Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  This was not ethical either, and Hardy wasn’t sure he could do it. The file was the public record. Tampering with it, suppressing potential evidence—even if its relevance hadn’t been demonstrated—was a felony. Still, he wasn’t telling Andy he’d take the earlier phone records out, not in so many words. And if he didn’t say it explicitly,he didn’t say it at all. That was this game, and Andy Fowler played it, too.

  Hardy, with the problem of where to draw the line between personal loyalty and the public trust, knew he had to get Fowler off the case and he didn’t want to blow the whistle on him. If a white lie could accomplish both results he thought it might be worth telling. He also thought it might not be. How many venial sins make a mortal sin? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

  “Dismas, I’m only sixty-two, I’m not ready to retire—”

  “You know, Andy, you’ve got to cut your losses, and you’re going to have ’em. At least you’ll still have your reputation. Maybe you’ll get a call to the federal bench.”

  They both got a wry smile at that. They were making last call, the lights coming up, the music going down.

  Hardy had to push it. “I’ve got to know by the morning, Andy. I’m real sorry.”

  Fowler patted his shoulder. “I’m sorry I put you through this, Dismas, although I’m glad it was you who found out. Anybody else . . .”

  “Andy, we’ve been friends a long time, but in this case I am anybody else. I’m just giving you one day to correct an oversight. But it’s got to get corrected, one way or the other. I want to be clear on that.”

  The judge was relaxed again, the situation worked out. “It’s clear, Diz. It’s clear. Don’t you worry.”

  34

  David Freeman had a tradition he’d carried over from his days in law school. Whenever he scored what he considered a clear-cut victory he would celebrate it immediately. His theory was that you never knew when or if you’d get another one, and you’d better savor every drop of satisfaction from the one in hand before it was swept away into the river of your past.

  So Tuesday night, after he’d arranged to have the boys and their father meet him at one-thirty the next day for a press conference in his office, he’d called a cab and taken it back to the Fairmont.

  After booking a room there he took the outside elevator to the Crown Room and ordered a bottle of Paradis cognac, which went by the snifter at $12.50. The bottle set him back $350 but he could save it and take it home, a trophy for the job well done. He arrived at the Crown Room just after ten and stayed until it closed at two, putting about a six-inch dent in the bottle, sitting at one of the north-facing windows, watching his city sparkle beneath him, a Nob in his own castle.

  Which explained why he wasn’t up anywhere near nine-thirty. If he had been, if he’d somehow gotten to Chris Locke and let him know that the May Shinn case couldn’t go to trial, that her alibi was rock solid, then he might have saved Superior Court Judge Andrew Bryan Fowler the trouble of announcing his early retirement, effective September 1.

  In a computerized age, Jeff Elliot considered this manual search for title to a piece of property the most unnecessarily tedious job he’d ever done. Yesterday, after only two hours at it, his blurred vision had forced him to give it up.

  Now, three hours into it again, not yet noon, he was having second thoughts, wondering if it could really matter. He’d thought of all sorts of plausible reasons to talk himself out of the search, not the least of which was that May Shinn herself might easily have accumulated enough for a down payment on $500,000 worth of real estate.

  He remembered stories in Playboy and Penthouse when he’d been in college about coeds who’d turned to hooking and pulled in $10,000 a month. Even allowing for the hyperbole of the publications, he knew it was possible for a high-class call girl to make $200 a night, plus all of her normal living expenses. So a smart one could save $4,000 a month, $50,000 a year. A little administrative acumen could provide a shelter for tax purposes—interior design, import/export, licensed sexual therapist.

  He’d seen May Shinn in court in her tailored suit. It required no leap of faith to think she had the collateral for her own bail—she’d had the cash to pay Maury, after all. Why not the rest of it?

  But—what if she didn’t?

  And, as always, it was that possibility that pulled him along. The chance that under the obvious and the plausible, there might lurk the secret, the hidden, the dangerous—the story.

  The title clerks could have been more helpful. But they were busy with their own work, with Realtors they saw more often. He was a nosy crippled guy who didn’t even know what to ask for. So, like good bureaucrats everywhere, the clerks volunteered nothing.

  But the learning curve was kicking in. Even if you knew the city—and Jeff wasn’t yet up to speed even there—the search took some getting used to. There were huge grid books that divided the land into areas that seemed to bear little relation to current neighborhoods. At first glance, street names were useless in determining which grid book—out of more than a hundred—held your property. But he felt he was closing in.

  The collateral was a six-unit apartment building three blocks up Powell from Washington Square. After his frustrating search of records the day before, Jeff had come up with the idea that he could just stop by the place and ask one of the tenants who owned the building, and he and Dorothy had tried that.

  The one person who’d been home—a mime artist who was preparing to go out and work the streets, whiteface and all—told them she sent her rent checks to a management company.

  Jeff thought it unlikely that he’d befriend another secretary who would divulge private records to him, and decided that if he wanted the story he’d have to work it, like always.

  He estimated the books weighed fifteen pounds each. Up close, they smelled like wet newspaper. He had to wait in line, return his previous request, using only one crutch, holding the title book in his other hand. He’d gone through twenty-six books so far, but the closest plot in the last book ended a couple of blocks north of his site.

