Elizabeth Pullios found out about it first in Jeff Elliot’s Chronicle story. Owen Nash was a righteous homicide, and probably, she thought, a murder. Also, its position there on the front page changed her opinion about the case.
While Dismas Hardy was stirring up the kettle she had been all for him – it never hurt for a rookie to get some heavy trial experience, and there were only a few ways a new person ever got to try a homicide. One was getting what they called a skull case – an old murder with some new evidence. Another way was when one of the regulars, like Pullios herself, would hand off a slam-dunk conviction to one of the rising stars, leaving herself time to try a more challenging case. Once in a while one of the regulars would go on vacation and everyone else would be full up, so a case would fall to the next level. But that was about it.
She had thought that Hardy’s interest in the mystery hand fell more or less under the umbrella of skull cases. Interesting stuff maybe, but not grist for her. There were four, and only four, homicide assistant district attorneys in the City and County of San Francisco. None of these people would hand off a publicity case. If Hardy had hit the jackpot, Pullios felt as though he’d done it by playing what was rightfully her dollar.
She dressed in her red power suit and sauntered into the Homicide Detail on the Fourth Floor at seven-forty-five on Friday morning. No one sat at the outside desk, and she walked through into the open area for the inspectors’ desks, all twelve of them. The lieutenant’s office was closed up, dark inside. Over by the windows, Martin Branstetter was doing some paperwork. Carl Griffin and Jerry Block were having coffee and some donuts at Griffin’s desk, talking sports.
‘Hi, guys.’ All the homicide cops liked Pullios. They liked her because when they went to the trouble to arrest a suspect and provide her with witnesses she generally saw to it the person went away, and often for a long time. ‘Anybody got a fuck for me?’ Her smile lit up the office. Branstetter looked up from his report.
When she was speaking to these guys, she called all suspects ‘fucks.’ She knew, as all of them knew, that anybody who got all the way to arrested was guilty. They had done something bad enough to eliminate them from society forever. Therefore, she would start the process of making them nonpeople. They were fucks, starting here in Homicide. And fuck them.
‘Slow night, Bets.’ Griffin put his donut down.
‘So who’s got the Nash thing?’ She held up her folded newspaper. ‘Front-page stuff.’
The cops looked at each other and shrugged. ‘Sounds exciting.’ Griffin was most interested in his donut. It wasn’t his case. End of story. ‘I must have missed it.’
‘I think Glitsky might have gone down there,’ Block said. ‘You can look on his desk.’
It was on top of the stack of papers on the corner of Abe Glitsky’s desk. There wasn’t much more than the manila folder with the name NASH in caps on the tab. Inside, Glitsky had started writing up the incident report, but hadn’t gotten far. There were no photos yet, either from the discovery scene or the coroner’s office.
Pullios closed up the folder, took a post-it and wrote a note asking Glitsky to call her as soon as he got in.
Hardy, awakened by Rebecca at five-thirty, had gone out running in the clear and already balmy dawn. Down Geary out to the beach, south to Lincoln, then inside Golden Gate Park back to 25th, and home. A four-mile circle he’d been trying to keep up since getting sedentary in March.
Now, near eight, he sat in his green jogging suit, taking his time over Frannie’s great coffee. She sat across the kitchen table from him, glancing at sections of the paper when she wasn’t fiddling with the baby, who was strapped into a baby seat on the table between them.
‘And this was a baby shark,’ he said. ‘Imagine what a twenty-footer would do.’
‘I think they made a movie about that.’
Hardy made a face at her as the doorbell rang, followed by the sound of the front door opening. ‘Don’t get up, commoners,’ Glitsky called out, ‘I’ll just let myself in.’
The sergeant wore a white shirt and solid brown tie, khaki slacks, cordovan wing tips, tan sports coat. Entering the kitchen, he stopped. ‘Taking fashion tips from dead guys?’
‘Hi, Abe,’ Frannie said.
Hardy pointed to the stove. ‘Water’s hot.’
Glitsky knew where the tea was and got out a bag, dropped it into a cup, came over to the table. He looked again at Hardy. ‘Oftentimes, I’ll go see a body and the next day decide to wear exactly what it had on.’
Hardy shrugged. ‘It was next up in my drawer. Am I supposed to throw it away?’
‘If anybody ever asks if your husband is superstitious, Frannie, you should tell them no.’
Hardy explained it to her. ‘Owen Nash was found in some sweats just like these. Abe thinks the streets are infested with sharks that are going to start a feeding frenzy over people in green sweats.’ Hardy lifted the front of his sweatshirt away from his body. ‘Besides, this is different. There ain’t any holes in this one.’
‘Major difference.’ Abe nodded and sipped his tea. ‘So tell me everything you know.’
Hardy and Glitsky went back into the office, where Hardy had the notes he’d taken after talking with Ken Farris. Abe sat at the desk while Hardy threw darts.
‘Who’s this guy in Santa Clara? Silicon Valley.’
‘I don’t know. Farris said he’d tell me if we needed it.’
‘I need it.’
‘Yeah, I thought you would.’
Glitsky kept reading, taking a couple of notes of his own. ‘He went out with this May Shinn on Saturday?’
Hardy pulled darts from the board – two bull’s-eyes and a 1. He was throwing pretty well, a good sign. ‘We don’t know that for sure. Farris says he was planning on it.’
‘But no one’s talked to her?’
‘Right. That’s her number there at the bottom. You’re welcome to give her a try.’
Glitsky did. He held the receiver for a minute, then hung up. Hardy sat at the corner of the desk. ‘You didn’t want to leave a message? Ask her to call you?’
‘I’d love to, but nobody answered.’
‘No, there’s a machine. I heard it.’
Glitsky thought a minute, then dialed again. ‘Okay, last time was four, I’ll give it ten.’
The sun reflected off the hardwood floors onto the bookcase. Hardy walked over and opened the window, a reasonable action only about ten days a year. The view to his north, up to Twin Peaks and the Sutro Tower, was blocked from his office by Rebecca’s room, but overhead, the sky was clear. Hardy could see Oakland easily. The air smelled like grass, even out here in the concrete avenues.
‘Nope,’ Abe said behind him. ‘Ten rings. This listed? Where’s she live? Where’s your phone book?’
She wasn’t listed. Without going into it too closely, Hardy said he’d gotten the number from Farris. ‘So she’s home, I’d guess,’ Abe said. ‘At least she unplugged her machine in the last couple days, right? You going to work today dressed like that?’
Hardy allowed that he would probably take a shower and get dressed, and moved toward his bedroom, Abe following. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t get too red hot about this.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, the body turns up yesterday, but Nash was probably dead on Sunday, we go on that, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay, today’s Friday. One week, assuming he went down on Saturday.’
‘And after four days…’ Hardy knew what Abe was saying, understood the statistics. If you didn’t have a suspect within four days of a murder, the odds were enormous that you’d never get one.
‘All I’m saying is don’t get your hopes up.’
Hardy stripped off his shirt. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got Mr Silicon Valley and you got May Shinn if you can find her.’
‘If she didn’t go swimming with Owen Nash.’
‘Then who unplugged her answering machine?’
‘I know, I know. I’m an investigator. I’ll investigate. I also thought we’d check out the boat.’
‘No, the boat’s clean.’ Hardy told Abe about his visit on Wednesday night.
‘You brought along a forensic team, did you?’
Hardy shut up and went to take his shower.
The case of The People v. Rane Brown was not going to be an easy one.
Back in late March, at around ten at night, two officers in a squad car cruising under the freeway heard a man calling for help. Turning into the lot, they saw one man down on the ground and another man going through his pockets. When he saw the cops, the suspect took off. The man on the ground was yelling, ‘Stop him! That’s the guy!’ The officers followed the running man as he turned into one alley, then another, a dead end. Getting out of their car, they proceeded cautiously down the alley, guns drawn, flashlights out, until they came upon a man crouched between two dumpsters.
This man turned out to be Rane Brown, a 5’8“, 135-pound, nineteen-year-old black male with four priors for mugging and purse snatching. When apprehended by the officers, he was wearing a black tank top and black pants that matched the clothes of the man who’d run from the scene. The officers found a.38 Smith & Wesson handgun under the dumpster next to Rane. The gun was registered to a Denise Watrous in San Jose.
What made the case especially difficult was that when the officers returned to the scene, the purported victim had disappeared, having evidently decided that the hassle of pursuing justice in this imperfect world was simply not worth the trouble.
But there was Rane Brown in custody, and the police didn’t particularly want to let him go and mug someone else.
So Hardy was in Department 11 with Judge Nancy Fiedler this Friday morning, trying to prove a robbery and knowing that he didn’t have a prayer of winning.
Which is what transpired. After a fairly stern lecture by Judge Fiedler on the advisability of producing some evidence before wasting the court’s time on this minor and unprovable transgression, she had granted the motion to dismiss and Rane Brown was a free man.
Hardy and the two arresting officers had been waiting by the elevator when Rane and his attorney came up and joined them. Everybody headed to the first floor, and Rane was in high spirits.
‘Man, you give me a turn when you walk in that courtroom,’ he said to Hardy.
‘Why’s that, Rane?’
‘You know, the man here’ – he cocked his head toward his attorney – ‘he tole me you ain’t got no witnesses, no victim, like that. So I be thinkin’ everything’s cool and you walk in and I thinkin‘ you the victim.’ He smiled, broken teeth in a pocked face. ‘I mean, you get it? You look just like the man I rob.’
Hardy stared at Rane a moment, letting it sink in. He saw the two cops that had arrested him, one on either side of him. Hardy allowed himself a small smile.
‘You’re telling me I look like the victim you just got let off for?’
Rane was bobbing his head. ‘Exactly, man, exactly.’ He just couldn’t believe the resemblance.
Hardy looked from one officer to the other. ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ he said, ‘we just got ourselves a confession.’ The elevator door opened and Hardy stepped out, blocking the way. ‘Take this guy back upstairs and book him.’
‘The boat was out when you got in? And what time was that?’
José and Glitsky sat on hard plastic chairs by the doorway to the Gateway Marina guardhouse. José was about twenty-five years old, thin and sinewy. He wore new tennis shoes with his green uniform, a shirt open at the neck. The day had heated up. Even here, right on the water, it was over eighty degrees.
‘I got here six-thirty, quarter to seven, and the Eloise, she was already gone.’
‘And nobody signed her out?’
‘No. They s’pose to, but…’ He shrugged.
‘Were there any calls on the intercom, anything like that?’
‘You remember Saturday? It was like nothing, maybe two boats, three go out. If anything had happen, I remember.’ José stood up and got a logbook from the counter. ‘Here, look at this. Air temp forty-eight, wind north northeast at thirty-five. Small craft up from the night before.’
‘So nobody was going out? What about the other boats? The ones that went out?’
José tapped the book. ‘These I write down.’ He ran a finger over the page until he got where he wanted. ‘The Wave Dancer, she goes out at ten-thirty, back at two. Then Blue Baby, she just clear the jetty’ – pronounced ‘yetty’ – ‘then turn aroun’ and come back in, like one-fifteen. Rough Rider leaves about the same as Blue Baby, like one-thirty. They no come back in on my shift.‘
Not bad, Glitsky thought. Every new witness didn’t double his work, it squared it. Here were only three boats to check, and maybe he could leave out the Blue Baby, Possibly one of them had seen the Eloise. If Saturday had been a day like today, clear and calm… He didn’t want to think about it. He started writing down names.
A uniformed officer appeared in the doorway. ‘Sergeant, the lab team is pulling up.’
As soon as he’d left Hardy’s that morning Glitsky had arranged to have the Eloise placed under the guard of a couple of officers. He stopped off downtown for an easily obtained search warrant, not even dropping into his office. After he and Forensics had gone over the Eloise, a prospect about which he entertained no great hopes -they’d cordon it off with crime-scene tape. But the boat was the place to start – it was more than probable that Nash had at the very least been dead on the boat and dumped from it. From there, he’d see where the trails led.
José was next to him as he greeted a team at the gate to the slips, and the six men walked out in the glaring sun to the end of Dock Two. José opened the cabin for them, then Glitsky dismissed him.
Abe went below, taking a moment to let his eyes adjust to the relative darkness. As the room became visible, one of the forensic team on the ladder behind him whistled at the layout. They went to work.
It was a tough call because they were looking for anything and nothing. Two men were on deck above, starting at the bow and coming back. Glitsky and two other guys were below, but there wasn’t much evident there either. No sign of any struggle.
Glitsky started in the main cabin, just poking around, looking. He wasn’t a forensics man. He would let them go over the fabrics and rugs and smooth surfaces. Whatever he was looking for would have to be obvious. But not too obvious, he thought, or Hardy would have seen it.
All of the cabinets were secured, both in the main cabin and in the adjoining galley. He opened each one, moved a few things around, closed it back up. Moseying back to the master suite, he noted the made bed. He considered calling back to remind his guys to bring the sheets in, but thought better of it. They would do that automatically.
To the right of the bed there was a wooden desk, shaped to the bulkhead, its surface cleared. He tried one of the side drawers and found it locked. The center drawer, however, slid open easily, and, with it open, the other drawers came free.
But it was slim pickings. The gutter to the center drawer contained pens and paper clips, several books of matches from various restaurants, a couple of keys on a ring that Abe assumed fitted this desk, rubberbands and a handball from the Olympic club. The flat back part of the drawer appeared to be completely empty, but reaching his hand back, Glitsky found two stale, crumbling cigars. The top side drawer, the slimmer one, was filled with lots of different colored sweatbands, which seemed to go with the exercycle and dumbbells on the other side of the bed. The bottom side drawer was empty.
On the other side of the bed was a rolltop desk, its cover down. He rolled back the oak top. There were probably twenty-five cubbyholes above the desk’s surface, most of them containing pieces of paper, some of them rolled up, some folded over. A general catchall. Glitsky pulled out a piece at random and found a shopping list. Eggs, cheese, spinach, orange juice. Sunday brunch, he decided. Another paper, also at random, read ‘W. re Taos/reschedule.’ That was all. Glitsky put the two pages back where he’d gotten them. Forensics would take them back downtown if they found any other evidence that Nash had been killed here.
The center drawer looked much like the other one -matches, cigars, pens and pencils, junk.
He pulled open the upper right drawer, expecting to find more headbands. At first glance this looked to be another functional drawer, but when Glitsky pulled the drawer out a little further, he saw a nickel-plated.25 Beretta 950 lying on top of what looked like a collection of folded-up navigational charts.
Just then one of the forensics men on deck called below. ‘Sergeant, you want to get up here? I think we got us some blood.’
It was close to noon on what was already the hottest day of the year and, naturally, the air conditioners were on the blink. There were no windows in the courtrooms in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. Fans were set up on either side of the bench in Judge Andy Fowler’s courtroom, Department 27, and they did move the air around. Unfortunately the temperature of the air getting moved was ninety-one degrees.
The whir of the fan blades also upped the decibel level. Nearly uniform in size, twenty-five by forty feet, with high ceilings and no soft surfaces except the minimal padding on the seats of jurors, judges and witnesses, courtrooms were, under the best conditions, loud and uncomfortable.
And today, under far less than optimal conditions, Andy Fowler was once again being forced, reluctantly, by the luck of the draw, into a role he hated – protector of suspect’s rights.
He’d been a young man at the time of his appointment to the bench. He’d worked on Pat Brown’s second gubernatorial campaign against Richard Nixon – more because he hated Nixon than loved Brown – and persuaded a goodly amount of his Olympic Club confreres, some of them Republicans, to donate to the cause. At the time, though not yet thirty, he’d already made partner in his firm, and he had put the word out that he would accept a judgeship if one came around, which, in due course, it did.
Though his politics rarely came up and hadn’t radically changed in thirty years, this was the 1990s in San Francisco. Anywhere but in the Hall of Justice, a Kennedy-style liberal Democrat was considered right-wing. Actual conservatives, again excluding the Hall, were as rare in the city as a warm day.
Political San Francisco was a Balkanized unit of special interests, many on the so-called left – homosexuals, people of color, middle-class white radicals… so political survival in the city was in large part a matter of pleasing enough of these groups to form a majority coalition on whatever issue happened to be the day’s hot topic.
In reaction, the denizens of the Hall of Justice – the police department, the D.A.‘s office, judges – had become a little Balkan republic of their own. It was tough, they said, to be for law and order, to serve blind justice, when first you had to take into account the trauma and/or discrimination that had been visited on you and yours on account of skin color, gender, sexual preference, religious orientation, poor potty training, whatever.
And in this climate, until three years ago, Andy Fowler had been a popular judge. He knew it was true, because prosecutors went out of their way to tell him they loved getting cases in his department. Why? Well, he tried to be fair. He wasn’t a wiseguy. He didn’t throw things -erasers, pencils, paper clips – from the bench at attorneys, bailiffs or suspects. If someone needed waking up in the courtroom, he would politely ask the bailiff to shake that person. He had a sly humor and no political axe to grind. He was knowledgeable about the law. He was, in short, a good judge.
The first sign of change came in the case of The People v. Randy Blakemore. It seemed Mr Blakemore was hanging out on Eddy Street one evening and saw an apparently drunk tourist stumbling along in a nice suit. Randy noticed a Rolex, a fat bulge in the tourist’s back pocket, the gold chain around his neck. When the man fell into a doorway to rest, Randy moved in and had his hands on the Rolex when two other ‘homeless people’ appeared with badges and guns. The tourist opened his eyes and uttered an extremely sober, ‘Boo, you’re it,’ and Randy was taken downtown – one of seventeen arrests in a police program to get the word out on the street that tourists were a valued business in San Francisco and were not to be hassled.
Six other cases had already come up for PXs – preliminary hearings – in other departments when Blakemore came up in Andy Fowler’s courtroom. Four of those men were awaiting trial and two had already been convicted and sent to jail. Andy Fowler took a look at Randy standing in the docket in his orange prison togs and told him it was his lucky day – this was as clear a case of entrapment as Judge Fowler had ever seen and though he had no doubt that Randy was a bad person who shouldn’t be on the streets, on this particular charge he was going to walk.
Other judges reconsidered. Three of the four remaining prelims resulted the same way. Both of the felons already convicted were released on appeal. The last suspect had also mugged the ‘tourist’ and fought the arresting officers, so he did go to trial, although the jury didn’t convict. The other dozen or so arrestees had their charges dropped by an angry District Attorney Christopher Locke.
So Fowler’s ruling had alienated Locke, the sixteen officers who’d taken part in the operation, Chief of Police Dan Rigby and the mayor, in whose brain the original germ of the idea had hatched in the first place.
For a short while Fowler became somewhat the darling of the media – the Sunday Chronicle’s Calendar/Style section did a piece on him, further alienating the Hall. Esquire liked his wardrobe. Rolling Stone asked his opinion on Roe v. Wade. People had a little squib on him in ‘End-Notes’, calling him a ‘crusading justice.’
Fowler laughed it off as his allotted twenty minutes of fame, and most of it blew over after a while. But it did leave a bitter residue, especially on a young female D.A. named Elizabeth Pullios, who didn’t like to lose and who’d been prosecuting Blakemore.
Now, on this sweltering morning, Fowler had listened to a half-hour of opening statements by Chief Assistant District Attorney Art Drysdale, making a rare personal appearance in a courtroom. The case was The People v. Charles Hendrix, and Drysdale was here because Locke had asked him to be.
There were eight sitting judges in San Francisco, their cases assigned by one of their number, a rotating calendar judge, in Department 22, starting at nine-thirty every Monday morning. When People v. Hendrix went to Fowler, Locke knew he was in trouble – Hendrix was another entrapment. In this case, the SFPD had set up a phony fence, a warehouse to receive stolen goods. After word got out, they had videotaped twenty to thirty suspects a day, waiting for a big score or a connection to a major dope deal, before they’d make some arrests. This, Locke suspected, wasn’t going to fly in Andy Fowler’s courtroom.
‘…And I want to see prosecuting counsel in my chambers immediately.’
Fowler, recovered from his illness of the previous day, left the bench and had his robe off before he left the courtroom. He told the bailiff to bring one of the fans into his office.
A minute later, Drysdale was knocking at his open door. ‘Your Honor.’
The bailiff brushed by Drysdale with the fan and plugged it in so it blew across Fowler’s desk.
‘How many of these turkeys are we likely to be seeing here? Come in, Art. Sit down. Hot enough?’
Drysdale crossed a leg. ‘With all respect, Your Honor, I think a flat dismissal is out of line as a matter of law.’ Fowler’s eyes narrowed, but Drysdale ignored the obvious signs, reaching into his briefcase. ‘I’ve got a brief here -’
‘You’ve got a brief already? Before you knew my ruling?’
‘Mr Locke had an… intuition.’
Fowler did not smile. ‘I’ll bet he did.’ He laced his fingers and brought them up to his mouth. ‘Why don’t you just give me the sense of it?’
Drysdale hadn’t written a ‘memorandum of points and authorities’ – a paper laying out current law based on past decisions in other courts, law-review articles, recognized lawbooks – in about eight years, and when Locke asked him to figure out a way to get by Fowler he thought this was as good a time as any to try one.
Entrapment was generally frowned upon in the 1st District Court of Appeal, San Francisco’s district, but there was a lot of leeway granted police depending on how the sting was set up. In this case, Hendrix, and in the many others sure to follow from the phony warehouse, the police were not arresting the suspect at the scene. Rather, they were using information gathered by videotape at the scene to identify the suspect, after which they tailed him to see what he was up to. This approach had resulted in righteous convictions that held up under appeal in several states, and Drysdale laid it all out in a nutshell while Fowler sat back in his chair, eyes closed, letting the fan blow over him.
When Drysdale had finished, Fowler opened his eyes. ‘Let me tell you a story, Art. This kid is sitting on his front lawn, minding his own business, and one of his neighbors comes by and tells him there’s a warehouse down the street paying top dollar for any goods brought to it, no questions asked. The neighbor shows him a roll he just got for a car stereo and two bicycles. Another neighbor comes by, flashes another wad of dough. This goes on for a week, and pretty soon our boy is thinking he’d be some kind of fool not to take advantage of this opportunity like all of his neighbors.
‘See? There’s two parts to stealing – taking and fencing – and both are risky, but now one half the risk is eliminated. So, and this is important’ – Fowler leaned forward over his desk, out of the flow of air from the fan -‘it is the impetus of this sting operation that causes our boy to go and commit a crime.’
‘Excuse me, Your Honor, but these people are already committing crimes. They’re going to fence them somewhere.’
‘But by making it easy to fence them, Counselor, we are encouraging them to steal more.’
Drysdale sat back. He knew Fowler’s argument. He just didn’t agree with it. But he was only the running footman. ‘Mr Locke doesn’t agree with you, Judge. Neither does Mr Rigby.’
Fowler allowed himself a tight smile. ‘Well, now, that’s what makes this country great, isn’t it?’
Drysdale leaned forward himself. ‘The cops have put in a lot of time and money on this already, Judge. So have we. We’re taking these guys off the street -’
‘Shooting them would also take them off the street. Art. And shooting them is also illegal.
‘This isn’t illegal.’
Fowler finally sat back, breaking the eye contact. ‘You know, it’s funny, but I’m the judge. It’s my courtroom and if I say it’s illegal, you and Mr Locke and Mr Rigby and anybody else will just have to live with it.’
Now Drysdale sat back. He realized that he was sweating and wiped a hand across his forehead. ‘I’d like to at least leave the brief,’ he said.
‘Fine, leave the brief. I’ll read it if I get the chance.’
‘The son of a bitch! The arrogant, pompous, liberal son of a bitch!’
‘Yes, sir.’ Drysdale stood by the window in Locke’s office, hands held behind his back. The air conditioner seemed to be working better on the third floor.
‘This was a righteous bust. We didn’t take Hendrix in dumping the goods – we caught him in the act.’
Drysdale turned around. ‘An act he would not have been drawn to commit had we not set up our fence.’
‘Oh bullshit!’
Art shrugged. ‘It’s not my argument.’
‘Hendrix does this for a fucking living. He steals things. You know that as well as I do. He breaks into your house or my house or his fucking Honor Andy Fowler’s house and takes things that aren’t fucking his. He is not coerced into doing this by finding a good place to unload it.’
‘Yes, sir, I know.’
The warehouse was an ongoing operation that had been in business for about four months. The police department had already brought in over forty suspects and had collected some $2.5 million worth of contraband, a good portion of which they had returned to its owners. It was a successful tool that they felt was working. Arrests were up, convictions should follow. And Locke was damned if he was going to let some commie judge screw it up for everybody.
He sat down now, played drums with a pencil on his desk. Shave and a haircut, six bits. Shave and a haircut, six bits. ‘Who’s on Calendar this month? Maybe we’ll get lucky in another department.’
‘I think Leo Chomorro’s taken up permanent residence.’
‘Poor bastard.’
Art lifted his shoulders. ‘He asked for it. If he rides with us, maybe we can ease him out of there. Maybe he’s ready.’
‘Find out, would you? Find out if he’ll play, keep any of these away from Fowler. Rigby’s going to have a shit-fit.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Art said.
Locke looked at his watch. ‘God, how could it be lunchtime already? I just got here. I’ve got an appointment in ten minutes, Art. You want to fill Rigby in? No, I’ll do it. He’s gonna shit! What are we going to do about Fowler?’
Drysdale shrugged. ‘He’s a judge, Chris. He’s in for the duration, I’m afraid.’
Locke was moving around his desk, straightening his tie. ‘I’d like to get a crack at him, I’ll tell you that. Son of a bitch could ruin my career.’
Drysdale, who’d been around and seen it all, was about to tell his boss that Andy Fowler was an okay guy, good on a lot of other issues. It was just his interpretation of the law, nothing personal. But he bit his tongue – he knew better.
It was personal. If it didn’t start personal, it got that way in a hurry. To the people who practiced it – even a seasoned veteran like Art Drysdale – everything about the law was personal. There were egos, careers, and lives wrapped up in every yea or nay, every objection sustained or overruled, every conviction, every reversal. If you didn’t take it personally you didn’t belong there.
Andy Fowler wasn’t just interpreting the law. He was stepping on toes, big toes. Although he was loyal to Locke, Drysdale had always gotten along well with Fowler, and he hoped like hell the judge knew what he was doing. If he slipped up, he was going to get squished.
‘You love this, don’t you?’ Frannie asked.
Hardy hadn’t stopped grinning since he’d told the cops in the elevator to rebook Rane Brown. He had just told his wife the story. ‘It has its moments, I must admit.’
‘So who are you nailing this afternoon?’
Hardy looked at the folders on his desk, still a formidable pile. ‘The afternoon looms large before me,’ he said. He noticed Andy Fowler’s jade paperweight and picked it up, cool and heavy in his hand. ‘Maybe I’ll shoot some darts, eat lunch…’ His feet were up on his desk, his tie loosened. Abe Glitsky appeared in his doorway, knocked once and sat down across the desk from him. ‘On the other hand, I’m sure Abe says hi. He just walked in.
‘I’ll let you go then.’
‘Okay, but guess what?’
‘I know. Me, too.’
‘Okay.’ Saying they loved each other in code.
Glitsky had come directly to Hardy’s office from the evidence-locker room. The telephone receiver wasn’t out of Hardy’s hand yet when Glitsky said, ‘As you astutely predicted, Diz, the Eloise was clean.’
Hardy was tossing the jade from hand to hand. ‘Well, I didn’t think -’
‘Except for a gun, a slug, a bunch of blood, some other stuff.’
Hardy put the jade down, swinging his feet to the floor. ‘I’m listening.’
Glitsky filled him in. He had bagged the Beretta for evidence. You could still smell the cordite. He would bet a lot it was the murder weapon, although Ballistics would tell them for sure by Monday. On deck, they had found what looked like blood on the railing where Nash might have gone overboard. ‘Whoever shot him, whoever brought the boat back in, must have washed down the deck, but they missed the rail.’
‘The gun registered?’
‘I’m running it now. We’ll know by tonight.’
‘Any word on May Shinn?’
‘I was thinking you might have something there. Maybe Farris?’
Hardy shook his head, told him a little about how he’d spent his morning, about Rane Brown. Glitsky nodded. ‘You ever notice how just plain dumb these guys are?’
It had crossed Hardy’s mind. ‘So what’s my excuse to talk to Farris again? Maybe you want to talk to him. Till you give me a suspect, I’m not really in it.’
Glitsky was firm. ‘You’re in it, Diz. You already know the guy. Tell him we need Mr Silicon and we haven’t located Shinn. See what he’ll tell you. He’s probably handling disposition of the body, too. Although maybe the daughter… no, probably him.’
‘I’m on it,’ Hardy said.
Hardy passed on his lunch. It was too nice a day to stay cooped up, so Hardy called, got directions and made an appointment, then drove with the top off his Samurai around the Army Street curve down 101. He got his first view of the Bay as he passed Candlestick Park – remarkably blue, clear all the way down to San Jose, dotted with a few sailboats, some tankers. The Bay Bridge glittered silver a little behind him and the pencil line of the San Mateo Bridge ran over to Hay ward. You could see it every day, Hardy thought, and the beauty still got to you.
