Dead Irish Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Teaser chapter

  The first novel in the Dismas Hardy series—by the New York Times bestselling author of The Oath, The First Law, and The Second Chair.

  In his new life as a bartender at the Little Shamrock, Dismas Hardy is just hoping for a little peace. He’s left both the police force and his law career behind. Unfortunately it’s not as easy to leave behind the memory of a shattering personal loss—but for the time being, he can always take the edge off with a stiff drink and a round of darts.

  But when the news of Eddie Cochran’s death reaches him, Hardy is propelled back into all the things he was trying to escape—and forced to untangle a web of old secrets and raw passions, for the sake of Eddie’s pregnant widow, Frannie, and for the others whose lives may still be at risk. . . .

  “Possessed of a singular writer’s instinct, Lescroart . . . produces a full-bodied, substantive, and stylistic effort of the first order.”

  —Library Journal

  “Full of the things I like. . . . Lescroart’s a pro.”

  —Jonathan Kellerman

  “A beautifully written San Francisco murder story with perfect-pitch dialogue.”

  —Playboy

  “The killer proves to be as fascinating a personality as Hardy himself.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “With John Lescroart’s polished writing, Dead Irish becomes more than a mystery novel with a bartender as detective. With razored precision, characters stand out, flawed and human. . . . Chilling in its intensity, this is an ingenious tale of many different kinds of people.”

  —Pasadena Star-News

  Praise for the Novels of John Lescroart

  The Second Chair

  “Lescroart gives his ever-growing readership another spellbinder to savor.”

  —Library Journal

  “Lescroart plays out clues with the patience and cunning of a master fly fisherman.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “Entertaining.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A sociological take on the justice system—every motive is carefully nuanced, every player rooted in social reality.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Under Lescroart’s assured hand, this perfectly paced tale of legal procedure and big-city politics keeps us turning pages, even when it’s time to turn in at night.”

  —Booklist

  The First Law

  “With his latest, Lescroart again lands in the top tier of crime fiction.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  The Oath

  A People Page-Turner

  “TERRIFIC.”

  —People

  The Hearing

  “A SPINE-TINGLING LEGAL THRILLER.”

  —Larry King, USA Today

  “EXCELLENT STUFF.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  Nothing but the Truth

  “RIVETING.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A rousing courtroom showdown.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  The Mercy Rule

  “WELL-WRITTEN, WELL-PLOTTED, WELL-DONE.”

  —Nelson DeMille

  “Readers of The 13th Juror will already be off reading this book, not this review. Join them.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  Guilt

  “BEGIN GUILT OVER A WEEKEND. . . . If you start during the workweek, you will be up very, very late, and your pleasure will be tainted with, well, guilt.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A well-paced legal thriller . . . one of the best in this flourishing genre to come along in a while.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  A Certain Justice

  “A West Coast take on The Bonfire of the Vanities . . . richly satisfying.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A gifted writer with a distinctive voice. I read him with great pleasure.”

  —Richard North Patterson

  The 13th Juror

  “FAST-PACED . . . sustains interest to the very end.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  Hard Evidence

  “ENGROSSING . . . compulsively readable, a dense and involving saga of big-city crime and punishment.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  Also by John Lescroart

  Betrayal

  The Suspect

  The Hunt Club

  The Motive

  The Second Chair

  The First Law

  The Oath

  The Hearing

  Nothing but the Truth

  The Mercy Rule

  Guilt

  A Certain Justice

  The 13th Juror

  Hard Evidence

  The Vig

  Rasputin’s Revenge

  Son of Holmes

  Sunburn

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Published by arrangement with the author. Previously published in Donald I. Fine, Dell, and Island editions.