  Why couldn’t you just type an address into a computer and push a button? He’d never figure it out.

  Jane was furious. “You didn’t have to tell anybody! Daddy’s whole life is the bench. How could you do that to him?”

  It was close to one o’clock. Jane had had her own early lunch with her father and he’d told her all about it. Hardy wasn’t too thrilled to learn that the judge had told his daughter, since he himself had elected to treat the entire sensitive subject on a need-to-know basis, hoping no one would.

  Frannie hadn’t liked it either. “You can’t tell me? What do you mean, you can’t tell me? I’m your wife. We tell each other things, remember?”

  “I can tell you it has nothing to do with us.”

  “You go out in the middle of the night and stay out until God knows when and I don’t even get a hint of an explanation?”

  “Frannie, no. It doesn’t have to do with us. It’s confidential, attorney-client—”

  “Well, la di da. And whose attorney are you? I thought you worked for the city.” She had him there, but he had made his decision. He had all sorts of conflicting loyalties. “This job is changing you,” she said.

  Maybe. Life changed people, big deal, live with it. But he wasn’t stupid enough to say that. Instead he’d gone off to work with the stomachache he got every time they fought.

  And now Andy Fowler had told his daughter, or she’d wheedled it out of him. But either way, here was another person—and not the soul of discretion—who knew.

  “I didn’t do anything to him, Jane. If anything, he did it to himself.”

  “You didn’t have to tell anybody!”

  “I didn’t tell anybody. I haven’t told anybody, at least not yet. I hope I won’t have to.”

  “Have to? My, aren’t we getting sanctimonious here.”

  Hardy’s door was open. He told Jane to hang on and he got up to close it. Pullios was c
oming down the hallway, deep in conference with Chris Locke. His stomach tightened further and he shut the door before they saw him.

  Back at the phone, he asked Jane if Big Chuck—he’d taken to thinking of her new boyfriend as Big Chuck—if Big Chuck had been there, too, when Andy had told her.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I think it means I don’t have to take any abuse from you, so leave me alone.”

  He hung up.

  There were lots of ways to do it, and Freeman naturally chose the most flamboyant. Well, perhaps not altogether naturally. The inclination to do things with flair, while meshing well with her personality, had been drummed out of him in law school, but over the years of private practice he had put it back in.

  In the first years of his practice he would have taken evidence he had dug up (such as the Strauss boys’ corroborationof May’s alibi) and brought it into the D.A.’s office, where it would be discussed and some decision would be made about whether it eliminated the need for a trial.

  But over the long run he had found that this cooperative attitude did little for him. Prosecutors often disbelieved what he brought them, doubted its truth or relevance, impugning his motives while they were at it. He had found that if he did it only sparingly, when his findings were unambiguous and, as in this case, critical, a public airing of evidence had a way of getting more action out of the D.A. than any attempt at amity, goodwill and cooperation. District attorneys, he had found, were acutely sensitive to public perception—more so, often, than to justice.

  A news conference made hairs stand up in the Hall, made young lawyers (and even a few old ones) fear you— a force who dared go outside the system if he had to. They’d call him a loose cannon, and watch out, guys. Loose cannons go boom.

  He stood now in the lobby of his office, surrounded by a totally unnecessary phalanx of some of his associates he’d sent home earlier to put on their best threads. He himself was as rumpled as usual in an old brown tweed and scuffed wing tips.

  In front of him was a makeshift podium with several microphones. Opposite the podium, facing him, stood a knot of some fifteen reporters, which was a pretty fair showing, considering the short lead time he’d given them. There were three sound trucks double-parked in the street outside, which meant he’d be on television. KGO radio was represented—so he’d get some sound bites on the most popular talk station.

  May was a good sport about it. He told her it was time to collect on his advertising fee. He’d come to admire her quite a bit, especially after finding out she had probably been telling him the truth the whole time. Now she was standing next to him, not yet daring to smile, flawlessly turned out as usual.

  His fingers did a little tap dance over the microphones and he smiled. Gosh, he wasn’t used to all of this, regular old working stiff that he was. Were these things on? He spoke extemporaneously. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to thank you all for coming here today and I won’t take much of your very valuable time. As you know, a couple of weeks ago Owen Nash, one of the giants of American business, was felled by a gunshot. No one would deny that Mr. Nash was a powerful and fascinating man.”

  He glanced at May Shinn and got another bonus. At the mention of Nash’s name, a tear had sprung from her eyes and was rolling down her cheek. Don’t wipe it, he thought to himself. A couple of bulbs flashed.

  Freeman took her hand, gave it a squeeze. “In cases like this, there seems to be a natural inclination to fasten guilt on somebody, to lay the blame somewhere. Who can say why? It could be it satisfies society’s need for order. Maybe our outrage is so great we crave any action that seems to redress the great wrong that murder represents.

  “How many of us, in our heart of hearts, blame Jack Ruby for killing Lee Harvey Oswald? No, when the king falls, the king’s killer must, in turn, be killed. Of course, I’m not comparing Owen Nash to our martyred president. Like Dan Quayle, Owen Nash was no Jack Kennedy.”

