Craig, maybe five years her senior, had been going out with her now for about three years, although they still maintained separate apartments. After four years working with Hunt, doing anything he was asked to do, but mostly subpoena service and stakeout work, Craig had acquired enough hours in the profession to start the application process for his own private investigator’s license. But, of course, being on Vogler’s list, his career plans were in jeopardy. And he was saying so to Tamara.
Who dismissed the idea with a wave. “Wyatt already told you not to worry about that.”
“Oh. Okay, I won’t then.”
“Craig. Really. He’s the one paying you, so if it doesn’t bother him, how is it going to hurt you?”
“It goes on my record and I have to put that on my application . . .”
Tamara shook her head. “It’s a misdemeanor at most, Craig.”
“That would do it, though, Tam, which is kind of the point.”
“But you don’t even have that. The only way that happens is if they catch you with the actual weed. Being on this list isn’t proof of anything. And you’ve gotten rid of all your stuff, so even if they come and search your place—as if—then so what?” She gave him a tolerant look. “You’re just upset because you got caught. And because now Wyatt knows.”
“Maybe some of that.”
“Except he doesn’t care. You don’t think he’s smoked a little weed in his time?”
“I’d bet not much.”
“Well, you might be right there. But don’t you think he supposes you and me maybe were together a time or two that your alleged dope-smoking took place?”
Craig, reclining sideways with his knees up over the edge of the small love seat that was the only place for a guest or a client to sit, broke a small smile. “I didn’t rat you out, Tam. Promise.”
She favored him with her own smile. “I didn’t say you did, Gala-had, and I know you wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean that Wyatt wouldn’t have put two and two together—or in our case, one and one.” She picked up an emery board from her desk blotter and started working on one of her fingernails. “I think the smart thing for you and me to do, which we’ve already done, is just take it as a wake-up call to be a little smarter, give the stuff up altogether.”
Chiurco, arms crossed, pursed his lips at that request.
“What?” Tamara asked. “Would that really be so hard?”
“Not really hard. More like just unnecessary. I like the stuff. You like the stuff. Everybody agrees it shouldn’t be illegal. So why should I be coerced to give it up entirely?”
Tamara held up one finger. “Me, me, Monty, call on me. How about because it is illegal? Whether it should be or not. And you want to work around law enforcement. You get caught with it—you said it—it’s on your record. It can affect things—your application, for example. So there’s a reason to give it up right there.” She pushed back her chair and turned to face him. “The thing is, though, in real life nothing’s going to happen around this. Your name is on a list that may or may not have been this guy Vogler’s clients. It might have just been people who owed him money.”
A short laugh. “That too.”
“Well, that’s fine. You may know that. But the police just can’t know anything, or prove anything, about anybody on that list. Even if everybody else owned up and said they were his customers, that still wouldn’t prove that you were. And, by the way, if you’re worried that the paper might print it, forget it. They’d get sued from here to Italy. It won’t happen.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m convinced.”
“Good. I mean, bottom line is we just don’t do it anymore. Easy enough, right?”
“It should be,” Chiurco said.
“Well, there you go. Done deal.”
Wyatt Hunt looked briefly out onto Grant Street through the one window across from Tamara in the reception area, then turned back to his employees. “I will entertain even the smallest crumb of an idea.”
“Do we have a hint,” Chiurco asked, “of what we’re looking for? Or some kind of timeline?”
“Hardy thinks when she was in college, so ten to fourteen years ago. In the city here. Something she was embarrassed by, or worse. Obviously, he thinks, something she could still get in trouble for if word gets out.”
“Well,” said Tamara, who had taken her share of criminology classes as well, “the statute of limitations would have run out on almost anything she did back then, except if she killed somebody. What did Vogler do that got him in prison? Could she have been involved in that?”
Hunt pointed a finger at his secretary. “There you go. There’s someplace to start. If she was any part of that, and Vogler took the fall for it . . . how well did you know him, Craig? Did he ever talk about that?”
“Not to me. I barely knew him at all, except through the coffee shop. Maybe we could get our hands on that list and ask some of those people what they know?”
“I wouldn’t bank much on that. Besides, I’m thinking what Tam suggests is probably going to be more productive. See if he had an accomplice or two and go talk to them.”
“Hardy should just ask her,” Chiurco said. “Whatever she tells him, it’s privileged, right? Nobody else would have to know. I don’t see the problem.”
“Well, one problem, Craig, not to sound mercenary, is if he asks her and she tells him, there goes our fee. But the other thing is that she’s evidently cut a deal with her husband—his name’s Joel—that she’s not going to be seeing Diz except with him there with them too. So what’s that leave?”
Tamara raised her hand like a good student and spoke right out. “She doesn’t want Joel to find out.”
“Ten points.” Hunt nodded. “That’s my guess too. Which of course means it might not be a criminal thing at all. Just some behavior she’d rather he never knew about.”
“She had an abortion,” Tamara said.
