A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  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 didn’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.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I think this forfeiture action you’re contemplating is going to turn out to be an embarrassment and a mistake. I don’t know how I’m going to help you avoid making it.”

  Glass’s mouth tightened, the lips conveying a mild distaste. “I’m not just contemplating going forward with the forfeiture process, Mr. Hardy. I’ve got plenty of grounds and it’s a pretty cut-and-dried precedent. You deal in drugs, your profits and whatever you buy with your profits are subject to forfeiture.”

  “Fair enough,” Hardy said. “But my client hasn’t been dealing in drugs. One of Maya Townshend’s employees evidently sold marijuana out of her coffee shop, but she didn’t know anything about it.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re sure of that?”

  “It’s not a question of whether I’m sure of it, which I am. It’s a question of whether you can prove it, which I don’t see how you can.”

  “Well, that’s another matter and what I’ve already convened the grand jury about. As I’m sure you know, I can’t talk about what goes on in those proceedings at all. But as to whether your client knew this was going on—and let’s leave for a minute the question of whether she was profiting from the sale of this marijuana herself—it would be hard to imagine that she didn’t.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because Bay Beans West has been the subject of no fewer than twenty-three nuisance calls from neighbors in the past five years. Almost all of them concerned flagrant marijuana use, much of it in front of children and adolescents. The nuisance complaints were, of course, conveyed not just to the manager of the business but to the owner of the establishment, who happens as well to own the building. Beyond that, and leaving out the stabbing that took place in the alley behind the place two years ago, to say nothing of the murder last week, would you care to guess how many citations for marijuana smoking have been issued in the past twenty-four months on the street directly in front of the coffee shop?”

  “In front of isn’t in.”

  Glass waved that objection away. “Forty-three. Forty-three tickets. The place is a well-known dope den, Mr. Hardy.”

  “Be that as it may, sir, and I’m not denying it, the fact remains that my client didn’t know much about it. She rarely went there. She was a silent partner in running the place, that’s all.”

  “She knew it well enough to have her civil lawyers come to the Zoning Commission when some neighbors tried to lift her business license three years ago. It went all the way to the Board of Supervisors, Mr. Hardy, and some say that if it weren’t for her brother, they would have shut her down then.”

  This was completely unexpected and bad news to Hardy. Neither Maya nor Joel had mentioned anything about it to him. “Okay,” Hardy said, conceding the point, “but this is marijuana on Haight Street. You can get it in any doorway. You can’t seriously claim that BBW was the source or even a major contributor to all these tickets.”

  Glass sniffed his displeasure. “Your client is the sister of one of our supervisors and the niece of the mayor. And mustn’t that be nice?” His lips turned up, but no one would have called it a smile. “Your client certainly knew the kind of place they were running, believe me. It’s a plain and simple narcotics operation, complete with the gun that’s the purported murder weapon for the latest problem there, huge amounts of cash—far more than you’d expect in a coffee shop—and substantial quantities of marijuana on the premises.”

  Hardy took in this information in silence, masking his concern with a nonchalant posture—sitting back now, arms on the chair rests, his foot resting over its opposite knee. “Mr. Glass,” he said, “I’m not here to dispute whether or not the place was a source for marijuana. Obviously, it was. But it’s
a long stretch—even if my client knew about it, or had a hunch about it, or anything like that—it’s a hell of a long stretch to prove that she profited from the dope at all. Do you know who Joel Townshend is? He doesn’t need dope money, believe me.”

  “You mean on the theory, Mr. Hardy, that people who have a lot of money don’t want to have more?”

  “He doesn’t need to take that kind of risk to get it. He wouldn’t take that risk. Neither would she.”

  “Which came first, I wonder, the real estate or the drugs? Mr. Townshend may have a fortune, Mr. Hardy, but we intend to claim every dollar of it that came from the narcotics business. Then we’ll see how much he’s got left.”

  “Why would they take the risk?” Hardy repeated.

