The Rule of Law

by John Lescroart

  Ike shrugged. “Not we. Maybe you, if you’re comfortable with it. But no pressure. Devin says he’s got some questions for us, but he might inadvertently give us some answers, too, slipping out through the cracks. And we can be pretty sure of one thing around that.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s not going to be sharing what we all have with Ron Jameson.”

  • • •

  DISMAS HARDY WAITED in stony silence in the gallery of Department 22 (in San Francisco, the courtrooms are called departments) on the second floor of the Hall of Justice. He checked his watch for the twentieth time, noting that a full two minutes had passed since the last time he’d looked.

  It was now 10:18. He’d been in the building for an hour and a half, in the courtroom for an hour and fourteen minutes. The judge today was Marian Braun, with whom Hardy was on poor terms. Her presence at the bench was not a propitious sign.

  After all this time, Phyllis’s case had still not been called, although Hardy had arrived early and talked to the clerk and should have, in theory, been third on the list. Instead, the judge seemed to be calling cases in no particular order but studiously avoiding his line number.

  He didn’t know for sure, and certainly had no proof, that this was another random bit of bureaucratic abuse that someone was trying to heap on him through Phyllis.

  But he thought it anyway, and something in his gut told him that he was right.

  From her ignominious arrest at the office yesterday, to the refusal of the DA inspectors to grant her a night in her own bed before Hardy would bring her down for a prearranged arraignment, to the delays in her processing, the handcuffs, the dislocated shoulder, the jumpsuit—all of these spoke to a gratuitous animosity in the handling of her prosecution. Hardy didn’t quite understand what this was all about, but there was no denying what it was.

  He rubbed at his burning eyes, forced himself to pay attention. They were currently on line 13, a domestic disturbance case that was about to fall apart and be dismissed due to the wife’s withdrawal as a witness. Hardy could have left the courtroom and taken a break and a breather, perhaps grabbed a soda or a cup of coffee, but he was certain that if he left the room even for a minute, somehow the fates would conspire to call his client next, whereupon—given his absence—the matter would be dropped to the end of the calendar. This was an immutable law of nature, and he would ignore it at his peril.

  So he sat, fighting sleep, and waited.

  At 10:55 the door behind him opened. He turned on his bench at the intrusion and, at the sight of Ron Jameson, the arresting officers Greene and Simms, and three other members of what Hardy took to be Jameson’s staff, suddenly found himself completely awake and energized. There could be only one explanation for this show of prosecutorial firepower, to say nothing of the DA’s personal appearance in the courtroom.

  Could it be that Jameson himself was going to represent the People against him and his client?

  Apparently so.

  When Judge Braun called his case, clearly in response to Jameson’s entry, Hardy grabbed his briefcase and stood up. Passing through the swinging gate that separated the courtroom from the gallery, he took his place at the right side table where the defense always sat, farthest from the jury. This morning, there was no jury, but over on the prosecution side the admitting DA—who’d handled every earlier case of the morning—had left the table and gone back into the gallery, and now Jameson and his two inspectors were getting themselves arranged, the DA in the middle.

  No glances at Hardy. No handshake. No acknowledgment of any kind.

  Well, he thought, if it was hardball they wanted . . .

  The clerk called line 19, Phyllis Anne McGowan. The side door, which Hardy knew led to a holding cell in the hallway behind the courtroom, opened, and Phyllis, again in her orange jail jumpsuit and—sling and all—those damned handcuffs, and accompanied by a female bailiff, came forward to where Hardy stood at his desk.

  But she had barely gotten there before Hardy spoke: “Your Honor, before we go any further here, I’d like to request that Ms. McGowan have the handcuffs removed immediately. They are painful and unnecessary in a woman who has been my personal secretary for nearly twenty years, as she has, and who has no criminal history of any kind. For heaven’s sake, Your Honor, her arm is in a sling—a sling, I might add, that is there because of the brutal and unnecessary force employed by the two DA investigators that Mr. Jameson apparently has brought with him to gloat over the results of their handiwork.”

