“What?”
She gave him a don’t-kid-me look. “Have you decided what you’re going to do with Catherine?”
“Well, first, Catherine is not my fantasy. You’re my fantasy.”
“All right, but you have to say that.”
“I don’t have to say anything like that.”
“But I just did, so if you didn’t, you’d be in trouble.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t mean it. Seriously. You don’t think this is a fantasy? Monday morning, nobody home but us up here alone? Taking time out on a workday to make love? Do you know what we’d have done for this moment even a couple of years ago?”
“Probably killed small cute furry animals.”
“At least.”
“But you still haven’t told me about Catherine.”
“That’s because, truly, I haven’t decided. The main thing is, I don’t think it’s likely they’re going to charge her. Cuneo’s just rattling her cage.”
“But if they do?”
“Charge her?” He turned to her. “I wouldn’t take it if it would make you uncomfortable.”
“It’s not just me. There’s this whole Cuneo thing. I know Abe’s definitely worried….”
“But Abe worries for a hobby.”
“Okay, but he’s got a reason this time. Cuneo could make a big mess for both of you. If anything about that day ever comes out…”
“Actually,” Hardy said, “that’s one of the reasons the nasty side of me is almost hoping they go ahead and charge her and try to make a case with this lousy evidence.”
“What reason is that?”
“Cuneo. Unless he strikes gold—or Hanover’s blood on Catherine’s stuff—he’s got a weak case he’s rushing in on. Abe says he’s a sloppy investigator. That’s just who he is. So depending on how fast and loose he decides to play, give me a chance to get him on a witness stand and I’ll bet I can do some serious damage to his basic credibility as a cop. At least enough so nobody would be inclined to go on a wild goose chase after me and Abe on his say-so. I’d almost look forward to the chance.”
Frannie sipped at her coffee. “If you turned her down, how much would it cost the firm?”
Hardy considered for a minute. “High-profile murder
trial? Three to five hundred thousand, maybe more. Plus, maybe, referrals.”
“So do you want to do it?”
“We’re not there yet. Maybe we won’t get there. But really, as I said, if you’ve got a problem with it…”
“Then I’m an insecure bitch.”
“Not at all. It’s completely legitimate that you’d be uncomfortable. Me and Catherine went together for four
years.
That’s a significant chunk of time. Obviously, as I’ve already told you, there’s still a connection. There’ll always be some connection.”
“And she’s still attractive.” Not a question.
He nodded. “She’s very good-looking. But, you know, we’ve already done the fantasy thing with you and me this morning. I’m yours, you’re mine. Like that.”
“Yes, but here’s a case where you can help someone you care about who you think is probably innocent and make half a million or more dollars in the bargain, and at the same time you’d get to professionally destroy someone who’s out to get you and Abe. How can I ask you
not
to take it?”
Hardy put his coffee cup down, reached over and pulled his wife close against him. “You say, ‘Diz, I’d just prefer you let someone else take this one.’”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“Well, that is your decision, Flaversham.” Hardy quoting a longtime household favorite line from Disney’s
The Great Mouse Detective.
“And I haven’t made my own decision yet, either.”
“You can’t turn her down if she needs you.”
“Somebody else could defend her.”
“But who as well as you?”
“Well…”
“But between us,” Frannie added, cutting him off, “it is a little scary.”
Just off the main lobby in Hardy’s Sutter Street offices, the Solarium conference room contained a profusion of greenery—rubber trees, ferns, dieffenbachia. One of the associates had even brought a redwood tree in a two-hundred-gallon
pot; thriving, its trunk was a foot thick and its boughs scraped the glass ceiling.
Now, after he and Frannie had continued their morning date with an early lunch, cell phones off, at Petit Robert, Hardy sat in one of the sixteen chairs that surrounded the immense mahogany table in the center of the room. Waiting for him on his arrival at the office were three urgent calls from Catherine Hanover—the first when the police had come early in the morning to serve a subpoena for her to appear
tomorrow
to testify in front of the grand jury, the second when Cuneo had arrived personally to deliver another search warrant at her house, and the third in a barely controlled,
I need help right now
hysteria, similar in tone to the first call he’d gotten from her on Saturday night. He called her right back and told her to get down to the office as soon as she could. She was barely coherent. Her voice had been choked and hoarse—“I’m sorry. I can’t seem to stop crying.”
