The Ophelia Cut

by John Lescroart

  Now, back from a swim where he’d run into Tony and invited him over for Sunday dinner—did Frannie mind setting another place?—Hardy tried a quick hug that his wife ducked away from. They were in the kitchen. The Beck had disappeared into her old bedroom to get in an hour of extra studying.

  Frannie kept her voice low and under control, but she wasn’t happy. “Dismas, tell me you’re not trying to set our daughter up.”

  “I’m not trying to set our daughter up.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I just said it.”

  “Yes, but I told you to say it.”

  “I know. And I did. And I meant it. And now I stand accused of not meaning it. It seems unfair.”

  “I am not in the mood for word games at the moment, if you don’t mind. Okay? Because I don’t think it’s a good idea. We don’t know anything about him.”

  “I realize that.”

  “And yet you bring him down to the Shamrock on Friday night, when it just so happens that the Beck is there, and here today—”

  Hardy held up a palm. “I didn’t know she was there Friday night. I wasn’t even positive she was coming here today.”

  “Although she told us she was.”

  “Yes, but traditionally, that has not been an iron-clad guarantee, you must admit. I’d feel better if I got just a little hug. I really would. I’m not trying to set anybody up with anybody. Promise.”

  “All right.” She stepped forward, and he put his arms around her.

  “Now,” he said. “Was that so hard?”

  OUTSIDE, THE SUN had gone down. Glitsky’s young children, Rachel and Zachary, were set up in front of the television in the family room behind the kitchen while the mothers chatted over the sink and the dishes.

  The three guys and the Beck sat at the dining room table, the talk finally getting around to Tony’s general predicament, the causes and effects of the ABC bust.

  Glitsky was unsympathetic. “You can’t sell alcohol to minors,” he said. “They knew that. They did it anyway. They got arrested.”

  “I didn’t know it,” Tony said. “They had IDs.”

  “I still can’t get the whole thing to make sense,” Hardy said. “I can see where it puts Goodman’s name in the paper, but how’d he even get to it?”

  “I heard a rumor,” Glitsky said. “Anybody here ever heard of Jon Lo?”

  Blank stares and head shakes.

  “Should we?” Hardy asked.

  “Probably not, if you’re not running for office. Politically, he’s connected. The word is that he was behind the whole thing.”

  “No, it was Goodman,” Hardy said. “He sure took enough credit for it.”

  Glitsky nodded. “Right. It might have been Goodman’s idea after all, but the word is it’s all because of Jon Lo.”

  “Wait a minute,” Rebecca said. “Liam Goodman the supervisor?”

  “Right,” Hardy said. “You know him?”

  “No, but the guy Brittany went out with on Friday—Rick, I think—he’s Goodman’s chief of staff.”

  “And your cousin’s going out with him?”

  “Went out with him. Once. It didn’t go too well. Big surprise. So he must have known about the ABC thing, too, huh?”

  “I would guess so,” her father said.

  “If I’d known all the trouble he’d made for me,” Tony said, “I would have kicked his ass when I met him.” He swirled Holly’s Hill superb Patriarche red wine around in his glass. “Who is this guy behind Goodman again? Lo?”

  “He’s a big donor. Throws a lot of weight around in the Korean community.”

  “And Koreans care more about underage drinking than we do?” the Beck asked.

  “Not so much, I don’t think.” Glitsky, a nondrinker even when Hardy was serving the good stuff, sipped iced tea out of his glass. “What Lo does care about is massage parlors. This, by the way, is not a rumor. He owns ten of them. To be precise, he’s got Health Department permits for ten of them. Last count, he had a hundred and fourteen girls working in them.”

  The number clearly floored the Beck. “A hundred and fourteen?” she asked. “Those places have eleven employees each?”

  “Maybe more, on any given day,” Glitsky said.

  Hardy’s eyebrows went up. “Licensed?”

  “Every one, in theory. Skilled, highly trained, certified massage therapists.”

  The light coming on, Hardy said, “Lo’s the guy who got busted in that federal raid a few months ago.”

