Read Online Dead Irish by John Lescroart - Free Book Online

real. He held out his hand. “If I can be of any more help . . .”
    Hardy asked, “Did you, by any chance, know Ed?”
    The pause, when it ended, was clipped. “Who?”
    “Ed Cochran, the guy who died.”
    “No,” Cruz said now without missing a beat. “No, I’m afraid not. Should I have?”
    At his car, Hardy looked back and saw that Cruz had returned to the hole in the fence and was standing, hands in his pocket, shaking his head from side to side.
     
    Hardy hadn’t gone to the Cruz Building for any other reason than to see the site in daylight, and within a couple of minutes had found himself talking to the president of the company. No wonder his questions, he thought, had been so random.
    At Blanche’s, a rickety canalside café and art gallery, the Campari umbrella offered shade from the sun but couldn’t do much about the glare coming up off the canal. Hardy sipped at a club soda, not bothering to turn away from the canal’s glare, and thought about this guy Cruz’s obsessive concern over his parking lot and his obvious lie about not knowing Ed Cochran.
    Hardy wiped the sweat and squinted into the city’s early-afternoon haze. A small breeze carried on it the smell of roasting coffee and burning engine oil, and Hardy wondered what the fuck he was doing.
     
    Carl Griffin stood by the one window that afforded a view of the building across the way and, four flights down, of the alley that ran between the parking lot and Bryant. Yesterday, he and Giometti had dealt some more with the wife and the kid’s family, then Cruz, then driven down to Army Distributing, which looked like it was close to going out of business.
    They didn’t have a locked-up reason for Cochran to have killed himself, but neither did anything much indicate a homicide. There had been two empty chambers in the gun, but he’d encountered that before—one shot where you jerk the gun away just as you fire before you get up the guts to go through with it the next time.
    It was a drag—a young guy acing himself—especially dealing with the relatives. But it happened a lot. More often younger guys than anybody else.
    He pushed some papers off to one side of his desk. Where the hell was Giometti now? He was hungry. He tried, but wasn’t having much luck getting himself motivated to think about this guy Cochran. What difference did it make? He could solve the Murder of the Century and all he’d get for it would be a “Good job, Carl. Want to do another one?”
    He decided to fuck waiting on Giometti and go downstairs and have a hero sandwich. Out of habit he grabbed for his windbreaker, which he wouldn’t need, just as his phone rang. He picked it up.
    “Carl,” Joe Frazelli said, “I got a friend of Glitsky’s here, got some questions about the Cochran thing. You got a minute for him?”
    That’s what he needed, he thought. He needed to help out a friend of Glitsky’s on one of his cases. “I was just going down to get a sandwich.”
    “Thanks, I’ll send him over,” Frazelli said, hanging up.
    Swear to God, Griffin thought, if I’m ever looie I’m not going to do shit like that. He threw his windbreaker on its peg and turned back to the window. It looked like a nice day out there, even a hot one. He pushed at the windowsill, trying to open it an inch or two for some sea breeze, but it was painted shut.
    “Inspector Griffin?”
    He turned. It was the guy from the other night. They shook hands, the guy introducing himself, and Carl offered him a seat, asking what he could do for him.
    “I’m kind of a representative of the family,” the man began.
    “The family?”
    “Ed Cochran’s. His wife’s, actually.”
    “You private?”
    The man shook his head, smiling, almost rehearsed, resting his elbows on his knees, very relaxed. “I’m a bartender.”
    “You’re a bartender,” Griffin repeated.
    “The Little Shamrock, out on Lincoln.”
    “Okay,” Griffin said.
    “Anyway, Ed Cochran’s brother-in-law owns the