The Ophelia Cut

by John Lescroart

  Brady was starting to get famous in the PD for holding the new record—formerly held by his Homicide colleague Darrel Bracco—for the number of parking tickets he’d collected from clueless traffic patrollers. In spite of leaving his business card—which clearly identified him as an inspector with the Homicide Detail—stuck under the wipers, the traffic cops universally would see his city-issued vehicle parked on sidewalks or in driveways near murder scenes and leave citations on his windshield. He had not paid one of these tickets—out of nearly a hundred—in the past couple of years. Nor would he fill out the administrative form that would have excused the transgressions. In theory, with fines and penalties, his car owed close to twelve thousand dollars in parking tickets, and every time he got a new one, it added to his bill and his legend. A sergeant once asked him what he did with the tickets, whether he threw them away. He said he put them under the seat and let the people who cleaned the car throw them away.

  “Hey, I’m not kidding,” he said, returning to their suspect. “I bet this was the closest spot he could find.”

  “Crime solving by parking analysis,” Sher said. “I like it.”

  “You’d better,” Brady replied. “It’s the next big thing.”

  13

  AT TEN O’CLOCK the next morning, Glitsky was trying to figure out what to do with about eight pounds of peanuts roasted in the shell that filled a bag in the middle of his desk. Over the weekend, he and Treya had made one of their regular pilgrimages to Costco, where, as usual, they had spent about triple their average food bill trying to save themselves money on their food bill. Since Glitsky always tried to keep one of his desk drawers at work filled with peanuts, and he knew he had been getting low, he’d purchased a ten-pound bag. Unfortunately, it took up approximately a cubic foot of space, whereas his desk drawer would hold only a fifth of the bag at most, provided, of course, that he threw away all the other stuff that actually belonged in the drawer.

  When Wes Farrell came to his open door and breezed in, Glitsky was scowling in perplexity, sitting behind this enormous bag of goobers, leaning back in his chair with his feet up. Farrell stopped in his tracks. “Nobody asked me,” he said, “but I’d say the peanut thing you do in here is getting a little out of hand.”

  “Costco,” Glitsky said. “Ten pounds seems like such a good deal when you’re there.”

  Farrell took it up. “We bought some frozen chicken breasts last time. Did I say ‘some’? I think like six dozen. If we ever finish them, I’m never eating chicken again. But not to worry, because we won’t ever finish them.” Farrell snapped his fingers, alight with an idea. “I got it. Maybe you could drop the bag over at Lou’s, and he could put ’em in little bowls at the bar. They’ll be gone in a week.”

  Glitsky shook his head. “Good thought, but Chui would probably make Kung Pao everything for the next three months, and then where would we be? Kung Pao tofu, Kung Pao octopus, Kung Pao pineapple dumplings. Schwarma. Eggplant. If people found out I was the peanut source, they’d stone me.” Then, realizing the oddity of the district attorney of San Francisco appearing in his office unannounced, Glitsky brought his feet down and straightened in his chair, his face darkening. “Is everything all right with Treya?”

  “Treya? Sure. I mean, fine the last time I saw her, which was like three minutes ago. Oh, as in why am I here?” His expression went serious. “You mind if I get the door?” He was already getting it, then coming back and opening one of the folding chairs Glitsky kept against the wall across from his desk. When Farrell was seated, he said, “Something’s come up that we need to talk about.”

  Glitsky pushed the bag of peanuts off to one side, all business. “Hit me.”

  Farrell’s smile faded. “Sam gave me a call a few minutes ago.” Sam Duncan was Farrell’s live-in girlfriend. She was the executive director of the Rape Crisis Counseling Center on Haight Street. “As you may remember, she is always superconcerned about confidentiality issues, but ignoring all the disclaimers I had to give her and so forth, she had a young woman come to the center on Sunday morning.”

  “Raped?”

  “That’s why they’re all there, Abe.”

  “Just making sure.”

  “All right. Whatever. This one’s a date rape, it looks like. She took a blood test, and they’ll have the results about what drugs, if any, were involved in a day or so, but that’s what Sam thinks. And so does the victim, for that matter.”