  First Signet Printing, February 2005

  eISBN : 978-1-101-53195-2

  Copyright © John Lescroart, 1989

  Excerpt from Betrayal copyright © The Lescroart Corporation, 2008

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or oth
erwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  I would like to thank Bob and Barbara Sawyer, Elaine Jennings, and Holt Satterfield for help in preparing the manuscript; Drs. Gregory Gorman and Chris Landon; Dalila Corral; Don Matheson for a few bons mots, and Patti O’Brien for two big words.

  Most especially, I would like to thank Al Giannini of the San Francisco District Attorney’s office, a great friend as well as a resource for technical and procedural matters, without whom this book truly could not have been written.

  Any technical errors are the author’s.

  To my mother,

  Loretta Therese Gregory Lescroart,

  and, again, to Lisa,

  with love

  “I have certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink.”

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  1

  FROM HIS AISLE SEAT, Dismas Hardy had a clear view of the stewardess as her feet lifted from the floor. She immediately let go of the tray—the one that held Hardy’s Coke—although strangely it didn’t drop, but hung there in the air, floating, the liquid coming out of the glass like a stain spreading in a blotter.

  The man next to him grabbed Hardy’s elbow and said, “We’re dead.”

  Hardy, as though from a distance, noted the man’s hand on his arm. He found it difficult to take his eyes from the floating stewardess. Then, as suddenly as she’d lifted, the stewardess crashed back to the floor with the tray and the drink.

  Two or three people were screaming.

  Hardy was the first one to get his seat belt off. In a second, he was kneeling over the stewardess, who appeared to be unhurt, though badly shaken, crying. She held him, muscles spasming in fear or relief, gasping for breaths between sobs.

  It was the first time Hardy’d had a woman’s arms around him in four and a half years. And that time had been just the once, with Frannie née McGuire now Cochran, after a New Year’s Eve party.

  The pilot was explaining they’d dropped three thousand feet, something about wind shears and backwashes of 747s. Hardy loosened the woman’s hold on him. “You’re all right,” he said gently. “We’re all okay.” He looked around the plane, at the ashen faces, the grotesque smiles, the tears. His own reaction, he figured, would come a little later.

  In fifteen minutes they were at the gate in San Francisco. Hardy cleared customs, speaking to no one, and went to the Tiki Bar, where he ordered a black and tan—ideally a mixture of Guinness Stout and Bass Ale. This one wasn’t ideal.

  Halfway through the first one, he felt his legs go, and he grinned at himself in the bar’s mirror. Next his hands started shaking and he put them on his lap, waiting for the reaction to pass. Okay, it was safe. He was on the ground and could think about it now.

  In a way, he thought, it was too bad the plane hadn’t crashed. There would have been some symmetry in that—both of his parents had died in a plane crash when he’d been nineteen, a sophomore at Cal Tech.

  A crash would also have been timely. Since Baja hadn’t helped him to figure his life out, nor had two weeks on the wagon, maybe there was simply no solution. If the plane had gone down, he wouldn’t have had to worry about it anymore.

  He’d spent his days underwater in the reefs where the Sea of Cortez meets the Pacific. He had held the shell of a sea tortoise and ridden it for perhaps two hundred yards. He’d gone over the side of the panga into a school, a city, a landscape of leaping dolphins while his guide tried to tell him they would kill him. Well, if that was the way he was going to go, he couldn’t have thought of a better one.

  The nights, he’d sit at the Finis Terra high above the water, drinking soda and lime. He’d come down to Baja alone on purpose, although both Pico and Moses had offered to go with him. But with them, he would have been the same Hardy he was in San Francisco—a fast and cynical mouth, an elbow customized for drinking. He hadn’t felt like being that Hardy for a while. It hadn’t been working very well, he thought, which was why he’d needed the vacation.

  The problem was, on vacation nothing else seemed to work too well either. He just felt he’d lost track of who he was. He knew what he did—he was a damn good bartender, a thrower of darts, a medium worker of wood.

  He was also divorced, an ex-marine, ex-cop, ex-attorney. He’d even, for a time, been a father. Thirty-eight and some months and he didn’t know who he was.