  Glitsky nodded. “That’s him, but you might remember, the bust didn’t stick. Every single girl who got arrested is back at work. They didn’t close down any of the parlors. Nobody even got fined.”

  “But if they’re all certified,” the Beck asked, “why should they be fined? Or even busted, for that matter?”

  Glitsky’s lips turned up a half inch, for him a broad smile. He reached over and patted the Beck on the back of her hand. “Don’t ever lose that beautiful innocence,” he said with real affection. “The sad truth, Beck, is that these women got paid to provide sexual services. They’re all essentially sex slaves, and Jon Lo may be one of the biggest human traffickers on the West Coast.”

  “So why don’t they arrest him?”

  Tony, who had grown silent during Glitsky’s explanations, let out a short laugh with no humor in it. “Because he buys protection.”

  Glitsky nodded. “Well, that, yeah. Indirectly, but mostly, nobody cares. At least not enough to do anything about it. Not in this town, anyway.”

  “Except the mayor,” Hardy put in. “His Honor has decided it’s one of the big issues that he cares a lot about. If Lo’s going to stay in business, he needs a smokescreen to get the mayor’s mind off the massage parlors, and that’s where Goodman comes in with the ABC.”

  “That’s the rumor,” Glitsky said.

  Tony’s face had hardened. “You’re telling me,” he said, “that this one cretin, Jon Lo, is the reason I’m sitting here charged with a felony, along with a dozen other regular folks who are just doing their jobs?”

  “Maybe two cretins,” Glitsky replied. “Lo and Goodman. But yeah, that’s about the size of it.”

  Tony turned to Hardy. “Any chance you can get this into my defense?”

  “You’re not going to need it,” Hardy said. “Besides which, it’s irrelevant to your charge.”

  “It doesn’t seem irrelevant to me.”

  “Me, neither,” the Beck said. “In fact, it seems plain wrong. I mean, if this whole sting was made up out of thin air to cover for some bad guy who’s into human trafficking, why is he walking around and Tony is looking at going to jail?”

  “Tony’s not going to jail,” Hardy said. “I’m not letting him go to jail. But the answer for you, Beck, is the golden rule. He’s got the gold, so he makes the rules. That’s the way it works. It shouldn’t, but it does.”

  “Welcome to San Francisco,” Glitsky said.

  “Welcome to everywhere,” Tony added.

  “But if this is true, why isn’t it in the news?” Rebecca asked. “Your buddy Jeff Elliot could put this in ‘Citytalk’ in the Chronicle, and it would be a huge story.”

  “How does he prove it?” Hardy asked. “Without proof, he can’t print it.”

  “Not to mention,” Glitsky added, “it might be dangerous. I mean for Jeff. Jon Lo has people who keep his women in line. Leaning on a reporter wouldn’t slow those guys down much, I don’t think.”

  “You think they’d actually hurt Jeff?” The Beck, idealistic law student that she was, shook her head in dismay. “You know this is going on, Uncle Abe, and you can’t stop them?”

  “Not before they do it. It’s the curse of my job. Though Lord knows I would love it if I could.”

  “Aren’t they doing bad things to these girls? Keeping them enslaved, or locked up, or beating them up? Can’t you go after them somehow?”

  Glitsky spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “The women would have to te
stify, wouldn’t they? And if they do that, guess what happens to them?”

  “So, basically,” Beck said, “the city tolerates this? Is that right?”

  “Except the mayor,” Hardy said, “who’s going to crack down on this really soon, unless he makes it to Sacramento first, in which case he’ll be too busy with state business to worry about any individual city and these local problems.”

  “This isn’t local! This is international trafficking in human beings!”

  Tony reached over and put his hand over the Beck’s, leaving it there. “It doesn’t touch most of us, Beck, that’s the point. That’s why it keeps working the way it does. These are really bad people who do really bad things, okay, but they do them to people who don’t have any power. They’re off the radar, completely invisible. So what they do to them is invisible, too.”