  “What happened?”

  “The woman, who shall—believe me—remain nameless, she’d been broken up with this guy for a couple of months after he knocked her around. She didn’t want any part of him anymore.”

  “Good for her.”

  “Yeah, well, he didn’t feel the same way. He wanted to get back together—”

  “So he could knock her around again.”

  “Probably. But after the first incident when he got rough, this woman’s father sought the guy out and beat the shit out of him.”

  Glitsky nodded. “I’m liking this family more and more.”

  “What’s not to like? The problem is, the guy decided he could get her to see him again by threatening to press charges against the dad.”

  “Opening himself up to where she charges him right back.”

  “Maybe she didn’t think of that. Or maybe she didn’t want it to get that far. Anyway, bottom line, he talks her into coming to see him, and they meet up at Perry’s on Union, and next thing she knows, she’s waking up at his place, it’s like one-thirty in the morning, and she knows he’s had sex with her. Without her consent. She’s been raped. She lets herself out, wanders around for a while before she finds her car where she left it, and gets away.”

  Glitsky, the father of a daughter and a stepdaughter, pulled at the skin of his face. “They do a rape kit on her?”

  “Yes, at the clinic. She didn’t want to go to the police.”

  The scar through Glitsky’s lips burned white with frustration. “She didn’t want to go to the police. She didn’t want to charge him with assault. Where have I heard all this before?”

  Farrell shrugged. “It is what it is, Abe. Sam may get the woman to change her mind. She says she’s trying. Either way, we’ve got the evidence if the rape victim wants to go forward and prosecute the guy. Which, as it turns out, isn’t going to be necessary.”

  “And why is that?”

  Farrell threw a quick look over at the closed door. His voice took on a note of urgency. “Sam got quiet reading the paper this morning, as she sometimes does, so I didn’t think anything special about it. But it turns out that the young woman told Sam the name of the man who’d raped her, and there he was in the paper.” Farrell met Glitsky’s eyes. “He was murdered, bludgeoned to death, probably on Sunday night.”

  Glitsky didn’t even need to think about it. “Rick Jessup,” he said.

  “WE HAVE TO talk to the woman, sir,” Sher said to Farrell. “She might become our prime suspect. Your wife’s got to give us her name.”

  Farrell laughed, but not because he thought what she’d said was funny. “Good luck with that.”

  Brady added, “She’s not a lawyer or a doctor or a psychologist, am I right? Where does she get off claiming privilege?”

  “She asserts it,” Glitsky said. “And dares anybody to do anything about it. Can she do that, Wes? Couldn’t you, as the DA, tell her she can’t?”

  “As the DA and not her boyfriend? I think not. Besides, she’s got it—privilege, I mean. Evidence Code 1035.4, if you’re curious.” Farrell spread his hands, helpless. “Listen up, gang. I’ve lived with this woman for many years and haven’t had much luck controlling any tiny part of her wonderful if stubborn personality. We could subpoena the center for records, which is a waste of time and would alert everyone to what we’re thinking, but there’s got to be a better way.”

  They were gathered in Farrell’s office after lunch. The inspectors had continued canvassing the Marina District in the morning, locating one more w
itness, Liza Moreno, who had an interaction with the man with the club on Sunday evening. He had been standing on the corner of Mallorca and Alhambra, the first intersection south of Jessup’s flat. Liza had been out jogging and the man was just standing there, looking lost, so she stopped and asked if she could help; he’d shaken his head, thanked her, and moved on. Liza thought that she might be able to work with an artist and get a composite drawing, and the two inspectors had spent the rest of the morning working out the logistics. In contrast to Anantha Douglas, Liza thought the man was at least fifty years old. She said he stuck in her mind because he was acting weird. She would definitely recognize him if she saw him again.

  WITHOUT THE RAPE, Sher and Brady were thrown back to the statements of their eyewitnesses, and of these, the most promising was Liza Moreno’s. She was almost an hour into her appointment with the forensic artist in one of the small interview rooms down the hall when the two inspectors made their appearance. She and the artist thought they had made real progress.

