16
GLITSKY SAT ON the couch in Hal’s living room while Hal paced back and forth. “I told her she shouldn’t say boo about it to the Homicide guys, and I probably shouldn’t be telling you about it, either,” Hal said.
“No,” Glitsky replied. “Telling me is a good thing.”
After the client had called and invited him down to his house to talk, Glitsky had beelined out to his place on Stanyan. The stepmother and her son were out grocery shopping; the kids were both napping. It was an ideal moment for confessions, and Hal had just dropped the whopper about him and Patti.
“How long did this affair last?” Glitsky asked.
“Five months or so.”
“And when did it end?”
“Three weeks ago.”
Glitsky grimaced. “Weeks?”
“I know,” Hal said. “Terrible timing.”
“Maybe better than if it was still going on,” Abe replied. “Did Katie know?”
“No. I don’t think so, anyway. But she might have suspected. I just don’t know.” Hal made a face. “For years, Patti was her best friend. I know it sounds awful. I promise, it wasn’t like we planned it.”
Glitsky shrugged. “It is what it is, Hal. It’s not my job to judge you, but Patti was right. It is better to know everything we’re dealing with. And we’re going to be dealing with this, trust me.” He chewed at the inside of his cheek. “Are you sure Katie didn’t know? Could she have found out?”
“Why?”
“It occurs to me that if she was feeling betrayed by her husband and her best friend, there’s another way she could have disappeared.”
Hal worked through the permutations, finally getting to it. “I don’t . . .” he began, then, “You’re saying she might have killed herself.”
Glitsky nodded. “Call a cab and take it out someplace close to the Golden Gate. Walk halfway across. Most jumpers, no one ever sees them again.”
Hal brought his hand up to his face. “Christ. I never thought . . .”
“Was she the kind of person who might have done that?”
Hal didn’t have to ponder long. “No. She wouldn’t have left the kids. I keep coming back to that. She was a fanatically protective mom. Say whatever else you will about her, the kids were everything. Besides, she left her purse, so how could she have paid for a cab?”
“Cash still works,” Glitsky said. “Here to the bridge is under twenty bucks. I’m saying it’s someplace we can check that I don’t think anybody’s looked into. But this theory is premised on the idea that Katie knew about you and Patti. And you say she didn’t?”
“All I can tell you is that there was no sign if she did. She never accused me of anything. We never fought about it. Although our personal life had gotten pretty bleak.”
“You mean sexually?”
Hal nodded. “It’d been probably a month, maybe more.”
“So a little before you and Patti called it off?”
Clearly, this wasn’t something Hal wanted to discuss. “Something like that,” he said. “I didn’t keep track, exactly. But I didn’t think it would be forever. I thought we’d get back to the way we were. She was just distant or taken up with the kids most of the time, and I was feeling guilty and didn’t want to push her.”
“This was when you and Patti were calling it off?”
“Somewhere in there, yes.”
Glitsky got to his feet and walked over to the window, where he cracked his back, stretched, and turned around. “This is the second time I’ve heard you talk about how much Katie protects the kids. She wouldn’t get a babysitter, right? Not even Ruth, who lives a half a mile away?”
“She has a problem with Ruth, but it’s not only Ruth. She has a problem with everybody. She’s the classic gatekeeper. You know the term?”
“Sure.”
“Well, she’s that in spades. She is convinced nobody else can do the job she’s doing with the kids.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“It’s a little much, if you want my opinion. Not to criticize her, but it’s not her most endearing quality. I can’t do anything. I mean, change a diaper, comb hair, put on clothes, make the beds a certain way. Fold the goddamn towels. Forget it. She did it all. You know why? Because I couldn’t do it right.” Hal looked over at Glitsky. “It pissed me off, to tell you the truth. Not that it’s any excuse, but it’s one of the things that got me together with Patti.”
“How was that?”
“Patti had been over a few days in a row—which used to be pretty common for us—and Katie wanted the kids down by seven exactly, so we could have an ‘adult’ dinner later. We all went in to help with the bedtime ritual, you know? Getting pajamas on and reading a story and then a lullaby and all that madness. Anyway, Patti and I were getting a little goofy, and I guess we started doing things out of order—out of order!—whatever that meant, and Katie kicked us both out to the kitchen while she calmed the kids down. She was really a bitch about it.
“Patti and I poured some wine, and we were laughing at how kind of crazy all of it was, and next thing you know, Katie comes storming out of the kids’ room. We’re keeping them up, for Christ’s sake! She told us to find our own dinner somewhere if we were having such a good time and couldn’t keep quiet enough to let the babies sleep.” He shook his head at the memory. “So we went out. Then we went over to Patti’s.”
“Maybe you don’t want to tell the Homicide people that story,” Glitsky said.
“Katie was confused and messed up,” Hal said, “but I loved her. I thought we could work it out. I wanted to for the sake of the kids, if nothing else. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s how I felt. It killed me that Patti and I had started up, and while it killed me to break up with her, Katie and I used to be great together, and I thought maybe we could be again.”
