Pullios closed up the folder, took a Post-it and wrote a note asking Glitsky to call her as soon as he got in.
Hardy, awakened by Rebecca at five-thirty, had gone out running in the clear and already balmy dawn. Down Geary out to the beach, south to Lincoln, then inside Golden Gate Park back to 25th, and home. A four-mile circle he’d been trying to keep up since getting sedentary in March.
Now, near eight, he sat in his green jogging suit, taking his time over Frannie’s great coffee. She sat across the kitchen table from him, glancing at sections of the paper when she wasn’t fiddling with the baby, who was strapped into a baby seat on the table between them.
“And this was a baby shark,” he said. “Imagine what a twenty-footer would do.”
“I think they made a movie about that.”
Hardy made a face at her as the doorbell rang, followed by the sound of the front door opening. “Don’t get up, commoners,” Glitsky called out, “I’ll just let myself in.”
The sergeant wore a white shirt and solid brown tie, khaki slacks, cordovan wing tips, tan sports coat. Entering the kitchen, he stopped. “Taking fashion tips from dead guys?”
“Hi, Abe,” Frannie said.
Hardy pointed to the stove. “Water’s hot.”
Glitsky knew where the tea was and got out a bag, dropped it into a cup, came over to the table. He looked again at Hardy. “Oftentimes, I’ll go see a body and the next day decide to wear exactly what it had on.”
Hardy shrugged. “It was next up in my drawer. Am I supposed to throw it away?”
“If anybody ever asks if your husband is superstitious, Frannie, you should tell them no.”
Hardy explained it to her. “Owen Nash was found in some sweats just like these. Abe thinks the streets are infested with sharks that are going to start a feeding frenzy over people in green sweats.” Hardy lifted the front of his sweatshirt away from his body. “Besides, this is different. There aren’t any holes in this one.”
“Major difference.” Abe nodded and sipped his tea. “So tell me everything you know.”
Hardy and Glitsky went back into the office, where Hardy had the notes he’d taken after talking with Ken Farris. Abe sat at the desk while Hardy threw darts.
“Who’s this guy in Santa Clara? Silicon Valley.”
“I don’t know. Farris said he’d tell me if we needed it.”
“I need it.”
“Yeah, I thought you would.”
Glitsky kept reading, taking a couple of notes of his own. “He went out with this May Shinn on Saturday?”
Hardy pulled darts from the board—two bull’s-eyes and a 1. He was throwing pretty well, a good sign. “We don’t know that for sure. Farris says he was planning on it.”
“But no one’s talked to her?”
“Right. That’s her number there at the bottom. You’re welcome to give her a try.”
Glitsky did. He held the receiver for a minute, then hung up. Hardy sat at the corner of the desk. “You didn’t want to leave a message? Ask her to call you?”
“I’d love to, but nobody answered.”
“No, there’s a machine. I heard it.”
Glitsky thought a minute, then dialed again. “Okay, last time was four, I’ll give it ten.”
The sun reflected off the hardwood floors onto the bookcase. Hardy walked over and opened the window, a reasonable action only about ten days a year. The view to his north, up to Twin Peaks and the Sutro Tower, was blocked from his office by Rebecca’s room, but overhead, the sky was clear. Hardy could see Oakland easily. The air smelled like grass, even out here in the concrete avenues.
“Nope,” Abe said behind him. “Ten rings. This listed? Where’s she live? Where’s your phone book?”
She wasn’t listed. Without going into it too closely, Hardy said he’d gotten the number from Farris. “So she’s home, I’d guess,” Abe said. “At least she unplugged her machine in the last couple days, right? You going to work today dressed like that?”
Hardy allowed as he would probably take a shower and get dressed, and moved toward his bedroom, Abe following. “You know,” he said, “I wouldn’t get too red hot about this.”
“Why not?”
“Well, the body turns up yesterday, but Nash was probably dead on Sunday, we go on that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, today’s Friday. One week, assuming he went down on Saturday.”
