Hardy 03 - Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  Frannie hadn’t liked it either. ‘You can’t tell me? What do you mean, you can’t tell me? I’m your wife. We tell each other things, remember?’

  ‘I can tell you it has nothing to do with us.’

  ‘You go out in the middle of the night and stay out until God knows when and I don’t even get a hint of an explanation?’

  ‘Frannie, no. It doesn’t have to do with us. It’s confidential, attorney-client —’

  ‘Well, la di da. And whose attorney are you? I thought you worked for the city.’ She had him there, but he had made his decision. He had all sorts of conflicting loyalties. ‘This job is changing you,’ she said.

  Maybe. Life changed people, big deal, live with it. But he wasn’t stupid enough to say that. Instead he’d gone off to work with the stomachache he got every time they fought.

  * * * * *

  And now Andy Fowler had told his daughter, or she’d wheedled it out of him. But either way, here was another person — and not the soul of discretion — who knew.

  ‘I didn’t do anything to him, Jane. If anything, he did it to himself.’

  ‘You didn’t have to tell anybody!’

  ‘I didn’t tell anybody. I haven’t told anybody, at least not yet. I hope I won’t have to.’

  ‘Have to? My, aren’t we getting sanctimonious here.’

  Hardy’s door was open. He told Jane to hang on and he got up to close it. Pullios was coming down the hallway, deep in conference with Chris Locke. His stomach tightened further and he shut the door before they saw him.

  Back at the phone, he asked Jane if Big Chuck — he’d taken to thinking of her new boyfriend as Big Chuck — if Big Chuck had been there, too, when Andy had told her.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I think it means I don’t have to take any abuse from you, so leave me alone.’

  He hung up.

  * * * * *

  There were lots of ways to do it, and Freeman naturally chose the most flamboyant. Well, perhaps not altogether naturally. The inclination to do things with flair, while meshing well with his personality, had been drummed out of him in law school, but over the years of private practice he had put it back in.

  In the first years of his practice he would have taken evidence he had dug up (such as the Strauss boys’ corroboration of May’s alibi) and brought it into the D.A.‘s office, where it would be discussed and some decision would be made about whether it eliminated the need for a trial.

  But over the long run he had found that this cooperative attitude did little for him. Prosecutors often disbelieved what he brought them, doubted its truth or relevance, impugning his motives while they were at it. He had found that if he did it only sparingly, when his findings were unambiguous and, as in this case, critical, a public airing of evidence had a way of getting more action out of the D.A. than any attempt at amity, goodwill and cooperation. District attorneys, he had found, were acutely sensitive to public perception — more so, often, than to justice.

  A news conference made hairs stand up in the Hall, made young lawyers (and even a few old ones) fear you — a force who dared go outside the system if he had to. They’d call him a loose cannon, and watch out, guys. Loose cannons go boom.

  He stood now in the lobby of his office, surrounded by a totally unnecessary phalanx of some of his associates he’d sent home earlier to put on their best threads. He himself was as rumpled as usual in an old brown tweed and scuffed wing tips.

  In front of him was a makeshift podium with several microphones. Opposite the podium, facing him, stood a knot of some fifteen reporters, which was a pretty fair showing, considering the short lead time he’d given them. There were three sound trucks double-parked in the street outside, which meant he’d be on television. KGO radio was represented — so he’d get some sound bites on the most popular talk station.

  May was a good sport about it. He told her it was time to collect on his advertising fee. He’d come to admire her quite a bit, especially after finding out she had probably been telling him the truth the whole time. Now she was standing next to him, not yet daring to smile, flawlessly turned out as usual.

  His fingers did a little tap dance over the microphones and he smiled. Gosh, he wasn’t used to all of this, regular old working stiff that he was. Were these things on? He spoke extemporaneously. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to thank you all for coming here today and I won’t take much of your very valuable time. As you know, a couple of weeks ago Owen Nash, one of the giants of American business, was felled by a gunshot. No one would deny that Mr Nash was a powerful and fascinating man.’

