Junk. But priceless junk.

Elaine’s box wasn’t all that different really, considering she was a woman. There were several pins for various political campaigns—her mother’s, Chris Locke’s, Sharron Pratt’s. A man’s college ring. A garter. A .38 caliber bullet. A packet of business cards with a rubber band around them. Many coins from different foreign countries. He closed the box back up—this was coming back with him.

A framed picture of Elaine’s mother rested on top of her dresser next to the lamp. In the drawers, he found underwear, socks, foldables. Condoms. The top right drawer, however, contained nothing at all, and this straightened Rhodin up in surprise. He walked across to the office and asked Walsh if he could come in for a minute. Sighing, putting down his magazine, the doctor labored up and followed him. “Do you know what she kept in this drawer?” Curtis asked.

Walsh looked, shrugged. “I guess not much. Did you just take something out of it?”

“No, it was like this. Was it always like this?”

Another shrug. “I don’t know. I didn’t go through her drawers.”

“No, of course not,” Rhodin said, “but there was nothing at all in this one. That seems a little odd, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Walsh repeated. “I didn’t take anything out of it.”

“But it sure seemed like he might have.” He was back now at Freeman’s office, in the Solarium reporting to Treya and Amy. He’d eventually left Tiburon with a cardboard box now about a quarter filled with what he’d collected from the office and the rest of the house, including a copy of the Koran and, of course, the white memento box. On a whim, at the last moment, he’d also thrown in the framed photograph of Loretta Wager. But it was the empty drawer that had captured his interest. “Any of you guys have a completely empty dresser drawer?”

“Drawers don’t get empty,” Amy said. “They get full about ten minutes after you move in someplace. Then too full. It’s a law of nature. He must have cleaned it out.”

Treya disagreed. “He would never have done that and left it empty knowing we were coming to look through her things. He would have put something back in before we got there.”

Rhodin had his own suggestion. “Maybe he didn’t really imagine that it would make any impression? I mean, it was just an empty drawer. Doesn’t mean anything.”

“No.” Treya was sure of it. “If he emptied it, he would have remembered and it would have seemed significant.”

“Then she emptied it,” Amy said. “Elaine.”

They were all with their thoughts a moment. Treya finally spoke up. “If she was leaving him, if they’d had a fight and she walked out one night, she might have just taken a handful of underwear.”

“I’ve got another one,” Rhodin said. “In the bathroom, she had a couple of months’ worth of birth control pills, but in her dresser she had maybe a dozen condoms.”

Amy had an answer for that. “So she
really
didn’t want to get pregnant.”

“Or she wasn’t being faithful,” Rhodin said.

Treya looked at both of them. “Or she knew he wasn’t.”

“Dash Logan?”

The lawyer looked up from the newspaper he was reading, which happened to be the
Democrat
. Jupiter was beginning to hop in the long slide of a Friday afternoon, but he was sitting alone in his usual back booth, a bowl of pretzels on the table next to him, a half-full glass of beer growing warm at his elbow. The look on his face was welcoming, untroubled. “You got me.” He ran his eyes down the man who’d addressed him, extended his hand. “And you’d be Mr. Hardy, I presume. Dismas? Was that the name, Dismas?”

“Still is.” Hardy took the hand—a firm grip—and slid in across from him. “You are one tough man to get a hold of.”

Logan nodded sympathetically. “I hear that a lot. Sorry. I must be having some kind of midlife crisis or something. My motivation’s just gone in the toilet. I got your calls, though.”

“That’s nice. I was starting to think the phones weren’t working.”

“Didn’t I say you could always get me here?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Well, then.” He flashed a smile. It seemed genuine enough. Hardy didn’t have to remind himself, though, that the greatest con men oozed sincerity—it was their stock-in-trade. “Hey, listen, let me buy you a beer for your trouble. If it’s any consolation, I would have called you Monday, but I figure now, Friday afternoon, nobody’s in when you call them anyway. It’ll wait for the weekend, right?” He raised a hand, flagging the bartender. “Wally, a couple of cold ones, see voo play. What do you drink, Dismas?”

Hardy made an apologetic gesture. “I’ve got to stick with water. I see a client at five.”

“And they wouldn’t want their lawyer to have a drink in the afternoon? I hear you. Wally? Just one. And some of that stuff fish fuck in.” A grin back at Hardy. “You know, I’ll tell you, that’s why I stopped working out of my office.”

“Why’s that, Dash?”

“Why? ’Cause when clients come to an office, they see the trappings, you know? You’ve got the secretary and the law library and the phones and all that shit—which is just what it is, shit—and they get so they expect the rest of the package that goes with it. Hey, thanks, Wally. Here’s looking at you, Dismas.” He held up his new glass of beer and touched Hardy’s glass. “So anyway, I’m not that guy. Used to try to be, but it didn’t work. So people would come in with these expectations and I’d
dash
’em. They wanted a different kind of lawyer and God knows there’s enough of ’em. But if they want me—and a lot of folks do—they can come down and meet me here and they know what they’re getting. No frills, maybe, but no bullshit either. And most of ’em, end of the day, they go away happy. So”—his limpid blue eyes fixed Hardy over the rim of his beer glass—“I’m assuming you’ve reconsidered on settling with McNeil?”

“Actually, not.” Hardy sat back and enjoyed Dash’s reaction, the quick snap in the mellow facade—a blink of an eye—then the impressive return to how he’d been. “I’m here on another matter entirely. Do you know a kid named Cullen Alsop?”

