The 13th Juror

by John Lescroart

  “What surprises?”

  Powell’s face took on a serious expression. “You haven’t seen the indictment yet. We charged Mrs. Witt with a third count of murder.”

  “What third murder?”

  “Her first husband died of a suspected drug overdose nine years ago. Did you know that? I don’t know how the media hasn’t come up with this yet but I’m sure they will.”

  Hardy stood still as a pole. He wondered whether his once-upon-a-time friend Art Drysdale had deliberately given him only half of the discovery—there wasn’t really any legal advantage in doing so, but Drysdale had been known to mess with defense lawyers just to keep them off balance. It was a good reminder for Hardy—he really was on the other side.

  “In any event,” Powell went on, “Inspector Terrell, the arresting officer? He’s been pushing for exhumation and got it through with Strout.” This was John Strout, the coroner. “It seems Mrs. Witt made a small bundle on that death, too. Something like seventy-five thousand dollars, which back then was a reasonable piece of change. Terrell found out she was dating a dentist when Ned—that was husband number one—bought it. Dating this dentist while they were still married? Bad form. Anyway, when Ned died it looked like an overdose—so the coroner ran the A scan, found coke and alcohol and ruled it an accidental overdose.”

  Hardy knew the medical examiner ran three levels of tests to scan for poisons in dead people. Level C included a lot more controlled substances—barbiturates, methamphetamines—than the check for volatiles—essentially alcohols—that turned up on a Level A scan, but it also cost a lot more to run, and when the apparent cause of death was found at the A level, unless there was an investigator’s report indicating foul play, the coroner most often stopped there.

  Hardy knew all this but he had to ask: “He didn’t check for anything else?”

  “Why would he? They found what they were looking for, coke and booze in an overdose situation . . . hell, you know. And Ned had ’em both, so the book got closed. But guess what.”

  “I can’t imagine.” Hardy was feeling numb.

  “Atropine.”

  “What?”

  “Atropine. Jimson weed. Deadly nightshade.”

  “What about it?”

  “Atropine is what killed him. We exhumed him on Terrell’s hunch and there it was.”

  “So he OD’d on atropine.”

  Powell shook his head. “You don’t just OD on atropine. Atropine doesn’t make you high. It’s not a recreational drug, but Ned was loaded with the stuff.”

  “That’s not necessarily murder—”

  “I think in connection with these latest two it is.”

  “She didn’t do these either.”

  Powell favored Hardy with one of his world-weary looks, which said okay, that’s a defense attorney’s answer about his client, but between us two professionals we know the truth. What he said was: “Your Mrs. Witt’s a black widow, Hardy. We’re going for Murder One on these. A death sentence. This is a capital case.”

  3

  “You can’t be serious . . . ”

  The color was gone from Jennifer’s face. She simply hung her head, then after a beat shook herself, stood and walked over to the window in the visitors’ room, through which she stared out into the guards’ office. “Ned killed himself, maybe by mistake . . . But somebody else killed Larry and Matt. I swear to God . . . I couldn’t have killed my little boy.”

  Hardy noticed she didn’t say the same about her husband. He sat with his shoulders hunched over, fingers locked together on the table in front of him. “Tell me about Anthony Alvarez,” he said.

  She combed her bangs back with her fingers, twice, still facing the window. “I don’t know any Anthony Alvarez . . . ”

  Hardy kept his voice low. “The police report identifies him as your neighbor, lives across the street.”

  Now she turned. “Mr. Alvarez? Oh, that’s Anthony Alvarez? I never knew his first name. What about him?”

  “What about him is that he’s a lot of the reason you’re here.” Hardy told her the gist of his testimony. While he talked she returned to the end of the table and sat again, kitty-corner to Hardy.

  “But I didn’t do that. I always start out by walking a couple of blocks to warm up. I wouldn’t have just shut the gate and started out running. Not only wouldn’t have, I didn’t.”

