by The Hearing
“Not at all,” she said. “You’re only doing your job. But Elaine is very personal to me. I know who her friends were and it’s a little insulting to pretend you were close to her, too, so maybe I’d tell you more.”
“That wasn’t what I was doing.”
“Really?” she asked with ill-concealed disbelief. “Then I’m sorry I got that impression. Perhaps I overreacted.” All business now, Treya cut off further inquiry as she stood, signaling—although it was not her place to do so—that the interview was over. “I’m sure the firm wouldn’t object if you got a warrant for her files or to go over her client list. You might find something there that you’re looking for.”
Glitsky rarely felt either inept or out of his depth, but now he felt both, and acutely. Perhaps it was a sense of foolishness because he found her so physically attractive and at such an inappropriate time. Whatever it was, he was standing along with her, not willing to risk falling any further in her esteem.
He hadn’t gotten anywhere here, and in fact he’d had little confidence that any real evidence was going to come from this quarter. But it had been the only place he could think of to begin, to connect with someone who had known her.
“Ms. Ghent, please.” His shoulders were sagging. He was a pathetic figure—he knew it. Regal, she stopped at the entrance to the cubicle, turned back to face him, challenging, her arms crossed, her color now high in her cheeks.
“I want you to understand that I’m not looking for specific evidence. I’m trying to get a sense of her work, her life, if maybe there was some reason . . .” Too close to revealing the nonprofessional truth about why he’d come here, he stood mute and helpless.
Treya Ghent gave every appearance of considering his words, but when she finally spoke, there was no sign of cooperation. “I really don’t think so, but if anything occurs to me, Lieutenant, I’ll let you know.”
This time, it was a dismissal.
6
At high noon, Hardy walked into the small lobby for the segregated jailing rooms at the hospital. It was a depressing and cold room, dimly lit, with high barred windows and a strong smell of antiseptic, sweaty yellowing walls and a couple of battered wooden benches, although no one was using them at the moment. To his left, a uniformed female officer sat at a pitted green desk equipped with a computer terminal and a telephone. She looked up at Hardy’s arrival with a kind of relief. He went across to her and stated his business.
“You know he’s already got a visitor. His mother.”
It didn’t take phenomenal cosmic powers to realize that Jody Burgess had made a poor impression on this woman. Hardy gave her a sympathetic smile. “Her poor baby isn’t a criminal, he’s sick. There’s been some terrible mistake. You can’t keep him here and it’s all your fault and she’s going to sue.”
The officer smiled back at him. “You’ve been reading my mail.”
“Maybe I can calm her down.”
“Maybe.” She pushed a button on her desk and an instant later another uniformed officer—this one a large white male—pushed open the door at the other end of the room. Hardy thanked her and she gave him a shrug. “Have fun,” she said.
When the guard unlocked the door to Cole’s room, Hardy understood why seasoned jailbirds might try to pull some kind of scam to get a few days here. It wasn’t the Ritz, but it was far better than a shared cell at the jail behind the Hall of Justice—a private room with a window and a television set, now blessedly dark and silent, suspended from the ceiling.
Cole was propped halfway up in a hospital bed, a clean sheet covering him to the waist. Wearing a standard hospital gown, he might have been any badly beaten-up patient except for the handcuffs which shackled him to the bed’s railing. An older, slightly more corn-fed but not unattractive version of Dorothy Elliot sat holding his free hand on the window side of the bed.
“Knock if you have any trouble,” the guard said, and closed the door. Hardy took a step forward and introduced himself—Dorothy’s friend.
“Thank God,” Jody Burgess exclaimed, standing up, coming around the bed with a kind of buoyantly expectant expression and both arms outstretched. “Mr. Hardy,” she enthused, “Dorothy told me what you did and I don’t know how we’ll ever be able to thank you.”
She wore an expensive-looking, baggy, dark green jogging outfit with an unfamiliar logo over the left breast. As she came closer, Hardy noted the carefully applied makeup, dyed blond hair and a lot of baubles, costume jewelry—earrings and bracelets, rings with large colored stones on both hands. He pegged her at sixty-two or -three, going for forty without great success.
