‘I loved Owen. I told that to the sergeant.’

‘You loved him.’ Flat, monotone. ‘Nobody else seems to think he was very lovable.’

‘Nobody else knew him.’

‘A lot of people knew him,’ he said.

The door to the room opened with a whoosh. ‘Just what the hell is going on in here?’

Hardy looked, then stood up. ‘Can I help you?’

The man wasn’t six feet tall. He had curly brown hair and sallow loose skin. His shabby dark suit was badly tailored and poorly pressed. There were tiny bloodstains on his white collar from shaving cuts.

Nevertheless, what he lacked in style he made up for in substance. His brown eyes were clear and carried authority. The anger seemed to spark off him. ‘Yeah, you can help me. You can tell me what this is all about!’

Hardy didn’t respond ideally on this onslaught. ‘Maybe you can tell me what it is to you!’

The two men glared at each other. The guard who had admitted the second man was still standing at the door; the woman investigator Hardy had brought along as a witness checked her fingernails. The guard asked, ‘You gentlemen have a problem with each other?’

The shorter man turned. ‘You know who I am?’

‘I don’t,’ Hardy said.

He was ignored. ‘I am representing this woman and she is being harassed by the district attorney -’

‘There is no harassment going on here -’

‘Save it for your appeal, which you’re going to need. To say nothing of the lawsuit.’

‘Who the hell are you?’

‘I’m David Freeman, Ms Shintaka’s attorney, and you don’t belong here.’

Like everyone else in the business of practicing law from either side of the courtroom, Hardy knew of David Freeman, and his presence stopped him momentarily.

Freeman was a legend in the city, a world-class defense attorney in countless cases – and here was Dismas Hardy, novice prosecutor in a place he technically shouldn’t be. He didn’t know how there came to be a connection between May Shinn and David Freeman, but it was clear there was one now and it was hardly promising for Hardy’s chances.

‘How did you -’

Freeman cut him off. ‘Because fortunately for justice’s sake, some judges are available on weekends. Now you get the hell out of here, Counselor, or I swear to God I’ll move to have you disbarred.’

May spoke up. ‘But he wasn’t -’

Freeman held up an imperious hand. ‘Don’t say another word!’

Judge Andy Fowler watched his drive sail down the middle of the fairway, starting low and getting wings up into the clear blue, carrying in the warm, dry air. The ball finally dropped down, he estimated, at about two hundred and ten yards, bouncing and rolling another forty, leaving himself a short seven-iron to the pin.

Fowler picked up his tee with a swipe and walked to his cart, grinning. ‘The man is on his game.’ Gary Smythe was Fowler’s broker and, today, his match partner. They were playing best ball at $20 per hole and now, on the fourteenth, were up $80. Gary wasn’t yet thirty-five, a second-generation member of the Olympic Club.

The other two guys, both members of course, were father and son, Ben and Joe Wyeth from the real estate company of the same name. Ben Wyeth was close to Fowler’s age and looked ten years older. He teed up. ‘I think the judge here ought to rethink his twelve handicap.’ He swung and hit a decent drive out about two hundred yards with the roll, on the right side of the fairway. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is a proper drive for guys our age, Andy.’

They got in their carts and headed down the fairway. ‘You are playing some golf today,’ Gary said.

Andy was sucking on his tee. He wore a white baseball hat with a marlin on the crest, maroon slacks, a polo shirt. He followed the flight of a flock of swallows into one of the eucalyptus groves bordering the fairway. ‘I think golf must be God’s game,’ he said. ‘You get a day like this.’

‘If this is God’s game, he’s a sadist.’ Gary stopped the cart and got out to pick up his ball. As had been the case most of the afternoon, Andy’s ball was best.

Andy put his shot pin high, four feet to its left. Gary’s shot landed on the front fringe, bounced and almost hit the flagstick, then rolled twelve feet past. ‘Your ball again,’ Gary said.

As they waited on the green for Ben and Joe, Gary told Andy he was happy to see him feeling better. ‘Some of us were worried the last few months,’ he said. ‘You didn’t seem your old self.’

‘Ah, old man’s worries, that’s all.’ Andy lined up an imaginary putt. ‘You get lazy. You get a few problems, no worse than everybody else has, and you forget you can just take some action and make them go away. It’s just like golf, you sit too long and stare at that ball, pretty soon it’s making faces at you, and before you know it, hitting that ball becomes clean impossible. The thing to do is just take your shot. Let the chips fall. Pardon the mixed metaphor. At least then the game’s not playing you. Which is what I let creep up on me.’

‘Maybe you could let it creep back just a little, give us young guys a chance.’

Andy lined up another imaginary putt and put the ball in the hole. He looked up, grinning. ‘No quarter,’ he said. To the victor goes the spoils.‘

19

Hardy had had better weekends.

Historical Martinez turned out to be a bit of a dud. Since Moses and Hardy had practically lived at the Little Shamrock bar on 9th and Lincoln in San Francisco’s cool and breezy Sunset district for many years, an hour-and-a-half road trip to check out some small bars in another windy town was, at best, they decided, dumb.

They snagged a few not-so-elusive martinis – the gin first nagging at Hardy, then washing out the memory of the morning’s disaster with May Shinn and lawyer David Freeman – then Frannie had driven them all home just in time to find out Rebecca had developed roseola and a fever of 106 degrees, which was worth a trip to the emergency room.

When they got back at midnight Hardy had been too exhausted to return the calls of Art Drysdale or Abe Glitsky.

But on Sunday he wasn’t. He got an earful of rebuke from Art and was intrigued to learn from Glitsky, who’d worked yesterday, that Tom Waddell, the night guard at the Marina, had seen May leaving the place on Thursday night.

‘Probably coming back, realizing she’d left the gun.’

‘Did she have a key?’

‘That’s just it. It appeared she couldn’t get into the boat. Waddell was going to go help her when he finished whatever he was doing, but she had gone. Maybe that’s when she decided to buy the ticket to Japan. The timing fits.’

Hardy remembered that when he’d first gone to the Eloise, the boat had been left unlocked. May, knowing that, would have thought she could have just slipped aboard, taken the gun and disappeared with nothing left to link her to the murder.

‘And there’s another thing, maybe nothing, maybe a joke, but it could be the whole ballgame.’

Hardy waited.

‘I got a warrant for her suitcases and we found what looks like a handwritten will of Owen Nash’s, leaving her two million dollars.’

‘Is it real?’

‘We don’t know, we’re getting a sample of Nash’s handwriting. We haven’t even mentioned it to her yet, but let’s assume Nash just disappears and his body doesn’t show up on a beach. After he’s declared dead, May appears with a valid will.’

‘Nice retirement.’

‘The same thought occurred to me.’ A good cop following up leads, building a case that Hardy hoped he hadn’t already lost on a technicality.

Hardy spent most of the day inside worrying about Rebecca, giving her tepid baths every two or three hours. Frannie, as she did, hung tough, but he could tell it was a strain on her, to say nothing of his own feelings, memories of another life and another baby -one who hadn’t made it – chilling the warmth out of the evening.


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