Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  Maury nodded. “That would be the fee, yes.”

  Was the smoke getting thicker, the light worse? Maybe he was just getting dizzy. He squirmed in his chair, got the blood flowing a little. “Then you pay that to the court?” It still wasn’t clear. Jeff knew, or thought he knew, this stuff, but suddenly it wasn’t making any sense.

  “No, I pay the court the half million. All of it. Not the fifty thousand, the full half mil.” Maury pulled his feet down and pulled himself up to the desk. “Look, I keep the fifty no matter what. That’s my fee for incurring the risk. Let’s face it, these guys—my clients—call a spade a spade, they got lousy credit. Hey, are you okay?”

  Jeff heard Maury’s chair move back. It was funny—it felt as though he just closed his eyes a minute, then he’d opened them again. But if his eyes were open, how come he couldn’t see anything? He guessed he was moving his head, trying to scan the room and find a flicker of light.

  The panic was taking over. He had to get out of here. He went to reach for where his crutches were, but missed, and knocked them to the ground, now grabbing wildly at nothing, pushing himself from the chair, falling, falling.

  Over the ringing that filled his head, he heard Maury yelling, “Dorothy! Dorothy, get in here!”

  After Farris left, Hardy had put in what he thought was a pretty good afternoon’s work. He pleaded out three assaults—a purse snatching and two robberies. A couple of dope cases were going to prelim. A teenage gang member had “tagged”—graffitied—six police cars, doing $9,000 worth of damage. Hardy was moving toward the opinion that possession of a can of spray paint ought to be punishable, like carrying a concealed weapon, by mandatory jail time. At four-thirty, he left the office and went down to the Youth Guidance Center, where he talked a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl into giving up the name of her thirty-year-old boyfriend who was letting her take the fall for a little friendly welfare fraud.

  But, like to a hole in a tooth, Hardy kept coming back to Owen and May Shinn.

  The drive back home from the YGC, top down on the Samurai, was over Twin Peaks, down Stanyan Street—and other sorrows—by the Shamrock, then the Aquarium, Golden Gate Park, out Arguello through the Avenues. It gave him enough time to worry it.

  The motive thing was the real problem. If they couldn’t sell it to a jury, they didn’t have capital murder, and Hardy couldn’t think of a rebuttal to his own argument: if May had killed Owen for the money, did it make sense for her to leave it to chance that his body would be found? He thought the answer had to be no. Resonantly, obviously, absolutely no.

  So the strategic issue became whether they could keep Freeman from asking the question. He didn’t see how.

  But more immediately, and this was what occupied him as he ran the red light on 28th, once that initial chink in the motive worked its way around, would the jury start losing faith in May’s guilt altogether?

  He heard the siren and pulled over to the right. It was not yet six o’clock, a glorious night, the warm spell miraculously hanging on. He was surprised when the patrol car pulled in behind him and the cop got out.

  “How you doin’?” Hardy asked.

  The cop nodded. “May I see your license and registration please?”

  Hardy reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He opened it to where he had the D.A.’s badge pinned in across from his driver’s license. He was reaching across into the glove box to get his registration when he felt the cop’s hand on his arm.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir, but you ran a red light back there.”

  Hardy half-turned. He must have. He didn’t remember seeing it. He apologized. Besides, he had no intention of failing the attitude test.

  The cop handed him his wallet. “Eyes on the road, huh.”

  “Gotcha.”

  He waited until the cop was back in his car, then started up again, getting into the traffic with a nice signal, turning right on Geary at his first opportunity.

  Hardy pulled up in front of his house still feeling foolish and a little guilty. It was the first time he’d experienced that particular professional courtesy—getting a break on a ticket—and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

  Rebecca was in her stroller next to Frannie, who was sitting on the front-porch steps, wearing sandals, Dolphinsshorts and a tank top. The sun hit her hair just right, like a burning halo around her.

