Hard Evidence

He stopped at the door, turned, raised a finger to make a point, then decided against it and disappeared into the hallway.

Lou the Greek’s was a restaurant and watering hole for cops and D.A.s, across the street from the Hall of Justice. Lou was married to a Chinese woman who did the cooking, so the place served an eclectic menu of egg rolls, chow mein, shaslik, rice pilaf, hot and sour soup, baklava and fortune cookies. Occasionally Lou’s special would be something like Kung Pao pita pockets or pot-sticker kabobs.

There were two bars, standing room only, at the front and back walls. Now, at five-thirty, the din was ferocious. An arm-wrestling contest was going on in the center of the room, twenty or thirty cops screaming, trying to get their bets in.

Drysdale and Glitsky huddled over an ancient Pong machine by the back door. Hardy pushed his way through the crowd. Drysdale was ahead, eight to six. Neither of the men looked up.

‘Boo,’ Hardy said.

Glitsky looked up for an instant, but it was long enough for the blip to get by him. ‘Damn.’

‘Nine six,’ Drysdale said. ‘Gotta pay attention.’

‘Just play,’ Glitsky growled.

Hardy watched the blip move back and forth. Both of these guys were good, playing at the master level, and the blip really moved. Hardy went to the bar, elbowed his way in and ordered a pint of cranberry juice, lots of ice.

Back at the Pong game, Glitsky glowered in defeat. Drysdale sat back in his chair, legs crossed, savoring a beer. Hardy squatted, checking out the final score of eleven to six. ‘You owe me five bucks,’ Glitsky told him.

Drysdale sipped his beer. ‘He never beats me anyway. I wouldn’t pay him.’

‘Can we talk about the hand?’

‘What hand?’

Hardy looked at Drysdale. ‘What hand, he says.’

Drysdale ran it down for Abe, who had spent the day interviewing family members of a murdered old man. The hand wasn’t the most compelling item of the day for him.

‘So who is it?’ Glitsky asked when he’d finished.

Drysdale shrugged. ‘Some guy,’ he said. Then, to Hardy, ‘What’s to talk about?’

‘How about if he was killed?’

‘How about it?’

‘You think he was killed?’ Glitsky asked.

‘I think he’s dead at least. How he got that way I don’t know. I wondered if you’d heard anything.’

‘I heard a good new song the other day,’ Glitsky said.

Hardy turned to Drysdale. ‘I thought the coroner might have come up with something.’

Drysdale frowned. ‘I doubt he’s even looked at it.’

‘It sounded like Garth Brooks, but it could have been Merle Haggard. A lot of these country guys sound the same to me.’

Hardy chewed some ice. ‘Yeah, well, if it does turn out to be a homicide, I wouldn’t mind drawing the case.’

‘Homicide’s a pretty long shot,’ Drysdale said. ‘Guy might have drowned, anything.’

‘I know. I just wanted to put the word in.’

Drysdale thought about the proposal. ‘You haven’t had a murder yet, have you, Diz?’

Hardy shook his head. ‘Not close.’

‘It could have been Randy Travis, though,’ Glitsky said. ‘Sometimes when he sings low he sounds a little like the Hag.’

Drysdale appeared to think hard a minute. Glitsky was humming the first few bars of his song. Finally Drysdale looked at the last inch of beer in his glass and finished it off. ‘Sounds fair,’ he said to Hardy. ‘You found it. If it’s a murder, it’s your case.’

Glitsky stopped humming. ‘Hardy makes the big time,’ he said, reining in his natural enthusiasm.

Hardy fished in his pocket and dropped a couple of quarters into the console in front of him. ‘Have another game,’ he said to Drysdale, ‘and this time let him win.’

Hardy sat on the Navajo rug on the floor of his living room, way up at the front of the house. His adopted daughter Rebecca was in his lap, her tiny hand picking at the buttons of his shirt. In the fireplace, some oak burned. Outside, the cocoon of fog that wrapped the house was darkening by degrees. Up in the kitchen, he heard Fra

The room, like the rest of the house, had changed with Fra

While Hardy had designed and built the back room for Rebecca, Fra

Hardy took it all in – the plants, the dark sheen of the cherry dining-room furniture, his baby girl. It seemed nearly impossible to him that all of this was so comfortable now, so right. Fra

‘You were so quiet,’ she said.

Hardy rested a flat palm against Rebecca’s stomach, feeling the heart pumping. ‘I don’t think I was home once this time of night when I was bartending.’

‘You miss it?’

‘Bartending?’ He shook his head. ‘No. It’s fu

She came over and sat down, Indian-style, across from him. She ran a finger up her daughter’s leg, left her hand there. ‘Aren’t you tired? Did you sleep at all last night?’

Hardy shrugged. ‘As Mr Zevon says, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’

Fra

Hardy sensed it. He put his hand over hers. ‘In truth, I am severely fatigued.’

As Fra

‘I know.’ Fra

Jeff Elliot knew news when he saw it, and if a human hand turning up in a shark’s belly didn’t deserve more than a graph on the back page, he’d eat his press card.

He knew that a good percentage of all the great stories -Watergate, Lincoln Savings, Pete Rose – had begun as tiny drops in the vast pool of information that came to a paper every day. And what made those drops congeal to a trickle that became a flood had been the reporters who viewed the news as their canvas. News happened, sure, but what made the news a story was what excited him. You couldn’t make things up, but you could manufacture interest, an angle, a hook. That’s what made a good reporter. And Jeff knew he had the gift – his bosses just hadn’t seen it yet.

So things weren’t moving as quickly for him as he’d hoped. In college in Wisconsin, he’d been the editor of the paper, then three years at the Akron Clarion, and finally his big break, the San Francisco Chronicle. But now he’d been on the coast for seven months, and he was amazed that even here in the big city, so little came in via the police incidence reports – the IRs – that was even remotely sexy.

And that’s what he’d been doing – the lowest dog work, checking over the IRs, looking for a lead, a grabber, a story. And then, today, finally, the hand.