  Glitsky was giving Tony a piercing look. “The man knows whereof he speaks.”

  “It’s everywhere,” Tony repeated, then, to the Beck, “It’s why, in theory, we have the feds.”

  Glitsky smiled again, this time his usual closed-mouth effort. “Who do you think ran the last bust on John Lo’s people, Beck? Final score: a hundred arrests, no convictions, not even a fine. As I said.”

  “Lo’s got somebody inside with the feds,” Tony said.

  Glitsky nodded. “If that were true, it would not fundamentally alter my worldview.”

  “This is appalling,” the Beck said. “Can’t anybody do anything?”

  “Somebody could kill Jon Lo,” Tony said.

  At this, Glitsky lit up a bit. “And then I could arrest that guy.”

  “Except,” Hardy said, “somebody, probably worse—maybe the guy who killed Lo in the first place, if Abe didn’t arrest him—would pop up to fill the vacuum.”

  The Beck let out a breath. “So it never ends?”

  Tony shook his head. “Not really, no. We just keep putting our fingers in the dike. As the lieutenant here says, if somebody goes too far, you reel him in. But mess with the system too much, the flow of the money, bad things can happen a lot closer to home, and that you really don’t want.”

  “What is it you really don’t want?” Treya asked as she came in from the kitchen.

  “Sexual slavery,” Glitsky said.

  Treya stopped midstep, tutted theatrically, her eyes shining with warmth and humor. She said to her husband, “Now they tell us.”

  ABOUT READY TO leave the Hardys’ place, Glitsky held his five-year-old sleeping son, Zachary, who’d wrapped his arms and legs around his father’s body. Three years before, in the street right in front of their duplex, a slow-moving car had knocked Zachary off his Big Wheel, and he’d been in critical condition with a brain injury for a few months. Since that time, he’d worn a helmet against future falls. When Glitsky held him at shoulder height or greater, as he was doing now, it took some management to talk around him. “So that Tony? How’s he fit in, exactly? Is he with Beck?”

  “No. He’s a client. Didn’t have anything going on today, so I asked him over.”

  “I gather he’s a bartender?”

  “Or was. We don’t know if Rome Burning is going to reopen. Meanwhile, we’re giving him some shifts at the Shamrock.”

  “You known him long?”

  “No.”

  “But before the bust?”

  Hardy shrugged. “He’s a Dolphin Club guy.”

  Glitsky paused. “You know what he did before he was a bartender?”

  “No. Why?”

  “No reason. He just seemed surprisingly conversant with the Jon Lo situation. I thought he sounded like a cop.”

  “I don’t know about that. But he’s a smart guy. He knew who Saint Dismas was before I told him.”

  “Yeah, there’s a true test of character.”

  “You worried about his character?”

  “I don’t know,” Glitsky said. “I can’t say I’m worried about anything. I just wonder sometimes. You might want to ask him.”

  “What?”

  “Where he comes from. What he did before.”

  “Under what guise?”

  “Any guise you want. Gentle persuasion. Naked curiosity. Obnoxious prying. Whatever it takes.”

  Hardy took a beat. “You ever wonder why you don’t have all that many friends?”

  “Because I want to arrest everybody?”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it,” Glitsky said. “I know I don’t.”

  “You don’t want to arrest everybody?”

  “No, I don’t worry about it.”

  8

  THE MOOD IN the office was tense when Rick Jessup got in at ten o’clock on Monday morning.

  It didn’t help that he was hungover.

  What had started out so promising on Friday night had turned into a terrible weekend, with Brittany McGuire walking out on him, then never answering his calls until he gave up.

  And started drinking.

  After the hangover wore off, he’d go by Peet’s today and try to get back to wherever they’d been, or start over, or something.

  He was going to get her back, he knew that. It had been only one night and one morning, but as far as he was concerned, no contest, she was the best he’d ever had—best face, best body, best sex. Having had her, he wasn’t about to let her walk away. That was not going to happen unless it was he who made the decision.