Hanging up, he put in a call to Abe’s pager. He wondered what, if anything, had happened on Sunday, or maybe Saturday, with the results of the first search warrant. Had the lab in fact uncovered significant evidence?
Clear on what he next wanted to do, Hardy forced himself to take a moment before he did it. Every action he took now as Catherine’s de facto lawyer moved him closer to the decision he hadn’t yet consciously made. But at each small incremental step, he didn’t seem to be able to stop himself.
Of course
he would call Catherine back after her three urgent calls. What else could he do?
Of course
he would page Glitsky and try to discover what the police had come up with. On some level, he felt he didn’t really have a choice. But up until now, his moves had been small and personal. What he contemplated next was larger and more public. He wanted more certainty about his commitment before he moved.
Whether it was more hangover from the guilt he’d felt at the way he’d had to drop her so long ago or a testament to the bond they’d once forged together, he couldn’t deny that between him and Catherine there remained a strong personal connection. They’d come of
age in the same culture—it had been immediately clear to Hardy on Saturday night at her house, when they’d easily fallen into a comfortable familiarity, even with the hard questions. The plain fact was that she’d been his first love, and the person he’d become could not bring himself to abandon her when she needed him so badly. Even as he recognized that she might—he told himself it was an infinitesimally small chance—even now be playing him.
Because she knew she could.
But that, he told himself, was
her
fate,
her
karma. Hardy himself had no choice but to be true to his own character, and to trust that she would not betray him.
Finally, telling Phyllis to interrupt him if Glitsky called, he rang up the district attorney’s office, where he talked to the relatively new chief assistant district attorney, Craig Bellarios, about the grand jury subpoena. There was really only one question Hardy needed to have answered, and that was whether his client—
his client!
—was considered a “target” of the investigation, i.e., a suspect, as opposed to a witness.
Bellarios, who didn’t know Hardy very well, wasn’t the most forthcoming man on the planet. He told Hardy that he couldn’t predict what the grand jury would do, and that it was always wise to be prepared for any eventuality. Thanking him for nothing, Hardy asked and did learn the name of the presenting prosecutor—Chris Rosen—and called him next, but he was out.
He sensed a stonewall and it tightened his stomach. If things had gotten to this juncture already, he had no choice but to tell Catherine to plead the Fifth Amendment before the grand jury and to refuse to talk anymore to the police. And in the terrible catch-22 of the legal game, once she adopted that strategy, though technically she’d still be a witness, in the eyes of the prosecution she would have moved a long way toward becoming the target of the investigation.
Now, with his legal pad and another cup of coffee on the table in front of him, Hardy was cramming with a single-minded attention, reviewing all the notes he’d taken at Catherine’s on Saturday night. Feeling her presence as
soon as she entered the lobby, he looked up, stood and walked over to the Solarium door. “Catherine.”
If she’d been crying, there was no sign of it anymore, other than maybe an added luminosity to her eyes. She wore a well-tailored khaki-colored pantsuit. Hardy was thinking that he was glad she’d chosen demure even as she turned toward him to reveal a light tangerine garment with a lace top, a sweep of décolletage underneath the jacket. An elegant chain of malachite beads encircled her neck and rested in the deep hollow of her chest. He realized that she’d had her breasts enlarged.
But he’d hardly digested these impressions when she stepped into his arms. Vaguely aware of the stares of Phyllis and Norma, the office manager, and a pair of paralegals who had stopped at the reception area for something, Hardy held her against him for the briefest of seconds, then turned to the gathered multitudes and introduced her, all business, as an old friend and new client.
A new client.
Back in the Solarium, they got seated and Hardy asked if he could see the subpoena. “You got this this morning?”
“Seven o’clock. I was hardly out of bed.”
“They’re still hassling you.”
“I thought so, too. And they’re doing another search. Is that unusual?”
He didn’t answer that one. Instead, he asked, “When did they do this, the search? At seven, too?”
