The Motive (15 page)

This time, cocktail hour Friday night, Maxine and Joseph Willis were both home at their place a few houses down from where Paul Hanover’s used to be. They were drinking manhattans in stem glasses and going out to meet some friends for dinner in a while, but Cuneo didn’t pick up any sense that they resented his visit. They invited him in, offered him a drink, which he declined, and then Maxine explained to Joseph again about what she’d told Cuneo the night before. As she talked, the three of them drifted back over to the space by the front window.

“I’m here about the same thing again, I’m afraid.” Cuneo took out the picture and handed it across to her. “We want to be sure that Missy D’Amiens was who you saw. I wondered if you’d mind looking at this?”

Maxine put her drink on a side table, then took the newspaper cutout. Looking out the window for a second—revisiting the moment—she came back to the picture and nodded her head one time briskly. “Yep,” she said, “that’s her all right.”

Joseph, maybe forty-five years old, was physically much smaller than his wife. Short and very thin, he probably didn’t weigh 150 pounds. His shoulders barely seemed sufficient to hold up his head. What hair he had, and it wasn’t much, he wore in a buzz. He was wearing rimless eyeglasses, a red bow tie over a starched white shirt, red paisley-print suspenders and brown tweed pants. But in a quiet way he managed to project a sense of confidence and inner strength.

He placed his drink carefully next to his wife’s, then peered at the picture over Maxine’s arm and shook his head, speaking with absolute certainty. “That’s Missy D’Amiens, certainly, but I can’t swear she was the woman we saw the other night.”

Maxine frowned deeply, looking over and down at him. “What are you saying, Joseph? That sure was who she was.”

Joseph put a hand lightly on her arm. “Could I please see the picture myself?” He was the soul of mildness, holding out
his other hand. When she gave it to him, he crossed over to the window and stood where the light was better, studying it for the better part of a minute. Finally, he raised his eyes, looked directly at Cuneo and shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

Cuneo emitted a long, low, single-note deep in his throat. Maxine crossed over to Joseph and pulled the picture from his hand, holding it up close to her face. While she was looking, Cuneo asked Joseph, “Where was her car, again, exactly?”

Pointing out the window, he indicated the same place that Maxine had shown Cuneo the night before. “Just across the street over there, five or six cars down, by the light post.”

“And what kind of car was it? Do you remember?”

“I’m not sure. Dark, certainly. Black.”

“It was a black Mercedes,” Maxine said, “C-type.”

Joseph turned to her, placed his hand on her arm again and said, “It might have been that, after all. I didn’t pay too much attention.”

“You weren’t looking at the car, were you?”

He gave his wife a tolerant smile. “Perhaps that, too.” Back to Cuneo. “In any event, she went to the car and we all went back to our drinks. Speaking of which…” He picked up both drinks and gave his wife hers.

“Did you see her do anything at the car?” Cuneo asked.

Joseph silently consulted with his wife, then shook his head. “No. She just went to the door.”

“Not the trunk?”

“Not that I saw. Maxine?”

“No. She just got in and drove off.”

Cuneo’s low hum had developed a melody, but the song remained unidentifiable. “Let’s get back for a minute, if you don’t mind, to whether or not it was Missy D’Amiens. Mrs. Willis, you say it was?”

“I thought it was.”

“But do you remember last night, when we talked, you said you thought you might have been mistaken? Do you remember that?”

She didn’t like the question and straightened up to her full height. “That was when I heard that she’d died in the house.”

“Right. So you reasoned that she must not have left. So maybe it was someone else out on the street here.”

“Or she left and came back later.”

“Sure, which is what she must have done, if she was in the house when it burned. But your husband now says he’s not sure it was her at all.”

The husband spoke up. “It might have been. But there was something…” He moved back a couple of steps, so he was standing in the jutting alcove of the front bay window. “I saw her as she came out of Hanover’s place and I remember first thinking, ‘Oh, there’s Missy’ But then, something about her walk…”

“Her
shake
, more like,” Maxine said.

He shrugged. “I don’t know what it was exactly, but something made me form the impression that it wasn’t Missy.”

“You knew her, then? Missy?” Cuneo asked.

“We’d spoken on the street a few times. We’re neighbors, after all. I can’t say we had a real relationship of any kind. But I knew who she was.”

“Okay. So you’re standing here and she comes out of Hanover’s…”

Joseph sipped at his cocktail, broke a small smile. “I must have kept looking a bit too long out of the corner of my eye.”

“Only the corner, Joseph?”

“Well.” He touched her arm gently and continued. “In any event, my dear bride must have seen me looking at something, because she turned to see what it was.”

“But,” Cuneo wanted it crystal clear, “by this time the woman from Hanover’s had come down as far as this window. Isn’t that when you told me you first saw her, Maxine?”

A nod. “She was right there.”

“Okay. Do either of you remember what she was wearing?”

“Blue,” Joseph said.

“Black.” Maxine turned on her husband. “A jacket. Leather. Now,
come on
, Joseph. I
know
what I saw, and I saw that.”

Joseph explained the apparent contradiction. “From the side you saw only the jacket. When she first came out, the
jacket was open, and she was wearing a bright blue blouse, shiny. It caught the sun.”

“Skirt or pants?”

They looked at each other. “Pants.” They agreed.

“So pants, a blue shirt, a leather jacket. Driving a black Mercedes.”

“That sounds about right,” Joseph said.

