Nothing but the Truth (22 page)
She stared at him for another beat. “We didn’t . . .” She stopped. “But he was
there,
Dismas. He was a friend. He listened. I just want you to understand.”
there,
Dismas. He was a friend. He listened. I just want you to understand.”
“I don’t listen?”
“Yes. I mean no, you know you don’t. Not about some things. You glaze over—the kids, school life, all those what you call mindless suburban activities. And I don’t even blame you, not really. I know it’s not the most exciting stuff in the world, but it’s my life, and sometimes it’s just horribly lonely and mind-numbing, and then suddenly there was this nice man who didn’t think all of this was tedious to listen to.”
“So he’d listen, did he, old Ron?”
She nodded, going on. “Ron and I, we were just having so many of the same issues with the kids . . .”
He couldn’t hold it any longer. “Wait a minute, Frannie. What about us? I seem to remember we’re doing some of the same things, too—live in the same house, do the kid thing, have friends over, like that. That stuff doesn’t count?”
“I know, I know. You’re right.” There was pain in her voice, too, perhaps some faint overtones of the desperation she must have been feeling. “But you know how things have changed with us. We’re different. I hope you’re still committed—”
“Of course I’m still committed. You think I’d be sitting here listening to all this if I wasn’t pretty damn committed?”
“Okay, I know that. But the romance . . .” She stopped. They both knew what she was getting at. The romance, and there used to be plenty, had been all but swallowed by the maw of the mundane.
And Hardy knew why. “We’re both working now. We work all the time.”
“Well, whatever the reason, we know we’re not the way we used to be. There’re whole areas of each other’s lives now that we don’t have the time or energy for.”
Hardy brought his hand up to his eyes, all the fatigue of the past hours suddenly weighing in. Everything Frannie was saying was true. Nobody’s lives were the way they used to be. But the accommodation he’d reached was to put it out of his mind. He had his job, making the money. She had hers, the house and the children’s day-to-day activities. They shared the children’s discipline and some organized playtime. They weren’t actually fighting; they were both competent, so there wasn’t much to fight about. This was adulthood and it was often not much fun. So what?
But she evidently had reached another conclusion— she needed something he wasn’t giving her and she’d gone out and found it. “What are you thinking?” she asked. “Talk to me.”
“I’m thinking everybody . . .” He started over. “I mean, married people . . . I don’t know.” He rubbed at his burning eyes. “I don’t know.”
“We all get further apart?”
He shook his head. “Maybe. But I’ve been trying to support us all here for the last few years. It takes a little bit of my time. Hell, it takes all my time. You think I’m okay with no leisure in my life? You think I don’t miss it, too, the fun? But what’s the option? Live poor, let the kids starve . . . ?”
“Nobody’s going to starve, Dismas. It’s not that. You know that.”
“Actually, I’m not sure that I do know that. It feels like if I stop working, somebody might. The world might end.”
“But you never talked to me about that, did you? That fear?” He shrugged and she pressed him. “Because you don’t talk about those kinds of things, not anymore.”
He shrugged that off. “I never did, Frannie. Nobody wants to hear about that, all those nebulous fears.”
“Yes, they do. And nebulous hopes, too, and little insignificant worries that just need to get aired out, and the occasional dream that’s just a dream, like we used to have all the time. What we were going to do when we got older, when the kids moved out?”
“Frannie, you’re talking a decade, minimum. We don’t even know if we’ll be alive in a decade. Why talk about it?”
She folded her arms. “That’s exactly what I mean. We don’t know something for sure and therefore it’s not on the Top Forty list of acceptable topics.”
“But Ron does, is that it? You’ve got hopes and fears you can share with Ron, but not with me?” He was hurt and mad and starting to swing pretty freely, maybe rock her with a roundhouse. “So what kind of dreams did you and Ron share and talk about?”
“I didn’t have any dreams with Ron, Dismas. I only have dreams with you.”
That stopped him. Her eyes were beginning to well up. He reached over, pulling her to him. “I don’t want to yell at you,” he said. “I don’t understand this right now. I’m trying.” He pulled back so he could look at her. “I’ve been trying with our whole lives, too, you know. I do try to be there for you and the kids. I haven’t been distant on purpose.”
“I know. I shouldn’t have let Ron even be friends, not that way. That’s all it was, really, but I . . . it seemed innocent, really, starting out. You know, connecting finally to somebody.”
Hardy knew. Just before Vincent had been born, he’d had the same experience—connection, infatuation. Fire that he had ducked away from before it had burned him and Frannie. He knew.
“I shouldn’t have let him get important,” she said. “I should have seen it and stopped, but we were just talking. It didn’t seem it would hurt anything.”
“Except it’s put you here.”
That brought them back to where they were, although of course they hadn’t gone anywhere. It was almost midnight and the next morning their own children would be waking up at Grandma’s with neither of their parents around.
Frannie, shivering now, looked down at her orange jumpsuit. This time the tears did well over.
“I’m so sorry, Dismas. I’m so sorry.”