  Hardy nodded. “Why do you think he says it was you? You have any words with him, anything like that?”

  “I don’t believe this.” Jennifer inhaled, shook herself, let it out in a sigh. “Maybe in four years I’ve said a hundred words to the man. I don’t think I’d recognize him if he wasn’t standing near his house. Why is he doing this to me?”

  “I don’t know,” Hardy said, “but for now I think we’d better concentrate on something that could help you. Was there anybody that might have seen you walking? Another neighbor?”

  Jennifer shut her eyes, leaning back in her chair, revealing the curve of her body, the plane of her cheek. Hardy suddenly realized how attractive she was, even in the jail garb. Pouty lips, a strong nose. Bones well-limned.

  “I passed a man,” she said, eyes still closed. “An older guy, maybe black or Mexican, dark anyway.”

  “I read about him.” Hardy sat forward now. “I don’t think he’s going to fly.”

  “What do you mean? I did see somebody. I think it was, I mean it could have been the person . . . ”

  Hardy was shaking his head. She reached a hand across the table to him. “No, no. No, listen. It was the week after Christmas, no traffic, no one around, and here’s this man walking up the street, he’s wearing this heavy trench coat, looking like he’s checking house numbers. I almost stop and ask can I help him but I didn’t want to be late so I keep going by.” She stopped talking, staring at Hardy. “It really could have been him, the one . . . I mean, somebody had to do it . . . ”

  “Did you notice if this man had a gun?”

  “No, but . . . ”

  “Did you stop and see him turn up your walkway?”

  “No, I’d have—”

  “Do you have any idea why somebody who didn’t know Larry personally would want to kill him? Or your son?”

  Her eyes stared into the space between them. “If you find a yes to any questions like these, Jennifer, then we can usefully talk about him again, but I’m afraid he isn’t going to do us any good right now.”

  “But it might—”

  “When it does,” Hardy said, “then we’ll look at it. Okay? I promise.”

  Hardy reminded himself that he wasn’t here to upset her. He had felt, though, he should tell her they were going capital. It was still going to be essentially Freeman’s case but it wouldn’t hurt to collect more impressions of Jennifer. “Let’s go on to anything else about that morning, anybody else who might have seen you.”

  “But that man, he might have been . . . ”

  Hardy patted her hand, held it down on the table. “Let’s move on, okay?”

  She pulled her hand away. “You’ve got to believe me, I didn’t do this. If it was that man . . . ”

  “If it was that man,” he said. “There could have been somebody, all right, he might even have shot Larry, but he also might be anybody—a neighbor, a tourist, a guy just taking a walk.”

  She glared at him. “He had his hands in his pockets, both hands. He might have been holding a gun.”

  Hardy almost said, Forgetting, of course, that your husband was killed with your own gun. He slowed himself down. “Let’s stop. Look, we’re not here to argue. We’ll come back to the man later. For now we’ve got to leave him, he’s not going to help us unless he lives near you and we can find him. Now I’m trying to find something to hang your defense on, and he’s just not it.”

  Her face went all the way down to the table, within the circle of her arms. Her body was shaking as she rolled her forehead back and forth.

  “Did you do anything unusual at all on your run? Anything
you might already have told the police? Or forgotten to tell them?”

  She stopped the rocking. As though struggling with its weight, she raised her head, sighing again. “They didn’t ask any questions like this,” she said. “I didn’t think . . . I mean, I didn’t know they thought I was a suspect. They misled me, they never asked any of this.”

  Hardy said quietly, “I’m asking now, all right? Let’s try to get something.”

  Jennifer nodded, then recalled that she had stopped at the automatic teller at her bank on Haight Street. Which seemed odd to Hardy. “You left to go running and happened to have your ATM card with you?”

  “What’s so strange about that?” And she explained that most of her running outfits had Velcro pockets and as a matter of course she grabbed her house key and her change wallet—in which she kept her ATM card—whenever she left the house. She told Hardy that on that morning she had walked down her block, passed the man in the trench coat, started running for a couple of blocks, then stopped for cash—“It was the Monday after Christmas, we hadn’t been to the bank for three days.”

