They worked their way to the side door-less crowd to get through-and out into the alley where now, just past noon, cans of garbage basked, baked, and from the smell, ripened in warm sunshine. Farrell blinked in the brightness, took a deep breath, and frowned. "I think somebody must have died near here. What's up?"
Hardy was ready, reaching for his inside coat pocket as they walked up toward Bryant and some good air. "I've got a list of names here and I was curious if any of them looked familiar to you."
Farrell took the piece of paper, glanced down at it. "What's this about?"
"Your favorite hospital."
A quick look up, then back at the list. Hardy saw his eyes narrow. He stopped and came up again. "Okay. I give up."
"Anybody you know?"
"One of 'em. Marjorie Loring."
"She's one of your clients with the Parnassus lawsuit you're filing, isn't she?"
"Not exactly. Her kids are. She's dead herself."
"I know. So's everybody else on that list. Did they do a postmortem on her?"
They'd stopped in some shade in front of the bail bondsman's office at the entrance to Lou's. Farrell squinted into some middle distance, trying to remember. Then he shook his head. "They always do. But they probably didn't spend much time on it. They knew what she died of."
"And what was that?"
"The big C. She was another one of those 'whoops' cases, as in, 'Whoops, we should have really got around to looking at that a little bit sooner.'"
"But when she died? Was it before her kids expected her to go?"
"They didn't know how long it would be exactly." But he pursed his lips, a muscle worked in his jawline. Hardy let him dredge it up. "Although it was, yeah, pretty quick if I recall. One of those, 'You've got maybe three months, unless it turns out to be three days.'"
"Three days?"
"No, no, figure of speech, one of my few flaws. I exaggerate. I think it was like a week, two weeks, something like that."
"And it was supposed to be three months?"
Farrell shook his head. "But you know how that works, Diz. It was three months outside, maybe as much as six. The reality turned out to be less. It happens all the time. It might even have been a blessing."
Hardy could accept that on its face. But not if somebody hurried the process along. "Do you think Mrs. Loring's family would agree to ask for an exhumation?"
Even with the preamble, the question shocked him. "What for?"
"A full autopsy."
"Why? You think somebody killed her?"
"I think it's possible."
Suddenly Farrell's gaze focused down tightly. A few years older than Hardy, a little softer in the middle, Wes usually affected an air of casual befuddlement. Some might even have read this as incompetence, but Hardy knew he was nobody's fool. A couple of years before, he'd electrified the city's legal community with his defense of another lawyer, a personal friend accused of murdering his wife. The case was considered unwinnable even by such an eminence as David Freeman. But Farrell had gotten his client off with a clean acquittal. Now he was giving Hardy his complete attention. "What about the other ten people on your list? Same thing?"
Hardy didn't want to exaggerate. "Let's say there are similar questions. I want to talk to my client before we go any further, of course, but after I do…" He let it hang.
Farrell backed into the last wedge of shade. "Last time we talked you didn't have a client," he said.
"I've got one now. You know Eric Kensing?"
"And you want to call him before I talk to the Lorings because…?"
"Because for some of these names," Hardy indicated the list, "he was on duty in the hospital when they died. Before we exhume Mrs. Loring and find out she didn't die of cancer, I'd be happier knowing Dr. Kensing wasn't on the floor taking her pulse at the time."
Farrell admitted that that would be bad luck. "So they haven't arrested him yet, I gather?"
"At least not as of a half hour ago, but things could change even as we speak."
Farrell narrowed his eyes. "You're talking Abe?"
Hardy nodded, spoke curtly. "He seems a little fixated."
"Abe's not dumb."
"No, he's not, but he took Kensing's statement last night, then left. No arrest. I guess what I'm trying to do is buy my client some time. Abe might get carried away in his enthusiasm. If Kensing gets arrested or indicted, he's never going to work again. And I've got friends who think he's a hero."
Wes chuckled, jerked a thumb toward Lou's. "Those two yahoos at the booth in there think I'm a hero. That doesn't mean anything." Then, "Did your boy do it?"
"Early on, he said not." Hardy left it at that.
Farrell's eyes shifted from side to side. This turn in the conversation-the objective fact of the guilt or innocence of a client-threatened to breach a largely unspoken rule among defense attorneys. But suddenly Hardy knew why Farrell had brought it up. The friend of his, for whom he'd won such a stunning acquittal, in whose innocence Wes had believed with his whole heart, turned out to have been guilty after all. "If you want to be sure," he said, "you'd damn well better find somebody else who did it."
Hardy cracked a tiny smile. "Okay, then, that's who I'm looking for. But my first line of defense is to find out if these Portola patients who are dying before they should are any part of this Markham thing."
"How do you propose to do that?" Farrell's expression reflected his deep skepticism. "Certainly Marjorie Loring couldn't…" He stopped, softened his look. "Maybe I just don't get it," he offered. "Let's pretend her kids let us dig her up in the first place, which is a wild assumption, by the way. So Strout agrees to do an autopsy, also not a sure thing. So then they find, say, that potassium killed her. How in the world does that help your client?"
"Well, right off, if he wasn't there…"
Farrell waved that off. "Okay. He wasn't there when Lincoln was shot, either. But it doesn't mean squat about Markham. And then what if it wasn't potassium?"
Hardy had admitted these problems to himself, and had gotten to a marginally satisfying answer. "If some other patient at Portola, unconnected to Markham, is another murder-especially if Kensing wasn't around when it happened-it might make somebody like Glitsky think he's missing something. He might want to fill in more blanks before they arrest Kensing. At this point, it's mostly delay, frankly, but I'm out of other great ideas."
"Well, delay's always a fine tactic, if it works." Farrell, clearly, still wasn't convinced. "But if your man thought these were questionable deaths, why didn't he ask for full autopsies originally?"
"I asked him the same question."
"That's 'cause you're a smart fellow. And what'd he say?"
"Basically, that all the deaths were expected anyway, and from expected reasons. It wasn't like these were people in the prime of health who suddenly died. They were dying people who died. Just a little early. The hospital ran postmortems. Sure enough, they were all dead." Hardy shrugged. "Essentially he put it down to just a general degradation in care at Portola." He moved closer and whispered conspiratorially, "But listen up, Wes. The point is that if anybody at Portola killed Marjorie Loring, you win no matter what."
"And that's because…?" He stopped because he suddenly understood. He could bring a slam dunk lawsuit on behalf of Marjorie Loring's children. There would be no need to prove general negligence or some other malpractice issue. He could begin billing immediately again. If Marjorie Loring didn't die of natural causes, but was a homicide committed in the hospital, Wes stood to make a pile in a very short time by doing comparatively very little. "I'll talk to her kids," he said. "See what we can do."
Treya looked up from her desk to the wall clock. She broke a genuine smile and rose from the chair. "Dismas Hardy, Esquire, three o'clock, right on the button. Clarence is expecting you, he'll be right with you, but he's got someone in with him for just another minute. Are you coming from upstairs?" she asked. Meaning Glitsky's detail.