Hardy 13 - Plague of Secrets, A

by John Lescroart

  “What did our paper’s most esteemed columnist have to say?”

  “He just wanted to give me a heads-up ’cause we’re friends. The Chronicle’s talking about running the weed story and including the whole list of us alleged dope-smoking fiends.”

  Hardy was shaking his head. “Can’t happen. Won’t happen. Never in a million years.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because your name on a list on somebody’s computer doesn’t mean anything. You didn’t admit anything to Schiff when she called and asked you about it, did you?”

  “I’m sure.” Farrell rolled his eyes. “What, I’m retarded?”

  “That’s my point. You’re not. So you didn’t cop to it. So she’s got nothing she can prove. Besides, no way does this make ‘CityTalk.’ That doesn’t sound like Jeff.”

  Farrell chewed and swallowed, chasing with Coke. “No. He was talking regular news. And you might be right about the libel problem, but the Chron’s got to be tempted. It’s a great story.”

  “It’s a nonstory. They can’t run it.”

  “Okay, good. But evidently there’s more than a few semipublic figures on the list, not including yours truly and Wyatt’s guy. And the public would like to know.”

  “Like who?” Hardy asked.

  “Jeff, God bless him, didn’t want to name names to me. But at least one judge, more than a couple of city department heads, several prominent educators, two supervisors, a few actors and like that, public personalities, and, oh yeah, some DAs . . .”

  “You want to talk screwed,” Hardy said. “Just on the innuendo, those DAs are screwed. At least the ones that didn’t have the sense to get medical marijuana cards.”

  “Yeah, heads are gonna roll for sure. If I still worked here, I’d swoop and scoop ’em up cheap and get ’em on our payroll.”

  “You’re still working here, Wes. Don’t worry about that.”

  “I’m not worried about getting fired, Diz.” He looked sideways down the couch. “Tell you the truth, I’m just embarrassed as all shit to have exposed the firm like this. You and Gina don’t deserve it, and it doesn’t exactly put on the best face for the associates, either, does it?”

  Hardy waved that off. “Wes, it’s marijuana in San Francisco in the twenty-first century. It’s going to blow over in a week, maybe two. I appreciate your feelings but truly, nobody really cares.”

  “They will if this murder turns out to be about a little benign weed.”

  “It won’t come down like that. Whoever shot Dylan, he didn’t steal any of it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He was still wearing his backpack, which was full of it. How about that?”

  “How about if he also happened to be pushing a shopping cart loaded with the stuff and the shooter ran off with that?”

  That proposal stopped Hardy short for a second, but then he shook his head, banishing the unwelcome thought. “That didn’t happen, Wes. Look, worst case, if the Chronicle does the story, it’ll sell a few papers, but it’s a nonissue to everybody else.”

  In fact, it wasn’t a nonissue to at least one San Francisco official—the newly minted special assistant United States attorney, Jerry Glass.

  The previous U.S. attorney in San Francisco, construed by the attorney general’s office to be too liberal, had been one of the notorious Alberto Gonzalez fires. Upon taking office his replacement wanted to waste no time establishing his credentials as a hard-line prosecutor, aligned four-square against the permissive culture of the city that Herb Caen, the legendary columnist for the Chronicle, had christened Baghdad by the Bay. For some years after his graduation from law school, Jerry Glass had been an assistant district attorney in Orange County, following his boss the district attorney to Sacramento as a speechwriter during the first appointments of the Schwarzenegger era, eventually catching on as an assistant director of one of California’s dozens of bureaucracies, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

  Glass, thirty-five by now, was a well-built though slightly overweight, plain-looking specimen with an office worker’s pasty complexion. He shaved close and wore his light brown hair short, parted low on the right. He trimmed his sideburns up around the top of his ears. He was also aggressive and ambitious and had seen his ABC assignment—accurately—as a dead end. He’d had résumés out and was in a holding pattern when his ex-boss, now an assistant attorney general in Washington, D.C., tapped him for the San Francisco job, and he jumped at it. With this plum in his lap Jerry had no intention of following in the footsteps of his predecessor and, among other priorities, set to work immediately making efforts to shut down the city’s medical marijuana parlors, of which there were dozens. This was always a somewhat delicate endeavor, since the state of California, as well as the city and county of San Francisco, either sanctioned or at the very least turned a blind eye to these so-called compassionate use facilities.