  At least it was someplace to start.

  In some ways Hardy’s involvement with Jennifer Witt was easier to explain to the client than it was going to be to his wife.

  After the successful conclusion of his first murder trial—defending former Superior Court Judge Andy Fowler—Hardy had been surprised to find himself something of a property in the small world that was San Francisco’s legal community. Trial lawyers—men and women who were good on their feet in front of a jury—were, it seemed, in great demand. Even in the large corporate firms, the final outcome of all the work done by offices full of bean counters and number crunchers, library rats, technical brief writers and legal strategists, paralegals and lesser staff often came down on the shoulders of the person in the firm who could convincingly present it all in front of a judge or jury or both.

  Since most corporate attorneys rarely if ever saw the inside of a courtroom, many firms hired trial lawyers the way baseball teams purchased designated hitters—the role was limited, but if it came up it was far preferable to having the pitcher come to the plate with the game on the line.

  Because of the sensational nature of Judge Fowler’s trial and of Hardy’s own role as an unknown, underdog, first-time defense attorney, it seemed that Hardy had unwittingly been auditioning for half the firms in the Bay Area. When the verdict came down in his client’s favor, his phone had started ringing.

  Another event that had coincided with the end of Fowler’s trial had been the birth of Hardy and Frannie’s son, Vincent. So for the first month Hardy had begged off many of the interviews, pleading his new fatherhood, Frannie’s desire to have him at home for a while.

  Now, three months later, he had visited eleven firms, riding elevators to plush offices in his only three-piece suit, going out to fine lunches with men and women with whom he felt no connection whatever—nice people, sure; smart, well turned-out, confident, financially secure, socially aware, all of the above. But no one to whom he was drawn as a human being.

  Seven of the firms had offered him positions, with salaries ranging from a low of $83,000 to a high (Engle, Matthews & Jones) of $115,000. All of the offers put him well onto the partner track, crediting him with up to six years of previous service. This meant that within, at the most, another three years (and at the least, one), he would become a partner in any of the seven firms and could expect annual compensation in the realm of $300,000 to $500,000.

  Frannie had brought an insurance settlement to their marriage. Hardy, aside from the fees in the Fowler trial that had run to the low six figures, owned a one-quarter interest in the Little Shamrock bar. Their house payment was under six hundred dollars a month. So Frannie and Hardy were not hurting. Nevertheless, the kind of money the big firms were waving in his face was not pocket change, was even tempting.

  Their house in the Avenues was already, with the addition of the two children, starting to feel pinched. They could see moving up; they’d even discussed it casually after Hardy had received the first couple of invitations. It had become more or less understood that Hardy would choose one of the firms, get a linear job, be an adult.

  But he just hadn’t been ready to commit to any of the firms—something better might come up, some people he felt better about being associated with. So in the interim he borrowed an empty office and paid a nominal rent in the building owned by David Freeman, which was where he had been, essentially twiddling his thumbs, when David Freeman himself had called up with the Jennifer Witt referral.

  “It’s probably going to be a fair amount of money,” Hardy said.

  “But it’s another case. It’s not a job.”

  “And I’m not even really on it. It’s Freeman’s case.”

  “But there’s something here for you.”

  Hardy’s hands, crossed in front of him at the table, came open. “Maybe. There might be.”

  Frannie was trying to understand, and he couldn’t blame her for being a little upset. He might argue to himself, and tell her that he wasn’t really changing the basic plan they’d discussed, but they both knew that wasn’t true. Working as a member of a defense team in one potentially lucrative case was not even remotely comparable to going to work as a senior associate in one of the city’s prestige law firms, and Frannie wasn’t being conned by it.

  “It’s a case that lasts a year, maybe two. Who knows? That could be as long as any of the jobs last, Frannie. Life’s uncertain.”

