Hardy 03 - Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  ‘I got here six-thirty, quarter to seven, and the Eloise, she was already gone.’

  ‘And nobody signed her out?’

  ‘No. They s’pose to, but…’ He shrugged.

  ‘Were there any calls on the intercom, anything like that?’

  ‘You remember Saturday? It was like nothing, maybe two boats, three go out. If anything had happen, I remember.’ José stood up and got a logbook from the counter. ‘Here, look at this. Air temp forty-eight, wind north northeast at thirty-five. Small craft up from the night before.’

  ‘So nobody was going out? What about the other boats? The ones that went out?’

  José tapped the book. ‘These I write down.’ He ran a finger over the page until he got where he wanted. ‘The Wave Dancer, she goes out at ten-thirty, back at two. Then Blue Baby, she just clear the jetty’ — pronounced ‘yetty’ — ‘then turn aroun’ and come back in, like one-fifteen. Rough Rider leaves about the same as Blue Baby, like one-thirty. They no come back in on my shift.‘

  Not bad, Glitsky thought. Every new witness didn’t double his work, it squared it. Here were only three boats to check, and maybe he could leave out the Blue Baby, Possibly one of them had seen the Eloise. If Saturday had been a day like today, clear and calm… He didn’t want to think about it. He started writing down names.

  A uniformed officer appeared in the doorway. ‘Sergeant, the lab team is pulling up.’

  As soon as he’d left Hardy’s that morning Glitsky had arranged to have the Eloise placed under the guard of a couple of officers. He stopped off downtown for an easily obtained search warrant, not even dropping into his office. After he and Forensics had gone over the Eloise, a prospect about which he entertained no great hopes —they’d cordon it off with crime-scene tape. But the boat was the place to start — it was more than probable that Nash had at the very least been dead on the boat and dumped from it. From there, he’d see where the trails led.

  José was next to him as he greeted a team at the gate to the slips, and the six men walked out in the glaring sun to the end of Dock Two. José opened the cabin for them, then Glitsky dismissed him.

  Abe went below, taking a moment to let his eyes adjust to the relative darkness. As the room became visible, one of the forensic team on the ladder behind him whistled at the layout. They went to work.

  It was a tough call because they were looking for anything and nothing. Two men were on deck above, starting at the bow and coming back. Glitsky and two other guys were below, but there wasn’t much evident there either. No sign of any struggle.

  Glitsky started in the main cabin, just poking around, looking. He wasn’t a forensics man. He would let them go over the fabrics and rugs and smooth surfaces. Whatever he was looking for would have to be obvious. But not too obvious, he thought, or Hardy would have seen it.

  All of the cabinets were secured, both in the main cabin and in the adjoining galley. He opened each one, moved a few things around, closed it back up. Moseying back to the master suite, he noted the made bed. He considered calling back to remind his guys to bring the sheets in, but thought better of it. They would do that automatically.

  To the right of the bed there was a wooden desk, shaped to the bulkhead, its surface cleared. He tried one of the side drawers and found it locked. The center drawer, however, slid open easily, and, with it open, the other drawers came free.

  But it was slim pickings. The gutter to the center drawer contained pens and paper clips, several books of matches from various restaurants, a couple of keys on a ring that Abe assumed fitted this desk, rubberbands and a handball from the Olympic club. The flat back part of the drawer appeared to be completely empty, but reaching his hand back, Glitsky found two stale, crumbling cigars. The top side drawer, the slimmer one, was filled with lots of different colored sweatbands, which seemed to go with the exercycle and dumbbells on the other side of the bed. The bottom side drawer was empty.

  On the other side of the bed was a rolltop desk, its cover down. He rolled back the oak top. There were probably twenty-five cubbyholes above the desk’s surface, most of them containing pieces of paper, some of them rolled up, some folded over. A general catchall. Glitsky pulled out a piece at random and found a shopping list. Eggs, cheese, spinach, orange juice. Sunday brunch, he decided. Another paper, also at random, read ‘W. re Taos/reschedule.’ That was all. Glitsky put the two pages back where he’d gotten them. Forensics would take them back downtown if they found any other evidence that Nash had been killed here.

