The Rule of Law

by John Lescroart

“Yeah, there’s another door leading upstairs, but so what? Somebody happens to come into the office with a gun when just at the same time Celia’s ducked out someplace? How does that happen? You got any evidence like that? And then what? That shooter comes in and does Hector and leaves the gun so that Celia can have it? I don’t think so. That don’t happen. That’s ’cause she did it, then kept the gun and ran.”

  “Right to your sister’s house. Here,” Beth said. “Isn’t that right?”

  Adam nodded. “That’s what she did.”

  “And how again did Celia know about Phyllis to begin with?”

  “I told her. Before, I mean.”

  Ike butted in, asking. “Just like that? Why’d you do that?”

  “Because she was in trouble. Hector, he was keeping her like a slave.”

  Ike’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “And you were going to be her hero and save her from all of that?”

  “Not so much that.” Adam shrugged. “Look, you don’t believe me because I’m an ex-con. That’s cool. I get it. But me and Celia, it was just what it was. She told me a couple of times that she was looking to get away, and I knew what my sister did, the immigrant stuff, so I gave her the address if she ever could break away without him hunting her down. So I think she had it planned if she ever saw her chance. Hector having a gun with him that day was just his bad luck. And hers, too, as it turns out.”

  “And she left the bar with the gun?” Beth asked.

  “Yep. Ask Mel and Rita. They’ll tell you.”

  “Well, thank you,” Beth said, reaching over, picking up her phone and turning it off. “You’ve been a help.”

  “Hey, check it out. I ain’t lying.”

  Ike gave him a curt nod. “Nobody said you were.”

  17

  CHET GREENE, THE man who had arrested Phyllis, was the least senior inspector in the DA’s Bureau of Investigations, but his star was rising fast. He intended to keep things moving in that direction.

  Before the arrival of Ron Jameson on the scene, he’d spent his entire adult life as an SFPD cop, and he’d become both bored and cynical: the city was either going or had already gone to hell with its anti-police bias and its mollycoddling of criminals, illegal aliens, immigrants, gay people, and the homeless (or, as Greene thought of them, bums). He’d come to wonder what the point was of identifying, locating, and arresting people who broke the law—murderers, rapists, gangbangers, whatever; it didn’t matter—only to see them released by juries at trial. The citizenry of San Francisco believed that they shouldn’t be punished. No, what they needed was sensitivity training and counseling, understanding and forgiveness.

  It made Greene crazy, and for the past couple of years, even though he’d been a homicide inspector, he was basically marking time until he could maximize his pension and get out.

  Then, during the last election cycle, and at first strictly for the money, he’d volunteered to moonlight doing security for the Jameson campaign. Eventually, over fifty or sixty events, the candidate and the cop formed a connection based on all the things that the city—and Wes Farrell, the sitting DA—did wrong over and over and over again. Eventually, Greene became Jameson’s driver and confidant.

  And a true believer.

  Behind the sometimes ambiguous rhetoric—so essential to electoral success in San Francisco—it was absolutely clear to Chet Greene that Jameson was going to do his damnedest to make things in the city right again. Right, that is, for the good guys. Beleaguered cops would be able to fight back when they got attacked making righteous arrests of criminals; illegal aliens taking so many jobs from his kids and their friends—they would be deported; they’d sweep the Tenderloin and Hunters Point and take the vicious animals off the streets.

  And all this talk of “sanctuary”: Greene admiringly thought that it was nothing short of amazing the way Jameson managed to talk out of both sides of his mouth on the issue. One of his campaign promises had been that he wouldn’t turn one innocent or unconvicted soul over to Immigration, but there were any number of ways to get around the letter of the city’s proclamation, this Celia Montoya case being a perfect example. You’re Ron Jameson and you have a clandestine meeting or two with supervisors at ICE, who somehow find informants like whoever it had been in Ukiah to turn in people who’d committed crimes and were simply running from the law. They go to trial, then they serve their terms, then they get sent back where they came from.

