Dead Irish (2 page)

I would like to thank Bob and Barbara Sawyer, Elaine Jennings, and Holt Satterfield for help in preparing the manuscript; Drs. Gregory Gorman and Chris Landon; Dalila Corral; Don Matheson for a few bons mots, and Patti O’Brien for two big words.

Most especially, I would like to thank Al Giannini of the San Francisco District Attorney’s office, a great friend as well as a resource for technical and procedural matters, without whom this book truly could not have been written.

Any technical errors are the author’s.

To my mother,

Loretta Therese Gregory Lescroart,
and, again, to Lisa,
with love

“I have certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink.”

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

1

FROM HIS AISLE SEAT, Dismas Hardy had a clear view of the stewardess as her feet lifted from the floor. She immediately let go of the tray—the one that held Hardy’s Coke—although strangely it didn’t drop, but hung there in the air, floating, the liquid coming out of the glass like a stain spreading in a blotter.

The man next to him grabbed Hardy’s elbow and said, “We’re dead.”

Hardy, as though from a distance, noted the man’s hand on his arm. He found it difficult to take his eyes from the floating stewardess. Then, as suddenly as she’d lifted, the stewardess crashed back to the floor with the tray and the drink.

Two or three people were screaming.

Hardy was the first one to get his seat belt off. In a second, he was kneeling over the stewardess, who appeared to be unhurt, though badly shaken, crying. She held him, muscles spasming in fear or relief, gasping for breaths between sobs.

It was the first time Hardy’d had a woman’s arms around him in four and a half years. And that time had been just the once, with Frannie née McGuire now Cochran, after a New Year’s Eve party.

The pilot was explaining they’d dropped three thousand feet, something about wind shears and backwashes of 747s. Hardy loosened the woman’s hold on him. “You’re all right,” he said gently. “We’re all okay.” He looked around the plane, at the ashen faces, the grotesque smiles, the tears. His own reaction, he figured, would come a little later.

In fifteen minutes they were at the gate in San Francisco. Hardy cleared customs, speaking to no one, and went to the Tiki Bar, where he ordered a black and tan—ideally a mixture of Guinness Stout and Bass Ale. This one wasn’t ideal.

Halfway through the first one, he felt his legs go, and he grinned at himself in the bar’s mirror. Next his hands started shaking and he put them on his lap, waiting for the reaction to pass. Okay, it was safe. He was on the ground and could think about it now.

In a way, he thought, it was too bad the plane hadn’t crashed. There would have been some symmetry in that—both of his parents had died in a plane crash when he’d been nineteen, a sophomore at Cal Tech.

A crash would also have been timely. Since Baja hadn’t helped him to figure his life out, nor had two weeks on the wagon, maybe there was simply no solution. If the plane had gone down, he wouldn’t have had to worry about it anymore.

He’d spent his days underwater in the reefs where the Sea of Cortez meets the Pacific. He had held the shell of a sea tortoise and ridden it for perhaps two hundred yards. He’d gone over the side of the
panga
into a school, a city, a landscape of leaping dolphins while his guide tried to tell him they would kill him. Well, if that was the way he was going to go, he couldn’t have thought of a better one.

The nights, he’d sit at the Finis Terra high above the water, drinking soda and lime. He’d come down to Baja alone on purpose, although both Pico and Moses had offered to go with him. But with them, he would have been the same Hardy he was in San Francisco—a fast and cynical mouth, an elbow customized for drinking. He hadn’t felt like being that Hardy for a while. It hadn’t been working very well, he thought, which was why he’d needed the vacation.

The problem was, on vacation nothing else seemed to work too well either. He just felt he’d lost track of who he was. He knew what he did—he was a damn good bartender, a thrower of darts, a medium worker of wood.

He was also divorced, an ex-marine, ex-cop, ex-attorney. He’d even, for a time, been a father. Thirty-eight and some months and he didn’t know who he was.

He tipped up the glass. Yeah, he thought, that wouldn’t have been so bad, the plane crashing. Not good, not something to shoot for, but really not the worst tragedy in the world.

He figured he’d already had that one.

