53
GLITSKY WASN’T KIDDING when he’d told Hardy he was getting obsessed.
And why wouldn’t he be?
He had made a career as a homicide investigator, and the idiots and sycophants within the city’s bureaucracy had taken that away from him; more, they’d made him question his instincts and belief in himself. Many people, even now—including his friend Dismas Hardy—seemed to believe that he was following a false trail in this matter. He wanted—no, needed—to show them all that he still had what it took to do the job, had in fact never lost it.
The facts of the case cried out for obsession.
Ruth’s wholly unexpected if subdued breakdown over Hal’s life story had only added to Abe’s sympathy for the man’s plight. Here was a kid who had lost his mother, and then his father to suicide, followed by an unpleasant (to say the least) career choice, a challenging marriage, the murder of his wife, and his own incarceration.
From his car outside Hal’s house, Abe called an understanding Treya and told her that he was going to be late getting home. He then placed another call. Fifteen minutes later, he pulled into the driveway in front of Jeff Elliot’s home, a gingerbread Victorian just off Upper Market. Jeff’s wife, Dorothy, greeted him cordially at the door and led him down the central hallway to a brightly lit office at the back of the house where Jeff sat in a leather recliner.
“The man of the hour,” Jeff said. “I don’t remember the last time the column got so much attention, Abe. It almost made me feel relevant for a minute there.”
Glitsky took a seat. “I’m glad the reaction on your end was positive. I can’t exactly say the same for mine.”
“You’re kidding. Who didn’t like it?”
“Farrell. Diz. Especially Cushing, who I heard went to the mayor.”
“I know.” Elliot fairly beamed. “I got a call from my boss, who’d heard from him, too. Irresponsible journalism and all that. But I was quoting ‘a source close to the investigation.’ What was I supposed to do, ignore you?”
“Others have been known to.”
“I’m sure. Mostly to their detriment, I’d bet.”
“Sometimes that, too.”
“So what’s up?”
“What’s up is I broke Foster’s alibi for Tussaint.”
Jeff looked at him with unfeigned admiration. “That was fast. And you’re right, it’s huge. What do you have?”
Glitsky took out his tape recorder, placed it on the recliner’s arm, and hit the play button. Speaking over the opening minute of the interview, he brought the columnist up to date on the woman he was talking to, how he got connected to her, and how she fit into his investigation. Dorothy came down the hall and, leaning against the door, listened in as well. When the playback stopped, Abe picked up the recorder and hit the pause button. “What do you think?”
Somewhat to his surprise, and definitely to his disappointment, Jeff’s countenance had darkened as the playback had gone on, and now he was all but frowning. “You got her, all right,” he said, “but I can’t use it. At least as it is.”
“Sure you can. Why can’t you?”
“Because it’s too far removed, Abe. She didn’t tell me this. She told you. And you’re telling me what she told you that her husband told her. Not gonna fly.”
“Sure it will. I went and talked to her, and she told me her husband was told to lie. Don’t you believe that?”
“Of course I believe it, Abe. But there’s none of what the lawyers would call foundation. You could have hired an actress to say these words, and if I ran them, or even an account of them, where would I be?”
“You’d be breaking a monster story.”
Elliot shook his head. “Not this way.” He held up a calming hand. “And I absolutely believe you, but that’s not the point.”
“I’ve got her number, Jeff. You can call her.”
“And then what? You really want me to tell her that the cop she talked to went to the press?”
Glitsky let out a breath and looked over to Dorothy, who was looking at her husband. “She’s telling the truth. This is the break you’ve been waiting for, Jeff.”
He nodded patiently. “I’m not denying that, and I’m delighted to see it, because it tells me where I might be able to bring some pressure. But I’ve got to get this, the basic information, from the horse’s mouth. Not to worry, because from what you said on the tape here, it sounds like somebody’s already got that. From one of the other guards. What’s his name?”
“Davis. Chick Davis.”
“That’s it. That’s how you got her to cave, when you said—”
“I know what I said.”
“Right. That Chick Davis had already said they’d never gone down to San Bruno that day. Let’s get Davis to come down and talk to me, and then I’ve got a source I can use and print.”
“Except,” Glitsky said, “that I made that up about Davis, to get her to talk.”
“You lied to her?” Dorothy asked from the doorway.
Glitsky turned to her and shrugged. “I gave her some false information. She reacted to it by telling me the truth. It’s not an unknown technique.”
Again, Jeff lifted his hand. “Thus the issue with quoting people who told you they talked to other people. I’m sure Dorothy doesn’t mean to criticize, Abe. I’m glad it worked. I just can’t use it. That’s the problem.”
Glitsky brought both hands up to his forehead and ran them back over the top of his head. “This is too close. We can’t let it slip away.”
“Okay, look, hold on a minute,” Jeff said. “You say you’ve got their number. Maybe all is not lost. You play Andy Biehl the tape, or maybe not even that. Just tell him you know what you know. This is his chance to save himself. You offer him some kind of deal. You already know the truth, and it’s only a matter of time before it comes out. Or I call Foster in my role of ace reporter. I’ve got this information. I don’t name the informant and—my own little lie—I think we’ll be running with it. Would he care to comment?”
As it turned out, Foster didn’t care to comment. As soon as Jeff identified himself on the phone, the chief deputy hung up on him.
? ? ?
MIDNIGHT, AND GLITSKY was still awake.
