Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  Judge Fowler plans to spend the next few weeks in Hawaii and then resume his position as a partner in the firm of Strand, Worke & Luzinski.

  Hardy sat across from Jeff Elliot’s desk in the Chronicle Building. “What do you mean Celine didn’t do it? What about everything I found out in Santa Cruz?”

  “Speaking of which, I trust you had a good time,” Hardy said. “You should have, for four hundred dollars. What costs four hundred dollars in Santa Cruz?”

  Elliot said, straight-faced, “I think we rode the Roller Coaster a hundred and forty times each. But listen, getting back to this thing, my story—”

  Hardy stopped him. “All you found out was she might not have been there, right?”

  Elliot nodded.

  “You got anything anywhere that puts her on the boat?”

  “No.”

  “Ask yourself why this sounds familiar.” Hardy hated to take Jeff’s story away, but he wasn’t in the prosecution business anymore. “Look, Jeff, you can try to get some police action on this, but they won’t thank you for it. I’ve tried, I know. Owen Nash gives everybody downtown a bad headache. You got any reason why you think Celine might have done it, other than I told you she might have?”

  Jeff shrugged. “Somebody lies about their alibi—”

  “Everybody has lied about their alibi in this case. Or looked like they have.” He put a hand on Jeff’s shoulder. “You’re welcome to it, Jeff, but it’s a dry well. It’s just another maybe.”

  Elliot turned to his computer, squinted at something, came back to Hardy. “What made you change your mind? I got the impression you honestly thought she’d done it.”

  Hardy crossed a leg over another one. “That was before my client was cleared, Jeff. If I’d needed to find out who killed Nash to get Fowler off, I suppose I would have kept on it. But now . . . Andy didn’t do it. That was my main interest.”

  “You’re not curious?”

  Hardy got cryptic. “No. I know everything I need to.”

  “Keeping life simple, right?”

  Hardy nodded. “Something like that.”

  On December 21, Hardy stood holding Rebecca in one arm and a package in the other at the Clement Street post office. With the Christmas rush, he had waited for almost twenty minutes by the time he got to the window.

  The clerk took the package, a box about two-by-three inches. “No way,” he said.

  “No way what?” Hardy asked.

  “Christmas, man. There’s no way.” The clerk looked at the address. “I were you, I’d just deliver it. It’s only half a mile, if that. Be there in fifteen minutes. Nice houses up there. I love it when it’s lit up.”

  “It’s not a Christmas present,” Hardy said, “it doesn’t have to get there any time.”

  “Probably won’t make it till New Year’s.”

  “That’s okay. It doesn’t matter.”

  The clerk shook the box. “It’s not fragile, is it? Sounds like keys or something.”

  “That’s what it is,” Hardy said. “Somebody lost some keys.”

  He read about it on the day his son, Vincent, was born. He was still in St. Mary’s Hospital, on the top of the world. He had spent the night coaching Frannie, breathing and yelling and pushing with her until nearly dawn when the head had come through and then, five minutes later, the doctor told them they had a boy.

  Frannie had pulled Hardy into the bed with her and the doctor laid the baby between them. The two of them looked in wonder at the life they’d produced. Vincent cuddled into both of them.

  That afternoon Uncle Moses brought Rebecca by. He also brought the day’s newspaper. After Moses had gone, Frannie had gone to sleep with Rebecca on the bed. Hardy started reading the Chronicle. On page 3, Jeff Elliot had written a brief story outlining the stabbing death of Celine Nash, “the daughter of the late financier Owen Nash,” at a rough trade hotel in the Tenderloin District. There were no suspects yet in connection with the slaying and it was presumed that the victim, who had a past history of occasional prostitution, had simply gotten unlucky with a john.

  Hardy closed the paper. Out the window of the hospital room, the day was fading into an overcast dusk.

  A while later, they brought Vincent in for feeding. Hardy gave Frannie a distracted smile, then looked back out at the falling night.

  “Are you all right?” Frannie was nursing the baby, studying him. “What is it?”

