Damage

by John Lescroart

  Eztli sighed with a hint of impatience. “I realize that. I know it’s a disappointment. But getting our hands on that piece was the exercise yesterday, fun and instructive. And in a pinch, you’ll know where it is. But today we won’t need it. Good?”

  “I don’t like it, but yeah. All right.”

  Because they had to make a stop at the bank for cash, they didn’t get down to Lupe’s until about noon. Once there, they drove around the back of the by-now-familiar warehouse to where a double-wide trailer sat incongruously up against a hill that looked as though it had been strip-mined at the back of the large parking lot. A brisk breeze blew under a pewter gray sky as they got out of the SUV and up the steps to the front door. They rang the bell and a short, heavy-set Latina answered. With a mere nod for an introduction, she directed them past the kitchen and eating area and along a short hallway to what was obviously the man’s business side of the trailer.

  Lupe and three other Hispanic men sat, each with a bottle of Negra Modelo beer, in a large living room that would have been spacious but for the clutter. Besides the enormous flat-screen television set, a low black-glass coffee table, a metal bench, two couches, and three leather Barcaloungers, Lupe or whoever had a penchant for storing things out in the open, and all around the periphery of the room on the floor were both opened and still-closed cases of beer and tequila, used pizza boxes, piles of girlie and dog-fight and hot-rod magazines. The three windows—two on one wall and one on the other—had no curtains, and even with the overcast day, the room had a certain brightness.

  When Eztli and Ro entered, Lupe stood up and he and Eztli greeted each other with an arm around the neck and a chest bump. Lupe then nodded in a businesslike way to Ro and said something in Spanish that Eztli answered, then translated for Ro. “He says this is a good way to find people. Put out a reward.”

  Ro shrugged. “Whatever works,” he said.

  “Here is your man. Hector.” Lupe reverted to English for Ro’s benefit. Turning around, he pointed at one of the men who’d come forward in one of the Barcaloungers, and who upon hearing his name stood up, his face with a hopeful, helpful expression and his hands clasped in front of him.

  Ro looked at him and laughed. “Guy looks like he’s going to piss himself.” He gave what sounded like a dog bark and at the same time made a quick lurch in Hector’s direction, and the diminutive worker jumped as though a current had passed through him. Everybody except Hector got a chuckle out of that. Ro straightened up and laughed again, then turned back to Lupe. “Tell him I don’t bite.” Then, directly to him, “Easy, José, I don’t bite.”

  “Hector,” the man said in a quavering voice.

  “Hector, José, whatever. The point is, where’s Gloria?”

  Hector threw a plaintive look at Lupe, who interpreted it and said, “First the money.”

  “First the money. Naturally.” Sighing dramatically, nodding, Ro reached into his jeans’ front pocket and extracted a thick stack of folded-over hundred-dollar bills. Handing them over to Lupe, he said, “You want me to count ’em out?”

  “No,” Lupe said. “If it’s wrong, he will tell us.” He looked back over to Hector, whose eyes were glued to the bills. “All right, Hector, they’ve come all the way down here to talk to you. Time to tell them what you know.”

  Hector pulled out his cell phone. “This is the woman you’re looking for, sí?” He showed Ro the picture.

  He recognized her immediately. “That’s her, all right. Where is she?”

  But Hector, perhaps understanding that he only had leverage until he gave up his information, put on an apologetic face. “I am sorry, but before, I will need the money,” he said in English.

  “There’s the money,” Ro said, gesturing to it. Then, to Lupe, “Give him the goddamn money.”

  Lupe turned back to Ro. “What is he going to do with all of this money? Where is he going to put it? Does he even have a bank account? I’m trying to save him a lot of trouble.”

  “Ask me if I give a shit,” Ro said.

  With a final small show of reluctance, Lupe held out the wad of cash, then reverted back to Spanish, saying something to Hector, who simply took the bills and nodded in satisfaction, stuffing them into his pants pocket.

  Ro turned to Hector. “Okay, you got the money. Talk to me.”

