The Rule of Law

by John Lescroart

  “I don’t have any idea. I’ve never heard either of these names. But when you say this Valdez is a major piece of work, what are you talking about?”

  “Pretty much you name it. His cover is that he runs a bar, El Sol, down in the Mish. Out of which he was into extortion, petty theft, drugs. At least, early on in his career. Mostly, lately, he was doing pretty good as a coyote bringing girls up from Mexico or El Salvador or both. Told them he had salon or waitress work for them, but guess what?”

  “Maybe not so much?”

  “Maybe never, more like it. And Celia was evidently one of these girls. Somehow, Hector let his guard down and left a gun where she could get her hands on it and she grabbed it and took him out. So if Celia knew your Phyllis somehow . . . and she must have had some connection if the grand jury . . .” He hesitated. “But why wouldn’t they have picked her up until this morning? I mean, if the indictment came down last Thursday . . .”

  Hardy said, “She left work in the middle of the day last Tuesday and only just came back this morning.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “No clue, Devin. Truly. I asked her about it this morning and she wasn’t saying. I have a hard time believing that she is connected in any meaningful way to this guy Valdez or his murder.”

  “Well, somebody must have testified against her to the contrary. Or they must have some pretty good circumstantial evidence, and the grand jury bought it.”

  “I’ll find out. If they ever let me talk to her again.” Hardy checked his watch—just after 3:00. “Speaking of which . . .” He got to his feet. “Oh, do you mind letting me know which inspectors drew this Valdez case? Maybe I could finagle a word or two out of them, if they’d talk to me.”

  “You can try. Tully and McCaffrey. I could mention that you’ve already talked to me. That might help.”

  “You’re a prince.”

  “Yeah, well, keep that to yourself.”

  • • •

  MORE TIMES THAN he’d care to remember, Hardy had been shocked almost to the point of nausea when he met clients in the jail’s attorney visiting room, seeing them for the first time dressed not as regular citizens but as de facto criminals in their bright orange jumpsuits. No belts, some variation of flip-flops instead of shoes. And, of course, for the women, no sign of any makeup. They might, technically, be innocent until proven guilty, but with this garb they certainly didn’t look it. This seemingly innocuous step effectively began the transformation of suspects from innocent citizens to dehumanized animals who needed to be caged.

  When Phyllis finally appeared with an accompanying guard where Hardy had been waiting for her for another interminable hour, the sight of her nearly broke his heart. Her right arm was in a sling, her hands almost ludicrously still cuffed together in front, and she was in obvious pain.

  Behind her desk at the firm, and in spite of Hardy’s teasing at her expense, she was a formidable presence, not only as Hardy’s gatekeeper but in her own right as a personality. Indeed, Hardy would never have considered needling her at all if he wasn’t absolutely sure that she could take it and maybe even enjoyed it on some level. And, more than that, he knew that she could in her own subtle way dish it out as well, and had done so many times.

  Now, after Hardy had insisted that the female guard undo her handcuffs, Phyllis waited patiently until she’d done just that and then left the two of them—now lawyer and client—alone in the large, ovoid-shaped room.

  Rubbing her chafed wrists, she turned to face Hardy and surprised him again as a trace of a smile played at her mouth. Meeting his eyes, she said, “Yo,” echoing Hardy’s default wiseass response whenever she reached him on their intercom. The smile grew more pronounced. “And ain’t this a fine kettle of fish?”

  Relief washed over Hardy in a wave. They hadn’t broken her spirit yet, not by a long shot. “Yo yourself,” he said. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’ve been better, to tell you the truth. These people in here are a lot crueler than they have to be. You know that?”

  “I’ve heard rumors. But no actual abuse?”

  Her smile went prim. “Well, the handcuffs seem a bit much. But when I mentioned it nicely after they took the first pair off, when they came to bring me down here, the second pair seemed tighter. I didn’t take that as a fluke. Of course, they did give me a sling and an Advil, which doesn’t seem to me to be overmedicating what feels like a dislocated shoulder.”

