Hardy 11 - Suspect, The

  The Suspect

  Dismas Hardy 11

  by

  J o h n L e s c r o a r t

  "Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few."

  —GEORGE BERKELEY

  1

  On a clear, still and silent Sunday at the end of the second week in September, a fifty-year-old outdoor writer named Stuart Gorman sat on a flat-topped rock at the edge of a crystalline lake set in a bowl of granite near the California Desolation Wilderness Area a few miles southwest of Lake Tahoe. The lake's mirrored surface, unsullied by even the trace of a breeze, perfectly reflected the opposite shoreline—more granite, studded with pine and a purple sky above.

  Stuart could barely be seen to breathe. In the warm afternoon, he'd removed his T-shirt and placed it beside him. Now he wore only his hiking boots and a pair of brown shorts. Though he had a good head of medium-length dark brown hair, the gray in his two-day stubble and on his chest betrayed the bare fact of his age. Without the gray, the developed torso, perhaps dangerously tan, could have been that of a man half Stuart's years. His solid barrel chest spoke of hours spent outdoors in vigorous exercise; there was a hollow of tight skin under his rib cage where most men his chronological age carried their fat.

  There was age, though, in the face. Lines scored the skin around the deeply set blue eyes and at the corners of his mouth. The stubble wasn't long enough to camouflage the strong jaw nor the nearly surgical cleft in his chin; neither did the lines mar the clear expanse of his forehead. The only obvious flaw in his face, although some might not call it that, was a silver-dollar-size port wine stain high on his right cheek.

  Stuart held a fly rod across his lap. He wasn't fishing yet. The evening hatch wasn't due for at least another half hour, until the sun ducked out of sight behind the foothills to the west. Then a few feeding trout would ripple Tamarack Lake's smooth and calm surface, and on a typical evening Stuart would find his spot, play out line, place his dry fly in the center of one of the few ripples and hope for a strike. The trail ran along Tamarack's shore, and so there was a great deal of pressure on the lake's fishery. The few trout that remained tended to be larger and wily, and Stuart relished the challenge. Normally, in the last moments before the beginning of the true gathering of dusk, while he waited for the first mosquitoes to hit the water, he felt closest to peace. In moments such as this one, and in the poetry, solitude, and even athleticism of the fly-fishing that would follow, he'd come to define who he was, what he was made of.

  The sun kissed the top of Mt. Ralston, and Stuart caught a glimpse of the first ripple—actually a rare splash—as a fish broke through the surface of the water somewhere across the lake. Normally, this would have been his signal to stir himself, but this evening he remained where he sat, unmoving.

  And very far from in a state of peace.

  Two days before, he'd driven up from his beautiful home on San Francisco's Russian Hill to his family's rustic cabin at Upper Echo Lake. His mood, dark enough as he'd left the city, faded to deep black when he got pulled over for speeding a few miles east of Sacramento. At that moment, his rage with the world in general and at his wife in particular had boiled over and had so nearly overtaken him that he'd lost his temper at the highway patrol officer who was writing him up. Even if he was "barely" exceeding the speed limit, every other car on the road was passing him, so Stuart wanted to know why was he the one getting a goddamn ticket? In response, the officer then had him get out of his car and take a field sobriety test, followed by a warning that he was "this close" to getting himself arrested. In the middle of this, Stuart lucked out when the officer suddenly recognized his name—the man was a fisherman who'd read two of Stuart’s books and loved them.

  Apologizing, and somewhat mollified, Stuart explained that he was still reacting to a terrible fight that he'd had with his wife, that he was coming up to his mountain retreat to get his head straight. The cop still gave him a speeding ticket, but then he'd gotten his autograph and let him go.

  But now he'd been up here for two days and his head didn't feel any straighter. In fact, if anything, he had grown more angry, frustrated and depressed at the realization that his twenty-two-year-old marriage to his charismatic, brilliant, difficult, headstrong and still-pretty orthopedic surgeon wife, Caryn, seemed to be over. In almost every imaginable way, they had grown apart. Her thriving practice, her investments, and the new medical office she was starting with her business partners had taken almost every spare minute of her life for the past couple of years.