  “You ought to get prettier,” Hardy said, coming through the gate. “It’s hell coming home to an ugly woman. And try to look a little younger while you’re at it.”

  He was almost to her when she jumped with an animal growl. She hit him high, wrapping her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, kissing him, then biting his ear, hard. He held her, marveling at her tininess, her smell, her fit to him. “Okay, okay, I guess you don’t have to look younger.”

  She clung to him. “Wet willie,” she said.

  Hardy bore up under the torture. “See, you’re making the baby cry.” He took the last step to the porch and made a face at the baby. “It’s all right, Beck, your mother’s just a little bit insane. I’m sure it’s not hereditary.” Rebecca kept crying and Hardy kissed Frannie, then let her down and reached into the stroller. “I’ll carry this neglected child,” he said. “You push the stroller.”

  They walked east on Clement, past the Safeway and the little Russian piroshki houses and Oriental restaurants, the antiques shops, Rebecca now happy in the baby seat, Frannie’s arm through Hardy’s, his coat hung over the stroller’s handles.

  They caught up on everything—Rebecca’s spots mostly gone now; the decision about the second car they were considering buying as soon as the Shamrock profit payment came in, which ought to be when the fiscal year closed this week; Pico’s weight, which led to Frannie’s own weight gain (monitored daily); the Fourth of July picnic this weekend. The pregnancy was going smoothly. Boys’ names. Girls’ names. The ticket Hardy almost got for running a red light.

  They walked as far as Park Presidio—over a mile— before they turned around and started back home. Hardy told Frannie about Pullios and her decision to get an indictment before the grand jury, move the proceedings to Superior Court.

  “Why does she want to do that? What’s the problem with a delay? I thought all trials took forever.”

  Hardy walked a few steps, strolling really, relaxed, squinting into the sun. “This is a hot story. She’s not going to let it cool off.”

  “Jeff Elliot,” Frannie said.

  “Exactly, but we’ve got a real problem.” Hardy briefed her on it, moving on to what had concerned him when he’d gotten pulled over. “The thing is, once you start asking about the motive, you open another can of worms.”

  “If she did it for the money, why did she dump the body? But if she didn’t do it for the money, why didn’t she burn the will or something?”

  “Right.”

  They walked along, pondering it. The sun had gotten behind the buildings. It was not cold, but there was a nip in the shade, and Hardy stopped and tucked his jacket around Rebecca. “Another thing, too,” he said, “although I hate to mention it.”

  “What?”

  “The ring. May’s ring.”

  “What about it?”

  “He was wearing it. Owen was wearing it.”

  “Does that mean something?”

  “I don’t know what it means, but it could mean that he put it on, that he left it on, that they had a relationship, that he wasn’t leaving her. And if that’s the case, and if she wasn’t killing him for the money, bye-bye motive.”

  “That’s a lot of ifs.”

  “True, but they don’t start with an if. He was wearing the ring.”

  “Couldn’t they just have had a fight, got to arguing, the gun was there . . . ?”

  “If that was it, it’s not first-degree murder. It’s definitely not capital murder.”

  Frannie hugged herself closer to Hardy. “I feel sorry for the woman. I’d hate to have you going after me.” />
  “I did go after you.”

  “See?” She beamed at him. “That’s what I mean.”

  25

  There were things about the job Glitsky would never love. One of them was the reality of subpoenas and arrests.

  The way you got people where you wanted them was to go out to their houses early in the a.m. and knock on their doors. Astoundingly, nobody expected to get arrested in the morning. So it was the best time to make an arrest.

  But he’d been out last night on this drive-by again. They had received a tip—probably from a rival gang, but you took your leads where you could—that the shooter’s car, with a cache of weapons in the trunk, was in a warehouse out in the Fillmore.

  So Glitsky and a couple of stake-out officers had gone down there, letting the warm evening dissipate into a bitter, foggy cold as they sat drinking tea and eating pretzels in his unmarked car, and waited for someone to come and open the warehouse. Which had happened.