  Glass had a hand stretched out casually in front of him as he scratched at his desk blotter. “One could make the argument, I think you’ll agree, given the, shall we say, personal relationship between your client and the mayor’s office, that there was no risk here in this city in running any kind of illegal operation.” Now he came forward, his eyes narrowing, a hint of real anger ruddying up the pale flesh of his face. His voice, though, remained controlled. “She was paying the man ninety thousand dollars a year, for Christ’s sake.”

  “That’s right.”

  “To manage a coffee shop.”

  “Correct. Last time I checked, that wasn’t a crime.”

  “No, but money laundering is. He gives her his dope money, she puts it in her or her husband’s account, and they pay him back out of that.”

  “That wasn’t happening,” Hardy said flatly.

  “I intend to show that it was. You get people worried about their assets, you’d be surprised what turns up.”

  Hardy uncrossed his legs and came forward in his chair. “Mr. Glass, have you met these people? They didn’t do any of this.”

  “No? Well, we’ll see. But what’s your point? That I’d like them if I met them socially? That it would matter to me? I’m sure they’re charming. People who deal in cons tend to be.”

  “You’ve got this completely wrong,” Hardy said. “You don’t have any facts that implicate my client in any of this. And meanwhile, you’ve got her threatened with this forfeiture. It’s just a blunt instrument at this point.”

  “Well.” Glass folded his heavy hands on the desk. “It’ll get us on the road to finding out what we need to know. And sometimes you just have to use the tools you got.”

  “You can still do that?” Hardy asked from the office doorway.

  “It’s like riding a bicycle,” Art Drysdale replied, “once you’ve got it . . .” He caught the last of the three baseballs he’d been juggling at his desk, tucked them into one enormous paw and, with a lot more enthusiasm than Jerry Glass had evinced, sprang up from his chair to shake Hardy’s hand. “But, hey, you’re looking great. How you doin’?”

  “Any better and they’d have to change my medication,” Hardy said. He cast a quick eye around the premises, which sported a lot more personality than Jerry Glass’s digs. Of course, that might have been because Drysdale himself had a lot more personality than his gung-ho new colleague. Drysdale—no relationship to the ex-Dodger Don—had been a professional baseball player in his youth, making it up to the Giants for a cup of coffee in the mid-sixties, before deciding to go into the law. The bookshelf that covered his left-hand wall was packed with sports memorabilia, trophies from the PAL coaching days, photos with the great—McCovey, Cepeda, Mays!—and with his family, four boys, himself, and even his wife usually attired in some kind of sports uniform.

  “If I hadn’t just come from Jerry Glass,” Hardy added, “I might even be positively glowing.”

  Drysdale boosted himself back up onto his desk, motioned that Hardy might want to get the door behind him. When that was done, Drysdale clicked his tongue. “Mr. Glass didn’t give you much satisfaction, did he?”

  “Oh, no. To the contrary, he was nothing if not informative. The problem was that the information sucked. You guys can really just take property?”

  Drysdale grimaced. “We’re the federal government, Diz. We can do anything we want. Why? Because who’s going to stop us?” Then, in a different tone, “I admit, it’s a bit of problem for some of us. On both sides. That little, tiny potential for abuse of the system, since if you play it close enough, you don’t really get seriously called on anything.”

  “And that’s what Glass is doing? Playing it close?”

  A nod. “From what I hear, he’s pretty much on his game, let’s say that.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’ve got a client involved here, Art. In theory I’m supposed to keep her and maybe even her family out of this trouble.”

  Drysdale let out a dry chuckle. “Well, there’s your problem. The system’s kind of set up to keep you out of it. Especially if he’s using the grand jury, which I happen to know he is.”

  “Yeah. He told me that too.”

  “Okay. So you’ll never find out what happens there. Don’t even try, Diz. No lawyers allowed. No witnesses. No talking about anything said there, ever ever. But you know this.”

  “Okay, but how’s he do the forfeiture?”

  “Well, actually, that’s pretty slick. He’s only asking for a civil forfeiture.”