  Now, with a purple dusk gathering around him, Stuart looked out over the water and saw a few more promising signs of trout feeding, but he couldn't even bring himself to move from where he sat to throw his line. His mind refused to leave the familiar rut it had been plumbing since he'd come up here.

  How could his life with Caryn have come to this?

  They'd met when he'd been a guide on a Snake River rafting trip her parents had given her for a graduation present. He had been twenty-eight to her twenty-two, and they were soul mates from the minute they'd laid eyes on each other. She was going to med school at Stanford in the fall, but nothing was going to stand in the way of their being together. Stuart moved from Wyoming out to California, and they were married in the second week of November.

  In those early days, their lives complemented one another. Caryn studied round the clock. Stuart submitted his writings everywhere he could think of and augmented his meager writer's income by working as a word processor in the law offices of Jedd Conley, one of his friends from college.

  At home, Stuart kept the apartment clean, made their dinners, did the dishes, quizzed Caryn on her classes. She read and helped him edit his articles and early manuscripts and took every chance to get into the wilderness with him—the Bay Area was good for that. They jogged together three or four times a week, talking the whole while. They liked the same music, the same books; they laughed at the same jokes. Busy lives notwithstanding, they found time to make love often. They would often brag to each other that in the history of the world, nobody had ever been as happy as they were.

  If that had been true then, Stuart thought, now there were few if any couples as miserable.

  On Friday, the fight had erupted when Caryn came home for lunch after her hip-replacement patient had caught a cold and canceled on her at the last minute. So her entire afternoon loomed open and free, and when she got home, she was in a foul humor. Stuart, who'd been planning to drive up to Echo Lake anyway and get some writing done, suggested that she take advantage of the unexpected opportunity and accompany him.

  She had no interest. No, she didn't have other plans, but why would she want to come up to his cabin for an entire weekend? What did he think they would do that she would remotely enjoy? Another hike? She'd done her share of Stuart's hikes. Eight or ten or fifteen miles up and down steep and difficult terrain. Two or three or even six thousand vertical feet in one day? Wow, what a good time that was! And all to accomplish what? To get some outdoor exercise or a variation of a nice view that they'd both already seen a thousand times?

  She'd pass, thanks. She'd outgrown all of that.

  He had offered to stay down in the city, then. Maybe they could go out to dinner, or even eat at home, get some overdue and richly deserved quality time together, maybe reconnect.

  "You mean sex?" she'd asked.

  "That wouldn't be the worst idea in the world. But I wasn't just thinking of sex ..."

  "No surprise there."

  "What does that mean?" The thing heating up between them.

  "You haven't thought of sex at all in a couple of months, Stuart."

  "I've thought of it all right, Caryn. It's just never been at a good time for you."


  "Oh, so it's all my fault?"

  After which it had gotten ugly fast, Caryn finally admitting that she was sick of the sham marriage between them. Kymberly, their incredibly high-maintenance daughter whose birth had forever altered the dynamic of their life together, was gone off to college now. There was no reason to stay together.

  She wanted a divorce.

  Stuart had slammed out of the house. Yesterday he'd walked for miles in the grip of an incoherent rage that seemed to grow with each passing minute. Last night, he drank off most of a quart bottle of vodka that had lain untouched in the cabin's freezer for five years. This morning he found that he'd trashed his cabin, thrown dishes around, broken two chairs and smashed the framed family photos. He woke up still mostly drunk and with little memory of what he'd done. But today, monstrously hung over, feeling ashamed and sorry for himself, he'd hiked for a grueling six-hour loop before taking a long afternoon nap and then walking up here to Tamarack, hoping the evening peace would soothe him.

