Dead Irish (9 page)

11

JOHN STROUT MADE his personal policy very clear in the first month of his tenure as San Francisco’s coroner. The responsibility of that position, according to U.S. Government Code 27491, is to determine the “cause, circumstances and manner of death” of individuals dying within a particular jurisdiction. And under “manner of death,” there are only four possibilities; natural causes, accident, suicide, or death at the hands of another.

In the course of doing that job, however, other elements, many of them political, have an opportunity to come into play. Strout, a tall, soft-spoken gentleman originally from Atlanta, wasn’t about to let anybody or anything affect his judgment on causes of death, and so he decided early on to send a message to those who would prefer a quick and sloppy verdict over a slow and correct one.

The victim in the case had been the cousin of the mayor and—not the greatest coincidence in the world, given the size of the city—brother-in-law to one of the supervisors. Strout came in to work that morning and found the morgue overrun with media people as well as with members of both the mayor’s and supervisor’s staffs.

Strout glanced at the body before going to his office, where he was hounded to issue some statement. He figured it was as good a time as any to get the word out.

A reporter for the
Chronicle
finally asked him point-blank, and rather insultingly, if he planned to make any decision at all in the foreseeable future. Strout had stood up to his full height behind his desk. “Seeing as this victim was stabbed twice and shot five times”—he said in his most syrupy drawl—“I’m very close, and you can print this, very close”—he paused and smiled at the assemblage—“very close indeed to rulin’ out suicide.”

Strout wasn’t about to hurry and be wrong. After eleven years as coroner, it was gospel that once Strout gave a verdict, you could take it to the bank.

Now Carl Griffin and Vince Giometti sat in the air-conditioned visitors’ room at the San Francisco morgue. It was not a decorator’s paradise. The long yellow couch was too low, the commercial prints on the walls were ugly and hung too high. The only living plant by the one window to the right of the couch was no greener or prettier than the three plastic floral arrangements that graced, respectively, the center table (too short for the couch), the blue plastic end table, and the pitted mahogany sideboard.

Griffin and Giometti sat on either end of the couch. Between them, in an almost-new cardboard briefcase, was the file on the Cochran case. Giometti, a new father, had just finished saying something that made Griffin explode.

“Do I gotta hear this right after lunch? You think this is interesting? You believe anybody cares what your baby’s bowel movements look like, whether it’s hard or soft or runny or whether the goddamn corn gets digested on its way through?” Griffin jumped up, unable to sit still. “Christ!”

“If you had a kid, you’d know how important it was.”

“Why do you think I never had a kid? You think that was just dumb luck? You may not believe this, but I thought about it at one time, and you know what decided it for me?” He went down on one knee in front of his rookie partner. “I asked myself this question: I said, ‘Think about the reality of babyhood, and what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?’ ”

Giometti started to answer, but Griffin put up a hand.

“No, let me finish. The first thing that came to my mind was shit. Rivers of it every day for like a couple of years. Then I asked myself another question: Is there anything I like about shit? I mean, its smell, texture, various colors? Do I look at it the way Eskimos look at snow, with nuances and a hundred different names? No, shit is shit. And I am not interested in any of it—your kid’s, my own, any of it, okay?” He stood up. “So from today on can we do without the daily bm moment, please?”

He turned away and walked over to the window, breathing hard. He rubbed a leaf of the plant between thumb and forefinger.

“It’s a natural function, Carl,” Giometti said. “You shouldn’t be so uptight about it.”

Griffin thought he’d leave a thumbprint on the leaf, he squeezed it so hard.

He heard the door open. Strout was shaking Vince’s hand, coming over to him. It wasn’t exactly how he’d wanted it. He would have preferred to be calm and dispassionate, and now, if he knew Strout at all and he did, his mood might affect Strout’s decision. Well, if he played it right, maybe it could work to his advantage.

“So, boys,” Strout said after he’d sat in a straight-back chair he’d pulled up to the too-short table, “what have you got here?”

Giometti opened the briefcase and took out the file. Griffin thought it would be wiser, also good experience for the kid, to let his partner talk until he’d calmed down, and he loitered again over by the window, hands in pockets.

“Well, sir, the deceased was having troubles at work. In fact, the job was about to come to an end.”