  The center drawer looked much like the other one —matches, cigars, pens and pencils, junk.

  He pulled open the upper right drawer, expecting to find more headbands. At first glance this looked to be another functional drawer, but when Glitsky pulled the drawer out a little further, he saw a nickel-plated .25 Beretta 950 lying on top of what looked like a collection of folded-up navigational charts.

  Just then one of the forensics men on deck called below. ‘Sergeant, you want to get up here? I think we got us some blood.’

  15

  It was close to noon on what was already the hottest day of the year and, naturally, the air conditioners were on the blink. There were no windows in the courtrooms in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. Fans were set up on either side of the bench in Judge Andy Fowler’s courtroom, Department 27, and they did move the air around. Unfortunately the temperature of the air getting moved was ninety-one degrees.

  The whir of the fan blades also upped the decibel level. Nearly uniform in size, twenty-five by forty feet, with high ceilings and no soft surfaces except the minimal padding on the seats of jurors, judges and witnesses, courtrooms were, under the best conditions, loud and uncomfortable.

  And today, under far less than optimal conditions, Andy Fowler was once again being forced, reluctantly, by the luck of the draw, into a role he hated — protector of suspect’s rights.

  He’d been a young man at the time of his appointment to the bench. He’d worked on Pat Brown’s second gubernatorial campaign against Richard Nixon — more because he hated Nixon than loved Brown — and persuaded a goodly amount of his Olympic Club confreres, some of them Republicans, to donate to the cause. At the time, though not yet thirty, he’d already made partner in his firm, and he had put the word out that he would accept a judgeship if one came around, which, in due course, it did.

  Though his politics rarely came up and hadn’t radically changed in thirty years, this was the 1990s in San Francisco. Anywhere but in the Hall of Justice, a Kennedy-style liberal Democrat was considered right-wing. Actual conservatives, again excluding the Hall, were as rare in the city as a warm day.

  Political San Francisco was a Balkanized unit of special interests, many on the so-called left — homosexuals, people of color, middle-class white radicals… so political survival in the city was in large part a matter of pleasing enough of these groups to form a majority coalition on whatever issue happened to be the day’s hot topic.

  In reaction, the denizens of the Hall of Justice — the police department, the D.A.‘s office, judges — had become a little Balkan republic of their own. It was tough, they said, to be for law and order, to serve blind justice, when first you had to take into account the trauma and/or discrimination that had been visited on you and yours on account of skin color, gender, sexual preference, religious orientation, poor potty training, whatever.

  And in this climate, until three years ago, Andy Fowler had been a popular judge. He knew it was true, because prosecutors went out of their way to tell him they loved getting cases in his department. Why? Well, he tried to be fair. He wasn’t a wiseguy. He didn’t throw things —erasers, pencils, paper clips — from the bench at attorneys, bailiffs or suspects. If someone needed waking up in the courtroom, he would politely ask the bailiff to shake that person. He had a sly humor and no political axe to grind. He was knowledgeable about the law. He was, in short, a good judge.

  The first sign of change came in the case of The People v
. Randy Blakemore. It seemed Mr Blakemore was hanging out on Eddy Street one evening and saw an apparently drunk tourist stumbling along in a nice suit. Randy noticed a Rolex, a fat bulge in the tourist’s back pocket, the gold chain around his neck. When the man fell into a doorway to rest, Randy moved in and had his hands on the Rolex when two other ‘homeless people’ appeared with badges and guns. The tourist opened his eyes and uttered an extremely sober, ‘Boo, you’re it,’ and Randy was taken downtown — one of seventeen arrests in a police program to get the word out on the street that tourists were a valued business in San Francisco and were not to be hassled.

  Six other cases had already come up for PXs — preliminary hearings — in other departments when Blakemore came up in Andy Fowler’s courtroom. Four of those men were awaiting trial and two had already been convicted and sent to jail. Andy Fowler took a look at Randy standing in the docket in his orange prison togs and told him it was his lucky day — this was as clear a case of entrapment as Judge Fowler had ever seen and though he had no doubt that Randy was a bad person who shouldn’t be on the streets, on this particular charge he was going to walk.