  Why, Greene wondered, would anybody be in favor of letting these people simply escape justice, where they could terrorize and victimize good citizens again and again? He just didn’t get it.

  And now Greene, who’d quit the PD and gotten hired by the new DA to his new position replacing the one that Abe Glitsky had abandoned on the day the election results became final, was taking the slow route through downtown, driving his boss to a Knights of Columbus meeting at Washington Square. When Jameson had first gotten into the back seat, he’d spent the first few blocks polishing up his remarks. Say what you will, the man worked like a dog.

  Until finally he closed his binder and sighed audibly.

  “You all right?” Greene asked.

  Another sigh. “Maybe a little frustrated still about the McGowan arraignment. It shouldn’t have gone down like that.”

  “Yes, sir. It sucked, I agree.”

  “I’m hearing this guy Hardy might actually file suit against us—not that he’s got a chance of making that stick.”

  “What an asshole,” Greene said.

  “I hear you. I ought to try to get Her Honor Marian Braun challenged out of the building, show her who’s holding the cards. And that would be me.”

  “Good idea. Get the word out to the others.”

  “Fucking judges.”

  “Really.”

  Greene caught a red light on Sansome and came to a stop.

  “None of that was anything you did wrong,” Jameson said. “The arrest, all that. Booking her in. I know I’ve said it before, but you went exactly by the book. I just wanted to let you know I’ve got your back. Still.”

  “Yes, sir. I appreciate that, though I never really had any doubt. Dealing with these defense guys, that kind of thing comes with the turf.”

  The light changed and they began to roll again. Their eyes met in the rearview mirror.

  Jameson said, “You ever have dealings with that guy before? Hardy?”

  “Not one-on-one. But for a defense guy, he got to be pretty well known around the detail—Homicide, I mean. He and Glitsky palled around a lot. I always thought that was weird.”

  “Hmm. You know he also used to be Farrell’s law partner?”

  “No, but I’m not surprised.” A connection fell into place, and Greene said, “So if Hardy’s with Farrell, he’s with Gina Roake, too. And her I do know.”

  “The four of them, yeah. Thick as thieves. In fact”—Jameson paused while they bumped through another intersection—“I had Andrea do a little document searching this morning. She didn’t have to dig too deep to get wind of some bad shit they were all around.”

  “Yeah,” Greene said, “the Dockside thing. I remember those rumors, but in the end I think they came down with it being some Russian mob hit, didn’t they? Blood diamonds or something.”

  “Maybe. But according to Andrea, evidently not everybody bought that. Hardy’s client at the time was one of the victims, and another victim was Barry Gerson.”

  “Gerson was running Homicide when I came up,” Greene said. “Great guy, good cop.”

  “Yeah. A good cop who got promoted when Glitsky got himself shot. And after Gerson died, guess who got his old job back in Homicide?”

  “You’re saying Glitsky . . . ?”

  “Just sayin’. Some people believe it. Andrea got a whiff of it. But guess who was Glitsky’s alibi for when the shooting was going down? Ten points if you say Roake.”

  “Roake.”

  In the rearview mirror, Greene saw Jameson nod. “There you go. Maybe worth looking
into. What’s your workload like down in the unit? You think you could find any free time? Maybe if I put in the word?”

  “I’m sure I could squeeze in a few hours.”

  Another nod in the mirror. “It might be worth your while. Get Hardy off my ass. Hell, get him off your own for that matter. Give him something else a little closer to home that he has to worry about. That’s what I’m saying.”

  • • •

  INSPECTORS BETH TULLY and Ike McCaffrey sat in the two folding chairs in front of Devin Juhle’s desk. On the drive in from their interview with Adam McGowan, they had kicked around the results of their interrogations, and finally Beth had overridden Ike’s reluctance about reopening the investigation into the murder of Hector Valdez. Ike was now about as enthusiastic as his partner that they’d gotten to some new truth.