  He wasn't really interested in tracing all the roots of his anger, though the strength and depth of it left him in a kind of shock, and exhausted. God knows there had been reasons enough. The last few years Caryn had all but abandoned him emotionally and physically, but he'd stayed on because he believed you should fight to save your marriage, even when it looked impossible. He'd stayed on, too, in order to carry the vast amount of the load of raising Kymberly because his wife didn't have the time. He'd stayed on in all of his own good faith, trying to get to compatibility with Caryn, from which he hoped they might again approach affection. Until Friday—just two days ago!—he'd repeatedly told her that he loved her, he loved her, he loved her. In these admissions, he realized that he was probably culpable of dishonesty, but he thought it might help, might bring her back. And if he said it enough and she came around, it might even become true.

  Now, after all that sacrifice and despair, all the hope and commitment, all the pain and constant work, she wanted to end it anyway. He had been such a fool, and he hated himself for that almost as much as he hated her.

  Tamarack Lake had grown dark and still again. The hatch and the bite were over, and the only sound off the lake was a whisper where the water met the shoreline.

  Stuart forced his stiff body to its feet. He could get back to his cabin by the moonlight, to his car and back to the city by midnight— have it out with her one last time on his schedule for a change, and not hers. It would be great to wake her up, which would make her miss a day of her precious work. It would do her good to see him in the full flower of his outrage at how she'd used and abused him, his naïve belief, his basic good nature.

  He broke into a jog, in a hurry now to get on the road and finally give her the real piece of his mind he'd been holding in for too long while trying to be fair, to be patient, to give her and their marriage yet one more chance. To be a good guy.

  What an idiot he was. What a loser. What a goddamn pansy.

  Well, all that was over, he thought. Now and forever. If she was done with him, he was done with her, too. And good riddance.

  As he ran, his footsteps crunched on the granite. Riding the wave of his anger, he wasn't consciously aware that he was saying anything, but to the rhythm of every footfall, he fell into the mantra and let it escape into the night on every exhale: Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her.

  The fish that Stuart heard breaking water at the first sign of the hatch was very large for a Sierra Nevada alpine lake—a fourteen-inch rainbow trout. It rose to the sight of a mosquito larva shimmering off the surface of the lake, slurped at the insect in the gentle way of all trout, then exploded in sudden fury out of the water as it felt the set of the tiny barbless hook.

  Gina Roake, a forty-seven-year-old attorney, fought the fish on very light 6x line for about five minutes—a really nice fight with at least four good runs—before she netted it. She stood in her moss-green hiking shorts on a shallow, submerged ledge that reached out about fifteen feet into the lake. When she saw the size of the fish, she whistled in satisfaction, then turned and, dipping the trout and her net into the water, walked back to the shore. There, grabbing the fish through the netting, with a humane efficiency she slapped its head hard once into the side of a large granite boulder.

  Besides her shorts, she wore a long-sleeved buttoned shirt of some space-age fabric that wicked out perspiration and then dried almost immediately. The clothes were functional in the extreme. Over her bare feet her legs were well-muscled and tan, her ankles slim. She had stopped dyeing her hair a couple of years before, and now the wisps that showed from beneath the red handkerchief around her head were a shining, silvery gray.

  Laying the now-still fish in a small concavity at the top of the boulder, her movements bespoke a temperament of brisk competence. Removing a six-inch Buck knife from its sheath on her belt, she picked up the fish by its gills and turned back to the water, where she paused for a moment to appreciate the setting. In the dying sun she saw another person, small in the distance, sitting on a rock across the water.

  Returning to the task at hand, she inserted the tip of the Buck's blade into the trout and slit up its belly to the gills. Pulling out its guts, she threw them out beyond the reach of the ledge, where they sank into the lake's depth and disappeared from view. After she'd scraped the dark line of gunk along the backbone, she pulled off and threw away the gills, then dipped the trout in the water and rinsed it clean.

  She'd pitched her tent on a level spot back a ways into the trees. Campfires weren't allowed here, but previous campers had left a clearing surrounded by large rocks for seating. As the far eastern end of the lake grew into shadow, she touched a flame to her small gas stove.

