‘Preconceptions are my favorite.’
‘Yeah, they’re a good time.’ Hardy was still on his earlier problem. ‘I guess the only thing I’m positive of is that, if May didn’t lie, then I’ve got myself a passel of rethinking to do over the weekend.’
‘Well, you know,’ Abe said, ‘I’m busy, but I’m here.’
It was an offer Hardy knew didn’t come easy. But Abe had his own reasons, too. As had happened with Hardy months before, when Pullios took his case away, it rankled.
Hardy thought a minute. It had to be something Abe -the police – had access to and he didn’t. ‘You could find out who took the coat,’ he said. ‘I mean, maybe they took something else. One of your guys…’
No response.
‘Hey, Abe, you there?’
‘Sure. I thought you were talking to Frannie.’
‘No, Abe, I was talking to you.’
‘You were talking to me about a coat?’
Hardy caught up to where Abe must be, then ran it down to him. Abe could check over the inventory on the Eloise, find if a member of the department had taken May’s coat, apply a little pressure, find out if some evidence had been misplaced.
‘Diz,’ Abe said, ‘our guys don’t steal from crime scenes. I mean, if they do, we’ve got to go to Internal Affairs. But they don’t.’
Hardy drank more coffee. ‘It’s someplace to look. See if something jumps out at you. Maybe, although of course I’d never suggest you do this, you could have an off-the-record chat with the guys who were there.’
‘Taking the inventory of what was on the Eloise?’
‘Right.’
‘I could never do that.’
‘I know,’ Hardy said. ‘And as I said, I’d never ask.’
Hardy had tried Farris at his home and gotten his answering machine. At his office he got another answering machine and left a message, hearing a couple of beeps as he did so. There was a concept, he thought. Recording the answering machine recording. Department of redundancy department indeed.
He felt like a receptionist. As soon as he’d finished leaving his message at Owen Industries for Farris to call him at home and leave a number where he could be reached, his telephone rang again.
‘Grand Central Station,’ he said, picking it up.
‘What are we going to do about clothes?’ It was Jane. She told Hardy that they’d taken her father’s suit for the lab tests, and what was he going to wear to court today? Hardy told her to swing by her father’s house, get him a decent change and meet him downtown at eight-fifteen, enough time to change and try to determine where they would try to go today with what he figured would be by now the most hostile jury in the history of jurisprudence, angry at having been locked up themselves. Since Jeff Elliot’s article had made the morning edition, like the rest of the world, Jane knew for certain now that her father hadn’t killed May.
This time, when he hung up, Frannie poked her head in his office. ‘In keeping with your popularity this morning,’ she said, ‘your daughter would appreciate a short audience.’
Hardy glanced at the pile on his desk – the two days’ worth of dailies, the binders and notepads, the cassettes. He raised his eyes back to his wife. She was smiling but did not appear particularly amused.
The Beck appeared on her still wobbly legs next to Frannie. Seeing Hardy, she lit up like the Christmas tree, held out her hands, yelled ‘da da da’ and started to run toward him, tripping on her own feet and pitching headlong into the front of his desk.
Hardy was up and around before Frannie could get to her. He picked her up, holding her against him, rubbing the red spot on her forehead where the bump would come up, kissing her. He hugged and rocked her. ‘It’s okay, Beck. It’s okay, honey. Daddy’s here. Everything’s all right.’
He took the dailies with him. He’d have to find the time to review them, maybe during lunch, maybe while Andy was getting dressed. He and Jane had delivered the new suit upstairs, leaving it at the guard’s desk with instructions for delivery, then he’d asked her if she could leave him to his reading until nine-fifteen, half a precious hour later.
He got settled in their little conference room, took the binders from his huge lawyer’s briefcase and spread them out, intending to start where he’d left off last night, or with where he thought he’d been – Tom’s testimony about May coming to the Eloise on Thursday.
But he couldn’t find it.
After the first pass through every word Tom had said to him, Glitsky or the court, Hardy rubbed his hands over his eyes and wondered if he had finally lost his mind. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for this kind of pressure. He ought to buy a boat and move to Mexico, start a fishing fleet.
Not by bread alone, he thought. No, sleep, too. Sleep ought to come into the picture. He wondered if Pullios was sleeping. Should he hire someone to call her every hour around the clock, level out the field?
He forced himself back. All right, it wasn’t in Tom’s testimony, where it should have been. How about José‘s?
Finally he found it at the end of Glitsky’s initial interview with José. But that was wrong. It had to be wrong. Hardy reread the transcript, José answering when Glitsky asked if he remembered exactly what May had been doing when he’d seen her:
A: I don’t know. She was out there, on the street. Walking back to her car, maybe, I don’t know. I see her going away.
Q: And you’re sure it was May?
A: Si. It was her.
Q: Are you certain what day it was? It could be very important.
[Pause.]
A: I think it was Thursday. Oh sure. It must have been. I remember, I got the note from Tom he’d locked the boat, which was Wednesday, right? So I go check it. It’s still locked. Thursday, I’m sure, si, Thursday.
Had May mentioned going back to the Eloise twice on Thursday? For some reason, because Tom and José had both seen May on Thursday, Hardy had been assuming it was the same sighting. But it couldn’t have been. José was there in the morning and that’s when he saw her. Later that same afternoon, Tom said that he saw her there again.
Hardy pulled another legal pad and wrote a heading on the top. ‘Questions for Freeman.’ Someone who had talked to May more frequently might be able to supply answers. Under his heading he wrote: ‘Number of visits -Thursday?’
It didn’t even matter, or rather he couldn’t figure why it might matter, but he was starting to believe that nothing here was irrelevant.
Hardy, walking next to Jane, got to the courtroom as Celine was coming up. As she had taken to doing, she looked right through him. Maybe that was the best way she could handle it. He thought probably it was best for him too. If they were going to be seeing each other on a daily basis it would be easier, better, if she avoided communication. But here they were, face to face. He reached for her arm and stopped her.
She froze.
Hardy backed off a step and apologized. ‘I just wondered if you’d heard from Ken Farris lately.’
She tried to gain control. ‘I spoke to him last night. I asked him about the Shinn woman’s claim, now that she was dead.’ At Hardy’s uncomprehending stare, she quickly, with annoyance, added, ‘The two million dollars.’
Hardy had never had any indication that Celine gave a damn about the money. He was interested in Farris, wanted to locate him. ‘So he was home? He wasn’t out of town?’
‘I think I just said that.’
‘That’s right, you did.’ She didn’t want to talk to him and he wouldn’t force it. He was, after all, defending the man on trial for her father’s murder. ‘If you talk to him again would you tell him I’d like a word with him?’
She looked him over, glanced at Jane, came back to him. ‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me.’