“I didn’t really do much.” Hardy felt that he had, in fact, done nothing. From what he’d been told, Cole had been here in the hospital by the time Hardy had arrived at the Hall of Justice yesterday afternoon. He assayed a polite smile. “They would have gotten to testing your son, Mrs. Burgess, but . . .”
“Don’t be so humble. If you hadn’t stepped in, Cole would still be over at the jail. They wouldn’t be taking care of him like this.” The woman’s effusiveness was slightly overwhelming. She grabbed Hardy’s hand in both of hers and held it tightly.
Eventually freeing his hand, he cast his eyes beyond her, to the suspect. He had to work to keep his tone neutral. “And you’re Cole. How are you doing?”
Jody popped right in, answering for her son. “He’s going to be fine, just fine, aren’t you, Cole?” Protectively, she was moving back toward the bed.
“I don’t know, Mom. I don’t know if ‘fine’ really covers it.” The young man’s voice was deep with a raspy quality and a slight but recognizable defect in enunciation. Hardy knew the latter could be simple fatigue, but more likely it was the telltale slur of long-term drug use. “Another day in that cell,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”
“They were going to let him die,” Mrs. Burgess offered. “They just wanted him to suffer.”
Hardy shook his head, told her a white lie. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not intentionally anyway. They don’t do that.”
“Then why . . . ?”
“They process a lot of people every day at the jail. This was just one of the times somebody fell through the cracks. The good news is we found out soon enough.” Hardy saw that he was going to have to talk through Jody and didn’t know how long he was going to have the patience for it. He addressed himself directly to Cole. “So they’ve got you on methadone?”
“It’s kicked in, yeah.”
Again, the mother. “It’s to help with the withdrawal pains. The idea is to lessen the dose so his body gradually—”
“Mom!”
She stopped, clamping her mouth tight with a pained expression. “I’m sorry. I just want Mr. Hardy to understand . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“He’s probably got the idea.” To Hardy. “Right?”
“Some.” He softened his inflection, gave her another reassuring smile. “Mrs. Burgess.” A pause. “Jody. I’d like a few minutes alone with Cole if you don’t mind.”
It hurt her anew, but there was no avoiding that. Her worried gaze fell on her son, came back to Hardy. “Of course, sure, I understand.”
But she didn’t move until he prompted her. “Just knock at the door and the guard will come and let you out. We won’t be too long.”
“She’s all right, really,” Cole said when the door had closed behind his mother. “She’s trying to help.”
But now, suddenly, with the innocent mother out of the room, Hardy abruptly abandoned chitchat mode. He might have wanted to spare some of her feelings, but he felt no similar compunction toward her son. Moving down to the foot of the bed, he rested his hands on the railing, looked Cole hard in the face, spoke with a flat deliberateness. “Tell me what happened the other night.”
The change in tone met its mark. The young man inhaled sharply, shifted his eyes from side to side, finally focused on the sheet in front of him. “It was bad.”
Hardy gave it a se
cond, then reached over and slapped the bed next to Cole’s foot.
Startled, Cole looked up. Hardy’s expression made him take another deep breath, which he let out slowly through puffed cheeks. “I mean, I was in bad shape. It was cold as hell, man. I remember that. I hadn’t scored all day.”
“Why not?”
“I had to get some money. I thought I might go and hit up Mom, but then”—he sighed again—“then the cramps started to come on, so I didn’t want to go all the way out where she lives.”
“Where’s that?”
“Like Judah, out in the Sunset. I score at Sixteenth and Mission. It was too far.”
“So you decided to mug somebody instead?”
“No! It wasn’t like that.” Hardy gave him no reaction so he felt pressed to explain further. “Look, my last score must’ve been heavily cut, okay? I mean, I was shaking already, cramping up, you know? It was like midnight. I’d scored a couple of pills but they weren’t doing it. I had to do something.”
Hardy waited.