  And they found the guns. Tonight’s suspect, coked out of his mind and scared to death, had admitted that he’d driven the car, but they’d forced him, man, and he hadn’t done any shooting. That was Tremaine Wilson. He was the shooter. Wilson. This witness, unlike Devon Latrice Wortherington, could actually put Wilson in the car with a gun in his hand, and if he didn’t go sideways, which he probably would when he straightened out, Glitsky might be able to make a case against Wilson.

  So now, four hours of sleep later, the dark not yet completely gone and the fog just as cold as when he’d left it, Glitsky found himself once again in the projects. The path to the door was a cracked cement strip that bisected a littered and well-packed rectangle of earth that might as well have been concrete except for the stalk of a tree that had made it to about one foot before someone whacked it off. Now the bare twig struggling out of the ground, maybe an inch thick, struck Glitsky as an example of what happened to anything that dared to try to grow up here.

  As always, they were going to try to do it neat and quick. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Just in case, though, three uniformed officers had gone to cover the back door of the duplex. Glitsky had two other guys, guns out, behind him on the walkway and another team in the street, out of their car and using it for cover on the not impossible chance that the frameless picture window would suddenly explode in gunfire.

  It seemed a miracle that one of the streetlights still worked. The half-life of a streetlight in any of the projects could be measured in minutes after nightfall before some sharpshooter put it out. In the light from this one it was easy to make out the closed drapes in the front window. The screen door hung open, framed by a riot of graffiti.

  Glitsky looked at his watch. The back entrance should be covered by now. He turned around and gestured at the guys huddled behind the car out in the street. They gave him the thumbs up—the place was, in theory, secured.

  Now there was no fog and no cold and no darkness. There was only his pounding heart and dry mouth—it happened every time—and the door to be knocked on. Three light taps. He had his gun out and heard shuffling inside. The rattle of chains and he was looking at a four-year-old boy, shirt off, feet in his pajama bottoms, rubbing his eyes with sleep.

  “Who’s ’at?”

  A woman’s voice behind him, and the boy backed away, leaving the door open. Glitsky didn’t like the boy between him and his perp. He’d seen guys—strung out on drugs or not—take their own children hostage, their wives, mothers, anybody who happened to be around.

  Glitsky didn’t wait. He had a warrant and Tremaine Wilson was wanted for special-circumstances murder. Tremaine wasn’t going to be getting himself any slick lawyer to bust him out on the technicality of illegal entry. The boy had opened the door—that was going to have to do.

  He pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped between the boy and his mother. “Police,” he said so she’d be clear it wasn’t just another gang hit. “Where’s Tremaine?”

  One of the guys behind him hit the lights and a bare overhead came on. The woman was probably twenty. She had a swollen lower lip, short cowlicked hair; giant frightened eyes. She’d been sleeping in a men’s plaid shirt that didn’t quite make it down to her hips. She made no effort to cover herself below, but stood blinking in the light, separated from her boy by this tall black man with a gun. She made up her mind quickly, pointing down a hallway and moving to clutch her son as soon as Glitsky stepped aside.

  The door to the room was open. The light from the hallway didn’t make it back this far. One of Glitsky’s men had stayed behind with the woman and her child, so Glitsky and his remaining backup moved quickly down the hallway. The sergeant went through the open door, his partner crouched in the dark hall, gun pointed in.

  There might have been a bed, but he couldn’t see it. He flicked on the light—another bare overhead. There it was—the bed—against the other wall, the only furniture besides a Salvation Army dresser. The man stirred in the bed, pulled the thin blanket over him. “C’mon, shit,” he said, “get that light.”

  Glitsky was at the bedside, pulling the sheet all the way down and off the bed, at the same time putting the barrel of his gun against the man’s temple. Wilson, naked except for a pair of red bikini underpants, blinked in the harsh light.