  He glanced at May Shinn and got another bonus. At the mention of Nash’s name, a tear had sprung from her eyes and was rolling down her cheek. Don’t wipe it, he thought to himself. A couple of bulbs flashed.

  Freeman took her hand, gave it a squeeze. ‘In cases like this, there seems to be a natural inclination to fasten guilt on somebody, to lay the blame somewhere. Who can say why? It could be it satisfies society’s need for order. Maybe our outrage is so great we crave any action that seems to redress the great wrong that murder represents.

  ‘How many of us, in our heart of hearts, blame Jack Ruby for killing Lee Harvey Oswald? No, when the King falls, the King’s killer must, in turn, be killed. Of course, I’m not comparing Owen Nash to our martyred president. Like Dan Quayle, Owen Nash was no Jack Kennedy.’

  He waited for the laughter, stole a glance at May and squeezed her hand again. ‘But Owen Nash was, in his own way, a Titan. And there was that same rush to judgment.

  ‘Unfortunately, in this case, that rush centered upon the person who now stands here on my right, May Shinn, a natural American citizen, a woman with no criminal record of any kind, a woman whose sole fault, if it is one, was to become involved with, to fall in love with, Owen Nash.

  ‘In a perfect world the district attorney would never have even condoned the kind of public vigilantism that has been the earmark of this case from the beginning. It is, however, a sad fact that this is not a perfect world and that our own district attorney’s office was from the beginning in the forefront of the racist witchhunt that brought this young woman to the dock without a shred of physical evidence that could implicate her in this horrible deed.’

  He stopped, enjoying a minute of eye contact with the journalists and reporters. He had them.

  ‘From the beginning, Ms Shinn has contended that on the day Owen Nash was brutally murdered she stayed home, waiting for his return. She did not use the telephone. She did not go out to buy a newspaper. She did not play the piano or hammer nails in her wall or sing in the shower. I submit to you all that this is not criminal behavior.

  ‘And yet, ladies and gentlemen, and let me make this very clear, this was the sum total of the people’s case against May Shinn. That she did nothing to make anyone notice she was home! Imagine that! Time was when that would have been the mark of a good citizen, an ideal neighbor. But because she is of Japanese descent, because she dared have a relationship with a powerful man’ — he lowered his voice — ‘because she was, in fact, a woman powerless to defend herself against the might of the state, she was the perfect scapegoat. She spent a quiet day at home and she is suspected, indeed, accused, of murder.

  ‘I’d like now to introduce you to two young men — Nick and Alex Strauss — who happen to live directly across the street from Ms Shinn’s apartment.’

  He nodded to one of his associates, who went into the adjoining room and brought out the two boys and their father.

  ‘If the district attorney had been interested in the truth, he too could have found the Strauss boys. They got back from a trip to Europe on June twentieth, the day Owen Nash was killed. You’ll never guess what they saw.’

  35

  He was getting a Diet Coke in the lounge, when one of the guys two doors down, Constantino, stuck his head in.

  ‘Hardy, you better get to Drysdale’s,’ he said.

  It wa
s five minutes to three. Drysdale had gotten a tip from one of his connections at KRON, and now Pullios, Chris Locke himself and a third of the rest of the staff were gathered in front of the television set. Hardy squeezed himself into the doorway, reminded of other gatherings like this — the day Dan White had killed Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone at City Hall, the Reagan assassination attempt. He wondered who’d been shot.

  Somebody called out. ‘Okay, okay, it’s on, turn it up.’ The room went quiet, except for the anchor’s voice, talking about an exceptional development in the Owen Nash murder case, and in a minute there was David Freeman on the screen in front of a bunch of microphones, May Shinn beside him.

  * * * * *

  ‘He’s paying those kids, or the father. It’s a setup.’ Pullios didn’t believe it, or she was pretending she didn’t believe it.

  ‘Two kids?’ Drysdale shook his head. ‘What about the naked part? He wouldn’t have made that up.’