“So I lucked out. One of the bums was crashed with his cart . . .”
“His cart?”
“Shopping cart. In this spot, I don’t know exactly where, south of Mission I think. Anyway, he was passed out and had most of a whole bottle of bourbon by his head, just lying there. So I lifted it. I needed something, you know?”
“He let you take his whiskey?”
“No, he was out already. I lifted it.”
“You didn’t hit him and take it?”
“Come on.” Cole actually appeared offended at the question. “Nothing like that.”
“How about the gun? Did you threaten him with that?”
“I didn’t have any gun.” His brow darkened for a minute. “Not then.”
“Did you get it from him, too?”
“No.” Then: “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so,” Hardy repeated. But he had no choice but to accept it for now. “All right, then what?”
“Then I guess I drank most of it. The bottle.”
“Where were you then?”
A shrug. “Just around. I don’t know. I was hurtin’. I mean, hurtin’, you hear me?”
“For the record, Cole, you’re not breaking my heart. How’d you get up to Maiden Lane?”
But the lack of sympathy had its price. “I don’t know, man. Maybe I levitated, huh? Maybe I took the Monorail.”
Hardy straightened up. “You think this is funny, huh? You’re looking at the rest of your life behind bars and you’re getting wise with me?”
“Hey.” Cole went to hold up his hands in a gesture of innocence. The handcuff on his left wrist brought him up short. “I’m just saying I don’t remember getting uptown. I drank the booze. I got loaded. I walked around, tried to keep warm. Maybe I’d run into somebody I knew, I don’t know. Maybe score some ‘g.’ ”
“ ‘G’?”
“God. Smack. You know, heroin.”
“And pay for it with what?”
Cole shook his head miserably. “I don’t know. It didn’t happen anyway.”
“So what did happen? Did you see Elaine come out of some building? Or just walking alone? What?”
“Elaine?”
Hardy’s temper flared. “Elaine Wager,” he snapped, but then checked himself, got his voice under control. “The woman you’ve confessed to killing. Elaine Wager.”
“What about her?”
“I asked when you first saw her.”
“I don’t really remember, you know? I told the cops this.”
“Why don’t you just tell me, too? What’s the first thing you do remember?”
“The gun. In my hand.” Cole made eye contact. “Like, there it was.”
“Where?”
“Well, I mean it was there on the street and I picked it up. Anybody’ll give you money for a gun, right?”
“So you remember picking up the gun? And then what?”
He closed his eyes, shook his head. “I’ve been through this already. Then I guess leaning over her.”
“You guess? What do you mean, you guess? Did you see her walking? Did you come up behind her? Or was she already on the ground?”
Cole’s face was taut with the effort at recall. “I must have blanked it.”
“What does that mean, you must have blanked it? Are you saying you blanked on pulling the trigger?”
As though trapped in a cage, the young man looked from side to side for an exit. “Well, I mean I had the gun, then I was leaning over her and saw all the gold, the necklace, then her purse and the other stuff.”
Hardy’s hands were white on the bed’s railing. “You don’t remember firing the gun?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
Cole gave it some thought, then shook his head no. “But the cop said it was common, blanking the moment. Like people in car wrecks don’t remember the last minute before.”
“What cop?”
“The guy who questioned me. Black dude. Banks, I think his name was.”
Hardy tore his eyes from the pathetic young man and looked through the barred window to the gray afternoon outside. Traffic was stopped in both directions on the freeway. Rows of boxlike apartment buildings clung to a dun-colored hill. He wasn’t going to find any solace in the view, and after Cole’s last words, he needed some. “But Cole,” he began quietly, “listen to me. You confessed to killing her.”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“But you don’t remember stalking her? Firing the gun?”
“No, none of that. But I must have.”
“Why do you say that?”
Cole stared down at the sheet covering him. “I shot the gun. They tested my hands. I shot the gun.” He brought his eyes up to Hardy. “So I must have done it. And by then I couldn’t hold out anymore anyway.”
“Hold out on what?”
This got an exasperated rise out of him. “Hey, come on, what are we talking about?”
