Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

“Nobody else knew him.”

  “A lot of people knew him,” he said.

  The door to the room opened with a whoosh. “Just what the hell is going on in here?”

  Hardy looked, then stood up. “Can I help you?”

  The man wasn’t six feet tall. He had curly brown hair and sallow loose skin. His shabby dark suit was badly tailored and poorly pressed. There were tiny bloodstains on his white collar from shaving cuts.

  Nevertheless, what he lacked in style he made up for in substance. His brown eyes were clear and carried authority. The anger seemed to spark off him. “Yeah, you can help me. You can tell me what this is all about!”

  Hardy didn’t respond ideally to this onslaught. “Maybe you can tell me what it is to you!”

  The two men glared at each other. The guard who had admitted the second man was still standing at the door; the woman investigator Hardy had brought along as a witness checked her fingernails. The guard asked, “You gentlemen have a problem with each other?”

  The shorter man turned. “You know who I am?”

  “I don’t,” Hardy said.

  He was ignored. “I am representing this woman and she is being harassed by the district attorney—”

  “There is no harassment going on here—”

  “Save it for your appeal, which you’re going to need. To say nothing of the lawsuit.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m David Freeman, Ms. Shintaka’s attorney, and you don’t belong here.”

  Like everyone else in the business of practicing law from either side of the courtroom, Hardy knew of David Freeman, and his presence stopped him momentarily. Freeman was a legend in the city, a world-class defense attorney in countless cases—and here was Dismas Hardy, novice prosecutor in a place he technically shouldn’t be. He didn’t know how there came to be a connection between May Shinn and David Freeman, but it was clear there was one now and it was hardly promising for Hardy’s chances.

  “How did you—”

  Freeman cut him off. “Because, fortunately for justice’s sake, some judges are available on weekends. Now you get the hell out of here, Counselor, or I swear to God I’ll move to have you disbarred.”

  May spoke up. “But he wasn’t—”

  Freeman held up an imperious hand. “Don’t say another word!”

  Judge Andy Fowler watched his drive sail down the middle of the fairway, starting low and getting wings up into the clear blue, carrying in the warm, dry air. The ball finally dropped down, he estimated, at about two hundred ten yards, bouncing and rolling another forty, leaving himself a short seven-iron to the pin.

  Fowler picked up his tee with a swipe and walked to his cart, grinning. “The man is on his game.” Gary Smythe was Fowler’s broker and, today, his match partner. They were playing best ball at $20 per hole and now, on the fourteenth, were up $80. Gary wasn’t yet thirty-five, a second-generation member of the Olympic Club.

  The other two guys, both members of course, were father and son, Ben and Joe Wyeth from the real estate company of the same name. Ben Wyeth was close to Fowler’s age and looked ten years older. He teed up. “I think the judge here ought to rethink his twelve handicap.” He swung and hit a decent drive out about two hundred yards with the roll, on the right side of the fairway. “That,” he said, “is a proper drive for guys our age, Andy.”

  They got in their carts and headed down the fairway. “You are playing some golf today,” Gary said.

  Andy was sucking on his tee. He wore a white baseball hat with a marlin on the crest, maroon slacks, a Polo shirt. He followed the flight of a flock of swallows in one of the eucalyptus groves bordering the fairway. “I think golf must be God’s game,” he said. “You get a day like this.”

  “If this is God’s game, he’s a sadist.” Gary stopped the cart and got out to pick up his ball. As had been the case most of the afternoon, Andy’s ball was best.

  Andy put his shot pin high, four feet to its left. Gary’s shot landed on the front fringe, bounced and almost hit the flagstick, then rolled twelve feet past. “Your ball again,” Gary said.

  As they waited on the green for Ben and Joe, Gary told Andy he was happy to see him feeling better. “Some of us were worried the last few months,” he said. “You didn’t seem your old self.”