“Any medical corroboration of depression?”

“No, sir, not formal.”

“Informal?”

“The family, not his wife, but his family family.”

Griffin saw Strout’s face stretch slowly. “You mean the one he grew up with? We call that the nuclear family, Officer.”

It went right by Giometti. “Yeah, well,” he said, “the nuclear family said he’d been on edge the last couple of weeks.”

Strout turned to Griffin. “Serious?”

“Couple of arguments with his father. Like that.”

“Did they say over what?”

Giometti took it again. “Something, he thought, about his work.”

Griffin: “We checked it out. The place is going bust. He was the manager.”

Strout was inclined to be skeptical. “He cared enough about it to kill himself?”

Griffin finally sat down. “It’s possible, sir. Guy was an overachiever his whole life, was planning on going to business school down at Stanford this fall. Could’ve ruined his image of himself, running a company going down the tubes.”

Strout nodded, silent. “All right,” he said, “marital?”

“Okay, even good,” Giometti said.

Griffin added, “The wife spent the night of his death talking to his mother. Two-hour conversation. Phone records verify it.”

“Worried about him?”

“This and that, but generally that’s my conclusion,” Griffin said.

“Any mental history at all?”

Giometti shook his head. Griffin said, “How ’bout you, sir? You find something?”

Strout leaned forward, putting his weight on his elbows, his elbows on his knees. Griffin noticed that the man’s eyebrows were so bushy they tangled in his lashes when he opened his eyes wide.

“I find a healthy young man,” Strout began, “with a good marriage. Good family. No history of mental illness. He’s got powder burns on his left hand and a hole in the half of his head that’s left.”

Giometti spoke up. “Oh, the gun was fired twice, you know.”

“The gun was fired twice. So what? Only one slug went in.” Strout’s lashes kissed his brows, looking at Griffin.

“Happens a lot,” Griffin said. “And while we’re at it, the gun was unregistered.”

Strout nodded. “Of course.”

Giometti butted in. “While we’re at things, nobody seems to want to talk about the note.”

“The fuckin’ note . . . ,” Griffin said.

“It was a note,” Giometti insisted.

“It was a piece of crumpled paper,” Griffin answered, not wanting to get drawn into anything in front of Strout.

But it was too late. “Are you telling me we have a suicide note, Officer?” Strout rolled his eyes up, up, out of his head. “Are we wasting our time here?”

“It’s not exactly the Rosetta stone of suicide notes,” Griffin said.

“It’s a note next to a body lying by a gun, though . . .”

“Not even that.” Griffin told him about finding it in the car, what it said, or, more particularly, didn’t say.

Strout chewed on it a moment, then nodded, deciding, going on to something else. “Might he have been gay?”

That was always a question in the city, Griffin knew. “No sign of it,” he said, glad to put the note behind them.

“No, there wasn’t,” Strout agreed. “Anyway, that’s what I find. Let’s be frank, gentlemen. Have you found anything points to a homicide here?”

Griffin and Giometti exchanged glances. “What we found,” Giometti said, “doesn’t point either way. We got a dead kid alone in a shitty place at night. A couple of random weirdnesses, like two shots,” he glanced at his partner, “maybe,
maybe
a note. Maybe he just got depressed, I don’t know. Maybe we need more time.”

“Everybody needs more time,” Strout said.

“On the other hand,” Griffin said, “it wasn’t a random parking lot—Cochran did deliver there. People knew who he was, but we’ve checked into that and there’s nothing evident.”

Strout cracked his knuckles. “But we do have a note, don’t we?” He sighed. “In the absence of any hard evidence to the contrary, I’m inclined to lean toward a suicide, then. But I’m a little reluctant. It’s not very tight, is it?”

Giometti spoke up. “You know if we go with suicide, the widow gets no insurance.”

“Insurance isn’t my problem,” Strout snapped. “Carl, you got something, give it to me, would you?”

Griffin thought about the chances of himself becoming lieutenant. He knew he could continue to conduct the best investigation in the history of the department and it wouldn’t mean beans. On the other hand, if Glitsky fucked up . . .