  Their lieutenant, upon whose shoulders the burden squarely rested, wasn’t so sure. “All you’ve got,” he was explaining, “is two small discrepancies among three witnesses about what this one guy did in the aftermath of what must have been a pretty uptight moment.”

  “Adam said he never went into the office either before or after the shot until Celia had run out of the bar, but according to Hardy he told his sister he did. That’s not a small discrepancy, sir,” Beth said. “And neither is whether anybody called out afterwards. Between them, that’s a whole new ball game.”

  “That’s the part I’m not getting too clearly,” Juhle replied. “Maybe you could explain to me one more time why it’s important. He went into the office after the shooting, right? He admits that. Found Hector dead on the ground and called nine-one-one like a good citizen.”

  “Yeah,” Beth said, “except if in fact he went into the office with his own gun and shot Hector, then explained the situation to Celia and told her he’d help her get out of town.”

  “Why wouldn’t she then just have called the cops?”

  “Because,” Ike said, “the simplest answer is that she’s undocumented. All she wants to do is get out of there alive, and Adam’s telling her how she can make that happen. ‘Go to my sister’s and she’ll get you out of here. Otherwise you’re a hooker and everyone will think you did it.’ ”

  “But she just witnessed him do it, according to your theory. She knew he had done it.”

  “Yes, she did,” Beth said. “But she knows his threat to her is righteous—that there’s three people right there who are going to swear that Adam was behind the bar the whole time; he never went into the office until Celia was gone and he called nine-one-one. Which meant that as far as we—the cops—were concerned, she had killed Hector. She knew he was framing her, but there wasn’t anything else she could do except run. Have I mentioned this? She was undocumented. She had to run, and that’s of course exactly what she did.”

  “Got it,” Juhle said. “I might have run, too. But why does this make Adam the killer?”

  “Because the story he told his sister is different,” Beth said.

  “And also because what he told Phyllis makes no sense,” Ike added. He settled back into his chair. “First of all, neither of the other two witnesses saw Hector with a gun. Ever.” He held up a hand. “Small point, I know, but if he doesn’t have a gun, the idea of Celia taking it from him makes no sense. But beyond that, even if he does have a gun, how do the witnesses not see it, and how does Celia get it from him in a fight? Unlikely at best, right?”

  “I’m still listening, at least,” Juhle said.

  Beth picked it up. “Adam told Phyllis that after the shot he went into the office and Celia was standing there with the gun on the desk in front of her, Hector dead on the floor, and Celia saying she hadn’t done it. Some mysterious other person from upstairs happened to come in while Celia was locked in the back room and not only shot Hector but left the gun there. Are you kidding me? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Adam is just making up something that his sister might believe. What he’s not making up, though, is that he went into the office, which is why his two partners get it differently about where he is right after the shot. Rita says he’s crouching behind the bar, and Mel says he’s standing up, looking toward the office. Fundamental difference. He never hears Mel calling out, asking if he’s all right. That’s ’cause Rita made that part up.

  “Then we’ve got Adam himself telling his sister that he went into the office right after the shot and discovered Celia in the back room, where she’d locked herself. If you’ll pardon the phraseology, sir, the whole thing’s a clusterfuck. None of it happened the way they originally said it did, and now our three witnesses are going to be tripping all over themselves trying to get their stories straight—which, because they’re all lies, is going to be difficult.”

  Juhle had listened to this with his elbows on his desk and his hands steepled at his lips. Now he put his arms out in front of him, resting on the desk. “I’d feel a little better,” he said, “if we had something in the line of physical evidence to support any of these theories. You guys come across anything like that? Anything on the gun?”

  Ike’s face reflected his disappointment. “Unfortunately, no, sir.”

  “Because it’s going to ruffle some feathers with the DA if we go ahead on this without any new evidence.”

  “It’ll serve him right,” Beth said. “He rushed the indictment and got it wrong.”

  “But how are you going to prove that?”