“But you wouldn’t go to counseling with her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Hal gave Glitsky a cop-to-cop look. “You ever go to counseling?”
“No.”
“You think you would?”
“What I’d do isn’t the issue. You admit you and Katie were having troubles. She wanted you to go with her. You were involved with another woman. Under those circumstances, you might have thought it was worth a try.”
Hal shrugged. “I’m not a counseling kind of guy. Besides, if I’m in counseling, first thing I’ll have to do is tell Katie about Patti, and that is simply not happening. That would have been the end of us, and I didn’t want that. Besides, I know what Katie’s basic problem is.”
“You do? What’s that?”
“The whole stay-at-home-mom thing.”
“What thing is that?”
“She was raised to believe that she could have it all. Great career, lots of money, motherhood, perfect kids, you name it. When she got out of school, she started her career and was great at it. By the time I met her, she was making way more than I was with the sheriff, and she thought she’d keep that up forever. We got married and saved our money and bought this house, and for the first couple of years, everything was easy and fun and we were really happy. We had friends and we went to restaurants and clubs and lived like royalty. It was great.
“Then we had Ellen, and we were both blown away by how much time she took and how much work she was. Still, Katie went back to her job, like she’d planned. We got a nanny who basically cost my entire salary, but we were all right, both money-wise and together. Then Will came along, and everything changed.”
“What happened?”
“The main thing is Katie decided she had to quit working. She thought that it wasn’t fair to be raising kids without at least one of the parents at home. I told her if that was the case, it should be me, since I made so much less. We wouldn’t miss my salary as much as we’d miss hers. But she wouldn’t do that. She was going to stay home and be there for the kids, and that was all there was to it. And since the kids had become her full-time job, they were going to be her full-time responsibility. She would do everything for them. And nobody else, including me, was going to poach on her turf. What I was making didn’t turn out to be nearly enough, and things started sliding from there. On all kinds of levels.”
Glitsky’s cop instincts were on full alert. He’d just heard Hal confess not only to his own infidelity and estrangement from his wife but to the financial difficulties brought on by her quitting her job. This, in the usual course of events, should have raised Hal’s profile as a murder suspect.
But as it had from the beginning of his dealings with Hal, Glitsky’s gut was overriding his mind. He felt in his gut, God help him, that his client was telling the truth. Hal’s was a common enough human story, and while it wasn’t a particularly happy one, it didn’t strike Glitsky as the prologue to Hal deciding to take his wife’s life.
“It was you who called things off with Patti, right?”
“Yep.”
“How’d she take it?”
“Not great. She thought we were going to be together. I thought so, too, for a while. But it felt too wrong. As I’ve told you.”
“You thought you could get back with Katie without telling her about Patti at all?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t have any idea how everything was going to work itself out. But I was going to give the marriage another chance.”
Glitsky had come up to the couch and rested a haunch against the back of it. “Okay. Before today, when was the last time you talked to Patti?”
Hal pondered for a second or two. “When we broke up. I could probably check the exact day; it was something like a month ago. Why?”
“Just checking things. How about Katie?”
“How about her?”
“Might she and Patti have talked?”
“Sure. They were friends forever. If Patti had stopped all communication, that would have been more suspicious than anything else. On the surface, everything was the same. Patti agreed we were going to try to keep it that way.”
“But the two of them, they might have talked just before Katie disappeared?”
“I don’t . . . No, wait. Now that you mention it, Patti was going to come to Thanksgiving dinner with us. She called Katie to say she was down with the flu and wouldn’t be able to make it.”
“That day? The day before Thanksgiving?”
“Maybe. Or the day before that, I’m not positive. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking about people who might have had a reason and an opportunity to kill your wife.”
“You’re not saying it could have been Patti?”
Glitsky scratched at the side of his face. “Why not?”
“Because it’s just . . . She wouldn’t ever have done anything like that. I told her it was over between us, and she didn’t like it, but she accepted it.”
“You just told me it was because you didn’t want to break up your family. Is that what you told her?”
“I told her I thought I owed it to Katie not to give up.”
“But if Katie were gone, suddenly out of the picture, leaving you free?”
Hal swallowed, then took a breath. “No,” he said at last. “That’s not possible.”
Glitsky put some edge into his voice. “I promise you it’s possible. People kill each other over jealousy every day. Now, you’ve got your recently jilted lover Patti talking to your wife on the day she disappears, possibly discovering exactly when you’re driving down to the airport, when she’ll be alone. Why couldn’t she have done it? Do you know what she was doing that night?”
Hal, mulling it over, shook his head.
“Okay, if it’s not you and it’s not Patti, maybe you could point at somebody else Katie knows. Because right now, I’m seeing a mom with very little life outside the walls of this house. So you tell me, Hal. Am I missing something?”