Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  “Hey, look. I’m telling you it was Wilson. I know it was Wilson. So I give him up and you let me go, that’s the deal.”

  Glitsky shook his head. “The deal is, you give us some evidence we can use in court. He was wearing a mask, wasn’t he?”

  Devon thought about it, figuring his chances, then shook his head no. “No way, man. No mask.”

  Glitsky sighed, then asked the technician to turn on the machine again. “Okay, Devon, for the record, was the shooter you’ve identified as Tremaine Wilson wearing anything over his face?”

  “I just told you no.”

  “Tell me again. Was the shooter wearing anything over his face?”

  “No.”

  It was, at this point, no surprise. Still, Devon seemed to be telling the truth about knowing the shooter was Wilson, but if he couldn’t testify that he actually saw him pulling the trigger, it wasn’t going to do anybody any good.

  “Are you related to Wilson?”

  Devon’s face was a question mark.

  “Cousin, half brother, like that?”

  “No.”

  “Is he related to anyone you know?” Again Devon paused, but this time Glitsky didn’t wait. He turned to the technician. “Shut that down,” he said. “Okay, Devon, how do you know Wilson?”

  It took about a minute, but it came out that Tremaine Wilson had recently moved in with the woman Devon had lived with for the past two years, the mother of Devon’s child.

  “So Devon figured he could cut himself a deal and put Wilson away at the same time, get his old lady back. Slick, right?”

  “Très.” Hardy had been sitting at Glitsky’s desk, cooling off after the altercation with Locke and Pullios. “But it came up Wilson did it?”

  “Yeah, sure. Devon thinks he was the target himself. That’s why he bought the gun we found him with on Thursday. Wilson wanted to take him out, but as they always do, they miss who they’re actually shooting at and kill a few folks standing around.”

  “So Devon’s back upstairs.”

  “No evidence, no deal. Devon’s sure Wilson was the shooter—he probably was. So big deal, we know one of the shooters. You want to try and sell Devon’s ID to a jury?”

  “Why don’t you cut Devon a deal, let him back on the street, give him back his gun? He goes and shoots Wilson, then we pick him up again.”

  Glitsky smiled, his scar white through his lips. “It’s a beautiful thought.” He gave it a moment’s appreciation. “Now how about you give me my chair?”

  Hardy rose. He took the folder he’d been holding and dropped it in the center of Glitsky’s desk. “While we’re giving things back,” Hardy said.

  Glitsky spun the folder around, facing him. “How’d you get this?”

  “I got a better one—how did Pullios get it?”

  “I gave it to her.”

  “You gave it to her.”

  “Sure. Happens all the time. She comes in, says, ‘Hi, Abe, what you got?’ and I give her a homicide.”

  “Did it occur to you this might be my case?”

  “I told her you’d been working on it, and she said she knew that and she’d take care of it.”

  “Well, she did that. She’s got the case.”

  “You got the folder, though, I notice.”

  “Yeah, I get to be her gofer. I follow up.”

  Glitsky leaned back, his feet on his desk. He dug a Life Saver from his coat pocket and put it in his mouth. “So what’s the problem?”

  Hardy could continue bitching about internal strife in the D.A.’s office, but it would be wasted breath and he knew it. The best thing would be to do his job and wait for another chance. He settled against the corner of Abe’s desk. “There’s no problem,” he said, “but I was going over the file and you say you found the gun in the rolltop desk.”

  “Right.”

  “Top right drawer? Maps and stuff like that?”

  “That’s it, so?”

  “So I looked in that drawer on Wednesday, and there wasn’t any gun there.”

  Glitsky took a breath, chewed up his Life Saver, then brought his feet down off his desk. “What?”

  Hardy told him about his own search of the Eloise.

  “But Waddell, the guard, he was with you, right? Hurrying you up?”

  “A little, yeah, but I checked the drawer.”

  “How close?”

  “I opened it, I looked in. What do you want?”

  “The gun was back a ways, Diz. How far in did you look?”