  “This is actually fun,” she said with an enthusiasm almost never encountered in this kind of setting, with this type of project. “Gus here is amazing. I tell him to change one line, and then suddenly it’s like ‘Wow, that’s it! That part’s right.’ I never thought it would be like this.”

  Gus Huang, in his late forties, had been doing the job on a piecemeal, pay-as-you-go basis for sixteen years. This was probably his thousandth sketch, of which perhaps forty-three had played some role in solving a crime; contrary to popular belief, the purpose of an artist’s sketch was not typically to identify one suspect but to eliminate others.

  Brady had used Gus’s talents at least twenty times, and he’d never seen him smile, but today he was beaming. “She sees this man,” he said. “She’s got him locked in. We’re going to get him.”

  Gus was sitting next to Liza, sketch pad before him, because he didn’t want her looking at his face while she tried to describe another face. (He couldn’t have said how many times a witness had him sketch his own likeness before he got wise and started sitting out of their line of vision.) They appeared to have settled upon the basic hairline and jawline and perhaps the eyes, the current version of which they were using as a template, with few skin creases or laugh lines.

  “The eyes are that young?” Sher asked. “They look almost like a boy’s.”

  “We’ll come back,” Gus said, waving away the objection. “Don’t worry about eyes. We’ll get him, you’ll see.” He turned to Liza. “Now the nose. Close your eyes, please.”

  Closing the eyes was one trick, but by far the most successful strategy had taken place when Gus walked Liza through the hour preceding her encounter with the suspect, taking her up to the minute she had come upon him looking lost at the corner.

  The witness did as Gus instructed, settling back in the chair, eyes closed. He drew a more or less generic nose in the middle of the face on his smaller sketch pad, then moved it in front of her and said, “When you are ready.”

  She waited a few more seconds, then opened her eyes, squinted down at the pad, and blinked a couple of times. “Flatter,” she said, “wider.” Then “More off center, to my left, just the one side.”

  Gus’s charcoal flew over the paper. Liza was all focus, almost as if she’d put herself in some kind of trance. “Okay, stop. Wait.”

  The inspectors leaned in to examine the new changes.

  “Put a bump in the middle just below the eyes.”

  When Gus had done that, she said, “That is exactly it. Put it up on Sammy.”

  “Sammy?” Brady asked.

  Liza nodded. “That’s what we’re calling the final. That’s Sammy’s nose.” She turned to Sher. “And you’re right, now the eyes need to bunch up a little more, a few more wrinkles.”

  Gus went back to his sketch pad, drew for a minute, took corrections from Liza, tried again and again until she stopped him, saying they had it for Sammy now, he could go ahead and add it.

  “He’s turning out to be a good-looking guy,” Sher said. “Would you have said he was handsome?”

  “I didn’t think of it that way at the time. He just looked lost.”

  “But this guy, Sammy,” Sher continued, “he’s got definitely attractive eyes.”

  Liza studied the easel. “I guess he does. He did.”

  “Just the mouth now,” Gus said, “and we’ll have him.” He looked across at Liza. “If you please?”

  She closed her eyes, and he started on the mouth.

  CONTRARY TO DISMAS Hardy’s hopes and predictions, after weeks of wrangling with the courts, at least a few of the Alcoholic Beverage Control cases—including Tony Solaia’s—did not appear to be going away. Liam Goodman had kept up his campaign with the press and other news outlets, bolstering his position with a flood of statistics purporting to show that the city had become a safer place since the raids. In what may have been a simple coincidence but remained persuasive, traffic accidents and DUI arrests involving minors were down nearly 35 percent over the past months.

  All too familiar with the ways that statistics could be manipulated to prove almost any proposition, Hardy remained skeptical about the raids’ true efficacy, though he had to admit that the numbers appeared to back up Goodman’s claims.