It sounded about right to Cuneo, too. But he wasn’t thinking it sounded like Missy D’Amiens.

G
litsky in shirtsleeves came out of Dismas Hardy’s back door and stopped on the top step that led down to the backyard. He had just left Treya and Frannie and his baby in the kitchen. He looked up at cerulean blue. The sun hadn’t yet set behind him, and the shade the house threw carried all the way across Hardy’s deep, narrow back lawn and halfway up the fence, to about the height where Frannie had trimmed the riot of blooming roses—white, red, yellow, purple, flame.

Hardy’s home stood on the top of a small rise, and from his vantage Glitsky could look over the sun-splashed roofs of the Richmond District all the way to downtown four miles east. The top of the Transamerica Pyramid peeked somewhat ludicrously above the rust-red dome of the synagogue on Arguello. Slightly to his right, he could just make out the shining whiteness of St. Ignatius Church on the USF campus. Here and there, a window would reflect the sinking sun’s light and cast it back, little diamonds sprinkled across the panorama. There was no sign of fog, only the barest of breezes, and the evening was completely without chill.

Just up against the house below him, Hardy the purist was arranging charcoal over newspaper in a chimney-flue-lighting device. Glitsky watched him counting out some no-doubt mystical exact number of briquettes. When Hardy held a match to the paper underneath, the smoke started to rise up toward where Glitsky sat.

“You’re safe,” Hardy said. “Smoke follows beauty.”

With a grunt, Glitsky took that as his cue to move. “You know,” he said, coming down the stairs, “you can buy a propane barbecue for about a hundred bucks. Turn on the
gas, press a button, you get heat. It got invented a few years ago, you might not have heard.”

Hardy drank from his beer bottle. “The starters always break. They don’t work.”

“And that chimney thing does?”

“You wait.”

“That’s my point. What if I don’t want to wait? Or get smoked out?”

“Then you don’t elect to barbecue, which, my friend, presupposes a lack of hurry and, you might have noticed, some likelihood of smoke. When things cook, especially over a fire, they often smoke. You could look it up. Besides, I don’t like the idea of a bomb in my backyard.”

“A bomb?”

“Those propane tanks. One of ’em blows up, it can level a building.”

“And this happens a lot in your experience?”

Hardy sipped his beer and shrugged. “Only takes once.”

“I’m not going to change your mind, am I? On propane or anything else.”

“But you so enjoy trying. And I think you did once on something. Change my mind, I mean. I know it wasn’t getting me to try Spam. I would never do that.”

“I know I got you to wear better shoes when we walked the beat.”

“See? There you go. Even if that was twenty years ago.”

“It was thirty years ago.”

“Thirty?” Hardy said. “Don’t say thirty. It
couldn’t
have been thirty. That would mean I’m old now.”

“You are
way
old.” Glitsky walked over to the grill, put his hand flat over the chimney starter. “And this isn’t hot yet.”

“You’re not supposed to monitor it by the second. It gets hot eventually.”

“So does pavement on a sunny day, but people generally don’t try to cook on it. Here’s another one.”

“Another what?”

“Time I got you to change your mind. I got you to apply back to the DA’s office after God knows how many years of wandering in the desert.”

“Only about a decade. And it wasn’t the desert. It was the Shamrock.” This was the bar that Hardy owned a quarter
of. “Jews like yourself wander in the desert. Good Irish stock like me achieve spiritual peace in a wetter environment. Guinness comes to mind, the occasional black and tan, if you recall.”

“I probably remember better than you do. But the fact remains. The reason you’re back practicing law and getting rich is because I changed your mind lo these many years ago.”

Hardy raised his beer bottle. “For which I salute you.”

Glitsky pulled a chair around to sit at the patio table. Hardy tinkered with the chimney thing, lifting it up, blowing into the bottom of it, putting it back on its grill. Now he, too, sat down. “Thank God for a warm night,” he said.

Glitsky didn’t respond right away. When he did, he said, “Do you ever wish you could just stop?”

“Stop what?”

“Everything. Change, new and exciting experiences, whatever comes next.”

“Then you’re dead,” Hardy said.

Glitsky shook his head. “I’m not talking forever.”

“But if you’re stopped, there’s no time, so it is forever.”

“Let’s pretend it isn’t, okay? But you know those books I love, Patrick O’Brian?
Master and Commander
, the movie. Those books.”

“What about them?”

“They make a toast all the time in them. ‘May nothing new happen.’ That’s how I’m feeling. That it would be nice to just stop for a while. When things are good.”

Hardy threw his friend a sideways glance over the table. This wasn’t a typical Glitsky conversation. “They
are
good,” he said. “Knock on wood, may they stay that way.” He rapped his knuckles on the table, lowered his voice. “You thinking about Cuneo?”

Glitsky was tracing the grain in the patio table’s surface. “A little.”

“A little bit, but all the time?”

Glitsky nodded. “Pretty much.”

“Me, too.”

“Waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“That, too, but maybe it won’t.” Hardy looked over at his friend. “You all right?”

“Right now, this minute, yeah. But things are going to change because they always do.”

“With Cuneo, you mean?”

“Him, yeah, but other stuff, too.” He indicated the house. “The pregnancy…”

“I thought everything was good with that.”

“It is.” Glitsky let out a heavy breath. “I keep telling myself,” he said, “that you can acknowledge a happy moment once in a while and it doesn’t necessarily curse you for eternity.”

“When things are good, the only way they can go from there is bad?”