  “We push harder on Mel and Rita next time and get one of them to change their story and put Adam in the office before the shot. Which will pretty much have to mean that he did it.”

  “You think you can do that? Put him there?”

  The two inspectors shared a glance. “We got a definite window with witnesses who’ve got to be getting nervous, keeping their lies straight, and knowing that Adam would probably just as soon kill them, too, as look at them,” Ike said. “If we turn up the heat, everybody involved is going to feel the pressure.”

  Beth nodded in agreement. “We’d like to give it a try. Dev, these witnesses stink. We’ve talked to them and, cop to cop, they just stink. We can just tell; you know what that’s like.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I do.”

  18

  HARDY HIT THE button on his office intercom and heard the buzz in his ear. Hoping to inject some relative normalcy into his interactions with Phyllis when she picked up, by way of greeting he said, “Yo.” Hearing the rewarding sigh of her frustration came close to warming his heart. “Do you have a couple of minutes?” he asked.

  “Certainly. In your office?”

  “Please.”

  “I’ll be right in.”

  Seeing her drawn look as soon as she appeared, Hardy immediately realized that no amount of superficial levity was going to make this any easier. Things in Phyllis’s world were obviously still in turmoil.

  He stood up and came around his desk, indicating that she should take one of the Queen Anne chairs in the major sitting area while he took the other one. “You don’t look very happy,” he said gently.

  She drew in a deep breath and released an almost audible sigh. “The police came by today and had another interview with my brother. It doesn’t seem like he’s out of the woods yet. Once you’ve been in prison, he says it’s always like this. You’re near any crime that gets committed, he says, and you become a suspect. Now he thinks they’re going to go after him for the Valdez murder.”

  With a straight face, Hardy asked, “How are they going to do that with Celia Montoya already indicted? They’d have to reopen the whole case, and I don’t see Mr. Jameson moving in that direction. They’re just probably trying to answer any remaining questions.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  Hardy temporized as he nodded. Phyllis was going to need a little more preamble before he got her to the nitty-gritty. “If Adam was really in trouble, they would have brought him in for the interrogation. He’s on parole. He can’t refuse to talk to them. It wouldn’t be uncommon for them to go back and tie u
p loose ends. Was Adam any more specific? Did they say they were going to charge him?”

  “No. At least, I don’t think so. He didn’t say that. But he was pretty sure that that was where they were headed. As you know, he’s been through this kind of thing before. He says he knows it when he sees it.”

  “Did he tell you if he’d changed anything about what he said to the grand jury?”

  “No,” she said. “What would there have been to be changed?”

  “I don’t know specifically. There’s usually something. The cops come in chipping at the details, that’s all. As long as his story stays the same, he’s probably got nothing to worry about.”

  “Why wouldn’t it stay the same? He just told them what happened. The pure facts aren’t going to change. I mean, how could they?”

  Hardy allowed himself to sneak a quick glance at his secretary’s guileless face. Was it possible, he thought, that she could remain so naïve after a forty-year career in a law office? Could it be the power of genetics—that she was just going to believe her only brother no matter what he told her? Or could it possibly be that the woman just had as trusting a nature as he had ever seen—so trusting as to be dangerous?

  “Do you think,” he asked her, finally broaching the real topic, “there might have been something else going on? With Adam.”

  She met Hardy’s look. “Well, of course, given his history, I’d be silly if I believed every word he said. But this was a murder . . .” Her expression betrayed a glimmer of hope. “He may not be a particularly honorable or good person, but it’s hard for me to believe that he could really be a killer.”

  “Really?”

  She leveled her gaze at him. “He’s my brother, sir. We’ve got the same blood. I don’t want to think about what he’s capable of, but maybe I’m being unrealistic, aren’t I? It’s just so hard to imagine, but if I’m being honest with myself . . .”

  “You’re afraid of him?”

  She nodded. “Maybe I shouldn’t be, I know, but . . .”

  “He’s nothing like you, Phyllis. You’re a good person, maybe to a fault.”