He exited the freeway at South San Francisco and drove north and west through the industrial section. Owen Industries spread itself over nearly two acres of land at the foot of the San Bruno mountains, a bunch of white and green structures that looked like army barracks. Hardy was issued a guest pass at the guard station after he’d had his appointment confirmed. These folks were into security.
He drove a hundred yards between two rows of the low buildings, then turned left as instructed and came upon the corporate offices, which showed signs of an architect’s hand. A well-kept lawn, a cobbled walkway bounded by a low hedge, a few mature pines, relieved the drab institutional feel of the rest of the place. A flag flew at half-mast. The corporate office building itself was fronted in brick and glass. It, like the surrounding compound, squatted at one story.
Inside, red-tiled floors, potted trees, wide halls with modern art tastefully framed, gave the place an air of muted elegance. An attractive young receptionist took Hardy back to Farris’s office and explained that he would be back in a moment and in the meantime Hardy could wait here.
The door closed behind him and for a moment after turning around, Hardy was struck by an intimate familiarity.
The walls were painted lighter and the view outside the window was certainly different, but otherwise Farris’s office was strikingly like Hardy’s own at his house. There was a fireplace with its mantel, the seagoing knickknacks, even a blowfish on the green blotter that covered the desk. There was no green-shaded banker’s lamp, but the file cabinets were wooden, the bookshelves contained business stuff but also some popular books. Finally, there was a dart board studded with two sets of what Hardy recognized as high-quality custom darts.
There were differences, of course. This room was twice the size and altogether brighter than Hardy’s. The floor was of the same red tile that had been in the lobby, partially covered by three Navajo throw rugs and a couch.
Hardy walked to the desk, felt the grain of the wood, moved to the bookshelves, then to the dartboard. He removed three of the darts and stepped back to the corner of the desk.
After throwing all six darts, Hardy sat on one of the stiff-back wooden chairs, crossed one knee over the other and waited. In under a minute the door opened.
‘Hardy. Dismas, how are you? Sorry to keep you waiting. Something came up.’ A somewhat forced smile in the handsome face. Again, impeccable clothes – a charcoal business suit – with the personal touch of cowboy boots. Hardy thought he looked exhausted. He went around his desk, arranged some papers and sat down. His eyes went around the room. ‘You’ve thrown my darts.’
‘That’s an impressive bit of observation.’
Farris brushed it off. ‘Party trick,’ he said, ‘like Owen breaking boards.’ He explained. ‘You’re around Owen, you better have something you can do better than he can. I got good at details.’ He seemed to slump, remembering something.
‘You all right?’ Hardy asked.
‘Yeah, I’ll live. This is a bitch of a blow, though. I’m not much good at pretending it isn’t.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘With you, okay. But out there’ – he motioned toward the door he’d just come through – ‘I set the tone. People out there see me panic, then it starts to spread, right? I just put the word out we’re closing up for today. Maybe things’ll look better on Monday.’
Hardy gave it a minute, then thought he might as well get down to it. He briefed him on Glitsky’s discoveries on the Eloise, which Farris took in without comment. Then he got the name, address and phone number of Mr Silicon – Austin Brucker in Los Altos Hills. Finally he got around to May Shinn.
‘I wanted to be clear on May, though. Wednesday when you called her, you left a message?’
Farris nodded. ‘That’s right. You were right there.’
‘Yeah, I know. I’m a little confused, though, because Sergeant Glitsky tried to call her this morning and no one answered.’
‘How’d he get her number?’
Details, Hardy thought, this guy is into details. He lifted his shoulders an inch. ‘Cops have access to unlisted numbers.’ He hoped.
Farris accepted that. ‘But the machine didn’t answer?’
‘Ten rings.’
‘No, it picked up after two, three for me.’ He thought a minute. ‘Maybe it got to the end of the tape.’
‘You’d still get her answering message, wouldn’t you?’
‘I think you would.’
The two men sat, putting it together. ‘She’s alive then,’ Farris said. ‘She unplugged it.’
‘Would she have had a reason to kill Owen?’
‘May?’
‘Somebody did.’
Farris shrugged again. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know her. I wouldn’t know her if she walked in here.’
‘But did Mr Nash -?’
‘Owen liked her.’ He paused. ‘A lot. More than a lot.’
‘So how about if he stopped liking her?’
‘So what?’
‘So might she have gone off, something like that?’
Farris shook his head. ‘I just don’t have any idea. The last I knew, Owen liked her. But, I mean, the woman’s a prostitute, right? She kills a John over his dumping her? Even if it’s Owen, I don’t see it. And I don’t think he was dumping her.’
‘So where is she? Why hasn’t she returned your call?’
‘I don’t know. That’s a good question.’
Hardy finally had to let it go. ‘What are you doing about the body?’ he asked.
Celine was going by the coroner’s this afternoon to sign some papers. The autopsy was supposed to have been done this morning. So they planned to have the cremation Sunday morning, scattering his ashes over the Pacific that afternoon.
Farris looked hard out the window. He had a minimum view of the sun behind the low green buildings, some grass, a couple of pine trees. He put his hand to his eyes and pushed against them, then pinched the bridge of his nose.
Hardy stood and thanked him for his time. Farris got up from his chair, shook hands over the desk and apologized again. He wasn’t himself. Sorry. Thanks for coming by.
Hardy turned back at the door. Farris had sat back down in his chair behind the wide expanse of the oak desk. He was staring out again into the evening shadow cast over the lawns and pine trees, the shade now reaching to his no-view window – a statue of grief.
The flight was on Japan Airlines at eight-fifteen.
It was four-fifteen, far too early to leave, yet she had phoned for the cab. What was she thinking of? May knew she would go mad sitting out at the airport for three hours, worrying that someone would stop her, knowing that she had to leave here, that this place, maybe America itself, was over for her.
Her bags were by the front door. She had decided to pack the Lennons, and the foyer looked bare without them. The sun shone in through the turret windows, which she’d opened due to the heat. The heat made her feel as though in some ways she was leaving a place she’d never been.
She wore a dark blue linen suit with dark hose, not the perfect outfit for this weather, but she thought it made her look more businesslike. Her hair was in a tight bun, her most severe look. She didn’t want people coming up and talking to her.
When the doorbell rang, she was surprised. Normally, the drivers would honk out on the street. Nevertheless, she determined that she would tell the man she’d made a mistake; he could come back later if he wanted the fare.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. Through the peephole, his looks scared her – a light-skinned black man with a nasty-looking scar through his lips, top to bottom. On the other hand, she wanted someone who wouldn’t talk to her and this man looked like that type. She opened the door.
She was looking at a badge of some kind, the man identifying himself as Inspector Abe Glitsky of the San Francisco Police, Homicide. She stepped back as he asked if she was May Shintaka. ‘May I come in?’ He sounded polite enough.
‘Certainly.’
He stood in the foyer. There was nothing she could do to keep him from noting the newly empty walls, obviously where the Lennons had been taken down. ‘I’m here about Owen Nash.’
A nod. She turned and walked back into the living room. Now she was really hot and she took off her coat, draping it across the arm of the couch. She went to the turret window and heard the honk of the cab down below.
The sergeant took a few steps into the room, but stopped near the foyer. ‘Your shoes,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’ She motioned to a long, polished and ridged board that began next to the door. Her own pair of dark-blue pumps were already resting over the ridge.
Abe stepped out of his wing tips and placed them on the board. ‘Were you planning on going somewhere?’ He motioned to the bags in the hallway.
She was coming back across the room. He seemed to fill up where he stood even more than Owen had, and Owen was a big man, had been a big man. ‘That’s my cab down there now,’ she said. ‘But it’s too early anyway. I should tell him.’
Abe was nervous about letting her go down, but she’d left her bags as well as the jacket of her suit. She didn’t take a purse. If she got in the cab, he’d be able to call the dispatcher and possibly stop her before she’d gone a mile.
The advantage was his now. She had invited him into her apartment. He hadn’t needed to show a warrant, which in any event he didn’t have.
As soon as he’d left Hardy, he decided he had to do some police work. He had the phone company run a reverse list on May’s phone number and got her address, which was on his way home. He’d called back Elizabeth Pullios, but she was out with a witness and wasn’t due to return to her office until Monday. He finished up his paperwork on the Nash incident report, grabbed an afternoon cup of tea and some peanut M &Ms downstairs, then went upstairs to the jail and interviewed a snitch who supposedly knew the name of the shooter in last weekend’s drive-by. The information was worth checking, so he scheduled a videotape session for Monday.
Back at his desk, now getting on four o’clock, he called records and got a registration on the Beretta. The gun belonged to May Shintaka.
Nash’s autopsy showed that the bullets that killed him were.25 caliber, and Glitsky figured he didn’t have to wait for the formal Ballistics report. He had her address, and for the moment at least, May Shinn was ‘it.’
She didn’t hop in the cab and make a run for it. He was standing in the turret, watching her say something into the passenger window. After she stepped back, the cab took off with a squeal of rubber.
Glitsky watched her close the door to the apartment, gently, holding the knob with one hand and fitting the door into the sill with the other, the way mothers sometimes did when their children were sleeping in the room they were closing off. Seeing her dark blue, low-heeled pumps and the tailored suit, he had to remind himself that according to all the information he had, this woman was a prostitute.
She was out of the shoes, then, turning away from the door. She came back into the living room. He found he couldn’t make a guess as to her age and hit it within a decade. She could be anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five. She had, he thought, a very unusual face, the bones clearly defined, the skin smooth and stretched tight with the hair pulled back.
She walked over to the low couch, next to where she’d laid her jacket, and floated down onto it. She made some motion that he took to be an invitation to sit, which he did, feeling like a clod in his brown socks and his American sports coat.
‘Would you like some tea?’ she asked. ‘Please, take off your coat. It’s too warm.’
So far as Abe knew, he was the only male tea drinker on the force. He thought about declining, then realized he would enjoy watching May Shinn move around. ‘That would be nice,’ he said. He folded his coat over his end of the couch, thinking if she kept this up, he’d be stripped before long.
She walked into the kitchen, open from the living room, and he watched her back, the straight shoulders, tiny waist, womanly curve of her hips. Even barefoot, her ankles tapered, thin as a doe’s.
She poured from a bottle of Evian into a kettle. ‘Owen’s dead,’ she said.
‘Yes, ma’am. Somebody killed him.’
He kept watching her closely. She was taking down some cups, placing them on a tray. If her hands were shaking, the cups would betray her, but they didn’t. She stood by the stove, turning full to face him. ‘I read that.’
Glitsky sat forward on the couch, elbows on his knees. ‘The suitcases,’ he said. ‘You were going somewhere.’
‘Japan. On business,’ she added, spooning tea into the cups.
‘You have business over there?’
She nodded. ‘I buy art. I am a – a broker for different friends of mine.’
‘Do you go over there a lot?’
‘Sometimes, yes. It depends.’
Glitsky would have time to pursue that if he had to. He decided to move things along. ‘We found your gun on Mr Nash’s boat. On the Eloise.’
‘Yes, I kept it there.’
‘We’re reasonably certain it’s the gun that was used to kill him.’ She seemed to be waiting, immobilized. ‘When was the last time you saw him, Ms Shinn?’
She turned back to the stove, touched the side of the kettle with a finger and decided it wasn’t ready yet. ‘Friday night, no, Saturday morning, very early. He stayed here.’
‘In this apartment?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then where did he go from here?’
‘He said he was going sailing. He sailed many weekends.’
‘And did you go with him?’
‘Most times, yes. But not Saturday.’
‘Why was that?’
She tried the kettle again, nodded, then poured the two cups. She brought the tray over and set it on the low table in front of them. ‘He had another appointment.’
‘Did he tell you who it was with?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Or what it was about?’
‘He didn’t say. He only said it was clearing the way for us.’
‘What does that mean, clearing the way for you?’
‘I don’t know. I think he needed to be alone. To think it out.’ She seemed to be searching for words, although not the way a foreigner would. She appeared to be a native speaker of English, but there was a hesitation, a pause. It threw Abe off – he couldn’t decide when, if, she was editing, when she was telling the truth. ‘We were going to be married.’
‘You and Owen Nash were going to be married?’
‘Yes.’ Keeping it simple and unadorned. The best kind of lie, Abe thought. And this, he was sure, was a lie. Owen Nash, internationally acclaimed tycoon and business leader, intimate of presidents and kings, did not marry his professional and well-paid love slave. Period.
‘Had you set a date?’
‘No,’ she said. She picked up one of the teacups and held it a second, then put it back down. ‘It is still too hot,’ she said. ‘We only decided, finally, last Friday. It was my ring.’
‘The snake ring? The one on his hand?’
‘Yes, that one.’
‘Then you’ve known since Monday that he was dead?’ Or since Saturday when you shot him, he was thinking. ‘Why didn’t you call the police?’
She picked up the teacup again, perhaps stalling. ‘When it doesn’t burn the fingers, it can’t burn the mouth,’ she said. She handed him the cup.
It was strong, excellent green tea. Abe sipped it, not really understanding why you could drink hot tea on a hot day and feel cooler. ‘May, why didn’t you call us, the police?’
‘What could they do? He was already dead. I knew it was Owen. The rest didn’t matter. It was his fate.’
‘It wasn’t his natural fate, May. Somebody shot him.’
‘Monday I didn’t know that. I only knew it was Owen’s hand.’
‘What about today? Did you read the paper today? Or yesterday?’
‘Yes.’
Glitsky waited. ‘Just yes?’
May Shinn sipped at her own tea. Carefully she put the cup down. ‘What do you want me to say? My instinct, after all, was not to call the police. Whoever killed Owen will have to live with himself and that is punishment enough.’
Abe put his cup down and walked back to the turret window. Across the street was another apartment house, the mirror image of this one. A cable car clanged by below. The sun was still fairly high, slanting toward him. There wasn’t a cloud clear to the horizon.
From behind him. ‘Am I a suspect, Sergeant?’
Glitsky turned around. ‘Do you remember what you did last Saturday, during the day?’
‘An alibi, is that right? I am a suspect, then.’
‘It’s an open field at this point, but unless you have an alibi for Saturday, I’m afraid you’re in it. Did you kill him?’
Just say no, he thought, I didn’t do it. But she said, ‘I was here Saturday, all day.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes, alone. I was waiting for Owen to come back.’ A little short there, exasperated. Deny you did it, he thought again, just say the words. But she said, ‘I loved the man, Sergeant.’
‘Did you make any phone calls, order out for pizza? Did anybody see you?’
Finally it was getting to her. She sat on the front three inches of the couch, ramrod straight. ‘I got up late, around nine. Owen had left sometime around six. I took a long bath. I was nervous. Owen was doing something to make it so we could get married -deciding, I think, that he was going to go through with it. He thought best out on the water. I waited. I paced a lot. When he wasn’t back by dark, I went to bed. I couldn’t face anybody. I was crying. I thought he’d decided not to.’
Glitsky put his jacket over his knees. ‘I think you might want to put your trip on hold,’ he said. ‘And maybe see about retaining a lawyer.’
He thought about taking her downtown now, but knew that he’d be asking for repercussions if he did. It was premature. He really had no evidence. It had been a week since the gun had been fired, and even the most sophisticated laser analysis wouldn’t show powder on the hands after that long. What May had told him was plausible, though pretty unlikely, and there was still plenty of legwork to try and verify her alibi or not, maybe neighbors hearing her walking around and so forth. If she agreed to put off going to Japan, there wasn’t any risk of imminent flight, and he didn’t really have any probable cause.
Plus, she being Oriental and he being half black, he didn’t want to give anybody any ammunition to be able to accuse him of hassling her on racial grounds. She had invited him, without a warrant, into her apartment. It was bad luck to arrest somebody under those conditions. Now if she took flight, it would be a different story.
But she was standing, too. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I understand.’
Glitsky was picking up his shoes. ‘Can you get a refund on that ticket? If you can’t, we may be able to help you.’
She shook her head. ‘They should refund it. God knows I paid full price, they should.’
So she’d bought the ticket recently, Abe thought. Probably since last Saturday. He hesitated. Strike two and a half. Tough call, but he was still an invited guest in her house, and she’d promised to stay around. He’d really prefer to have an indictment before he decided to arrest somebody on a murder charge.
He thought he’d bring his suspicions to Hardy and Hardy could decide whether they wanted to try to persuade the grand jury. But he doubted there was enough yet. Two and a half strikes didn’t make an out.
He said goodbye and she closed the door, gently, behind him.
Abe didn’t love himself for it, but it was too close and he thought with a little patience he would at least not have to worry over the weekend. He pulled his Plymouth away from the curb and made a point of turning west at the corner under the turret window. He drove three blocks, turning north again on Van Ness, left on Geary and back up to Union. He parked at the far end of May’s block on her side of the street.
Even with the windows down, in the shade, it was hot. Fortunately, he didn’t have long to wait.
A cab pulled up in front of the corner apartment building and honked its horn twice. Glitsky waited as May came out of the building. He let the driver load her suitcases into the trunk, let May get settled into the back seat before he pulled out into the street.
As the cab rounded the first corner, Abe turned on his red light and hit his siren. The cab, directly in front of him, pulled over immediately.
Abe came up to the window and flashed his badge. The driver asked what he’d done; Abe had him get out of the car, then asked him where this fare had asked to be taken.
‘Down the airport,’ he said. ‘Goin’ to Japan at eight o’clock.‘
Glitsky thanked the man, then opened the back door and looked in at May. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid you’re under arrest.’
It was after five, but yesterday Hardy had gone home early after the beach, so today he felt compelled to check in after his visit with Farris instead of going directly home from the field. He parked under the freeway and stopped for a moment to admire the huge hole in the ground that now, after a year of political struggle, was the beginning of the new county jail.
Like everything else in San Francisco government, the decision to build a larger county jail had been arrived at after a fair and wide-ranging debate of other uses to which the alloted money should, in a perfect world, be put. Although the electorate had approved the bond measure that would provide the funds, the board of supervisors had at first leaned toward using this money to buy electronic bracelets to keep track of prisoners – Hardy grinned involuntarily whenever the thought crossed his mind – and using the remainder for AIDS research. This enlightened plan was discussed by the mayor, the board and various agencies for eleven months. Finally, over the threatened resignations of both Police Chief Dan Rigby and County Sheriff Herbert Montoya, the jail had been approved.
Hardy gazed down into the hole as the last of the workmen were wrapping it up for the day. He had a vision of five gang members in an old Ford cruising out to one of the projects to shoot whoever might be standing around, each of them wearing a Captain Video wrist bracelet to keep him from committing crimes because, see, if the cops knew where you were at all times, then it would be the same as being in jail, wouldn’t it?
The first time he’d seen her she’d had mascara running down her face, hair witched out in shanks, so Hardy didn’t immediately recognize Celine Nash, who was coming out of the coroner’s office, on Hardy’s left, thirty feet in front of him.
The ashen hair – or was it blonde? – was thick and combed straight back, to just below her shoulders, looking like it had been professionally done about ten minutes before. She wore a peacock-blue leotard on top that disappeared into a pair of designer blue jeans, cinched at the waist with a red scarf. Watching the body approach him from the side, he was almost preternaturally aware of its substance, the solid thereness of a splendid female -the movement almost feline, the rock of hip and jounce of breast. He stopped breathing.
Then she turned toward him, and he recognized her.
‘Ms Nash?’ he said.
She was still ten feet away when she halted. Hardy introduced himself again, coming up to her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘there’s been so many…’ She let it trail off. ‘Were you with the coroner?’
Hardy explained his connection, that he would be handling the case when it got to the district attorney. ‘I just got back from seeing Ken Farris. He told me you might be up here. He’s pretty broken up.’
‘I imagine he is.’ Her eyes were light blue, almost gray. He thought he might as well be invisible – the eyes looked past him, then came back to him, waiting.
‘I’m sorry about your father,’ he said, meaning it.
She nodded, without any time for him, or simply lost inside herself.
‘Well, I’m keeping you.’ He took a step and she touched the sleeve of his jacket, leaving her hand there, her eyes following an instant later.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s all this keeping up appearances.’
Her hand was like a brand on his lower arm – he felt it through the sleeve of his coat, a grip like steel. He caught her eyes, still distant; her face a mask. He wondered if she might be in some kind of shock.
‘Are you all right?’
She took a deep breath, then seemed to realize she had his arm. A flush began at the top of her leotard. She let go of Hardy and brought her hand to her neck, embarrassed. ‘It’s one of the main traumas, death of a parent,’ she said. ‘I guess I’m not prepared for it.’
‘I don’t think we get prepared for it,’ Hardy said. ‘That’s the point.’
‘I do things… I don’t know why.’ Letting go of her neck, she brought the palm of her hand down across her breasts. The flush was still on her chest. ‘Like I’m just going through motions, you know? Doing what has to be done, but all this other stuff is going on inside me.’
‘Would you like to take a break? Come up to the office? Go get a drink somewhere?’
‘I don’t drink, but it would be nice if…’
‘We can go to my office then.’
‘No, you go ahead. I’ll just… well, we could go to a bar, thanks. I could use the company.’
Lou the Greek’s would not have been an inspired choice under these conditions.
They were sitting on high stools around a small raised table at the front window of Sophie’s, which after eight turned into a dinner club for the young and hip. But two blocks north of the Hall, if you wanted a quiet short one after work it wasn’t a bad spot before the scene came alive.
Celine wore expensive Italian sandals and no socks. She crossed her legs on the high stool, showing off the pedicure, the toenails a light pink, the skin between her ankle and her jeans honey-toned – warm and smooth. She watched Hardy take the first sip of his Irish whiskey.
On the way over, in the warm dusk, she had again taken his arm. They hadn’t said ten words. Now she said, ‘Thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘For taking this time, that’s all.’
He didn’t know what to say. He lifted his drink, clicked it against her glass of club soda and brought it to his lips. He found it hard to believe that two days before he’d been around this woman and had no reaction. He felt pretty sure it wasn’t anything she was doing purposely, but he was acutely conscious of everywhere her skin showed – at her feet, above the leotard on her chest, her arms and neck. But why not? It had been a broiling day. He kind of wished he could be sitting there wearing a tank top, instead of his shirt and tie. He’d folded his coat over another stool at the table. ‘I’ve got time,’ he said at last.
‘That’s all I’ve got now, it seems.’
‘It’s rough, isn’t it?’
Now her eyes met his. ‘What I was saying before -that’s the hardest part. The stuff going on inside.’
‘I know,’ Hardy said. He couldn’t exactly say why, but he found himself telling her how after his son Michael had died by falling out of his crib, Hardy had made the decision that he would be strong and deal with it, the way adults dealt with things, right?
‘It didn’t work?’
‘Oh, I made it maybe two months. You know, go to work, come home, eat, drink, wake up, do it again.’ Hardy paused, remembering. ‘You’re not married, are you?’
‘No. I was once.’
‘I don’t know if it’s better or not, having someone there. It broke me and my wife up.’
Celine didn’t say anything for a long time. The music in Sophie’s changed, or at least Hardy became aware of it -some automatic stuff that he hated. The sun was almost down, hitting the tops of the taller buildings north of Market and a few up on Nob Hill.
‘I almost wish there were somebody to break up with,’ she said at last. ‘Take it out on somebody else. But Daddy was my only family, so now what?’ She tipped her glass and found it empty. ‘Do you think I could have a drink now? Something with gin in it?’
At the bar, Hardy ordered himself a second Bushmills and Celine a Bombay on the rocks. The bartender poured a three and a half count, a solid shot, close to a double. Hardy tipped him two bucks and asked him if he could lose the noise on the speakers.
Celine sipped at the gin and made a face. ‘I haven’t had a drink in a couple of years,’ she said. ‘Daddy didn’t like me to drink too much.’
‘He didn’t too much like you to drink or he didn’t like you to drink too much?’
She smiled, small and tentative, but there it was. ‘Both, I think.’ Her eyes settled on him again. ‘Sometimes I’d get a little out of control. You couldn’t get a little out of control around Daddy.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if the daughter of Owen Nash is not in control, that means he’s not in control of me.’ She took another sip of the gin, and this time it went down smoothly. ‘And if Owen Nash is in the picture, he’s in control.’
‘He was that way?’
‘God, what am I saying? I loved my father. I just miss him. I’m so mad at him.’
‘It’s okay,’ Hardy said. ‘It happens.’
‘He was just such a… I mean, I was his only family, too, so it made sense he wanted me to be a good reflection of him.’
‘He saw you as his reflection?’
She shook her head, putting more movement in it. ‘No, not exactly, you know what I mean.’ She put her hand over his on the small table. ‘He wanted what was best for me… always.’
‘And that got to be a burden?’
‘Sometimes,’ she admitted. She took a drink. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t get so worked up.’
Hardy found himself covering her hand now. ‘Celine, look. This is one time you should be allowed to get worked up. You can let it go once in a while or it’ll come out all at once, and you don’t want that.’
‘But it wasn’t so much of a burden. Look at all the good it’s done me. I’m serious. Stuff I never would have done without Daddy.’
‘I believe you.’
She shook her head. ‘He was just always so hard. Even when he was good, he was hard. He pushed people – I’m surprised Ken Farris didn’t tell you. I mean, look at us, we’re perfect examples. But it was worth it for what you got out of it.’
‘Which was what?’
She took her hand away and Hardy thought he’d offended her. ‘The main thing was being close to him. You got to be close to Daddy, which was the most alive you could be.’
Hardy swirled his drink in the bottom of his glass. Outside, it was full dusk. A couple more people had come into Sophie’s. ‘You know what I think?’ he said. ‘I think you’re allowed to have some mixed feelings right now. I wouldn’t worry about it.’
Celine put her hand back over Hardy’s. ‘I’m sorry, I think I feel this gin already.’
‘You want some cheap advice? Go get a bottle of it, find somebody you can talk to and drink half of it. There’s nothing more natural than being mad at somebody close when they die.’
‘I can’t talk to anybody,’ she said. ‘Not about Daddy.’
‘You’ve just been talking about him to me for a half hour.’
She tightened her hand over his one last time, then released it. ‘You’re the D.A. This isn’t personal for you. It’s not the same thing.’
‘It’s personal enough for me. This is my job, my case.’
‘But that’s what it is, a case.’
‘It’s also that, Celine. Somebody killed your father.’
‘And maybe it was me, right?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘You’re investigating the murder, and now you get me to tell you I’m mad at him -’
‘Celine
‘Well, I was down in Santa Cruz the whole weekend. I was staying in a house with three of my friends. I couldn’t have been up here…’
Hardy stood up and moved close in to her, pulling her head tight against him. The gin was hitting her, the panic on the rise as it loosened her up. ‘Stop it,’ he whispered. ‘Stop.’
He felt her breathing slow down. A bare arm came up to his shoulder and held him, pulled him down to her. A second passed. Five. Her grip relaxed and he lifted himself away from her. Her blue-gray eyes had teared up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m a mess.’
‘You’re okay,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’ She waited meekly by the door while he grabbed his coat, then took her arm. They walked out into the warm early night.
On the way back to the Hall, she told him about Owen’s Saturday appointment on the Eloise with May Shinn.
‘I know,’ Hardy said. ‘We’re looking into that.’ He considered telling her about everything they’d found on board, but there was still police work to be done there, and all of that could wait. What Celine needed was some understanding and a little time to get used to her father having been murdered. Hardy didn’t think an update on the investigation would do a thing for her piece of mind.
They got to her car – a silver BMW 350i – and she hugged Hardy briefly, apologizing again for her ‘scene.’ She told him he was a good man, then she was in her car, leaving him with the faint scent of gin, a memory of her body against his and the feeling that, without ever meaning to, he’d done something terribly wrong.
They were having pizza in the reporters’ room on the third floor of the Hall of Justice, the same floor that contained the offices of the district attorney.
The room, befitting the esteem with which the police held the medium of print journalism, wasn’t much. There was a green blackboard that kept up a running total of murders in San Francisco thus far that year (sixty-eight). There was a bulletin board tacked three deep with Christmas cards the press guys had received from their friends in the building, as well as the jails some of them had gone to reside in. The surface area of all three desks combined did not equal the expanse of oak on Ken Farris’s desk in South San Francisco. There was also an old-fashioned school desk. Jeff Elliot sat in that one.
It wasn’t bad pizza. Anchovies, pepperoni, sausage and mushroom. Cass Weinberg, an attractive gay woman of about thirty, had ordered it. She was with the Bay Guardian and didn’t have much going on until later that Friday night, so she thought she’d bring in an extra large and schmooze with whoever might be hanging. Holding down the second ‘big’ desk was Oscar Franco from the Spanish-language La Hora. Then there was Jim Blanchard from the Oakland Tribune, who’d been worried for the past eighteen months about his job ending when the paper went bankrupt.
