Hardy 03 - Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  Fine. The eyes were fine.

  Dorothy was at the curb at six sharp, the door opened and waiting for him. He saw flowers in the backseat, a brown grocery bag with a loaf of French bread sticking out the top.

  * * * * *

  He lived in a first-floor studio apartment on Gough Street, where it leveled off at the top of one of San Francisco’s famous hills.

  ‘My, isn’t this cheery,’ she said. The room featured sconced lighting, hardwood floors and a mattress on the floor in one corner. In the other corner there was a stack of old San Francisco Chronicles about three feet high. The white walls were bare except for one black-and-white poster of Albert Einstein, daily reminding Jeff that great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The rest of the furniture consisted of a stool pushed under the overhang of the bar that separated the cooking area from the rest of the room.

  Dorothy picked up the mail that was lying on the floor and put it on the bar along with her bag of groceries. She held up the flowers. ‘Any old vase will do,’ she said. ‘Don’t break out the Steuben.’

  He loved the way she talked. Not mean, but squeezing out the drop of humor in situations. Like his apartment. He hadn’t wanted to come here, but she’d teased him into it. ‘Didn’t get time to call your girlfriend, huh? Afraid she’ll be mad?’

  There’s no girlfriend, Dorothy.‘

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  Now here they were. She cut the top off a milk carton and poured out the four ounces of sour milk that was left in it — ‘It’s so neat you make your own yogurt’ — and arranged the flowers, a mixed bouquet of daisies, California poppies and daffodils, sitting them at the end of the bar.

  She made him chicken breasts with onions and peppers and mushrooms and some kind of wine sauce that they poured over rice. They ate on the floor, their places laid on a blanket from the bed, folded over. When they’d finished, Dorothy pulled herself up and leaned against the wall. She patted her lap.

  ‘Why don’t you put your head here?’

  His eyes hurt and he couldn’t see her clearly. The only light they’d eaten by was cast by the tiny bulb over the stove. He put his head down on her thigh and felt her lingers smoothing his hair.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid not.’ Then her finger ran along his cheek. She flicked his chin lightly. ‘You’re a bit of a bozo. Anybody ever tell you that?’

  ‘No. People don’t kid with me.’

  ‘People are missing out,’ she said. ‘What did you want to ask me?’

  There was no avoiding it. He had to know. ‘Why are you doing this? Being nice to me?’

  ‘Oh, I get four units for it. It’s a class project.’ Now she took his cheek and gave him a hard squeeze. ‘Haven’t you ever had any girl like you?’

  ‘Sure. Well, not since…’

  ‘What? Your legs?’

  He shrugged. ‘You know. The whole thing.’

  ‘I don’t know. What whole thing? Your personality get deformed or something?’

  ‘It’s just a lot to ask somebody to deal with.’

  ‘It seems like it might just be a good crutch, no pun intended. I mean, nobody’s perfect. You get involved with somebody, you’re going to have to deal with their imperfections.’

  ‘Yeah, but romance doesn’t exactly bloom when you see them right out front.’

  ‘Sometimes it does,’ she said. ‘Less gets hidden. It might even be better. It’s definitely better than being fooled and finding out later.’

  ‘I don’t see too many of yours. Imperfections, I mean.’

  ‘Well, that’s just a fluke. It so happens I am the one person who doesn’t have imperfections.’ Her fingers were back in his hair, pulling it. ‘Except, I warn you now, I am pretty Type-A. I like a clean house. If you squeeze the toothpaste in the middle I go insane, I need to fill up ice trays immediately. Nothing makes me madder than a half-empty ice tray. Also I’m impatient and outspoken although I have to say I’m not really bitchy. But I’m very organized, too organized.’

  ‘Those are not exactly major imperfections.’

  ‘I’m also pushy. And pretty selfish. I think of myself first a lot, what I want.’

  ‘I haven’t seen any sign of that. Not with me, at least.’

  ‘Yes you have.’ She dipped her finger into her wineglass and traced his lips with it. ‘If you think about it. For example, I am in a highly selfish mode right now.’