  “Shit. Really.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll get over it.”

  “I know you will.” Hardy sighed. “Why don’t we sit down?”

  “All right.” She pulled around one of the steel and plastic chairs—chained down to the floor—and waited for Hardy to get settled in his own chair across the table. Before he could say anything, she preempted him. “First of all, let me say how sorry I am to have gotten you involved in this, to say nothing of the disruption to the firm today. I had no idea anything like this was going to happen.”

  “Well,” Hardy said, “just so you understand why you’re being fired.”

  “Of course. I’d expect nothing less. It’s the only thing to do.”

  Just for a second, Hardy wondered if she realized that he was kidding.

  “Great,” he said. “Now that that’s settled . . .” But the joking had quickly run its course. Hardy gave her a straight, no-nonsense look. “But seriously. Do you want to tell me what’s going on? I’m assuming this has to do with your family crisis last week.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t realize that you had a family. I know that’s unforgivable with all the time we’ve been together, but—”

  “It’s not a whole family, sir. It’s a younger brother. Adam. And most of the time I’d rather forget that we are related.”

  Hardy sat back in the hard seat and crossed a leg. He nodded encouragingly.

  She went on. “He’s eighteen years younger than me, so we were never close growing up. I left my mother’s home when I was eighteen and he’d just been born, and I never moved back in with them. And by that time my father was long gone, too.” She steeled herself, taking a breath. “Anyway, I got some student loans and did two years at Heald here in the city and learned how to type, and then David hired me, so I’ve been lucky. I’ve always had a job.”

  “Maybe because you are really good at it.”

  “Maybe. Thank you. But meanwhile Mom and Adam moved to Bakersfield, where she’d gotten some work in a hospital down there. Mom died from throat cancer about ten years after that, when my brother was eighteen. I went down for the cremation and hung out for those couple of days with Adam, who was already pretty much of a mess.”

  “In what way?”

  She chuckled mirthlessly. “You name it. He’d fallen in with a different culture: dropped out of school, worked on motorcycles all day, long hair, dirty jeans, dirtier T-shirts, tattoos, drugs and alcohol. He tried to keep himself relatively straight when I first got down there, but he was strung out enough that he couldn’t even keep it together to make the appointment we’d made to go scatter her ashes. I went by their house with the urn and he made it all the way to the front door, where he told me he was just too hungover. Why didn’t I just go and do it myself? And, PS, the place also smelled like marijuana, and lots of it. Anyway”—she shrugged her shoulders and winced at the pain—“he got his first prison sentence within a year or so after that—carjacking—and of course got in touch with me. Could I help him out with his attorney fees? Which, stupidly, that first time, I did.”

  “You’re saying there were more times?”

  “Three.” She leveled her gaze at him. “The last one was for armed robbery. It was his third strike and he was just lucky that he didn’t kill somebody. He could have, and maybe should have, been doing life without. But anyway, he got out of Avenal six weeks ago.”

  “And somehow got in touch with you.”

  A bitter smile. “One of the drawbacks to living at the
same address for forty-three years—thank you, rent control—is that people can generally find you in a pinch.”

  Hardy breathed a sigh of relief, albeit one laced with guilt. This was information he never should have acquired in the first place through his snooping with Glitsky, but now she was giving it to him firsthand, and so anything he collected from here on out would be fair game. He hoped. “So he contacted you?”

  Nodding, tight-lipped with frustration, she said, “He needed, he said, a few weeks to get himself together. Someplace to stay short term while he looked for a job. He’d promised me that he was a different person. He’d changed. Which I doubted, because, you know, people don’t really ever change, and especially in prison, except maybe to get worse. But he was my brother, my only living relative. And I convinced myself that he sounded different. Older, more mature, which of course he was, although not necessarily better. I told myself I owed it to my mom’s memory, at least. All the usual stupid excuses why this time it was going to be different.”