‘My theory,’ he was saying, ‘is that Elliot here did the guy himself. Otherwise how’s he gonna get a story this good.’
Cass picked it up. ‘You used to be a sailor, didn’t you? Didn’t you tell me that? In college?’
‘He did,’ Blanchard said. ‘At college, in Lake Superior.’
This was true. Before the multiple sclerosis had kicked in, Elliot had loved to sail, spent his summers under the canvas. He’d covered the America’s Cup for his high-school newspaper as a special project. ‘Not in Lake Superior, on Lake Superior, anchovy breath,’ he said.
‘In, on, doesn’t matter. He finds out where Nash keeps his boat, scams his way aboard and kills the guy,’
‘Then I jump overboard and hand-feed his hand to the shark.’
Blanchard popped pizza. ‘Exactly. That’s the part that took guts.’
Cass was judicious. ‘It could have happened. People nowadays do anything to get famous.’
Jeff was in heaven. He would take all the razzing they were going to give him. He was one of them now.
Oscar Franco rolled his bassett eyes around the room. ‘How long you guys been in the business an’ nobody even noticed the really big story today? Just me.‘
Cass looked at Blanchard. ‘That’s the longest sentence he’s ever said, isn’t it?’
‘You laugh,’ Franco said. The big story is in Department Twenty-seven on the Charles Hendrix sting. Fowler threw out the case.‘
‘Oh boy.’ Blanchard sat straight up.
‘That man is a mensch,’ Cass said.
‘What?’ Jeff Elliot didn’t like to miss a big story, no matter whose it was. ‘Judge Fowler? What did he do?’
Oscar explained it to him. Cass and Blanchard sat listening for a moment, then both of them asked him to slow up and start again while they took a few notes. Owen Nash was a good story, but this thing with Fowler might be the opening sally in a protracted war.
They were still into it when Jeff saw the cop – Glitsky, that was it – who’d been at the coroner’s the night before, going towards the elevator. He left his pizza on the small desk, grabbed his crutches and said he had to run, hoping he’d catch the guy before the elevator got to the third floor.
Glitsky wasn’t happy in the first place about having to stay around late on a Friday night booking somebody for murder, writing up a report on his conversation with her, the reasons for his arrest when there wasn’t the hint of an indictment. But more, he’d finished all that, closing in on eight o’clock, still a chance to get out and have a nice dinner with Flo, when he went to his car downstairs and found out that, new tune-up or not, it wouldn’t start.
‘Officer.’ Now there was this reporter again.
The elevators weren’t setting any land speed records and the temperature in the hallway was over eighty degrees.
Elliot came right up next to him. ‘Excuse me, Officer,’ he repeated.
Glitsky corrected him. ‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘I look like I’m wearing a uniform?’
‘Sorry. Sergeant. We met last night, briefly.’ Jeff introduced himself again. ‘At the coroner’s. Owen Nash.’
‘That’s right.’
Elliot pushed on. ‘Well, we’re on the third floor. I thought you might be seeing the D.A. about that, about something breaking?’
The one elevator in service after business hours arrived with a small ding. Glitsky stepped in and Elliot stuck with him. ‘I just did an hour-and-a-halfs worth of IRs upstairs.’
‘So something’s happening?’
Jeff thought this was a pretty scary man. ‘Something’s always happening,’ he said. ‘That’s why there’s time – it keeps everything from happening at once.’
The elevator doors closed – finally. ‘As to the third floor, that’s where they give out keys to city vehicles, and my goddamn Plymouth has quit on me again, and all the other cars are out for the weekend, so I’m taking a cab home.’ Elliot didn’t know it, but Glitsky swore about as often as he laughed out loud, maybe twice a year.
‘Where do you live?’ Jeff didn’t miss a beat, and though he’d been planning on stopping back in at his office, he said, ‘I’m heading home now, I could drop you off.’
Glitsky said he lived out on Lake, and Jeff only fibbed slightly, saying it was right on his way. The sergeant thawed a little. ‘That’d be nice. Where are you parked?’
They had reached the ground floor and the door opened, hitting them with a welcome shot of cooler air. ‘First slot out the back.’
‘You’re lucky,’ Abe said.
Jeff grinned his winning grin. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Handicapped.’
Except for the green gauzy glow of the fish tank, the lights were out. The bedroom window, facing east to the city’s skyline, was wide open, but no air moved. Hardy’s wife was curled against him spoon fashion, and he was inside her, holding her to him at the waist. They were both sweating, at it now a long time, Hardy wanting to prove something.
‘Diz.’
He shushed her, trying not to hear her and break his own spell. He’d started with his eyes closed, she coming to him, feeling a distance there after the quiet dinner, the brooding in the living room.
‘Diz.’
He didn’t want to hear her and buried his mouth into the back of her neck, under her hair. When he opened his eyes, he could make out the shape of her back in the dim light. Only her back. Any back. Anyone’s he wanted it to be.
But he was closing in on it now, feeling the thrust of her – wanting to help him even if she was ready to quit, reaching down for him, arching herself backward. He pulled at her waist, up against him now, feeling the air now between them, closing the distance, hard up in her wetness. Harder then, pounding, losing her as he felt himself starting, finding it again and driving in again and again and again.
It was Celine’s back. An angry Celine. And Hardy for some reason furious too, feeling her grip, the tight grip she had on him. And now he heard her, crying out, after she thought it was over, liking it rough, and the sound of her cry starting something at the base of his backbone, moving up.
He slapped her against him, as hard as he could, knowing he wasn’t hurting her, crying out himself, his hands now up against Celine’s breasts that were somehow wet, crushing them to her, crushing himself against Frannie’s back, she pumping him, the sweet agony…
Finished now, he lay on his back, breathing hard. He felt the sweat cooling, the lightest warm breeze through the window. Frannie was on her side, leaning on her elbow, all up against him. She kissed his cheek. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Sorry.’
She kissed him again. ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. I liked that.’
He pulled her to him and kissed her. She put her head down against his shoulder and started breathing regularly. In one minute she was asleep. Hardy lay with his eyes open, listening to the gurgling of the fish tank for almost an hour.
He woke up refreshed, his devils exorcised by spent lust and deep sleep. In the light of day, he thought it hadn’t done him any harm to fantasize – it was natural once in a while. No need to whip himself over it.
Now he wasn’t fantasizing. Frannie was in his here and now. He was cooking breakfast – french toast and sausages – in his black cast-iron pan, the only artifact he’d taken from his time with Jane. In the decade he’d lived alone, that pan had been one of the inviolate certainties in his world. He cleaned the pan with salt and paper towels, no water, no soap. After every use, he put a drop or two of oil in it and rubbed it in. No food stuck to that pan. It was a joy.
Taking a bite of a sausage link, he turned a piece of sliced sourdough bread over in the mixture of egg, milk and cinnamon – dripping it only for a second so it wouldn’t get soggy – and forked it into the pan, where it hit with a satisfying hiss. Outside, the sun had come up hot again. Maybe they’d get an entire weekend of summer this year.
Frannie was dressed in hiking boots with white socks, khaki shorts and a Giants t-shirt, ready for the historical expedition to Martinez that she, Hardy and Moses had planned for the day. They were going to track down the elusive origin of the martini.
‘Or is it the origin of the elusive martini?’ Moses had asked. This had been last Wednesday night at Yet Wan.
‘The martini itself is not elusive,’ Hardy had replied.
‘But the ideal martini can be elusive.’ Two bartenders, Jesus, finally coming to an agreement. Frannie was smiling, remembering. She came back down the hall from the front door with the morning newspaper and laid it on the table in front of Rebecca, who was finger-painting with baby food on the tray of her high chair. Standing, opening to the front page, she grabbed a sausage and took the mug of coffee Hardy handed her,
‘This Jeffrey Elliot’s turning into a daily feature.’ Hardy came over and stood with his arm around her.
SUSPECT ARRESTED IN OWEN NASH MURDER
by Jeffrey Elliot
Chronicle Staff Writer
Police yesterday arrested May Shinn, the alleged mistress of Owen Nash, for the murder of the local financier. According to the arresting officer, Sergeant Abraham Glitsky, Ms Shinn had purchased a ticket to Japan after the discovery of Nash’s body on Thursday on a beach in Pacifica, and was attempting to leave the jurisdiction after she had agreed to remain in the city.
Although Glitsky refused to go into much detail regarding the evidence collected thus far, he did acknowledge that a search of Owen Nash’s sailboat, the Eloise, had revealed traces of blood and a.25-caliber Beretta handgun registered to Ms Shinn. Additionally, a slug, imbedded in the wall of the boat, was recovered. The gun had been fired twice, and Nash’s body contained two wounds. The Ballistics department has not yet conclusively identified the gun as the murder weapon, although Glitsky conceded he thought the possibility ‘likely.’
The article picked up on the back page, but Hardy was already at the telephone. ‘That’s what I like,’ he said, ‘when I follow the comings and goings of my dear friends and professional colleagues by reading about them in the newspaper.’
‘What are you eating?’ Glitsky asked. ‘It sounds great.’
Hardy swallowed his sausage. ‘You forgot my phone number, Abe. I’ll get it for you.’
‘On Friday night? Come on. I got done talking to Elliot around nine-thirty, ten. I thought I’d call you this morning.’
‘What were you doing talking to Elliot?’
‘My car went out again. He was at the Hall. He gave me a lift home.’
‘What a guy,’ Hardy said.
‘He seems like a good kid.’
‘I know he does. Nicest guy in the world. Is she out of jail?’
‘I doubt it. I guess it depends who she calls. A good lawyer might find a judge to set some bail, get her out today.’
‘And when do I talk to her? Did she do it?’
After a minute Glitsky answered. ‘I don’t know. She might have. No alibi. It’s her gun. She was getting out of Dodge, and she bought her ticket to Japan after Nash was identified, after the paper had it.’
‘No alibi?’
‘The famous I-was-home-alone-all-day. When’s the last time you were home alone all day, no phone calls, no nothing? I didn’t want her going to Japan.’
‘You think I ought to go down and see her?’
‘Hey!’ Frannie gave him the eye. ‘Martinez,’ she whispered. ‘The elusive martini, remember?’
In the normal course of events, there was a skeleton staff at the Hall on weekends. The D.A.‘s office was officially closed. Courtrooms were not in use. Of course, there was still police work and people getting into and out of jail, which occupied the top floors until the new one in the back lot was completed. A clerk was on duty twenty-four hours a day to let people out if a bondsman met bail. Defense attorneys came and went. There were visitors.
Hardy had parked in his usual spot under the freeway, promising an unhappy Frannie he’d be home by noon for their foray into history. You didn’t want to drink martinis before noon anyway, he had told her. She told him she wasn’t going to drink martinis for seven or so months, and in any event, she had gone along with this idea just to be with her husband, brother and daughter and have a relaxing time together, which seemed to be becoming less of a priority for him day by day.
You thought you had trained yourself. You’d traveled far enough along your own rocky path to some inner peace that you had come to believe you couldn’t go back -events would never control you again.
Then they took your clothes from you. They gave you a yellow gown that smelled like Lysol and put you in a small barred room with a sullen young black woman and a toilet with no seat, the whole place, beneath the disinfectant, smelling like a sewer.
You threw away your phone calls on the man who’d been your lover’s attorney. ‘You ever need help – I mean real help – and I’m not around, you just call on the Wheel. He’s your man.’ He would come down and get her out. He was a lawyer and knew about these things. But he wasn’t at the number Owen had given her. No one had answered, and now there was no one to call and she was alone.
You spent the night in fear, waking up sweating in the still heat, the smell of yourself, of the other woman who didn’t talk, who sat on her mattress with her back against the wall. A clanging wake-up and a meal of cold powdered eggs, the regimented shower, the indifference of the women guards.
She swore to herself that she would not let them take her so easily, but it was difficult finding a mechanism to deal with it, to keep the loss of herself under control. She felt her will eroding, and she knew that’s what they wanted. To turn her into a victim again.
She’d really believed she was through with that for good. If Owen had done anything for her, it was that. She would not be a victim. That was something she could control.
She sat cross-legged on her mattress and closed her eyes. If she did not have a physical shrine, she would create one inside herself, even here. She had been this close to despair before. It was the day she had met Owen…
Alone in a darkened corner at Nissho, an exclusive Japanese restaurant near the Miyako Hotel in Japan-town, a thick winter fog out the windows, she had sat contemplating her death. She would use seconal and alcohol, starting with a small bottle of sake. After lunch she would walk slowly back up to her apartment and sit by her window, watching the fog, and drink the bottle of Meursault. She would disrobe and take a hot bath. She would swallow the pills and draw the clean silk sheets up over her naked body. And she would go to sleep.
That was where life, after thirty-four years, had led her.
She could not have said precisely where she had failed, or which failure had marked her Rubicon. Should she have tried harder with her family? Tried to communicate more and break the icy bonds of reserve? There had been two sisters and a brother, living with her parents in a square and empty house under the flight path to Moffatt Field in Sunnyvale. Passive. ‘Remember, we are Japanese.’ Her father never able to get over his internment in Arizona during World War II, when he was a boy, snatched with his whole family from his home. The excuse for his whole life – ‘We will never belong.’ Harboring the hatred and disappointment in who he was, who they all were, doling it out to her mother, to his children, to May.
Starting college at Berkeley, glad to be rid of them, letting the family fall away. Running out of money in the first semester, taking a job selling shoes to gaijin with their huge feet; marrying Sam Hoshida, ten years older than she, because his landscape work got her out of the shoe store.
Another semester in college then, with Sam supporting her. Another year with a man who grew quiet and bitter as he came to know she was using him. Wearing better clothes, becoming conscious of her beauty, other men making her aware of it.
There was a teaching assistant, then, a half-Japanese, Phil Oshida, for whom she left Sam, for love. They married and she miscarried three times in two years; she could never have children. He hated her for that, felt pity and hate, trying to disguise them as love. She thought that was where the big fall had begun – when the only person she’d ever let herself care for gave up on her.
She got her meaningless degree in political science and her second divorce. She was a shell, empty and used up at twenty-four.
The first time it happened, she hadn’t planned it. She had gone to Hawaii for a one-week vacation, her first vacation from her meaningless job at the Bank of America. Of course, as always, she was on a budget – the package was a round-trip ticket, hotel and one meal a day. She let a student on Christmas break from USC buy her an ice cream near the beach. He was big and built and blond and all-American and told her he liked her bathing suit. Could he buy her dinner? He had lots of money. His parents lived on Hilo. Next day he asked her if she’d like to go with him over to his parents’ house. He was straightforward. He was going back to school in a week, he had a girlfriend, so no commitments, but they could have a good time.
No actual money changed hands, although he did pay for her rebooked return flight. But the experience gave her the idea of what could be done. She quit her job at the Bank of America, shortened her name to Shinn, and started to make a good living, alone, discreetly.
But there she was at Nissho’s, still a shell, carrying her father’s victim-load around with her. Men had been doing what they wanted with her for ten years. She couldn’t be further debased or devalued. She was still in demand, but there was no May Shintaka anymore, not even, she thought, much of a May Shinn, and she didn’t really care. Her usefulness, if she’d ever had any, was at an end.
Then Owen Nash had walked to her table. He sat down, uninvited. She raised her eyes to look at him. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you as alone as you look?’
Of the many men she had known, she recognized something in Owen Nash that she thought she had given up on.
In her business – it was inevitable – you got to thinking all men were the same, or similar enough that the small differences didn’t matter.
Here was a man, though, who on first meeting caught you in an aura, swept you up in it. He stood over her, looking down, giving off a sense of power, with a massive, muscular torso, a square face and eyes that vibrated with life and, half-hidden, suffering…
She stared at him, not wanting to acknowledge what she intuitively felt – that this man already knew her, knew what she was feeling. ‘Are you as lonely as you look?’ An old pickup line. But this, she felt, wasn’t just that. He was telling her that they were connected, somehow. Suddenly, with nothing else holding her to her meaningless life, she wanted to know how the connection worked and what it might mean.
He had reserved the private room in the back, but had been watching her from the kitchen, where he was helping prepare the side dishes to accompany his main course of fugu, a blowfish delicacy in Japan that killed you if you prepared it wrong.
After sharing the meal, they both waited for the slight numbness on the tongue. Owen had brought a bottle of aged Suntory whisky and they sipped it neat out of the sake cups.
During the meal, he had gotten back some of what she would come to know as his usual garrulous persona. Now he ran with it, laughing, loud in the tiny room, emptying his sake cup.
‘I think you’re unhappy,’ she said. ‘If the fish had been wrong, it could have poisoned you.’
He drank his whiskey. ‘There’s risk in everything. You do what you need to -’
‘And you need to risk death? Why? Someone like you?’
They were alone in the room, sitting on the floor. The table had been cleared – only the Suntory bottle and the two cups were left on the polished teak.
‘It’s a game,’ he said, not smiling. ‘It’s something I do, that’s all.’
She shook her head. This wasn’t any game for him. ‘I think that’s why you came over and talked to me. You recognized me. I am like you.’
She told him she wanted him to follow her – she would show him what wanting to die was really like. They walked twenty blocks in the deep fog to her apartment. He followed her up the stairs. In the foyer, she stepped out of her shoes and went into the bathroom, where she turned on the bath. She went to the refrigerator and got out the wine, opened it. It was as though he weren’t there.
She went to her dresser and took off her earrings, her necklace. Unbuttoning the black silk blouse, she felt him moving up close behind her, but he didn’t touch her, didn’t speak. That was the understanding. She continued to disrobe – her brassiere, her slacks, the rest.
She finished the first glass of wine in a gulp and poured herself a second, which she brought to the bathroom. The bath was ready, the mirror steamed. He sat on the toilet seat, watching her lather, occasionally sipping from the Suntory bottle he’d carried with him.
She stood and rinsed under a hot shower, then stepped out and over to the medicine cabinet, where she took down the prescription bottle and poured the pills, at least twenty of them, into her hand. She lifted her glass of wine, threw back her head and emptied her hand into her mouth.
Which is when Owen moved, knocking the glass out of her hand, smashing it to the tiles, grabbing her, his fingers in her mouth, forcing the pills out into the sink, the toilet, onto the floor.
That had been the beginning.
The shrine was gone in the clang of the bars, the door opening. ‘Shinn. D.A.’s here to see you. Move it.‘
Remember who you are, she told herself. You are not what they think you are.
It wasn’t quite eleven in the morning. Out the windows, through the bars, she saw the sun high in the sky.
The interview room was like a cell without toilet or bars. It was furnished with an old, pitted gray desk and three chairs. She sat down across from the man, casual in jeans and a rugby shirt. He introduced himself, Mr Hardy, and some woman he called a D.A. investigator. He would be taping this interview. He asked how they were treating her.
‘I need more phone calls,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be in here.’
She was not stupid. She was a citizen, and she wasn’t going to fall into the trap that had ensnared her father. She had to believe that there was another reason she was arrested – it was not because she was Japanese. She told Hardy about her attempted call to Ken Farris.
‘I could call Farris for you. He tried to call you several times last week, you know.’
‘I didn’t kill Owen Nash,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t say anything you didn’t want to hear repeated.’
‘Then why are you here?’
‘I thought you might want to tell me what happened. Maybe we could both get lucky.’
‘What happened when?’
The man shrugged. ‘Last night. The arrest. The last time you saw Owen Nash.’
‘Shouldn’t I have a lawyer?’
‘Absolutely. You have the right to one. You don’t have to say one word to me.’
But she found she wanted to explain, to talk. ‘I’m not sure I even understand why I’m here.’
‘I think trying to leave the country was a bad idea.’
‘But I knew -’ She stopped herself. ‘Don’t you see?’
‘See what?’
She picked her words carefully, slowly. ‘When I saw my name in the paper, I knew I’d be suspected.’
‘Were you out on the boat with him?’
‘No! I told the officer that, the one who arrested me.’
‘Then why would we suspect you?’
‘I’m Japanese.’ No, she told herself. That was her father’s answer. But it was too late to retract it now. ‘And it’s true,’ she said. ‘You do suspect me, with no reason. Who I am, what I have done for a living.’ She knew she should be quiet, wait for an attorney, but she couldn’t. The gun, too.‘
‘Your gun?’
She nodded. ‘I knew it was on the boat. That’s where I left it. I didn’t want it in my apartment. I couldn’t even bring myself to load it. Owen thought I was silly.’
‘So you kept it on the Eloise?’
‘In the desk, by the bed.’
The man frowned, something bothering him. ‘You knew it was there when you went out on Saturday?’
‘Yes, but -’
‘So you did go out on Saturday.’
‘No! I didn’t mean that, I meant when Owen went out. I knew it was there all the time. That’s where I kept it.’
‘Did anyone else know it was there?’
‘Well, Owen, of course.’ There was something else. She paused, not quite saying it. ‘Anyone could have.’
‘Anyone could have,’ he repeated.
‘Yes!’ She was starting to panic, to lose herself, and hoped it didn’t show in her voice. She forced herself to breathe calmly. ‘If it were me, why would I leave the gun on the boat after I shot him? Why wouldn’t I have thrown it overboard?’
‘I don’t know, May. Maybe you were in shock that you’d actually done it and reverted to habit, not thinking, putting the gun where it belonged. Why don’t you tell me?’
‘I loved Owen. I told that to the sergeant.’
‘You loved him.’ Flat, monotone. ‘Nobody else seems to think he was very lovable.’
‘Nobody else knew him.’
‘A lot of people knew him,’ he said.
The door to the room opened with a whoosh. ‘Just what the hell is going on in here?’
Hardy looked, then stood up. ‘Can I help you?’
The man wasn’t six feet tall. He had curly brown hair and sallow loose skin. His shabby dark suit was badly tailored and poorly pressed. There were tiny bloodstains on his white collar from shaving cuts.
Nevertheless, what he lacked in style he made up for in substance. His brown eyes were clear and carried authority. The anger seemed to spark off him. ‘Yeah, you can help me. You can tell me what this is all about!’
Hardy didn’t respond ideally on this onslaught. ‘Maybe you can tell me what it is to you!’
The two men glared at each other. The guard who had admitted the second man was still standing at the door; the woman investigator Hardy had brought along as a witness checked her fingernails. The guard asked, ‘You gentlemen have a problem with each other?’
The shorter man turned. ‘You know who I am?’
‘I don’t,’ Hardy said.
He was ignored. ‘I am representing this woman and she is being harassed by the district attorney -’
‘There is no harassment going on here -’
‘Save it for your appeal, which you’re going to need. To say nothing of the lawsuit.’
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m David Freeman, Ms Shintaka’s attorney, and you don’t belong here.’
Like everyone else in the business of practicing law from either side of the courtroom, Hardy knew of David Freeman, and his presence stopped him momentarily.
Freeman was a legend in the city, a world-class defense attorney in countless cases – and here was Dismas Hardy, novice prosecutor in a place he technically shouldn’t be. He didn’t know how there came to be a connection between May Shinn and David Freeman, but it was clear there was one now and it was hardly promising for Hardy’s chances.
‘How did you -’
Freeman cut him off. ‘Because fortunately for justice’s sake, some judges are available on weekends. Now you get the hell out of here, Counselor, or I swear to God I’ll move to have you disbarred.’
May spoke up. ‘But he wasn’t -’
Freeman held up an imperious hand. ‘Don’t say another word!’
Judge Andy Fowler watched his drive sail down the middle of the fairway, starting low and getting wings up into the clear blue, carrying in the warm, dry air. The ball finally dropped down, he estimated, at about two hundred and ten yards, bouncing and rolling another forty, leaving himself a short seven-iron to the pin.
Fowler picked up his tee with a swipe and walked to his cart, grinning. ‘The man is on his game.’ Gary Smythe was Fowler’s broker and, today, his match partner. They were playing best ball at $20 per hole and now, on the fourteenth, were up $80. Gary wasn’t yet thirty-five, a second-generation member of the Olympic Club.
The other two guys, both members of course, were father and son, Ben and Joe Wyeth from the real estate company of the same name. Ben Wyeth was close to Fowler’s age and looked ten years older. He teed up. ‘I think the judge here ought to rethink his twelve handicap.’ He swung and hit a decent drive out about two hundred yards with the roll, on the right side of the fairway. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is a proper drive for guys our age, Andy.’
They got in their carts and headed down the fairway. ‘You are playing some golf today,’ Gary said.
Andy was sucking on his tee. He wore a white baseball hat with a marlin on the crest, maroon slacks, a polo shirt. He followed the flight of a flock of swallows into one of the eucalyptus groves bordering the fairway. ‘I think golf must be God’s game,’ he said. ‘You get a day like this.’
‘If this is God’s game, he’s a sadist.’ Gary stopped the cart and got out to pick up his ball. As had been the case most of the afternoon, Andy’s ball was best.
Andy put his shot pin high, four feet to its left. Gary’s shot landed on the front fringe, bounced and almost hit the flagstick, then rolled twelve feet past. ‘Your ball again,’ Gary said.
As they waited on the green for Ben and Joe, Gary told Andy he was happy to see him feeling better. ‘Some of us were worried the last few months,’ he said. ‘You didn’t seem your old self.’
‘Ah, old man’s worries, that’s all.’ Andy lined up an imaginary putt. ‘You get lazy. You get a few problems, no worse than everybody else has, and you forget you can just take some action and make them go away. It’s just like golf, you sit too long and stare at that ball, pretty soon it’s making faces at you, and before you know it, hitting that ball becomes clean impossible. The thing to do is just take your shot. Let the chips fall. Pardon the mixed metaphor. At least then the game’s not playing you. Which is what I let creep up on me.’
‘Maybe you could let it creep back just a little, give us young guys a chance.’
Andy lined up another imaginary putt and put the ball in the hole. He looked up, grinning. ‘No quarter,’ he said. To the victor goes the spoils.‘
Hardy had had better weekends.
Historical Martinez turned out to be a bit of a dud. Since Moses and Hardy had practically lived at the Little Shamrock bar on 9th and Lincoln in San Francisco’s cool and breezy Sunset district for many years, an hour-and-a-half road trip to check out some small bars in another windy town was, at best, they decided, dumb.
They snagged a few not-so-elusive martinis – the gin first nagging at Hardy, then washing out the memory of the morning’s disaster with May Shinn and lawyer David Freeman – then Frannie had driven them all home just in time to find out Rebecca had developed roseola and a fever of 106 degrees, which was worth a trip to the emergency room.
When they got back at midnight Hardy had been too exhausted to return the calls of Art Drysdale or Abe Glitsky.
But on Sunday he wasn’t. He got an earful of rebuke from Art and was intrigued to learn from Glitsky, who’d worked yesterday, that Tom Waddell, the night guard at the Marina, had seen May leaving the place on Thursday night.
‘Probably coming back, realizing she’d left the gun.’
‘Did she have a key?’
‘That’s just it. It appeared she couldn’t get into the boat. Waddell was going to go help her when he finished whatever he was doing, but she had gone. Maybe that’s when she decided to buy the ticket to Japan. The timing fits.’
Hardy remembered that when he’d first gone to the Eloise, the boat had been left unlocked. May, knowing that, would have thought she could have just slipped aboard, taken the gun and disappeared with nothing left to link her to the murder.
‘And there’s another thing, maybe nothing, maybe a joke, but it could be the whole ballgame.’
Hardy waited.
‘I got a warrant for her suitcases and we found what looks like a handwritten will of Owen Nash’s, leaving her two million dollars.’
‘Is it real?’
‘We don’t know, we’re getting a sample of Nash’s handwriting. We haven’t even mentioned it to her yet, but let’s assume Nash just disappears and his body doesn’t show up on a beach. After he’s declared dead, May appears with a valid will.’
‘Nice retirement.’
‘The same thought occurred to me.’ A good cop following up leads, building a case that Hardy hoped he hadn’t already lost on a technicality.
Hardy spent most of the day inside worrying about Rebecca, giving her tepid baths every two or three hours. Frannie, as she did, hung tough, but he could tell it was a strain on her, to say nothing of his own feelings, memories of another life and another baby -one who hadn’t made it – chilling the warmth out of the evening.
A dinner of leftovers – cold spaghetti, soggy salad, stale bread. They were all in bed for the night before nine o’clock.
Family life with sick child.
‘Excuse me,’ Pullios said, ‘there is no issue here.’
‘Then I will take the folder and leave.’ It was nine-thirty on Monday morning and Hardy was, for the second time in a week, in District Attorney Christopher Locke’s sanctum sanctorum. With him, in the second chair before the D.A.‘s desk, was Elizabeth Pullios and, standing by the window, his back turned to the proceedings, Art Drysdale.
Pullios remained calm. ‘I am the homicide prosecutor here. What’s the issue?’
‘The issue is Art promised me this case.’ Hardy knew it sounded whiny, but it was the truth and had to be said.
