by The Hearing
It was called civilization.
3
Sharron Pratt, the district attorney of the city and county of San Francisco, sipped a preprandial newfangled cocktail concocted from gin and chocolate liqueur and served in a tall blue martini glass. Perched on a high stool at one of the financial district’s power restaurants, Sharron cut an elegant figure in her tailored blue suit. She wore her hair shoulder length and made no effort to hide the gray that had once lightly peppered and now dominated it. Lightly made up—a touch of mascara and a subtle shade of lip gloss—she was very easy to look at. Rimless bifocal eyeglasses added a few years to her true age of forty-four, but behind them, green-flecked eyes sparkled youthfully. Her wide mouth animated her face, the plane of her cheeks was well defined, her skin smooth. Even with the added gray and the no-nonsense glasses, she was a woman who’d come into herself as she’d aged, and was now far more handsome than she’d been a decade before.
But internally, she suffered from a great discontent. Since the upset victory resulting in her election three years before, Sharron Pratt had suffered a steady decline in popularity. Now, with her chance for reelection coming up in November, she had eight months to recoup the eleven points which the latest poll told her she had lost.
“I don’t understand how this has happened, Gabe. I really don’t.”
Gabriel Torrey, her chief assistant D.A. and political mentor, was methodically breaking apart the pistachios from the bowl on the bar, gathering the nuts onto his napkin. When he’d accumulated somewhere between eight and a dozen, he would pop them into his mouth, washing them down with nonalcoholic beer.
Torrey had no trouble understanding what had happened to Sharron Pratt’s fans. Conveying it to her was the difficult part.
He shrugged, cracked a nut, keeping a casual tone. “Crime’s up, Sharron. Convictions are down. That’s the short answer. People are tired of it.”
“I’m tired of it, too, Gabe.” Pratt leaned forward on her stool, moved a hand onto his sleeve. “But the damn police are so hostile and we can’t seem to get any coverage . . . what?”
Torrey was shaking his head. “People are impatient with the excuses, too, Sharron. It’s been three years. People are thinking that if you haven’t been able to fix things in that time, you’re not going to.” He’d only cracked two shells, but he threw the nuts into his mouth early. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news here, but the agenda you got elected on last time just hasn’t played in the real world.”
“It would, though. If everyone would just get behind it.”
Torrey knew he had to answer with a great deal of care. This woman might be his bedmate at widely spaced intervals when the stars were aligned just right, but every day she was, after all, his boss. Traditionally she did not warm to philosophical argument.
She’d worked the legal trenches in San Francisco for years—social worker, public defender, lawyer for various civil rights coalitions—and she knew what played in this town. Her election had confirmed that the people were behind her. They were ready for a change. No more white guys prosecuting minorities. It was going to be a new age.
She had won by, among other things, promising to do all she could to stop police brutality. Stop prosecuting victimless crimes. Don’t charge petty drug users or prostitutes. Institute counseling and rehab programs for people whose emotional and substance problems caused them to break the law.
Her administration was going to be known not for enforcing outmoded laws but for doing what was right. And Sharron Pratt always knew, without doubt, what that was—no matter what, she was on the side of the angels.
But if Torrey wanted to get Sharron elected again, he was going to have to get her to bend, except Torrey knew—to borrow from an old song—that Pratt was an oak, not a willow. She did not bend.
Maybe, though, he could get her to acknowledge that a private moral position did not have to be reflected absolutely in the political arena. Maybe there could be a gray area, although gray areas, too, God knew (or at least Torrey did), were not Pratt’s long suit. “I don’t know,” Torrey began again. “Maybe people didn’t realize how the results of your—our—programs would affect them.”
Pratt’s nostrils flared and her vibrant eyes flashed. “What do you mean by that, Gabe?”
“Well, let’s take the homeless, for example. Now, being homeless is not a crime in itself.”
“Not a crime at all.” Pratt employed a crisp school-marmish correction almost as a verbal tic.