  Locke was silent, standing by the window, looking out.

  ‘It is for sure going to play,’ Hardy said.

  Everyone else had gone. Ironically, the room seemed smaller with only four of them in it.

  ‘How could they be sure it was the same day?’ said Pullios.

  Drysdale picked up his baseballs and began to juggle.

  ‘Would you please not do that!’ The exasperation of Elizabeth Pullios. Hardy didn’t mind seeing it, thought she’d earned it. It was, after all, her case.

  ‘Sorry,’ Drysdale said. He caught the balls and palmed them all in one hand. ‘I think they covered that pretty well. It was the day they came back from Europe, they’d just gotten off the plane. It’s pretty solid documentation.’

  ‘Maybe they’re just plain lying. He’s paying them —’

  ‘Pretty risky. Cross-exam would kill them and Freeman knows it.’

  ‘I want to interview them.’

  ‘I would think so,’ said Drysdale.

  She stood flat-footed in front of his desk. She kept looking over at Locke’s back, but he wasn’t turning around. Freeman’s hammering of Christopher Locke wasn’t lost on any of them. Locke was the district attorney, they weren’t. So far as the public was concerned, Christopher Locke — personally — had screwed this one up. He, a black man, was a racist. He had picked on a woman. An ethnic. It was a disaster.

  ‘Goddamn it!’ Pullios said.

  Drysdale nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said.

  * * * * *

  When Jeff Elliot discovered at the title office that the owner of the collateralized apartment was Superior Court Judge Andrew Fowler, he was pretty sure he had hit the jackpot.

  Then, finding out he’d missed Freeman’s press conference — ‘Why didn’t somebody call me?’ — he saw it all slip away.

  Finally, hearing the news about Fowler’s retirement, he knew he had himself the story of his career. There was only one person who held in his hand all the elements to this thing, and he was it.

  * * * * *

  To Glitsky it meant something else entirely — he’d arrested the wrong person, and they still had a live homicide. He was in the office of his Lieutenant, Frank Batiste, after five, chewing on the ice that was left in his styrofoam cup.

  Though one outranked the other, the two men had come up together and knew that politics outside of either of their control had dictated Batiste’s promotion — they still viewed themselves more as partners than anything else.

  ‘You’re lucky the grand jury indicted,’ Batiste said. ‘It takes the heat off.’

  ‘I’ll probably still get sued.’ Glitsky found a spot for his cup on Batiste’s cluttered desk. ‘Let’s see, false arrest, sex discrimination, race discrimination… I might as well give you my badge now.’ It wasn’t funny, but they both were smiling. Cop humor. ‘Maybe Locke won’t drop it.’

  Batiste looked hard at him. ‘Maybe it’ll snow tomorrow.’

  ‘The kids could be mistaken.’

  ‘There could be peace in our time.’

  ‘You know, Frank, you are solace to a troubled soul.’

  ‘I try to be.’ Batiste had his feet up on his desk, a legal pad on his lap. He started doodling. ‘So what do you think we’ve got here, the perfect crime? I hope not, because I’ve got a feeling this one isn’t going to go away. Anybody else could have done it?’

  ‘Maybe. Nobody looks near as good as Shinn did.’ Glitsky told his lieutenant that he’d take another look at the business side, Mr Silicon Valley, somebody else who might benefit, but the evidence was slim and none if it wasn’t Shinn. He flicked ice into his mouth and chewed. ‘You know, this one time I thought I might have a case with, you know, witnesses who weren’t already in jail, maybe a motive aside from lack of imagination.’

  ‘Maybe next year,’ Batiste said. ‘And in the meantime we still have a very important dead person.’

  * * * * *

  Hardy called Celine after he returned from Drysdale’s office — he told himself that she at least deserved to be among the first to know that her father’s killer was still on the streets.

  He reached her at Hardbodies!, where she’d been working out again. After he told her, he listened to the background noise in the phone — the throbbing music, the torture machines. Finally she asked him what he meant.

