John Lescroart (31 page)

I
t was closing in on dusk, and Ridley Banks was back at the same crime scene to which he'd been summoned just after dawn.

He'd had a busy day, putting a greater concentration of investigative fieldwork into the past ten hours than he normally would get to in a month. The results were mixed, as they almost always were in homicides anyway. But they were also, in his opinion, provocative in the extreme.

The victim had been found dead in room 412 of the Excelsior Hotel at Sixteenth and Mission. In spite of its name, the Excelsior is not a hotel in the usual meaning of the word. Rather, its clientele rent rooms by the week or the month, and these tended to be casually bartered by its inhabitants mostly for drugs, but also for sex, booze, clothes, money.

There was no current guest registered to the room containing the body of Cullen Leon Alsop. The door had not been locked when he'd been found. Still, the homicide team upon its arrival had little trouble identifying him—his wallet bulged in the back pocket of his jeans, which he was still wearing. He also had his jail release and OR papers on him, stuffed into the front pockets. So it was Cullen, all right, and Ridley's name was on one of the sheets, so he got looped into the call.

The inspector spent a few hours at the scene, asking questions of the crime scene investigation unit. He then decided it would be instructive to wait for John Strout's arrival. He wanted to talk to the coroner before things moved too far along. Because while people died quite often from heroin overdoses in the city—especially in
this neighborhood—there was too much coincidence in this case for Ridley's liking.

The sergeant with the CSI team was of the opinion that somebody else had been with Cullen and then, not too surprisingly when he realized what was happening, fled. He was surprised, though, that he'd left the Baggie with a reasonable amount of white powder still in it on the small table next to the bed. This stuff was far more valuable than gold to any addict—it was unprecedented in the CSI sergeant's experience that this much would be left behind, regardless of what had occurred in the room. Cullen also had six hundred and fifty-four dollars in cash, a couple of joints and a matchbook from a bar called Jupiter jammed into his other front pants pocket.

When Strout came, he was his cautious, but helpful, self. After he'd examined and autopsied the body and all forensic evidence relevant to it, the coroner would eventually release his opinion on the official cause of death. Before that, Strout wasn't going to be hurried, nor was he inclined to make any official pronouncement before he had time to analyze all of his facts. But there were a few informal opinions he could share with an inspector of homicide to guide him in his investigation.

The first was that the residue left in the bag appeared to be an unusually pure form of heroin, possibly almost uncut China White. Strout told Banks that if this was a representative sample of the latest stuff to hit the street, they could expect half a dozen overdoses, maybe more, in the next couple of days. Neither Strout nor the CSI team could see any sign of struggle, and that, combined with the probable cause of death, suggested to Strout that this was most likely an overdose situation. An accidental suicide, not a homicide.

Banks couldn't shake the feeling that in this the coroner was mistaken.

Over the next two hours, he talked to everyone who'd been in the building and who hadn't managed to escape before the word got out that the police were on hand. Of
the twenty-seven people he interviewed, fourteen admitted to knowing Cullen at least by sight, but none of them had seen him come into the building. None admitted to knowing he'd been there last night.

The “manager” was a toothless mid-fifties gnome in a lime green bathrobe and combat boots. He had no idea how that poor boy had gotten into the room. It was vacant. See? He still had the key! Far more concerned with getting reimbursed by the city for the room's rent during the time the police kept it closed off as a crime scene than he was with the death, the manager had not seen or heard anything unusual in the past couple of days. Of course, he would have said the same thing if he had personally witnessed the Second Coming.

In the next four hours, Ridley had first called his old mentor Glitsky in the hospital. After that, cursing himself for everything he was and everything he'd done in the past ten days, he'd gone back to the beginning, and remembered the matchbook from Jupiter. Armed with a mug shot, he got to the bar at around two-thirty, and five people, including the bartender, a lawyer, a private investigator and two random daytime drinkers recognized Cullen's face. Yes, he'd been there, had a few drinks, seemed impatient, but didn't cause any trouble.

Ridley was glad to run into some cooperative witnesses. The five of them had been helpful, sitting in a circle around him at the bar trying to help him connect the dots. The lawyer and the private eye—Logan and Visser—were sure that they had left the bar before the victim had, so they couldn't vouch for when he left, but the other three witnesses came to an agreement that Cullen had left at a little after dark.