But Torrey was used to her, and her response didn’t slow him down. “And no one’s saying it is. But you’ll recall one of your campaign issues was that we treat the homeless with respect, and that seemed to strike a positive chord with the voters.”
“Absolutely, as well it should.”
Also, Torrey was thinking, remove the word “should” from her conversation and his boss would become functionally mute. “Yes, well, in practice you have to admit the policy caused some problems.”
This, Torrey knew, was a whopper of an understatement. After Pratt had been swept to power on a tide of benevolent humanity, she formed a coalition with the mayor and several supervisors and, to a great deal of positive press, announced to the country that under this administration, San Francisco would be a haven for the homeless. No longer would the police hassle the poor and downtrodden. There would be no more rousting. There would be city-funded programs for free meals. Armies of volunteers would move out from the soup kitchen base and take sandwiches to the hungry where they lived.
In short order, this utopian policy resulted in a mass migration of many of the nation’s chronically unemployed to the City by the Bay. Within months, camps of vagrants, drunks, the psychologically impaired and drug addicts had essentially taken over Golden Gate Park, Dolores Park, any number of neighborhood green areas. The downtown streets became gauntlets of panhandlers, drunks in doorways, public urinators. And then, as the worst became bolder, polite requests for spare change became belligerent demands and gave way to intimidations, purse snatchings, shakedowns and muggings.
“But those weren’t the homeless we were trying to help,” Sharron said. “They were the criminal element, that’s all. People needed to see that. We just need to educate them.”
Torrey was shaking his head. “No, Sharron. They’ll never see it. They think you let the bums in. You ruined the tourist industry.”
Pratt straightened her back and lifted her martini glass to her lips. She sipped contemplatively. “Is it too late?”
“Let me ask you one, Sharron. Are you sure you want to keep doing this? That you want to run again?”
“That’s two.” She smiled halfheartedly, lightly touched Torrey’s arm again. “Do I want to keep doing this?” she repeated. “We’ve done a lot of good, Gabe, haven’t we?”
Again, Torrey crafted a careful response. “I think we’ve changed the agenda in a positive way, Sharron. People are thinking about the office—the district attorney—in a way they never had before, now more as a force for social, maybe even moral, leadership. And all that’s to the good.”
“But . . .”
Torrey popped a couple of nuts. “But the fact remains that most of the electorate seems to have returned to the theory that the main role of the district attorney is to prosecute people who break the laws. And that’s never been your forte. You want to help people. That’s always been what’s driven you. Which is why I ask if you want to keep doing this.”
She sighed, considering. “It’s a bully pulpit, Gabe. We’re way ahead of the curve in our thinking. We knew that going in. We can’t just keep building more prisons and throwing more people into them. We’ve got to—”
Torrey put his hand on Pratt’s arm, stopping her. They had to educate the masses, and the criminals, and the victims, and do counseling, and rehab, and yada, yada, yada. At some point, before he’d come to work full-time in the Hall of Justice and become immersed in the stupidly hopeless march of crime through the system, he�
�d even believed a good portion of it. But that day was in the past.
“Let’s keep this discussion on point,” he said a little more firmly than he’d planned. But before his boss could react negatively, he pressed on. “We’ve tried to raise the moral bar, Sharron. We’ve done the right thing time and time again. But the polls are telling us that the people aren’t getting the message, or it’s not the one they want. Now the question is, do you want to go ahead? And if you do, I really think the wise move would be to consider”—he paused—“refining your position slightly.”
Her mouth twisted in distaste. “No.”
He almost said, “Well, that was a delightful exchange of ideas.” But the words that came out were, “No what? You don’t want to go ahead?”
“No. I don’t want to quit. I’ve worked hard for this position, for the people’s trust. I am the absolutely best person for district attorney. And let’s not forget that I’m running the office the way it should be run.”