  Hardy shook himself away from his thoughts. He got up from his chair and came over to her bed. Lifting the sleeping Beck onto him, squeezing in next to Frannie, he said, “Nothing. Just the world out there, I guess.”

  “You know what,” she said. “That’s not the world. The world is on this bed right now.”

  Frannie laced her fingers in his hand. Hardy felt his daughter stir against him and his son made some contented sounds. He tried to blink the room back into focus, but it didn’t work, so he brought his hand up to his eyes.

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  “Mr. Hardy?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Mr. Hardy, this is Oscar Thomasino.”

  “Your Honor, how are you?”

  “Fine, thanks. Am I bothering you at an inopportune time?”

  “No, but whatever, it’s no bother. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, admittedly this is a little unusual, but you and I have known each other for a long time, and I wondered if I could presume slightly upon our professional relationship.”

  This was unusual, if not to say unprecedented, but Hardy nevertheless kept his tone neutral. “Certainly, Your Honor. Anything I can do, if it’s within my power.” A Superior Court judge asking an attorney for a favor was a rare enough opportunity, and Hardy wasn’t going to let it pass him by.

  “Well, I’m sure it is,” Thomasino said. “Did you know Charles Bowen—Charlie?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’d remember him. Flashy dresser, bright red hair, big beard.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell. He a lawyer?”

  “Yes—he was, anyway. He disappeared six months ago.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “If I knew that, he wouldn’t be disappeared, would he? He’d be someplace.”

  “Everybody’s someplace, Your Honor. It’s one of the two main rules. Everybody loves somebody sometime, and you’ve got to be someplace.”

  During the short pause that ensued, Hardy came to realize that he’d overstepped. His tendency to crack wise was going to be the end of him yet. But Thomasino eventually recovered to some extent, even reverting to his own stab at not-quite-cozy informality. “Thanks, Diz,” he said. “I’ll try to keep those in mind. Meanwhile, Charlie Bowen.”

  “Okay.”

  “Yes, well . . . the point is that he was a sole practitioner. No firm, no partners, but a reasonably robust caseload.”

  “Good for him.”

  “True, but his disappearance hasn’t been good for the court. Or for his wife and daughter either, to tell you the truth. She’s hired her own lawyer to file a presumption of death claim, which between you and me has very little chance of getting recognized, in spite of the fact that it would be convenient for the court.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because when sole practitioners die and go to heaven, the bar inherits the caseload and has to dispose of it.”

  “What if they don’t go to heaven?”

  “Most lawyers argue themselves in, don’t you think? I know you would.”

  “Thanks, I think. Your Honor.”

  “Anyway, I know it’s just housecleaning, but Bowen had a ton of work outstanding, and that work needs to get done. And while we’re not going to issue any presumption of death until he’s been gone a lot longer, last month Marian Braun”—another of the city’s Superior Court judges—“ruled that his disappearance rendered him legally incompetent, a
nd just yesterday the State Bar suspended his ticket at the court’s request.”

  “So now they’ve got to farm out his cases. If he hadn’t returned my calls for six months and I was his client, I would have fired him by now.”

  “I’m sure some of his clients may have done just that, but not all by a long shot.” Thomasino sighed. “Charlie was a friend of mine. His wife’s going to need whatever he still has coming from his cases. I’d like to be sure that the bar puts those cases in the hands of somebody I know will do the right thing by her. Anyway, bottom line is that I ran into Wes Farrell today at lunch.” This was one of Hardy’s partners. “He said things at your place were a little slow. The good news is that you can probably count on some percentage of Mr. Bowen’s clients hooking up with your firm. Not that any of ’em will make you rich.”

  Reading between the lines, Hardy knew what the judge was saying—that this was grunt administrative work. The court probably had appointed the majority of Charlie’s clients, indigents up for petty crimes and misdemeanors. Nevertheless, the court would pay for every hour Hardy’s associates spent on the criminal cases, and if the civil cases made any money, the firm could expect reasonable compensation. And it was, again, an opportunityto do a small good deed for a judge, and that was never a bad idea.