  In the blink of an eye, Jameson was on his feet. “Your Honor, Ron Jameson for the People—”

  Hardy interrupted. “Well, well. I see that Mr. Jameson himself has come down for this arraignment, and I think he should be ashamed of himself for this grandstanding.”

  “Your Honor!”

  Hardy knew that he was completely out of line, and didn’t care. “We all know,” he went on, “that Mr. Jameson isn’t doing this case himself, since he’s never done a criminal case from either side. In fact, it appears he requires two assistants to help him find the prosecution table. So his only purpose for being here must be to pose for the reporters and photographers outside the courtroom.”

  “Your Honor, Ms. McGowan all but resisted arrest yesterday when—”

  But Hardy was ready for this, and slapped his hand on the table in front of him, stunning the court and shocking even himself. “Your Honor! Please. Eighteen people have appeared before you so far today, and only two before Ms. McGowan have been handcuffed. Both of those individuals were charged with violent crimes and were facing enhanced charges for use of weapons. In Ms. McGowan’s case, this is unconscionable bullying of a kind and gentle woman and has no place in this courtroom.”

  On the bench, Braun clamped down her expression and banged her gavel. She cast a withering glance at Jameson, held up a finger to him, then—in an obvious high fury but in tight control—spoke in a near whisper. “I will be the only one slamming tables or gaveling for attention in this courtroom, Mr. Hardy. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. But I didn’t want to allow the district attorney to waste time in a futile argument while my client stands here in handcuffs. They need to be removed before we can proceed.”

  “Again, Mr. Hardy, I will not be dictated to in my courtroom. I make the rules here.”

  “Of course, Your Honor. I apologize for my sense of urgency, but this degree of restraint is completely unnecessary.”

  Somewhat to Hardy’s surprise—because this was about as hard as he’d ever pushed in a courtroom in his career, certainly right to the edge of contempt—with a shake of her head conveying her disappointment in the DA, Braun brought her gavel down and said, “Bailiff, please remove the handcuffs.”

  A minute later Phyllis and Hardy stood at the defense table and Braun had the clerk read the charge again: accessory after the fact.

  Hardy waived instruction and arraignment.

  The judge herself then asked the question: “Ms. McGowan, how do you plead?”

  She and Hardy had gone over all the details in the jail the night before, and now Phyllis raised her head and said in a clear voice, “Not guilty, Your Honor.”

  Since the charge had come about because of an indictment by the grand jury, there was no need to schedule a preliminary hearing. Instead, the judge asked Hardy if his client wanted to “waive time” before scheduling a trial. In the normal course of events, defendants had the right to trial within sixty workdays of their arraignment, but if they chose to waive time, the trial could be postponed almost indefinitely, certainly for several months if not a year or more. Hardy did not choose to waive time. So this trial would be on the fast track.

  None of this took much more than another minute.

  So far, except for his outburst against Hardy’s objection to the handcuffs, Jameson had no further comments.

  That was about to change.

  “Now,” Judge Braun said, “moving on to the matter of bail: Mr
. Jameson, I’m wondering if what I have here in front of me is a typo. The People are requesting ten million dollars for bail?”

  Jameson got to his feet. “We are, Your Honor. And I might add, that is in lieu of denying bail altogether.”

  Braun made a guttural noise, cleared her throat, and looked out over the bench to the defense table. “Well, I’m just guessing, but I’m thinking Mr. Hardy might have an objection to this request.”

  “I do, Your Honor, of course. The bail amount is absurd on the face of it. Ms. McGowan has deep and strong ties to the community and a full-time job working at my own law firm for nearly forty years. She is an exemplary human being and a valued employee. She has never run afoul of the law. She is no flight risk. She poses no threat to society in any way, shape, or form, and to imply that she does is nothing short of a deluded fantasy or a publicity-seeking abuse of power.”

