Hardy already had it out. "Another family secret bites the dust. Besides, stop calling me a relative. Frannie's your relative." He was squinting at the number.
"Just let it go," Frannie said. "Call them Monday. We're having a party."
"This isn't a party," Moses repeated. "It's a lunch."
"Dismas, just let it go…"
"Take me a minute." He was moving to the door on the roof. "I just have to see what it's about."
"Good-bye," Frannie said.
"I'll be right back. Promise."
Hardy got there first, as he had the time before. Unlike the time before though, Freeman was on his way over. It was still light out, hot and now strangely still on the women's side of the jail. Saturday, late afternoon.
He was struggling to hold his temper. They had frisked him at the door. Normally, to get in the jail, he showed his bar card and the guard, whom he'd seen many times, would buzz him in. This afternoon, though, to see Jennifer, he'd gotten patted down and now they were making him wait in the hot and airless room.
Two female guards walked with her this time, and she wore a red, not a yellow jumpsuit. She also had leg chains and handcuffs attached to a metal band around her waist. Her hair had been cut, hacked off unevenly so that an inch or two remained all around.
Her face was blotched, her lips cracked, both eyes with purplish bruises.
Hardy – jeans and a T-shirt – stood up, and she nearly fell against him, reaching up until her hands were stopped by the chains. She was sobbing.
"What the hell…! Hardy began.
One of the guards peeled her off him and got her seated in the chair. "Cut the act, sweetie."
"You get your hands off my client." The guard glared. The second one had her nightstick out. "Both of you can back off. Now!"
These women weren't going to be intimidated by a lawyer in blue jeans. But it also availed them nothing to harass Jennifer in his presence, so – grudgingly – they withdrew.
When the door had closed, Hardy leaned forward. "They didn't do this, did they?"
She shook her head no.
"Then who…"
"Down there," she mumbled, her head down. This wasn't the cowed look she'd shown earlier, Hardy thought, but real fear. Something had obviously happened to her.
Glitsky's call had filled him in on some of it – Terrell flying down to Costa Rica and handling the details of her extradition. They were coming in to SFO. Hardy and Freeman might want to be at the jail pretty soon after that.
"What happened?"
Slowly she raised her head. Unlike many of the inmates here, her eyes were not empty. They were full of pain. Again, she shook her head from side to side, tears streaming over her cheeks. "Everything," she said. "They did everything."
He got back to their dark house in the Avenues at 11:45 p.m.. He stopped in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The tropical fish tank gurgled from his bedroom. He sat at the kitchen table, sipping his beer.
"It was an engagement party." Still dressed in her sundress, hair tousled from sleep, Frannie leaned against the doorpost. "It wasn't just a lunch. Of course, you missed it, so it doesn't matter."
"Frannie, don't-"
"No, of course not. Don't bother Dismas. His work is more important than any old family stuff."
"I didn't say that. I don't think that."
"Sure you don't."
He drank some more beer. "You want me to sit down and talk about it? Or you just want to bitch at me?"
"I think just bitch at you."
He steadied the beer on the table, looked across at her. Life wasn't as simple as Frannie sometimes wanted to think. She tended to lose sight that there were some things going on in the world beyond tow little kids and Moses' love life. "You're losing perspective," he told her.
"I'm losing perspective. That's good. That's really good."
"Thank you," he said. "But you know, this isn't really a good time for me. I don't feel like getting bitched at. I'm out trying to make a living so you can stay here and have the life of Reilly and I'm sorry as hell that sometimes I've got to do things that aren't on anybody's schedule. Things happen, shit happens, Frannie, and I'm supposed to deal with it."
"Oh, poor thing."
He stared at her. This had just escalated into a stupid fight. Retreat. He picked up his beer, took a slow sip, then stood and walked back down the long hallway to the living room.
She didn't follow him. Fine. He grabbed one of the throw pillows and tucked it under his head on the couch, where he would spend the night.
15
On July 11, the luckiest day of the year, Hardy woke up in the living room with a sore back. He looked at his watch and saw that it wasn't yet six. The house was quiet, the light subdued.
He opened the front door and picked up the Sunday paper. Then walking in his socks to the kitchen, he took out the cast-iron pan he'd had since college, put it over one of the burners and laid in a pound of bacon.
He moved economically, the kinks in his back easing as he crossed the kitchen, quietly opening cupboards, getting the coffee going, mixing up some waffle batter (the Beck loved waffles). The bacon started sizzling, the smell coming up.
He sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee.
For the last four months, while Jennifer was an escapee, he'd been working out of the office in David Freeman's building and, truth be told, he wasn't having the best time of his life. He'd gotten several hand-off cases from David or his associates. Perhaps half a dozen he'd gone down and pleaded out. The other two – a disputed DUI and a shoplifting were, in the snail's pace way of these things, moving toward a trial sometime during the century.
Worse, though, was the feeling that he was simply spinning his wheels, going through the motions. It was similar to being with the DA's office, where you dealt with petty malfeasances and moved them along through the bureaucracy – except here he was often, from his point of view, on the wrong side.
The other problem, and it loomed large, was that he had gotten himself qualified by the court for the list of approved lawyers available for appointment, and a month ago Leo Chomorro, who had been the presiding judge in his ex-father-in-law Andy Fowler's case, had tabbed Hardy as one of three defense attorneys for a Penal Code Section 187 – murder.
Where things went south was that Hardy studied the file and decided he'd be good and damned if he was going to spend six months trying to convince a jury that Leon Richman had not in fact sat in his Ford Escort with the other two defendants and fired approximately ten shotgun loads each into Damon Lapierre, who just happened to be cohabiting with Leon's ex-girlfriend.
Aside from the fact that Leon had already been convicted of man-slaughter once and been acquitted of murder once, two sawed-offs and one regulation shotgun had been found in the trunk of the Escort. Shell casings were under the seat. Leon had bragged to lots of his friends that they wouldn't be seeing Damon anymore. And four patrons of the Woodshack saw Leon and the other two defendants leave the drinking hole with the less-than-cooperative victim on the night of the murder.
In short, Leon did it, and Hardy wasn't going to help him get off. Period.
This hadn't sat well with Chomorro. Did Hardy want to be on the appointment list or didn't he? If he didn't, why was he wasting everybody's time?
Hardy had almost said that he had no interest in defending guilty people but stopped himself before saying it. Those words would have given him immediate status in the Hall as a legendary horse's ass. Instead he'd mumbled something to Chomorro about a conflict of schedules and the moment had passed. But Hardy knew it would come again, and he knew he'd feel the same way, do the same thing. It wasn't a comforting thing to think.