  Out of his other pants pocket, Hector extracted a folded piece of paper, opened it, and passed it across to Ro. In pencil, written in block letters, he saw the name GLORIA SERRANO and a street address with the word Sunnyvale under it. He pointed at the name and asked Hector, “So, Gloria Serrano.”

  “Sí.”

  “You know for a fact she lives at this address?” Then a thought occurred to him. “What if it turns out it’s not the right one?”

  Hector made a face. “I know it’s the right address. I know her husband.”

  Ro said to Lupe. “You know where this fucker lives if he got it wrong?”

  Lupe turned and spoke in Spanish to one of the other two men. “Near Jorge,” he said. “He can find him.”

  “He’d better be able to.”

  “Really,” Lupe said. “No problem.” He pointed at the piece of paper. “That is your woman.”

  Hector said a few more sentences in Spanish, after which all the other men looked around at one another and laughed.

  “What’s funny?” Ro turned to Eztli and asked.

  “Hector suggested a way that Lupe could get some money out of this was that maybe after the woman gets her inheritance, Lupe could go by and see if she’d like to give him some of it for helping to find her so she could claim it.”

  After a minute to let it sink in, Ro threw a baleful look at Hector and said, “Good idea, José.” Then, “Let’s go, Ez. We’re done here.”

  Lupe, his crew, and Hector were still standing around while Lupe went to one of the windows to watch Eztli and Ro get into their car and drive out of the lot.

  When they had gone around the corner of the warehouse, Lupe turned around and walked over to where Hector stood waiting for something else to happen with Jorge Cristobal and Lupe’s companion, a wiry rail of steel named Daniel.

  “Hey, man,” Lupe said to Hector in Spanish. “You still look like you got to pee. You got to take a leak, is that it?” Murillo was in fact shifting his weight from foot to foot, hands in his pockets as though he were cold. Lupe’s face, set in a half smile, didn’t signal a warning of any kind as he brought his fisted right hand up in a vicious punch to Hector’s cheek.

  The backs of the young man’s knees hit the glass coffee table and he fell heavily over it and down on his back to the floor. Before he had any time to even begin to recover, Daniel was on him, his knees on his arms, holding them useless, pummeling his face and head with a flurry of punches. After he’d knocked any chance of a fight out of him, he jumped back up to his feet and, with the fury still on him, kicked at his head two, three, four times.

  Until at last Lupe reached out and grabbed him. “Daniel! Bastantes!”

  Seemingly unable to stop himself, Daniel struck out another time with his boot, then finally, reluctantly stepped back, breathing hard. He continued to back away while Lupe went around the table and leaned down over Hector’s now nearly motionless body. He reached into the boy’s jeans pocket and pulled out the folded wad of bills, then straightened up and kicked Murillo in the side once more for good measure. “Idiota!”

  Then he turned to face Jorge and Daniel, peeling hundred-dollar bills off and counting them out: “. . . dos, tres, quatro, cinco ...” He handed the first five hundred to Jorge, then counted out another equal share to Daniel. Finally he looked down at Hector, still unconscious. “I offer this little prick two thousand dollars and he tells me no, the money is all his?” He walked back over a couple of steps, hawked and spit on him, then looked over at Daniel. “Go dump this trash someplace,” he said. “Jorge, get us both a couple of beers, would you?”

  Farrell only needed twelve to issue an indictment, but
as it turned out, he persuaded fourteen of the grand jurors to come in on their Friday off for the emergency session. Now and for the past hour and a half they were seated in front of Amanda Jenkins and listening attentively, many taking notes, as she finished outlining her case against Ro Curtlee.

  Jenkins knew that in spite of the earlier Sandoval conviction, this was going to be close. She needed twelve votes to indict, and she was all but certain that she had ten, but all four of her skeptical jurors had independently peppered each of the witnesses so far with questions about the lack of physical evidence in the Nuñez case.