  But Jerry was there to enforce U.S., not local, law, and the use of marijuana was a federal crime. He got his name in the paper several times during his first year in office for busting some of the medical marijuana folks, but except for burnishing his conservative credentials—not exactly a plus in the San Francisco cultural environment—these actions did little, if anything, to raise his profile.

  And suddenly, here in his office this cool Wednesday afternoon, all by herself, was Debra Schiff. He’d run into the very attractive homicide inspector a couple of times at the bar at Lou the Greek’s and he’d planned to meet her there some more if he could, but here she was now, telling him about this murder of a coffee-shop manager out in the godforsaken Haight-Ashbury.

  To date, Glass had only been aware of rumors and what he’d read about this particular murder in the papers. Astoundingly, he thought, Schiff was telling him with a straight face that she and her partner, Bracco, hadn’t brought up the dope connection to the news media before because it simply didn’t occur to them that it might be of some special importance—since apparently no marijuana had been stolen, it couldn’t have been part of a motive in the case.

  She waved off his objection. “No, listen, Jerry, there’s always dope somewhere in a homicide picture. A roach in the drive-by car, some paraphernalia around a DD”—domestic disturbance—“gangbangers loaded up with coke or heroin. So it’s always there someplace. You don’t comment on it any more than you’d talk about the weather. ‘In other news tonight,’ she said in her best anchor voice, ‘Shawahn Johnson was shot seventeen times in an apparent drive-by shooting in Hunters Point when the fog was in.’ Generally, we don’t mention the fog.”

  “But this fellow, Vogler, he had an entire marijuana garden in his attic, didn’t he? Thousands of dollars’ worth, right?”

  “Right. But again we didn’t have any reason to believe that was part of our case at the outset. We handed the dope part over to the narcs and that might have been the end of it.”

  “But for what?” Glass adjusted his spectacles.

  For the next few minutes Schiff ran the highlights of their investigation. “The bottom line, though,” she concluded, “is that we think . . . in fact, we’re morally certain that Maya, Jansey, and Robert Tripp have lied to us, in some cases more than once. We have motives for each of them, both alone or possibly together in the case of Jansey and Tripp, but almost no evidence and certainly nothing we can use to bring any leverage to bear on getting anybody to talk. We’re pretty sure, for example, that Vogler was blackmailing Maya, and that Jansey may have known about that, but if they both say, ‘No he wasn’t,’ we’re stuck.”

  “You can’t just lean on them harder?”

  “We could, but as I say, it’s kind of pointless without some new leverage, some change in the status quo. There’s no physical evidence that’s very compelling.” She shook her head. “Besides, we’ve already gone back and talked to all of them at least twice, but Jansey and Tripp are at the very least well-rehearsed, and Maya’s got herself a lawyer. Plus, you know, we’ve got to walk a little e
asy around her anyway.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The whole political thing, which I hate, and Darrel hates, but there you go. The plain fact is, Darrel and Harlen Fisk used to be partners, and she’s Harlen’s sister.”

  Jerry’s eyes lit up. “Are you talking Supervisor Fisk?”

  “Right.”

  “Which also makes her the niece of Mayor West?”

  “I guess so, yeah.”

  Jerry Glass pulled himself up straight in his chair, his attention now riveted. “Is Mr. Fisk interfering with your investigation? Is he talking to your partner?”

  “Not that I know of, no. That would be a little awkward, even if . . .” She stopped.

  “What?”

  “Well,” she said, “Harlen, among many other names you might recognize, was one of Vogler’s regular customers.”

  This stopped Glass dead. He squinted through his glasses, across at her. “Marijuana customers? You’re sure of that?”

  “Absolutely. He’s on the list.”

  “The list?”