‘Art was out of line there, Hardy.’ Locke could smile very nicely for the cameras, but he was not smiling now. He leaned forward, hands clasped before him. ‘Now, you listen. I appreciate your enthusiasm for your work, but we work in a hierarchy and a bureaucracy’ – he held up a hand, stopping Hardy’s reply. ‘I know, we all hate the word. But it’s a precise term and it applies to this office. Ms Pullios here has a fine record trying murder cases, and on Saturday’ – Locke pointed a finger – ‘you seriously jeopardized this investigation. The accused has an absolute right for an attorney to be present. You’re aware of that?’
‘I didn’t force her to say a word.’ ‘You shouldn’t have been there at all, is the point. Thank God you taped what you did get.’
Pullios swiveled on the leather seat of her chair. ‘Freeman could still make a case for procedural error.’
‘Shit.’ Hardy said.
‘I beg your pardon.’ If anyone was going to swear in Locke’s office, it was going to be him.
Hardy reflected on the better part of valor. ‘I don’t think he can make a case there.’
‘Regardless’ – Pullios was calm but firm – ’this should not be up for debate. I am a Homicide D.A., is that right, sir?‘
‘Of course.’
‘Art?’
‘Come on, Elizabeth.’
‘So I went up to Homicide and picked up a folder from Abe Glitsky, as I have done many times in the past. It happened, randomly, to be this Nash murder. There is a suspect in custody at this very moment, who was arrested while attempting to flee the jurisdiction. This is the kind of case I do.’ She wasn’t yelling. She didn’t even seem particularly excited. She had the cards.
Hardy gave it a last shot. ‘Elizabeth, look. I have put in some time on this thing. I found the hand. I’ve talked to the daughter, the victim’s lawyer and best friend. Now I’m not on the case. What’s that going to do to their confidence in this office?’
‘That’s irrelevant,’ Pullios said.
‘More than that,’ Locke, to whom public perception of the district attorney’s office was always the primary issue, spoke up, ‘it’s not for you two to haggle about. Hardy, you’ve made a small but real point there. I can see you think you’ve got a legitimate right to this case, but so does Elizabeth. So here’s what we do – you, Hardy, take second chair. Under Elizabeth’s direction you keep contact with people you’ve already interviewed and you keep her informed at every step. Every single step. When we bring this thing to trial, Elizabeth puts on the show and you get to watch a master perform close up.’ The D.A. crossed his hands on his desk and favored the room with his patented smile. ‘Now let’s cooperate and get this thing done. We’re on the same team here, as we all sometimes forget. Art, Hardy, thanks for bringing this to my attention. I’ve always got an open door. Thanks very much. Elizabeth, could you stay behind a minute?’
‘Talk about seeing a master perform close up.’
Drysdale was juggling in his office. ‘My good friend Chris Locke tries to make sure everybody wins.’
‘Win, my ass.’
The baseballs kept flying. ‘Pullios tries the case. You’re on it. My authority in giving you the case is upheld. The office looks good. Everybody wins.’
‘Who was it said “Another victory like this and we’re ruined”?’
‘Pyrrhus, I think.’
‘I’ll remember that.’ Hardy shook his head. ‘I can’t believe this. She doesn’t know anything about this case.’
Drysdale disagreed. ‘No, she knows, and I must say with some justification, that once a perp is arrested for whatever it might be, that perp is one guilty son of a bitch.’
‘How about innocent until proven guilty?’ Hardy felt silly even saying it out loud. He wasn’t sure he believed it anymore, after the tide of humanity that had washed across his desk in the past months, all of them – every one – guilty of something, even if it wasn’t what they were accused of. The temptation to get whoever it was for whatever they could, regardless of whether it was something they did, was something all the D.A.s faced. The best of them rose above it. Some didn’t find the exercise worthwhile.
That still didn’t make it a good argument for Drysdale. ‘Let’s tick it off,’ he said. ‘She had a sexual relationship with the guy. Okay, already we’re in most-likely-to-succeed territory. Two, what did Glitsky tell you this morning? She maybe benefits to the tune of a couple million dollars if the guy dies. This is a big number two. This is not insignificant.’
‘It may not even be true. And Elizabeth doesn’t know about it in any event.’
Drysdale kissed the air, a little clicking sound. ‘She will. Anyway, next, it’s her gun and a witness puts her at the crime scene and she doesn’t have an alibi for the day in question. Finally, she attempts to leave the country ten minutes after being warned to stay. It is not what I’d call farfetched to think she did it.’
‘I didn’t say she didn’t do it. I’m saying there’s no real evidence that she did, not yet.’
‘Fortunately, that’s the jury’s job.’
‘And Betsy’s.’
‘And yours.’ Drysdale raised a finger. ‘And I wouldn’t call her Betsy.’
‘Am I glad to be back working here?’
‘Is that a question? You’ve got your murder case, quicker than most.’
Hardy straightened up in the doorway. His name was being called over the hall loudspeaker. He had a telephone call. ‘Pyrrhus, right?’ he said, before turning into the hall.
The snitch was named Devon Latrice Wortherington, and he certainly seemed to be enjoying the moments of relative freedom away from his cell. Devon had been picked up carrying an unlicensed firearm and a half pound of rock cocaine the previous Thursday night, outside a bar near Hunter’s Point, and he had been in jail about twelve hours when suddenly he recalled his civic duty to assist the police if he knew anything that might help them in apprehending persons who had committed a crime. In this case a drive-by shooting that had left three people dead – including a small boy who reminded Glitsky of his son – and seven wounded.
He seemed to like Glitsky. Maybe he was just in a good mood. In any event, he couldn’t seem to shut up. ‘What kind of name is Glitsky?’ he asked while they were setting up the videotape for the interview. ‘I never knew no Glitsky.’
‘It’s Jewish,’ Abe said.
‘What you mean, Jewish?’
‘I mean it’s a Jewish name, Devon.’
‘Well, how you get a Jewish name?’
‘How’d you get the name Wortherington?’
‘From my father, man.’
‘Well…’
‘You telling me you got Glitsky from your father? How’d he get Glitsky?’
Abe was used to room-temp IQs. Still, he thought Devon might be close to the range where he wouldn’t be competent to stand trial. But he could be patient when it suited him, and now there wasn’t much else to do. ‘My father,’ he said, ‘got Glitsky from being Jewish.’
‘No shit? You shittin’ me?‘ Glitsky felt Devon eyeing him for some sign of duplicity. He kept a straight face.
‘We’re just about ready, Sergeant.’ The technician was a middle-aged woman of no looks and no humor. Maybe she dated the jail warden who’d accompanied Devon down and who now stood inside by the interview room’s door.
‘My father isn’t black,’ Abe said.
He saw Devon take it in, chew it around, get it down. ‘Hey, I get it. Your father is Jewish. I mean he is a righteous Hebe.’
Abe wondered about how his father Nat would feel about being called a righteous Hebe and decided he’d ask him the next time they were together. He sat down across the table from Devon and asked the first questions -name, age, place of birth.
‘Okay, Devon, let’s get to it. At about seven o’clock on the night of Sunday, June twenty-first, you were standing at the corner of Dedman Court’ – Glitsky loved the name – ‘and Cashmere Lane in Hunter’s Point, is that correct?’
Devon nodded, and Glitsky continued, running down his mental list of questions – establishing that Devon had been standing in a group of neighborhood people when a green Camaro drove up with two men in front and two in back. At the first sight of the car, someone at the corner yelled and a few people dropped to the ground. Devon had stayed up to see the barrels of guns poking out of the front and back windows. Another man appeared to be sitting in the backseat window, leveling a rifle or a shotgun over the roof of the car. ‘You have identified the shooter as Tremaine Wilson?’
‘Yeah, it was Wilson.’
Glitsky was wondering how Devon could have identified Wilson, since two other witnesses had said that the shooters had worn ski masks. ‘And he was firing from the passenger-side front window?’
‘Right.’
‘Did anything obstruct your view of him?’
‘No. He was only like twenty feet away. I seen him clear as I see you.’
‘I hear he was wearing something over his face.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, a ski-mask, a bandanna, something over his face?’
Devon stopped, his easy rhythm cut off. ‘It was Wilson,’ he said.
‘I’m not saying it wasn’t, Devon. I’m asking was there something covering his face.’
‘What difference that make?’
Glitsky nodded to the technician, and she stopped the videotape. Glitsky knew the tape recorder under the table was still going. ‘Okay, we’re off the machine, Devon. Was he wearing a mask or not?’
‘Hey, look. I’m telling you it was Wilson. I know it was Wilson. So I give him up and you let me go, that’s the deal.’
Glitsky shook his head. ‘The deal is, you give us some evidence we can use in court. He was wearing a mask, wasn’t he?’
Devon thought about it, figuring his chances, then shook his head, no. ‘No way, man. No mask.’
Glitsky sighed, then asked the technician to turn on the machine again. ‘Okay, Devon, for the record, was the shooter you’ve identified as Tremaine Wilson wearing anything over his face?’
‘I just told you no.’
‘Tell me again. Was the shooter wearing anything over his face?’
‘No.’
It was, at this point, no surprise. Still, Devon seemed to be telling the truth about knowing the shooter was Wilson, but if he couldn’t testify that he actually saw him pulling the trigger, it wasn’t going to do anybody any good.
‘Are you related to Wilson?’
Devon’s face was a question mark.
‘Cousin, half brother, like that?’
‘No.’
‘Is he related to anyone you know?’ Again Devon paused, but this time Glitsky didn’t wait. He turned to the technician. ‘Shut that down,’ he said. ‘Okay, Devon, how do you know Wilson?’
It took about a minute, but it came out that Tremaine Wilson had recently moved in with the woman Devon had lived with for the past two years, the mother of Devon’s child.
‘So Devon figured he could cut himself a deal and put Wilson away at the same time, get his old lady back. Slick, right?’
‘Très.’ Hardy had been sitting at Glitsky’s desk, cooling off after the altercation with Locke and Pullios. ‘But it came up Wilson did it?’
‘Yeah, sure. Devon thinks he was the target himself. That’s why he bought the gun we found him with on Thursday. Wilson wanted to take him out, but as they always do, they miss who they’re actually shooting at and kill a few folks standing around.’
‘So Devon’s back upstairs.’
‘No evidence, no deal. Devon’s sure Wilson was the shooter – he probably was. So big deal, we know one of the shooters. You want to try and sell Devon’s ID to a jury?’
‘Why don’t you cut Devon a deal, let him back on the street, give him back his gun? He goes and shoots Wilson, then we pick him up again.’
Glitsky smiled, his scar white through his lips. ‘It’s a beautiful thought.’ He gave it a moment’s appreciation. ‘Now how about you give me my chair?’
Hardy rose. He took the folder he’d been holding and dropped it in the center of Glitsky’s desk. ‘While we’re giving things back,’ Hardy said.
Glitsky spun the folder around, facing him, ‘How’d you get this?’
‘I got a better one – how did Pullios get it?’
‘I gave it to her.’
‘You gave it to her.’
‘Sure. Happens all the time. She comes in, says “Hi, Abe, what you got?” and I give her a homicide.’
‘Did it occur to you this might be my case?’
‘I told her you’d been working on it, and she said she knew that and she’d take care of it.’
‘Well, she did that. She’s got the case.’
‘You got the folder, though, I notice.’
‘Yeah, I get to be her gofer. I follow up.’
Glitsky leaned back, his feet on his desk. He dug a LifeSaver from his coat pocket and put it in his mouth. ‘So what’s the problem?’
Hardy could continue bitching about internal strife in the D.A.‘s office, but it would be wasted breath and he knew it. The best thing would be to do his job and wait for another chance. He settled against the corner of Abe’s desk. ’There’s no problem,‘ he said, ’but I was going over the file and you say you found the gun in the rolltop desk.‘
‘Right.’
‘Top right drawer? Maps and stuff like that?’
That’s it, so?‘
‘So I looked in that drawer on Wednesday, and there wasn’t any gun there.’
Glitsky took a breath, chewed up his LifeSaver, then brought his feet down off his desk. ‘What?’
Hardy told him about his own search of the Eloise.
‘But Waddell, the guard, he was with you, right? Hurrying you up?’
‘A little, yeah, but I checked that drawer.’
‘How close?’
‘I opened it, I looked in. What do you want?’
‘The gun was back a ways, Diz. How far in did you look?’
Hardy remembered back, remembered feeling pressure from Tom, the guard, to stop going through things. He’d pulled that drawer out, had seen the maps. He was sure -almost certain – he would have seen a gun. But to be honest – he hadn’t looked or felt around anywhere near the back of the drawer.
‘So you missed it,’ Glitsky said. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it. It happens. That’s why we have a team go and look.’
The phone rang on the desk. Hardy got up, grabbed his file and walked to the back window, which overlooked the hole for the new jail and the freeway, on about the same level four stories up as Homicide. Traffic was stopped southbound. The sun was still out in a pure sky – day four of the hot spell.
Glitsky came up beside him. ‘That was Ken Farris,’ he said. This morning when I got in I faxed him a copy of the will, the alleged will – two million dollars, remember? I figured he’d be the quickest way to verify the handwriting.‘
‘And?’
‘And he says it looks like Nash’s writing, all right, but it can’t be real. Nash wouldn’t have done that.’
‘Why not?’
‘He just says he wouldn’t have. He let Farris handle all his legal stuff.’
‘But it’s his writing?’
‘Looks like. Could be forged, of course. No telling at this point. It’s also, if it is his, a legal form for a will. Blank paper, dated, nothing else on it. But legal or not, I’ll tell you something.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m glad I brought the Shinn woman in. She almost pulled it off.’
Hardy kept looking at the stalled traffic on the freeway, the glare of the reflected sun. He felt a stabbing pain behind his left eye and brought his hand up to rub it away. ‘Almost,’ he said, ‘almost.’
Hardy marveled at how busy Abe must have been. No wonder he’d been working through the weekend; smaller wonder still that he’d been so reluctant to arrest May without a warrant or indictment. On a no-warrant arrest, as May’s had been, the arresting officer has forty-eight hours to bring all the paperwork on a case to the district attorney’s office. Forty-eight hours was by Sunday night – last night. By then he had to have a complaint, any relevant incident reports, witness interviews, forensics, ballistics if available – enough evidence so the D.A. wouldn’t throw it out.
This morning a typist had worked like a dog to type up the complaint and transcripts, then two copies of the folder were prepared – the original stayed with the D.A., one copy went to the clerk for putting it on a docket and one copy was saved for the defense attorney.
Pullios not only had gotten to the folder first, she had evidently convinced the clerk to get it on a docket for that day, in the early afternoon.
Rebecca’s fever had broken at noon; spots were showing all over her skin. Otherwise, everything at home was fine. Frannie was planning on taking a nap, catching up if she could on the sleep she’d missed the night before.
Hardy was back from lunch – ribs at Lou’s. Club soda. He threw three games of Twenty Down at his dart board and by the third game was nailing two numbers a round, sometimes all three. For the tenth time he considered registering for the City Championship Tournament. Someday he really would.
He got a black three-ring binder and started filling in some tab labels. Police Report. Inspector’s Chronological. Inspector’s Notes. Coroner. Autopsy. Witnesses. The drill, except for Coroner and Autopsy, wasn’t all that different from his prelims – proof was proof. A trial was a trial.
There was one definitely new tab here, though, in Hardy’s own folder – Newspaper. He had gone back and cut out all of Jeff Elliot’s stories to date. Most crimes in the big city didn’t get any ink. This one was already on the front page. Hardy figured he’d see the name Pullios in the paper within a day or so and he wanted to have a record of it.
He hadn’t gotten far that morning on Glitsky’s reports, when the gun issue – that he hadn’t seen it on Wednesday – had stopped him cold. He’d been looking for an excuse to blow some steam anyway, get out of the office. Well, now he’d done that. He’d checked in on his baby, had a good lunch. It was time to go to work. He opened the folder again, turned to the first witness interview, the transcript unedited off the tape:
Three, two, one. This is Inspector Abraham Glitsky, Star number 1144. I am currently at the office of the Golden Gate Marina, 3567 Fort Point Drive. With me is a gentleman identifying himself as Thomas Waddell, Caucasian, male, 4/19/68. This interview is pursuant to an investigation of case number 921065882. Today’s date is June 27, 1992, Saturday, at 1415 hours in the P.M.
Hardy skimmed quickly through the preliminaries, down to where Abe had started talking about putting May at the crime scene.
Q: You remember locking up the Eloise with Mr Hardy?
A: That’s right. It wasn’t locked before then.
Q: It was just left open?
A: It happens all the time. We notice it, we lock ‘em, but we don’t do a regular check, like that.
Q: But you locked it, when, Wednesday night?
A: I’m not sure. When the D.A. guy came by, after that.
Q: That was Wednesday.
A: Okay.
Q: And did you see anybody else board the boat, the Eloise?
A: No, not exactly. You guys, you know, the police, were still here Friday when I came on. You mean besides that?
Q: Right. What do you mean not exactly?
A: Well, you know I remembered ‘cause of locking it up special, but Mr Nash’s lady friend came by.
Q: His lady friend?
A: You know, the Japanese lady? She was out here a few times. I recognized her all right.
Q: This is a snapshot of a woman named May Shintaka. Do you recognize her?
A: Yeah, that’s her. She was by, like, Thursday night, out on the float.
Q: What time was that?
A: Still light. Maybe seven, seven-thirty.
Q: What was she doing there? Did you talk to her?
A: No. I don’t know. She walked by the office when I was with some other people, went out onto Dock Two by the Eloise, stayed a minute, then when I got done and looked up, she was gone.
Q: Did she go aboard the boat?
A: It was locked up.
Q: I know it was. Maybe she had a key?
A: I don’t know, I guess she might’ve. I don’t know. I didn’t see her again, and later I went to check the boat, and it was still locked up. She wasn’t in it.
Q: How do you know that?
A: Well, the lock is outside. You can’t go in and lock the door from inside. So if she was still inside, it couldn’t have been locked.
Q: But you didn’t actually see her leave?
A: No, sir, but I wasn’t looking. People are going by all the time. I only put it together about Mr Nash after she was already out there.
Hardy couldn’t put his finger on it, but he wasn’t happy gathering these nails for May’s coffin. She wasn’t his anymore, maybe that was it. She was Elizabeth Pullios’s. And the more he looked at it, the more nails he seemed to find.
Glitsky’s theory – that May had gone back to the Eloise to pick up her gun because it was the only physical evidence tying her to the crime – was starting to look pretty good. And certainly her idea that she and Owen Nash were going to be married was ridiculous.
He went around his desk and absently grabbed his darts again. His door was closed and he threw, not aiming, not paying any attention. He used his darts like Greeks used worry beads.
Thursday, the twenty-fifth, had been the day of Elliot’s story linking Owen Nash, the Eloise and May. On that same day, she’d bought her ticket (without a return) to Japan and gone down, presumably, to get her gun back. And failed.
Why did he so badly want her not to have done it?
He thought it might be that so many of the people he’d been seeing on his other cases had been the kind you’d expect to be doing bad things. May Shinn, when he’d gone up to see her in jail, wasn’t that type at all. She’d talked to him openly, until Freeman had shown up, unconcerned about her rights, the way innocent people might be expected to start out until they found out how the system worked.
Hardy was willing to believe she was a liar, but if she was, she was very good at it. Hardy knew such people existed. He just hadn’t run across too many of them among the lowlifes – liars, sure, good liars not often.
There was a knock on his door, it opened and Pullios was in, watching him poised, dart in hand, ready to toss. She grinned her sexy, charming, I’m-your-best-friend grin and leaned against the door jamb. ‘Reviewing the Shinn case?’ she asked.
Hardy wanted to put a dart in her forehead, but thought he’d have a hard time pleading accident. It was one of the drawbacks of having talent.
‘As a matter of fact, I am,’ he said. He threw the dart and sat down.
‘You’re mad at me.’ She actually pouted.
‘I’m not much at games, Elizabeth. How do you want to play this?’
She sat herself down, the kitten disappearing as soon as it saw it wasn’t going to get petted. ‘Come on, Dismas, we’re on the same team.’
‘That’s what Locke said, so it must be true.’
‘Look, I know how you feel.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s a load off my mind. The thing is, I don’t know how you feel, so we’re not even. I don’t, for example, know why you let me jerk myself off on this case for most of a week before you showed any interest in it, other than encouraging me to push for my rights, beat the bureaucracy.’
‘I meant it.’
Hardy studied her face. Elizabeth Pullios, he was coming to understand, had a gift for sincerity. It probably played well in front of juries. ‘But then it was a skull case, and now it’s hot ink.’
‘No, what it is, is a homicide and I do homicides. I’ve worked my way up to there.’
Hardy looked longingly at his darts stuck in the board across the room. In lieu of them, he picked up his paperweight and leaned back in his chair, passing it from hand to hand. It might be unfair, and it might be manure, but it was a done deal, and he didn’t want to discuss it anymore. ‘Farris says the will was Nash’s handwriting,’ he said.
Pullios was right with him. ‘Definite?’
‘Until we get an expert, but it looks like it.’
‘That’s great, that’s what we need.’
‘What do we need?’
‘It’s a hell of a motive, don’t you think? Two million dollars?’
Hardy couldn’t help himself. Things were just falling too easily. If Pullios wanted this job, she ought to do a little work for it. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that if May were going to collect money on Nash’s death, she wouldn’t have dumped him in the ocean.’
‘Didn’t she?’
‘I mean it was pure luck he washed ashore. How could she have known that?’
‘So?’
‘So if you were going to kill somebody for two million dollars, wouldn’t you want to make sure they found the body? You don’t get the money until he’s dead, right? And he’s not dead till there’s a body, unless you want to wait seven years or so.’
‘But there is a body.’
‘But she couldn’t have known that.’
He enjoyed watching her stew over that, but it didn’t last long. ‘I’ll be prepared for that argument,’ she said. ‘It’s good you brought it up. The great thing is the money angle.’
‘The great thing?’
‘Murder for profit. Makes it a capital case.’
‘A capital case?’
‘Absolutely,’ Pullios declared. ‘We’re going to ask the State of California to put May Shinn to death.’
Hardy sat next to Pullios in the courtroom, randomly chosen by computer for Department 11 in Municipal Court, which was where the arraignment in a no-warrant arrest, even on a capital case, was scheduled.
Glitsky was there, sitting next to Jeff Elliot in the mostly empty gallery seats. David Freeman, looking more disheveled than he had on Saturday, came through the low gate and shook hands cordially with both Pullios and Hardy, which was some surprise. Hardy found himself liking the guy and warned himself to watch it. If he was good at trial, he was by definition – like Pullios – a good actor. You could admire the technique, but beware of the man.
The judge was Michael Barsotti, an old, gray, bland fixture in his robes behind the desk. Barsotti had been in Muni Court forever and he wasn’t known for moving things along.
The court reporter sat at a right angle to Hardy, midway between the defendant’s podium and the judge. Assorted functionaries milled about – two or three bailiffs, translators, public defenders waiting to get clients assigned.
Hardy leaned over the table, organizing his binder, now knowing what his role, if any, would be. He wasn’t prepared for his first sight of May Shinn.
She looked so much smaller, diminished. The yellow jumpsuit hung on her. He supposed she’d been in her jail garb on Saturday, but his focus had been talking to her, eye to eye, concentrating on her face.
She walked up with the bailiff, hands cuffed, and stood at the podium next to Pullios, giving no indication she’d ever seen Hardy before, or anyone else.
The gravity of a murder case was underscored by the judge’s first words. Even Barsotti gained a measure of authority, casting off his boredom, caught up in the drama of the formal indictment being pronounced, the courtroom getting still.
‘May Shintaka,’ Judge Barsotti intoned, ‘you are charged by a complaint filed herein with a felony, to wit, a violation of section 187 of the Penal Code in that you did, in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, on or about the twentieth day of June, 1992, willfully, unlawfully and with malice aforethought murder Owen Simpson Nash, a human being.’
‘How do you plead?’ Barsotti asked.
‘Not guilty, Your Honor.’ Freeman spoke for May. After Freeman’s booming oratorio in the interview room on Saturday, Hardy was struck by the modulation of his voice. He was matter-of-fact, conversational. But there was a fist under the glove. Suddenly, he put on his trial voice. ‘Your Honor, before we continue with this charade I’d like to move to have all charges against my client dismissed due to procedural error.’
‘On a murder charge, Mr Freeman? And already?’
‘Mr Hardy of the district attorney’s office interrogated my client on Saturday morning without informing her -’
‘I object, Your Honor.’ Elizabeth Pullios was up from the D.A.‘s desk, where she’d appeared during the recess. ’Mr Hardy informed Ms Shintaka that she had the right to have an attorney present and Ms Shintaka waived that right. The prosecution has a tape recording of that meeting.‘
‘I think we can establish coercion…’
Barsotti tapped his gavel. He sighed. ‘Mr Freeman,’ he said, ‘save it for the hearing. In the meantime, we’ll move on to bail.’
He adjusted his glasses and double-checked the computer sheet in front of him. The handwritten notation next to the computer line read ‘No bail.’
‘The prosecution asks that no bail be granted?’ he asked Pullios.
‘This is a capital murder case, Your Honor.’
Freeman turned and looked directly at Pullios. ‘You’re not serious.’
Barsotti tapped his gavel again. ‘Mr Freeman, please direct your remarks to the bench.’
‘Excuse me, Your Honor, I am shocked and dismayed by this mention of capital murder. I can see that this is alleged as a special-circumstances case, but I can’t believe that the state is asking for death.’
Pullios stood up. ‘Murder for profit, Your Honor.’
‘I assume you have some evidence to substantiate this claim, Ms Pullios.’
‘We do, Your Honor.’
‘Your Honor, Ms Shintaka poses no threat to society.’
‘No threat? She killed somebody last week!’
The sound of the gavel exploded in the room. ‘Ms Pullios, that’s enough of that. Both of you hold your press conferences outside this courtroom.’
Hardy was impressed. Barsotti might be a bland functionary, but he was in control here.
Freeman had recovered his cool. ‘Your Honor, my client has never before been accused of a crime, much less convicted.’
Pullios wasn’t slowed down by the rebuke. ‘Your Honor, the defendant was attempting to leave the jurisdiction when she was arrested.’
‘Mr Freeman, was your client attempting to flee?’
‘She was going to Japan on business, Your Honor. It’s our contention the arresting officer overreacted. She was intending to come back. There had been no warrant issued. She was going about her normal life, which included a previously planned trip to Japan.’
‘She’d only bought the ticket the day before, Your Honor, and she didn’t buy a return. She’d also packed many personal effects.’
‘And she’d left many more. She wasn’t fleeing the jurisdiction. She was going on a trip. She will gladly surrender her passport to the court. There is no risk of flight here.’
Pullios started to say something more, but Barsotti held up a hand. ‘I’m going to set bail at five hundred thousand dollars.’
Pullios leaned over and whispered to Hardy. ‘Close enough.’
‘A half million dollars is a lot of money, Your Honor.’
‘I believe that’s the point, Mr Freeman. We’ll set the preliminary hearing for -’
‘Your Honor.’ Freeman again.
Even Hardy the novice knew what was next. Although the defendant had an absolute right to a preliminary hearing within ten court days or sixty calendar days of arraignment, no defense lawyer in his right mind would agree to go to prelim that soon, at least until he’d gotten a chance to see what kind of evidence the prosecution had gathered. ‘The defense would request three weeks for discovery and to set.’
‘Will the defendant waive time?’ Which meant that in exchange for this three-week delay, May would give up her right to a preliminary hearing within ten days.
‘Yes, Your Honor.’
Barsotti scratched his chin. ‘Three weeks, hmm.’ He looked down at his desk, moved some papers around. ‘Will counsel approach the bench?’
Pullios, Hardy and Freeman moved around their respective tables and up before the judge. Barsotti’s eyes were milk-watery. The drama hadn’t lasted long. ‘We’re getting ourselves into the beginning of vacation season here. Would there be any objection to, say, the day after Labor Day?’
‘None here, Your Honor,’ Freeman said.
‘Your Honor, Labor Day is over two months away. The defendant has a right to a speedy trial, but the people have no less a right to speedy justice.’
‘I don’t need a lecture, Counselor.’
‘Of course not, Your Honor. But the prosecution is ready to proceed in ten days. Two months is a rather lengthy delay.’
This was not close to true, and everyone knew it. Barsotti looked at Pullios over his glasses. ‘Not for this time of year, it isn’t. We got a full docket, and you know as well as I do it can go six months, a year, before we get a hearing.’ Barsotti clearly didn’t expect to get any argument, and it put his back up. He shuffled some papers, looked down at something on his desk. ‘We’ll schedule the prelim for Wednesday, September sixth, nine-thirty A.M. in this department.
‘Thank you, Your Honor,’ Freeman said.
Pullios had her jaw set. ‘That’d be fine, Your Honor.’
‘That’s all now.’ He brushed all counsel away and looked over to the bailiff. ‘Call the next line,’ he said.