  And one of them, a retired schoolteacher named Julian Ross, had in the course of his questions gone from the specific to the general, which Amanda feared in this case might sway the others: What had taken so long to bring this ten-year-old case to the grand jury? Jenkins had assured them that while she could not discuss specifics, it was for delays that had nothing to do with the strength of the evidence and that they should not consider it. Didn’t Inspector Glitsky find it unusual that police had uncovered no physical evidence implicating Mr. Curtlee in the Nuñez murder? Glitsky had emphasized the motive, the way the body was found, and other similarities between the killings.

  Amanda was nearly to the end.

  Farrell had told her to let them take a short recess before they received instructions and began to deliberate. He had something more he wanted to bring before the grand jury.

  And now here Farrell was, sitting at the witness stand. He’d come up during the break after Amanda had called him on her cell phone. A couple of clerks from the DA’s office had accompanied him, one of them pushing a dolly that held a good-size cardboard box, which they’d picked up and deposited on the evidence table in front of him.

  Farrell’s presence here was extremely problematic, to say the least. He knew that, if not political suicide, the legal fallout of having the district attorney be a witness in his own case would be enormous. Certainly the courts would say that, with the chief prosecutor as a witness, the office would never be permitted to continue handling the matter. They might even toss out any indictment as a product of prosecutorial misconduct. He could see the words like unethical and indefensible appearing in the ultimate decision.

  Farrell knew that what he was supposed to do was call the attorney general’s conflict staff and turn the case over to it. And if he hadn’t known it, Jenkins had told him that three times in the five minutes before he took the stand.

  He flat didn’t care. At least if I get run out of office, he thought grimly, I can wear any goddamn T-shirt I want.

  So they had cleared everyone from the room except Amanda, Farrell, and the grand jurors. What was happening here would remain secret until a transcript was prepared and turned over to the defense. And in the meantime, hopefully Ro Curtlee would be behind bars while they regrouped and formed a plan to keep him there. Even if it was the AG who ended up with the case, Farrell and his office would have done what they could.

  And then it began.

  Under questioning by Jenkins, Farrell told the grand jury why he was before them. “Yesterday afternoon, I received a telephone call from Cliff Curtlee, the father of Ro. He had come into the information that I was planning on convening this grand jury at its regular time next Tuesday, when I would present the evidence that you’ve heard today and seek a no-bail indictment against Ro.”

  “Tell the grand jury what he told you,” Jenkins said.

  “He said to me, and I remember the quote exactly. ‘I don’t want this grand jury thing to move forward. It would be a bad thing for you personally if it did.’ ”

  Suddenly Farrell had to grip the front rail of the witness box, almost as though he were going to faint. Swallowing, blinking back his emotions, he struggled to regain his composure. “Excuse me,” he said. “This is difficult.”

  Jenkins had the box he’d brought earlier into the courtroom marked as an exhibit and put it in front of him. “Tell us, please, do you recognize the contents of this box?”

  “I do.”

  “Will you please show the contents to the grand jury.”

  Opening the top of the carton, Farrell reached in with both hands, lifted Gert’s body out, and laid it gently on the table. Giving her a last loving pet, he looked up at the members of the jury, several of whom appeared stricken.

  “This was my dog, Gert. She was on the street in front of my girlfriend’s place of business yesterday.”

  Jenkins then asked. “Mr. Farrell, what if anything did you do with Gert’s body?”

  “I had it taken to the police laboratory early last night for testing.”

  Amanda turned to the panel and explained. “Mr. Farrell can’t testify about the results of the test because he didn’t do them himself, but what he was told by the lab techs explains what he did next, which is why I’m going to ask him, ‘Mr. Farrell, what did you learn from the lab?’ ”

  Farrell couldn’t keep the emotion out of his voice. “Somebody poisoned my dog.”

  “Mr. Farrell, you talked about your partner’s place of business. What is that place of business?”

  “She runs a rape crisis center on Haight Street.”

  “Does it have surveillance equipment?”

  “It does.”

  “Based on what the lab told you, did you go and download some photographs from that surveillance equipment?”

  “I did.”