  “I’m sorry. Haven’t I told you yet about the list?” She gave him that news, the incriminating computer records. “Anyway, in short it looks like there’s a ton of connections between all these people, and we’d like an excuse to shake their trees and find out if we can what those connections are. The blackmail, for example. What was that about? Was it serious enough that Maya might have killed to keep it quiet? Or, on the other hand—”

  “No”—Glass raised his palm to her—“hold up a minute. Let’s go back to what might really make a difference. You’ve told me that Maya says she didn’t know this weed was sold out of her shop, right? How credible is that to you? Especially if her brother was one of the customers.” He waited, a smile beginning to play at the corners of his mouth. “That’s what I thought. And beyond that, if the mayor—I’m kind of new in town, but Harlen’s her protégé if I’m not mistaken—I mean, she’d know as well, or might know. How much was Maya paying Vogler again?”

  “Ninety thousand,” Schiff said.

  “Well, that’s enough, or almost enough, to live on, right? Do you think it’s actually possible that he didn’t kick back some percentage of this drug money to Maya, who had, after all, set him up in business?”

  Schiff kept nodding. “You’re saying Vogler—”

  “I’m saying it sounds to me like he was her partner on the dope side as well. Which would explain his cavalier attitude toward her as much as blackmail, wouldn’t it? He can treat her any way he wants and she can’t fire him, can she? Since he’s her supplier. They’re in it together hip deep.”

  Glass was making sense, although neither she nor Bracco had yet considered the possibility that this whole thing might, in fact, be about the weed. Schiff’s hope, and the reason she’d come to visit Jerry Glass today, was that he could start some kind of a U.S. prosecution on the marijuana issues that would make the principal witnesses nervous enough about the possible dope charges against them that in exchange for lenient treatment on that score, they would perhaps be inclined to trade information they might have about the murder.

  But now Jerry’s take took it to a different level, contemplating that Maya herself might have been the prime mover, and armed with political connections and possibly even police protection, she would have been all but invulnerable to suspicion, much less prosecution.

  And then—instead of this imagined blackmail about what she’d maybe or maybe not done in her past—the murder had simply been the usual dope deal gone bad. Maya had killed her employee because of any number of common reasons—he wanted a bigger cut, he was selling to his own customers and leaving her out, he was either getting sloppy or hard to control.

  Now Jerry Glass settled back into his chair, his hands clasped on the desk in front of him, a faraway glint in his eyes over a tight-lipped smile. “I know how we can get these people to talk,” he said.

  Back in his office once again, Glitsky sat slumped, his elbows on the armrests of his chair, his hands joined in front of his mouth. He was back in at work because what else was he going to do? Zachary was coming out of the coma, although they were going to operate on him again to close up his skull tomorrow. Rationally, he knew that there was reason for hope, and yet all he could feel was a deep self-loathing. Regardless of what Treya or Hardy or anyone else said, he knew that all of this was his fault.

  Through his lack of attention he’d allowed his son to be hit by a car—there was still a reasonable chance that his boy could die. Even if he didn’t die, he might never be completely right in the head again. And they might not know the extent of those injuries, if any, for years.

  He’d left the lights off at the door, so again the high windows provided the only illumination, and not much of it at that.

  He clearly wasn’t welcoming guests.

  Nevertheless, somebody knocked and he straightened up and intoned, “Come in.”

  Bracco poked his head in. “Sir? Lights?”

  “Sure.”

  Glitsky covered his face with one hand against the sudden brightness, then lowered the hand and faced both of his inspectors with a flat eye. “Come on in. Have a seat.”

  Bracco was on his way over to a chair, but Schiff saw him and noticed something and stopped in the doorway. “Are you okay, Lieutenant?”

  He turned to look at her and surprised himself when he said, “My son’s in the hospital. He got hit by a car. He came out of a coma this morning, but he’s got another operation tomorrow. I’m sorry I’ve been out. What can I do for you two?”

  Both of the inspectors broke into condolences and questions, and he responded and answered dutifully without really hearing many of the individual words. They were just noise against the constant thrum of the guilt in his head.