  Other judges reconsidered. Three of the four remaining prelims resulted the same way. Both of the felons already convicted were released on appeal. The last suspect had also mugged the ‘tourist’ and fought the arresting officers, so he did go to trial, although the jury didn’t convict. The other dozen or so arrestees had their charges dropped by an angry District Attorney Christopher Locke.

  So Fowler’s ruling had alienated Locke, the sixteen officers who’d taken part in the operation, Chief of Police Dan Rigby and the mayor, in whose brain the original germ of the idea had hatched in the first place.

  For a short while Fowler became somewhat the darling of the media — the Sunday Chronicle’s Calendar/Style section did a piece on him, further alienating the Hall. Esquire liked his wardrobe. Rolling Stone asked his opinion on Roe v. Wade. People had a little squib on him in ‘End-Notes’, calling him a ‘crusading justice.’

  Fowler laughed it off as his allotted twenty minutes of fame, and most of it blew over after a while. But it did leave a bitter residue, especially on a young female D.A. named Elizabeth Pullios, who didn’t like to lose and who’d been prosecuting Blakemore.

  Now, on this sweltering morning, Fowler had listened to a half-hour of opening statements by Chief Assistant District Attorney Art Drysdale, making a rare personal appearance in a courtroom. The case was The People v. Charles Hendrix, and Drysdale was here because Locke had asked him to be.

  There were eight sitting judges in San Francisco, their cases assigned by one of their number, a rotating calendar judge, in Department 22, starting at nine-thirty every Monday morning. When People v. Hendrix went to Fowler, Locke knew he was in trouble — Hendrix was another entrapment. In this case, the SFPD had set up a phony fence, a warehouse to receive stolen goods. After word got out, they had videotaped twenty to thirty suspects a day, waiting for a big score or a connection to a major dope deal, before they’d make some arrests. This, Locke suspected, wasn’t going to fly in Andy Fowler’s courtroom.

  * * * * *

  ‘…And I want to see prosecuting counsel in my chambers immediately.’

  Fowler, recovered from his illness of the previous day, left the bench and had his robe off before he left the courtroom. He told the bailiff to bring one of the fans into his office.

  A minute later, Drysdale was knocking at his open door. ‘Your Honor.’

  The bailiff brushed by Drysdale with the fan and plugged it in so it blew across Fowler’s desk.

  ‘How many of these turkeys are we likely to be seeing here? Come in, Art. Sit down. Hot enough?’

  Drysdale crossed a leg. ‘With all respect, Your Honor, I think a flat dismissal is out of line as a matter of law.’ Fowler’s eyes narrowed, but Drysdale ignored the obvious signs, reaching into his briefcase. ‘I’ve got a brief here —’

  ‘You’ve got a brief already? Before you knew my ruling?’

  ‘Mr Locke had an… intuition.’

  Fowler did not smile. ‘I’ll bet he did.’ He laced his fingers and brought them up to his mouth. ‘Why don’t you just give me the sense of it?’

  Drysdale hadn’t written a ‘memorandum of points and authorities’ — a paper laying out current law based on past decisions in other courts, law-review articles, recognized lawbooks — in about eight years, and when Locke asked him to figure out a way to get by Fowler he thought this was as good a time as any to try one.

  Entrapment was generally frowned upon in the 1st District Court of Appeal, San Francisco’s district, but there was a lot of leeway granted police depending on how the sting was set up. In this case, Hendrix, and in the many others sure to follow from the phony warehouse, the police were not arresting the suspect at the scene. Rather, they were using information gathered by videotape at the scene to identify the suspect, after which they tailed him to see what he was up to. This approach had resulted in righteous convictions that held up under appeal in several states, and Drysdale laid it all out in a nutshell while Fowler sat back in his chair, eyes closed, letting the fan blow over him.

