17

Whatever the special at Lou the Greek's would turn out to be today, Hardy didn't have a taste for it. He was hoping he could just stick his head through the door and survey the room to see if it contained Wes Farrell.

But no such luck.

Smack in the middle of the lunch hour, the place was wall to wall, three deep ordering drinks. The law continued to be thirst-making work, Hardy noted. He pushed himself into the crowd, got through the crush by the bar, and made a quick tour of the room, exchanging the occasional pleasantry with a familiar face, but mostly moving. If Farrell wasn't here, he didn't want to be, either. Not least because he didn't want to run into Glitsky.

He was still pissed off.

Hardy's call to Farrell's part-time secretary had luckily caught her at her desk and she'd told him her boss was scheduled to be in court all day. She wasn't sure if it was muni, superior, or federal, but she'd guess muni, which meant the Hall of Justice. So Hardy's hunch was lunch at the Greek's, and it turned out he was right. Wes had scored a back booth, invisible from the front door. He shared it with a large, nearly full pitcher of beer and a couple of guys who, in jeans and work shirts, were not dressed to impress any judge Hardy had ever heard of.

Sliding in next to Farrell, Hardy asked how he was doing. "So good I ought to be twins." Wes introduced everybody around the table. It turned out that his two companions-Jason and Jake-were father and son, which Hardy had guessed as soon as he'd sat down. The boy, Jake, maybe twenty years old, was Farrell's client. They were celebrating (hence the beer) because Jake's arresting officer hadn't shown up at his preliminary hearing this morning. Since he was the state's chief witness, the prosecution had dismissed all charges. Hardy had better manners than to ask what those had been.

So, they both insisted, Wes was a hero.

"He's always been one of mine," Hardy agreed. "In fact, that's why I'm here now." He turned to Wes. "Something important's come up. Can I steal you away for a few minutes? You guys mind?"

Just so long as he left the beer, everything was cool.

They worked their way to the side door-less crowd to get through-and out into the alley where now, just past noon, cans of garbage basked, baked, and from the smell, ripened in warm sunshine. Farrell blinked in the brightness, took a deep breath, and frowned. "I think somebody must have died near here. What's up?"

Hardy was ready, reaching for his inside coat pocket as they walked up toward Bryant and some good air. "I've got a list of names here and I was curious if any of them looked familiar to you."

Farrell took the piece of paper, glanced down at it. "What's this about?"

"Your favorite hospital."

A quick look up, then back at the list. Hardy saw his eyes narrow. He stopped and came up again. "Okay. I give up."

"Anybody you know?"

"One of 'em. Marjorie Loring."

"She's one of your clients with the Parnassus lawsuit you're filing, isn't she?"

"Not exactly. Her kids are. She's dead herself."

"I know. So's everybody else on that list. Did they do a postmortem on her?"

They'd stopped in some shade in front of the bail bondsman's office at the entrance to Lou's. Farrell squinted into some middle distance, trying to remember. Then he shook his head. "They always do. But they probably didn't spend much time on it. They knew what she died of."

"And what was that?"

"The big C. She was another one of those 'whoops' cases, as in, 'Whoops, we should have really got around to looking at that a little bit sooner.'"

"But when she died? Was it before her kids expected her to go?"

"They didn't know how long it would be exactly." But he pursed his lips, a muscle worked in his jawline. Hardy let him dredge it up. "Although it was, yeah, pretty quick if I recall. One of those, 'You've got maybe three months, unless it turns out to be three days.'"

"Three days?"

"No, no, figure of speech, one of my few flaws. I exaggerate. I think it was like a week, two weeks, something like that."

"And it was supposed to be three months?"

Farrell shook his head. "But you know how that works, Diz. It was three months outside, maybe as much as six. The reality turned out to be less. It happens all the time. It might even have been a blessing."

Hardy could accept that on its face. But not if somebody hurried the process along. "Do you think Mrs. Loring's family would agree to ask for an exhumation?"

Even with the preamble, the question shocked him. "What for?"

"A full autopsy."

"Why? You think somebody killed her?"

"I think it's possible."

Suddenly Farrell's gaze focused down tightly. A few years older than Hardy, a little softer in the middle, Wes usually affected an air of casual befuddlement. Some might even have read this as incompetence, but Hardy knew he was nobody's fool. A couple of years before, he'd electrified the city's legal community with his defense of another lawyer, a personal friend accused of murdering his wife. The case was considered unwinnable even by such an eminence as David Freeman. But Farrell had gotten his client off with a clean acquittal. Now he was giving Hardy his complete attention. "What about the other ten people on your list? Same thing?"

Hardy didn't want to exaggerate. "Let's say there are similar questions. I want to talk to my client before we go any further, of course, but after I do…" He let it hang.

Farrell backed into the last wedge of shade. "Last time we talked you didn't have a client," he said.

"I've got one now. You know Eric Kensing?"

"And you want to call him before I talk to the Lorings because…?"

"Because for some of these names," Hardy indicated the list, "he was on duty in the hospital when they died. Before we exhume Mrs. Loring and find out she didn't die of cancer, I'd be happier knowing Dr. Kensing wasn't on the floor taking her pulse at the time."

Farrell admitted that that would be bad luck. "So they haven't arrested him yet, I gather?"

"At least not as of a half hour ago, but things could change even as we speak."

Farrell narrowed his eyes. "You're talking Abe?"

Hardy nodded, spoke curtly. "He seems a little fixated."

"Abe's not dumb."

"No, he's not, but he took Kensing's statement last night, then left. No arrest. I guess what I'm trying to do is buy my client some time. Abe might get carried away in his enthusiasm. If Kensing gets arrested or indicted, he's never going to work again. And I've got friends who think he's a hero."

Wes chuckled, jerked a thumb toward Lou's. "Those two yahoos at the booth in there think I'm a hero. That doesn't mean anything." Then, "Did your boy do it?"

"Early on, he said not." Hardy left it at that.

Farrell's eyes shifted from side to side. This turn in the conversation-the objective fact of the guilt or innocence of a client-threatened to breach a largely unspoken rule among defense attorneys. But suddenly Hardy knew why Farrell had brought it up. The friend of his, for whom he'd won such a stunning acquittal, in whose innocence Wes had believed with his whole heart, turned out to have been guilty after all. "If you want to be sure," he said, "you'd damn well better find somebody else who did it."

Hardy cracked a tiny smile. "Okay, then, that's who I'm looking for. But my first line of defense is to find out if these Portola patients who are dying before they should are any part of this Markham thing."

"How do you propose to do that?" Farrell's expression reflected his deep skepticism. "Certainly Marjorie Loring couldn't…" He stopped, softened his look. "Maybe I just don't get it," he offered. "Let's pretend her kids let us dig her up in the first place, which is a wild assumption, by the way. So Strout agrees to do an autopsy, also not a sure thing. So then they find, say, that potassium killed her. How in the world does that help your client?"