A shroud of gray enveloped the westernmost twenty blocks of San Francisco and extended from the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge down to Daly City. The fog covered an area of perhaps no more than five square miles, but within it gusting winds of thirty miles per hour were not uncommon and the temperature was twenty degrees lower than in the rest of the city. Nowhere was visibility greater than half a block, and squalls of bone-chilling drizzle drifted like malevolent ghosts across the drear landscape.

In almost the precise center of this fog sat a squat one-story frame house set back nearly sixty feet from the sidewalk. Hardy had thought when he bought it that it looked like the kind of dollhouse a sailor might have made for a daughter he’d never seen while he traveled to warm and exotic ports. It was a house that seemed to remember summers fondly, with a small, white latticed porch up three brick steps, broad white planks surrounding a jutting bay window.

Dwarfed on the left and right by medium-rise apartment buildings, the house seemed especially quaint and vulnerable. Next to the porch, in front of the windows, a scrub juniper hugged the ground as though for warmth. The rest of the area just in front of the house, cleared for a garden that might have once been there, was barren. The lawn itself was green and slightly overgrown.

Hardy sat in his office in the back. The shades were pulled and a coal fire burned in the grate. It was a Monday in the first week of June.

Hardy picked up a dart and flung it at the board on the wall opposite him. He reached for his pipe, stopped himself, sat back. The wind slapped at the window, shaking it.

Hardy pushed himself back from his desk and went to retrieve his round of darts, stopping to poke at the blue-burning coal. He wore a dirty pair of corduroys, a blue pullover sweater and heavy gray socks. He rearranged some of the ships in bottles on his mantel and brushed the dust from one of his fossils.

It crossed his mind that the average temperature of the entire universe, including all suns, stars, planets, moons, comets, black holes, quasars, asteroids and living things, was less than one degree above absolute zero. He believed it. It had been three weeks since he’d returned from Cabo.

He heard the cover drop at his mail slot, the late Monday delivery. As usual, his mail was a joke. He would have almost welcomed a bill just to have something addressed to him personally. As it was, he got an invitation to join a travel club, a special offer on cleaning his rugs (only $6.95 per room, with a three-room minimum—maybe not a bad deal if he had owned any rugs), a tube of some new toothpaste, a free advertising newspaper, two letters to the previous owner of his house, who had moved nearly six years before, and a “Have You Seen This Child?” postcard.

He opened a can of hash and spooned it into a heavy cast-iron skillet. When it had stuck well to the bottom of the pan, he pried under it and turned it nearly whole. Poking three holes into the mass, he dropped an egg in each, covered it, and went to the tank in his bedroom to feed the tropical fish.

He went back to the kitchen and opened a newspaper to the sports section. The Giants were at home. That ought to keep the ghosts at bay.

He ate the hash and eggs out of the skillet slowly, thinking. When the skillet was empty, he placed it back on the stove, covering the bottom with salt. He turned the flame under it up high. When the pan was smoking, he took the wire brush that hung from the back of the stove and ran it around under the salt, dumping what he’d worked loose into the garbage. In twenty seconds, the pan was spotless. He ran a paper towel over it, then left it on the stove.

He’d had that pan longer than almost anything else he owned. It was the only household article he’d taken when his marriage to Jane had ended. If he treated it right—no water, no soap—it would last a lifetime. It was one of the few things he was absolutely sure of, and he didn’t mess with it.

In his bedroom, he put on a three-quarter-length green peacoat, boots, and a misshapen blue Greek sailor’s cap. Grabbing a pipe from the rack on his desk, he risked a glance outside, but someone might just as well have erected a slate wall there.

With the pipe clamped between his teeth, he walked through the echoing house as though fighting a gale. As he flicked the light switch in the hallway, there was a pop and a flash, then a reversion to darkness.

While he’d been in Cabo the wood in the front door had swollen. Normally, Hardy took care of carpentry that needed to be done, but he hadn’t gotten around to re-planing the door.

He had to yank on it twice to get it open. Standing for a moment in the hallway, contemplating nature’s perversity, he drew on the cold pipe. Then he stepped into the swirling mist.

On the way to Candlestick Park he considered stopping by the Steinhart Aquarium to see if Pico would like to accompany him. But he decided against it. Pico would talk about his great passion—getting a live great white shark into the aquarium. Long ago, Hardy had helped “walk” the traumatized sharks that fishing boats brought in, hoping to coax them into swimming on their own. None of them had ever made it, and Hardy didn’t do it anymore.