  * * * * *

  Hardy was back where it started, at the shark tank at the Steinhart Aquarium.

  He sat on the gurney, listening to the vague bubblings and vibrations emanating from the walls around him. Although he knew the water in it wasn’t even remotely warm, a thin veil of steam rose from the circular pool in the center of the room. The walls were shiny with distillation, the light dim and somehow green-tinged. He’d let himself in with his own key.

  After dinner Frannie had been tired, and he’d felt flabby and soft, so he changed into some sweats and told her he was going for a run. Why didn’t she turn in early?

  Now it was close to nine-thirty. He hadn’t done much running, more a forced walk to no destination. In any event, it had taken him here. He’d worked up a light sweat and he sat, his elbows on his knees, his hands intertwined in front of him.

  ‘Do you know what it is to be completely alone’?‘

  He certainly did. He was there now.

  His family was at home. Some of his friends, undoubtedly, were a quarter mile away at the Shamrock. He could call Glitsky, or Pico, go out and drink a few brewskis, shoot some darts. But he knew somehow that none of that would make a difference. He was completely alone, knocked out of his orbit, trying to feel the pull of the other bodies, the old familiar gravity. He couldn’t get it, couldn’t get to it.

  The thing to do, he thought, was to go into Drysdale’s office tomorrow morning and resign. Just stop. Shut down the rockets. Go back and ask Moses for his old shift at the Shamrock and go back to that earlier life.

  He didn’t need the money. He could walk out on the law right now and the world would keep right on turning, May Shinn would still go to trial, Pullios would get another notch in whatever it was she notched.

  Stiffly, he pushed himself up off the gurney and walked up to the side of the pool, a concrete ring four feet deep. He had his hands in the front pockets of his sweatshirt, felt his keys on the right side.

  There was only one other person in his orbit right now. And she, he believed, was completely alone, too. Yesterday, he’d thought maybe she was crazy. Today he saw it differently. Celine was barely holding herself together. Her father had been her life. Whether or not you liked or admired Owen Nash, whether their relationship was good or bad — control or no control, she was left with a gaping hole. If she’d broken down around Hardy, it had been because she was strung too tightly, holding it all back. That’s why the long workouts — to loosen the coil.

  But it wasn’t working. Not yet, anyway. She was trying, and she’d get there. She knew what she needed —she needed some surcease from the emptiness, the loneliness, the pain of the fresh wound. She was trying, she just needed time.

  And one other thing, face it, she needed him. For whatever reason, he was the lifeline. Like she’d said, she didn’t care about their professional relationship. He was connected to her…

  Which was exactly why he should quit. This wasn’t his job. It wasn’t his concern. It couldn’t be in his life.

  But she was. He tried to tell himself it was the level he had to control. He could not allow himself to do anything to threaten Frannie; she too depended on him. And so did Rebecca and the unborn child. If he had any view of himself at all, it was, he hoped, as a man of some honor, and he’d given Frannie his absolute vow. And he loved Frannie. His life satisfied him. His own endless emptiness seemed to have vanished over the last year, thanks to her. She was his rock and he knew he had to get back to her orbit. H
is own salvation, he knew, lay there, with her.

  But he also knew he wasn’t going to quit — either the law or the case — and he knew why. He hoped — normally he didn’t pray but he prayed — he wasn’t going to do anything about the attraction, the connection. He told himself again that he could keep the level under control.

  But if Celine had to see him again, he would see her. He would have to see her.

  29

  ‘Beware of what you wish for — you just might get it.’ Judge Leo Chomorro had heard it a thousand times from his father. It had always struck him as misguided advice. The way you got things was to wish for them, focus on them. It had gotten him everything he had today — a judgeship by forty, a beautiful wife, three intelligent children, a home in St. Francis Wood.

  But lately he was beginning to think that his father’s advice might have had something to it after all. He had wished and wished that someday he could get out from under the burden of being a good administrator, which was itself something to be proud of. Leo had always been an organizer, a team player, intelligent enough to be a leader, but a subscriber to the theory that a good leader must first know how to be a good follower.