  “Don’t blink any harder, Tremaine,” Glitsky said, “this thing might go off. You’re under arrest.”

  Glitsky’s partner had his cuffs out, was flipping Wilson over, snapping them in place. Glitsky went to the doorway and turned the light on and off, the signal that everything was all right. He heard the cops from outside come to the door. He went out to the front room, where the woman sat on the floor in the corner, holding her son. He lowered himself onto the green vinyl couch, letting his adrenaline subside.

  The domicile looked the same as all the others—no rug, no pictures on the walls, stains here and there, a lingering odor of grease, musk, marijuana. Holes in the drywall.

  Tremaine Wilson, untied shoes and no socks, pants and shirt thrown on, was led out. At least it had been an easy arrest. Small favors.

  Now, nine o’clock, Tremaine booked, Glitsky was at the Marina and he was cold. July 1, and cold again. The past few days of warmth were already a dim memory. He thought maybe he ought to start keeping a log of certain dates, maybe the first of every month. He could see it, year after year, a microcosm of San Francisco’s cute little boutique microclimate: January 1—cold, February 1—cold, March, April, May—cold and windy, June and July—foggy and guess what. August 1—chilly, possibility of fog. September and October—nice, not warm, but not cold. November, December—see January, etc.

  José was out doing something with one of the lunatics who was taking a yacht out this morning onto the choppy Bay. Glitsky stood over a portable electric heater behind the counter, wondering what he was supposed to be doing here.

  When he’d gotten back to his desk from booking, there had been a message to call Pullios. He found out she was taking the Nash murder to the grand jury, top secret, and he should clear his calendar because he—Glitsky—was going to appear tomorrow as a witness before the grand jury and explain that he arrested May Shinn because he was sure she was trying to flee the jurisdiction to avoid her inevitable trial for murder. And by the way, did he think he could take another shot at a few witnesses before tomorrow and see if he could dig up any more evidence?

  Sure, he’d told her, no problem. Always here to help. Except, what witnesses? The case was pretty much characterized by lack of witnesses. The only true interrogation he’d written up was the night guard at the Marina, Tom Waddell, and that, he thought, hadn’t provided squat in the way of convictable testimony.

  But you kept at this long enough, you got a feeling about these things. Some cases were light on eyewitness testimony. Didn’t mean they weren’t any good. Prosecutors were always wanting a little more, a look under one more rock for that fabled smoking gun. Pullios had asked him how he really felt about the case against Shinn, and he told her he
thought it was tight as a frog’s ass— watertight, but not airtight.

  “Airtight would be better,” she said.

  So here he was. And here was José, the morning guard, back from the pontoons, going straight to the coffee machine. Normally tea was Glitsky’s drink, but on less than four hours’ sleep he thought a little java wouldn’t hurt him.

  This was going to be another formal interview, another report, and he got José comfortable, sitting at his desk while he loaded a fresh tape into his recorder.

  “Three, two, one,” he said. He stopped, smiled, sipped at his coffee, and listened to it play back. “Okay . . .”

  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 José Ochorio, Hispanic male, 2/24/67. This interview is pursuant to an investigation of case number 921065882. Today’s date is July 1, 1992, Wednesday, at 9:20 a.m.

  Q: You have said that when you arrived at work a week ago Saturday, June 20, the Eloise had already gone out.

  A: Sí.

  Q: Had it been out the day before?

  A: No. When I leave the day before, it’s at its place at the end of Two out there. Where it is now.

  Q: And what time did you leave the day before?

  A: I don’t know. Sometime normal. Two, three o’clock, but the boat was there.

  Q: And it was back on Sunday morning when you came in?

  A: Sí.

  Q: Do you get any days off here?

  A: Sure. It’s a good place. I get Monday and Tuesday, but we can switch around. Long as it’s covered.

  Q: But no one switched on the morning in question?

  A: No.

  Q: All right, José. [Pause]

  During which Glitsky drank some coffee and tried to find another line of questioning.