  “As opposed to criminal, I presume. But what does that mean?”

  “It means, basically, that he posts the property . . . you know anything about this at all?”

  “Not really. It doesn’t come up every day.”

  “No. I’d guess not. Which is why Glass can have so much fun with it. Just for starters, you want to guess what the forfeiture rules are administered under?”

  “The Little League?”

  Drysdale cracked a smile. “Closer than you’d think, actually. The Rules of Admiralty.”

  “That was my second guess.”

  “I’ll give you partial credit, then. And you know why it was Admiralty rules? Because since Elizabethan times, the British Empire allowed an action against a ship as a way of getting at the owner. They would literally ‘arrest’ the thing, the ship, before it took off, and make the owners in some faraway country post a bond before they would release the ship back to the high seas. Then they could collect whatever was owed from the bond. In rem jurisdiction. Latin for ‘against the thing.’ Just like here. Grab the store. Make the owners come to court to free it in a civil case. So basically, your clients are going to have to sue to get their shop out of this limbo, and, surprise, the burden of proof is now on them. The good news is that they get to stay in business—their legitimate business—until the final ruling.”

  Hardy walked over and settled himself into a rocking chair in the corner by the bookshelf. “So what’s the point? What’s it get Glass to just post the place?”

  “Not much, if that’s all he’s doing. He might win, he might not. But either way, he gets their attention.”

  “So what?”

  “Aha!” Drysdale held up a finger. “ ‘So what’ is that he’s allowed to talk about a civil case. To the newspapers, TV, to your clients, to the cops, to anybody. He’s doing the public a service by talking about it. Meanwhile, he’s stirring the pot to see what rises.”

  “But as opposed to what?”

  “I’d tell you, but I know you already know.”

  Hardy paused, and of course the obvious truth emerged. “The grand jury.”

  “Ta da!” Drysdale spread his hands in a victory gesture. “Two prongs. One public, one secret.” His face went dark. “It is a serious, no-bullshit press, Diz. And my sources tell me that old Jerry is playing it so far like a maestro. You know, he got his homicide inspector—Schiff, is it?—designated as a special agent of the grand jury?”

  “He can do that?”

  Drysdale tsked. “I believe we’ve mentioned that he can do anything, haven’t we? He can get the grand jury to designate anybody as its agent. And what does that agent have
access to? Grand jury documents, including financial and bank records, which, by the way, in real life the feds—us—can subpoena anytime and the state can never ever get its hands on.” Drysdale turned a hand over. “Now, of course, that agent can’t reveal what’s in those documents—that’s secret—but she can act on her knowledge of them. Including—you’ll love this—based on this private knowledge, she can argue for a judge to order release of these otherwise secret docs. And also, PS, if that doesn’t work, once the documents leave the grand jury room, sometimes they get leaked somehow. Though that, of course again, would be wrong.”

  Hardy could listen to Drysdale’s commentary all day, but he wasn’t even slightly amused. “This isn’t right, Art.”

  Drysdale laughed with some enthusiasm. “We’ve barely started, Diz, and if you can’t laugh at it, you’re in deep shit.”

  Hardy sat back. “What else?”

  “You really want to know?” At Hardy’s nod Drysdale settled himself on the desk. “Jerry’s got so many ways he can play this, it’s just gorgeous. You said Kathy West may be involved here, right? And Harlen? Okay, first, he has them talk to one of our agents a few times. They’re not targets, he tells them. He wants them to roll over on your client, but they’re not themselves part of the investigation. So what’s that get him? Well, first, if either of them tells even a little fib to the federal agent, they are in felony land. And guess what? Federal agents don’t have to tape-record interviews.”

  “Now you’re kidding me!”

  “Would that I were, my son, but that was J. Edgar’s original policy and it’s in force today, so it’s always your word against that of a federal agent, and guess who the grand jury is more likely to believe? They’ve even got a cute little name for this cute little strategy—the Perjury Trap. Isn’t that special?”