  Hardy remembered back, remembered feeling pressure from Tom, the guard, to stop going through things. He’d pulled that drawer out, had seen the maps. He was sure—almost certain—he would have seen a gun. But to be honest—he hadn’t looked or felt around anywhere near the back of the drawer.

  “So you missed it,” Glitsky said. “I wouldn’t worry about it. It happens. That’s why we have a team go and look.”

  The phone rang on the desk. Hardy got up, grabbed his file and walked to the back window, which overlooked the hole for the new jail and the freeway, on about the same level four stories up as Homicide. Traffic was stopped southbound. The sun was still out in a pure sky—day four of the hot spell.

  Glitsky came up beside him. “That was Ken Farris,” he said. “This morning when I got in I faxed him a copy of the will, the alleged will—two million dollars, remember? I figured he’d be the quickest way to verify the handwriting.”

  “And?”

  “And he says it looks like Nash’s writing, all right, but it can’t be real. Nash wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Why not?”

  “He just says he wouldn’t have. He let Farris handle all his legal stuff.”

  “But it’s his writing?”

  “Looks like. Could be forged, of course. No telling at this point. It’s also, if it is his, a legal form for a will. Blank paper, dated, nothing else on it. But legal or not, I’ll tell you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m glad I brought the Shinn woman in. She almost pulled it off.”

  Hardy kept looking at the stalled traffic on the freeway, the glare of the reflected sun. He felt a stabbing pain behind his left eye and brought his hand up to rub it away. “Almost,” he said, “almost.”

  20

  Hardy marveled at how busy Abe must have been. No wonder he’d been working through the weekend; smaller wonder still that he’d been so reluctant to arrest May without a warrant or indictment. On a no-warrant arrest, as May’s had been, the arresting officer has forty-eight hours to bring all the paperwork on a case to the district attorney’s office. Forty-eight hours was by Sunday night—last night. By then he had to have a complaint, any relevant incident reports, witness interviews, forensics, ballistics if available—enough evidence so the D.A. wouldn’t throw it out.

  This morning a typist had worked like a dog to type up the complaint and transcripts, then two copies of the folder were prepared—the original stayed with the D.A., one copy went to the clerk for putting it on a docket and one copy was saved for the defense attorney.

  Pullios not only had gotten to the folder first, she had evidently convinced the clerk to get it on a docket for that day, in the early afternoon.

  Rebecca’s fever had broken at noon; spots were showing all over her skin. Otherwise, everything at home was fine. Frannie was planning on taking a nap, catching up if she could on the sleep she’d missed the night before.

  Hardy was back from lunch—ribs at Lou’s. Club soda. He threw three games of Twenty Down at his dartboard and by the third game was nailing two numbers a round, sometimes all three. For the tenth time he considered registering for the City Championship Tournament. Someday he really would.

  He got a black three-ring binder and started filling in some tab labels. Police Report. Inspector’s Chronological. Inspector’s Notes. Coroner. Autopsy. Witnesses. The drill, except for Coroner and Autopsy, wasn’t all that different from his prelims—proof was proof. A tri
al was a trial.

  There was one definitely new tab here, though, in Hardy’s own folder—Newspaper. He had gone back and cut out all of Jeff Elliot’s stories to date. Most crimes in the big city didn’t get any ink. This one was already on the front page. Hardy figured he’d see the name Pullios in the paper within a day or so and he wanted to have a record of it.

  He hadn’t gotten far that morning on Glitsky’s reports, when the gun issue—that he hadn’t seen it on Wednesday—had stopped him cold. He’d been looking for an excuse to blow some steam anyway, get out of the office. Well, now he’d done that. He’d checked in on his baby, had a good lunch. It was time to go to work. He opened the folder again, turned to the first witness interview, the transcript unedited off the tape.

  Three, two, one. This is Inspector Abraham Glitsky, Star number 1144. I am currently at the office of the Golden Gate Marina, 3567 Fort Point Drive. With me is a gentleman identifying himself as Thomas Waddell, Caucasian male, 4/19/68. This interview is pursuant to an investigation of case number 921065882. Today’s date is June 27, 1992, Saturday, at 1415 hours in the p.m.