He’d gone to bed with Treya at ten-thirty and hadn’t been able to get to sleep within the next twenty minutes; that was the limit of his endurance before he declared the effort hopeless and got up. Now he sat up in the living room by the picture window—still life with fog—with a book called Consider the Fork facedown on his lap. It was a good book, full of fascinating facts about how cooking utensils and pots and kitchens had evolved, but he’d given up after only a few pages, turned off the light, and tried not to think.
The not thinking wasn’t going very well.
Eventually, he got up and walked in to check on Rachel and Zachary. They slept in the same room because that was how they felt most comfortable. Thank God for them, he thought as he pulled the blankets up first around one, then the other. He stood at their door, listening to them breathing, grateful that both were healthy and apparently well-balanced.
For an instant, his overactive brain flashed back to the Chase children, with all their difficulties, especially Ellen, or Ellie, as Ruth called her. He couldn’t imagine dealing with that day to day with his own children—ADHD or hyperactivity or whatever it might be. Unbidden, Ruth’s comment that Ellie’s problems were “under control” slammed into his brainpan. He wondered if that meant Ruth had put Ellie on medication. He should tell Hardy to talk to Hal about his instructions for the kids, make sure things at his home didn’t get lost in the shuffle.
Thinking about Hal brought him sharply up against a conflict he’d had to resolve in his own life. He was nearly fifteen years older than Treya. When they’d started talking about marriage, Abe hadn’t wanted to start another family. He’d already raised three boys. He did not want to have children with Treya and then not live long enough to raise them. His relationship with his own father, Nat, was one of the touchstones of his life and always had been. He regularly talked to all of his grown-up boys and saw them with as much frequency as he could. The importance of fathers could not be overestimated; for a child to lose one had to be devastating.
Even more so, to lose a father to suicide.
As Glitsky looked at his son and daughter, he felt a pang. He had no control over it, and he knew it, but he vowed silently that if he could extend his life span at all by will or fortitude, by nutrition or exercise or attitude, he would do whatever it took.
Someday, Abe knew, Zachary would move into his own room down that short hallway, but for the past four years, his young son’s future bedroom had been the family’s computer room. Now Abe went there, closing the door behind him. Sitting at the ergonomic chair in the dark, he reached for the mouse and brought the screen to life. Going to Google with no plan in mind, he pulled up Jeff Elliot’s column from that morning, which he reread and where he found nothing new—just the same tantalizing connections.
Searching “Hal Chase” provided him around a thousand hits, everything from the articles that had run in the local and national media, to blogs and discussion groups and all of the other permutations of online madness that seemed to attend any sensational story. He glanced at the first couple of websites at random, then realized that there was too much information to digest, and probably little if any that he didn’t already know.
He should go back to bed and try to get some sleep.
Instead, he typed in “Katie Chase” and discovered nearly as many hits as he had for her husband. Glitsky made a mental note to check back with Frannie on Ruth’s contention that Katie had been dealing with mental illness as opposed to emotional problems. He thought it unlikely, first because Frannie was a marriage and family counselor and not a licensed psychiatrist, and second because he hadn’t heard it from any other source. If Katie suffered from mental illness that needed medication, Glitsky was fairly certain he would have known about it before today.
Of course, mothers-in-law had been known to form and hold opinions without any basis in fact. Almost everybody in the world saw what they expected or wanted to see, believed what they wanted to believe.
The name “Ruth Chase” brought up several hundred more hits, but Glitsky knew it was a common enough name. Finding the various hits on Hal’s stepmother among the other Ruth Chases would require more time and energy than Glitsky felt it warranted, especially since all of this Web surfing was mere curiosity, a mindless exercise fed by his insomnia.
However, at the bottom of the first page of the Ruth Chase hits, under “Searches related to Ruth Chase,” he saw “Ruth Chase San Francisco” and clicked on that. Once again, several pages of hits turned up, but this time Abe could identify Hal’s stepmother among the crowd. Somewhat to his surprise—although it shouldn’t have been, since he knew she had a college-age son—she had a Facebook account. A blog site, the last entry from three years ago, gave her tag as WineBitch and seemed to be about investing in upscale wines and the wine auction market. There was a short article in the San Mateo County Times about the marriage of Ruth Johannson to Peter Chase in 1989, the second marriage for both and a new beginning for the couple, each of whom had lost a spouse to tragedy—Pete’s first wife to a cerebral hemorrhage and Ruth’s first husband to a tragic accident. There was a legal notice about her adoption of Hal in 1991.
Yawning now and finally beginning to fade, Glitsky clicked on another site that caught his eye and found himself looking at a short news article from the San Francisco Chronicle in 1995:
* * *
DEPUTY’S DEATH RULED ACCIDENTAL
After an initial preliminary ruling of suicide, a police investigation into the death of a San Francisco jail guard has concluded that the drug and alcohol overdose death last Saturday was accidental. Peter Chase, 46, was taking medication for his insomnia and imbibed alcohol in a combination that proved lethal. When his wife, Ruth, returned from grocery shopping, she discovered her husband lying on the floor of their garage and called paramedics. Following the autopsy, police investigators noted that there was no sign of foul play, that Chase had no reason to take his own life and had been in good spirits when last seen by his wife. Investigators also found no evidence of marital or financial difficulties. Ruth Chase expressed her gratitude to the investigating team for the revised ruling: “I’m just so relieved to have this ordeal behind us.”