Torrey brought a hand to his mouth to hide the grimace. That old “should” again. Pratt’s vision was at least entirely, self-righteously consistent, he thought: never mind the way things actually were. Pratt had a vision of a better world, and the people who didn’t share it were stupid, damned, ignorant, venal, criminal, clueless or all of the above. Therefore, they didn’t count. But her adviser had to try to get Pratt at least to realize that their votes did. “Okay,” he said. “Then maybe it’s just a question of perception.”
Pratt’s bright eyes sparked. She liked this direction. “Of what?”
“That you’re soft on crime.”
The spark turned dark. “That’s rubbish. I hate crime. Why do you think I ran for the job in the first place? It’s criminals—the people—that I don’t hate. I try to understand them, see what happened, how they got—”
He brought some more pressure to her forearm. “Sharron. Perception, okay?”
A show of reluctance, then she nodded. “Go on.”
“The killing of Elaine Wager by this vagrant.”
“That is so horrible. I loved Elaine, Gabe.”
“Everybody loved Elaine, Sharron. That’s my point. Here’s a much-loved, well-known community figure, daughter of a popular ex-senator, and African-American to boot. She is brutally murdered by a homeless white man for a few coins in her purse. Are you seeing where I’m going with this?”
To his satisfied surprise, he saw that his idea had clicked with Sharron.
“And one other thing,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to try the case myself.”
This did bring a clearly visible reaction, almost a start. “But I need . . .” She slowed herself down. “Why would you want to do that, Gabe?”
Torrey had stopped chewing his nuts. He put down his glass, met Sharron’s eyes. “When she first came up . . .”
“This is Elaine?”
He nodded. “When Chris Locke was D.A.”
Her mouth tightened. In private, Sharron referred to Locke’s administration as “the Neanderthal years.” Since her own election, she had purged the office of all but a very few of Locke’s old prosecutors, and it was no secret that this was part of the reason that now her office couldn’t seem to convict anyone. She’d had to let them go for their political incorrectness, to say nothing of the general culture of incorrigibility. Locke had been black but he’d hired, in Pratt’s view, far too many white males who’d adopted a macho “win at all costs” mentality that had infected the office—getting convictions, sure, but at what cost?
Sharron’s own motto was: “There’s more to being a prosecutor than getting convictions.” To which the Locke crowd tended to respond, “Oh yeah? Like what?”
So any mention of Chris Locke and his administration put Sharron Pratt on the defensive, and it was immediately apparent that she was on it now, the fingers of her right hand thrumming uneasily on the bar.
Torrey carefully reached over and covered her hand with his. “Elaine was having an affair with Locke.”
“With the D.A.? While she worked for him? How much younger was she than he was? God, that man!”
Torrey suppressed his desire to point out to his boss that the two of them—he and Sharron—were in precisely the same relationship that Elaine and Locke had enjoyed. There would be no point—Sharron would be hard pressed to see any similarity, in spite of the fact that in both cases the D.A. was sleeping with an assistant D.A. But Locke had been a predator of gullible young women; she was nothing like that. She and Torrey had a mature relationship between equals, and that could not have been true with Locke and Elaine.
Instead, he waited her out in silence. Then: “In any event, after Locke was killed, she needed a shoulder to cry on, and we—”
Pratt pulled her hand out from under his. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“It wasn’t that, Sharron.” He took her hand again, patted it soothingly. “It wasn’t that. Okay?”
She finally nodded. “Okay.”
“There wasn’t anybody she could talk to here. The office was changing. She felt there were spies everywhere.” He shrugged, making light of it. “I was doing some neighborhood work in the African-American community, outreach stuff, you know, just like you were. Anyway, Elaine and I, we got to be close for a while. Platonically. Really.”
He squeezed her hand. “She’d lost her mother and her lover within a week. She wanted to talk ideas. What was the place of a strong, smart black woman in a white man’s world? What was the price of her mother’s fame? Was any of it worth it? Was it wise to have affairs with married men? Where was she going? What had she done? That kind of thing.”