Prelim courtrooms were on the first and second floors. The hallway outside the courtrooms on both floors was about twenty feet wide, the ceilings fifteen feet high, the floors linoleum. But except for the sound of falling pins, it had all the ambience, volume and charm of a low-rent bowling alley.
During the hours court was in session there were seldom less than two hundred people moving to and fro -witnesses, lawyers, clerks, spectators, families and friends. People chatted on the floors against the walls. Mothers breast-fed their babies. Folks ate lunch, kissed, cried, cut deals. On Monday and Thursday mornings, after the janitors had cleaned up, the hallway smelled like the first day of school. By now, seven hours into the workday, it just smelled.
Hardy, Glitsky and Jeff Elliot stood in a knot outside Department 11. All of them were watching Pullios’s rear end as it disappeared around the corner down near the elevators. ‘Good thing justice is blind,’ Glitsky said, ‘or Freeman wouldn’t have a chance.’
‘I don’t know,’ Elliot said. ‘He’s got May.’
‘Yeah, her dress though, that baggy yellow thing doesn’t show it off like old Betsy.’ Hardy liked calling her Betsy. He knew he was going to get used to it and slip someday. He kind of looked forward to it. He pointed at Elliot. ‘That was off the record.’
Jeff was happy to be included again. ‘Of course.’
‘Just making sure.’
‘So what do you think,’ Glitsky asked, ‘Christmas for the trial? Next Easter?’
Hardy said he didn’t know how long Freeman could delay if he wasn’t going to make bail. He wouldn’t want to leave May in jail for a year, awaiting trial.
‘I don’t know. Maybe she’ll make bail,’ Glitsky said.
‘How’s she gonna make bail?’ Elliot asked. ‘Half a million dollars?’
‘How much does David Freeman charge? Half a million dollars? If it goes a year, it could easily come to that.’
‘How’d she get Freeman anyway?’ Hardy asked.
Glitsky shrugged. ‘If we only knew an investigative reporter or something…’
‘She’s got to have some money. What’s her house look like?’ Hardy asked.
‘Apartment,’ Glitsky answered. ‘Small. Nice, but small.’
‘Maybe Freeman is one of her clients.’ Elliot clearly liked the idea, was warming to it. That’s it! Freeman is one of her clients. Nash was another.‘
Glitsky held down his enthusiasm. ‘And the will is collateral on the come after he gets her off.’
‘What will?’
Glitsky stopped short. He took a beat, then smiled down at the reporter. ‘Did I say “will”? I don’t think I said “will.” ’
Hardy shook his head. ‘No, I’m sure I would’ve heard it. I was right here and I didn’t hear anything like “will.” ’
‘Are we on the record here or what?’ Elliot leaned into his crutches. ‘Come on, guys.’
Hardy glanced at Abe. ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s gonna come out anyway,’ Abe said, ‘but it would be sort of nice to find out how Freeman got connected to May. Pullios is really going for capital?’
Hardy nodded. ‘You heard her.’
Glitsky laid it out for Jeff – the $2 million will, the profit motive, Farris tentatively authenticating the handwriting.
‘Well, there’s the money if he gets her off,’ Elliot said.
Glitsky looked at Hardy. ‘This guy must not know any defense attorneys,’ he said. Then, explaining, ‘Jeff, listen, if there’s one thing all defense attorneys do, they get their money up front.’
‘Think about it,’ Hardy said. ‘You’re found guilty, you don’t pay your attorney ’cause he didn’t do the job. You’re not guilty, you don’t pay him ‘cause you don’t need him anymore. Either way, your attorney is stiffed. Maybe you’re grateful, but not a half million dollars’ grateful.’
‘Maybe he just gets the rights up front for the book deal. Maybe that’s his fee.’
‘Pico was telling me that we – him and me – ought to go for a book deal. We found the hand, after all.’
‘Hey!’ Rare for him, Glitsky got into it. ‘I arrested May. I ought to get the book deal.’
Elliot said, ‘Somebody is paying Freeman. You still don’t think maybe he’s one of her clients?’
Glitsky put a look on Jeff. ‘A half million dollars’ worth of ass?‘
‘Not including bail,’ Hardy put in.
Glitsky said, ‘If she makes bail.’
‘I don’t know,’ Hardy said. ‘I’ve got a feeling here. Freeman’s going for delay. He doesn’t want delay if she’s cooling her heels upstairs. Which means she makes bail.’
‘I think you’re innocent. That’s why.’ This was not close to true. David Freeman’s words were tools to produce the effect he desired. That’s all they were.
May Shinn was drinking Chardonnay in a booth at Tadich’s Grill. David Freeman, her rumpled genius, sat across from her. Before the arraignment, he’d gone down to her bank with power of attorney and withdrawn $50,000, just about cleaning out her life savings. He’d known exactly the amount they’d set bail for. He’d gotten the clothes they’d taken from her and got them pressed before they gave them back to her. He’d bought her new makeup.
He’d followed the story in the newspaper. When he read of her arrest on Saturday morning, he knew he had to help her, that she would need an attorney, that a Japanese mistress of a well-known and powerful man was going to have a very difficult time making a defense against the arrayed powers. Now, having talked to her, he also had the advantage of believing she was innocent.
‘But I am unable to pay.’
He lifted his shoulders, sipped lugubriously at his own wine. The curtain was pulled across the booth. They had been through this before. He had started by trying to convince her that he was taking her case pro bono. Once in a while, he had told her, you just had to do something because it was the right thing to do. Which had caused her to smile.
‘If I can’t lie to you, you should not lie to me.’
‘May, why would I lie?’
She put her glass down, twirled it around, kept her eyes on him. Finally he cracked, laughing at himself. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘okay, but its not a terrifically flattering motive.’
‘It’s not been a very flattering few days,’ she said.
‘No, I guess not.’ Freeman drank some wine, then took a breath and began. ‘Until about ten years ago, attorneys weren’t allowed to advertise, did you know that?’
She nodded.
‘And even now, when it’s technically legal, it’s still not particularly good for business unless you’re doing divorce or DUI or ambulance chasing. I mean it kind of puts you in the low-rent market. Good attorneys don’t advertise because they don’t need to, and if they do need to, they’re not good.’ He had a good smile, a strong face. Sincere, brown eyes, a full head of dark hair. ‘It’s a vicious circle.’
‘And I am advertising?’
‘I’ve got seven associates left. I had to let three go in the last twelve months. Business is terrible. This is a high-profile case. Owen Nash was a well-known man.’
It didn’t surprise her. She was to the point where she thought nothing could surprise her. At least she knew.
But at the mention of Owen’s name, a shadow fell within her. She didn’t want to be sitting here, drinking wine, enjoying food. ‘I didn’t kill him, David.’
He patted her hand across the table. ‘Of course you didn’t.’
He didn’t believe her. He’d told her Saturday, before they’d even talked, before he’d reviewed any of the prosecution’s evidence, that it was irrelevant whether or not she’d killed Nash – he was going to get her off.
‘But I didn’t!’
He shushed her gently, index finger to his lips. ‘I must say, there is very little evidence that you did.’
‘What about the will?’
He brushed that away. ‘The will. Does the will put you on the boat? Did it give you the opportunity to kill Owen? Did it give you the means? You were home, weren’t you?’
She nodded.
‘All right, then. We will prove you were home. The will, like the rest of the so-called evidence, is completely irrelevant. What do they have? The will? The ticket to Japan?’
‘I thought the police would…’
‘Of course. Naturally.’ He emptied the bottle into their glasses and continued with the litany. ‘There is nothing physically tying you to the gun, no proof you pulled the trigger’ – he held up a finger, stopping her. ‘Uh, uh. No more denials. They don’t matter, you see? There is nothing that could prove you did it. I don’t even see a case that will get to trial. At the preliminary hearing, we point out the racial discrimination, mixed in with your profession… It’s really not going anywhere. There is simply no hard evidence.’
May Shinn was back in her apartment. David Freeman had driven her home, then walked up and made sure she was safe inside her door.
She ran a bath and sank into the hot water, letting the memories wash over her. She thought it might have been the closeness to death that brought her and Owen back to life.
The first couple of weeks they were inseparable – she canceled her appointments with all her clients. She didn’t know who Owen was then, didn’t know that he had money. All she knew was he made her feel things, that there was some connection between her mind and her body that she’d lost touch with long before, and now while it was back, for however short a time, she was going to keep it.
There was strange behavior – they tied each other up, blindfolded each other, tried every position and every orifice. They went outside at two in the morning and did it on the sidewalk. They shaved each other bare. He ate her with honey and chocolate and, once, garlic, which burned hotter and longer than Spanish fly. Owen had his appetites.
The man was also in fantastic shape. Big, barrel-chested, hard everywhere. He drank Scotch and wine and brandy and took pills to get to sleep. Gradually she became aware that he was doing business from her house – phone calls in the middle of whatever they were doing, mention of the Wheel, taking care of his daughter’s problems. He had a real life somewhere out there, but it wasn’t coming between them.
She didn’t understand it exactly. She just knew that in some unspoken way they were in this together, finding something out, something essential for them both to go on. It wasn’t the sex, or at least it wasn’t only the sex.
She’d made her living from sex for fifteen years, and none of it had seriously touched her. Her life, even her professional life, had evolved into something remote. She made love with her clients, but not every time she saw them. When they needed it, predictably missionary after the first few times, then she was there. Often they couldn’t make it. More often they wanted to hug, lie there afterward and talk.
She made them dinners, too. Scampi in brandy, raw oysters, rare filet and cabernet. She’d turned into a great cook. She sang for them, played piano while they sat with their bourbon or gin, gave them the companionship or escape or a kind of romance they didn’t find in their homes.
Owen, though. Owen wasn’t like anyone else. And not just his hungers. He didn’t live a life of quiet desperation. He wasn’t looking for respite, or peace, or a sheen of culture laid on top of the vulgarity of the world. He’d seen it for what it was, or more, he’d seen himself for what he was.
No games. And she was with him. The oblivion – the sex – the sex was the only way they both knew anymore to get to it, to get underneath the crust. Something was cooking inside each of them, threatening to blow if it didn’t get some release, get through the crust.
It was morning, early, before dawn. The sky was gray in the east and still dark over the ocean.
May Shinn had been out of bed for an hour, walking naked in the dark. She moved away from her turret windows and went back through the kitchen to the bedroom, stopping to pick up her razor-sharp boning knife. Owen slept on the bed, breathing regularly, on his back.
She put the edge of the knife up under his throat, sitting, watching him breathe. The bedroom was darker than the rest of the apartment. Finally she laid the blade down across his collarbone and kissed him.
‘Owen.’
He woke up like no one else. He simply opened his eyes and was all the way there. ‘What?’
She moved the edge of the blade back up so it touched the skin above his Adam’s apple. ‘Do you feel this?’
‘Would this be a bad time to nod?’
‘Do you want me to kill you?’
He closed his eyes again, took a couple of breaths. ‘That’s where we’re going, isn’t it?’ He didn’t move.
‘Owen. What are we doing?’
He took a moment. Perhaps he didn’t know either. Maybe they both knew and it scared them too much. ‘What are we doing?’ she asked again.
‘We’re showing each other each other.’ He swallowed. She could feel the blade move over his skin.
‘I don’t know what I feel.’
‘You love me.’ And as soon as he said it, she knew it was true. She felt her eyes tearing and tightened her hand on the knife. ‘And I love you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want you to put your hopes in me. I’m not saving your life, May.’
‘I’m what you want, though.’
‘That’s right. You’re what I want. But I play fair. I’m telling you straight, the best way I know how.’
‘I’m a whore, Owen. I’m nothing, but I play fair, too. You know me. I don’t know how long I’ve loathed what I am. I don’t want to care about you, but you’re my last great chance…’
Owen had closed his eyes again. She pulled the knife away from his throat. ‘I’ve warned you,’ she said.
‘And I’ve warned you.’ He pulled her down and kissed her, held her against his chest.
The next morning, Pullios was sitting in Hardy’s office when he walked in at 8:25. She held the morning Chronicle folded in her lap. ‘Nice story,’ she said. She opened the paper to the front-page article, in its now familiar spot lower right: ‘State To Seek Death Penalty In Nash Murder.’ And under it: ‘D.A. Claims Special Circumstances – Murder For Profit – In Tycoon’s Death.’
He came around the desk, opened his briefcase, started removing the work he’d taken home and ignored – some stuff he’d let slide while concentrating on May Shinn. Moses had come over, worried about Rebecca (and about Frannie and probably Hardy, too) and had stayed to eat with them and hang out.
‘I read it,’ he said.
‘I’m surprised Elliot didn’t get the news about the bail.’
Hardy stopped fiddling. ‘She made bail? I had a feeling she’d make bail. Freeman put it up?’
Pullios closed the paper, placed it back down on her lap. ‘I don’t know. We can subpoena her financial records if we can convince a judge that we think she got it illegally.’
‘Not Barsotti.’
‘No, I gathered that. We’ll look around.’
‘How about prostitution? Last time I checked, that was illegal.’
‘Maybe. It’s a thought, we should check it out.’ She recrossed her legs. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I came by to apologize again. I was out of line. It should have been your case. I’m sorry.’
Hardy shrugged. ‘There’ll be other cases.’
‘Thank you.’ She didn’t try her smile or her pout. “Cause we’re going to be busy.‘
‘I don’t know,’ Hardy said. ‘We’ve got two months now and I’ve let all this stuff back up.’ He motioned around his office.
Now she was smiling, but he didn’t get the feeling it was for any effect. ‘You believe we’re going out on a prelim in two months?’
‘I got that general impression.’
Pullios shook her head. ‘We’re not letting that happen. There’s no way Freeman and Barsotti are putting this thing off until next year. I talked to Locke after the arraignment, and he okayed it – we’re taking this sucker to the grand jury on Thursday. Get an indictment there, take it into Superior Court and blindside the shit out of the slow brothers.’
‘Can we do that?’
‘We can do anything we want,’ she said. ‘We’re the good guys, remember.’
‘I don’t want to rain on this parade, but isn’t there some risk here? What if the grand jury doesn’t indict?’
Pullios rolled her eyes. ‘After you’re here awhile, you’ll understand that if the D.A. wants, the grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. Besides, the grand jury always indicts for me. We’ve got everything Glitsky had, which ought to be enough. But if it isn’t, Ballistics says the gun is the murder weapon. But one thing…“
‘Okay, but just one.’
She smiled again. They seemed to be getting along. ‘No leaks on this. This is an ambush.’
David Freeman knew his major character flaw – he could not delegate. He couldn’t even have his secretary type for him. He’d let Janice answer the telephones, okay, put stamps on letters if they were in the United States and less than three pages – more than that, he had to weigh them himself and make sure there was enough postage. He did his own filing, his own typing. He ran his own errands.
He was, after Melvin Belli, probably the best-known lawyer in the city. He had seven associates but no partners. None of the associates worked for him – recession or no – for more than four years. He burned ‘ em out. They ’d come to him for ’trial experience.‘ But if you were a client and came to David Freeman to keep you from going to jail, he wasn’t about to leave that up to Phyllis or Jon or Brian or Keiko – he was going to be there inside the rail himself, his big schlumpy presence personally making the judge and jury believe that you didn’t do it.
His deepest conviction was that nobody, anywhere, was as good as he was at trial, and if you hired the firm of David Freeman & Associates, what you got was David Freeman. And you got your trial prepared – somewhat -by associates at $135 an hour. When David got to the plate – and he personally reviewed every brief, every motion, every deposition – the price went up to $500, and trial time was $1,500. Per hour.
It was his pride, and he knew he carried it to extremes. This was why private investigators existed – to do legwork. But no one did legwork as well as he did. One time, when he’d just started out, he’d hired a private investigator to talk to all possible witnesses in a neighborhood where a woman had supposedly killed her husband. The woman, Bettina Allred, had contended she’d had a fight with her husband Kevin, all right – she’d even fired a shot into the wall. Terrified of herself and her own anger, she’d run from the apartment to go out to cool off. While she was gone, she said, someone had come in and shot her husband with his own gun. So the private investigator David hired had talked to everybody in the apartment and they’d all heard the fighting and she’d obviously done it. Except the P.I. hadn’t talked to Wayne, the thirteen-year-old son who hadn’t even been home during the relevant time. When Freeman doubled-checked as he always did, he decided to be thorough – as he always was – and found that Wayne had been hiding terrified in the closet and when Mommy had run out, he’d taken the gun and shot his daddy. He’d had enough of Daddy beating up on him and Mommy.
Since then, Freeman had done his own legwork. Though it was his precious time, he only charged his clients the $65 an hour he would have paid a private eye. It was, he thought, one of the best bargains in the business.
No one in May’s building had seen or heard her on Saturday. Now he was going up the other side of the street, ringing doorbells, talking to people.
‘You see the turreted apartment on the corner, up on the top over there? Anything at all? Shades going up, blinds being pulled? How about a shadow? Yes, well, it’s confidential, but it has to do with a murder investigation, Jesus, don’t tell my boss. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
The French deli across the street. The cleaners on the opposite corner. Nada, nada, nada. If May had been home, as she claimed, she had been invisible. Of course, he didn’t believe she’d been home, but as he’d told her, what he believed was irrelevant.
He was on the fourth and last floor of the building directly across the street from May’s. His feet hurt. He was considering rashing his billing rate for this work up to $75 an hour. He rang the bell and listened to it gong for a moment. No one answered. There was one other door down the hall, and it opened.
‘Mr Strauss isn’t in. Can I help you?’
Mrs Streletski was a well-dressed elderly woman and he gave her his spiel. She invited him in and forced him to drink a cup of horrible coffee. She was sorry she couldn’t really help him. She’d been out of her apartment for the last ten days – in fact, she’d just gotten back from visiting over in Rossmoor. She was considering moving into Rossmoor with Hal. They did so much there. It was an active place, even if you were a little elderly, no one treated you like you were old. There were lots of classes, movies, lectures. It was a fun place, a young place.
Mrs Streletski showed Freeman that you couldn’t see anything of May’s building from her window. He thanked her for the coffee and left his card so that Mr Strauss, who lived alone next door, could call him when he got in if he had the time.
‘He’s not home very often, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘He travels a lot. He’s always working. He got divorced last year and I think he’s very lonely. We’ve played Scrabble a few times and I tried to get him to go out with Hal and me, but I think he misses his wife and his boys.’
‘Well, if you could have him call me, he might have been home, remember something.’
She said she would. He thanked her and started walking down the steps, thinking that even when you didn’t get anything, this was probably worth more than $75, call it $100 an hour.
‘Two months before you even set a date for a preliminary hearing?’
Hardy was biting his tongue, held to the stricture not to leak anything about Elizabeth’s upcoming appointment with the grand jury. Ken Farris, in the interview room down by the evidence lockers, wasn’t happy, and Hardy wondered how far he could go to make him feel better. ‘We’re working on something.’ Lame, he knew.
‘Let’s hope so. And meanwhile she’s out walking around.’
‘That’s how it works.’ Farris shook his head.
Hardy thought he’d get away from it. ‘So how are things down in South City? Getting any better?’
Farris didn’t look better. There were bags under his eyes. His shoulders slumped. He sat kitty-corner to Hardy at a gray-topped metal table, his arms half-cupped – protectively – around the original of Owen’s will. May’s gun was also bagged on the table. The snake ring.
Farris shrugged. ‘The stocks went down, then back up. We’ve got contracts. People have work and life goes on.’ He looked back down at the piece of paper in front of him. ‘This, though, this is unbelievable. What was he doing?’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Owen. Two million dollars. Christ. Celine told me she talked to you.’
The man was jumping around, trying to find a foothold. Hardy still wasn’t comfortable talking about Celine. He’d been able to put her out of his mind, but if something came up that put her back in, she tended to stay. He didn’t really understand it. ‘When did you see her?’
‘Sunday. The cremation.’
The cremation. Farris – and Celine – they were both coming off that, too. They’d had a rocky week. ‘How’s she holding up?’
Farris seemed to be studying the will some more. ‘What? Oh, she’s pretty fragile right now. A little fixated on May. I talked her out of going to court for the arraignment.’
‘Good idea. What’s she say about May?’
‘She wonders why we waste all the time with arraignments and hearings and trials. And then there’ll be appeals. Somebody ought to go and just kill her. Celine says she’d do it herself.’
‘Try to talk her out of that, too, would you? It would be frowned on… You’re sure she did it, huh?’
That woke Farris up. ‘You’re not?
‘Whoa, I didn’t say that. We just can’t put her on the Eloise. It’s kind of a major detail.’
‘Well, I’ve got her on the Eloise. Celine told me Owen was meeting her on the Eloise.’
Hardy nodded. ‘She told me that, too.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, what? It’s hearsay. Inadmissible.’
‘Bullshit. She was on the boat.’
‘I didn’t say she wasn’t. We’re trying her for murder.’
‘Okay. Sorry.’ Farris looked down again, tapped the paper. ‘This is definitely Owen. Why didn’t he tell me about it?’
‘Maybe he thought it would never come up.’
‘How couldn’t it come up?’
‘If he didn’t die, how’s that? Maybe it was a goof, maybe he wrote the thing drunk. She might have dared him or something. The point is, it’s here, and it’s a damn good reason to kill somebody.’
‘Another one,’ Farris said.
‘What do you mean, another one?’
Farris frowned, as though surprised he’d been caught saying anything out loud. He rose from the chair, pushing the physical evidence back toward Hardy. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Figure of speech.’
Jeff Elliot went blind in Maury Carter’s office.
It had started, he guessed, on the night after he’d gone to the morgue. The tension of those moments, coupled with his first front-page article and the background stuff, had produced too much stress, and there had always been – and his doctors agreed – a correlation between stress and the onset of his attacks.
But MS was a sneaky thing. It wasn’t like it came up and wopped you upside the head. With his legs, it had begun with pins and needles one morning. His left leg just felt a little bit like it was asleep, like a low-voltage current was passing through it. Then, over the course of a couple of weeks, the feeling not only didn’t go away, it got worse and his leg became a weight he dragged around. Which was when he’d gone to the doctor and the bomb dropped.
The right leg had gone two years later. But since then he’d had five good years, three on Prednisone and then, because he hated the steroid, trying to get along without it. And, he had come to think, successfully.
So successfully that he hadn’t really related it to the MS when he woke up with slightly blurred vision. He ignored it. If he wasn’t looking directly at something, it was nothing.
This morning, though, he’d noticed it a lot. The right eye didn’t seem to focus at all, and there was a brown smudge over half of what he could see through his left eye. He should go to the doctor, but this was the chance he’d worked so hard for. He was the man of the hour.
Once he got a few more things tied up here he’d go see about his vision.
Maury Carter did business out of a building about two blocks from the Hall. There was a black-and-white four-foot-square sign above the doorway outside, bolted up against the old brick, that read ‘Bail Bondsman.’ Inside, a desk for Maury’s secretary took up the big front window. Behind that desk were file cabinets and acoustic baffling that served to separate Maury’s private office from the street.
It was Tuesday afternoon. Jeff had spent most of the morning following up on what he’d missed the day before – May’s bail. It wasn’t a stop-the-presses story anyway -people, even murder suspects, made bail all the time – but it bothered him that he’d found it out on television. He had to keep concentrating on his story, not worry about his eyes.
And the real story now, if it existed and he could get it, was the Shinn/Freeman connection. Along with the fact that May had made bail, he’d discovered Freeman’s billing rates, so Hardy and Glitsky must have been right -there was a source of money somewhere.
But Dorothy, Maury’s secretary, said she wasn’t supposed to talk about their clients, ‘but we can talk about anything else. Maury’s over at the Hall. Do you want to wait? I can get you some coffee.’
Jeff thought she was about the nicest girl he’d met in San Francisco. She wore a print dress and her skin was fair with a few freckles. It occurred to Jeff that she might even think he was okay, in spite of his crutches.
She, too, was from the Midwest – Ohio – and had been out here for four months, living with a girlfriend in the Haight, which wasn’t anything like she’d expected it to be. She was going back to school to get her nursing degree; she’d already majored in bio, so it shouldn’t be too hard, but she was going to be doing it at night and until then this job paid the bills.
Jeff could have listened all day, was even starting to feel comfortable telling her a little about himself. He found himself looking around the growing brown smudge, willing it away in the vision of her, but then Maury came in, who’d actually put up the bond. And the reason Jeff was here came back.
Maury wasn’t going to tell him, though. It was confidential information. They were back in Maury’s part of the office now, behind the partition. ‘But we know how much the bail was.’
Maury had a shiny, deep forehead with white steel-wool for eyebrows. On the map of his face, his nose was a small continent. His ears stuck out and his jowls hung. He leaned back in his chair, feet on his desk, and brought his cigar to his purplish lips. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Blowing out a line of blue smoke, he chewed reflectively on his tongue. ‘Then what can I tell you?’
‘May Shinn put up fifty thousand dollars?’
‘As you say, you know how much the bail is.’
Jeff was fighting a kind of ringing panic attack. He looked down at his notepad and found he couldn’t make out what he’d written there.
‘Bail was half a million,’ he persisted. It was the stress, this circular discussion. He should end it and get out of here. The room was closing in – the cigar smoke, the funny light. ‘Let’s be hypothetical,’ he said. ‘Your normal fee – suppose I’m a client now – is ten percent, right?’
Maury threw him a bone and nodded, blowing more smoke.
‘So if I’ve got bail of half a million, I give you fifty thousand.’
Maury nodded. ‘That would be the fee, yes.’
Was the smoke getting thicker, the light worse? Maybe he was just getting dizzy. He squirmed in his chair, got the blood flowing a little. Then you pay that to the court?‘ It still wasn’t clear. Jeff knew, or thought he knew, this stuff, but suddenly it wasn’t making any sense.
‘No, I pay the court the half million. All of it. Not the fifty thousand, the full half mil.’ Maury pulled his feet down and pulled himself up to the desk. ‘Look, I keep the fifty no matter what. That’s my fee for incurring the risk.
Let’s face it, these guys – my clients – call a spade a spade, they got lousy credit. Hey, are you okay?‘
Jeff heard Maury’s chair move back. It was funny – it felt as though he just closed his eyes a minute, then he’d opened them again. But if his eyes were open, how come he couldn’t see anything? He guessed he was moving his head, trying to scan the room and find a flicker of light.
The panic was taking over. He had to get out of here. He went to reach for where his crutches were, but missed, and knocked them to the ground, now grabbing wildly at nothing, pushing himself from the chair, falling, falling.
Over the ringing that filled his head, he heard Maury yelling, ‘Dorothy! Dorothy, get in here!’
After Farris left, Hardy had put in what he thought was a pretty good afternoon’s work. He pleaded out three assaults – a purse snatching and two robberies. A couple of dope cases were going to prelim. A teenage gang member had ‘tagged’ – graffitied – six police cars, doing $9,000 worth of damage. Hardy was moving toward the opinion that possession of a can of spray paint ought to be punishable, like carrying a concealed weapon, by mandatory jail time. At four-thirty, he left the office and went down to the Youth Guidance Center, where he talked a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl into giving up the name of her thirty-year-old boyfriend who was letting her take the fall for a little friendly welfare fraud.
But, like to a hole in a tooth, Hardy kept coming back to Owen and May Shinn.
The drive back home from the YGC, top down on the Samurai, was over Twin Peaks, down Stanyan Street -and other sorrows – by the Shamrock, then the Aquarium, Golden Gate Park, out Arguello through the Avenues. It gave him enough time to worry it.
The motive thing was a real problem. If they couldn’t sell it to a jury, they didn’t have capital murder, and Hardy couldn’t think of a rebuttal to his own argument: if May had killed Owen for the money, did it make sense for her to leave it to chance that his body would be found? He thought the answer had to be no. Resonantly, obviously, absolutely, no.
So the strategic issue became whether they could keep Freeman from asking the question. He didn’t see how.
But more immediately, and this was what occupied him as he ran the red light on 28th, once that initial chink in the motive worked its way around, would the jury start losing faith in May’s guilt altogether?
He heard the siren and pulled over to the right. It was not yet six o’clock, a glorious night, the warm spell miraculously hanging on. He was surprised when the patrol car pulled in behind him and the cop got out.
‘How you doin’?‘ Hardy asked.
The cop nodded. ‘May I see your license and registration please?’
Hardy reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He opened it to where he had his D.A.‘s badge pinned in across from his driver’s license. He was reaching across into the glove box to get his registration when he felt the cop’s hand on his arm.
‘Sorry to bother you, sir, but you ran a red light back there.’
Hardy half-turned. He must have. He didn’t even remember seeing it. He apologized. Besides, he had no intention of failing the attitude test.
The cop handed him his wallet. ‘Eyes on the road, huh.’
‘Gotcha.’
He waited until the cop was back in his car, then started up again, getting into the traffic with a nice signal, turning right off Geary at his first opportunity.
Hardy pulled up in front of his house still feeling foolish and a little guilty. It was the first time he’d experienced that particular professional courtesy – getting a break on a ticket – and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.