  “You could probably get them all assigned out or closed in the next couple of months.”

  “I’m sold, Your Honor. I’d be happy to help you out.”

  “Thanks, Diz. I appreciate it. I know it’s not very sexy. I’ll have it all delivered to your office within the week.”

  “How much stuff is it?”

  Thomasino paused. “About sixty boxes.” In other words, a lot. “But here’s the silver lining. It’s only half as much as it appears, since half the boxes are one client.”

  “Tell me it’s Microsoft.”

  A soft chuckle. “No such luck. It’s Evan Scholler.”

  Hardy hesitated for an instant. “Why is that name familiar?”

  “Because you’ve read all about it. The two guys who’d been over in Iraq together?”

  “Ah, it comes flooding back,” Hardy said. “They had the same girlfriend or something, too, didn’t they?”

  “I believe so. There’s a bunch of juicy stuff, but you’ll find that out soon enough, I guess. But in any event, Diz, I really appreciate you doing this.”

  “I live to serve the court, Your Honor.”

  “You’re already up on points, Counselor. Don’t lay it on too thick. Have a nice night.”

  Hardy hung up and stood for a moment, musing. The judge’s line played back in his mind: “There’s a bunch of juicy stuff” in the Scholler case. Hardy thought he could use some juicy stuff in his life about now. If his memory served, and it always did, Scholler’s situation was even more compelling than the bare bones of the murder case because of its genesis in chaos and violence.

  In Iraq.

  A burnt-orange sun kissed the horizon to the west as twenty-six-year-old Second Lieutenant Evan Scholler led his three-pack of converted gun truck support Humvees through the gates of the Allstrong compound in the middle of an area surrounded by palm trees, canals, and green farmland. The landscape here was nothing like the sandy, flat, brown terrain that Evan had grown used to since he’d arrived in Kuwait. The enclosure was about the size of three football fields, protected, like every other “safe” area, by Bremer walls—twelve-foot-tall concrete barriers topped with concertina wiring. Ahead of him squatted three double-wide motor-home trailers that Allstrong Security, an American contracting company, had provided for its local employees.

  Pulling up to the central temporary building, over which flew an American flag, Evan stepped out of his car onto the gravel that extended as far as he could see in all directions. A fit-looking American military type stood in the open doorway and now came down the three steps, his hand extended. Evan snapped a salute and the man laughed.

  “You don’t need to salute me, Lieutenant,” he said. “Jack Allstrong. Welcome to BIAP. You must be Scholler.”

  “Yes, sir. If you’re expecting me, that’s a nice change of pace.”

  “Gotten the runaround, have you?”

  “A little bit. I’ve got eight men here with me, and, Colonel . . . I’m sorry, the commander here?”

  “Calliston.”

  “That’s it. He wasn’t expecting us. Calliston said you had some beds we could use.”

  “Yeah, he called. But all we’ve got are cots, really.”

  “We’ve got our own on board,” Evan said. “We’re okay with cots.”

  Allstrong’s face showed something like sympathy. “You all been on the road awhile?”

  “Three days driving up from Kuwait with a Halliburton convoy, four days wandering around between here and Baghdad, watching out for looters and getting passed off around the brass. Now here we are. If you don’t mind, sir, none of my men have seen a bed or a regular meal or a shower since we landed. You mind if we get ’em settled in first?”

  Allstrong squinted through the wind at Evan, then looked over to the small line of Humvees, with M-60 Vietnam-era machine guns mounted on their roofs, exhausted-looking and dirty men standing behind them. Coming back to Evan, he nodded and pointed to the trailer on his right. “Bring ’em on up and park over there. It’s dorm-style. Find an empty spot and claim it. Showers are all yours. Dinner’s at eighteen hundred hours, forty minutes from now. Think your men can make it?”

  Evan tamped down a smile. “Nobody better stand in their way, sir.”

  “Nobody’s gonna.” Allstrong cocked his head. “Well, get ’em started, then.”