He paused. “Eventually, she got it together. I put her in touch with Aaron Rand and you know the rest. But she was just very special somehow. And now . . .” A sigh. “I cared about her, and now I feel I owe her something.”
“What? You couldn’t have prevented what happened with her. It wasn’t anything to do with you.”
“No, I know that.” He considered his phrasing. “Let’s just call it a payback. This bum who killed her, if somebody’s going to take him down, I’d like it to be me.”
Two hours after he’d left Glitsky, after a visit to Frank Batiste, the chief of inspectors, Hardy was coming out of his shock but still wasn’t sure how to proceed. He had, at least, gotten Cole Burgess booked into the jail, and now he wanted to talk to him, get some take of the damage. He took the outside corridor from the back door of the Hall. It was bitter with a wet wind, and when he got inside the door to the jail, he stood a minute getting the warmth.
The admitting sergeant at the counter was a short, skinny Caucasian with the name tag “Reilly” and a buzz cut of orange hair. Glitsky was six foot two, half black and all buffed. After his first three minutes with Reilly, Hardy thought it was amazing that they could look so much alike.
Because whether he knew it or not, the desk sergeant was giving Hardy his Glitsky imitation and doing a hell of a good job at it. Yeah, he was pretty sure Cole Burgess had been processed in. No, he hadn’t heard about any heroin. Sorry, he hadn’t made it into the computer yet. He couldn’t say for sure where he was, even if he’d been taken to the sixth floor or to the hospital.
Hardy took that runaround until it became obvious, then demanded to speak to Reilly’s superior. Reilly told Hardy that, well, darn, he really wasn’t sure whether anybody was in this time of evening. Deliberately pitching his voice so low that Reilly had to lean closer to hear it at all, Hardy whispered, “All right, Sergeant, then get me the watch commander, and if he’s not in, I’ll call Dan Boles”—the sheriff—“at home. Oh, and I almost forgot, your inmate Mr. Burgess is the brother-in-law of Jeff Elliot, who writes the ‘CityTalk’ column for the Chronicle.”
Within two minutes, Reilly had located somebody who might know something. Big, black and beefy, the man appeared from a door behind the reception desk, made a show of spotting the man in the
lawyer suit, pointed at Hardy and closed the space between them. “I’m Lieutenant Wayne Davies, Mr. . . . ?”
Hardy said who he was, laid out the problem. Then: “This man needs detox. His medical evaluation hasn’t moved forward, not as far as I can tell. Your admitting sergeant tells me he’s not even in the computer yet.”
“Then he’s probably not been processed. That’s when they do the med eval.” Davies had his arms crossed, his brow furrowed. Hardy was to understand that he was thinking hard about all this, trying to remember one in what must have been dozens of people brought to the jail today for processing. “And you’re his attorney?” he asked.
The veneer of patience now transparently thin, Hardy nodded. “His sister retained me on his behalf. And he’s been in custody now for almost a full day.”
“Hmm . . . and you say Lieutenant Glitsky brought him down?”
“Look, Lieutenant, I’m talking about Cole Burgess, the suspect in the Elaine Wager murder. He’s here. He’s in withdrawal and you’re responsible for him. What are you going to do?”
Davies decided, although he dressed it up for Hardy’s benefit, pretending it had all just come back to him. “Elaine Wager. That guy? Yeah, he’s here, but I don’t know how far he’s gotten.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean processing him in. It was busy today, thirty admits. There might still be some delay.” Another elaborate shrug. “I don’t know.”
Hardy had heard more than enough. “Okay, Lieutenant, let’s cut the bullshit. I demand to see my client now. If he’s not in detox immediately, you personally can probably look forward to being named in about a billion-dollar lawsuit against the city . . .”
Davies held up an authoritative hand. “Keep your shorts on, Mr. Hardy. I’m sure he’s here. We’ll find him and get him checked out. He’ll be upstairs in jail or on his way to County Hospital. You can see him either place when we’re through, Mr. Hardy. But not before.”