  For longer backpacking trips, Gina tried to keep her pack to under thirty-five pounds. Besides her portable stove, she'd carry a Girl Scout-style mess kit and a bear canister filled mostly with dehydrated fruits and ready-to-cook meals. But she'd planned this trip to be day hikes out of this base camp. She'd come up on Friday and would go home tomorrow morning. Beyond that, the camp was only a couple of relatively level miles from the Echo Lakes trailhead. She didn't need to worry about her pack's weight for this type of trip, and she'd loaded up her canister with GORP—good ol' raisins and peanuts (and added M&Ms)—for quick energy, then for her lunches a couple of small loaves of San Francisco sourdough, a block of cheddar cheese, a chub of Italian dry salami.

  Heaven.

  For dinner tonight, she had even thought to carry a half-bottle of decent white wine. Using the mess kit's covered pot, she'd boil her fresh green beans in a little lake water, finishing them with fresh minced garlic, pepper and salt, and olive oil. The trout was far too big for the mess kit frying pan, too long in fact for the ten-inch Calphalon from her own kitchen, so though the concept offended her, she was forced to cut the trout in half. A squeeze of olive oil from its little plastic container, salt and pepper, mixed Italian herbs, a few drops of Tabasco sauce.

  Beat that, Farallon, she thought as she laid the halves of trout into the oil and spices. Eat your heart out, Boulevard—Farallon and Boulevard being two of San Francisco's finest restaurants.

  When she finished eating, she took some boiling water and the dishes she'd used down to the lake to wash them. Back at the camp, she settled against her rock and sipped at the last of her wine from her Sierra Cup. The moon was up, and so was Venus, in a wine-dark sky.

  The diamond in the ring on her left hand caught a glint from the bright moon and for a second she looked at the thing as though its presence there surprised her. There was no rational explanation for this reaction—she'd worn the ring now for almost three years, but in truth she didn't often think of it because it was too painful.

  Now she stared at it for a long moment. Putting her wine down, she reached over, twisted it off her finger, and held it up in front of her. The facets in the diamond caught more moonlight as she turned it around and around, as though she were trying to find some secret magic within it.

  But sh
e knew there was no secret. There was no more magic in her life anymore, not as there had been when David Freeman had stunned her by proposing marriage and then placed the ring on her finger. Freeman, much older than she was, and a legend in the law world of San Francisco, was a slovenly dressed, big-living, profane, cigar-smoking genius in an ancient gnome's body whom, much to Gina's initial surprise, she'd come to love.

  She often felt that he'd literally cast some spell on her. She would look at his ill-fitting brown suits, his scuffed shoes, the rheumy eyes under unruly and wiry eyebrows, the rosacea-scarred nose—Freeman didn't appear to be joking when he said that he liked to think of himself as mythically ugly—and during the six months she had lived with him, she couldn't think of a more attractive man of any age. Objectively, he was a frog, but she could see only the prince. It had to be sorcery. But whatever it was, it had worked and she had fallen under his spell, satisfied and happily in love at forty-four, for the first time in her life.

  And Freeman, for his part, a seventy-something lifelong bachelor and notorious womanizer, apparently felt the same way about her. When he'd proposed, nervous as a schoolboy, this man who could be eloquent in front of the Supreme Court could barely get the words out. They were already living together most of the time in David’s apartment, although Gina had kept her own place as well, and they decided to have a small, no-frills civil ceremony within the week.

  But then David, who considered himself "bulletproof," had decided to walk home from work one night that week after he'd finished at the office. At the time, he'd been embroiled in some highly contentious litigation with a local mobster, and the gang leader's men had set upon the old barrister and beaten him into a coma from which he never recovered. When he died three days later, Gina felt a part of herself die with him.

  But unbeknownst to her, in those last months of his life, David had changed his will, and Gina found herself the owner of the Freeman Building, downtown on Sutter Street. The large, gracious, recently renovated, three-story structure, complete with underground parking, housed the forty-odd employees of David's firm, Freeman & Associates, as well as one rogue "of counsel" tenant named Dismas Hardy. In the months following David's death, Gina, Dismas, and another colleague named Wes Farrell had reconsolidated the firm as Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, and it had become somewhat of a power player in the city.