Again, Hunt nodded. “Not impossible. Especially being a good Catholic and all like she is, like they are.”
“Wait a minute.” Chiurco swung his body around and sat up. “She pays Vogler ninety thousand dollars a year just so he won’t tell her husband that she had an abortion? And Vogler’s the only one who knows? I don’t think that flies.”
“I don’t know, Craig. Stranger things have happened. Maybe Vogler was the father.” Hunt pushed himself off the window ledge. “But why don’t we see what we can find out about this prison time he did, who he might have been hanging with, see if it leads us back to Maya in any way?”
“I’ll take that,” Chiurco said.
“Fine. Meanwhile, I’ll dig around and see if I can talk to somebody who remembers her from school. I talked to Diz about this yesterday and he’s a little worried, beyond everything else we’ve talked about, that if Vogler was blackmailing her, she might know something dangerous that she doesn’t know she knows. So there’s a bit of urgency.”
Chiurco was on his feet. “I’m all over it,” he said.
At a little before noon, with a full blustery fall day building up around them, Bracco and Schiff were back out in the Haight-Ashbury, this time talking to an elderly woman named Lori Bradford. They were all sitting around a small wooden table with a lace tablecloth in a nook off her kitchen. She lived on the second floor of an apartment building looking out over Ashbury, several structures up and across the street from the alley where Dylan Vogler had died.
She’d of course seen the police and the crowd last Saturday and since then had read about the murder, following the story rather closely in the newspaper. Over the last couple of days she had been trying to decide if it would be worthwhile to call somebody about a possible discrepancy that she’d noticed, and finally thought that, yes, it would be, and here they all were.
“Are you sure about this?” Schiff asked her.
“Yes. Absolutely. There were two shots, not just one.” Mrs. Bradford, in her late sixties, had dressed for her appointment with these inspectors in a pair of purpl
e slacks over sensible black shoes, and a black turtleneck. “I thought at the time I heard them that I should have called nine one one, but then there wasn’t any more noise, and no screaming or anything like that, so I just assumed it must have been a backfire or cherry bombs or something. If it was a real emergency, someone else would have called nine one one anyway, I thought. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get involved. People always say that, I know, that they don’t want to get involved, but I don’t have a problem with that. But I think I just convinced myself that it was probably nothing. I looked out the window there—you see how you’ve got a clear view of the first twenty or thirty feet of the alley anyway—and didn’t see anything moving. Or on the street either. And then I didn’t want to send a false alarm, which would have been worse than not calling at all. Wouldn’t it? Anyway . . . ,” she said. And trailed off.
“Well, it’s good you called at whatever time, ma’am,” Bracco said. “But we haven’t heard anybody else talking about more than one shot.” Bracco’s face reflected his frustration with San Francisco’s laissez faire reality. This wasn’t Hunters Point, exactly, in terms of gunshots per minute, but Bracco thought it wasn’t such a high crime area that a couple of gunshots would be a completely normal event. And yet, apparently, no one among the citizenry had seen fit to rally to report them. If it wasn’t napalm, he figured, nobody paid attention.
Mrs. Bradford looked from one inspector to the other, as though soliciting their forgiveness. “Nobody else called nine one one, then?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Oh, then I really should have, shouldn’t I?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that, Mrs. Bradford,” Schiff said. “The point is that you called now and we’re here. Inspector Bracco and I will check with dispatch and see if anybody called to report these shots or make a noise complaint on Saturday morning. Maybe they didn’t think it was an emergency, and then it wouldn’t have come to us through dispatch.”
Bracco leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Could you tell us a little more about these shots, ma’am? How far apart were they spaced, for example?”
Mrs. Bradford sat back and stared off into nothing for a second or two. “I’d say about a minute. A fairly long time, anyway. They weren’t right away, one after the other. I was awake, I remember, but still in bed, when I heard the first one, and I kind of lay there wondering what that was for a while, and if I’d really heard it. You know? The way you are when you’re half awake. And then I decided I’d really heard something and got up to see if I could see what it had been and I was just in the hallway there when the second one went off.”
“And what did you do then?” Schiff asked.
“Well.” Mrs. Bradford’s face grew animated at the recollection. “Well, then, I of course got to the window as fast as I could and looked down at the street here, and I could see the alley, too, but I didn’t know that’s where the shots must have come from. I couldn’t tell anything, really. Anyway, but then when I didn’t see anybody moving and hear anything else down below there, that’s when I decided it was probably nothing and not to call nine one one.”
“Mrs. Bradford,” Schiff asked, “did you happen to notice the exact time of these shots?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was ten minutes after six. The second one, I mean. The first one, just before that. Six oh eight or nine.” She pointed. “There’s the digital on the stove.”
“And how sure are you,” Bracco asked, “that it was the same kind of sound?”