  “Ah, old man’s worries, that’s all.” Andy lined up an imaginary putt. “You get lazy. You get a few problems, no worse than everybody else has, and you forget you can just take some action and make them go away. It’s just like golf, you sit too long and stare at that ball, pretty soon it’s making faces at you, and before you know it, hitting that ball clean becomes impossible. The thing to do is just take your shot. Let the chips fall. Pardon the mixed metaphor. At least then the game’s not playing you. Which is what I let creep up on me.”

  “Maybe you could let it creep back just a little, give us young guys a chance.”

  Andy lined up another imaginary putt and put the ball in the hole. He looked up, grinning. “No quarter,” he said. “To the victor go the spoils.”

  19

  Hardy had had better weekends.

  Historical Martinez turned out to be a bit of a dud. Since Moses and Hardy had practically lived at the Little Shamrock bar on 9th and Lincoln in San Francisco’s cool and breezy Sunset district for many years, an hour-and-a-half road trip to check out some small bars in another windy town was, at best, they decided, dumb.

  They snagged a few not-so-elusive martinis—the gin first nagging at Hardy, then washing out the memory of the morning’s disaster with May Shinn and lawyer David Freeman—then Frannie had driven them all home just in time to find out Rebecca had developed roseola and a fever of 106 degrees, which was worth a trip to the emergency room.

  When they got back at midnight Hardy had been too exhausted to return the calls of Art Drysdale or Abe Glitsky.

  But on Sunday he wasn’t. He got an earful of rebuke from Art and was intrigued to learn from Glitsky, who’d worked yesterday, that Tom Waddell, the night guard at the Marina, had seen May leaving the place on Thursday night.

  “Probably coming back, realizing she’d left the gun.”

  “Did she have a key?”

  “That’s just it. It appeared she couldn’t get into the boat. Waddell was going to go help her when he finished whatever he was doing, but she had gone. Maybe that’s when she decided to buy the ticket to Japan. The timing fits.”

  Hardy remembered that when he’d first gone to the Eloise, the boat had been left unlocked. May, knowing that, would have thought she could have just slipped aboard, taken the gun and disappeared with nothing left to link her to the murder.

  “And there’s another thing, maybe nothing, maybe a joke, but it could be the whole ball game.”

  Hardy waited.

  “I got a warrant for her suitcases and we found what looks like a handwritten will of Owen Nash’s, leaving her two million dollars.”

  “Is it real?”

  “We don’t know, we’re getting a sample of Nash’s handwriting. We haven’t even mentioned it to her yet, but let’s assume Nash just disappears and his body doesn’t show up on a beach. After he’s declared dead, May appears with a valid will.”

  “Nice retirement.”

  “The same thought occurred to me.” A good cop following up leads, building a case that Hardy hoped he hadn’t already lost on a technicality.

  Hardy spent most of the day inside worrying about Rebecca, giving her tepid baths every two or three hours. Frannie, as she did, hung tough, but he could tell it was a strain on her, to say nothing of his own feelings, memoriesof another life and another baby—one who hadn’t made it—chilling the warmth out of the evening.

  A dinner of leftovers—cold spaghetti, soggy salad, stale bread. They were all in bed for the night before nine o’clock.

  Family life with sick child.

  “Excuse me,” Pullios said, “there is no issue here.”

  “Then I will take the fo
lder and leave.” It was nine-thirty on Monday morning and Hardy was, for the second time in a week, in District Attorney Christopher Locke’s sanctum sanctorum. With him, in the second chair before the D.A.’s desk, was Elizabeth Pullios and, standing by the window, his back turned to the proceedings, Art Drysdale.

  Pullios remained calm. “I am the homicide prosecutor here. What’s the issue?”

  “The issue is Art promised me this case.” Hardy knew it sounded whiny, but it was the truth and had to be said.

  “Art was out of line there, Hardy.” Locke could smile very nicely for the cameras, but he was not smiling now. He leaned forward, hands clasped before him. “Now, you listen. I appreciate your enthusiasm for your work, but we work in a hierarchy and a bureaucracy”—he held up a hand, stopping Hardy’s reply. “I know, we all hate the word. But it’s a precise term and it applies to this office. Ms. Pullios here has a fine record trying murder cases, and on Saturday”—Locke pointed a finger—“you seriously jeopardized this investigation. The accused has an absolute right for an attorney to be present. You’re aware of that?”