He pulled her back to him, moved his hand up and down over her back, feeling pretty damn sorry himself.
Glitsky was at his desk, sipping from a mug of tepid tea, trying to get a take on what Frannie had told him, which wasn’t much that he hadn’t already known. Bree and the oil wars. But so what? He’d been a homicide inspector for a long time and the idea that this was some sort of business-related slaying was, for him, almost too far-fetched to consider.
When he got back to basics and asked himself who stood to benefit from Bree’s death, he came up with Ron. Also, the same cop instinct that had momentarily forgotten—simply because she was behind bars—that Frannie was an innocent person, was at the same time screaming that nobody gets as defensive as Frannie was if there wasn’t something to hide. Maybe it wasn’t always true in real life, but if you dealt as much as Glitsky did with the criminal world, you could pretty much bet on it.
So regardless of how much he’d prefer Sharron Pratt and Scott Randall to be wrong, he was thinking he’d be wise not to forget entirely about Ron. It might be nice to find an alternate suspect, but if homicide took the road less traveled and found no one on it after the DA had shown them the way, he had a hunch he’d be hearing about it for a decade or two.
He was vaguely aware of two inspectors writing reports out in the open homicide detail. Suddenly there was a shadow in his doorway and he looked up.
“I was half expecting you not to show.”
“Which half?” Hardy asked. He stepped into the office and crabwalked around the desk, which barely fit into the room, to one of the wooden chairs wedged into the tiny space that was left. “Frannie told me you two had a nice talk.”
The lieutenant was twirling his mug around and around, wrestling with something. “I’m not too happy about what I heard, Diz. I’m thinking it may be Ron after all.”
Hardy was poker-faced, keeping it casual. “How could he have done it? I mean like when and where?”
“I know. There are problems with it.”
“Like he wasn’t there? Would that be one of them?” Low-key. But the last thing he needed now was to get homicide on Ron. Because they would have a good shot at finding him, which would put him and his kids back in the system. It would eliminate Hardy’s own private agenda—the only one, he believed, that could produce a satisfactory conclusion to this mess. So he asked, “What do you have on Bree? What did Griffin get?”
The mug stopped halfway to Glitsky’s mouth, came back down. Glitsky’s normal expression was something between a frown and a scowl, and now it moved a few degrees south. “Carl might have had the case closed in two hours if he hadn’t died. Or he might have been nowhere. Either way, he didn’t get to writing up his reports. Paperwork wasn’t his strong point.”
“What was?”
Glitsky narrowed his eyes. “What are you getting at?”
“Well, he must have done something. Just because there’s not much in the file doesn’t mean there’s nothing. ” He had Glitsky’s interest now and he kept going. “Was Griffin married? Did he talk to his wife? Anybody in the office here? Who supervised at the crime scene? They must have gotten some kind of physical evidence at Bree’s place. I mean, Griffin was in this, right? He had to have something.”
Hardy found it a lot easier getting into the penthouse with the key that Ron had given him.
Once inside, he turned and locked the door behind him, then switched on the lights. Nothing obvious had changed since he and Canetta had walked out together last night, but Hardy felt a dim charge as he started for the office with the answering machine.
What was it?
Stopping completely, telling himself that it was probably the difference between being merely tired, which was last night, and semi-comatose, now, he still took a minute getting his bearings, casting his eyes around the periphery of the rooms.
While he’d been visiting downtown with Frannie and then Glitsky, he’d left his gun stowed in his trunk. When he got back to his car he’d tucked it back into his belt. Now, feeling stupid about it for the second time in five hours didn’t stop him from pulling it out again.
The paintings, the view, the dining area, all the same. It was nothing, he concluded. He was the walking dead at the moment, seeing ghosts, maybe playing with them.
But suddenly there it was.
He’d gone out to the balcony last night, and to do that he’d pulled the drapes aside a foot or two. He remembered it specifically because from the inside of the house, where he stood now, he hadn’t been able to see the French doors leading out to the balcony from which Bree had been thrown. He hadn’t known the doors were there.
And now they were covered again, the drapes pulled closed.
He crossed the living room again, the dining area with its seating nook, trying to remember, growing more sure of it. Neither he nor Canetta had come anywhere near this area last night. And as Hardy was leaving he’d glanced back at the rooms one last time—the French doors stuck in his mind, and that meant the drapes hadn’t been pulled closed.
Moving them aside again, he pushed open one of the doors and stepped back out onto the balcony, over to its edge. It still was a long way down. Fighting vertigo, he backed up a step. Nothing had been moved, nothing had changed.
So somebody had pulled the drapes against the unlikely event that he would be seen moving around twelve floors up at the scene of a murder.
A last glance and Hardy was inside, this time pulling the drapes behind him. He still had the gun in his hand. “Hello,” he called out. “Anybody here?”
Silence.
Flicking the hall and room lights on before him, he took a tour of the back rooms, as he and Canetta had done last night. Nothing looked disturbed. Even the office, presumably the location of Bree’s important files, was as he’d last seen it.
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