  He tipped up the glass. Yeah, he thought, that wouldn’t have been so bad, the plane crashing. Not good, not something to shoot for, but really not the worst tragedy in the world.

  He figured he’d already had that one.

  A shroud of gray enveloped the westernmost twenty blocks of San Francisco and extended from the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge down to Daly City. The fog covered an area of perhaps no more than five square miles, but within it gusting winds of thirty miles per hour were not uncommon and the temperature was twenty degrees lower than in the rest of the city. Nowhere was visibility greater than half a block, and squalls of bone-chilling drizzle drifted like malevolent ghosts across the drear landscape.

  In almost the precise center of this fog sat a squat one-story frame house set back nearly sixty feet from the sidewalk. Hardy had thought when he bought it that it looked like the kind of dollhouse a sailor might have made for a daughter he’d never seen while he traveled to warm and exotic ports. It was a house that seemed to remember summers fondly, with a small, white latticed porch up three brick steps, broad white planks surrounding a jutting bay window.

  Dwarfed on the left and right by medium-rise apartment buildings, the house seemed especially quaint and vulnerable. Next to the porch, in front of the windows, a scrub juniper hugged the ground as though for warmth. The rest of the area just in front of the house, cleared for a garden that might have once been there, was barren. The lawn itself was green and slightly overgrown.

  Hardy sat in his office in the back. The shades were pulled and a coal fire burned in the grate. It was a Monday in the first week of June.

  Hardy picked up a dart and flung it at the board on the wall opposite him. He reached for his pipe, stopped himself, sat back. The wind slapped at the window, shaking it.

  Hardy pushed himself back from his desk and went to retrieve his round of darts, stopping to poke at the blue-burning coal. He wore a dirty pair of corduroys, a blue pullover sweater and heavy gray socks. He rearranged some of the ships in bottles on his mantel and brushed the dust from one of his fossils.

  It crossed his mind that the average temperature of the entire universe, including all suns, stars, planets, moons, comets, black holes, quasars, asteroids and living things, was less than one degree above absolute zero. He believed it. It had been three weeks since he’d returned from Cabo.

  He heard the cover drop at his mail slot, the late Monday delivery. As usual, his mail was a joke. He would have almost welcomed a bill just to have something addressed to him personally. As it was, he got an invitation to join a travel club, a special offer on cleaning his rugs (only $6.95 per room, with a three-room minimum—maybe not a bad deal if he had owne
d any rugs), a tube of some new toothpaste, a free advertising newspaper, two letters to the previous owner of his house, who had moved nearly six years before, and a “Have You Seen This Child?” postcard.

  He opened a can of hash and spooned it into a heavy cast-iron skillet. When it had stuck well to the bottom of the pan, he pried under it and turned it nearly whole. Poking three holes into the mass, he dropped an egg in each, covered it, and went to the tank in his bedroom to feed the tropical fish.

  He went back to the kitchen and opened a newspaper to the sports section. The Giants were at home. That ought to keep the ghosts at bay.

  He ate the hash and eggs out of the skillet slowly, thinking. When the skillet was empty, he placed it back on the stove, covering the bottom with salt. He turned the flame under it up high. When the pan was smoking, he took the wire brush that hung from the back of the stove and ran it around under the salt, dumping what he’d worked loose into the garbage. In twenty seconds, the pan was spotless. He ran a paper towel over it, then left it on the stove.

  He’d had that pan longer than almost anything else he owned. It was the only household article he’d taken when his marriage to Jane had ended. If he treated it right—no water, no soap—it would last a lifetime. It was one of the few things he was absolutely sure of, and he didn’t mess with it.

  In his bedroom, he put on a three-quarter-length green peacoat, boots, and a misshapen blue Greek sailor’s cap. Grabbing a pipe from the rack on his desk, he risked a glance outside, but someone might just as well have erected a slate wall there.