He didn’t do anything like that anymore. You could put your hope in anything you wanted, he figured, but to put it in hope itself was just pure foolishness.

And as Hardy often said, “I might be dumb, but I’m no fool.”

2

THE MEXICAN GUY in the upper-deck front row two sections from where Hardy sat was trouble. He probably weighed two hundred fifty pounds. Sitting with his shirt off, a red bandanna around his head, and a big meaty arm around a stout Latino woman, he was intimidation incarnate.

By Hardy’s best count, since the vendor had stopped coming around in the bottom of the fourth inning, the guy had put away a dozen large beers. He brandished a near-empty pint brandy bottle in his free hand. The entire upper deck smelled like marijuana.

Hardy had gotten his ticket from Jimmy Deecks, a cop who was working the second deck casual, moonlighting. Mostly it was an easy gig, consisting of exchanging tickets with the scalpers—you took their game tickets and gave them citations. Once in a while you’d take a drunk to the holding tank. Occasionally, like tonight with Hardy showing up, you’d give an old buddy one of the scalped tickets. You’d see a lot of good baseball.

But sometimes, Hardy knew, you had to work. A guy would try to prove he was the world’s greatest asshole; Hardy had a feeling about tonight and this guy. Jimmy was going to earn his bread.

Although the sun was barely down and the sky was still blue, the lights were on. The asshole was standing up, waving his arms, trying to get the attention of a beer vendor, screaming
“Cerveza”
as though someone were torturing him by putting him through beer withdrawal cold turkey. Like a foghorn. Players on the field looked up to see who was making the racket.

Hardy looked around, wondering when Deecks and his partner were going to come bust the guy. Suddenly the asshole took a swing at the fan sitting behind him. The fan swung back, missed, and took one aside the head that sent him sprawling. That got some other guys up. A couple of women screamed.

The crowd up there roared, of course. What a good time! A bonus during the ball game! Hardy left his seat. Jimmy Deecks or not, this bullshit had to stop.

But then he saw Jimmy running down the steps loosening his nightstick, no partner in sight.

The Mexican woman was pulling at her man’s arm, trying to get him to stop, but three or four other guys were joining in now, with the asshole just screaming and swinging at random. Jimmy blew on his whistle to no effect. Hardy tried to keep moving through the seats, but more and more people were closing in to see the fun.

“All right, enough, hold it, break it up.” He heard Jimmy’s words, the same ones always used, the ones that never worked. Things started to quiet when Jimmy laid a couple of taps on shoulders with the nightstick.

Hardy, trying now to step over some seats, saw that only the asshole was still standing. His woman was pulling on his arm, glaring at Jimmy Deecks.

“Come on, now. Let’s go downstairs.”

The sweet voice of reason. Hardy loved it. He caught Jimmy’s eye briefly, then saw him fix on the woman, seeking an ally. “Get him downstairs and take him home, huh? How ’bout that?”

The asshole just kept glaring. The woman pulled at his arm again and he looked down, as though just being reminded she was there, and casually cuffed her face, backhand.

“Shut up!” Then something else in Spanish.

Hardy couldn’t get through the crowd that had formed. Jimmy rolled his eyes toward him, as if for support, then unsnapped his holster. Though drawing down on fans wasn’t a recommended procedure at the ballpark, it seemed to work for an instant; the asshole appeared to forget what was going on. He looked up behind Jimmy Deecks and started yelling for beer again.

It was all the distraction Jimmy needed. He stepped toward the guy and slapped him hard alongside the head just over the ear, and the guy went down sideways.

There was a hearty round of applause from the stands. The woman, her own nose bleeding, leaned over the asshole, seeing if he was all right.

Jimmy turned again to Hardy, a plea for help in his eyes.

Somebody yelled a warning and he turned as the asshole was about to slam into him. Drunk, stoned, and probably half concussed, the guy was formidable. Jimmy sidestepped the main force of the tackle but still fell backward across some seats. The asshole was up again, as fast as he was, and he charged back down the steps.

Hardy saw Jimmy duck away and swing hard with his nightstick as the guy passed, hitting him high on the back of his neck, probably aiming for and certainly hitting the lower edge of the bandanna. The guy’s momentum carried him down to the railing, which he slammed into, leaned over, weaving, went over some more, and finally, almost in slow motion, disappeared off the second deck.