  And his talents had gotten him out of Modesto and his father’s auto shop. He always thought it was his study habits more than his brains that had pulled him through San José State and then gotten him into Hastings Law School in San Francisco.

  At Hastings he hadn’t made Law Review, hadn’t been in the top ten percent, hadn’t been rushed by the big firms. But he’d gotten through, passed the bar on the second try, got a job as a clerk for the State Attorney General.

  He worked hard. No one could say he wasn’t a loyal and diligent staffer, and when the Attorney General finally made it to the State House, Leo was a top aide on budgetary issues. He was the organization man, efficient and objective. Guys weren’t doing their jobs, fire them. They got families, tough — they should have worked harder, seen the ax coming.

  The numbers of the budget game appealed to him. It was pretty simple. You had so much money to spend, first you looked around at who had been good to you, then you factored in services you needed and you cut where you had to — or wanted to — make a point, where the system wasn’t working efficiently. And then you made the numbers balance. For an organized guy like Leo, it was a cakewalk.

  For example, during some budget committee meetings Leo had made a big stink about liberal judges, especially in San Francisco, getting paid a lot to do nothing — letting off people caught in stings, like that. Clip, clip. Cut back on salary adjustments, do away with judicial raises.

  Of course, to survive, yourself, you didn’t make too many friends. You really couldn’t afford to. You had allies instead — the Attorney General-turned-Governor, for example, was a damn good one. Leo’s wife also, Gina. Brilliant, much smarter than he was — and attractive. A Santa Barbara Republican, she’d been a staffer, too, but after they’d had Leo Jr., all thought of politics left her head. Now she was an ally. She was loyal and did her jobs. That was life, right?

  And then, according to plan, Leo got what he’d wish for. On his way out of office, his mentor the governor had rewarded him for his sixteen years of loyal service by appointing him to a judgeship in San Francisco. Except that now that he was here, he found the job had all the glamor of a stockyard, except the cattle were human.

  Before Leo Chomorro had arrived eighteen months before, Calendar judges in the City and County of San Francisco were rotated every six months. The work was so dull that no one could be expected to keep at it longer than that. But Leo’s budgetary philosophy when he’d been with the Governor, combined with his lack of belief in personal friendships, had created for himself a cloud of political resentment, and San Francisco’s judges wasted no time putting him in his place — which was Calendar, where he had remained and remained.

  It was ironic. Leo was a judge who believed there was justice in the world. Or should be. He had believed that if you worked hard and did a good job, people came to value you. You got promoted. You moved up.

  Ha.

  * * * * *

  Today, Tuesday, July 7, Leo Chomorro sat sweating under his robes in Department 22, overseeing work he wouldn’t have assigned to his clerk. The Calendar was a necessary evil in all larger jurisdictions — there had to be some mechanism to decide which suspects went to what courtroom, whether or not cases were ready for trial, all of the administrative work that went along with keeping eight courtrooms and their staffs reasonably efficient so the criminal justice system could keep grinding along.

  It was the kind of work for which Leo was suited by experience and temperament. He thought he’d never get out of it, and it was driving him mad.

  ‘Okay, Trial Calendar line six, what have we got here?’

  This morning was never going to end. The bailiff brought in Line Six — all the cases were given line numbers off the huge computer printout that had to be processed every Monday. Except Monday had been a holiday. So the list was longer.

  He forced himself to look up. Line Six was a guy about Leo’s age and, like Leo, an Hispanic, although Leo couldn’t have cared less about his race. Line Six shuffled behind the bailiff to the podium in front of the bench. Mr Zapata was represented by the public defender, Ms Rogan. Chomorro looked down at the list for the next available judge. Fowler, Department 27. He intoned the name and department.

  ‘Excuse me, Your Honor.’ Leo looked up. Any interruption, any change in the deadly routine was welcome. It was the summer clerk who’d been quietly monitoring proceedings at the D.A.‘s table all morning. ’May I approach the bench?‘

  The boy reminded Leo of himself when he’d been a student. Dark, serious, intent, fighting down his nerves, he whispered. ‘Mr Drysdale would like to ask you to reconsider your assignment of Mr Zapata to a different department.’