  Without waiting for the judge to call for his response, Jameson started right in. “It is no fantasy that the defendant has been indicted and charged with accessory after the fact to the crime of murder, and in this case murder connected to human trafficking. This is a form of organized crime where she has been smuggling people, perhaps hundreds of them, out of the country for several years. She could just as easily make herself disappear.”

  Hardy snapped back without benefit of the judge’s invitation. “Except that she has no reason to want to make herself disappear, Your Honor. She has a steady job and has lived in the same apartment for over forty years. Forty years, Your Honor! She is not going to be running away rather than show up to face her accusers at her trial.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Hardy, I believe you’ve made your point.” Braun looked over at the DA. “Mr. Jameson, I will set bail at the statutory amount of fifty thousand dollars. Is there anything else?”

  Hardy briefly considered letting things stand as they were. He had already succeeded in getting the handcuffs removed and the ludicrous bail lowered to a more reasonable amount. He might as well call it a day and get his client released and back to life outside of the jail. But his blood still ran high, and he wasn’t really inclined to stop himself or even slow himself down. Instead he said, “Yes, Your Honor. There is something else.”

  “And what is that, Mr. Hardy?”

  “I want a gag order.”

  Over at Jameson’s table: “Oh, for the love of Christ.”

  Hardy said, “I believe this prosecution to be unfounded and political. The way Mr. Jameson got this indictment, the way he sent his henchmen to make this arrest, the brutal and unnecessary force employed against my client, even Mr. Jameson’s personal appearance here smacks of prosecutorial misconduct. The district attorney should not be permitted to taint any potential jury pool by making inflammatory and frankly false statements about my client to further his own vindictive, personal, political agenda.”

  “Your Honor, objection! These are just lies meant to discredit me and my office. There was nothing irregular about Ms. McGowan’s treatment by any of my staff. Getting arrested is not a pleasant event, granted, but my inspectors followed protocol in spite of the hostile and even dangerous atmosphere at Mr. Hardy’s office. There is nothing unfair about arresting someone involved in human trafficking who has helped a murderer escape.”

  In his anger, Jameson betrayed his lack of courtroom experience by asking his opponent a rhetorical question. “Besides which,” he said, “why would I treat this one defendant unfairly?”

  Hardy had given this question a lot of thought and come up with what he believed to be the answer. “Because this one defendant, Your Honor, as I’ve mentioned, happens to work at my law firm, which is also where Wes Farrell, Mr. Jameson’s predecessor in the DA’s office, is about to come on as a partner. And the DA’s behavior in this matter is just pure harassment of his former political opponent—”

  “I don’t have to harass Mr. Farrell. I already beat him. And now he’s got you out fighting his fights with these baseless accusations. Which, frankly, doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

  “Look at the sling on Ms. McGowan’s arm. Tell me why two large cops have to dislocate the shoulder of a nonresisting woman of her age and stature to take her into custody.”

  Braun picked up her gavel, ready to slam it down. “All right, all right. That’s enough. Mr. Hardy, this is neither the time nor the place to air out this issue. If you think you’ve got grounds, you can file the appropriate motions and the two of you can fight it out in another courtroom. In the meantime, Mr. Jameson, if you’re not interested in a gag order in this case, you might want to temper your public pronouncements. But having said that, I think we’re at the end of the arraignment process for this defendant. If Ms. McGowan can meet her bail today, she’ll probably want to get out of these buildings as soon as she can.”

  9

  RIGOBERTO ALVAREZ CAME to the United States with his Mexican parents in 1995 when he was two years old and lived with them first in Modesto in California’s Central Valley, then in Napa. Finally as an adult he moved by himself to Ukiah, a small Northern California town with a burgeoning wine industry.

  During the Obama administration, he had qualified to become a DREAMer under the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act. He fit the bill to a T. Under thirty-one years of age, he had entered the US before he was sixteen and had lived continuously here for more than five years, had never been convicted of a felony or “serious” misdemeanor (or three misdemeanors), and had earned a GED or general education high school diploma. Beyond his native Spanish, he spoke fluent vernacular unaccented English.

