the hand. For the first time in months, he couldn't even be bothered with the newspaper. Out of the house before anyone else was up, he stopped at St. Francis to check on David, who perhaps on his deathbed looked just like Hardy felt. An hour in the office produced a cup of coffee and fourteen minutes of disjointed dictation. He was never going to drink alcohol again.
Getting nothing done, he went back down to his car, which was parked under the building. Paranoid, he knelt and looked under the chassis, not really knowing what he was looking for. Moses's warnings kept replaying in his brain-the brother-in-law had not been mellow at all about Hardy getting shot at. He got into the driver's seat, stopped himself, then pulled the lever to open the hood, got all the way out and around the front again, and lifted it. 'Motor,' he said aloud. Disgusted with himself.
At the Hall of Justice, Hector Blanca was busy; he'd be a while. Hardy waited in the outer office while time passed. A half hour. Forty-five minutes. He asked at the desk again, was told that it might still be a few minutes.
An hour.
The secretary finally suggested he come back another time. Sergeant Blanca really wasn't going to be able to spare any time this morning. 'Well, I wonder if you'll be able to help me, then.' He heard himself, the clipped and impatient tone guaranteed in any bureaucracy to produce glassy-eyed, unfeeling incomprehension, if not outright hostility. He reined himself in, fooling no one, however. 'Listen. Someone shot at me last Friday-shot at me!-and I was hoping to find out if Sergeant Blanca or anybody else had made any progress finding out who it might have been.'
The secretary shook his head. 'Did you make out a report? Well then, as soon as we have something, the sergeant will let you know.'
He walked back down a long hallway to the main lobby, where the day had now progressed enough to where the familiar vulgar din reigned, maybe even louder than usual. The traffic court line stretched from the ticket window, out past the elevator banks, over to the coffee kiosk, where he waited in another line to place his order. A baby was crying up front while, closer to him, a couple of five-year-olds chased each other, screaming. In the entrance to the courtroom hallway, a man in a frock and collar was lecturing a group of fifteen or twenty people in Spanish. A shaggy young man, barefoot, fell into line behind him and hit him up for some spare change. Reaching into his pockets, he found some coins and dropped them into the man's dirty, outstretched hand.
The coffee line wasn't moving, or maybe he had mistakenly wandered into the traffic line after all. Either way, he walked to the elevators and stepped into an open one, pressing 4, Glitsky's old floor, out of habit. Six people shared the car with him-he didn't hear a word of English. When it stopped at his floor, he got out and stood lost in the suddenly empty, almost eerily quiet, space.
The elevator area on all the floors looked almost identical, so he'd gotten well into the hallway that should have led to Glitsky's new digs when it struck him that something was wrong. Familiar, but wrong.
He stopped again, looked around.
Out of a doorway further along on the right, two men emerged and turned toward him. One-gray-haired, heavy and bespectacled-wore a well-tailored tan business suit. The other was a policeman in uniform. They were coming toward him, talking easily to one another, and at about twenty feet, recognition kicked in. Hardy moved into their path. 'Richard,' he said to Kroll.
'Diz! How you doin'? I think you know Roy Panos. Roy, Dismas Hardy.'
'Sure.' Roy's smile evaporated. He nodded cautiously, but neither man offered to shake hands.
Kroll put on the proper face. 'So how's David coming along?'
'Not well, I'm afraid.'
'No change at all?'
Hardy shook his head. 'It doesn't look too good, Dick.'
He put a hand on Hardy's arm. 'I am so sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do? Or anybody can do? Anything at all?'
'I think they're doing all they can.' Hardy motioned with his head. 'So you been down at homicide?'
'What? Oh, yeah.' Kroll laughed out of all context. 'Following up on poor Matt Creed. Did you know Matt?'
'No. Afraid not.'
'Good kid. A real tragedy.'
'Yeah,' Hardy said. 'I'm aware of the case.'
'Oh, that's right. Sorry.'
'No need to be. It wasn't my client. He didn't do it.'
'No. Of course not. You going down now to explain about that to Gerson?'
Hardy forced a cold grin. 'Something like that.'
'Well, good luck.'
'Thanks.'
Hardy started for homicide as Kroll and Panos walked toward the elevators. He heard their talking resume in modulated tones. Suddenly, Kroll's voice pierced the silence again. 'Oh, Diz!'
Hardy turned.
'On the other matter.' He walked a little back the way he'd come, lowered his voice. 'I don't know if you've heard. Your witness LaBonte?'
'Aretha? What about her?'
He moved two or three steps closer, started to talk, stopped, started again. 'I just heard about it from Gerson. You know they hauled her in for hooking again yesterday.' He hung his head for an instant. When he looked up, he met Hardy's gaze. 'I know you're getting a lot of bad news this week, Diz, and I hate to add to it, but I guess she couldn't take the life anymore. Sometime last night she hanged herself in her cell.'
Hardy never intended to go to homicide anyway, so deciding to climb to Glitsky's floor by the inside stairs wasn't much of a change of plans. But he didn't go up them right away.
When the hallway door closed behind him, he turned around and sat heavily on the second step. He leaned over, feeling sick, elbows on his knees, his pounding head resting on the heel of his one good hand.
Hardy hadn't been Aretha's criminal defense attorney because, frankly, she couldn't afford him. She was a professional girl who got busted two or three times a year. Nevertheless, in the past six months, he'd come to know Aretha fairly well. She was twenty-four years old, black, functionally illiterate. The fact that she did not have a pimp contributed to the continuing difficulties in her life because she had no street protection, but she did have a steady boyfriend, Damoan. Quiet and polite, although unkempt and gang-dressed, Damoan often accompanied her to depositions and court appearances. It seemed to Hardy that the couple was happy with each other, unlikely as that might seem.
With Freeman, Hardy had spent several hours with her, coaching her, taking her statements. But also having coffee, joking, driving someplace or another. He'd come to know her as an honest, uncomplicated person with a surprisingly sunny disposition and outlook. Things-sometimes terrible things-seemed to roll right off her. She'd probably spent two hundred nights of her life in jail. She'd told Hardy, and he believed her, that she viewed the experience as a neutral one. On the one hand, it gave her some time off; on the other, it was a hassle and an inconvenience.
Kroll's statement that she must have 'grown tired of the life' didn't wash with anything Hardy knew about the woman. She hadn't begun to lose her looks yet. Sephia's plant on her notwithstanding, she didn't use hard drugs. Unless she and Damoan had broken up, and he'd seen them apparently happy together within the past week, she was as unlikely a candidate for suicide as Hardy could imagine.
He opened his eyes and raised his head, slowly got to his feet. He turned around, looked at the stairs, wondered if he could muster the strength to climb them.
When Hardy first came in, Glitsky brought him a glass of water and four aspirin. Now the door to the office was closed. Glitsky sat behind his desk, scowling, tugging absently at a rubber band. 'She must have, though.' 'I can't accept it. Somebody got to her.'
'In her cell? Not as easy as it sounds, Diz.' He snapped the band a few times. 'But don't get me wrong. I'm not ruling it out entirely.' After a minute, he added, 'Maybe you were right keeping Holiday outside.'