  “I didn’t force her to say a word.”

  “You shouldn’t have been there at all, is the point. Thank God you taped what you did get.”

  Pullios swiveled on the leather seat of her chair. “Freeman could still make a case for procedural error.”

  “Shit,” Hardy said.

  “I beg your pardon.” If anyone was going to swear in Locke’s office, it was going to be him.

  Hardy reflected on the better part of valor. “I don’t think he can make a case there.”

  “Regardless”—Pullios was calm but firm—“this should not be up for debate. I am a Homicide D.A., is that right, sir?”

  “Of course.”

  “Art?”

  “Come on, Elizabeth.”

  “So I went up to Homicide and picked up a folder from Abe Glitsky, as I have done many times in the past. It happened, randomly, to be this Nash murder. There is a suspect in custody at this very moment, who was arrested while attempting to flee the jurisdiction. This is the kind of case I do.” She wasn’t yelling. She didn’t even seem particularly excited. She had the cards.

  Hardy gave it a last shot. “Elizabeth, look. I have put in some time on this thing. I found the hand. I’ve talked to the daughter, the victim’s lawyer and best friend. Now I’m not on the case. What’s that going to do to their confidence in this office?”

  “That’s irrelevant,” Pullios said.

  “More than that,” Locke, to whom public perception of the district attorney’s office was always the primary issue, spoke up, “it’s not for you two to haggle about. Hardy, you’ve made a small but real point there. I can see you think you’ve got a legitimate right to this case, but so does Elizabeth. So here’s what we do—you, Hardy, take second chair. Under Elizabeth’s direction you keep contact with people you’ve already interviewed and you keep her informed at every step. Every single step. When we bring this thing to trial, Elizabeth puts on the show and you get to watch a master perform close up.” The D.A. crossed his hands on his desk and favored the room with his patented smile. “Now let’s cooperate and get this thing done. We’re on the same team here, as we all sometimes forget. Art, Hardy, thanks for bringing this to my attention. I’ve always got an open door. Thanks very much. Elizabeth, could you stay behind a minute?”

  “Talk about seeing a master perform close up.”

  Drysdale was juggling in his office. “My good friend Chris Locke tries to make sure everybody wins.”

  “Win, my ass.”

  The baseballs kept flying. “Pullios tries the case. You’re on it. My authority in giving you the case is upheld. The office looks good. Everybody wins.”

  “Who was it said ‘Another victory like this and we’re ruined’?”

  “Pyrrhus, I think.”

  “I’ll remember that.” Hardy shook his head. “I can’t believe this. She doesn’t know anything about this case.”

  Drysdale disagreed. “No, she knows, and I must say with some justification, that once a perp is arrested for whatever it might be, that perp is one guilty son of a bitch.”

  “How about innocent until proven guilty?” Hardy felt silly even saying it out loud. He wasn’t sure he believed it anymore, after the tide of humanity that had washed across his desk in the past months, all of them— every one—guilty of something, even if it wasn’t what they were accused of. The temptation to get whoever it was for whatever they could, regardless of whether it was something they did, was something all the D.A.s faced. The best of them rose above it. Some didn’t find the exercise worthwhile.

  That still didn’t make it a good argument for Drysdale. “Let’s tick it off,” he said. “She had a sexual relationship with the guy. Okay, already we’re in most-likely-to-succeed territory. Two, what did she tell you this morning? She maybe benefits to the tune of a couple million dollars if the guy dies. This is a big number two. This is not insignificant.”

  “It may not even be true. And Elizabeth doesn’t know about it in any event.”

  Drysdale kissed the air, a little clicking sound. “She will. Anyway, next, it’s her gun and a witness puts her at the crime scene and she doesn’t have an alibi for the day in question. Finally, she attempts to leave the country ten minutes after being warned to stay. It is not what I’d call farfetched to think she did it.”