  Those numbers were not Hardy’s pressing concern. His immediate problem came, ironically, in the form of another of his defense bar colleagues, Janice Rodriguez, who shared offices with another low-rent lawyer. The two attorneys had also picked up clients from the conflicts pool in the wake of the bust. They were two Ukrainian immigrants—Igor Povaliy and Vadim Gnatyuk—who, as it turned out, were in the country and working behind the bar at Burning Rome illegally. Knowing that they would be kept in custody before being summarily deported, the two friends had concocted a conspiracy theory that, were it not proving so difficult for Tony, Hardy would have admired for its cynicism and elegance.

  According to Messrs. Povaliy and Gnatyuk, Liam Goodman and the ABC were not by any stretch making up their claims of illegal activity in certain bars, as evidenced by the nice little side business in fake IDs and drug sales that they had been running out of Burning Rome. As soon as the seriousness of the charges became clear to them, they decided to kill a couple of birds with one stone—they could stay in the country via a special arrangement known as a work permit, issued to witnesses of certain crimes if they assisted the prosecution by cooperating in a case in which they were involved; and they could also lay the blame on Tony Solaia, another bartender named Rona Ranken, and the bar’s owner, Tom Hedtke, who, according to the Ukrainians, were the true conspirators in the manufacture and sale of the phony IDs and the drugs, as well as the sale of liquor to minors.

  Today Hardy sat at the large circular table in what they called the solarium on the main floor of his law offices. It was a large circular room, perhaps twenty feet in diameter, most of it—including the entire roof—made of glass. A veritable forest of indoor plants—palms, ficus, Japanese maple—seemed to bloom in perennial profusion, lending to the feng shui of the space a softer aspect than your typical law firm’s conference room.

  Next to Hardy, Gina Roake was taking some documents out of her briefcase. “What I don’t understand,” she was saying with a bit of heat, “is why Wes is going along with prosecuting these bartenders at all. The businesses, the owners, okay, maybe, but most of these guys, like your Tony, what were they supposed to do? Double-ID everybody? And by the way, even if they did that, they would have just seen the same fake IDs that the kids showed at the door. On what legal theory can these charges be sustained?”

  “Conspiracy,” Hardy replied. “Everybody—the owners, the bartenders, the guys checking IDs at the door—they all knew the truth about what was going on.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I agree with you. And for the record, so does Wes. Meanwhile, he’s stuck.”

  “He’s the DA, Diz. He can get himself unstuck. Just say no. Dismiss the charges against the bart
enders, if nothing else. Or at least get ’em knocked down from felonies. I mean, really? Felonies? State prison? That’s just absurd. Especially when we know that Igor and Vadim are pure flat-out liars trying to save their own sorry asses so they won’t be deported.”

  Hardy nodded amicably. “My call is that Wes is letting it play as it lays for a minute, and then he’s going to step in.”

  “But why let it play at all when it’s so wrong on the face of it?”

  Hardy, with a tolerant glance at his partner, said, “You’ve been practicing law for how long and can still ask that question?”

  Roake sighed. “I know. You’re right.”

  “One step after another,” Hardy said. “Eventually, something happens.”

  “Sounds like a Russian novel.”

  “Pretty close. Maybe Ukrainian.” Hardy sat back in his chair. “Changing the subject, did you read about the guy from Goodman’s office? Rick Jessup?”

  Roake nodded. “Yeah. Awful.”

  “It is awful. It’s also potentially close to home. Brittany McGuire—Moses’s daughter?—went out with him once a couple of months ago.”

  Roake closed the folder she was perusing and turned toward her partner. “Are the police talking to her?”

  “Not that I’ve heard, but I haven’t talked to Mose since it happened. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get around to it.”

  Gina was silent for a moment. “What’s her situation now? Brittany’s?”

  “You’re going to love this. She appears to be hooking up with Tony Solaia.”

  Gina cocked her head. “Really?”

  “Really.” Hardy broke a small smile. “It’s a bit of a disappointment, too, you want to know the truth.”

  “Why’s that?”

  A shrug. “For starters, he’s got at least ten years on her.”

  “Last time I checked, didn’t you have at least ten years on your blushing bride?”

  Hardy grinned. “I knew you’d say that. And you’re right, but it seems different with them.”