“Elaine Wager’s death, Cole. How about that?”
But he was shaking his head. “No, man. We’re talking ‘g.’They got me in that room and I’m coming down hard. I’m dying! You understand? Then Banks tells me he’ll see he gets me something as soon as I say I did it. So I told him.”
“That you killed her?”
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “But hell, I would have told him I’d shot Kennedy if that’s what he wanted to hear.”
The chief assistant district attorney of the city and county of San Francisco did not have a big office. In fact, Gabriel Torrey’s office was the same size as the other third-floor offices which were shared two to a room by the rank and file assistant D.A.’s. The big difference was in the furnishings—a sofa and matching armchairs of exquisitely soft leather, built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, plantation shutters, twin original Tiffany lamps, a Persian rug over the hardwood floor Torrey had installed. And, of course, there was also the Desk—a large, custom-crafted, beautifully finished cross section of redwood burl from an old-growth stand of trees that had been clear cut in the late 1970s.
The Desk had been a gift to Torrey from the CEO of Pac-Ore Timber. In those days, Torrey was a young attorney working as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., representing whatever clients were willing to pay him back then, regardless of their political agenda. The provenance of the Desk was old news by now—it was simply the stunning centerpiece of an intimidating work space. The old-time D.A.’s, a handful of old white guys who remained from past administrations, remembered the office from the days when Art Drysdale had been the chief A.D.A. Back then it had been just like their own—a mess. Battered green files, sagging metal bookshelves that held binders full of active cases, a cork bulletin board, one wall-mounted six-foot length of two-by-four that held Art’s baseball memorabilia.
But Gabriel Torrey believed in the trappings of power. The prosecutors who reported to him would never have cause to doubt that he was hugely important, more so than they would ever be. Victims
of crimes and their families would be reassured that their cases were being handled at the highest level. Other visitors to the office—personal guests as well as opposing attorneys and political acquaintances—were greeted not by a faceless bureaucrat but by an affable, self-assured gentleman in total control of his world. The subtext, Torrey thought, was clear—this man didn’t get here, in these surroundings, by mistake. He was a winner. You crossed him at your peril.
Now, a half hour after he’d finished a wonderful lunch at La Felce, he sat behind the Desk, the jacket of his Armani suit draped over the wooden valet behind him. He wore a silk tie in deep maroon with gold threads over a starched shirt with a subtle purple hue. On the sofa opposite him was a mid-thirties attorney named Gina Roake. Next to her on the cherry end table, a cup of freshly brewed Blue Mountain coffee, untouched, was turning tepid—Ms. Roake was so angry that she couldn’t have swallowed a drop to save her life. She was representing another woman named Abby Oberlin in a will contest between Abby and her brother Jim, and things had gotten beyond ugly.
“But my client loved her mother, Mr. Torrey,” she managed to say. “She’s the one who has taken care of her for the past seven years. Jim hasn’t so much as visited in, I don’t know, forever. Five years, maybe more.”
“Which is why your mother left Abby the lion’s share of her estate?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“And it’s valued at around eight million dollars?”
“That’s right.”
“A lot of money.” Torrey let the words sink in. “And all of it to your client. Less your fee of course.”
This got Gina’s back up. She chose not to respond to the latter comment, but she was going to stick up for her client. “She took care of her mother and loved her. Jim is just a selfish . . .” She bit at her lip. “He is lying, that’s all there is to it. There was no abuse. Abby didn’t . . .” The words stopped.
Torrey leaned forward. He was in prosecutor mode and Gina’s client stood accused of a serious crime. Gina could protest about her innocence all day. Torrey would listen patiently, conveying that he’d heard all this before from other attorneys in other, similar cases, and in his vast experience most of them had done what the other family members had accused them of. He spoke quietly, but with a firm edge. “Nevertheless, your client’s brother contends that the will is invalid. That his mother signed it under coercion. Additionally, he has reported this criminal conduct of his sister and this office is going to have no option but to pursue a vigorous prosecution.”
