'Well,' Holiday said, 'I'm telling you, there were. Clint, my night guy, said the cops were trying to scare him putting the three of us together-me, Clint, and Clint's boyfriend Randy. Clint's gay.'
'I guessed,' Hardy said. 'And they've got alibis? Clint and Randy?'
'They were here together the whole time from six. Clint was behind the bar.'
'And customers saw them and would swear to it?'
Holiday shrugged. 'Somebody must have.'
'Very strong, John, very strong. Does Clint remember any of them, these customers?'
'I'm sure he could come up with somebody.'
This answer didn't warm Hardy's heart. He sipped at his club soda, wiped his ringer along the overlacquered bar. 'John, remember our first few interviews when they busted you for the bad scrip? When you just couldn't believe anybody really cared about prescription drugs enough to hassle anybody about them?'
'I still can't believe it. Adults ought to be able to get anything they want. If they kill themselves with whatever it is, hey, they're adults.'
'It's really special you believe that, and we can have a debate about it later, but maybe right now we can agree that murder is more serious.'
Holiday, on the other side of the bar, was filling the garnish trays. He stopped cutting lemon peel and looked up. 'I really didn't kill Sam, Diz. The other thing was different since I actually did it.'
'Then why'd you call me last night? About this?'
He went back to cutting. 'Clint was freaked out about the cops coming by. It got a little contagious.'
'But you're over that now?'
A shrug. 'I really didn't do it. Clint and Randy certainly didn't do it. They're not going to nail three of us when none of us were there.'
Hardy sipped his club soda, said nothing.
Holiday stopped again. 'What? What's that look?'
'No look,' Hardy said. 'I guess I forgot for a minute that nobody's ever been arrested for a crime they didn't commit.'
'They're not going to arrest me. They didn't arrest Clint last night and they were right here with him.'
'Okay, I'm convinced. You're in no danger. But do me a favor. The cops come by to talk to you, call me first. Don't say one word.'
Holiday made a face. 'Surely I should say hello. If I don't return their greeting, they become surly. I've done experiments.'
'Sure, say hello. Bake 'em a cake if you want.' Hardy drained his glass, stood up and walked out the open door without another word.
After he calmed down a little, he called his home from the cell phone in his car, but nobody answered. At Glitsky's, too, he got the answering machine again. This was turning into a rare day, with no work and no family. He considered going home and doing something physical-they had half a cord of wood that needed to be stacked, or he could take a run-but then he decided screw it. He'd go to his own well-run and pleasant bar and talk to someone with a functioning brain.
'The guy's an idiot,' he told McGuire, who'd once, when he cared about different things, earned a Ph. D. in philosophy from Cal Berkeley. They were both waiting for the churning foam in Hardy's Guinness to fall out. 'I don't know why I waste my time.'
'You like him, that's all. I like him, too. He's a firstborn male, right?'
'And this means something?'
McGuire had his standard Macallan poured into a rocks glass that sat in the Shamrock's gutter. He took a bite of a piroshki he was eating from a place around the corner and washed it down with scotch. 'You got any close friends that aren't?'
Hardy quickly filed through the litany-McGuire, Freeman, Glitsky, Pico Morales, even Graham Russo, another ex-client. And now Holiday. 'That's interesting.'
To McGuire, it was an old, self-evident truth, and he shrugged. 'It might be that, but don't mistake it for a character reference. He reminds me of everybody we knew when we went to school. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, party all night. You remember.'
'Not as much as you'd think. I didn't go to Berkeley.'
'You were alive in the sixties, though, if I'm not mistaken.'
'Here's an ugly surprise, Mose. I hated the sixties. The only good thing in that decade was the Beatles.'
'Come on. The Turtles. Herman's Hermits.'
Hardy had to smile. 'My point exactly. But I give sixty-eight my vote for the worst year of our lifetime. So saying Holiday brings back those good ol' days isn't what I'd call high praise.'
'I'll tell you something, though, and no reference to the sixties.' Moses leaned over the bar, his broken-nosed face six inches from his brother-in-law's. He spoke quietly, nearly in a whisper, but with some intensity, possibly even rebuke. 'He's just like you were when you worked here. You weren't so hot on all the rules before you got with Frannie and decided it was time to grow up.'
This brought Hardy up short, threw him back on himself as McGuire straightened back up and turned to check on the other five customers in the bar. Hardy took a slug of his daytime stout and looked at his face in the back bar mirror.
McGuire was right, he realized. Crippled by grief, loss and guilt over his baby's death and the breakup of his marriage in the wake of that, Hardy had walked the boards behind this very bar for most of another decade. A lawyer without a practice, a thinker without a thought, he hadn't been able to commit to much more than waking up every day, and sometimes that was too much.
Now, with a good marriage, a thriving practice, and teen-aged children, Hardy had a life filled-sometimes overfilled-with meaning, import, details, routine, relationships and responsibility. Holiday's life, his situation, couldn't be more different and more importantly, it hadn't been of his choosing. Hardy, of all people, should remember that Holiday was living day-to-day, waiting for that first flicker of meaning or hope to assert itself. Until then, he'd take his solace from whatever source, a woman or a bottle or easy money at the poker table.
McGuire was back in front of him. He poured another half inch of scotch, dropped in one ice cube and stirred with his finger. 'So where were we?'
'At the part where I was being a judgmental old dick.'
'There's a sixties concept, the famed value judgment.' His brother-in-law reached over and good-naturedly patted his arm. 'But you can't qualify for true old dickdom for at least a couple of years.'
'The sad thing is, though, Mose, I kind of believe in value judgments nowadays.'
McGuire clucked. 'Yeah. Well, as you say, most of those sixties ideas-value judgments are bad, dope won't hurt you, fidelity's not important-they haven't exactly stood the test of time. But there's still that old nagging tolerance for different lifestyles.'
'And the Beatles,' Hardy said. 'Don't forget the Beatles.'
'Only two of 'em left, though, you notice,' Moses said.
7
Hardy didn't talk to Glitsky again until he showed up unannounced late Monday afternoon at his office. His baby's fever hadn't been from teething, and by early Saturday morning it had gotten to 104 degrees and he and Treya were with her at the emergency room. Roseola.
'You should have called me,' Hardy said. 'The Beck had it, too. I could have diagnosed it over the phone.'
'Next time she wakes us up screaming at three a.m., I'll call you first.'
'I'll look forward to it.' For the past couple of hours, Hardy had been reviewing the technical specifications of a supposedly fully automated truck-washing unit. One of his clients had bought it for a million and a half dollars. It hadn't worked even within the ballpark of the manner promised by the company's brochure from day one. The gap