  And then finally he became vaguely aware that they were talking about something else, something to do with their case, and after a couple of minutes of that—mostly more white noise—he held up a hand. “Whoa up,” he said to Schiff, who appeared to be acting as spokesperson. “Can you repeat that last part? Are you talking about Jerry Glass? Federal Jerry Glass?”

  “Yes, sir, but that’s what makes this so good, at least potentially. He says the dope is enough, especially in the quantity we found at Vogler’s place, to trigger a forfeiture.”

  “Forfeiture?”

  Schiff nodded with enthusiasm. “Confiscating their property.”

  Glitsky said, “I know what forfeiture is, Debra. But whose property?”

  “Maybe Vogler’s, if for example we can prove that he used any part of the profits from the drug sales to pay off his house. But also Maya Townshend’s, and even better, maybe her husband Joel’s.”

  “Townshend Real Estate?” Glitsky asked.

  Bracco finally spoke. “It could be huge, Abe. Millions and millions.”

  “They were in the drug business? I thought she didn’t know anything about that.”

  “Well, that’s her story,” Schiff said. “But Darrel and I don’t really believe it. And Jerry Glass doesn’t believe it. And he thinks he can get a federal grand jury motivated to prove it.”

  “Well, all that’s well and good, but how’s it relate to the homicide you’re trying to bring to trial? We’re still doing homicide here, right? That hasn’t changed during my short absence?”

  “Jerry thinks there’s much more going on, and that Vogler’s murder’s in the middle of it. He gets these people into a forfeiture situation on the civil side, then he gets to ask them anything on the criminal side in secret with the grand jury, they look into their assets, get connections we wouldn’t have a chance at.”

  “Plus,” Bracco added, “the threat alone. It’s pretty powerful leverage. They tell us the truth or—”

  Glitsky cut him off. “I get the concept,” he said, “but I can’t say I really like it.”

  “What’s not to like?” Schiff asked.

  “Well, for starters, if you don’t have any evidence, how do you de
cide that these people are your suspects? Or that one of them is. You leaning toward any one of them?”

  “Maya doesn’t look bad for it, Lieutenant,” Schiff said. “She was down there, it was her gun. We know her relationship with Vogler was squirrelly at best.”

  “So bring her downtown and sweat her.”

  “Not so easy,” Schiff said. “She’s already lawyered up. Your friend Diz Hardy.”

  “Wonderful.” Glitsky studied the ceiling for a moment. Then, “What about this list of Vogler’s customers? You don’t think it’s reasonable he was killed by one of them?”

  “Why?” Bracco asked.

  A shrug. “The usual stupid reasons, Darrel. He cut the dope with parsley and somebody didn’t like it. Or one of ’em graduated to crack and just went psycho. Or he stiffed a guy for five bucks. Or any one of a hundred other reasons. Have you talked to any of these people?”

  “Some,” Schiff said. “There’s seventy-two of them, Abe.”

  He nodded soberly. “I’m sorry about that, I really am. But it seems to me that at least you’ve got to talk to them, if only to eliminate. Find out who was where on that Saturday morning. I know it’s tedious, but that’s the job. Sometimes we’ve just got to grind it out.”

  “What about Jerry Glass?” Schiff asked.

  “I don’t know,” Glitsky said. “If I’d have been here, I might have suggested you two hold off on going that route for a while, at least until somebody pops up as a bona fide suspect that the forfeiture or the grand jury might squeeze. Now I think we just gotta hope he doesn’t get too much in the way.”

  12

  As was often the case early on a workday, Craig Chiurco was lounging in the small reception area of The Hunt Club, Wyatt’s office in the heart of Chinatown, chewing the fat with his girlfriend, Tamara Dade, who answered the phones and occasionally did fieldwork—taking pictures, tailing female witnesses. Tamara, twenty-six, tended to dress for the office in brightly colored miniskirts with form-hugging tops, and there was ample form to hug over the tight, and often exposed, stomach with its tasteful little gold naval ring. Today only the ring’s shape showed under the orange leotard an inch or two before it disappeared into her black skirt—Halloween was coming up.