The Motive (47 page)

Treya squeezed Glitsky’s hand, forced a smile of sorts. He knew her, knew that she didn’t want to hear any false or possibly false cheer. She wanted to know what to do so that they could be prepared for it and do it right. “So I guess we’d better set up an appointment for next week, then. That’s the next step?”

They got home by three o’clock, and Treya said she didn’t want the two of them moping around together until it got dark, so Glitsky called his driver, Paganucci, thinking he would go check in at work for a few hours, maybe catch up on his mail, answer some of the more legitimate urgent calls, perhaps even talk to Batiste or Kathy West about the conspiracy and the various issues it raised.

But the normally taciturn driver hadn’t taken him a block when he said, “Excuse me, sir.”

He’d been looking at the slow continuous rain, his mind on his wife and new son, wondering how long it would take for this oppressive weight to lift, for life to begin to feel real again. In the backseat, arms crossed, he cleared his throat. “What is it, Tom?”

“Well, sir, it’s the Hall. You know they’re having the Hanover trial there, and the place is a circus, way worse than usual. Even going through the jail door, you’re going to have to break through a line of ’em to get in. And then upstairs, there’s probably a dozen in the hall just outside your office. They’ve been there all day since the morning, waiting for you to show up.” Paganucci, depleted after the lengthy string of words, glanced into the rearview. “Knowing what you’ve been going through at home, I didn’t know if you were really feeling up for that.”

Glitsky was silent for a beat. “That bad, huh?”

“A zoo. Plus, look at the time, the trial’s going to be getting out about when we get there or a little later, and then we’re talking maybe three times as many of the vultures. I wouldn’t normally say anything, you know, sir, but I just thought you ought to get a heads-up.”

“I appreciate it, Tom. Thanks.” They were moving east on Geary. “Why don’t we take a detour and think about it?”

“You got it.” Paganucci hung a right onto Fillmore Street. “Anyplace in particular?”

“I don’t know. My wife doesn’t want me home. Says I’m too morose. You think I’m morose, Tom?”

“No, sir.”

“Me, neither. It’s just most people don’t have my sense of humor. Not that I’ve had a lot to laugh about lately.”

“No, sir.”

“We’re close enough. Why don’t we swing by the Painted Ladies? See how they’re doing.”

“The Painted Ladies, sir.”

“Let’s kick it up, Tom. Lights and sirens.”

“Sir?”

“Joke.”

“Ah.” Then, “Good one.”

“There you go.”

Hanover’s old place was now a gaping hole, still shocking even after most of a year. Especially since its sisters—cousins? daughters?—had been resuscitated and now preened with all or more of their former glory on the 700 block of Steiner. Paganucci, back to his habitual silence, drove the long way around Alamo Square and pulled over to the curb in front of the empty lot.

Hat on, in full uniform, Glitsky opened the door and let himself out into the steady drizzle. Walking up the steps to the front landing, he stepped over onto the earth in the footprint of the old building. Though soaked with the constant rain, the site still crackled with broken glass and the remnants of cinders. Glitsky thought he could still detect a slight burned odor. Walking through the vacant space, he got to the back of the lot and turned around due west to face the park across the street—a grassy knoll topped by windswept cypresses—deserted now in the awful weather. Crunching back the way he’d come, he made it back to Steiner, turned and looked at the row of lovely houses one more time.

He had no idea why he had come here. Could it have been as random as Paganucci’s suggestion that he might want to avoid his office downtown today? He didn’t think that was it.

Something nagged at him.

The house next door had a small sign in the front window that read:
ANOTHER QUALITY REMODEL BY LEYMAR CONSTRUCTION
. The health issues with his son had buried any other thoughts for the better part of the past few hours, but now suddenly he found that the loam had heaved as an idea mushrooming to the surface of his con-sciousness. No, not one idea exactly. More an accumulation of related inconsistencies.

What did it mean that Jim Leymar of Leymar Construction said he hadn’t charged Hanover anything near a million dollars?

Why did Missy D’Amiens, apparently, lie to her landlady about where she worked?

For that matter, what had happened to her car? Or to the ring?

At the outset, Glitsky had of course considered from several angles the possibility that Missy D’Amiens, and not Paul Hanover, might have been the primary intended victim. But she had never assumed a prominence. Always cast into semi-obscurity by Paul’s huge shadow, and then lost in the swirling maelstrom of events and media insanity that had seen Catherine charged and arrested, Missy’s death came to feel to Glitsky like a kind of unfortunate footnote in an unsung and unknowable life. In some ways, she had become to him just another one of San Francisco’s homeless, albeit a wealthy one, who one day merely disappeared, never to be mourned or missed.

But even the homeless, he knew, were sometimes—in fact, depressingly often—killed for their meager possessions, for their shopping carts, for their prime begging turf, for half a bottle of Thunderbird. As a more or less random human being walking around in San Francisco, Glitsky suddenly began to appreciate how tempting a target she might have been on her own, without reference to the Hanovers and their politics or money.