  Hardy skimmed quickly through the preliminaries, down to where Abe had started talking about putting May at the crime scene.

  Q: You remember locking up the Eloise with Mr. Hardy?

  A: That’s right. It wasn’t locked before then.

  Q: It was just left open?

  A: It happens all the time. We notice it, we lock ’em, but we don’t do a regular check, like that.

  Q: But you locked it, when, Wednesday night?

  A: I’m not sure. When the D.A. guy came by, after that.

  Q: That was Wednesday.

  A: Okay.

  Q: And did you see anybody else board the boat, the Eloise?

  A: No, not exactly. You guys, you know, the police, were still here Friday when I came on. You mean besides that?

  Q: Right. What do you mean not exactly?

  A: Well, you know I remembered ’cause of locking it up special, but Mr. Nash’s lady friend came by.

  Q: His lady friend?

  A: You know, the Japanese lady? She was out here a few times. I recognized her all right.

  Q: This is a snapshot of a woman named May Shintaka. Do you recognize her?

  A: Yeah, that’s her. She was by, like, Thursday night, out on the float.

  Q: What time was that?

  A: Still light. Maybe seven, seven-thirty.

  Q: What was she doing there? Did you talk to her?

  A: No. I don’t know. She walked by the office when I was with some other people, went out onto Dock Two by the Eloise, stayed a minute, then when I got done and looked up, she was gone.

  Q: Did she go aboard the boat?

  A: It was locked up.

  Q: I know it was. Maybe she had a key?

  A: I don’t know, I guess she might’ve. I don’t know. I didn’t see her again, and later I went to check the boat, and it was still locked up. She wasn’t in it.

  Q: How do you know that?

  A: Well, the lock is outside. You can’t go in and lock the door from inside. So if she was still inside, it couldn’t have been locked.

  Q: But you didn’t actually see her leave?

  A: No, sir, but I wasn’t looking. People are going by all the time. I only put it together about Mr. Nash after she was already out there.

  Hardy couldn’t put his finger on it, but he wasn’t happy gathering these nails for May’s coffin. She wasn’t his anymore, maybe that was it. She was Elizabeth Pullios’s. And the more he looked at it, the more nails he seemed to find.

  Glitsky’s theory—that May had gone back to the Eloise to pick up her gun because it was the only physical evidence tying her to the crime—was starting to look pretty good. And certainly her idea that she and Owen Nash were going to be married was ridiculous.

  He went around his desk and absently grabbed his darts again. His door was closed and he threw, not aiming, not paying any attention. He used his darts like Greeks used worry beads.

  Thursday, the twenty-fifth, had been the day of Elliot’s story linking Owen Nash, the Eloise and May. On that same day, she’d bought her ticket (without a return) to Japan and gone down, presumably, to get her gun back. And failed.

  Why did he so badly want her not to have done it?

  He thought it might be that so many of the people he’d been seeing on his other cases had been the kind you’d expect to be doing bad things. May Shinn, when he’d gone up to see her in jail, wasn’t that type at all. She’d talked to him openly, until Freeman had shown up, unconcerned about her rights, the way innocent people might be expected to start out until they found out how the system worked.

  Hardy was willing to believe she was a liar, but if she was, she was very good at it. Hardy knew such people existed. He just hadn’t run across too many of them among the lowlifes—liars, sure, good liars not often.

  There was a knock on his door, it opened and Pullios was in, watching him poised, dart in hand, ready to toss. She grinned her sexy, charming, I’m-your-best-friend grin and leaned against the doorjamb. “Reviewing the Shinn case?” she asked.

  Hardy wanted to put a dart in her forehead, but thought he’d have a hard time pleading accident. It was one of the drawbacks of having talent.

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” he said. He threw the dart and sat down.

  “You’re mad at me.” She actually pouted.

  “I’m not much at games, Elizabeth. How do you want to play this?”

  She sat herself down, the kitten disappearing as soon as it saw it wasn’t going to get petted. “Come on, Dismas, we’re on the same team.”

