Finished now, he lay on his back, breathing hard. He felt the sweat cooling, the lightest warm breeze through the window. Frannie was on her side, leaning on her elbow, all up against him. She kissed his cheek. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Sorry.’
She kissed him again. ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. I liked that.’
He pulled her to him and kissed her. She put her head down against his shoulder and started breathing regularly. In one minute she was asleep. Hardy lay with his eyes open, listening to the gurgling of the fish tank for almost an hour.
18
He woke up refreshed, his devils exorcised by spent lust and deep sleep. In the light of day, he thought it hadn’t done him any harm to fantasize – it was natural once in a while. No need to whip himself over it.
Now he wasn’t fantasizing. Frannie was in his here and now. He was cooking breakfast – french toast and sausages – in his black cast-iron pan, the only artifact he’d taken from his time with Jane. In the decade he’d lived alone, that pan had been one of the inviolate certainties in his world. He cleaned the pan with salt and paper towels, no water, no soap. After every use, he put a drop or two of oil in it and rubbed it in. No food stuck to that pan. It was a joy.
Taking a bite of a sausage link, he turned a piece of sliced sourdough bread over in the mixture of egg, milk and cinnamon – dripping it only for a second so it wouldn’t get soggy – and forked it into the pan, where it hit with a satisfying hiss. Outside, the sun had come up hot again. Maybe they’d get an entire weekend of summer this year.
Frannie was dressed in hiking boots with white socks, khaki shorts and a Giants t-shirt, ready for the historical expedition to Martinez that she, Hardy and Moses had planned for the day. They were going to track down the elusive origin of the martini.
‘Or is it the origin of the elusive martini?’ Moses had asked. This had been last Wednesday night at Yet Wan.
‘The martini itself is not elusive,’ Hardy had replied.
‘But the ideal martini can be elusive.’ Two bartenders, Jesus, finally coming to an agreement. Frannie was smiling, remembering. She came back down the hall from the front door with the morning newspaper and laid it on the table in front of Rebecca, who was finger-painting with baby food on the tray of her high chair. Standing, opening to the front page, she grabbed a sausage and took the mug of coffee Hardy handed her,
‘This Jeffrey Elliot’s turning into a daily feature.’ Hardy came over and stood with his arm around her.
SUSPECT ARRESTED IN OWEN NASH MURDER
by Jeffrey Elliot
Chronicle Staff Writer
Police yesterday arrested May Shinn, the alleged mistress of Owen Nash, for the murder of the local financier. According to the arresting officer, Sergeant Abraham Glitsky, Ms Shinn had purchased a ticket to Japan after the discovery of Nash’s body on Thursday on a beach in Pacifica, and was attempting to leave the jurisdiction after she had agreed to remain in the city.
Although Glitsky refused to go into much detail regarding the evidence collected thus far, he did acknowledge that a search of Owen Nash’s sailboat, the Eloise, had revealed traces of blood and a.25-caliber Beretta handgun registered to Ms Shinn. Additionally, a slug, imbedded in the wall of the boat, was recovered. The gun had been fired twice, and Nash’s body contained two wounds. The Ballistics department has not yet conclusively identified the gun as the murder weapon, although Glitsky conceded he thought the possibility ‘likely.’
The article picked up on the back page, but Hardy was already at the telephone. ‘That’s what I like,’ he said, ‘when I follow the comings and goings of my dear friends and professional colleagues by reading about them in the newspaper.’
‘What are you eating?’ Glitsky asked. ‘It sounds great.’
Hardy swallowed his sausage. ‘You forgot my phone number, Abe. I’ll get it for you.’
‘On Friday night? Come on. I got done talking to Elliot around nine-thirty, ten. I thought I’d call you this morning.’
‘What were you doing talking to Elliot?’
‘My car went out again. He was at the Hall. He gave me a lift home.’
‘What a guy,’ Hardy said.
‘He seems like a good kid.’
‘I know he does. Nicest guy in the world. Is she out of jail?’
‘I doubt it. I guess it depends who she calls. A good lawyer might find a judge to set some bail, get her out today.’
‘And when do I talk to her? Did she do it?’
After a minute Glitsky answered. ‘I don’t know. She might have. No alibi. It’s her gun. She was getting out of Dodge, and she bought her ticket to Japan after Nash was identified, after the paper had it.’
‘No alibi?’
‘The famous I-was-home-alone-all-day. When’s the last time you were home alone all day, no phone calls, no nothing? I didn’t want her going to Japan.’
‘You think I ought to go down and see her?’
‘Hey!’ Frannie gave him the eye. ‘Martinez,’ she whispered. ‘The elusive martini, remember?’
In the normal course of events, there was a skeleton staff at the Hall on weekends. The D.A.‘s office was officially closed. Courtrooms were not in use. Of course, there was still police work and people getting into and out of jail, which occupied the top floors until the new one in the back lot was completed. A clerk was on duty twenty-four hours a day to let people out if a bondsman met bail. Defense attorneys came and went. There were visitors.
Hardy had parked in his usual spot under the freeway, promising an unhappy Frannie he’d be home by noon for their foray into history. You didn’t want to drink martinis before noon anyway, he had told her. She told him she wasn’t going to drink martinis for seven or so months, and in any event, she had gone along with this idea just to be with her husband, brother and daughter and have a relaxing time together, which seemed to be becoming less of a priority for him day by day.
You thought you had trained yourself. You’d traveled far enough along your own rocky path to some inner peace that you had come to believe you couldn’t go back -events would never control you again.
Then they took your clothes from you. They gave you a yellow gown that smelled like Lysol and put you in a small barred room with a sullen young black woman and a toilet with no seat, the whole place, beneath the disinfectant, smelling like a sewer.
You threw away your phone calls on the man who’d been your lover’s attorney. ‘You ever need help – I mean real help – and I’m not around, you just call on the Wheel. He’s your man.’ He would come down and get her out. He was a lawyer and knew about these things. But he wasn’t at the number Owen had given her. No one had answered, and now there was no one to call and she was alone.
You spent the night in fear, waking up sweating in the still heat, the smell of yourself, of the other woman who didn’t talk, who sat on her mattress with her back against the wall. A clanging wake-up and a meal of cold powdered eggs, the regimented shower, the indifference of the women guards.
She swore to herself that she would not let them take her so easily, but it was difficult finding a mechanism to deal with it, to keep the loss of herself under control. She felt her will eroding, and she knew that’s what they wanted. To turn her into a victim again.
She’d really believed she was through with that for good. If Owen had done anything for her, it was that. She would not be a victim. That was something she could control.
She sat cross-legged on her mattress and closed her eyes. If she did not have a physical shrine, she would create one inside herself, even here. She had been this close to despair before. It was the day she had met Owen…