  He waited for the laughter, stole a glance at May and squeezed her hand again. “But Owen Nash was, in his own way, a titan. And there was that same rush to judgment.

  “Unfortunately, in this case, that rush centered upon the person who now stands here on my right, May Shinn, a natural American citizen, a woman with no criminal record of any kind, a woman whose sole fault, if it is one, was to become involved with, to fall in love with, Owen Nash.

  “In a perfect world the district attorney would never have even condoned the kind of public vigilantism that has been the earmark of this case from the beginning. It is, however, a sad fact that this is not a perfect world and that our own district attorney’s office was from the beginning in the forefront of the racist witchhunt that brought this young woman to the dock without a shred of physical evidence that could implicate her in this horrible deed.”

  He stopped, enjoying a minute of eye contact with the journalists and reporters. He had them.

  “From the beginning, Ms. Shinn has contended that on the day Owen Nash was brutally murdered she stayed home, waiting for his return. She did not use the telephone. She did not go out to buy a newspaper. She did not play the piano or hammer nails in her wall or sing in the shower. I submit to you all that this is not criminal behavior.

  “And yet, ladies and gentlemen, and let me make this very clear, this was the sum total of the people’s case against May Shinn. That she did nothing to make anyone notice she was home! Imagine that! Time was when that would have been the mark of a good citizen, an ideal neighbor. But because she is of Japanese descent, because she dared have a relationship with a powerful man”—he lowered his voice—“because she was, in fact, a woman powerless to defend herself against the might of the state, she was the perfect scapegoat. She spent a quiet day at home and she is suspected, indeed, accused, of murder.

  “I’d like now to introduce you to two young men— Nick and Alex Strauss—who happen to live directly across the street from Ms. Shinn’s apartment.”

  He nodded to one of his associates, who went into the adjoining room and brought out the two boys and their father.

  “If the district attorney had been interested in the truth, he too could have found the Strauss boys. They got back from a trip to Europe on June twentieth, the day Owen Nash was killed. You’ll never guess what they saw.”

  35

  He was getting a Diet Coke in the lounge, when one of the guys two doors down, Constantino, stuck his head in.

  “Hardy, you better get to Drysdale’s,” he said.

  It was five minutes to three. Drysdale had gotten a tip from one of his connections at KRON, and now Pullios, Chris Locke himself and a third of the rest of the staff were gathered in front of the television set. Hardy squeezed himself into the doorway, reminded of other gatherings like this—the day Dan White had killed Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone at City Hall, the Reagan assassination attempt. He wondered who’d been shot.

  Somebody called out. “Okay, okay, it’s on, turn it up.” The room went quiet, except for the anchor’s voice, talking about an exceptional development in the Owen Nash murder case, and in a minute there was David Freeman on the screen in front of a bunch of microphones, May Shinn beside him.

  “He’s paying those kids, or the father. It’s a setup.” Pullios didn’t believe it, or she was pretending she didn’t believe it.

  “Two kids?” Drysdale shook his head. “What about the naked part? He wouldn’t have made that up.”

  Locke was silent, standing by the window, looking out.

  “It is for sure going to play,” Hardy said.

  Everyone else had gone. Ironically, the room seemed smaller with only four of them in it.

  “How could they be sure it was the same day?” Pullios asked.

  Drysdale picked up his baseballs and began to juggle. “Would you please not do that!” The exasperation of Elizabeth Pullios. Hardy didn’t mind seeing it, thought she’d earned it. It was, after all, her case.

  “Sorry,” Drysdale said. He caught the
balls and palmed them all in one hand. “I think they covered that pretty well. It was the day they came back from Europe, they’d just gotten off the plane. It’s pretty solid documentation.”

  “Maybe they’re just plain lying. He’s paying them—”

  “Pretty risky. Cross-exam would kill them and Freeman knows it.”

  “I want to interview them.”

  “I would think so,” said Drysdale.

  She stood flat-footed in front of his desk. She kept looking over at Locke’s back, but he wasn’t turning around. Freeman’s hammering of Christopher Locke wasn’t lost on any of them. Locke was the district attorney, they weren’t. So far as the public was concerned, Christopher Locke—personally—had screwed this one up. He, a black man, was a racist. He had picked on a woman. An ethnic. It was a disaster.

  “Goddamn it!” Pullios said.

  Drysdale nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  When Jeff Elliot discovered at the title office that the owner of the collateralized apartment was Superior Court Judge Andrew Fowler, he was pretty sure he had hit the jackpot.

  Then, finding out he’d missed Freeman’s press conference—“Why didn’t somebody call me?”—he saw it all slip away.

  Finally, hearing the news about Fowler’s retirement, he knew he had himself the story of his career. There was only one person who held in his hand all the elements to this thing, and he was it.

  To Glitsky it meant something else entirely—he’d arrested the wrong person, and they still had a live homicide. He was in the office of his lieutenant, Frank Batiste, after five, chewing on the ice that was left in his cup.

  Though one outranked the other, the two men had come up together and knew that politics outside of either of their control had dictated Bastiste’s promotion—they still viewed themselves more as partners than anything else.