Witt had a run-in with somebody?'
'No way, no way. This isn't a social club here. These volunteer docs come in and put in their time and leave. And Witt more than most. Nobody's billing anybody here – no reason to hang out.' He gestured at the waiting area behind Hardy, lowering his voice. 'This is not fun city west.'
Hardy recognized the gospel when he heard it. He pointed at his card lying on the window ledge between them. 'If you do think of something personal – anything at all – would you mind giving me a call?'
Hardy watched his wife walk from the back of the restaurant, noticed the heads at the bar turning. One of the problems he had had when he was starting to fall in love with her had been her looks – they were too good. He knew it was easy to get fooled by a pretty face. It had happened to him before.
And even though he had known Frannie since she was a young girl – Moses' kid sister – once he started connecting with her, letting himself really see her, he made himself put on the brakes. Not for too long, but enough to persuade himself that at least most of what he loved about her wasn't on the outside. He had to admit, though, that even after three years, a lot of it still was.
The waiter was there, holding her chair out for her. The little amenities.
'What are you smiling at?'
'I'm shallow. I have no depth. I wonder if our relationship is purely physical.'
Frannie daintily popped a bite of calamari into her mouth. They were by the window at Mooses', looking out through the sunshine onto Washington Square. 'Well, some of it, anyway.'
They hadn't discussed it, but they had both felt they needed to go someplace nice – light, upscale, carefree – to wash away the tastes of their mornings.
She reached across the table and touched a finger to Hardy's cheek, trailing it along his jawline. Picking up her glass, she swirled the Chardonnay, staring into it. 'Wine two days in a row. You think Vincent will be all right?' Their son was living on breastmilk and a few squashed bananas.
Hardy told her he didn't think Vincent would notice. It wasn't as if she was out pounding herself into the ground with alcohol.
'I know. Sometimes I just worry.' She put the glass down, scratched at the tablecloth. But she wasn't really worried about Vincent – it was something else and Hardy was fairly certain he knew what it was.
'Pretty bad?'
She nodded. 'You look around here, and you see all these people being so happy, and then back there, in the jail… it kind of makes you wonder what's the real world.'
Hardy covered her hand with his own.
'I mean, how isolated are we?' she asked.
The waiter lifted the empty plate from the middle of the table. He removed some non-existent crumbs from the starched linen tablecloth with a small rolling hand-brush. Someone began playing classical music – expertly – at the piano by the bar.
19
By Friday Hardy felt that he'd covered a lot of territory and uncovered very little. Freeman had been his usual unenthusiastic self about the ATM, although he did admit – grudgingly – that it might be helpful at some point.
Freeman's attitude made Hardy decide that there was a real disadvantage in believing your client was guilty. He was trying to keep his own mind open. He had verified Lightner's opinion – about the battery passing through generations – with several other published and unpublished authorities. Their explanations were all consistent – Jennifer had seen her mother beaten at home. Her mother took it and took it, possibly without complaint to the children. So that behavior became Jennifer's expectation of married life – if it wasn't there, things just wouldn't feel right. Intimacy couldn't begin.
So, Hardy thought, Larry had been beating Jennifer. Without a doubt, so had her first husband Ned. According to Lightner's theory she would have had a difficult time marrying either of them if they hadn't gotten at least a little tough with her during courtship – they wouldn't have felt like husband material.
Whether or not it could be proved in a court of law, Terrell's scenario of Jennifer injecting Ned with atropine was plausible. And – Hardy had to believe – if she killed Ned, it was a possibility that she killed Larry, too.
Next was, if Jennifer did kill both men, at least she had a good reason, though Hardy had a hard time with any kind of premeditated murder.; Jennifer, on her part, still hadn't budged an inch on her denial of abuse, which continued to infuriate David Freeman, signed affidavit or no.
Freeman was afraid he would lose and that the decision would be upheld on appeal. But he was hamstrung – he couldn't bring up BWS at all. If he did he was all but admitting that Jennifer did it and even process of saying why, in spite of all her denials.
Hardy had finally located brother Tom at a construction site near the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Struck out during the day, Hardy returned to the site after work hours wearing dirty jeans and carrying two six-packs of Mickey's Big Mouth and got him to talk for twenty minutes.
Hardy verified what the mother, Nancy, had said – Jennifer and Larry did not visit the family since a few months after the wedding. Tom had been seventeen at the time. Hardy could see that it had hurt the boy back then, although now the man covered it with bluster.
The last time Tom himself had seen the Witts had been Christmas Eve. No one had mentioned that before and Hardy asked why not.
Tom had shrugged it off. Why would anybody care? He'd gone by his parents' home during the afternoon, had a few beers, and his mother had started moaning about Jennifer and the grandchild she never saw. She'd bought Matt this great present and he wasn't even going to come over to see it.
Tom had gotten pissed off. He drove his motorcycle over to Olympia, intending – he said – to kick a little ass, but by the time he got there, he figured there wouldn't be any point. He wasn't going to change them. He'd dropped off his own Christmas present – a whiffle ball and bat – with his nephew, said Merry Christmas to his sister, told her she really ought to go by their parents so Matt could get his present from his grandmother, then left.
And, he added – no surprise, they didn't come.
But here, Hardy thought, might have been the catalyst Glitsky had been talking about. Out of the blue, Tom might not wake up one morning and say, 'I think I'll go kill my brother-in-law,' but he sure as hell might do it three days after being snubbed during the holidays, touching off years of resentment.
Walter Terrell sat in with them while they went through the physical evidence, and stood over them in the evidence lockup while Hardy and Freeman checked off the computer list with the items that came out of the bags.
There was Larry's blood-stained shirt. All the other clothes. The stuff that had been in pockets – Larry had a comb, a small Swiss Army knife, keys, some coins including a quarter painted with red nail polish.
'Larry hung out in bars?' This didn't fit Hardy's profile so far.
Terrell shook his head. 'No sign of it.'
'That's a bar quarter.' Freeman and Terrell both looked at him blankly. 'For the juke box,' he explained. 'You paint your quarters red, you feed the box, you don't get charged when they come collect.'
Freeman was unimpressed. 'So he went out for a drink on Christmas Eve. Maybe. I've had quarters like that turn up in my pocket. Means nothing.'
But pickings had been so slim that Hardy wanted to keep grabbing. 'Two days before he gets killed, anything he did means something.'
Freeman didn't respond. He had already moved the pile of coins to the side, going on to what looked like a bag full of trash. 'What's this stuff?' Forensics had picked the room clean and bagged whatever might have interest