She wore a very visible diamond worth a hundred thousand dollars or more, and drove a Mercedes with a hefty price tag as well. Anyone could have seen her, an apparently defenseless woman alone, followed her home and broken in (or simply knocked at the door on some pretense). Many people who kept guns for their personal protection kept them in the headboard of their beds, and this might simply have been a bonus for the burglar and thief. After he’d killed them both, he removed the ring from her finger, probably rifled the house for other valuables. There might have been gasoline in a container in the garage, and he’d used that to torch the place, then drove off in D’Amiens’s car.

On its own terms, it wasn’t impossible. But it didn’t explain the other discrepancies in Missy’s story—the construction business, the false employment.

Back in his car, Glitsky sat with his arms folded over his chest. Paganucci saw him reflected in the rearview mirror and decided not to ask him where he wanted to go. Glitsky’s natural authority was forbidding enough. When he
scowled as he did now, his jaw muscle working and the scar through his lips pronounced, he was truly fearsome.

After a few moments, he shifted in his seat, searched in his wallet, then in the little book he kept. “There’s a Bank of America branch at Twelfth and Clement, Tom. Let’s go see if they’re still open.”

W
ith full darkness outside and the rain still falling, Hardy stood at the window of his office looking down on Sutter Street and spun around at the knock on his open door.

“Anybody here?”

“I am, Wes.”

“What are you doing standing around in the dark?”

“Thinking. You can turn the lights on if you want.”

“
Fiat lux.
” The room lit up. “You know that Theresa was at the fire?”

“You talked to her.” Hardy got to his desk, sat in his chair.

“At length. I think she developed a little bit of a crush on me.”

“From what I hear, she’s not exactly the crush type.”

“Well, as the song says, Diz, ‘There’s someone for each of us they say.’”

“What song is that?”

“I think a bunch of ’em say it. You ought to listen to more country music, you know that? I mean it. Sam got me into it and now I don’t listen to anything else.”

“I’ll put it on my list,” Hardy said. “She was at the fire?”

Farrell plopped himself into one of the upholstered chairs in front of Hardy’s desk. “This is going to sound familiar, but she saw it on TV and drove over. Got her name and address taken by one of the arson guys and everything. She didn’t see Catherine, but that’s not really surprising given the number of spectators. She said there were probably a couple of hundred people out there that night, maybe more.”

“Okay.”

“What?”

“I’m wondering if it means anything. Did you ask her what she was doing before that?”

“Watching television.”

“Wes…” Hardy’s patience, sorely tried throughout the long day, was all used up.

Farrell held up a placating hand. “I’m getting there, I promise. She works in real estate, you knew that, right? And she does okay, pays the bills, goes on a vacation every couple of years. But not much extra. Anyway, the point is she was home, alone. She remembers specifically because…well, it was that day, mostly, but also because…I think you’ll like this…she remembers the call from Mary.”

Hardy was, in fact, glad to hear this. For Theresa to be any kind of a convincing alternate suspect—for the jury’s benefit if not in actual fact—he had to be able to establish that she had found out on the same day as Catherine that Paul was going ahead with his marriage to Missy, and that he was possibly changing his will in the very near future, perhaps the next week. She had to be strongly motivated to stop him immediately, and without the phone call from Mary to spur her to act, the theory would have had no traction.

“So she was home, got the call from Mary, then what?”

“Then nothing. She and Mary talked about it for a while, and she was extremely pissed off and upset, enough so that she canceled a date for dinner.”

“That night?”

Farrell nodded, pleased with Hardy’s enthusiastic reception. “I know. It’s almost too good to be true, but there it is. She got a stomachache.”

“Who was she going out with?”

“One of her girlfriends. I’ve got the name and we can talk to her if we need to.”

“We might. But meanwhile, Theresa’s so sick she can’t go out to dinner, but a couple of hours later she’s at the fire?”

“Right. But I mean, remember, this is her ex-husband’s house burning down, maybe with him in it. Of course she’s going to go.”

“All right, I know. But still…”

“Still, no alibi. I get it.”

Hardy scratched at his desk blotter. His partner often took a humorous and low-key approach, but he didn’t miss much, which was why Hardy had thought to send him on this errand. “Anybody ever question her about it? Her alibi?”

“I didn’t get that impression. Cuneo glommed onto her over Catherine, but he never thought about her as a suspect. And you’re right, by the way, that they’re not close, Catherine and Theresa. She should have stood up against her when Will said he was going to marry her.”

“But she didn’t?”

“And he’s been paying for it ever since.”

“Did she say that?”

“More or less verbatim.” Farrell paused. “If you haven’t gathered by now, Diz, she doesn’t particularly want to help us out on the defense. She’s finally got Catherine out of the family and wants to keep it that way. Will’s happier.”

“Will’s a jerk,” Hardy said.