Rebecca was in her stroller next to Frannie, who was sitting on the front-porch steps, wearing sandals, Dolphin shorts and a tank top. The sun hit her hair just right, like a burning halo around her.
‘You ought to get prettier,’ Hardy said, coming through the gate. ‘It’s hell coming home to an ugly woman. And try to look a little younger while you’re at it.’
He was almost to her when she jumped with an animal growl. She hit him high, wrapping her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, kissing him, then biting his ear, hard. He held her, marveling at her tininess, her smell, her fit to him. ‘Okay, okay, I guess you don’t have to look younger.’
She clung to him. ‘Wet willie,’ she said.
Hardy bore up under the torture. ‘See, you’re making the baby cry.’ He took the last step to the porch and made a face at the baby. ‘It’s all right, Beck, your mother’s just a little bit insane. I’m sure it’s not hereditary.’ Rebecca kept crying and Hardy kissed Frannie, then let her down and reached into the stroller. ‘I’ll carry this neglected child,’ he said. ‘You push the stroller.’
They walked east on Clement, past the Safeway and the little Russian piroshki houses and Oriental restaurants, the antique shops, Rebecca now happy in the baby seat, Frannie’s arm through Hardy’s, his coat hung over the stroller’s handles.
They caught up on everything – Rebecca’s spots mostly gone now; the decision about the second car they were considering buying as soon as the Shamrock profit payment came in, which ought to be when the fiscal year closed this week; Pico’s weight, which led to Frannie’s own weight gain (monitored daily); the Fourth of July picnic this weekend. The pregnancy was going smoothly. Boys’ names. Girls’ names. The ticket Hardy almost got for running a red light.
They walked as far as Park Presidio – over a mile -before they turned around and started back home. Hardy told Frannie about Pullios and her decision to get an indictment before the grand jury, move the proceedings to Superior Court.
‘Why does she want to do that? What’s the problem with a delay? I thought all trials took forever.’
Hardy walked on a few steps, strolling really, relaxed, squinting into the sun. ‘This is a hot story. She’s not going to let it cool off.’
‘Jeff Elliot,’ Frannie said.
‘Exactly, but we’ve got a real problem.’ Hardy briefed her on it, moving on to what had concerned him when he’d gotten pulled over. ‘The thing is, once you start asking about the motive, you open another can of worms.’
‘If she did it for the money, why did she dump the body? But if she didn’t do it for the money, why didn’t she burn the will or something?’
‘Right.’
They walked along, pondering it. The sun had gotten behind the buildings. It was not cold, but there was a nip in the shade, and Hardy stopped and tucked his jacket around Rebecca. ‘Another thing, too,’ he said, ‘although I hate to mention it.’
‘What?’
‘The ring. May’s ring.’
‘What about it?’
‘He was wearing it. Owen was wearing it.’
‘Does that mean something?’
‘I don’t know what it means, but it could mean that he put it on, that he left it on, that they had a relationship, that he wasn’t leaving her. And if that’s the case, and if she wasn’t killing him for money, bye-bye motive.’
That’s a lot of ifs.‘
True, but they don’t start with an if. He was wearing the ring.‘
‘Couldn’t they just have had a fight, got to arguing, the gun was there…?’
‘If that was it, it’s not first-degree murder. It’s definitely not capital murder.’
Frannie hugged herself closer to Hardy. ‘I feel sorry for the woman. I’d hate to have you going after me.’
‘I did go after you.’
‘See?’ She beamed at him. That’s what I mean.‘
There were things about the job Glitsky would never love. One of them was the reality of subpoenas and arrests.
The way you got people where you wanted them was to go out to their houses early in the A.M. and knock on their doors. Astoundingly, nobody expected to get arrested in the morning. So it was the best time to make an arrest.
But he’d been out last night on this drive-by again. They had received a tip – probably from a rival gang, but you took your leads where you could – that the shooter’s car, with a cache of weapons in the trunk, was in a warehouse out in the Fillmore.
So Glitsky and a couple of stake-out officers had gone down there, letting the warm evening dissipate into a bitter, foggy cold as they sat drinking tea and eating pretzels in his unmarked car, and waited for someone to come and open the warehouse. Which had happened.
And they found the guns. Tonight’s suspect, coked out of his mind and scared to death, had admitted that he’d driven the car, but they’d forced him, man, and he hadn’t done any shooting. That was Tremaine Wilson. He was the shooter. Wilson. This witness, unlike Devon Latrice Wortherington, could actually put Wilson in the car with a gun in his hand, and if he didn’t go sideways, which he probably would when he straightened out, Glitsky might be able to make a case against Wilson.
So now, four hours of sleep later, the dark not yet completely gone and the fog just as cold as when he’d left it, Glitsky found himself once again in the projects. The path to the door was a cracked cement strip that bisected a littered and well-packed rectangle of earth that might as well have been concrete except for the stalk of a tree that had made it to about one foot before someone whacked it off. Now the bare twig struggling out of the ground, maybe an inch thick, struck Glitsky as an example of what happened to anything that dared to try to grow up here.
As always, they were going to try to do it neat and quick. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Just in case, though, three uniformed officers had gone to cover the back door of the duplex. Glitsky had two other guys, guns out, behind him on the walkway and another team in the street, out of their car and using it for cover on the not impossible chance that the frameless picture window would suddenly explode in gunfire.
It seemed a miracle that one of the streetlights still worked. The half-life of a streetlight in any of the projects could be measured in minutes after nightfall before some sharpshooter put it out. In the light from this one it was easy to make out the closed drapes in the front window. The screen door hung open, framed by a riot of graffiti.
Glitsky looked at his watch. The back entrance should be covered by now. He turned around and gestured at the guys huddled behind the car out in the street. They gave him the thumbs up – the place was, in theory, secured.
Now there was no fog and no cold and no darkness. There was only his pounding heart and dry mouth – it happened every time – and the door to be knocked on. Three light taps. He had his gun out and heard shuffling inside. The rattle of chains and he was looking at a four-year-old boy, shirt off, feet in his pyjama bottoms, rubbing his eyes with sleep.
‘Who’s ’at?‘
A woman’s voice behind him, and the boy backed away, leaving the door open. Glitsky didn’t like the boy between him and his perp. He’d seen guys – strung out on drugs or not – take their own children hostage, their wives, mothers, anybody who happened to be around.
Glitsky didn’t wait. He had a warrant and Tremaine Wilson was wanted for special-circumstances murder. Tremaine wasn’t going to be getting himself any slick lawyer to bust him out on the technicality of illegal entry. The boy had opened the door – that was going to have to do.
He pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped between the boy and his mother. ‘Police,’ he said so she’d be clear it wasn’t just another gang hit. ‘Where’s Tremaine?’
One of the guys behind him hit the lights and a bare overhead came on. The woman was probably twenty. She had a swollen lower lip, short cowlicked hair, giant frightened eyes. She’d been sleeping in a man’s plaid shirt that didn’t quite make it down to her hips. She made no effort to cover herself below, but stood blinking in the light, separated from her boy by this tall black man with a gun. She made up her mind quickly, pointing down a hallway and moving to clutch her son as soon as Glitsky stepped aside.
The door to the room was open. The light from the hallway didn’t make it back this far. One of Glitsky’s men had stayed behind with the woman and her child, so Glitsky and his remaining backup moved quickly down the hallway. The sergeant went through the open door, his partner crouched in the dark hall, gun pointed in.
There might have been a bed, but he couldn’t see it. He flicked on the light – another bare overhead. There it was – the bed – against the other wall, the only furniture besides a Salvation Army dresser. The man stirred in the bed, pulled the thin blanket over him. ‘C’mon, shit,’ he said, ‘get that light.’
Glitsky was at the bedside, pulling the sheet all the way down and off the bed, at the same time putting the barrel of his gun against the man’s temple. Wilson, naked except for a pair of red bikini underpants, blinked in the harsh light.
‘Don’t blink any harder, Tremaine,’ Glitsky said, ‘this thing might go off. You’re under arrest.’
Glitsky’s partner had his cuffs out, was flipping Wilson over, snapping them in place. Glitsky went to the doorway and turned the light on and off, the signal that everything was all right. He heard the cops from outside come to the door. He went out to the front room, where the woman sat on the floor in the corner, holding her son. He lowered himself onto the green vinyl couch, letting his adrenaline subside.
The domicile looked the same as all the others – no rug, no pictures on the walls, stains here and there, a lingering odor of grease, musk, marijuana. Holes in the drywall.
Tremaine Wilson, untied shoes and no socks, pants and shirt thrown on, was led out. At least it had been an easy arrest. Small favors.
Now, nine o’clock, Tremaine booked, Glitsky was at the Marina and he was cold. July 1, and cold again. The past few days of warmth were already a dim memory. He thought maybe he ought to start keeping a log of certain dates, maybe the first of every month. He could see it, year after year, a microcosm of San Francisco’s cute little boutique microclimate: January 1 – cold. February 1 -cold. March, April, May – cold and windy. June and July – foggy and guess what. August 1 – chilly, possibility of fog. September and October – nice, not warm, but not cold. November, December – see January, etc.
José was out doing something with one of the lunatics who was taking a yacht out this morning onto the choppy Bay. Glitsky stood over a portable electric heater behind the counter, wondering what he was supposed to be doing here.
When he’d gotten back to his desk from booking, there had been a message to call Pullios. He found out she was taking the Nash murder to the grand jury, top secret, and he should clear his calendar because he – Glitsky – was going to appear tomorrow as a witness before the grand jury and explain that he arrested May Shinn because he was sure she was trying to flee the jurisdiction to avoid her inevitable trial for murder. And by the way, did he think he could take another shot at a few witnesses before tomorrow and see if he could dig up any more evidence?
Sure, he’d told her, no problem. Always here to help. Except, what witnesses? The case was pretty characterized by lack of witnesses. The only true interrogation he’d written up was the night guard at the Marina, Tom Waddell, and that, he thought, hadn’t provided squat in the way of convictable testimony.
But you kept at this long enough, you got a feeling about these things. Some cases were light on eyewitness testimony. Didn’t mean they weren’t any good. Prosecutors were always wanting a little more, a look under one more rock for that fabled smoking gun. Pullios had asked him how he really felt about the case against Shinn, and he told her he thought it was tight as a frog’s ass -watertight, but not airtight.
‘Airtight would be better,’ she said.
So here he was. And here was José, the morning guard, back from the pontoons, going straight to the coffee machine. Normally tea was Glitsky’s drink, but on less than four hours’ sleep he thought a little Java wouldn’t hurt him.
This was going to be another formal interview, another report, and he got José comfortable, sitting at his desk while he loaded a fresh tape into his recorder.
‘Three, two, one,’ he said. He stopped, smiled, sipped at his coffee, and listened to it play back. ‘Okay…’
This is Inspector Abraham Glitsky, star number 1144. I am currently at the office of the Golden Gate Marina, 3567 Fort Point Drive. With me is a gentleman identifying himself as José Ochorio, Hispanic male, 2/24/67. This interview is pursuant to an investigation of case number 921065882. Today’s date is July 1, 1992, Wednesday, at 9:20 A.M.
Q: You have said that when you arrived at work a week ago Saturday, June 20, the Eloise had already gone out.
A: Si.
Q: Had it been out the day before?
A: No. When I leave the day before, it’s at its place at the end of Two out there. Where it is now.
Q: And what time did you leave the day before?
A: I don’t know. Sometime normal. Two, three o’clock, but the boat was there.
Q: And it was back on Sunday morning when you came in?
A: Si.
Q: Do you get any days off here?
A: Sure. It’s a good place. I get Monday and Tuesday, but we can switch around. Long as it’s covered.
Q: But no one switched on the morning in question?
A: No.
Q: All right, José.
[Pause.]
During which Glitsky drank some coffee and tried to find another line of questioning.
Q: Let’s talk about Owen Nash and May Shinn. I have here a snap-shot of Ms Shinn. Do you recognize this woman?
A: Oh sure, man. She come here a lot.
Q: A lot? What’s a lot, José?
A: Last three, four months, maybe twice a month, three times.
Q: So you’ve seen her here at the Marina, a total of, say, ten times, twelve times?
A: About that, maybe more, maybe less.
Q: Did you ever see her at the helm of the Eloise?
A: Well, sure. She always with Mr Nash.
Q: I mean alone, guiding the boat in herself, like that.
[Pause.]
A: I don’t know. I try to remember.
Q: Take your time.
[Pause.]
A: Yeah, she take it out under motor one time, at least to the jetty. But that’s only like, you see, maybe two hundred feet.
Q: But Mr Nash wasn’t at the wheel?
A: No. I remember. He’s standing out on the bowsprit, laughing real loud. That’s when I look up. I remember.
Q: And she’s alone. May is alone, under power?
A: Si.
Q: And have you seen her since?
A: Steering the boat?
Q: No. Anytime.
A: Si.
Q: When was that?
A: I don’t know. Last week sometime. I remember, ‘cause, you know, you guys…
Q: Sure, but do you remember when? What was she doing?
A: I don’t know. She was out there, on the street. Walking back to her car, maybe, I don’t know. I see her going away.
Q: And you’re sure it was May?
A: Si. It was her.
Q: Are you certain what day it was? It could be very important.
[Pause.]
A: I think it was Thursday. Oh sure. It must have been. I remember, I got the note from Tom he’d locked the boat, which was Wednesday, right? So I go check it. It’s still locked. Thursday, I’m sure, si, Thursday.
‘I need to see you.’
Hardy felt his palms get hot. He leaned back in his chair at his desk. Without thought, he reached for his paperweight, cradled the phone in his neck, started passing the jade from hand to hand. There was no mistaking Celine’s husky voice. ‘Ken says you don’t think May did it.’
‘I’m sorry I gave him that impression. I do think May did it. I just don’t think it’s going to be easy to prove.’
‘What do you need?’
‘What do you mean, what do I need?’
‘I mean, what could make it more obvious?’
‘It’s obvious enough to me, Celine, but our job is to sell that to a jury -’
‘Your job,’ she said flatly. ‘It’s not our job. It’s your job.’
‘Yes, right.’
She was breathing heavily, even over the phone. She might as well have been in the room with him. It could be she was still worked up, just off the phone from Farris. There was no avoiding it, the principals – the victim’s circle – tended to talk among themselves.
‘What more do you need?’ she repeated.
Hardy temporized. ‘We’ve got more since I talked to Ken. We’ve got ballistics now. May’s gun did kill your father.’
‘Well, of course it did. We’ve known that all along.’
He didn’t know how to tell her they hadn’t known it, they’d just assumed it. That the assumption turned out right was fine for them but it hadn’t made the theory any more or less true before the ballistics report came in. ‘And her prints are on it. And no one else’s.’ Silence. ‘Celine?’
‘I need to see you. I need your help. I’m worried. I’m afraid. She’s out on bail. What if she comes after me?’
‘Why would she do that, Celine?’
‘Why did she kill my father? To keep me from testifying? I don’t know, but she might.’
‘So far as I know, Celine, we’re not having you testify, at least not about that.’
‘But I know she was on the boat.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘My father told me he was going out with her.’
‘That’s not evidence.’
He heard her breathing again, almost labored. ‘It is evidence, he told me.’
‘Your father might have intended to go out on Saturday with May, but that doesn’t mean he was actually out with her.’
‘But he was.’
How do you argue with this? he thought. The woman is struggling with her grief, frightened, frustrated by the system’s slow routine – he couldn’t really expect a Descartes here.
‘Celine, listen.’ He filled a couple of minutes with Glitsky’s saga of Tremaine Wilson, how the first witness had known he was in the car, holding a gun, using the gun. But he hadn’t actually seen his face. He knew it was Tremaine, he’d recognized him, ski-mask and all, but there was no way to even bring that evidence to a jury because it wasn’t evidence. It was assumption. It wasn’t until the next witness showed up and could connect the car, the murder weapon and – undoubtedly – Tremaine, that they’d been able to make an arrest. ‘It’s a little the same thing here, Celine.’
She was unimpressed with the analogy. She didn’t want an analogy. ‘I need to see you,’ she said for the third time.
She was fixating on him. He didn’t need this. He didn’t need any of it, common though it might be. His reaction to her was too unprofessional. Maybe on some level she knew that, was reacting to it, using it in her own desperation. ‘I’m here all day. My door’s always open -’
‘Not in your office.’
‘My office is where I work, Celine.’
‘That bar, the last time, that wasn’t your office.’
Hardy was starting to know how people got to be tightasses. It really was true that you gave people an inch and they took a mile – they expected a mile. You didn’t give ‘em the full mile and they felt betrayed.
Her voice softened, suddenly without the hint of a demand. ‘Dismas, please. Would you please see me?’
He sighed. He might know how people evolved into tightasses, but that didn’t mean he wanted to become one himself. ‘Where’s a good place? Where are you now?’
It was three-thirty now and she was just going to change and then work out. She would be at Hardbodies! near Broadway and Van Ness until around six. If he pushed it a little, he could tell himself it was right on his way home.
Jeff didn’t have a private room, but he had the window, and the other bed was empty, so it was just as good. He was at the Kaiser Hospital near Masonic, and his window looked north, the red spires of the Golden Gate poking through the cloud barrier beyond the green swath of the Presidio. Closer in, the fog had lifted and the sun was bathing the little boxes along the avenues.
Jeff Elliot wouldn’t have cared if there had been a monsoon blowing out there over a slag heap – at least he could see it.
His vision, coaxed by the Prednisone, had begun to slide back, furtive as a thief, sometime early in the morning, a dim, lighter shadow amid all the darkness.
He was afraid to believe it. This disease didn’t give back. It took away, and kept what it took. First his legs. Now his sight? And besides, there really wasn’t anything to see. Some shapes, but dark.
He could press his hands into his eyes and hold the pressure for a minute, and there would be little explosions of light – purple, green, white – that seemed to take place inside his brain. He didn’t know if real blind people experienced that. The stimulus, though, didn’t come from outside light. He was sure of that. Could it be his optic nerve was still working?
By morning there was no doubt. At least he wouldn’t, thank God, be stone-blind. And all during the day, between naps, it had gotten better, until now he could see. Not perfectly, still fuzzy, but enough.
Dorothy Burgess – from Maury’s office – had been in before she’d gone to work that morning just to see if he was all right, bringing flowers. Now she was coming through the door again – visitors’ hours – smiling, concerned, the most lovely sight he had ever seen.
She sat down. ‘How are you feeling?’
He pushed himself up, half sitting now. ‘Much better. I can see you.’
He hadn’t called his parents back in Wisconsin. He didn’t want to worry them. He thought he’d call them when the attack was over, when they could assess the latest damage. After he’d been admitted last night, he’d made a call to the Chronicle, but nobody from there had been in to visit.
He didn’t know what to say to Dorothy. Before the MS, he hadn’t done much dating to speak of, and since losing the use of his legs, his confidence in that area had dipped to zero. He’d concentrated on his career. But he was doing all right – he wasn’t asking for anything more.
If you were crippled, you couldn’t expect women to be crawling all over you, except the pity-groupies, and he didn’t want any part of them. He knew he was probably the last mid-twenties virgin in San Francisco, if not the known world, and it was okay. He could live with it. At least he was alive. You had to keep your priorities straight.
Dorothy moved her chair against the bed and rested her arm down by his legs. Her hair was the color of wheat just before it was harvested. The white blouse had a scoop neck, a scalloped row of blue cornflowers that perfectly matched her eyes. Freckles on a tan bosom. He found he couldn’t stop taking her in, like the air he breathed. ‘I’m staring.’
She laughed, more sunlight. ‘I’d stare too if I’d been blind yesterday.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He always felt apologetic about this damn disease. ‘I didn’t mean to get anybody involved in all this. Don’t feel like you have to come visit. I’m okay.’
‘It is a terrible inconvenience.’ Was she teasing him? ‘I was just saying to Maury today, ’I guess I’ve got to go visit that awful Jeff Elliot again. He is really making my life difficult, going blind in our office like that.‘
‘I was just saying -’
‘I know what you were saying. And it’s silly.’ She patted his leg. ‘Are they feeding you all right here?’
He tried to remember. ‘I guess so. I must have had something. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be out tomorrow anyway. They just wanted to observe me for the day.’
‘Kaiser,’ she said. ‘Keep those beds empty. You never know when someone might need one.’
‘It’s okay,’ he repeated. ‘All I need is steroids. I don’t need to be in the hospital.’
‘You need food.’
‘I guess so. I never really thought about it.’
‘You never think about food? I think about food all the time.’
His eyes traveled down over her slim body. ‘Where do you put it?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I put it. Now who’s picking you up when you leave here? How are you getting home?’
He hadn’t thought about that, either. He supposed he’d take a cab. He hoped his car was still parked in one of the handicapped stalls behind the Hall of Justice.
‘Okay, it’s settled then. I’m coming by tomorrow, taking you home, and cooking you a meal. After that, you’ve just got to stop bothering me.’ She stood up, leaned over and kissed him. ‘Don’t get fresh,’ she said, then was gone.
Hardy reflected, not for the first time, that he was too much in touch with himself. Wouldn’t it be nice to sometimes be able to truly fool yourself? Not know every motive you had down to about six levels.
He wanted to see Celine, and not in his office. That was the problem.
He had simply decided – last week, as soon as it had come up – that he was not going to do anything about it. It was too risky – for him, for Frannie, for the new life that was making him more content than he’d ever thought possible. It seemed to him that sometimes you met people who were immediately recognizable as having an almost chemical power to insinuate themselves into your life. Those people – men or women – could power your engines if you weren’t yet settled down. But if you had a career and a family and a rhythm to your life, a blast like that could only destroy things. If you wanted to keep your orbit you avoided that extra juice. Simple as that.
Hardy could control himself – that wasn’t it – but Celine was fire. And the best way to avoid getting burned, even if you were careful, was to avoid the fire.
‘Dumb,’ he said, pausing a moment before pushing open the semi-opaque glass doors of Hardbodies! He was greeted by twenty reflections of himself. Mirrors, mirrors, on the wall.
‘Can I help you?’
The name tag said ‘Chris,’ and Chris, Hardy thought, was the Bionic Man. Muscles on his muscles, green Hardbodies! headband, yellow Hardbodies! t-shirt, black Spandex shorts. Wristbands on both wrists. Perfect shiny black Beatle-length hair. Behind the long counter he could see three girls and four guys, all from the same mold as Chris.
‘I’m meeting somebody,’ he said.
‘Sure, no problem,’ Chris said. ‘We got a pager at the desk here.’
He heard her name called while he waited on a padded stool. There weren’t any chairs, only stools. And little mushroom tables with magazines on them: City Sports, Triathloner, Maximum Steel, The Competitive Edge. There was music playing, heavy-beat stuff. He heard what sounded like a lot of basketballs getting dribbled on a wooden floor.
The place already seemed packed, and people were filing by him as though they were giving away money in the back room.
Suddenly, though he jogged four or five days a week, he felt old and flabby. Everybody in here was under thirty, except for the ones who were fifty and looked better than Hardy figured he had at twenty.
And Celine, who wasn’t anywhere near fifty and looked better than any of the twenties, even with a good sweat up. Especially, perhaps, with a good sweat up. A blue sweatband held her hair back, a towel was draped around her neck. She wore a fluorescent blue Spandex halter top soaked dark between her breasts. The bare skin of her stomach gleamed wet and hard. The leotard bottoms rose over her hips at the sides and dipped well below her navel in the front. A Spandex bikini bottom matched her top. White Reeboks.
He was standing almost before he was aware of it. They were shaking hands, hers wet and powdery. She brushed his cheek with her lips, then wiped the slight moisture from the side of his mouth. ‘Sorry. Thank you for coming down.’
Hardy stood, wanting to rub the spot on his cheek. Fire burns.
‘I feel a little funny here,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t my natural environment, especially dressed like this.’
She took him in. ‘You look fine.’
‘Is there someplace to talk?’
Celine told him there was a juice bar on the second floor. Would that be all right? Hardy followed her up a wide banistered granite staircase to the upstairs lobby, the entire space bordered by hi-tech metallic instruments of torture – exercycles, Climb-Masters, rowing machines, treadmills. Each was in use. You couldn’t avoid the panting, the noise of thirty sets of whirring gears, occasionally a moan or a grunt. Beyond the machines, the glass wall to the outside showed off another of the city’s famous views – Alcatraz, Angel Island, Marin County. You could see where the fog abruptly ended a mile or so inside the Golden Gate.
The juice bar was about as intimate as a railroad station, but at least the noise level was lower. The aerobic music wasn’t pumped in here, although it did leak from the lobby. Celine ordered some type of a shake that the perfect specimen behind the bar poured a bunch of powders into. Hardy thought he’d stick with some bottled water; he paid $4.75 for the two drinks.
They sat at a low table in the corner of the room where the glass wall met brick. ‘Do you come here a lot?’ Hardy asked.
‘Sometimes it’s like I live here. Then since Daddy…’ She sipped her shake. ‘It works it off. I don’t know what else to do to fill up the time.’
‘What did you do before?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Before your father died. Sometimes the best thing you can do is go back to your routines, what you were used to.’
A tanker that appeared through the fog bank on the Bay seemed to take her attention for a minute. ‘But I didn’t really do anything routinely,’ she said. ‘I mean, I don’t work or anything. I just lived. Now…’ She let it trail off, went back to staring.
‘Did you see your father every day?’
‘Well, not every. When he wanted to see me, I had to be there. I mean, I know that sounds weird, but he’d get hurt.’
‘He’d get hurt if you didn’t drop everything to see him?’
‘Well, not everything. I had my own life too.’
‘That’s what I was talking about. Getting back to your own life.’
She was shaking her head. ‘But it’s like there’s no point to it now. Don’t you see? It’s like the center’s fallen out.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that’s how it feels, but it hasn’t really. You’ve got your own center. You do. You just have to find it again.’
But he seemed to keep losing her. Again, her eyes were out toward the evening sky. ‘Celine?’ He brought his hand up and laid it over hers, exerting a little pressure. She came back to him. ‘You mind if I ask you how old you are?’
‘No, I don’t mind. You can ask anything you want.’ She met his eyes, solemn, then suddenly broke into a smile. Thirty-nine,‘ she said. ’Almost got you, didn’t I?‘
Hardy nodded, smiling himself. ‘Almost.’
‘So what about thirty-nine?’
‘I’m just thinking that’s not too young to stop being dependent on your father.’
He felt the shift in her tension just before she pulled her hand out from under his. ‘I wasn’t dependent on my father. I loved my father.’
‘Of course, I’m not saying anything else. But, well, isn’t thirty-nine a little old to be at his beck and call?’
‘I wasn’t at his beck and call.’
‘But he made you feel guilty if you weren’t there when he wanted to see you. That’s pretty classic parental control.’
‘It just hurt his feelings. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, that’s all.’
Hardy knew he was digging a hole, but thought he might get all the way through to China and see some light. ‘Remember when we were talking the other day, what you said about being so mad at him? Maybe that’s why.’
‘I’m not mad at him! Ken’s the same way.’
Hardy leaned back, slowing down, wanting to make the point and not get in a fight over it. ‘Your father controlled people, Celine. Ken too. Maybe that’s why he was so successful.’
‘My father did not control me.’
She clearly didn’t want to hear it. Time to back off. ‘Okay, okay.’
‘And who are you to talk? What makes you such an expert?’
Hardy help up a hand, trying to slow her down. ‘Whoa, I didn’t say -’
‘I know what you were saying. That my daddy was this control freak who was ruining my life because he loved his daughter and wanted to see her. Well, that’s all it was. We loved each other. We had the best times. You didn’t know him. We loved each other!’
She was starting to cry now, punctuating her speech by punching her glass into the table. Other people were looking over at the commotion.
‘Celine…’
‘Just go away. I don’t need your help. Go away. Leave me alone.’
Hardy leaned forward in the chair, put his hand again on the table. ‘Celine.’
She slammed her glass down onto the table, the drink spilling out over her hands, over the glass. ‘Get out of here! Now! Get out of here!’
‘I think she’s nuts.’
‘She’s bereaved, Diz. The girl’s father dies, you don’t pick that moment to point out to her he was a prick.’
‘I didn’t say he was a prick. I was trying to give her something to help her break away, give her a little insight -’
‘Insight comes in its own sweet time.’
‘That’s beautiful, Mose. I’ll remember that. Give me another hit, would you?’
Hardy was drinking Bushmills at the Shamrock. It was Wednesday, date night, and he was meeting Frannie at seven, in another half hour. There weren’t more than twenty patrons in the place and only two others at the bar, nursing beers.
The Little Shamrock had been in existence since 1893. Moses McGuire had bought it in 1977 and pretty much left it the way it had been. The place was only fifteen feet wide, wall to wall, and about forty-five feet deep. The bar itself – mahogany – extended halfway to the back along the left side. Twelve tables, with four chairs each, filled the area in front of the bar on the linoleum floor. Over that area hung an assortment of bric-a-brac – bicycles, antique fishing rods, an upside-down sailfish and the pièce de résistance, a clock that had stopped ticking during the Great Earthquake of 1906.