Now Ridley was back where he'd begun, on the streets surrounding the Excelsior. He pulled his shirt out, untied his shoes and adopted a slouch. In a half hour, he'd made a friend who directed him to one of the neighborhood's salesmen—Damien was parked in an alley a block and a half from the Excelsior, selling prewrapped, packaged,
brand-name dime bags of heroin out of a shiny Buick Skylark.

In another five minutes, whatever streetlights still worked in the city would come on. Ridley looked around to be sure nobody was watching. He reached under his jacket and pulled out his gun and badge and walked up to the car. “Lucky for you, dirtbag,” he said, “I'm in homicide. Get out real slow.”

Backing up to let the door open, Ridley nearly had his own heart attack. To his right, at the back bumper of the Skylark, stood another bum—his face in the dim light vaguely familiar. He, too, had a gun in one hand. In the other, he held out a badge. He was smiling dangerously.

Damien had one foot on the pavement when the other man sprang forward in one long step. Grabbing him by the collar, he dragged him the rest of the way out of the car and threw him to the ground.

“Hey, man,” Damien whined. “My clothes, you know.”

Both men kept their guns trained on him. “Damien, Damien, Damien,” the bum with the badge clucked sympathetically. “Some people are just never going to learn. Do you not have brains, is that the problem? Are they defective? Can't you tell a cop yet after all this time? Haven't you and I done this enough?” He shook his head dishearteningly. “I swear, it's depressing.”

He looked over at Ridley, still holding his badge up to avoid any misunderstanding. Then he went back to Damien, still on the ground. “This man here,” he said, indicating Ridley, “is Inspector Banks from homicide.” He flashed a smile, speaking over his own shoulder. “Jan Falk. Narcotics. I tried to get you coming out of Jupiter, but you were too fast. Sorry if I spooked you just now.”

Ridley was coming back to earth, finally recognized Falk as one of the daytime drinkers from Jupiter. Undercover, and fooled him clean. “I'll get over it.”

“You guys going to kiss now or what?” Damien asked.

Falk smiled at him again, put on a mincing voice. “If we want to, Damien. In fact, we're going to do anything
we want to, and I get the feeling Inspector Banks wants to ask you some questions. Is that right, Inspector?”

“That's right.”

“Well, you can ask my lawyer. I didn't do no homicide.”

Banks gave Damien a heartless little grin of his own. “I didn't say you did now, did I?”

“I'll tell you what,” Falk said. “I'm going to make a phone call now to some friends of mine and meanwhile let you fellows get to know each other a little better. How's that sound, Inspector?”

 

A half hour later, Damien was leaving the alley on his way downtown in the backseat of a squad car. Inspectors Banks and Falk waved good-bye, then went to lean against the bumper of the Skylark to wait for the police tow truck to come and impound the vehicle. By now, they were laughing about it.

“You were damn lucky I didn't pop you where you stood,” Banks said.

“I know. I realized that about a second too late. It just seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. I hate that little pecker. Haven't seen him in a couple of years.”

“How'd you know where I was going?”

“You said Excelsior. Drug overdose. I guessed. I'm made here, so I don't hang about much, but I saw you and thought it would be fun to stroll through the old neighborhood. And what do you know, we both run into Damien.”

Ridley phrased it carefully, not wanting to step on a fellow officer's toes. “He wasn't very hard for me to find, you know.”

“No, we figure it takes maybe a half hour for a new guy, one of us, to make one of them. Then we leave 'em alone.”

“But you just busted him.”

“That was purely for fun, Inspector. We got twenty Damiens in this square mile. If you hadn't connected with him, I wouldn't have done a thing. They're just literally holding the bags, not worth the trouble. Their only
value is maybe leading us to their source, and even at that next level . . .” He shrugged. It was terrible, but it was reality. Every policeman knew that arresting the intermediaries in the drug trade was at best a stopgap measure, a nuisance for all concerned. Between Damien and his ultimate supplier (whom Damien would never meet, or know, or possibly even hear of), there were probably six to ten layers of intermediaries, each taking their money, most cutting the product. “Anyway, you wanted something from him. I thought I might put him more in the mood to be cooperative. You find what you wanted?”

It was Ridley's turn to shrug. “I have trouble believing insurance salesmen are telling me the truth. And Damien scores a little lower than they do.”

“What did you want to know?”

“If there was something new, super pure, on the street. That's what my guy died of.”

“What did he say, Damien?”