  Leo Chomorro cast his eyes around the courtroom. He and Art Drysdale went over the Calendar on disposition of cases every Friday night, and he’d mentioned nothing about Zapata at that time. Well, maybe something new had come up, but Art wasn’t in the courtroom.

  ‘Where is Mr Drysdale?’

  ‘He’s in his office, Your Honor. He asked if you’d grant a recess.’

  ‘When did he do that if he’s not here?’

  ‘That’s all he’s asked me to say, Your Honor, if you could grant a recess and call him.’

  Leo frowned. He wanted to keep things moving but felt empathy for the kid, and Drysdale made up the Calendar with him every week. In a world full of no friends, Art was as close to one as he had. He looked up at the defendant.

  ‘Mr Zapata, sit down. We’ll take a ten-minute recess.’

  * * * * *

  ‘It’s pretty unusual, Art. It’s circumvention.’

  ‘I know it is.’ Drysdale wasn’t going to sugarcoat anything. This was Locke’s call, and he was delivering a message, that was all. He was sitting back, comfortable in the leather chair in front of Chomorro’s desk. ‘We don’t want Zapata going to Fowler’s department. He threw out the last one.’

  ‘I know. I read about that. Zapata’s another sting case?’ Art nodded. ‘I just plain missed him on Friday or I would have mentioned it then.’

  Chomorro was moving things on his desk. ‘I’ve already assigned it, Art. Rogan might make a stink.’ He’d called out Department 27 — Fowler’s courtroom. If the defense attorney he’d appointed was on top of things, she’d know Fowler’s position on these kinds of cases. From Rogan’s perspective, Fowler was a winner for her client — he’d throw out the case. Any other judge probably would not.

  Art leaned forward. ‘We’re ready to lose one like that. What we don’t want is Fowler getting any more of these —start another landslide and screw up this program.’

  Chomorro shuffled more paper. His life was shuffling paper. He didn’t believe he could do what Art was suggesting. It was at the very least close to unethical. The D.A. or the defendant could challenge one judge, on a
ny case. A judge could be recused from a case because of conflicts of interest, because he or she knew the defendant, for no reason at all, but such a public challenge always involved a political fight that both sides lost. Usually such problems were settled privately in the chambers of the Master Calendar department —certain cases just never happened to be assigned to certain judges. But here, Mr Zapata’s case had been publicly assigned for trial. ‘I don’t think I can do it, Art.’

  Drysdale wasn’t surprised. He nodded, then leaned forward, fore-arms on knees, and settled in. ‘Leo, Your Honor, how long have you been on Calendar here?’

  It took Chomorro a minute, a subtle shift in posture, like Art’s own. His mouth creased up. ‘Year and a half, maybe.’

  ‘Any talk of you getting off?’

  Chomorro shrugged. ‘Somebody’s got to retire soon, die. I’m the low man.’

  Art leaned back. ‘The job used to rotate, Leo. You know that?’

  Again, a tight smile. ‘I’d heard that rumor.’

  ‘But if somebody carries a grudge around, maybe a little superior attitude, doesn’t make any friends, do any favors…’ Art held up a hand. ‘I’m not talking illegal, I’m talking little things, amenities. Things could change, that’s all I’m saying. Chris Locke is pals with some of your colleagues, so is Rigby. They both like this program, the one that got Zapata. And no one — not even Fowler —is denying these guys are stealing. They’ve still got to be found guilty by a jury. They get a fair trial. We’re not circumventing justice here, maybe just fine-tuning the bureaucracy.’

  Chomorro did not for a moment buy Drysdale’s argument that they weren’t circumventing justice. Of course they were. But Chomorro was not a newcomer to politics, deals. He knew a deal when he heard one, and — assuming you were going to play — it wasn’t smart to leave things up in the air. ‘Labor Day,’ he said. ‘I’m off Calendar by Labor Day.’