  “I didn’t say she didn’t do it. I’m saying there’s no real evidence that she did, not yet.”

  “Fortunately that’s the jury’s job.”

  “And Betsy’s.”

  “And yours.” Drysdale raised a finger. “And I wouldn’t call her Betsy.”

  “Am I glad to be back working here?”

  “Is that a question? You’ve got your murder case, quicker than most.”

  Hardy straightened up in the doorway. His name was being called over the hall loudspeaker. He had a telephone call. “Pyrrhus, right?” he said, before turning into the hall.

  The snitch was named Devon Latrice Wortherington, and he certainly seemed to be enjoying the moments of relative freedom away from his cell. Devon had been picked up carrying an unlicensed firearm and a half pound of rock cocaine the previous Thursday night, outside a bar near Hunter’s Point, and he had been in jail about twelve hours when suddenly he recalled his civic duty to assist the police if he knew anything that might help them in apprehending persons who had committed a crime. In this case a drive-by shooting that had left three people dead—including a small boy who reminded Glitsky of his son—and seven wounded.

  He seemed to like Glitsky. Maybe he was just in a good mood. In any event, he couldn’t seem to shut up. “What kind of name is Glitsky?” he asked while they were setting up the videotape for the interview. “I never knew no Glitsky.”

  “It’s Jewish,” Abe said.

  “What you mean, Jewish?”

  “I mean it’s a Jewish name, Devon.”

  “Well, how you get a Jewish name?”

  “How’d you get the name Wortherington?”

  “From my father, man.”

  “Well . . .”

  “You telling me you got Glitsky from your father? How’d he get Glitsky?”

  Abe was used to room-temp IQs. Still, he thought Devon might be close to the range where he wouldn’t be competent to stand trial. But he could be patient when it suited him, and now there wasn’t much else to do. “My father,” he said, “got Glitsky from being Jewish.”

  “No shit? You shittin’ me?” Glitsky felt Devon eyeing him for some sign of duplicity. He kept a straight face.

  “We’re just about ready, Sergeant.” The technician was a middle-aged woman of no looks and no humor. Maybe she dated the jail warden who’d accompanied Devon down and who now stood inside by the interview room’s door.

  “My father isn’t black,” Abe said.

  He saw Devon take it in, chew it around, get it down. “Hey, I get it. Your father is Jewish.
I mean he is a righteous Hebe.”

  Abe wondered about how his father Nat would feel about being called a righteous Hebe and decided he’d ask him the next time they were together. He sat down across the table from Devon and asked the first questions—name, age, place of birth.

  “Okay, Devon, let’s get to it. At about seven o’clock on the night of Sunday, June twenty-first, you were standing at the corner of Dedman Court”— Glitsky loved the name—“and Cashmere Lane in Hunter’s Point, is that correct?”

  Devon nodded, and Glitsky continued, running down his mental list of questions—establishing that Devon had been standing in a group of neighborhood people when a green Camaro drove up with two men in front and two in back. At the first sight of the car, someone at the corner yelled and a few people dropped to the ground. Devon had stayed up to see the barrels of guns poking out of the front and back windows. Another man appeared to be sitting in the backseat window, leveling a rifle or a shotgun over the roof of the car. “You have identified the shooter as Tremaine Wilson?”

  “Yeah, it was Wilson.”

  Glitsky was wondering how Devon could have identified Wilson, since two other witnesses had said that the shooters had worn ski masks. “And he was firing from the passenger-side front window?”

  “Right.”

  “Did anything obstruct your view of him?”

  “No. He was only like twenty feet away. I seen him clear as I see you.”

  “I hear he was wearing something over his face.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, a ski mask, a bandanna, something over his face?”

  Devon stopped, his easy rhythm cut off. “It was Wilson,” he said.

  “I’m not saying it wasn’t, Devon. I’m asking was there something covering his face.”

  “What difference that make?”

  Glitsky nodded to the technician, and she stopped the videotape. Glitsky knew the tape recorder under the table was still going. “Okay, we’re off the machine, Devon. Was he wearing a mask or not?”