  When Drysdale had finished, Fowler opened his eyes. ‘Let me tell you a story, Art. This kid is sitting on his front lawn, minding his own business, and one of his neighbors comes by and tells him there’s a warehouse down the street paying top dollar for any goods brought to it, no questions asked. The neighbor shows him a roll he just got for a car stereo and two bicycles. Another neighbor comes by, flashes another wad of dough. This goes on for a week, and pretty soon our boy is thinking he’d be some kind of fool not to take advantage of this opportunity like all of his neighbors.

  ‘See? There’s two parts to stealing — taking and fencing — and both are risky, but now one half the risk is eliminated. So, and this is important’ — Fowler leaned forward over his desk, out of the flow of air from the fan —‘it is the impetus of this sting operation that causes our boy to go and commit a crime.’

  ‘Excuse me, Your Honor, but these people are already committing crimes. They’re going to fence them somewhere.’

  ‘But by making it easy to fence them, Counselor, we are encouraging them to steal more.’

  Drysdale sat back. He knew Fowler’s argument. He just didn’t agree with it. But he was only the running footman. ‘Mr Locke doesn’t agree with you, Judge. Neither does Mr Rigby.’

  Fowler allowed himself a tight smile. ‘Well, now, that’s what makes this country great, isn’t it?’

  Drysdale leaned forward himself. ‘The cops have put in a lot of time and money on this already, Judge. So have we. We’re taking these guys off the street —’

  ‘Shooting them would also take them off the street. Art. And shooting them is also illegal.

  ‘This isn’t illegal.’

  Fowler finally sat back, breaking the eye contact. ‘You know, it’s funny, but I’m the judge. It’s my courtroom and if I say it’s illegal, you and Mr Locke and Mr Rigby and anybody else will just have to live with it.’

  Now Drysdale sat back. He realized that he was sweating and wiped a hand across his forehead. ‘I’d like to at least leave the brief,’ he said.

  ‘Fine, leave the brief. I’ll read it if I get the chance.’

  * * * * *

  ‘The son of a bitch! The arrogant, pompous, liberal son of a bitch!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Drysdale stood by the window in Locke’s office, hands held behind his back. The air conditioner seemed to be working better on the third floor.

  ‘This was a righteous bust. We didn’t take Hendrix in dumping the goods — we caught him in the act.’

  Drysdale turned around. ‘An act he would not have been drawn to commit had we not set up our fence.’

  ‘Oh bullshit!’

  Art shrugged. ‘It’s not my argument.’

  ‘Hendrix does this for a fucking living. He steals things. You know that as well as I do. He breaks into your house or
my house or his fucking Honor Andy Fowler’s house and takes things that aren’t fucking his. He is not coerced into doing this by finding a good place to unload it.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I know.’

  The warehouse was an ongoing operation that had been in business for about four months. The police department had already brought in over forty suspects and had collected some $2.5 million worth of contraband, a good portion of which they had returned to its owners. It was a successful tool that they felt was working. Arrests were up, convictions should follow. And Locke was damned if he was going to let some commie judge screw it up for everybody.

  He sat down now, played drums with a pencil on his desk. Shave and a haircut, six bits. Shave and a haircut, six bits. ‘Who’s on Calendar this month? Maybe we’ll get lucky in another department.’

  ‘I think Leo Chomorro’s taken up permanent residence.’

  ‘Poor bastard.’

  Art lifted his shoulders. ‘He asked for it. If he rides with us, maybe we can ease him out of there. Maybe he’s ready.’

  ‘Find out, would you? Find out if he’ll play, keep any of these away from Fowler. Rigby’s going to have a shit-fit.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Art said.

  Locke looked at his watch. ‘God, how could it be lunchtime already? I just got here. I’ve got an appointment in ten minutes, Art. You want to fill Rigby in? No, I’ll do it. He’s gonna shit! What are we going to do about Fowler?’

  Drysdale shrugged. ‘He’s a judge, Chris. He’s in for the duration, I’m afraid.’

  Locke was moving around his desk, straightening his tie. ‘I’d like to get a crack at him, I’ll tell you that. Son of a bitch could ruin my career.’

  Drysdale, who’d been around and seen it all, was about to tell his boss that Andy Fowler was an okay guy, good on a lot of other issues. It was just his interpretation of the law, nothing personal. But he bit his tongue — he knew better.