  “So he moved in with you?”

  “Temporarily. Until he found his own place and a job to make his rent. Ha!”

  A tentative silence descended into the room. Through the building’s walls, they heard car horns blaring on the freeway, punctuated by the clang of metal on metal—a cell door slamming?

  Phyllis let her shoulders settle; her free hand dropped into her lap.

  Hardy in a brown study scratched at his jawline. “So how is your brother connected to Celia Montoya?”

  For an instant Phyllis’s eyes widened in surprise. “How did we get to Celia?”

  “You got arrested as an accessory after the fact of the murder that Celia’s charged with. A guy named Hector Valdez. Which means the grand jury believed that you knew something about that murder, specifically that Celia committed it or had been charged with it, and then you harbored, concealed, or aided her to avoid arrest, trial, conviction, or punishment. Not to sound too much like a lawyer. Does that pretty much sound like what you might be involved in?”

  For a few seconds Hardy wondered if perhaps Phyllis had gone into a trance of some kind. He felt he could almost see her mind accepting and rejecting responses to what he’d asked her. Finally, in a quiet and controlled voice, she said, “I don’t mean to sound like a vigilante, sir, but if she did, I believe that she would have had every right to kill him—out of pure self-defense. Adam told me he’d evidently bragged that he’d killed a few girls himself when they’d tried to get out of the life once they got here. And the poor other ones that he sent back to where they’d come from? Guess what? They got killed by their handlers as an example to the others. It’s a humanitarian nightmare, sir. The sex trade. And this time it caught up to Celia.”

  “And you could somehow help her? How was that?”

  Phyllis brought her hands up to her mouth in a prayerful attitude. Closing her eyes briefly, she sighed into her hands. “I don’t know what else I should tell you, sir. There’s more to this than just Celia’s story. And Adam’s.”

  “You can tell me anything, Phyllis. I’m your lawyer. Anything we say to each other is covered by the attorney-client privilege.”

  “I understand that. But I’ve also seen how privileged communications sometimes get out in the real world.”

  “Not in my world,” Hardy said, although he knew part of that answer, at least, was a lie.

  “Maybe not on purpose,” Phyllis shot back, “but you can’t deny it happens. I’ve been in the law business long enough, too, sir. You can’t let a drop through that dam or the whole thing comes down. And this is a big dam. It’s not just Celia. And if they’ve connected this to me—my goddamn brother selling me out for a plea deal or a cup of coffee, if you want my bet—well, it’s bigger than you think.”

  7

  AMONG THE AMENITIES that had improved his life, Hardy ranked the garage he had finally rented as right near the top. In an enclosed street-level spot four buildings north of Geary, it was on the west side of Thirty-Fourth Avenue, on the block where he lived.

  In the old days, before he’d started shelling out the $850 a month for the parking place, it was not uncommon for him to wind up finding some legal spot three, four, even six or seven blocks from his home. He would regularly trudge home carrying his twenty pounds of lawyer’s briefcase, often buffeted by the wind, soaked and chilled through and through by the shroud of misty fog. Out in “the avenues,” San Francisco often rivaled winter in London or Moscow for the inclemency of its weather, and the search for curb space nearly always left Hardy dispirited and, at least in the short term, exhausted.

  Tonight, though it was dark, windy, and low-50s, the walk from the garage to his home took him less than five minutes. When he got to the picket fence bordering his property, he stopped for a moment and took in the place: with the porch light on, the two-story bungalow was by far the most inviting building on the block, huddled as it was between two four-story apartment buildings. He caught a whiff of smoke and looked up at the chimney. No doubt breaking some law against the burning of wood, Frannie—God bless her—had apparently started a fire going in the fireplace.

  Opening the door, in sudden high spirits, he put his briefcase down on the floor and sang out in his best Ricky Ricardo voice: “Honey, I’m home.”

