The mayor was adamant that there had to at least be the appearance of progress-he mentioned creating a special task force if there weren't some results soon. Everybody knew what that would mean. Meddling by amateurs, political deals, compromise, and quite probably no resolution ever. The message was clear: If Jackman wanted to get any credit for fixing this mess, this was his chance and he'd better take it.
The next batter lined a sharp single on one hop to the left fielder and Vincent, running on the hit, was to third base and by him before Hardy got his head back into the game. The throw to home beat his son by fifteen feet. After the play, Mitch, the manager, came down to the end of the dugout. "Diz," he said urgently, "you gotta tell him to hold up on that play. Give him a sign. Come on now. You're coaching. Let's get in the game."
The Tigers won in spite of Hardy's mental error, and the team went for pizza to a place on Clement. The whole family had attended the game and didn't get home until 9:30. Frannie and Rebecca had become Survivor fanatics-they'd taped the evening's show and went straight in to watch the replay while Vincent showered, did the last of his homework, made it for the last half of the program. Bedtime rituals consumed another hour, so it was almost midnight when Hardy and Frannie dragged themselves up the stairs to their bedroom.
He came up behind her and put his arms around her as she was brushing her teeth, put his lips against the side of her neck. "I will come straight to bed if you're even remotely alive." They'd been having a decent run of physical contact and he was telling her they could keep the string alive if she wanted, but he knew she was exhausted.
She leaned back into him, managed a goofy smile in the mirror through the toothpaste. "I don't think I am. Aren't you tired?"
"Not really. Evidently I slept during Vinnie's game."
"It wasn't that bad. So what are you going to do?"
"I've got some reading material in my briefcase. Maybe if I blur my eyes just right, I can get it to make some sense."
He was sitting at the desk in the bedroom, five of Driscoll's purloined pages spread out before him. He wasn't completely sure why these five had made his cut-none had more than a couple of lines. But something about each of them had seemed pregnant enough with some kind of hidden meaning to warrant one more round of conjecture.
"See MA re: recom. on SS. Compare MR memo 10/24."
"Talk to MR-address complaints re: hands on at Port. PPG ult."
"Medras/Biosynth/MR."
"Foley. Invest. $$$. Saratoga. DA? Layoff? Disc. w/C."
"See Coz. re: punitive layoffs-MR. Document all. Prep. rpt. to board. Severance?"
And then a little voice said, "Go to sleep. This is not happening." He must have made it to the bed because that's where he was when he woke up.
34
Glitsky kissed his wife good-bye at the front door.
"If I'm around for lunch, I'll call."
"If I'm around, I might go out with you." Treya gave him a mock-sad moue. "A year ago the mere thought of lunch with me would have made your morning. You'd have planned your whole day around it."
"I know, but we're married now, and you're pregnant and all. It's pretty natural, the romance going away with all that day-to-day stuff."
She put an arm around his neck and brought her mouth up to his ear. "What was last night, then?"
"Last night?" Glitsky scratched at his scar, pretended not to remember. "Last night?"
She swung a hard elbow and caught him in the gut. "Oh, sorry." A smile, then, "Shoot for lunch."
Rubbing his stomach, he closed the door and came back into his kitchen, where Hardy sat at the table. He'd called an hour before and offered to drive Glitsky in to work, though he usually drove in with his wife. But Hardy thought he might have something on Markham, although he didn't know what it was, and maybe Abe, now pulling up his chair, could help.
Hardy drummed his fingers. After twenty seconds, Glitsky said, "You want to stop that?" Then, "Ross looks like he's in some kind of trouble, doesn't he?" A minute later, he pulled one page over in front of him. "This one, maybe, it could be Mike Andreotti."
"New to me," Hardy said.
"The administrator at Portola. He'll talk to you if I ask him to. He's all cooperation with these homicides. I might even go with you. Where'd you get this stuff?"
"Jeff Elliot couldn't make heads or tails of it. He said if I could, I was welcome to it."
"Yeah, but where did it come from originally?"
"It was Markham's, through Driscoll, then through Elliot."
"Not exactly Tinkers to Evers to Chance."
"No, but I'll take it."
"At this point"-Glitsky was getting up-"I'll take anything."
If at Glitsky's last meeting with him, Andreotti had been at the edge of physical and nervous exhaustion, now he was the walking dead. He didn't even bother rising from the chair behind his desk, didn't wonder that the new man, something Hardy, wasn't a policeman or a DA or even a reporter. He just didn't have any more energy to expend. He'd been at work all night, dealing with a sick-out of his nurses, scared off either by the rumors or sensing an opportunity for leverage in their struggle for higher wages. He didn't know and really at this point didn't care. The ship was going down anyway, and he saw no way to stop it.
And now these men had a puzzle for him. He got a perverted kick out of that. He was so beat he'd have trouble with the rules of tic-tac-toe, and they wanted him to decipher this puzzle. It was funny, really, if he had the strength to laugh.
"See MA re: recom. on SS. Compare MR memo 10/24."
"No idea," he said.
The other fellow, Hardy, leaned forward slightly. "We believe the MR stands for Malachi Ross. Does that help?"
Glitsky had seen a lot of burnout in his job and read the signs here. He pulled the page around, facing him again. "See Mike Andreotti about his recommendations on SS. Compare with the Malachi Ross memo dated October twenty-fourth. Does that help? What's SS?"
This time, there was no hesitation. "Sinustop."
"And what was your recommendation?"
"Well, it wasn't mine. I'm just the administrator, but the PPG recommended-"
"Excuse me," Hardy said. "What's the PPG?"
Andreotti blinked slowly, took a breath, and let it out. "The Parnassus Physicians' Group. Basically, they're the doctors that work here."
"Okay." Glitsky, staying with the program, continued, "And what did they recommend about Sinustop?"
"Just that we'd been inundated with samples, and that perhaps we should make it a policy for a while to go easy on giving the stuff out until more data got collected on it. Which now, in retrospect, was a smart suggestion."
"But you didn't implement it?" Hardy asked.
"No. Ross overrode it. He wrote a long memo justifying the position-I've got it somewhere here. I gather the stuff was medically pretty substandard. I'm not a doctor myself, but some of the senior staffers were appalled that our medical director would put his stamp on anything like that. So as usual, we compromised, and Malachi got what he wanted."
"You don't like him much." Glitsky didn't phrase it as a question.
But Andreotti merely raised his shoulders a centimeter. "People become pricks around money and money's been so tight here for so long…" Another shrug. "If it wasn't him, it would be somebody else."
"Only a couple of weeks ago, it was Markham," Hardy reminded him.
"No. It was still Ross. Ross has the passion for money. Markham just wanted to make a profit. There's a difference."
"What's the difference?" Glitsky asked.
"Well, take Sinustop, for example. It didn't have to be any issue at all, but Ross saw it saving us a million bucks a year, right to the bottom line. If there might be some downside, he was willing to risk it if it stemmed the bleeding."