Face facts, he told himself. Strout was right. There was no hard evidence that the boy had been murdered. If there was,
and
if they busted tail for a week or a month, chances were that he and Vince would find something.
If
it was there. But the two of them so far had been thorough, if not inspired. Maybe somebody wanted him especially, Carl Griffin, to hump his ass for a month and come up empty. Okay, then, he thought. They want inspiration, they can hold the carrot out.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I’m a little worried about the lack of motive. Nobody we talked to had a bad word to say, much less wanted to kill him.”

Strout rose to it. “All right, then, let’s go with suicide/ equivocal, see if something turns up.”

Back in their car, Giometti seemed sullen.

“What’s eating you?” Griffin asked, knowing full well what it was.

“This guy didn’t kill himself.”

“He didn’t, huh?”

“You know he didn’t.”

Griffin slammed the dashboard. “Don’t tell me what I know, Vince. I been at this a long time.” He was feeling Giometti’s look on him. He took a breath. Giometti hit the ignition. “Turn off the car,” he said, leaning his head back against the seat, closing his eyes. “I’ll tell you something, Vince. I honestly don’t know. I’m an evidence cop. You give me something to go on, and I’m on it like white on rice. But what do we got here? We’ve interviewed the wife—suspect number one if you go by the stats. She was home all night talking to the guy’s mother. Who else? Cruz, the guy who owns the lot and building? He’s with his boyfriend. Okay, maybe not, but we couldn’t break him—either of them—could we?”

Giometti nodded grudgingly.

“Polk? His foxy wife? No way. This guy Cochran was their star. It was all on him to make the business work, or keep working. Losing fight, and he took it hard. It may not be a good motive, but right now it’s our only motive. He drove out there, depressed. He started to write a note, saw the futility of that and stopped in the middle. He’d gotten this piece from somewhere and shot it once to make sure he knew how it worked. It’s sad as hell, but I can see it happening. I’ve
seen
it happen. A lot of times.”

Griffin was winding down. “Look,” he said, “we got five righteous homicides besides maybe this one. Maybe, probably, another gets reported this afternoon or tonight. How much time you want to waste on this one?”

“It’s not wasted if somebody killed him.”

“True. But we got nothing pointing anywhere. We get something, anything, we go back on it. It’s not like it’s closed—it’s equivocal. We haven’t given up, technically. We’re just putting it on hold in lieu of evidence. Vince, look, we’re in the collar game. You want to make it in homicide, bring in your collars. These other ones, put ’em on your desk. Check ’em every few months. Keep an open mind. But if nothing sticks out after three, four days of looking—and I mean nothing . . .” He shrugged.

“Cruz wouldn’t see you today?”

“Too busy today, he said.”

“Does he think you’re a cop?”

“Abe, I’d never impersonate a police officer. That’s a felony, I’m pretty sure.”

“But he might, at your first interview, have reached the conclusion that you were of the city’s finest?” Glitsky tolerantly scratched at the scar that ran between his lips.

“It’s always surprising what the mind can sometimes come up with,” Hardy said. “I guess it’s possible he thought that if he let his imagination run wild.”

Glitsky’s telephone rang. It was five o’clock, and Hardy settled back, relaxed. It had been a long day, but not without its rewards. Even Cruz refusing to see him had been instructive.

Into the phone, Abe was saying something about angles of knife wounds, heights of suspects. Hardy listened with one ear. It was real, that kind of stuff, like his problem with Eddie Cochran having been right-handed.

Glitsky hung up. As though there’d been no interruption, he continued. “So what about when Cruz realizes that you’re not a cop?”

“Why would he do that?”

Glitsky tried to sound patient. “Because, Hardy, cops get interviews. They don’t say, ‘Sorry. I’ll come back tomorrow.’ They flash their buzzer and say, ‘Look, I’m busy too.’ ”

“I never used to do that.”

“Which is not to say it’s not the proper procedure.” The inspector got up abruptly. “Want some coffee?”

Hardy shook his head. “If you got a beer?”

Glitsky reached into the drawer under the Mr. Coffee and tossed Hardy a warm sixteen-ounce can of Schlitz. “Alcohol is forbidden anywhere in this building.” He didn’t go around again behind his desk but sat against the edge of the steel file cabinet sipping at his black coffee, waiting.

Hardy pulled the tab on the can, sipped, and grimaced. “It ain’t Bass Ale.”