  Dressed in blue workout clothes, Frannie appeared, walking through from the dining room carrying a wineglass in one hand and a leaded crystal cocktail glass half filled with amber liquid in the other. “I took the liberty,” she said, handing him the glass and leaning up for a quick kiss. “Macallan 12 and one ice cube. Dinner in a half hour. Meanwhile, you take off your coat, sit in your chair, enjoy the fire and your drink.”

  “Well, all right, if you insist. But to what do I owe all this fanfare?”

  “The Beck”—their daughter, Rebecca—“called and told me about the showdown you had in your office over Phyllis.”

  “The bastards.”

  “They really walked her out in handcuffs?”

  “Well, you know, because she’s such a danger to the community.”

  “Right. So, anyway, then I get your text that you won’t be home until at least seven thirty. You’re at the jail. So I put two and two together and realized it probably hasn’t been your favorite day of all time. Maybe you could use a drink and a fire and a little relaxation when you finally get here.”

  “Even if you didn’t do stuff like this, I’d still love you. You know that?”

  “Of course. And why wouldn’t you?” She kissed him again. “Now give me your coat,” she said. “And sit down.”

  • • •

  THE DINNER WAS simple—filet mignon, green beans, orzo, a bottle of Hafner Cabernet Sauvignon. Frannie had set out the good china and several candles. They sat across from one another rather than at the opposite ends of the table as they did more often. Frannie was a marriage and family counselor, and one of the couples she’d been working with for several months had just decided to reconcile and were moving back in with one another, which she was taking as an unqualified success.

  On the home front, Frannie had talked to both of the kids, the Beck and Vincent. They were both going to try making it over for Sunday dinner, and how about if they also included the Glitskys?

  “Oh,” she added, “and Vincent sounded like he might be thinking about bringing a young woman with him as well.”

  “He’s going to try to make it Sunday and he’s thinking about bringing a girlfriend with him if he comes? God forbid he just says ‘Yeah, we’ll both be here. See you then.’ ”

  “He’ll probably commit by Saturday.”

  “Probably, though, you notice. Not definitely.”

  “He’s just having some issues with commitment.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Well, you and me, for example.”

  “We don’t count. We’re an anomaly.”

  Dessert—a rare event—was a brownie and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Hardy took a first spoonful, rolled
his eyes, and feigned a swoon. “Can I get three more of these?”

  “Sorry. The limit is one each.”

  “I could take yours.”

  “I don’t think you could.”

  “I’m bigger and stronger than you are.”

  “You don’t want to try, Dismas. It won’t turn out well for you.”

  He sighed, theatrically. “Ah, well. So do you want to hear about Phyllis?”

  “If you’re up for talking about it.”

  “I figured for a bite of your ice cream and brownie . . .”

  Frannie shook her head. “Nice try, but it’s not that important to me.”

  “How can you say that when you don’t know what it is? It’s really pretty darned amazing.”

  “I’m sure it is.” She spooned another bite into her mouth and gave him a tolerant smile. “I can’t wait to hear. It can’t really be that she’s involved in a murder, can it?”

  “It kind of depends on what you mean by ‘involved.’ I don’t believe she had anything to do with killing anyone herself, but as it turns out, I could be wrong about that, too.”

  “What do you mean, ‘too’?”

  “Well”—he popped the last bite of dessert—“you think you know somebody, especially if you’ve worked with them for twenty years or so, but it turns out I really didn’t have much of a clue about who she really is.”

  “And today you found out?”

  “Got some idea, at any rate.”

  “And who, really, is she, then?”

  Hardy, hesitating as if he had to process his answer internally one last time so that he could believe it, finally said, “She’s part of . . . of this underground railroad system that helps undocumented immigrants get out of the country and up to Canada before they can get themselves deported.”

  “But that’s not happening here. Not in San Francisco. We’re a sanctuary city.”