“He said no. Same stuff all the time lately. Guaranteed. You know, I've got to say, I can't believe they put brand names on this stuff. Those bags Damien had on him. Heavenly Daze. Jesus.”

“Sure. There's all kinds of great shit—Nirvana. China Sleep. Tar Babies. But your guy had something else?”

“The coroner said—unofficially of course—that he thought it was nearly pure. And it wasn't in any container, just a plain Baggie.”

Falk took his heel off the bumper and walked off a few steps. He stood there a couple of moments, nodding his head as though reaching some conclusion. Then he turned back around. “This is why I came out looking for you after you left.”

“Why?”

“ 'Cause I'm on a thing out of the Jupiter. There's a lot of cocaine in and out of there, and since it's mostly a law crowd, people want to see it cleaned up before it gets busted. Am I making it clear?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, so yesterday, I'm passing a slow afternoon and
your man Cullen comes in, just like we all said today. But he's not like a
little
impatient—he's climbing the walls. So he's halfway through a beer, and he gets up and goes to the bathroom. Couple of minutes later, one of the guys today—the PI, Visser?—he gets up and goes to the bathroom. Now I been in there, the bathroom, and it's one stall, one pisser, and those two guys are in there, swear to God, ten minutes, before Visser comes out first and sits back down in his booth. Of course, it's Jupiter, late afternoon, nobody's paying any attention. Except me.”

“So what?”

“Not what you're probably thinking. Another minute and out comes your guy, Cullen Leon Alsop. Now he's Mr. Mellow. Sits and finishes his beer, has another one while Visser and his lawyer friend leave.”

Ridley shook his head. “I must be missing something. This wasn't cocaine. This was heroin.”

But Falk had a scent. “Either way,” he said. “Visser was in there and gave him something. Then this morning the guy's dead? I never thought of it until you came in today asking questions, but as soon as I saw that kid's face, I'm going click click click, you know?”

“I know the feeling,” Ridley said. “I'm getting it now.”

“A
decent legal mind?” Frannie whistled, impressed. “David actually said those words?”

“Every one of them, in that order.”

Behind the bar of the Shamrock, Moses McGuire slid a black and tan—half Bass ale, half Guinness stout—across to his brother-in-law. “He's buttering you up,” he said. “I'll bet he raises your rent in the next few weeks. You watch.”

But Hardy was shaking his head. “It was a sincere compliment. You had to be there. I doubt if he even realized he said it.”

“We're talking David Freeman,” Frannie said flatly. “If he said it, he realized it.”

“Shameless flattery,” Moses said. “And not much of it at that.”

Hardy sipped at his brew. “Mose, I once heard Freeman say he thought Oliver Wendell Holmes wasn't too stupid. If the greatest jurist our country has produced is not too stupid and I've got a decent legal mind, you see where that puts me.”

“At least in line for the Supreme Court,” Frannie said. “I can't wait.”

“In line for a rent increase, is more like it.” Moses wasn't to be persuaded. “I wouldn't go anyplace expensive for dinner tonight. You're going to need the money.”

It was Date Night. Normally they didn't do the Redwood Room at the Clift followed by Charles Nob Hill. On a typical Wednesday, they would meet—Hardy from downtown and Frannie from their house out on Thirty-fourth Ave—at the Little Shamrock midway between them at Ninth and Lincoln. They would have one drink,
usually at the bar with Moses behind it, and then repair to dinner wherever the mood took them.

A young couple had seated themselves at the bar by the front window and Moses walked down to wait on them. Hardy covered Frannie's hand with his own, gave it a gentle squeeze, put on an apologetic face and reached for the beeper on his belt. “Sorry. I meant to leave it in the car.”

“Now, though, since you didn't . . .” But she was used to it—the constant interruptions were always unwelcome, but they had ceased to be an issue. When they got to wherever they were going for dinner, she would remember to have him take the beeper off his belt, leave it in the glove compartment. She put her hand over his now, kissed him lightly on the cheek. “It's okay, go ahead.”

He used the phone behind the bar, which he figured was the last working rotary in California. The callback number wasn't immediately familiar to him, and this was in itself a bit unusual—Hardy's legal mind might only be decent, but he had almost an idiot savant's knack for remembering telephone numbers, and this one seemed new to him.

“Banks,” he heard. “Homicide.”

“Inspector. This is Dismas Hardy. Thanks for getting back to me.”