“And after four days . . .” Hardy knew what Abe was saying, understood the statistics. If you didn’t have a suspect within four days of a murder, the odds were enormous that you’d never get one.
“All I’m saying is don’t get your hopes up.”
Hardy stripped off his shirt. “Okay,” he said. “But you’ve got Mr. Silicon Valley and you got May Shinn if you can find her.”
“If she didn’t go swimming with Owen Nash.”
“Then who unplugged her answering machine?”
“I know, I know. I’m an investigator. I’ll investigate. I also thought we’d check out the boat.”
“No, the boat’s clean.” Hardy told Abe about his visit on Wednesday night.
“You brought along a forensic team, did you?”
Hardy shut up and went to take his shower.
The case of The People v. Rane Brown was not going to be an easy one.
Back in late March, at around ten at night, two officers in a squad car cruising under the freeway heard a man calling for help. Turning into the lot, they saw one man down on the ground and another man going through his pockets. When he saw the cops, the suspect took off. The man on the ground was yelling, “Stop him! That’s the guy!” The officers followed the running man as he turned into one alley, then another, a dead end. Getting out of their car, they proceeded cautiously down the alley, guns drawn, flashlights out, until they came upon a man crouched between two Dumpsters.
This man turned out to be Rane Brown, a 5’8‘, 135-pound, nineteen-year-old black male with four priors for mugging and purse snatching. When apprehended by the officers, he was wearing a black tank top and black pants that matched the clothes of the man who’d run from the scene. The officers found a .38 Smith & Wesson handgun under the Dumpster next to Rane. The gun was registered to a Denise Watrous in San Jose.
What made the case especially difficult was that when the officers returned to the scene, the purported victim had disappeared, having evidently decided that the hassle of pursuing justice in this imperfect world was simply not worth the trouble.
But there was Rane Brown in custody, and the police didn’t particularly want to let him go and mug someone else.
So Hardy was in Department 11 with Judge Nancy Fiedler this Friday morning, trying to prove a robbery and knowing that he didn’t have a prayer of winning.
Which is what transpired. After a fairly stern lecture by Judge Fiedler on the advisability of producing some evidence before wasting the court’s time on this minor and unprovable transgression, she had granted the motion to dismiss and Rane Brown was a free man.
Hardy and the two arresting officers had been waiting by the elevator when Rane and his attorney came up and joined them. Everybody headed to the first door, and Rane was in high spirits.
“Man, you give me a turn when you walk in that courtroom,” he said to Hardy.
“Why’s that, Rane?”
“You know, the man here”—he cocked his head toward his attorney—“he tole me you ain’t got no witnesses, no victim, like that. So I be thinkin’ everything’s cool and you walk in and I thinkin’ you the victim.” He smiled, broken teeth in a pocked face. “I mean, you get it? You look just like the man I rob.”
Hardy stared at Rane a moment, letting it sink in. He saw the two cops that had arrested him, one on either side of him. Hardy allowed himself a small smile.
“You’re telling me I look like the victim you just got let off for?”
Rane was bobbing his head. “Exactly, man, exactly.” He just couldn’t believe
the resemblance.
Hardy looked from one officer to the other. “If I’m not mistaken,” he said, “we just got ourselves a confession.” The elevator door opened and Hardy stepped out, blocking the way. “Take this guy back upstairs and book him.”
“The boat was out when you got in? And what time was that?”
José and Glitsky sat on hard plastic chairs by the doorway to the Gateway Marina guardhouse. José was about twenty-five years old, thin and sinewy. He wore new tennis shoes with his green uniform, a shirt open at the neck. The day had heated up. Even here, right on the water, it was over eighty degrees.
“I got here six-thirty, quarter to seven, and the Eloise, she was already gone.”
“And nobody signed her out?”
“No. They ’spose 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 happened, 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 the 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 adjustto 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, rubber bands and a handball from the Olympic Club. The flat back part of the drawer appeared to be completely empty, but reachinghis 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 persuadeda 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 of 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 arrestingofficers, 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.
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