Abe Glitsky was figuring out his chances.

He was one of 1,780 policemen in San Francisco. The voters in their wisdom had just rejected a mayor’s referendum calling for a city/county-wide increase of two hundred cops. The rejection, completely unexpected, though maybe it shouldn’t have been in the City That Once Knew How, had come after the department had already hired many of the new officers, which meant they would now be laid off.

Worse, from Abe’s point of view, was that all the promotions that had been based on the hirings would be rescinded. As usual in the bureaucracy, they were using “last hired first fired,” so the officers with least seniority would get knocked back: robbery inspectors would go back to desk sergeants, desk sergeants to the beat, homicide guys to vice or robbery. And all because the citizens of this clown town thought too many cops would make the city a police state.

Glitsky’s desk was in a cubicle of baffled masonite. He had a window with a view of the Oakland-Bay Bridge and his own coffee machine—seventy square feet of the high life, the perks of his seniority.

He sipped some cold herb tea and thought maybe he should move to L.A. Pick up the wife and kids and go someplace where they believed in law enforcement. He’d heard that down there they were increasing the size of the force by a thousand. A thousand! He ran that number around in his brain. And no one in their right mind would say L.A. was overrun with cops. Everyone already knew that half the town was controlled by gangs; a thousand new cops probably wouldn’t even make a dent. And here in San Francisco, a mere fifth of that made people think about Mussolini.

Abe didn’t get it.

He really ought to go home, he thought. Get away from it. The atmosphere in homicide, outside this cubicle, was not good. Three new guys, all just promoted, knew they were going back down. And this was happening in every department, which made the entire Hall a pure joy to work in.

To make matters more complicated, Glitsky’s lieutenant, Joe Frazelli, was retiring. (Of course, this assured that only two of the three new guys slated for demotion would actually go back to their old jobs. One would stay in homicide. Wonderful for cooperation among the rookies.)

Abe, along with Frank Batiste and Carl Griffin, was up for Frazelli’s job, which was nine-tenths administrative and which took you off the street, which was not what any of the guys wanted. But there were other considerations, like power and, not unimportantly, money. Also, it was another rung up the ladder to captain, maybe chief, and like most cops Glitsky entertained thoughts of moving up.

But it wasn’t easy being half black and half Jewish. Some days, when his paranoia ran high, he was amazed he’d come as far as he had, which was homicide inspector. Other times he’d think the sky was the limit—he was a good cop, he knew his way around, he could lead others.

But if he was honest, he had to admit there were some problems. First, he knew he could direct investigations, but he had a problem working with the other guys. Out of the fourteen homicide cops, only two worked solo, and he was one of them. He told himself that it was just the way it had happened, but in his heart he knew that he’d worked it around this way.

He’d come up four years before when an armed-robbery suspect—J. Robert Ronka, he’d never forget—had dovetailed into a wife killer. Frazelli had admired his handling of that case and put him on another hot one as soon as he’d come on board in homicide. There had been no free partners at the time, so Frazelli had asked him if he minded going solo again until somebody’s vacation ended or somebody else quit or got promoted, leaving another solo spot to be teamed. Then he’d put Glitsky together with that guy.

Except Abe had never pushed it, and it hadn’t happened. And now he sometimes thought that not being particularly close to anybody might hurt his career.

But that wasn’t as serious as the other problem—the race thing. The San Francisco Police Department has two unions—one for white officers and one for nonwhite officers. And Abe would be good and goddamned if he was going to use any affirmative-action bullshit to get himself moved up. When he finally did make captain or chief he didn’t want even the tiniest smell of that in his background, and so far he thought he’d avoided it.

The trouble was, some black cops resented him for rejecting the hard-fought-for rights that they’d earned. And a lot of white guys wouldn’t believe that he didn’t get special consideration because he was black, regardless of what he said or did about it. Hell, he was solo, wasn’t he?

(The fact that the other solo guy, McFadden, was white wasn’t a comparable situation because everybody knew McFadden was just a mean sorry son of a bitch who hated everybody and their dog Spot. He wouldn’t work with his own mother, and his mother wouldn’t want to work with him.)