The voice wasn't enthusiastic. “Sure. I try to return calls. What can I do for you? You said the lieutenant . . .” He didn't finish the sentence.

“I talked to Abe this afternoon. He said maybe this Cullen Alsop thing is related to Elaine? To Cole Burgess.”

“Maybe.” The voice wasn't any more inviting.

“I understand the gun story felt a little funny to you. And now the overdose the day he gets out . . . ?” At some point, Hardy hoped Banks was going to catch up and run with it, but he also knew the cause of the reluctance and respected it. “Somebody might have wanted to shut him up.”

“Possible.” Banks was noncommittal. “Strout's leaning toward calling it an accident.”

“What do you think?” Hardy let a silence develop. This wasn't working. He wasn't getting through to the young man. Professionally, they were still on opposite sides. He had to find a way to bridge the gap.

Banks said, “Well . . .” About to end the call.

Hardy cut him off. “Remember the other day at the funeral, Inspector? Asking Abe if there was anything you could do?”

No response.

“This might be it. All I'm asking is give me a half hour.”

Another long pause. Then the voice more matter-of-fact, a decision reached. “I got an appointment coming up I've got to make. It's on this. After that I thought I'd go down and see the lieutenant around the end of visiting hours, maybe nine, nine-thirty.”

“As it happens, I was going to stop by and see him after dinner myself.”

It was a way for Ridley to justify what he was about to do. That appeared to be what he needed. “So it would just be a coincidence if we both got there around the same time?”

 

The weather had cleared and warmed up slightly. Not that it was balmy by any stretch, but the biting damp wind of the past week or so had abated, and now the air was calm, the stars bright overhead.

Hardy and Frannie had miraculously gotten a table without advance reservations at Pan Y Vino, a longtime favorite Italian place just up from the Marina, and when they finished, they decided to take a walk. They'd already discussed what seemed to be every possible permutation in the lives of their children, Frannie's progress with her school applications—she'd gotten them all off—the terrific food they were eating, Moses, Abe, his health and his children. Even Treya Ghent. And what had that been about, the degree of personal involvement in her showing up at the hospital. This was what Date Night was for—to catch up, to stay in touch. Personal lives.

They were holding hands, strolling with the mass of other pedestrians up Union Street. It wasn't yet eight-thirty. Occasionally, they would stop and look in a window at something. Eventually, Frannie squeezed her husband's hand. Smiling, she looked over at him.

“I'm sorry? What?” he asked.

“I was saying, ‘. . . and then my grandmother died.' I think that must have been what you heard that woke you up.”

“Sorry,” he said again. “I guess I'm a little distracted.”

But she didn't want to criticize him. “All right,” she said, “you've been the soul of patience. We can declare the date over if you want, talk about whatever it is.”

Out of the topics they could talk about, in the first years of Date Night, one had come to predominate—Hardy's work. From time to time, he would become so involved in his cases that he would suggest they drive together to crime scenes, or maybe stop by the jail to interview his client. They would theorize cases to death over meals that neither of them tasted.

Finally, they had outlawed discussing his cases during Date Night. It still did creep in but generally the law was respected and, in fact, treasured.

But she was right. Tonight Hardy's input to the various family and personal discussions was minimal at best. Distracted was hardly the word. She already knew that he and Freeman had made some crucial strides on one of his cases at lunch. There was some inkling that much of his involvement in several cases might be related somehow. He would be seeing Glitsky within the hour, getting new information from Ridley Banks. The connection between the relationships might become clear. It was all he could think about.

“I just don't want to waste Ridley's time with stupid questions,” he said by way of explanation. “He's not going to want to help me without Abe anyway. I don't want to wind up threatening him, getting him all defensive, scaring him away.”

“How would you do that?”

“I start talking about the videotape on Cole, the confession, and he's gone.”

“Why?”

“Because Ridley's the one who got it. He's still standing by it, but this new overdose makes it a little funky. He doesn't really know why and neither do I, but it's there. And also, Abe's lost his job over it and then nearly died. All that may or may not be related, but either way, Ridley's conflicted.”

“And you hope to straighten him out?”

Hardy nodded. “With my decent legal mind, at least identify the issues. Maybe.”

“Which are?”