The back of the place had an old wall-to-wall maroon Berber carpet and several couches, armchairs, coffee tables, a fireplace. It wasn’t designed to seat the maximum amount of bodies, but to make it comfortable for what bodies there were. The bathrooms had stained glass in the doors. There were two dart boards against the side wall in the back by an old-fashioned jukebox.
The entire front of the bar was comprised of two picture windows and a set of swinging doors. Out the windows was Lincoln Boulevard. Across the street was Golden Gate Park, evergreen and eucalyptus. Three years ago, after working as a bartender there for nearly a decade, Hardy had acquired a quarter-interest in the place. It was almost as much his home as his house was.
McGuire walked down to the taps and came back with a pint of stout. ‘And what I am supposed to do with this? I see you come through the door, I start a Guinness. It’s automatic. So now I got a Guinness poured and tonight you’re drinking Irish.’
‘It’s that element of surprise that makes me such a fascinating guy to know. Tonight I needed a real drink.’
‘My father told me that the secret to controlling alcohol is never to take a drink when you feel like you need one.’
‘Those are noble words,’ Hardy said. ‘Aphorism night has come to the Shamrock. Hit me again, though, would you?’
Moses sighed, turned and grabbed the Bushmills from the back bar and poured. ‘We’re never heeded in our own countries, you know. It’s the tragedy of genius.’
‘Leave the Guinness,’ Hardy said. ‘I’ll drink it, too.’
Moses pulled over his stool. Hardy had often said that Moses’s face probably resembled the way God’s would look after He got old. His brother-in-law was only a few years older than Hardy, but they had been heavy-weather years. He had long, brown hair with some gray, pony-tailed in the back, an oft-broken nose. There were character lines everywhere – laugh lines, worry lines, crow’s-feet. He was clean-shaven this month, although that varied. ‘So why’d she want to see you in the first place – Celine?’
Hardy shrugged. ‘Hold her hand, I don’t know. She seemed to be hurting. I thought I might be able to help her out. Now I’m thinking we ought to get some protection for May Shinn.’
‘You don’t really think she’d do anything to her, do you?’
‘I don’t know what she’ll do. I don’t think she knows what she’ll do.’
Moses took a sip of his own Scotch, a fixture in the bar’s gutter. ‘She’s upset, can’t exactly blame her. She probably won’t do anything,’ he said.
‘It’s the “probably” that worries me.’ He took his dart case out of his jacket pocket and started fitting his hand-tooled flights into the shafts. ‘I think I’ll go shoot a few bull’s-eyes,’ he said. ‘Do something I’m good at.’
David Freeman picked up his telephone. It was after work hours, but he was still at his desk, back after dinner to the place he loved best. He didn’t have any particular work to do, so he was doing some light reading – catching up on recent California appellate court decisions for fun.
‘Mr Freeman, this is Nick Strauss. I got your card from a neighbor of mine, Mrs Streletski. How can I help you?’
‘Mr Strauss, it’s good of you to call. As Mrs Streletski may have mentioned, I’m working for a client who needs to establish what she was doing during the daytime on Saturday, June twentieth. The woman in question happens to live directly across the street from you on the same level – that other turreted apartment?’
‘Sure, I know it, but I can’t say I’d know any particular person who lives there.’
‘She’s an Oriental woman. Quite attractive.’
‘I’d like to meet her. I could use a little attractive in my life.’ A little manly chuckle, then Strauss was quiet a moment. ‘Sorry. June twentieth, you say?’
‘That’s the date. I know it’s a while ago now.’
‘No, it’s not that. Normally I probably wouldn’t remember. It’s just that’s the day I picked up my kids. They’d been traveling in Europe with their mother -we’re divorced – and I picked them up at the crack of dawn at the airport.’
‘And they didn’t mention anything, seeing anything?’
‘I don’t know how they could. They’d slept on the plane and were ready to go, so we just stopped in to have a bite and drop their luggage. Then we took off, exploring the city. It was a great day really, they’re good kids.’
‘I’m sure. But you saw nothing?’
‘No, sorry. What did she do, this attractive Oriental woman?’
‘She’s being charged with killing someone, although the case is weak. If anyone saw her at home during that day, we can make a case that there is no case.’
‘I’ll talk to the boys, double-check, but I really doubt it. Who’d she kill, by the way?’
Freeman kept himself in check. This was the natural question. ‘She didn’t kill anyone, Mr Strauss.’
‘Oh yeah, that’s right. Sorry.’
‘It’s all right. Thanks for the call.’
‘Sure.’
Freeman sat back with his hands crossed behind his head. So the alibi wouldn’t hold up. It was no great surprise.
The grand jury convened at ten A.M., Thursday, July 2, 1992. It was Hardy’s first appearance there. He wore a brand-new dark suit with nearly-invisible maroon pinstripes, a maroon silk tie, black shoes. When Pullios saw him outside the grand-jury room door, she whistled, looked him up and down. ‘You’ll do.’
Hardy thought she didn’t look so bad herself in a tailored red suit of conservative cut. Instead of a briefcase, she carried a black sling purse.
‘No notes?’
She tapped her temple. ‘Right here.’
At her knock, the door was opened by a uniformed policeman. This was light years from the bustling informality of one of the Municipal or Superior Court courtrooms.
The grand jury was a deck so heavily stacked in favor of the prosecution that Hardy thought a case could be made against its constitutionality. The fact that no one had brought such an appeal was probably a reflection of the reality that nobody representing the accused was allowed in the room. He thought the prosecution winning on an indictment before the grand jury was kind of like a Buick winning the Buick Economy Run.
Hardy sat next to Pullios at the prosecution desk and studied the faces of the twenty jurors arranged in three ascending rows behind long tables.
He couldn’t remember ever having seen such a balanced jury of twelve. These twenty were comprised of ten men and ten women. Three of them – two women and a man – were probably over sixty. Four more – two and two- were, he guessed, under twenty-five. There were six blacks, two Orientals, he thought two Hispanics. Most were decently dressed – sports coats and a few ties for the men, dresses or skirts for the women. But one of the white guys looked like a biker – short sleeves, tattoos on his forearms, long unkempt hair. One woman was knitting. Three people were reading paperbacks and one of the young women appeared to be reading a comic book.
The room wasn’t large. It smelled like coffee. At what would have been the defense table – if there had been one- was a large box full of donuts and sweet rolls that about half the jurors had dipped into.
The grand jury wasn’t chosen like a regular jury – if a trial jury was a time commitment and minor inconvenience for the average taxpayer, selection to the grand jury was more like a vocation. You sat one day a week for six months, essentially cloistered, and the only kinds of crimes you discussed were felonies. And if you mentioned anything about the proceedings outside of this room, you were committing a felony yourself. There were stories -impossible to verify – that D.A.s had come in and said, ‘Off the record, I don’t believe our eyewitness either. We’ve got no credible evidence at this time. But I’ve been doing homicides now for twenty years and I tell you unequivocally that John Doe, on the afternoon of whatever it is, did kill four Jane Does. Now we’ve got to get this guy off the street before he kills someone else. And he will, ladies and gentlemen, he will. You can count on it. I will stake my reputation and career upon a conviction, but we’ve got to get this man indicted and behind bars and we’ve got to do it now.’ Of course they were only stories. Whatever, the grand jury was a cornerstone of the criminal system, and it behooved prosecutors to take it seriously, which Elizabeth did, in spite of her ‘ham sandwich’ rhetoric. She stood up, greeted the jurors pleasantly and began her attack.
‘Ladies and gentleman of the jury, this morning the people of the State of California present the most serious charge in the matter of the capital murder of Owen Nash. You may have read in the newspapers something about this case, and specifically you may be aware that the defendant, May Shintaka, has already been scheduled for a preliminary hearing in Municipal Court in this jurisdiction. However, the delay proposed by the Municipal Court is, in the opinion of the district attorney, terribly excessive. No doubt many of you are aware of the legal axiom that justice delayed is justice denied. It is the contention of the people in this instance that the proposed delay would in fact constitute a denial of justice for this most heinous crime – the crime of cold-blooded, premeditated murder for financial gain, a crime that calls for the death penalty in the State of California.’
Pullios paused and walked stone-faced back toward Hardy, to where he sat at the table. She picked up a glass of water, took a small sip. Her eyes were bright – she was flying. Immediately she was back to business. Hardy couldn’t help but admire the show.
‘So in a sense,’ she said, ‘the indictment the people seek today is simply an administrative strategem to move the trial for this crime to Superior Court, where it can be heard in a timely fashion. But in a greater sense, an indictment before this body will reinforce the state’s contention that, based on real and true evidence, there is indeed just cause for issuance of a warrant for the arrest of May Shintaka and a compelling need for a fair and speedy trial in pursuance of the interests of the people of this state.’
Hardy thought it was getting a little thick, but he also realized that Elizabeth Pullios, looking like she did and fired up as she was, could probably read the telephone book to these people and keep their attention. She went on to describe the witnesses she would call: Glitsky, Strout, the cab driver, the ballistics expert, the two guards from the Marina, a handwriting analyst. Then she got to Celine Nash. Hardy remembered the other giant lapse in evidentiary rules before the grand jury – hearsay was technically inadmissible, but there was no judge or defense lawyer there to keep it out.
How could Celine not have mentioned to him yesterday that she was testifying today? Well, they hadn’t had much time to get to it before she went off on him. It could have been that the initial reason she called him was nerves over this appearance today, testifying against Shinn. She’d even said something about it.
Hardy found himself unhappy in a hurry, wishing he’d reviewed the witness list before they’d come down here -he still did have a lot to learn. Pullios had been doing her homework while Hardy pursued his own agenda. They were going to nail May Shinn six ways from Sunday.
Then, at lunch, Pullios told him she wanted him to take Celine Nash.
‘No way, Elizabeth. She’s mad at me.’ He explained and she thought it over for a moment, then overruled him. ‘No, you’re better. Just get her confidence back.’
‘You’ve already got her confidence.’
‘No, I don’t. I’ve never met her personally, but Sergeant Glitsky tells me she’s stunning.’
‘I guess.’
Pullios shook her head. ‘Then it’s not a good match. The jurors will see something between us. It might even be there.’
‘What’s to see? What are they looking for?’
‘This will maybe sound arrogant, but it’s true that people don’t identify with two attractive women on the same side. Right now I’ve got the jury on my side – our side. If Celine comes in, human nature is going to tell the jurors that we – she and I – are natural enemies. Somebody’s credibility is going to suffer. Whoever’s, it’s bad for our side. If you question her there’s no conflict. It’s only natural she’d want to cooperate, especially looking all spiffy like you do today.’
Hardy shrugged.
Pullios put her straw in her mouth and sucked up some iced tea. ‘You’d better believe those jurors are a fairly good representation of the average man, or average woman. I couldn’t care less if I sound enlightened or liberated or anything else. I’m playing to win, and I’m telling you that if I depose Celine Nash it’s a weak move. We can probably afford a weak move, okay, but it’s a bad tactic. You don’t give anything away. Even to grand juries. You still take your best chance every time. And you’re our best chance with Celine.’
She whispered she was sorry – more mouthed it – as soon as she sat down. She was elegant in cool blue. She’d put on extra eyeshadow, and Hardy wondered if she’d slept last night. Or cried.
It wasn’t supposed to be lengthy. All he was supposed to do was nail down what Owen had said to her about going out with May on the day he was killed.
It had been the Tuesday before – the sixteenth, in the morning. She had called him at his office. Celine had intended to go away the upcoming weekend and wanted to make sure her father hadn’t made plans that included her.
‘Don’t you think thirty-nine’s a little old to be at his beck and call?’
‘I wasn’t at his beck and call. My father didn’t control me!’
He put that out of his mind. That was last night. This was today. He had a limited role and he’d better keep to it. ‘And Ms Nash, tell us what your father said regarding the day in question, June twentieth.’
She kept trying to catch his eye, give him a look that promised forgiveness, but he kept himself focused on individual jurors. He would look at her as she answered questions.
‘He said he was planning on going over to the Farralons on Saturday with his girlfriend, with May.’
‘Had he told you of such plans in the past?’
‘Yes, all the time.’
‘And in your experience, did your father tend to follow through on these types of things?’
This was shooting fish in a barrel. He kept expecting to hear somebody object to the nature and thrust of his questions, but since there was neither a defense attorney nor a judge in the room he could ask what he liked.
‘Always. If Daddy said he was going to do something he did it.’
‘All right, but just for the sake of argument, what if, for example, Ms Shinn had gotten sick Saturday morning?’
‘Daddy would have done something else. He wouldn’t have wasted a day. He wouldn’t have done that.’
‘He wouldn’t have gone out alone, perhaps, since he’d already made those plans?’
Celine gave it a moment, chewing on her thumbnail. ‘No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t a solitary man. Besides, we know he didn’t go out alone, don’t we?’
‘You’re right, Ms Nash, we do. Indeed we do.’
It took until three-thirty, but they got the indictment.
There was no immediate flurry of activity. The bail was still in effect. There would be no immediate arrest of May Shinn, but the fur would really begin to fly when David Freeman got the news, which would be very soon.
Meanwhile, Hardy packed his briefcase, hoping that Celine Nash had decided not to wait around until the jury adjourned.
Celine fell in beside him just outside the door.
‘I am sorry,’ she said. She linked an arm through his and he felt the heat of her body where they came together.
‘It’s okay, people get upset. It happens.’
‘I don’t know what happened. I didn’t mean for anything like that to happen.’
‘It’s all right, forget it. We’ll just move ahead on the trial. It ought to go pretty quickly now.’
He had stopped walking, waiting by the elevators. She was standing too close and his heart was beating enough that he felt it. ‘What do you want me to do, Celine?’
‘I just don’t want you to be mad at me.’
‘I’m not mad at you. I was out of line, it wasn’t exactly professional.’
‘I don’t care about professional.’
‘That’s our relationship,’ he said, clearly as he could say it. Then, ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does, it does matter. Do you know what it is to be completely alone?’
Not a professional question.
The elevators opened, jammed as usual. Hardy got in, Celine cramming next to him, thigh to thigh, arm in his. He smelled the powder she used, the same powder she’d left on him as she’d greeted him with a kiss at Hardbodies! last night – that he’d scrubbed off in the Shamrock before Frannie had come in for date night. He didn’t press the button for his floor and they rode it all the way down to the street level in silence, everyone else chattering away.
They went outside the front doors, turned east on Bryant, away from the bright sun. A cool wind was up off the Bay. They went two blocks before Hardy said he did know what it was to be alone.
Celine took that with no response. Then: ‘You must think I’m crazy.’
He grinned tightly. ‘People do crazy things. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re crazy.’
‘It doesn’t?’
Hardy walked a couple more steps. ‘I don’t know, maybe it does.’
It was a little Cuban coffee shop, unnamed, dark as a cave. The table was of finished plywood – there were seven such tables, four with people at them. A Spanish television station whispered from the back corner. The good smell had stopped their walk and brought them inside. They were drinking café con leche made with heated Carnation evaporated milk, sweet.
If you walked in and saw them sitting across from one another, aside from knowing they didn’t belong here in their Anglo clothes and complexions, you would assume many true things about them. Though they didn’t know each other very well, there was a powerful attraction between them. They had to control it by putting the table between them. They weren’t lovers; if they were they’d have moved together. Well, maybe they were in the middle of a fight, but they weren’t acting angry. No, the first call was right. They were getting to something.
The man was leaning forward, hands clenched around the wide, deep coffee cup. He was more than leaning, in fact, more like hunched over, rapt, mesmerized?
She seemed more controlled, but there were giveaways, invitations. She sat sideways to him, very well put together. Her dark suit was muted but a lot of her excellent legs showed, tightly crossed and curled back under her chair. She held her cup lightly in one hand -her other extended out, subtle enough, toward him, there if he wanted it, if he dared take it.
She was doing most of the talking. You would think this might be the day they would do it. From here they’d go to one of their places, or maybe a motel. You could feel it, even halfway across the room.
After Dorothy had gone, Jeff Elliot called Parker Whitelaw at the Chronicle and told him his sight had returned -he’d be back at work the next day.
This wasn’t completely true, but Parker wouldn’t have to know it. Most people were ignorant about how MS worked. They could see the results – the weakened limbs, weight loss, lack of coordination – but they had no clue about the way the disease progressed. Jeff thought this was just as well. It was actually to his advantage if Parker thought that whatever had laid him up for a day had now completely passed and he could go back to being the ace reporter he’d been before.
In reality, his sight was still very poor. Yesterday, which had begun in total blackness, had heartened him as some sight, then quite a bit, had returned. But, testing it, he found the left eye still all but worthless, the brown smudge blotting all but its extreme periphery. The right eye was a little better – the range of vision was wider, though all of it was fuzzy. But he thought that he could get by. He didn’t particularly think it would be wise to try and drive, but he could fake the rest.
The doctor had told him that since there had been some almost immediate remission in the total blindness, there was a small chance he could expect gradual improvement with continual steroid treatment. He might even regain normal sight. Maybe.
This morning he called Maury Carter’s office and told Dorothy he really had to go in to work, but he would like to see her tonight as they’d planned.
‘Well, how are you getting to work?’
‘I’ll just take a cab.’
She wouldn’t hear of him taking a cab. She told him she could take some time off – ‘Maury feels terrible about this, too. He’s a nice man underneath’ – and be down there by lunchtime. Would he please wait for her?
‘You don’t have to do this.’
‘Of course, I don’t. Who said I did?’
They let him take a shower and shave. He still had his clothes from two days before, but they were okay, better by far than the gown. Dorothy was there by twelve-thirty and pushed him in a wheelchair out to her car. The morning fog out in the Avenues hadn’t burned off, and the daylight glared. She put his crutches in the trunk and he got himself settled on the passenger side in the front seat. His legs weren’t completely dead yet.
They had sandwiches at Tommy’s Joynt and he got to the office close to four. She left him at the Chronicle’s front door and said she’d be back at six, he’d better be there. She’d kissed him again.
He had a message from an Elizabeth Pullios at the district attorney’s office and the memo line said it was regarding Owen Nash. It brought everything back – the bail question, Hardy and Glitsky, Freeman’s strategy. He hoped he hadn’t missed much in his day away. He returned the call to Pullios and scanned the last two days’ newspapers, turning up his desk light, squinting at the blurry print. After the little blurb on page nine that May had made bail, the story disappeared.
Of course they’d dropped it. Nothing had happened. The court’s decision to schedule the prelim at the end of the summer had taken the wind out of those sails. It was frustrating. Unless he found something about the Freeman/Shinn connection he was going to have to get himself another story, another scoop.
He loved being on a hot story. It changed his whole view of the job, the world. People cared about him, asked his opinion, included him in their jokes. He wasn’t just that crippled guy anymore.
The phone rang and it was Pullios – she didn’t know if he’d heard from Hardy or anyone else, but the grand jury had just indicted May Shinn. The case was going to Superior Court. She just thought he’d like to know.
The grand-jury story was written and submitted. Parker had come by, impressed by the line on the grand jury. Parker said it was good to see a reporter hustling, working his connections. It might be old-fashioned reporting, but it got the best results. By the way, how were the eyes?
Fine. The eyes were fine.
Dorothy was at the curb at six sharp, the door opened and waiting for him. He saw flowers in the backseat, a brown grocery bag with a loaf of French bread sticking out the top.
He lived in a first-floor studio apartment on Gough Street, where it leveled off at the top of one of San Francisco’s famous hills.
‘My, isn’t this cheery,’ she said. The room featured sconced lighting, hardwood floors and a mattress on the floor in one corner. In the other corner there was a stack of old San Francisco Chronicles about three feet high. The white walls were bare except for one black-and-white poster of Albert Einstein, daily reminding Jeff that great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The rest of the furniture consisted of a stool pushed under the overhang of the bar that separated the cooking area from the rest of the room.
Dorothy picked up the mail that was lying on the floor and put it on the bar along with her bag of groceries. She held up the flowers. ‘Any old vase will do,’ she said. ‘Don’t break out the Steuben.’
He loved the way she talked. Not mean, but squeezing out the drop of humor in situations. Like his apartment. He hadn’t wanted to come here, but she’d teased him into it. ‘Didn’t get time to call your girlfriend, huh? Afraid she’ll be mad?’
There’s no girlfriend, Dorothy.‘
‘We’ll see about that.’
Now here they were. She cut the top off a milk carton and poured out the four ounces of sour milk that was left in it – ‘It’s so neat you make your own yogurt’ – and arranged the flowers, a mixed bouquet of daisies, California poppies and daffodils, sitting them at the end of the bar.
She made him chicken breasts with onions and peppers and mushrooms and some kind of wine sauce that they poured over rice. They ate on the floor, their places laid on a blanket from the bed, folded over. When they’d finished, Dorothy pulled herself up and leaned against the wall. She patted her lap.
‘Why don’t you put your head here?’
His eyes hurt and he couldn’t see her clearly. The only light they’d eaten by was cast by the tiny bulb over the stove. He put his head down on her thigh and felt her lingers smoothing his hair.
‘Can I ask you something?’ he asked.
‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid not.’ Then her finger ran along his cheek. She flicked his chin lightly. ‘You’re a bit of a bozo. Anybody ever tell you that?’
‘No. People don’t kid with me.’
‘People are missing out,’ she said. ‘What did you want to ask me?’
There was no avoiding it. He had to know. ‘Why are you doing this? Being nice to me?’
‘Oh, I get four units for it. It’s a class project.’ Now she took his cheek and gave him a hard squeeze. ‘Haven’t you ever had any girl like you?’
‘Sure. Well, not since…’
‘What? Your legs?’
He shrugged. ‘You know. The whole thing.’
‘I don’t know. What whole thing? Your personality get deformed or something?’
‘It’s just a lot to ask somebody to deal with.’
‘It seems like it might just be a good crutch, no pun intended. I mean, nobody’s perfect. You get involved with somebody, you’re going to have to deal with their imperfections.’
‘Yeah, but romance doesn’t exactly bloom when you see them right out front.’
‘Sometimes it does,’ she said. ‘Less gets hidden. It might even be better. It’s definitely better than being fooled and finding out later.’
‘I don’t see too many of yours. Imperfections, I mean.’
‘Well, that’s just a fluke. It so happens I am the one person who doesn’t have imperfections.’ Her fingers were back in his hair, pulling it. ‘Except, I warn you now, I am pretty Type-A. I like a clean house. If you squeeze the toothpaste in the middle I go insane, I need to fill up ice trays immediately. Nothing makes me madder than a half-empty ice tray. Also I’m impatient and outspoken although I have to say I’m not really bitchy. But I’m very organized, too organized.’
‘Those are not exactly major imperfections.’
‘I’m also pushy. And pretty selfish. I think of myself first a lot, what I want.’
‘I haven’t seen any sign of that. Not with me, at least.’
‘Yes you have.’ She dipped her finger into her wineglass and traced his lips with it. ‘If you think about it. For example, I am in a highly selfish mode right now.’
Hardy was back where it started, at the shark tank at the Steinhart Aquarium.
He sat on the gurney, listening to the vague bubblings and vibrations emanating from the walls around him. Although he knew the water in it wasn’t even remotely warm, a thin veil of steam rose from the circular pool in the center of the room. The walls were shiny with distillation, the light dim and somehow green-tinged. He’d let himself in with his own key.
After dinner Frannie had been tired, and he’d felt flabby and soft, so he changed into some sweats and told her he was going for a run. Why didn’t she turn in early?
Now it was close to nine-thirty. He hadn’t done much running, more a forced walk to no destination. In any event, it had taken him here. He’d worked up a light sweat and he sat, his elbows on his knees, his hands intertwined in front of him.
‘Do you know what it is to be completely alone’?‘
He certainly did. He was there now.
His family was at home. Some of his friends, undoubtedly, were a quarter mile away at the Shamrock. He could call Glitsky, or Pico, go out and drink a few brewskis, shoot some darts. But he knew somehow that none of that would make a difference. He was completely alone, knocked out of his orbit, trying to feel the pull of the other bodies, the old familiar gravity. He couldn’t get it, couldn’t get to it.
The thing to do, he thought, was to go into Drysdale’s office tomorrow morning and resign. Just stop. Shut down the rockets. Go back and ask Moses for his old shift at the Shamrock and go back to that earlier life.
He didn’t need the money. He could walk out on the law right now and the world would keep right on turning, May Shinn would still go to trial, Pullios would get another notch in whatever it was she notched.
Stiffly, he pushed himself up off the gurney and walked up to the side of the pool, a concrete ring four feet deep. He had his hands in the front pockets of his sweatshirt, felt his keys on the right side.
There was only one other person in his orbit right now. And she, he believed, was completely alone, too. Yesterday, he’d thought maybe she was crazy. Today he saw it differently. Celine was barely holding herself together. Her father had been her life. Whether or not you liked or admired Owen Nash, whether their relationship was good or bad – control or no control, she was left with a gaping hole. If she’d broken down around Hardy, it had been because she was strung too tightly, holding it all back. That’s why the long workouts – to loosen the coil.
But it wasn’t working. Not yet, anyway. She was trying, and she’d get there. She knew what she needed -she needed some surcease from the emptiness, the loneliness, the pain of the fresh wound. She was trying, she just needed time.
And one other thing, face it, she needed him. For whatever reason, he was the lifeline. Like she’d said, she didn’t care about their professional relationship. He was connected to her…
Which was exactly why he should quit. This wasn’t his job. It wasn’t his concern. It couldn’t be in his life.
But she was. He tried to tell himself it was the level he had to control. He could not allow himself to do anything to threaten Frannie; she too depended on him. And so did Rebecca and the unborn child. If he had any view of himself at all, it was, he hoped, as a man of some honor, and he’d given Frannie his absolute vow. And he loved Frannie. His life satisfied him. His own endless emptiness seemed to have vanished over the last year, thanks to her. She was his rock and he knew he had to get back to her orbit. His own salvation, he knew, lay there, with her.
But he also knew he wasn’t going to quit – either the law or the case – and he knew why. He hoped – normally he didn’t pray but he prayed – he wasn’t going to do anything about the attraction, the connection. He told himself again that he could keep the level under control.
But if Celine had to see him again, he would see her. He would have to see her.
‘Beware of what you wish for – you just might get it.’ Judge Leo Chomorro had heard it a thousand times from his father. It had always struck him as misguided advice. The way you got things was to wish for them, focus on them. It had gotten him everything he had today – a judgeship by forty, a beautiful wife, three intelligent children, a home in St. Francis Wood.
But lately he was beginning to think that his father’s advice might have had something to it after all. He had wished and wished that someday he could get out from under the burden of being a good administrator, which was itself something to be proud of. Leo had always been an organizer, a team player, intelligent enough to be a leader, but a subscriber to the theory that a good leader must first know how to be a good follower.
And his talents had gotten him out of Modesto and his father’s auto shop. He always thought it was his study habits more than his brains that had pulled him through San José State and then gotten him into Hastings Law School in San Francisco.
At Hastings he hadn’t made Law Review, hadn’t been in the top ten percent, hadn’t been rushed by the big firms. But he’d gotten through, passed the bar on the second try, got a job as a clerk for the State Attorney General.
He worked hard. No one could say he wasn’t a loyal and diligent staffer, and when the Attorney General finally made it to the State House, Leo was a top aide on budgetary issues. He was the organization man, efficient and objective. Guys weren’t doing their jobs, fire them. They got families, tough – they should have worked harder, seen the ax coming.
The numbers of the budget game appealed to him. It was pretty simple. You had so much money to spend, first you looked around at who had been good to you, then you factored in services you needed and you cut where you had to – or wanted to – make a point, where the system wasn’t working efficiently. And then you made the numbers balance. For an organized guy like Leo, it was a cakewalk.
For example, during some budget committee meetings Leo had made a big stink about liberal judges, especially in San Francisco, getting paid a lot to do nothing – letting off people caught in stings, like that. Clip, clip. Cut back on salary adjustments, do away with judicial raises.
Of course, to survive, yourself, you didn’t make too many friends. You really couldn’t afford to. You had allies instead – the Attorney General-turned-Governor, for example, was a damn good one. Leo’s wife also, Gina. Brilliant, much smarter than he was – and attractive. A Santa Barbara Republican, she’d been a staffer, too, but after they’d had Leo Jr., all thought of politics left her head. Now she was an ally. She was loyal and did her jobs. That was life, right?
And then, according to plan, Leo got what he’d wish for. On his way out of office, his mentor the governor had rewarded him for his sixteen years of loyal service by appointing him to a judgeship in San Francisco. Except that now that he was here, he found the job had all the glamor of a stockyard, except the cattle were human.