  ‘I mean May’s alibi checks out. She wasn’t out on the Eloise with your father.’

  ‘But what does that mean’?‘

  ‘It means she didn’t kill him, Celine.’ He waited, not pushing, for another minute. ‘Celine?’

  Okay, he thought, you’ve done your duty. Now tell her you’ll keep her informed of developments and hang up. Just hang up, go home and have a date night with Frannie.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Celine asked him quietly, shock in her voice. ‘Can I see you?’

  No, I’m busy. How about coming by the office tomorrow‘? ’All right,‘ he said.

  * * * * *

  He met her at Perry’s on Union, a meat market in the classic sense — fine food, big drinks, good vibes.

  Though her hair was still damp, pulled back by a turquoise band, she’d found time to make herself up. But somehow Hardy found her physical presence not quite so overpowering as before. It was the first time he’d seen her since their original meeting that the contours of her body — under the baggy purple sweater, the black and blousy pants — weren’t immediately evident. He was grateful for that.

  It was early dusk but the place was already jammed. She was standing near the entrance, which was on the side down an alley, an orange juice in her hand, talking to another man who was about Hardy’s age, though taller, broader and better dressed. When Hardy came in, her face lit up and she moved to him, kissing him briefly on the lips. She took his hand and turned; the man had already started for the bar.

  ‘I told him my boyfriend was on his way,’ she said, ‘but you know this place. A woman alone is fair game.’ She didn’t let go of his hand. ‘Come, let’s see if we can get a table.’

  ‘I can’t eat, Celine. I’m just on my way home.’

  She stopped pulling him along, still didn’t let go of his hand. ‘You mean you’re going to leave me here alone? I won’t last five minutes.’

  ‘Oh, you will if you decide to.’

  Another side of her, a little more humanity, a trace of humor. She did have a real life he knew nothing about.

  A couple vacated their table two feet from them and Hardy let go of Celine’s hand and guided her to it. A waitress appeared and he ordered a club soda. He could feel the heat of her thigh where it pressed against his.

  ‘Are you always alone?’ Hardy asked her. ‘Every time I see you, you’re alone.’

  ‘Wrong. Every time you see me, I’m with you.’ She leaned away from him. ‘Why do you want to know? You’re married.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he said. ‘I just wonder.’

  She accepted that. ‘Not right now. Does this have to do with my father?’

  He tried and failed to find some
connection. ‘No, I don’t suppose so.’

  She reached for her orange juice, took a sip and cradled the glass in both hands in her lap. ‘I was married one time. I was twenty-one, going through one of my rebellious phases. He was a musician, a good player. He finally made a couple of albums. Heavy metal, which now I truly hate. I think I despised it then, and I know Daddy did.’

  ‘Did your father and he get along?’

  She started to laugh, then stopped herself. ‘No. Daddy hated everything about him.’

  ‘Is that why you broke up?’

  ‘No, not really. He was a jerk, which I suppose I knew all along, but Daddy had him followed when he was on the road and he didn’t act like he was married. So,’ she continued, shrugging, ‘we had it annulled. It’s ancient history now, but it kind of soured me on men for a long while. Plus, there’s being rich. You know, it’s hard to find people you believe. Guys try to pick you up, first it’s your looks, then if they find out you’ve got money…’

  Hardy’s club soda arrived. He held it, staring out the window. It seemed to not be getting any darker outside.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. That there’s more than the pickup scene. I mean, didn’t you meet anybody in your regular life?’

  She shook her head. ‘Sometimes, once in a while. But my regular life always had Daddy in it.’

  ‘I think this is where our problem started last time.’

  She reached over and took his hand again. ‘We’re not going to do that again. I can’t explain to people about me and Daddy. It was all right, we did everything together.’

  ‘But he seemed to have a personal life, I mean women friends, and you apparently weren’t allowed to. How can that have been fair? How was it living with that?’