  Jenkins produced an eight-by-ten black-and-white photo of the BMW Z4 and had it marked as an exhibit. “According to the surveillance equipment, when was this photo taken?”

  “Right about the time the dog was poisoned,” he said.

  “Can you see the license number on that vehicle?” Jenkins produced a certified DMV record, had it marked as an exhibit, and handed it to Farrell. “Tell the grand jurors, Mr. Farrell, based on the photo and those records, whose car was parked near the rape crisis center just before your dog was poisoned.”

  “The records indicate,” Farrell said, “that the car belonged to Ro Curtlee.”

  Jenkins let a long minute pass before she concluded. “Questions from the grand jury? Mr. Farrell, you’re excused.”

  After being admonished, like every other witness, by the fore-person not to discuss his testimony, Farrell got up and, nodding soberly as he passed Jenkins, walked out of the room.

  Down in his office, Wes closed and locked his door behind him. His whole body was shaking with the cynical enormity of what he’d just done. Crossing over to the foosball table, he grabbed two of the near handles and put all of his weight on them. Closing his eyes, he sucked in a deep breath, swallowing against the urge to throw up.

  He’d been through difficult times before in his trials, his failed marriage, with his children, in his life, but never before had he completely abandoned his essential view of himself as a good man, an honest man, a man of good character. And he had just—willingly, knowingly, with aforethought—done exactly that.

  He didn’t kid himself. He knew that what he’d said and shown the grand jury might have been marginally relevant—even there he was on thin ice. But he also knew that the way he did it, appearing as a witness in his own prosecution, was at very best unprofessional if not flat-out unethical. He had done something he knew he wasn’t supposed to do.

  In the grand jury room, there was no check on his power. It was virtually absolute, and it had corrupted him absolutely. He remembered what Treya Glitsky had told him in his first days in office: that his predecessor Clarence Jackman had stayed on because he’d become addicted to the power. And now Farrell had a clear understanding of what she had meant.

  This was his Rubicon—he was cheating, he knew he was cheating, he would cheat again under similar conditions.

  And then suddenly the shaking within him stilled into a calm acceptance. He let go his death grip on the handles, got his weight back onto his feet. Surveying the shattered remnants of his conscience as though from a great height, he felt neither guilt nor pain, only a mil
d regret at its former gentle insistence upon the right and the fair, the last vestige of his idealistic youth.

  What mattered most to him was that, in the sacred secrecy of the grand jury room, Jenkins would get her twelve votes.

  34

  “I’m sorry, Abe,” Amanda Jenkins said. “I just can’t seem to stop crying.”

  “Crying is okay. It’s not like baseball. We allow crying in law enforcement, even encourage it. There are classes.” Trying to keep it light.

  It didn’t work. “I don’t know whether it was the dog, the stupid beautiful dog. Or relief. Or even Matt. I mean, Matt . . . I still can’t believe . . .” She couldn’t go on, dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.

  Glitsky put an arm around her. She had come down to his office to share with him what she hoped would be the upcoming good news about the indictment, except that as she started telling him it had blindsided her. In the end, she couldn’t stand being cooped up inside the Hall of Justice any longer and she’d borrowed Glitsky’s spare raincoat and they’d snuck out the back stairs down to Bryant, and now were walking east in the misty, cold, gray, windy early afternoon.

  “You know what else I can’t stop. I can’t stop thinking I want them to kill him,” she said. “I want this indictment so bad, and then I want him to just think about resisting arrest and have them kill him.”

  “Maybe they will.”

  They walked another half block in silence. Glitsky tightened his arm briefly around her shoulders, and then let it drop as they continued side by side.

  “Assuming we get the vote, you think we’ll really get him?” she asked.

  “I don’t see why not. We got him last time. Not without a little difficulty, but we got him. We’ll get him again.”

  “Who’s going out?”

  “Lapeer’s picking a couple of special teams. Assuming the grand jury decides soon enough, they’ll be waiting for him when he gets home.”

  “Not you?”