Before Leo Chomorro had arrived eighteen months before, Calendar judges in the City and County of San Francisco were rotated every six months. The work was so dull that no one could be expected to keep at it longer than that. But Leo’s budgetary philosophy when he’d been with the Governor, combined with his lack of belief in personal friendships, had created for himself a cloud of political resentment, and San Francisco’s judges wasted no time putting him in his place – which was Calendar, where he had remained and remained.
It was ironic. Leo was a judge who believed there was justice in the world. Or should be. He had believed that if you worked hard and did a good job, people came to value you. You got promoted. You moved up.
Ha.
Today, Tuesday, July 7, Leo Chomorro sat sweating under his robes in Department 22, overseeing work he wouldn’t have assigned to his clerk. The Calendar was a necessary evil in all larger jurisdictions – there had to be some mechanism to decide which suspects went to what courtroom, whether or not cases were ready for trial, all of the administrative work that went along with keeping eight courtrooms and their staffs reasonably efficient so the criminal justice system could keep grinding along.
It was the kind of work for which Leo was suited by experience and temperament. He thought he’d never get out of it, and it was driving him mad.
‘Okay, Trial Calendar line six, what have we got here?’
This morning was never going to end. The bailiff brought in Line Six – all the cases were given line numbers off the huge computer printout that had to be processed every Monday. Except Monday had been a holiday. So the list was longer.
He forced himself to look up. Line Six was a guy about Leo’s age and, like Leo, an Hispanic, although Leo couldn’t have cared less about his race. Line Six shuffled behind the bailiff to the podium in front of the bench. Mr Zapata was represented by the public defender, Ms Rogan. Chomorro looked down at the list for the next available judge. Fowler, Department 27. He intoned the name and department.
‘Excuse me, Your Honor.’ Leo looked up. Any interruption, any change in the deadly routine was welcome. It was the summer clerk who’d been quietly monitoring proceedings at the D.A.‘s table all morning. ’May I approach the bench?‘
The boy reminded Leo of himself when he’d been a student. Dark, serious, intent, fighting down his nerves, he whispered. ‘Mr Drysdale would like to ask you to reconsider your assignment of Mr Zapata to a different department.’
Leo Chomorro cast his eyes around the courtroom. He and Art Drysdale went over the Calendar on disposition of cases every Friday night, and he’d mentioned nothing about Zapata at that time. Well, maybe something new had come up, but Art wasn’t in the courtroom.
‘Where is Mr Drysdale?’
‘He’s in his office, Your Honor. He asked if you’d grant a recess.’
‘When did he do that if he’s not here?’
‘That’s all he’s asked me to say, Your Honor, if you could grant a recess and call him.’
Leo frowned. He wanted to keep things moving but felt empathy for the kid, and Drysdale made up the Calendar with him every week. In a world full of no friends, Art was as close to one as he had. He looked up at the defendant.
‘Mr Zapata, sit down. We’ll take a ten-minute recess.’
‘It’s pretty unusual, Art. It’s circumvention.’
‘I know it is.’ Drysdale wasn’t going to sugarcoat anything. This was Locke’s call, and he was delivering a message, that was all. He was sitting back, comfortable in the leather chair in front of Chomorro’s desk. ‘We don’t want Zapata going to Fowler’s department. He threw out the last one.’
‘I know. I read about that. Zapata’s another sting case?’ Art nodded. ‘I just plain missed him on Friday or I would have mentioned it then.’
Chomorro was moving things on his desk. ‘I’ve already assigned it, Art. Rogan might make a stink.’ He’d called out Department 27 – Fowler’s courtroom. If the defense attorney he’d appointed was on top of things, she’d know Fowler’s position on these kinds of cases. From Rogan’s perspective, Fowler was a winner for her client – he’d throw out the case. Any other judge probably would not.
Art leaned forward. ‘We’re ready to lose one like that. What we don’t want is Fowler getting any more of these -start another landslide and screw up this program.’
Chomorro shuffled more paper. His life was shuffling paper. He didn’t believe he could do what Art was suggesting. It was at the very least close to unethical. The D.A. or the defendant could challenge one judge, on any case. A judge could be recused from a case because of conflicts of interest, because he or she knew the defendant, for no reason at all, but such a public challenge always involved a political fight that both sides lost. Usually such problems were settled privately in the chambers of the Master Calendar department -certain cases just never happened to be assigned to certain judges. But here, Mr Zapata’s case had been publicly assigned for trial. ‘I don’t think I can do it, Art.’
Drysdale wasn’t surprised. He nodded, then leaned forward, fore-arms on knees, and settled in. ‘Leo, Your Honor, how long have you been on Calendar here?’
It took Chomorro a minute, a subtle shift in posture, like Art’s own. His mouth creased up. ‘Year and a half, maybe.’
‘Any talk of you getting off?’
Chomorro shrugged. ‘Somebody’s got to retire soon, die. I’m the low man.’
Art leaned back. ‘The job used to rotate, Leo. You know that?’
Again, a tight smile. ‘I’d heard that rumor.’
‘But if somebody carries a grudge around, maybe a little superior attitude, doesn’t make any friends, do any favors…’ Art held up a hand. ‘I’m not talking illegal, I’m talking little things, amenities. Things could change, that’s all I’m saying. Chris Locke is pals with some of your colleagues, so is Rigby. They both like this program, the one that got Zapata. And no one – not even Fowler -is denying these guys are stealing. They’ve still got to be found guilty by a jury. They get a fair trial. We’re not circumventing justice here, maybe just fine-tuning the bureaucracy.’
Chomorro did not for a moment buy Drysdale’s argument that they weren’t circumventing justice. Of course they were. But Chomorro was not a newcomer to politics, deals. He knew a deal when he heard one, and – assuming you were going to play – it wasn’t smart to leave things up in the air. ‘Labor Day,’ he said. ‘I’m off Calendar by Labor Day.’
Art Drysdale stood up, reached his hand over the desk. ‘Done,’ he said.
‘Line Six.’ Mr Zapata was back up at the podium. ‘I’m sorry, there was a scheduling conflict, my mistake. The trial will be in Department,’ he looked down again, making sure, ‘Twenty-four, Judge Thomasino.’
Leo watched Line Six being led out in his yellow jumpsuit. Time was standing still. It wasn’t yet noon and he’d just had a recess. His blood was rushing. Well, it was done. It was possible that Ms Rogan would never understand the significance of the change of department. Art would make sure he would be forewarned on any other Zapatas, and the whole thing would never have to come up again. Still…
He shook himself, chilled in the hot room.
‘On the arraignment calendar, line one thirty-seven,’ the clerk intoned. ‘Penal code section 187, murder.’
Suddenly the chill was gone. Something about murder cases got your attention, even when you were already familiar with them. This was the one he and Elizabeth Pullios had discussed after the indictment on Thursday -Owen Nash. They were dragging their feet over in Muni and the D.A. wasn’t going to stand for it. On Friday, Art Drysdale told Chomorro it would hit this morning, and they were going to move ahead if not with haste then with dispatch. Send a little message to the junior circuit.
Line 137, May Shintaka, had surrendered on the grand-jury indictment and bailed again. She was in the gallery, Chomorro had noticed her earlier this morning, the one flower in a field of weeds. This was Line 137? He raised his eyebrows, then looked back down. Now she stood, unbowed, at the podium. Next to her was David Freeman, about the best defense attorney in the city. The defendant and her rumpled attorney were a study in contrasts. Leo theorized that Freeman’s sloppy dress was a conscious ploy to appeal to juries as a common man, one of them, regular folks.
But regular folks didn’t make half a million or so a year.
‘Mr Freeman,’ he said, ‘how are you doing today?’
Freeman nodded. ‘Fine, thank you, Your Honor.’
During his recess with Art, Elizabeth Pullios had come into the courtroom and sat at the prosecution table with her second chair, one of the new men. He nodded to them.
‘Is the prosecution ready to proceed?’
‘I object, Your Honor.’ Freeman, wasting no time.
‘We are, Your Honor.’ Simultaneously, from Pullios.
‘Grounds?’
Freeman’s voice rose. ‘As Your Honor knows, Municipal Court continued proceedings on this matter until after Labor Day.’
‘Well, you’re in Superior Court now, Mr Freeman. What’s the point?’
‘There is no evidence to support -’ Freeman stopped, started again. ‘The preliminary hearing would have revealed insufficient evidence to proceed to trial, Your Honor.’
‘Evidently the grand jury doesn’t agree with you. They issued an indictment.’
‘Your Honor.’ Pullios was standing. ‘The people -’
Chomorro brought down his gavel. ‘Excuse me, Ms Pullios. I understand the people’s position here. Mr Freeman, we’re not going to debate the evidence at this time. That’s for a jury to decide. Perhaps a request for a shorter continuance in Municipal Court could have avoided this problem.’
‘Your Honor, my client should not be subjected to the expense of a trial on this charge. I’m going to move for remand back to Municipal Court.’
Chomorro smiled. Freeman was pulling out the stops early. ‘I’m afraid that option is foreclosed, Mr Freeman.’
Defense counsel didn’t seem to take a breath. ‘This hurry-up show trial is clearly motivated by state’s counsel enjoying the publicity of this high profile -’
‘Your Honor, I object!’
Chomorro nodded to Pullios. ‘I think I would, too.’
Freeman kept right on. ‘- to say nothing of the blatant racial and class discrimination evidenced by -’
‘Mr Freeman! Enough. I remind you that this court operates under the grand-jury system. I will not tolerate these outbursts. The prosecution says it is ready for trial. If their evidence is weak it seems to me that should be to your advantage. All right, then.’
Chomorro didn’t even have to look down to see where the next trial was going. ‘It sounds like there will be extensive motion work in this case. I’m sending the whole matter – arraignment, motions, pretrial and trial – to Department Twenty-seven, Judge Fowler. Forthwith. You can fight it out down there.’ He brought his gavel down again, allowed himself a small smile. ‘Goodbye, Counsel. Now.’
It wasn’t a long walk down the hallway, so there wasn’t much time for Hardy to tell Pullios about his relationship with Fowler.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Have you discussed the case with him outside the office?’
‘No, no place, in fact.’
‘Then I wouldn’t worry about it.’ It was another opportunity to remind him of their respective positions, so she took it. ‘Besides, you’re not the attorney of record here. I am. You’re assisting me.’
‘I think if Freeman even gets a whiff of it, though, he’ll move to dismiss.’
‘Freeman moves to dismiss if the bailiff has a runny nose. So what?’
‘So I’m a little worried about it.’
She stopped and faced him. ‘Dismas, look. He’s not your father-in-law anymore, is he?’
‘No.’
‘So essentially it boils down to the fact that you’ve met the judge socially. Well, I’ve met the judge socially and we get along like pickles and milk. I wouldn’t be surprised if Freeman’s met him socially. Hell, they’re both in the rich men’s club, they probably play poker together. Maybe they trade stock tips. It’s irrelevant. Judge Fowler and you are not related, legally or otherwise. It’s not an issue.’
Pullios, Hardy thought, was good on things that weren’t issues. She was good on everything. It got to you.
Pullios got to the doors of Department 27 and held one of them open for Hardy. ‘Age before beauty,’ she said.
The orbits had aligned themselves.
Friday had been a busy day, a couple of prelims, some plea bargaining, a lunch with four of the office gang, nobody even thinking about homicides.
Frannie and Hardy had made love twice over the long Fourth of July weekend. The first time, Friday night, intense and silent, then the closeness, body to body, lying there, talking until after midnight.
Saturday was the picnic with Moses, his current girlfriend Susan, all the Glitskys, and Pico with Angela and their kids. And Rebecca was healthy again, finally – her jolly gurgling wonderful little self. Baseball, beer and barbeque. America’s birthday party on another miracle of a warm day.
Then Sunday morning they went out for brunch and shared the best paella in the city. Afterward, back home, Frannie telling Hardy it was okay, Rebecca might remember that her parents had laughed and wrestled a lot when she’d been a baby, but it probably wouldn’t damage her psyche.
On Monday, the sixth, back on his own center again, Hardy and Frannie had spent the morning stenciling some pastel horses and dolphins onto the wall in Rebecca’s room. In the afternoon he did a little work in his office, asking if Abe could get hold of May Shinn’s phone records for the day Owen Nash had been killed. He realized that if she had made a call on that day, their case was in trouble, and as far as he knew, no one had checked those records. He asked Abe if they could pinpoint flurries of gas or water use, electricity, anything that might indicate somebody had been home, and Abe had told him no, those utilities weren’t monitored that way.
Celine wasn’t clouding things. Hardy knew that Pullios in a hurry was not the imperial wizard of detail, and after his oversights on Thursday with the grand jury, he was simply double-checking himself.
Jeff Elliot hissed at him from the gallery side of the rail in Department 27. He must have also been in 22 for Calendar, though Hardy, his mind on other things, hadn’t seen him. In fact, come to think of it, Hardy hadn’t seen Jeff for a few days, and now he didn’t look so good – his face was puffy and he was wearing dark glasses, even here inside the courtroom. Still, he was smiling, his usual high-energy self. And why not? His story was back in the fast lane.
Jeff was motioning him back toward the rail. He nudged Pullios. ‘That’s Elliot back there,’ he said. ‘The reporter. You wanted to meet him.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Good.’ She was putting down some papers, starting to turn, Hardy waiting, when the bailiff called out, ‘Hear ye, hear ye! Department 27 of the Superior Court of the City and County of San Francisco is now in session, Judge Andrew Fowler presiding. All please rise.’
The judge appeared in his robes from chambers. Elliot would have to wait.
Seeing Andy, Hardy felt a twinge of guilt – he hadn’t followed up worth a damn on seeing how the judge was doing, whatever it was that had been bothering him. He should have called and set up a squash date. Something.
He hadn’t heard from his ex-wife, Jane, either. Maybe the crisis – if there had been one – had passed. Certainly, up on the bench, Andy looked as he always did, magisterial and commanding. He gave Hardy a friendly nod. His eyes rested on the defense table for a moment – May Shinn was looking directly at him, meeting his gaze. She was one tough lady, although antagonizing a judge wasn’t recommended defense strategy. Freeman was busy emptying his briefcase. He seemed to miss the exchange of glances.
Fowler broke first, his eyes drifting back to Pullios, then Hardy again. He arranged some work in front of him while the bailiff read the indictment again – Section 187, murder.
The gallery had filled up already. It was so unlikely as to be impossible that the trial would begin today. Normally the earliest trial date would be sixty calendar days from the arraignment. But setting that date would be up to Fowler. It was his courtroom.
Nevertheless, a murder trial, especially this one, was news. After the indictment on Thursday, Hardy had heard that Locke had gotten calls from Newsweek, Time, all the big ones – they couldn’t escape it.
Fowler welcomed counsel to his courtroom. He barely got a word in before Freeman predictably requested his continuance. The district attorney was using this as a publicity vehicle, there was racial discrimination. Hardy heard it with half an ear.
Fowler listened to most of it, nodded sympathetically, then touched his gavel to its block. ‘We’ll set a date now, Mr Freeman, and before that, if there is good cause for continuance, you can make a motion.’ He smiled. That was the end of that story. The trial would begin about when the Municipal Court would have held the preliminary hearing. This was a good sign.
The judge adjusted his robes and addressed the courtroom. ‘Mr Freeman,’ he said, ‘did you have the opportunity to exercise a challenge in Department Twenty-two?’ Defense counsel had a one-time right to challenge the judge to which the trial had been assigned, on no grounds whatever. If Freeman didn’t like Andy Fowler for any reason on earth, he just had to say so and they would go back to Calendar for another department.
But Freeman barely rose to answer the question. ‘No challenges, Your Honor.’
Fowler paused a minute, his face darkening. ‘Mr Freeman?’
Freeman was still fiddling with his binders, laying out papers, whispering to May. ‘I said no challenge, Your Honor.’
The judge seemed to be moving things around behind the rim of his desk. He leaned back in the high chair, arms straight out before him. His frown was pronounced. The instant passed. ‘Would defense counsel approach the bench, please?’
Hardy became aware of a growing stillness in the courtroom as Freeman pushed his chair back, patted May on the shoulder and stepped up before the judge. Fowler leaned over and there was the briefest of whispered exchanges, after which he straightened up, hit his gavel and announced a recess. He would see Mr Freeman in his chambers.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Pullios asked Hardy.
‘I don’t have a clue. Maybe they’re trading stock tips again.’
Jim Blanchard from the Tribune came up and touched Elliot on the shoulder. ‘You got a call upstairs. Some girl.’
Jeff had been trying to get Hardy’s attention since the recess was called. He knew there was an element of cheating in it but he had to get caught up, since he hadn’t given five minutes of thought to anything but Dorothy Burgess since Thursday night. He thought he would use Hardy to catch up, grab back the inside track he seemed to have lost to both the local and national media over the long weekend.
And now it looked as though something between Freeman and Fowler was happening right here at the outset. He wanted to be here when the judge returned to court, see if an explanation would present itself.
But Dorothy – it had to be Dorothy – was the priority. There would be other stories. He would not have traded the last four days for anything – not for his job, not even for the use of his legs.
Hardy and Pullios appeared to be in some kind of argument. He wasn’t going to get anything out of them, so he grabbed his crutches and awkwardly crabwalked out of his row in the gallery, then out the doors.
In the reporters’ room he picked up the telephone. This is Jeff Elliot,‘ he said.
‘Mr Elliot,’ she said. ‘This is Ivana Trump. You’ve got to stop pestering me.’ Jeff lowered himself into the school desk. Dorothy’s voice got lower. ‘Jeff, you’ve got to get over here. You’re not going to believe what I found.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not sure what it means, but Maury’s been out all morning and I finally got to typing up the paperwork on that story you were working on, the May Shintaka bail?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You’ve got to come see this, the collateral on the bail loan. You said you needed a paper trail, someplace to start. This looks like the trailhead. But you realize you’re going to have to pay for this information.’
‘Of course.’
‘It won’t be cheap.’
He smiled, remembering the bartering system they’d developed over the weekend to pry secrets from each other – secrets they couldn’t wait to tell. ‘I’ll be ready,’ he said.
Andy Fowler sat back down, banged his gavel, and continued the trial until September 14, at nine-thirty.
‘Your Honor!’ Pullios was up.
‘Counsel?’
‘Permission to approach the bench?’
The judge nodded and motioned her forward. She walked firmly, with none of her usual sway. ‘What is it, Elizabeth?’
‘Your Honor, with respect, the state would be interested in the substance of your conference with defense counsel.’
Fowler, gravitas intact, glared down from his elevated position. There was no love lost between these two. ‘With respect, Counsel, what I do in my chambers is none of your business. But -’ He leaned forward with his hands folded in front of him – ‘but you’re right, we must avoid even the appearance of impropriety. You think defense counsel and I are colluding?’
‘No, of course not, Your Honor, I -’
‘But you think it may look like that to others. I appreciate your concern. Do you read the newspapers, Elizabeth? Watch television?’
Pullios stared at him. ‘Yes, Your Honor, occasionally.’
‘You might have noticed that this Owen Nash murder has attracted more than a modicum of publicity.’
‘Yes, Your Honor.’
‘Well, in keeping up with this story over the past week or so, it occurred to me that a fair trial might be hard to obtain in San Francisco. I was quite certain defense counsel would move for change of venue. And, as you’ve no doubt noticed, Mr Freeman made no such motion. I wanted to make it clear to him that this strategic decision – if it backfires – could not be used later on as grounds for a mistrial. How’s that?’
‘That’s very fine, Your Honor, thank you. No disrespect intended.’
Fowler allowed himself a chilly smile. ‘Of course not, Counsel. An honest question.’
After Fowler left the bench Pullios stomped out of the courtroom, leaving Hardy to gather their papers and eventually follow along. Freeman came over to the prosecution table and told Hardy he hoped there were no hard feelings about their initial meeting in the visitors’ room at the jail.
‘None at all.’
‘You know, if you wouldn’t mind a little free advice, I wouldn’t recommend using my client’s little slip about being on the Eloise. She really wasn’t there.’
Hardy smiled. ‘That seems debatable, doesn’t it?’
Freeman had his hands in his pockets, his leg thrown casually over the corner of Hardy’s table. ‘I’ve listened to the tape several times. The way you phrased it, it will come out as a trick question. It will only cast the prosecution in a poor light, make the playing field uneven.’
‘Well, we wouldn’t want that.’ Hardy finished picking up the papers, closed the briefcase. Thanks for the tip,‘ he said. ’I’ll pass it along.‘
Hardy was beginning to get used to it. These trial attorneys played a no-limit game and didn’t go about it according to Hoyle. How could Freeman get the balls to offer such advice? Did he think he was so green he’d be taken in by so transparent a bluff?
But the more Hardy thought about that, the more it made no sense at all. So maybe it wasn’t a bluff, it was a double reverse. Which made it a very effective bluff, if it was one.
Slick, he thought, walking along the hall back to his office. You had to admire it.
What did Freeman really want? He wanted to win. In a circumstantial case like this, if he could cause the prosecution to have doubts about bringing up any evidence whatever, it could only help the defense. On the other hand, on the surface his advice was sound – Hardy hadn’t planned to bring up May’s slip of the tongue, which had seemed to imply she’d been on board the Eloise because not only was it in itself unconvincing, Hardy didn’t want to introduce into the record his impropriety in visiting May in jail without her attorney present.
But now Freeman had told Hardy it wouldn’t be a good idea to bring it up. Certainly Freeman wasn’t actually trying to be a nice guy, help out the new kid. But his advice was something Hardy had intended to do anyway.
Which meant – what?
‘So why are we continuing until tomorrow? What’s the point of that?’ It had been less than five minutes since Pullios left the courtroom and now she sat in her office, door closed. Hardy, entering, had been shocked to see tears in her eyes. He started to tell her it was all right, he didn’t mean…
She stopped him and pointed to her eyes with both index fingers. ‘This is anger, Hardy. Don’t confuse this with having my feelings hurt. That bastard.’
Hardy had thought he’d discuss Freeman and strategy, but that clearly wasn’t going to be on the agenda. ‘He’s probably continuing it so he can read the file. He just found out he had the case this morning,’ Hardy said.
‘There’s no excuse for that tone.’
Hardy put her briefcase on the desk and sat down across from her. ‘Maybe he resented having his own motives questioned?’
She didn’t buy that. ‘You wouldn’t have asked him?’
‘I don’t know. I was curious, sure.’
‘When you’re curious, ask. It’s one of the rules.’
‘I didn’t think there were any rules.’
She looked straight at him. Her eyes still glittered. ‘There aren’t,’ she said.
It had turned into this.
Owen Nash stood on a balcony twenty-three floors above Las Vegas, his skin still damp from his shower. A towel was tucked under his protruding stomach, a fresh cigar remained unlit in his mouth. He liked the desert, especially now at twilight. It was still hot and dry after the scorching day, but the water evaporating from his skin kept him cool.
He fixed his eyes beyond the city. The mountains on the horizon had turned a faint purple. From far below, street noises carried up to him softly. More immediately, he heard May turn the shower off in the bathroom. He leaned heavily, with both hands, on the railing.
Sucking reflectively on the cigar, he felt rather than heard the soft tread of her bare feet crossing the rug behind him. He sighed again, started to say something, but May hushed him. She opened her kimono and pressed herself against him, then she led him silently back into the room and pushed him onto the bed.
‘Lie down,’ she ordered. ‘You’re getting a back rub.’
She started kneading his shoulders. The muscles were knotted tightly, but May was in no hurry. She knew what she was doing. Gradually, the stiffness began to work itself out. He began breathing deeply, regularly. For a moment she thought he might have fallen asleep, but then he groaned quietly as she moved to a new knot.
Outside, the twilight had deepened. May stretched out on top of him, ran her hand up along his side. ‘Pretty tense, you know that?’
He nodded.
‘You want to talk about it?’
He didn’t answer immediately, just lay with his eyes closed, breathing heavily. ‘We’ve got dinner,’ he said. It was to be their first public appearance together. He thought it was important to her. May didn’t push. She lay quietly in the growing dark.
‘I’ll decide in a minute,’ he said.
Even in the dimness, May could make out the lines in his face. His high and broad forehead showed a lifetime of living. His thin lips were tight. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, his voice strangely flat, ‘I don’t know.’
‘What?’
‘I think things may be getting a little out of hand.’
May stiffened – she’d been trying to let herself believe that she’d never hear this kind of thing from him. ‘With us?’
He laughed, pulling her tight against him. ‘Shinn, please. Well, maybe it is us, but not the way you mean.’
‘You tell me.’
‘You know the bitch about life is you can’t do everything. You take one road and it means you can’t take another. And either way, you’re going to miss something.’
‘Are you afraid of missing something?’
He laughed dryly. Tm afraid of missing anything. I never felt I had to. I never made any commitment that way. It just wasn’t in my life. Now I’m thinking about it. It scares the shit out of me. I keep thinking you’re going to find out.‘
‘Find out what?’
‘What I am. What I’ve been.’
She pressed herself long against him. ‘Haven’t we been through that. What do you think I’ve been?’
‘I don’t care what you’ve been, Shinn.’
‘I don’t care what you’ve been, Nash. Are you worried about those other roads, what you’re going to miss?’
‘Not so much. It’s making the change.’
‘Nobody’s forcing you.’
‘You’re wrong, Shinn. You’re forcing me. But it’s okay, it’s what I want. It’s the only thing I want anymore.’
She tried to believe him.
Freeman chewed on a pencil, looking out the sliding glass doors to the little courtyard, enclosed on the other three sides by the bricks of the surrounding buildings. A pigeon pecked on the cobbles.
May was sitting next to him at the marble table in the conference room. There was a fresh spray of flowers in the center of the table. The room smelled faintly like a walk-in humidor. ‘Did you ever go out?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that night. You said it was supposed to be your first public appearance. I just wondered how it went.’
She seemed to gather inside herself, as she’d done before. Freeman wasn’t sure he’d call it a visible withdrawal, but it was somehow palpable. He would have to try and define it better, get her trained not to do it, whatever it was, in front of a jury. ‘No,’ she said finally. ‘No, we never met any of his friends.’
She raised her eyes, seeing how he took that. Perhaps emboldened, she added, ‘He… we never needed to, we were enough for each other.’
Hardy reached a hand out over his desk. ‘Those the phone things?’
Glitsky held what looked like a small booklet of yellow paper. He passed it across the desk. ‘I think some clerk got carried away. I just asked for June twentieth. I think they gave us the whole year.’
‘Well, how’s the twentieth look?’
‘Good. For us. Not so good for Shintaka.’
Hardy intended to merely glance at the printout – he had his binder open, ready to put it in. Given it was half a year, there weren’t all that many calls, maybe fifteen pages, each of them five inches long. He began flipping through quickly. ‘Look at this,’ he said.
Glitsky nodded. ‘I noticed. No calls to Japan.’
Hardy looked up. Glitsky, he knew, rarely missed a trick. ‘You’re no fun, you know that.’
If May did business in Japan, it made sense she would at least occasionally need to call there, especially if she were planning a trip. Even if she did most of her work by fax, Hardy thought he could reasonably expect one or two calls. ‘Well, it can’t hurt. You check any of these?’ Hardy was scanning the pages, turning them backward, now on March.
‘No. I checked the twentieth. I just happened to notice Japan. You want, I can assign a guy.’
‘No, I’ll…’ Suddenly Hardy’s eyes narrowed. He stopped flipping.
‘What?’ Glitsky asked.
‘Nothing.’ He closed the pages and put them on his desk. ‘I just remembered I’ve got to pick up some stuff for the Beck.’
‘You’re a good daddy.’
‘I know. I amaze myself.’ He tapped the pages, back to business. ‘I’ll go through this stuff. Thanks.’
Glitsky stood up. ‘Thank you. That is not my idea of a good time.’
Hardy kept it loose. ‘God, they say, is in the details.’
‘Wise men still seek Him. Want me to get the door?’
‘Please.’
He hoped he was wrong, but he didn’t think so.
Hardy wasn’t great at math, but he had a natural affinity for numbers, especially telephone numbers. He hadn’t called the number on the March listing recently, but as soon as he saw it, he knew that at one time he’d known it.
He grabbed the pages and looked back to the beginning. The number appeared in February, too, more frequently. Twice a week in January. Eighteen total calls.
Maybe the number had changed, but Hardy didn’t think so. He picked up the telephone on his desk and dialed the number. There were three rings.
‘This is 885-6024. Please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you.’
Hardy’s mouth had gone dry. His left hand gripped the paperweight so tightly his knuckles were white. The paperweight!
He thought of Owen Nash’s jade ring, the distinctive filigree, the animal motif. Frannie’s early theory. For a second he couldn’t think of what to say. The tape hissed blankly in his ear. He forced himself to speak into the home answering-machine of Superior Court Judge Andrew B. Fowler.
‘Andy,’ Hardy said, ‘this is Dismas. We’ve got to talk. I’m going by your office now, but if I haven’t reached you by the time you get this, please call me immediately. It’s urgent, it’s extremely urgent.’