A telephone rang somewhere out in the main room. Glitsky could see three of the maybe five guys who were at their desks doing paperwork. The secretaries had all disappeared. It was close to nine o’clock on a Monday night.

Frazelli had gone home. Abe and Griffin had rank in the shop. Wearily, Abe stood, stretched, and walked to the entrance to his cubicle. Griffin, three cubicles down, poked his head out the same way. They nodded at one another warily.

As Abe feared, it was the desk phone. One of the new guys went and picked it up, listened for a minute, then covered the mouthpiece.

“Anybody want to see a dead guy?” he asked.

Abe wanted to go home. He was working on four current homicides and one he’d been hounding for sixteen months. On the other hand, his plate had been fuller, and he was gunning for looie. He stepped out of his cubicle. “Want to flip for it?” he asked Griffin.

“Where is it?” Griffin asked the new guy.

“Candlestick.”

“Naw. Baseball’s boring,” Griffin said.

“Okay, I’ll take it,” Abe said, not liking it. Griffin should have gone for it too. And there seemed to be a personal edge to what he’d said. Something was going on.

Abe didn’t like it.

The Giants beat the Phillies, 4 to 3.

After the last out Hardy stayed in his seat, drinking beer and waiting for what crowd there was to thin out. They stopped selling beer after the eighth inning and he’d gone back and bought three to hold him over to the end of the game. He still had one, open but untouched, in the deep pocket of his coat.

They left the field lights on. Hardy squinted below to the place the man had fallen. They’d stopped the game back in the seventh right in the middle of what turned out to be the Giants’ game-winning rally, when they had two men on, nobody out and Will Clark coming up.

Most of the spectators had gone. He figured by now it was just the cops, so he got up and meandered through the seats, sipping beer.

The area was cordoned off with yellow tape. Deecks was sitting slumped, his legs hanging over the seat in the row in front of him. The Cougar—Rafe Cougat, Deecks’s partner—was talking to one of the techs. They were getting ready to move the body.

Hardy felt a hand on his shoulder and turned around. “Abraham, my man,” he said. Then, the thought occurring to him, “This a murder?”

Abe Glitsky grinned, and the scar running through his lips lightened. Fifteen years before, he and Hardy had walked a beat together. They still wrote Christmas cards.

“You see it happen?” Abe asked.

“No. I was watching the game.”

“Still fascinated by crime, huh?”

Against Hardy’s will, the sarcasm rankled slightly. “I read the sports page, sometimes the food section. I get my current events across the bar.”

Glitsky jerked his head. “These low railings,” he said. “I mean, you see kids leaning over ’em all the time going for fouls. They ought to put up nets or something.”

Three men lifted the body bag and were carrying it over the seats. Another group waited on the cement stairs. The gurney waited at the top of the ramp. “I’m kind of surprised you bothered to come over and check this out.”

Hardy lifted his shoulders an inch. “Parades,” he said, “can’t get enough of ’em.” A section of seats separated them from the rest of the group. Hardy asked why Abe was here himself if it wasn’t a murder.

Glitsky pursed his lips, thinking for a minute. “Long story,” he said finally. “Politics.”

“You? I thought you didn’t do that.”

Glitsky made a face. “I used to think you got political to move ahead. Now you need it to stay even.”

Hardy sipped at his next-to-last cup of beer. “Gets to that point, it’s too much stress.”

“That’s how people live, Diz,” Glitsky answered. “It’s how you stay alive.”

Hardy took a long, deliberate drink. “Is it?”

Glitsky’s nose flared. They had come up to the concession area, still away from the others, the gurney. “Yeah, it is. I got a wife and three kids. What am I supposed to do?”

The vehemence took Hardy back a step. “You feel that locked in, Abe?”

“I don’t know how I feel. I’m trying to do my job right and not lose what I got.”

“Well, there’s your problem,” Hardy said, trying to make it lighter, “you’ve got stuff you care about.”

The gurney went by. Deecks and the Cougar followed it, talking quietly. One of the techs came up and started saying something to Glitsky. He listened, nodded once, started walking. “But to answer your question,” he said, “no, this wasn’t a murder. The gentle victim got a little overenthusiastic near the railing. Deecks’ll write it up. End of story.”

“So why’d you come out?”