  It wasn’t like he was some nobody. You didn’t become chief of staff to a city supervisor at his age if you weren’t several cuts above. Beyond that, Rick’s next step was chief of staff to the mayor, when his boss moved up. Eventually, he’d enter politics himself; in fact, he was already there.

  He could make Brittany see that. She just didn’t understand. He hadn’t made it clear enough who he was, what he could do. How important he was. He wasn’t going to have some woman from a coffee shop put him down.

  Right now his head was killing him. The staff was all hunkered down, slouching or huddled in the small conference room, nobody talking, nobody goofing off, no one working.

  Face tight and posture rigid, the usually affable Diane held up a finger, a signal for him to bypass his own office door and keep coming into the reception area. He wasn’t quite at her desk when she gave him a warning look and said, “He wants to see you the minute you get in.”

  “What’s up?”

  “He’ll tell you.”

  Sucking in a breath, Rick covered the short distance to his boss’s door in a couple of strides, knocked, turned the doorknob, and went in. Goodman, seated with his elbows on his desk, his fingers templed at his lips, said, “I believe the hours in this office are from nine to five.”

  “Yes, sir. I got stuck at my apartment. The disposal backed up and made a mess. I’m sorry. I should have called.”

  “Yes, well, speaking of calling, I tried to reach you several times over the weekend. Didn’t you get any of those messages?”

  “No, sir. I was down in San Jose visiting my sister and forgot to take my phone. I didn’t get back till last night.” He tried a sheepish grin.

  His boss’s accusatory tone was unusual and troubling. The two men had shared many secrets, some of them sensitive, and had always worked more as partners—or coconspirators—than as employer and employee. Rick wasn’t going to show any sign of fear, although his stomach clutched at him. He brazened out in a low-key tone, “Not my most productive weekend, I’m afraid. So what’s going on?”

  Goodman sat back in his chair. “Jon Lo was by here on Friday night. I’ve asked everybody else, and they’ve all said it wasn’t them.”

  “What’s not them?”

  When Goodman finished telling him, Rick hesitated until he was sure he had his emotions under control. If he was identified or even seriously suspected as the wayward intern, his career was over. The thing to do was remain calm, act as though he truly were Liam’s partner and they’d be working on the problem together. “How do we know it’s som
eone from our staff?” he asked.

  “We don’t for sure. But it seems a strange detail to make up, doesn’t it?”

  “It would be more weird if somebody from here admitted it, don’t you think? I mean, ‘Hi. I’m here breaking the law and making threats, and this is where you can find me.’ Really?”

  “Maybe you’re right. You put it like that.”

  “I’m thinking it’s more likely someone who wants to tarnish your relationship with Lo. There’s a lot of contributor money out there with those guys, and you’re getting a good chunk of it. They take you out of the equation, that frees it up.”

  “You’re right. It would, wouldn’t it?”

  “Sounds like it to me.”

  “So,” Goodman said, “I guess I won’t have to send over photos of everybody on the staff and see if anyone gets ID’ed.”

  With his emotions under tight rein, Rick caught the subtext, both the suspicion and the warning. It was an unmistakable tug on his leash, but he couldn’t let Goodman know that he’d felt it. “I don’t see how that would help us,” he said. “There’s just as good a chance that any ID would be false. You’d be giving Lo ammunition.”

  Goodman appeared to consider carefully. At last he broke a small smile. “You’re right, Rick. Lo’s put the word out. Let’s hope that stops it. And listen, I’m sorry I jumped on you coming in here. I know you put in your hours, more than enough. I really don’t expect you to punch a clock.”

  “I’ve got it, sir. No worries. I should have called when I knew I was going to be late.” He straightened up. “Anything else?”

  SULKING AT HIS desk, with the door to his office closed, Rick was thinking that Jon Lo was turning into a real problem. He couldn’t believe Lo had gone to Goodman about the indiscretions with some of the hookers. Okay, maybe Rick had let his confidence get the better of him, stiffing the girls because he knew he could.