Phyllis looked disapprovingly over her bank of phones. Too much noise. Hardy ignored her. ‘But, Graham, you might want to call your brother and sister, advise them not to go spending their inheritance money. We’ve got a real lead on Joan Singleterry. I’ll tell you all about it later.’ He kept moving toward the stairs, climbing.
Graham tailed behind him. ‘But that’s what I wanted to tell you.’
Hardy stopped, turned. Graham was brushing by him, two steps at a time. ‘I left it in your office.’
Feigned outrage. ‘You broke into my office?’
At the top of the stairs Graham grinned back down at him. ‘It’d be harder if you locked it.’ The young man was excited; clearly he’d found something. ‘We would have called you last night but it was after nine-thirty. We figured you old guys were already asleep.’
‘Get out of my way.’
Graciously, still beaming, Graham let Hardy open his own door. He crossed to the desk and in the middle of the blotter found a large article, stapled together, from an old copy of the Chronicle. Nineteen eighty-eight.
While he read, Graham was filling him in. ‘So we had all these boxes, mostly just junk and paper, taking up room. Sarah thought we ought to go through everything in them, page by page, throw away everything we didn’t want. Clean the place up.’
Hardy glanced up at him. ‘And I think I live a wild life, going to bed at nine-thirty and all.’
‘I didn’t say it was all we did. Anyway, Sarah found that.’
It was one of those follow-up stories the papers sometimes run: ‘What Happened To?’ or ‘Life After…’ This one concerned the patched-together lives of six women whose husbands had been killed doing their jobs in the prime of their lives. A construction worker, two cops, a race-car driver, a charter pilot, and Randy Palmieri, fireman.
‘This guy’s wife, Joan Palmieri,’ Graham was saying, ‘she moved to Eureka and married a man named Ron Singleterry.’
‘And her husband, I notice, was killed in the Grotto fire.’
‘She’s got to be our Joan Singleterry,’ Graham said.
‘She is.’
Graham went mute for a beat. ‘You know about her?’
‘A little. That’s what I wanted to tell you about.’
‘The only thing is,’ Graham said, ‘I called information in Eureka, she isn’t listed. There’s no Singleterry there, no Palmieri either.’
No, Hardy thought, but there’s a Walsh and a Sanford and you don’t need to know that right now. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s someplace to start. Look, I’ve really got to run. We’ll get to it later.’
But Graham, this close to something, didn’t want to let him go. ‘Wait a minute. What did you find?’
‘Same thing, different story. Chronicle archives. I’m going to see if I can talk to Mario Giotti today, see how Sal was connected to the fire at the Grotto. If he was.’
‘You don’t think Sal started it by mistake, do you? Got drunk or something?’
‘No,’ Hardy said honestly. ‘No, I don’t think that.’
But at last he now knew the mechanism by which Sal had come to know Joan Palmieri’s married name. He knew, as he would say, how it was all connected.
‘Mr Hardy.’ Judge Mario Giotti had not shrugged himself out of his robes, although he was alone, reading in his chambers. Hardy didn’t think this was an unintentional oversight. The trappings of power and authority. ‘You said it was an emergency.’
‘I am sorry to bother you, Judge, and thanks for seeing me. I know you’re busy.’
‘If I didn’t see people when I was busy, I’d never see anybody.’ The strong smile. ‘You want to sit down?’
Hardy went to the seating arrangement by the ornate fireplace, with its electrical heater purring within it against the bitter day. The wind had brought in a low blanket of cloud cover and as Hardy, in a trench coat, had been walking from his office to Giotti’s, it had started to mist.
He got right to it. ‘Judge, I’ve got a big problem.’
‘I’d assumed that. What is it?’
Hardy considered his response. He wanted to blurt out, ‘It’s you,’ but he had to restrain his tendencies. He had to box him in until there was no escape.
‘I’m afraid it’s about the fire at your restaurant again. I’ve come upon some information that leads me to think Sal had something to do with it.’
Giotti leaned back in his wing chair, fingertips templed at his lips. ‘Go on.’
‘You remember that morning I stopped you on your run out back here in the alley and asked you if you knew anybody named Singleterry?’
‘Of course.’
‘At that time I was hiding some information from the public, keeping it out of the trial because it seemed so inherently not credible.’
‘And what was that?’
Hardy outlined Sal’s request to Graham, that he give the money to this Singleterry woman. ‘Since we didn’t have her, I didn’t believe anyone in the courtroom would believe the story. So we decided not to bring it up.’
‘It does seem like a reach,’ Giotti agreed. ‘Now I gather you’ve found her.’
‘Almost,’ Hardy said, ‘- her daughters.’
The judge took that in. ‘That would be good, then, wouldn’t it? You could find out what you need about Sal?’
‘That’s true. I’ve done that. Joan Singleterry’s first husband was Randy Palmieri.’
Giotti’s face seemed by degrees to be growing darker now, the black circles under his eyes becoming more pronounced, the jowls heavier as his chin went down, resting on his chest. He let out a long breath and came back to Hardy. ‘The man who died in the fire.’
A nod. ‘That’s right. You knew him?’
‘Who he was, of course. The name’s forever burned into my memory. It was a tragedy. How could I not know it?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose you could. But then, by the same token, I’m afraid I don’t understand how you could forget the name Singleterry.’
‘But Singleterry wasn’t her name. How would I-?’
Hardy couldn’t make himself listen to it anymore. He had to cut him off. ‘Because, Judge, your trust – the BGG, that’s your trust, isn’t it? Bruno Giotti’s Grotto Memorial Trust? It sent her money for seventeen years. I’m just having a hard time seeing how that could have slipped your mind.’
Giotti was nodding repeatedly, his eyes on the middle distance between them. After a long minute he got up and crossed the room back to his desk, stared above it out the window into the gray mist. ‘I remember thinking I liked the way your mind worked, Mr Hardy. Maybe that was misguided. Now you’re implying I had something to do with that fire, aren’t you? With arson and murder.’ Finally he turned around. ‘I’m afraid I’m too busy for this. It’s arrant nonsense.’
‘I’d be glad to hear your explanation.’
Giotti’s nostrils flared. ‘I don’t need to give you any explanation, Mr Hardy. Like everyone else in America I am innocent until proven guilty. If you’ve got some proof of these outrageous accusations, why don’t you bring it to the attention of the police? Right now this interview is over.’ He pointed at the door. ‘You know your way.’
Hardy stood up, but instead of moving toward the door, he assumed an at-ease position in front of his chair. ‘I don’t think so.’
Clearly unaccustomed to anything less than immediate obedience at any display of his authority, Giotti stiffened. ‘I said get the hell out of here!’ He reached for the telephone. ‘I’ll have you removed.’
‘You don’t want to do that,’ Hardy said calmly. ‘I’m not talking about a twenty-year-old fire. I’m talking about Sal Russo.’
Giotti gently replaced the receiver. ‘What about him?’
‘The fifty thousand dollars.’
The judge waited.
‘Somehow it came from the fire. I don’t know exactly how it got into Sal’s hands, but the police are going to want to find out. They’re going to see a connection between you and Sal’s death. Maybe a motive for you to have killed Sal. I don’t have to tell you this.’