  Although of course his immigration status remained problematic and a force in his daily life—he was, after all, technically an undocumented alien—it was something he’d long ago come to grips with, thinking that it was only a matter of time before he could find some kind of path on the way to citizenship. In the meanwhile, he’d keep a low profile, do his vineyard job very well, obey the law, and enjoy his life.

  Which he did until the day after last Thanksgiving, when he was just walking away from an ATM with eighty dollars. Three white guys with guns had been waiting by their pickup truck in the parking lot. Hemmed in, he gave up all the money, and was just starting to consider himself lucky to get away with his life when one of the guys clocked him from behind, hard, with his gun, knocking him to the ground, whereupon at least one of the other muggers, and maybe both of them, joined in, kicking him wherever he/they could land a foot—head, body, legs, groin.

  When he came to, bloody and battered, they were gone and a couple of local town cops that he vaguely knew were there and had already called an ambulance. Rigoberto cooperated with them in every way, including supplying them with a description of the pickup and its license number, which he’d noticed and memorized before the fracas had developed.

  Two days later, the guys who’d mugged and robbed him were in jail and the local cops from the other night stopped by out at the vineyard, where Rigoberto lived in a two-room apartment behind the barrel storage barn. They told him that he needed to come down to the jail and identify his attackers, but he told them that he wasn’t inclined to do that. He just wanted to get his money back.

  But the cops explained the situation: he wasn’t going to get his money back—and these hoodlums probably weren’t even going to jail—if he didn’t show up to be a witness against them. Because he, Rigoberto, was the whole case.

  And besides, they asked him, did he want these guys to go unpunished so they could keep on beating and robbing innocent people like himself? If Rigoberto was afraid that they’d come after him and hurt him again in exchange for his testimony, the cops understood that, and the prosecution could accommodate him by helping him relocate.

  Whichever way it went, it was perfectly safe.

  Rigoberto had nothing to worry about.

  But he had to point the finger at these bastards if he wanted to get them off the streets, if he ever wanted to have a chance to see his eighty dollars again.
>
  Eventually, he’d given in.

  Officers Dyson and Simonds—who by now were Brad and Chester—picked him up Monday morning and took him down to the courthouse, where it all went as they’d predicted it would. Rigoberto identified his attackers in a lineup and by noon he was back outside, waiting for the patrol car to pull up and take him back out to the vineyard.

  But just in front of that patrol car as it was pulling up, a black sedan slid itself to the curb and four men wearing black parkas with the acronym “ICE” on the back were suddenly all around him. One of them had his ID out, demanding to see Rigoberto’s. Brad and Chester jumped out of their car and tried to intervene, but these ICE people clearly had rank over the locals. Unable to provide anything like sufficient identification, Rigoberto got taken into custody and put into another cell in a different building to wait while the feds clarified his documentation and immigration status.

  To the new administration, he was no longer a DREAMer but an illegal alien, an undocumented immigrant. He was in the country illegally. That was the bottom line. And the crime of entering the US without documentation—never mind that Rigoberto had “committed” that “crime” when he was two years old!—was now in many jurisdictions prima facie evidence of guilt. So, upon apprehension and identification, he could legally be immediately deported back to Mexico, where he knew no one and had never even visited, without further administrative interference.

  Just as though he were a burglar, a rapist, or a murderer.

  • • •

  THEY HAD KEPT him alone in his cell—no food and no water—for seven hours, until the man who’d originally flashed his ICE badge when they’d taken him into custody outside came to the cell door with one of the guards.

  “Rigoberto Alvarez?”

  He had been sitting on the edge of his cot, and now he stood up and turned to face them. “That’s me. And I’d like to see a lawyer. You’ve got pro bono lawyers here, right? And public defenders. I want to see one of them.”