"Laws are the man's life," Frannie said.
Perhaps she meant it playfully, and none of the other women seemed to take it wrong, but Glitsky have Hardy a look that was interrupted by the doorbell – it would be Flo.
Hardy went with Abe to answer it.
Moses was regaling everyone – for Susan's benefit – about the time Hardy had saved his life in Vietnam. Embarrassed, Hardy was trying to put a face on it.
"Come on – this guy is shot in the legs and I'm fifteen feet away."
"And things hopping pretty good all around us, am I right?" Moses was exploding mortars and tracer rounds all around him in the air.
"What am I supposed to do, let you lie there? So I pop up, grab him, drag his sorry ass back in the hole. Whole thing took ten seconds."
"He left out getting hit himself."
"Believe me, that wasn't planned. And P.S. – twenty years later, the shoulder's still a pain."
Moses grinned. "My legs, though, are fine."
When the telephone rang, Hardy was going to let the answering machine get it, but he recognized David Freeman's voice and got up, excusing himself.
"Sorry to interrupt your dinner," Freeman began, "but this is not good news."
Hardy waited.
"There was a woman named Rhea Thompson brought in the same day Jennifer got arrested." Freeman's voice was hoarse, guttural. He cleared his throat. "Her bail was five grand and she made it today and walked out of here with her pimp."
"Okay."
"Okay yourself. Rhea's about five-four, one-twenty-five, blond hair, blue eyes. Sound familiar? The answer's yes."
Hardy waited. "So what happened?"
"So somehow Jennifer's picture got on Rhea's housing card."
The housing, the Field Arrest card, was the bailiff's ID of choice on the seventh floor. You looked at the picture, you eyeballed the person, they either matched or they didn't. Both Rhea and Jennifer had only been two days in jail – they weren't yet known on sight to many of the guards. Especially the swing-shift guards.
"What are you saying, David?"
"I'm saying our client only paid us through Monday because she wasn't planning on sticking around after that. Our little darling has flown the coop."
"Jennifer escaped? From the seventh floor? You've got to be kidding."
Freeman sighed. "Would that I were wrong, my son. Would that I were."
John Lescroart
Hardy 04 – 13th Juror, The
Part Two
Larry granted her forty-five minutes for the run, which was a reasonable length of time. He was a reasonable man, she tried to tell herself. He just didn't want her getting hurt – if she fell while she was running and there wasn't any time limit, she could be lying somewhere, suffering, at the mercy of strangers, and Larry wouldn't know. He'd have no reason to suspect that something could be wrong. This way, if she was late, he'd know – he could be there to help her.
He loved her. Yes, that was the reason for all the limits.
Taking Matt to his private school, Laguna Honda, twelve blocks away, was a half-hour, and that allowed for traffic on some days, though not any talking to the other mothers. That way, and it made sense, she couldn't get into trouble saying too much the way some women did. The Witts were who they were in the community because no one had anything bad on them and Larry wasn't going to let anything threaten that – he was protecting all of them that way. Not just her.
For shopping, just so long as she called him before she left and then again as soon as she got back… before she'd even unpacked the bags… he could be flexible. And she was good at shopping. She could get down to the big Petrini's on Ocean Avenue – they carried everything – and load up a cart and get back home in under an hour.
Sometimes she cheated. But that was because she was, at her very heart, a bad person. A rebellious person. Larry knew she would cheat, and he gave her rules so that she wouldn't have time and would be tempted. But she still got around the rules, even though she knew they were good for her. That was just who she was.
Larry loved her in spite of that, in spite of knowing who she really was. She didn't blame him, really, if once in a while he lashed out at her. If it were her she'd probably have killed someone like herself long ago. Sometimes she wanted to kill herself, but that wouldn't be fair to Matt, or to Larry either.
It was like the time she tried to get away, to take Matt with her. What was that if it wasn't just a cry for help? And Larry heard her – she'd never even told Ken Lightner about that. Who else would have cared enough to follow her all the way to Los Angeles? She didn't blame Larry when he said that if she tried that again he'd kill her. She couldn't leave him. He needed her, he loved her. He didn't mean to that he'd actually kill her. In fact, after they'd come home that time he didn't even hit her for a couple of months. Ned had almost killed her when she'd done the same thing with him. But Larry seemed to happy to have her back.
And he was right about her family, too. They proved on that first visit or two that they didn't like Larry, or her either anymore. They were just jealous. Larry said he felt bad about that but it was one of those things you really couldn't do anything about. You didn't change people, she should know that. And she knew she wasn't going to change her mother and father. And especially not Tom. Nothing was going to change Tom – he was just plain nasty and mean.
Well, there wasn't any reason to put up with that. She and Larry hadn't asked for that, not from any of them. They'd given her family every chance in the world, and they just stayed who they were. They thought Larry hated them and had poisoned her toward them. But that wasn't true. Maybe she'd seen things a little more clearly after Larry had helped her with the connections, helped her hear the between-the-lines insults about her "airs" or their "culture." No, they were, sad to say, just jealous people like they'd always been, and there wasn't any reason to see them and get everyone upset.
The things with the banking and with Ken… Dr. Lightner… she was just scared. She'd always been scared. Life was scary. People changed or the life you were in suddenly went sour and sometimes you couldn't see it coming or do anything about it, but she wanted to understand it a little more so she'd gone – okay, sneaked off – to Ken. And he knew more about her than Larry – knew about Ned, in fact – and he still cared about her. She believed that, that Ken really cared. She wasn't just a patient with him. Of course, now…
Well, she didn't have to think too much about that. That was just another thing.
And the bank. It wasn't that Larry wouldn't give her the money if she'd asked. But it was hard getting surprises for him if she had to tell him what she was spending the money on. Well, at least that was how it had started. The account. It was easy asking the checker at Petrini's to just ring up an extra twenty dollars in cash, then fifty, then two hundred. Shopping was just her job and Larry didn't check the receipts.
She opened accounts as Mrs. Ned Hollis, using her dead husband's social security number and was careful to see that all the taxes were paid. That had been a close one the first year. And then after that she got the post office box and the form got sent there, and it hadn't ever been a problem.
Besides, you never did know. What if Larry somehow lost all his money? Or really got sued for malpractice like he was always talking about? The she could imagine his surprise and happiness when she told him she had all this extra money that had saved them. She'd been doing it to save them all, the family.
She thought about it sometimes, why she'd gone away that time. Besides the call for help, she'd wanted to protect her face and Larry had started to hit her face.
For a while Ken had made her see it differently – she thought that might have been it. For a while he'd had her believing that Larry hadn't been good for her, that she was her own power and all she had to do was, as he put it, assert it, walk away from Larry and take Matt with her. California law, he said, would give her custody.