“No. Nine or so. They were separate. Cuneo was with the second bunch. I called you again.”
“I had business this morning,” Hardy said. “I called back as soon as I got in. Was Glitsky with the search team this time?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve never met him, but I’m sure that wasn’t the other name. I would have remembered.”
“So what were they looking for this time?”
“I don’t know. Everything, I think. They went upstairs and just started in.”
Hiding his exasperation, Hardy smiled helpfully. “They list specifics on the warrant. Did they show that to you?”
“No.”
“What about your husband? Wasn’t he there? Did he ask to see the warrant, by any chance?”
She looked down, scratched at the fabric of her pants. “Will’s taken a…” She stopped. “He’s not home right now.”
Hardy waited.
After a minute, she wiped an eye with her finger, then the other one. Reaching down, she opened her purse and removed a small package of Kleenex, brought one of the tissues up to her face. “This is anger, not sadness.” She dabbed at her eyes some more, sniffed once, clenched the Kleenex in her fist. “He started having another affair,” she said without looking at him. “The son of a bitch.”
Hardy said the first thing that came to his mind. “So he wasn’t fishing last Wednesday?”
She kept her eyes straight in front of her. “He was in Southern California, though. That’s where they met up. On the same goddamn boat as the last one.” Finally, she cast a sidelong glance at him. “I’m sorry about the language, and I didn’t mean to lie to you about Will and me the other night.” Again, a labored breath. “Anyway, after you left on Saturday, it blew up. He made some smart-ass remark about you and me….”
“You and me?”
“All the time we spent talking, just making it sound sleazy.”
“I was there as your
lawyer
, Catherine.” Hardy didn’t like being cast as the wedge between wife and husband, but he immediately regretted referring to himself as her lawyer. It seemed to be another irrevocable step.
“Of course you were. What else could you be? But you have to know Will. As though he needed a real reason to pick a fight. Anyway, he was slandering you, too, and I just thought, ‘How dare he?’ and lost it. I threw him out.”
“He thought you didn’t know about the affair?”
“He must have thought I was an idiot. He even wanted to…to have sex with me when he got home, maybe so I wouldn’t suspect he’d been rutting around for four days. The bastard.” A bitter little sound escaped. “I thought if I could avoid bringing it up, it might stay hidden from the kids. I used to hope I could hold out until Heather went to college, then I could file for divorce. The kids wouldn’t really be in our lives as much, so it would be easier. This last
time, though, last week, I realized I couldn’t do that anymore. I couldn’t go on that way. But I still hadn’t really
decided
, you know?”
“Decided what, exactly?”
“When I’d call him on it. Move out or have him do it. Bring it to a head. I didn’t want it to just
happen
the way it did. I wanted to control the timing, at least. Now I’m just feeling so ashamed of myself.”
“For what?”
She turned in her chair and faced him. “Don’t you see? For ruining our home life. Bringing it out into the open.” She shrugged. “But something just snapped. Maybe it’s all this being a suspect.”
“If your husband was having an affair, how was it that
you
ruined your home life?”
“I know, it’s stupid, but it’s how I feel. If I were a stronger person, I could have kept pretending”—she motioned around the room ambiguously—“except for all this. And seeing you, in some way. Remembering how good you were, how sweet a relationship could be. It all broke me down.”
“I’m sorry if I had a role in it. I wouldn’t have come over if…”
“No, no. It was going to happen sometime.”
Hardy let a moment pass. Then said, “So that’s why you went to your father-in-law’s? To talk about this? Will’s affair.”
She couldn’t hide her startled expression. “Why do you assume that?”
“Because that’s what changed, Catherine. You’re going about your normal life and your husband goes off with another woman. You’re going to do
something.
I’m glad you didn’t decide to follow him down and kill him.”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“Let’s keep that between us, okay?”
She found half a smile. “I wouldn’t have killed him, Dismas. Or his father, either.”
Hardy’s antennae were all the way up. Without a conscious thought, he noted her use of the subjunctive and wondered if she’d done it on purpose.
She wouldn’t have killed Paul, except for
…