Logan appeared to think about it. “Some cop—Banks, I think his name was—was asking about him in here the day before yesterday. OD, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Looks like.”

“So this boy Alsop,” Logan asked, “was he your client?”

“No,” Hardy said. “My client’s Cole Burgess.” If the name registered, Logan didn’t show it. “Elaine Wager?”

His face fell. “Oh, Elaine.” Logan had sympathy down pat. He clucked. “Such a shame about her.”

“It was,” Hardy agreed. “Though I’d understood the two of you had had some problems.”

“No, noth—” The smile. “You don’t mean that special master thing? That was nothing to do with Elaine.”

“Really? I heard she might have taken it that way.”

He shook his head back and forth. “No. That was all for the benefit of the cops. They call me down here . . .”

“The police do?”

“No, no. My office.”

“I thought you didn’t have an office.”

“Hey, what am I, stupid? No, I keep an office. I just don’t use it much. So anyway, I’m down here having a couple of brewskis, my girl calls all in a panic. The cops are there, they got a warrant, they’re doing a search. Well, I go a little ballistic and who’s gonna blame me?”

Hardy lifted his shoulders ambiguously.

“So I’m smack in the middle of something in the female line here and I’ve got to run uptown, rush hour. Time I get there, I’m not feeling my most cooperative. Now Patsy, my girl, she makes a nice presence at the door—you know what I’m saying?—but she’s a little weak on the business side, filing stuff, like that. So I say to the search party, ‘Fine. You’re showing me this kind of respect, you’re treating me like I’m vermin, you can go find the shit yourselves.’ ” He wore his apologetic look again, his voice back to calm and reasonable. “So that’s all it was with Elaine. She got in the middle of it, that was all. ’Nother couple of weeks, I would have gotten back to her and told her I was sorry. If she hadn’t gotten herself shot.”

The recitation seemed to tire him out. His expression went strangely blank, then he recovered, grabbed a pretzel, picked up his beer glass and drank. “But how’d we get on Elaine? You were asking about the OD.”

“Cullen.”

“Right, Cullen, okay. And the guy who killed Elaine. Your client.”

“Cole Burgess. Cullen snitched him out. He was the source of the murder weapon.”

“And I’m supposed to know these guys? How do you get to that?”

“I don’t, really. I went by the Hall today to see if I could get my hands on some early discovery on Cullen since Cole’s prelim is next week. Cullen had a matchbook from here on him.”

“Yeah, that’s what Banks said.”

Hardy shrugged. “You’d told me you hung out here. I thought there was a chance you might have known him.”

Logan couldn’t believe it. “Dismas, turn around, would you?”

Hardy did.

“How many people you see here?”

Hardy did a quick count. “Thirty-five, forty.”

“That’s about right.” Logan popped another pretzel. “At four o’clock. You know how many people are jammed in here come nine or ten? You can’t take a deep breath ’cause there’s no room to put it. So the odds of me knowing one guy . . .” He let the sentence drop, shook his head at Hardy’s optimism. “Forget it.”

“Well, I thought I’d ask,” he said. “Couldn’t hurt. Thanks for your time.” He started to get up.

Logan stopped him. “But the McNeil thing. You’re really going ahead on that? My guy still might settle, but who knows for how long? I think you’re missing a bet.”

“That could be.” Hardy conveyed that clearly he believed it was the least of his worries. And in spite of all his talk about Cole and Cullen, carrying that message to Logan was the primary reason for his visit here. Maybe the news that McNeil wasn’t going to settle would flush something. He smiled politely. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Driving up from Jupiter to his office, he stopped on Seventh Street and this time got lucky with Strout. The coroner, lanky and laconic, knew Hardy from several trials as well as his days as an assistant district attorney. It didn’t matter that he was doing defense now. Generally, Strout had no ax to grind over which side of the courtroom you called home. He was a scientist who dealt in medical facts, equally useful—or not—to both the prosecution and defense.

It was near the end of the workday and he came out himself to the lobby to let Hardy back into his office, a large room filled with medical books and a famous collection of murder weapons from antiquity to the present. Many were under glass, but an equal number—including a reputedly live hand grenade on a candlestick pedestal on his desk—were out there for anybody to grab, wield and use. Hardy could read the upside-down title of the book that was open on Strout’s desk:
The Golden Age of Torture: Germany in the 15th Century.

“There’s a sweet-looking little tome,” Hardy remarked. “Keeping up on the old research, are you? Are they teaching that in med school now?”

Strout lifted the book, ran a finger fondly over the open page, put the volume back where it had been. “If you ever wonder why cruel an’ unusual punishment made it to the Bill of Rights,” he drawled, “you don’t need to look any further’n this. The stuff people was doin’ to one another back then, just as a matter of course.”

“Slightly cruel, was it?”

The coroner chuckled. “I tell you, Diz, the
least
of ’em is more’n most people would believe anybody without serious mental problems ever did to one another. And here we got our judges splittin’ hairs over what’s cruel and unusual, what the Foundin’ Fathers meant. They all ought to read this book, settle their minds on the matter. I mean, this tongue clamp here, for example . . .”

“John.” Hardy held up a hand. “Maybe another time, huh?”

“Not your area of interest today?” Strout settled into the chair behind his desk, chuckling contentedly. He reached for the hand grenade and threw it gently from one hand to the other. “No. Lemme remember. Cullen Alsop.”