He stopped walking and stepped out of the stream of foot traffic. It was still chilly enough that his sigh produced a visible plume of vapor. “That's the problem. I don't know, Fran. I've been racking my brain all day, especially since I ran into Dash Logan connected with Elaine, which of course is Cole's case. But I'm not convinced he's killed anybody. And I really don't see any connection between Elaine and Rich McNeil. None of it makes any sense. None of it relates except for Logan, who seems to be in the middle of all of it.”

“Well,” Frannie said, “if Abe's got the doubts, and now Ridley—and neither of them are exactly pro-defense—then maybe you'd better start considering that Cole is telling you the truth.”

“It wasn't unconsciousness? He just happened upon her after somebody else did her?”

She shrugged. “It could have happened.”

“ ‘Could have happened' doesn't meet much of a legal standard, Fran. I can't argue that in front of a jury.”

“How about just a judge? How about at the hearing?”

Hardy didn't even have to think—he shook his head no. “The hearing's a formality. The standard is probable cause, not reasonable doubt. Torrey demonstrates that—and the confession alone ought to be enough on that score—and that's it. We go to trial.”

“I know, I know, but listen . . .” Her eyes were alight
with the idea. “There's something about this particular case that's causing all kinds of confusion even among you professionals, right? You've got to admit that. I mean, Abe getting put on leave over it? Come on, that is not normal. Now Ridley Banks agreeing to talk to you. Even you yourself and your decent mind.”

“Decent
legal
mind. The rest of it's often pretty indecent.”

“Okay, still. I'm saying you might be able to get a judge to feel that way, too. Not a jury, but one person. If you could get all the questions out in front of one of them.”

His eyes had turned inward. A couple of times he seemed about to speak, but the thread eluded him. Finally, he looked at her. “The problem is, Fran . . . that presupposes that he didn't do it after all, and I think he did.” He put up a hand to stop her from breaking in. “I'm not saying he meant to. I don't think he planned it. Maybe even as he did it, he didn't
get
it. But I'll tell you something: he sure had means, motive and opportunity. He's got the opposite of an alibi.” His voice was becoming harsh, unyielding. “He's exactly the kind of pathetic loser who makes mistakes and ruins lives and then really, truly wishes he hadn't done it. Maybe even to the point of believing his own lies. But frankly, I think he deserves to be punished for it. Not death. Not even life without since nobody else in San Francisco gets it. That's why I took the case at all. But he ought to get a good long spell in the slammer, during which maybe he'll come to have a little bit of a clue.”

“But probably not.”

“Probably not,” Hardy agreed. “Law of averages, probably not.”

“So you're going to try for unconsciousness?”

His eyes flashed impatiently. “And that, Fran, would be a major triumph.”

“Even if he didn't do it?”

“He did do it!”

“He says he didn't, doesn't he?”

“Everybody says they didn't. Smart lawyers don't even ask.”

“But if the best defense the law allows is proving he didn't kill Elaine, that he's telling the truth after all, don't you have to try for that? Otherwise, maybe you should give him to somebody else.”

“I'm not giving him to anybody else!”

She let him live with that for a second. “When you talk to Abe and Ridley, maybe you ought to really listen to what they say.”

“That was my actual plan, believe it or not. What did you think I was going to do?”

She looked into his eyes. Her voice was gentle, without any threat in it. “I thought you might be looking for something to argue, not something to believe.”

She rarely saw any sign of her husband's Irish temper. It surprised her that he was on the edge of losing it now. Over Cole Burgess? It made no sense unless the boy had come to represent something beyond himself.

She reached a hand out and touched his arm. “What's going on, Dismas?” she asked.

“I'm not looking for something to believe, that's for sure.” His voice was harsh.

“Then what are you arguing against? What's so terrifying?”

“What's so terrifying?” he snapped back. “How can you even ask me that? That's what I want to know. You can't envision our sweet little Vin where Cole is someday? Or even the Beck? You don't think that's terrifying?”

She tightened her grip on his arm. “That isn't going to happen, Dismas. That doesn't make any sense.”

“That's my damn point, Frannie. It doesn't have to make any sense. It just happens sometimes. It just happens.”

And suddenly the source of his terror was clear to her. Educated, white, middle-class, raised by caring parents, Cole Burgess was Dismas's own private vision of the devil, the personification of everything he feared and could not control. Their own children might turn out just
like Cole if they weren't ever-vigilant with them, and maybe even if they were. And beyond that, the dangers everywhere in the modern world—the threat of random violence, terror out of the dark night. The tragedy inherent in every moment of temporary weakness—why the struggle must never end, not for an instant.