“Oh, the same, definitely. If the second one was a shot, the first one was a shot, and vice versa. Loud, and sharp. Louder than TV.” Back to her recurring theme, she said, “I really should have called nine one one. Someone might have gotten here in time to catch the killer.”
“Really, Mrs. Bradford”—Schiff patted her hand on the table—“I wouldn’t lose one minute of sleep over that. You’ve done the right thing to call us now, and this is a very important bit of information that we didn’t have before.” She cast an eye on Bracco. “This may change our entire theory of the case, and it’s all because you’re a good citizen. We thank you very much.”
On the second flight down the stairs, out of earshot, Schiff started talking about it. “You believe her?”
“I think she heard something.”
“There was only one bullet missing from the murder weapon.”
“Maybe the murder weapon. Consistent with the murder weapon. And I kind of vaguely remember, Debra.”
“Vogler didn’t shoot somebody in that alley.”
“Nope.”
“And there was only one casing.”
“Yep.”
“Which means what?”
“It means the woman’s going on a hundred. She’s bored living alone. She heard some noises maybe the same morning Vogler was shot.”
They came out into the overcast and windy day and turned downhill toward Haight, where, even though they’d parked legally in an open metered space, Darrel had gone through his radio-over-the-rearview-mirror and business-card-on-the-dashboard routine. They were walking on the opposite side of the street from Bay Beans West, and as they came abreast of the place, Schiff hit Bracco on the arm. “Darrel,” she said, “wait up. Look at that.”
They both stopped.
“What?” Bracco asked.
“On the door.”
Bracco squinted to look, then stepped off the curb and started across the street. “What is that?”
When they came closer, the answer presented itself. Taped to the front door was an official yellow-colored single sheet of a government document with the heading “Posting of Real Property,” declaring that the establishment was subject to forfeiture to the federal government, as the proceeds of trafficking in controlled substances.
“Jerry Glass,” Schiff said. “I fucking love that guy.”
13
Dismas Hardy hadn’t thought to bring his trench coat to work with him this morning, and on general principles he’d be damned if he was going to take a cab from his office the dozen or fewer blocks to the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue. But now he was paying for his stubbornness, leaning into the teeth of a minigale as he walked, suitcoat buttoned up, hands in his pants pockets.
After the ten-thirty A.M. emergency cries for help, first from Maya and then minutes later from Joel Townshend, Hardy had immediately placed his own high-priority call to Jerry Glass, who did not seem inclined to discuss much about the forfeiture situation on the telephone—“It pretty much speaks for itself” was all the explanation he was ready to volunteer. But Hardy had an ace or two up his sleeve, as well, in the person of his former DA friend and mentor Art Drysdale, now one of the Grand Old Men of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and ten minutes after Hardy got off the phone with Art, Glass called him and told him he’d give him some face time if they could do it in Glass’s office in the next half hour.
Hence the hike.
But the exercise did serve a couple of small purposes. It gave Hardy time to think. And walking into the gusts and grit really pissed him off.
Now, as he walked down the perennially sterile hallway on the eleventh floor, Hardy found himself forcefully reminded of the last time he’d been down to this neighborhood on business. It had been directly across the street in the State Building. At that time, probably the best part of six years before, he’d essentially been accused of setting fire to his own home for the insurance. An arson inspector and a couple of detectives had three-teamed and threatened him with arrest until he’d called their bluff and simply walked out on them in the middle of the interview.
He wondered, not for the first time, if there was some kind of bland but powerful psychic karma in these two governmental edifices—one federal and one state—that attracted heartless, deceptive, self-righteous bureaucrats. For all of his dislike of the physical layout and general tone of the Hall of Justice at Seventh and Bryant—which is where he normally did his business—no one could argue that the place d
idn’t thrum with almost the very heartbeat of humanity in all of its flaws and grandeur. By contrast these fat faceless rectangles of glass and granite—the halls were silent—seemed the embodiment of the anonymous power of the state to harm and to meddle wherever it saw fit under the rubric of enforcing the rules.
An aphorism of someone he’d once known sprang to his mind: The essence of fascism is to make laws forbidding everything and then enforce them selectively against your enemies.
It wasn’t that bad, of course. Hardy had several friends, including Art Drysdale, who worked in one or the other of these buildings. But he himself avoided them whenever he could, all but unconsciously. And getting to Glass’s outer office, he could neither ignore the bile that had risen in his gut nor the frisson of what felt like fear tickling at the base of his brain.
Glass evenly carried twenty extra pounds on a frame about the same size as Hardy’s. Today he wore a gray suit, white shirt buttoned tight at the neck, a light blue tie. With some effort he shook Hardy’s hand over his desk, then sat back down and indicated either of the two beige faux-leather chairs facing him.
Hardy generally thought it best to start out civilly. “I appreciate your taking the time to see me.”
Glass turned a hand up. “Art Drysdale’s a legend, Mr. Hardy. He recommends that I talk to you, that’s what I do. Although I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to help you.”
“Well, then we’re a bit in the same boat.”
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