  “That’s what Locke said, so it must be true.”

  “Look, I know how you feel.”

  “Good,” he said. “That’s a load off my mind. The thing is, I don’t know how you feel, so we’re not even. I don’t, for example, know why you let me jerk myself off on this case for most of a week before you showed any interest in it, other than encouraging me to push for my rights, beat the bureaucracy.”

  “I meant it.”

  Hardy studied her face. Elizabeth Pullios, he was coming to understand, had a gift for sincerity. It probably played well in front of juries. “But then it was a skull case, and now it’s hot ink.”

  “No, what it is, is a homicide and I do homicides. I’ve worked my way up to there.”

  Hardy looked longingly at his darts stuck in the board across the room. In lieu of them, he picked up his paperweight and leaned back in his chair, passing it from hand to hand. It might be unfair, and it might be manure, but it was a done deal, and he didn’t want to discuss it anymore. “Farris says the will was Nash’s handwriting,” he said.

  Pullios was right with him. “Definite?”

  “Until we get an expert, but it looks like it.”

  “That’s great, that’s what we need.”

  “What do we need?”

  “It’s a hell of a motive, don’t you think? Two million dollars?”

  Hardy couldn’t help himself. Things were just falling too easily. If Pullios wanted this job, she ought to do a little work for it. “It seems to me,” he said, “that if May were going to collect money on Nash’s death, she wouldn’t have dumped him in the ocean.”

  “Didn’t she?”

  “I mean it was pure luck he washed ashore. How could she have known that?”

  “So?”

  “So if you were going to kill somebody for two million dollars, wouldn’t you want to make sure they found the body? You don’t get the money until he’s dead, right? And he’s not dead till there’s a body, unless you want to wait seven years or so.”

  “But there is a body.”

  “But she couldn’t have known that.”

  He enjoyed watching her stew over that, but it didn’t last long. “I’ll be prepared for that argument,” she said. “It’s good you brought it up. The great thing is the money angle.”

  “The great thing?”
>
  “Murder for profit. Makes it a capital case.”

  “A capital case?”

  “Absolutely,” Pullios declared. “We’re going to ask the State of California to put May Shinn to death.”

  21

  Hardy sat next to Pullios in the courtroom, randomly chosen by computer for Department 11 in Municipal Court, which was where the arraignment in a no-warrant arrest, even on a capital case, was scheduled.

  Glitsky was there, sitting next to Jeff Elliot in the mostly empty gallery seats. David Freeman, looking more disheveled than he had on Saturday, came through the low gate and shook hands cordially with both Pullios and Hardy, which was some surprise. Hardy found himself liking the guy and warned himself to watch it. If he was good at trial, he was by definition—like Pullios—a good actor. You could admire the technique, but beware of the man.

  The judge was Michael Barsotti, an old, gray, bland fixture in his robes behind the desk. Barsotti had been in Muni Court forever and he wasn’t known for moving things along.

  The court reporter sat at a right angle to Hardy, midway between the defendant’s podium and the judge. Assorted functionaries milled about—two or three bailiffs, translators, public defenders waiting to get clients assigned.

  Hardy leaned over the table, organizing his binder, not knowing what his role, if any, would be. He wasn’t prepared for his first sight of May Shinn.

  She looked so much smaller, diminished. The yellow jumpsuit hung on her. He supposed she’d been in her jail garb on Saturday, but his focus had been talking to her, eye to eye, concentrating on her face.

  She walked up with the bailiff, hands cuffed, and stood at the podium next to Pullios, giving no indication she’d ever seen Hardy before, or anyone else.

  The gravity of a murder case was underscored by the judge’s first words. Even Barsotti gained a measure of authority, casting off his boredom, caught up in the drama of the formal indictment being pronounced, the courtroom getting still.

  “May Shintaka,” Judge Barsotti intoned, “you are charged by a complaint filed herein with a felony, to wit, a violation of section 187 of the Penal Code in that you did, in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, on or about the twentieth day of June, 1992, willfully, unlawfully and with malice aforethought murder Owen Simpson Nash, a human being.”