  Frannie rolled her green eyes, as if she had to be told that.

  Hardy pressed on. “Mrs. Witt is worth a couple of million dollars, maybe more . . . ”

  “Which the insurance company isn’t going to release to her now that she’s charged with the murders.”

  It was a point he had hoped she wouldn’t raise. “Stranger things have happened.” He tried a grin. “They might.”

  “Do me a favor, would you, Dismas? Find out? You owe us that much.”

  Dinner finished, both kids asleep, they were sitting across the dining room table from each other, finishing the last of their red wine with chocolate candies on the side—Frannie’s latest culinary discovery that had addicted them both. A brace of nearly burned-out candles sputtered with fitful light.

  Frannie sighed. “You don’t want to work for anybody, do you?” She held up a hand, cutting off his response. “If you don’t, that’s okay, but we shouldn’t talk about it as if you do.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “I bet it is. You call all these people who’ve been interviewing you corporate rats. I think the phrase betrays a certain prejudice.”

  Hardy popped a chocolate, sipped some wine. “I really don’t know what it is. This thing with Jennifer Witt just walked into my life this morning. What am I supposed to do? Freeman has asked me to help. He’ll take over in the morning.”

  “But you are interested, aren’t you?”

  “No commitments,” he said. “But yes, it’s interesting. I looked at the file.”

  “You mean the file you couldn’t get your nose out of, that you seem to have memorized?”

  Hardy gave up. “Yeah, that file.”

  “And what if she did it?” Frannie was grabbing at straws and knew it.

  Hardy sat back. “She still has the right to an attorney.”

  Frannie gave him a look. “What’s that got to do with you?”

  “I’m an attorney?”

  They both laughed; the tension broken a little. One of the candles gave up the ghost, a wisp of smoke rising straight in the still room.

  Frannie reached a hand across the table and took her husband’s. “Look. You know I’m with you. I just want you to be sure you’re doing something you’ll be happy with. This isn’t just one case, you know. If you take this one, that’s what you’re going to be doing, taking cases. Maybe defending people all the time.”

  Hardy had once been a cop, and on two separate occasions he had worked in
the District Attorney’s office. Frannie was of the opinion that if anyone was born and bred to the prosecution, it was her husband. She had heard his tirades against and/or scornful dismissal of defense attorneys, the “ambulance chasers,” the “pond scum” who took anybody for their fee up front.

  “It doesn’t have to be sleazy,” Hardy said.

  Frannie smiled at him. “I just wonder if that’s the life you want.”

  “The life I want is with you.”

  She squeezed his hand. “You know what I mean.”

  He knew what she meant. It worried him some, too. But he knew if David Freeman asked him to help with Jennifer Witt, in almost any capacity, and off the top of his head he could think of several, he was going to do it. Which meant he wasn’t pursuing any of his job possibilities. Which, in turn, meant . . .

  He didn’t know.

  The other candle went out. “Let’s leave the dishes,” he said.

  4

  San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, located near—almost under—the 101 Freeway at the corner of 7th and Bryant, is a gray monolith of staggering impersonality. Its lower stories house various city and county departments, including police, coroner, the office of the District Attorney, and courtrooms and jury-selection waiting rooms. The jail on the sixth and seventh floors is administered by the San Francisco County Sheriff, as opposed to the city’s police department. Behind the building, a new jail was slowly rising in what used to be a parking lot.

  Hardy entered through the back entrance, was cleared through the metal detector and, deciding to bypass the slowest elevator in America, ascended to the third floor by the stairway and into the familiar bedlam that reigned in the wide high hallway.

  Aside from the usual circus, this morning’s sideshow featured a convention of perhaps twenty gypsies. Uniformed policemen were remonstrating with several women about their use of a Butagas container to heat their coffee in the hallway. Hardy first wondered how they had managed to get a portable gas container through the metal detectors, then watched for a while, fascinated as he often was by the raffish mélange one encountered almost daily between these institutional green walls.