by The Hearing
“I’m sorry. Yes. I had heard about it.”
“But you didn’t hear the tape itself?”
“No.”
“Or talked to Inspector Banks? Or read a transcript?”
Pratt slapped the table in anger. “How many times are we going to hear this question, your honor?”
Hardy made an apologetic gesture to the judge. “I want it to be clear, your honor, that Mr. Feeney didn’t know anything about the talk between Inspector Banks and Cullen Alsop, other than that it had occurred.”
“You’ve succeeded there, Mr. Hardy. Move along.”
“Mr. Feeney, didn’t you testify that you hadn’t spoken to Mr. Alsop in connection with this case until your meeting with him on Tuesday, February ninth?”
“Yes.”
“And you were the first and only D.A., to your knowledge, to have talked to him up to this time?”
“Yes.”
“And wasn’t it also your testimony that, after talking with him, you left him to discuss his information with Mr. Torrey?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“During your discussion with Mr. Alsop on February ninth, did you offer him any deal in connection with the information he was providing?”
“No.”
“Did you suggest any deal might be in the works?”
“No.”
“No?” Hardy expressed surprise. He raised his voice over the background din. “Mr. Feeney, didn’t you in fact offer him release on his own recognizance in exchange for his testimony about this gun in the Elaine Wager case?”
Now he’d riled Feeney up good and proper, as had been his intention. “Absolutely not! I offered him nothing. We have procedures about this kind of thing and I followed them exactly. I took his information, that’s all! Then we analyzed and discussed it upstairs and came to a decision. We didn’t offer him any deal of any kind until the next day.”
“February tenth? The day he was released?”
“Absolutely.”
Hardy lifted the exhibit and handed it to the witness. “Mr. Feeney, would you be so kind as to read aloud the first few lines of this transcript after Inspector Banks’ introduction.”
It didn’t go very far. Feeney got to the words “I got a deal going here with the D.A.” and Hardy stopped him cold. “How do you explain that, Mr. Feeney? On the night before you saw Cullen Alsop, he told Inspector Banks that he already had a deal with the D.A.?” A pause. “What was that deal? Who did Mr. Alsop have it with?”
The witness tried to figure it out, then gave it up. “I can’t explain it. He must have been mistaken, or bluffing.”
Hardy knew he’d be rebuked for it, but he had to get it on the boards. “Or somebody else with the D.A. had already cut him a deal.”
Pratt exploded up again, and the gallery noise reached a level where Hill slapped his gavel and called for order. Sternly, he told Hardy that he should know better. He was to refrain from that type of editorial comment.
“I’m sorry, your honor,” he said. “But this does lead back to the question I asked earlier. I’d like now to revisit that issue if the reporter would read back the question.”
After only a small hesitation, the judge so directed, and the reporter found the spot. “Did Mr. Alsop tell you how he had learned of Elaine Wager’s murder?”
Hardy added, “Or my client’s arrest?”
Pratt’s voice behind him was firm. “Your honor, I still object. The question remains irrelevant.”
But something had sparked Hill’s curiosity. “Overruled,” he said simply, and directed the witness to answer.
Feeney, wrung out, shook his head. “I have no idea. He didn’t say.”
“Did you ask him?”
Another accusation of oversight. Feeney sighed at the burden of it. “Mr. Hardy, as you know, San Francisco has newspapers and the jail’s got a grapevine. Somebody like Elaine Wager dies, it gets around.”
“Perhaps it does. But you didn’t answer my question. Did you ask Cullen how he knew that Elaine Wager had been killed by Cole Burgess using his gun?”
“No.”
“Did you wonder how he could have put all that information together?”
Feeney shrugged. “Maybe he read a newspaper, saw it on television, I don’t know.”
“All right,” Hardy conceded. “Maybe he did.” He walked back to the defense table and, stalling, took a drink of water. He needed a last connection, and didn’t know where he was going to get it. The first rule of questioning witnesses is never ask a question for which you don’t know the answer. But Hardy had Feeney on the ropes now, defensive and doubtful. He might let something slip. It might be a knife that would come back and stab Hardy, but he felt he had to take the risk. “Mr. Feeney, just a few more questions. You’ve told the court that you knew Cullen Alsop from previous arrests and prosecutions, isn’t that true?”
“Yes, it is. Three to be precise.”
“But you had never spoken to him personally, correct?”
“Yes, correct.”
“But you’d seen him in court before many times? Perhaps a dozen or more?”
Weary, wanting to get it over with, Feeney was bobbing his head with resignation. The gallery was a tomb behind Hardy. “Yeah, sure, something like that.”
“And in those cases, before last Tuesday, did Mr. Alsop ever appear with a codefendant?”
The bobbing stopped. At the prosecution table, Torrey was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, shoulders hunched, and he raised his head. “In two or three of the narcotics offenses, he had a codefendant,” Feeney answered.
“And who would that have been?”
Feeney didn’t like it. “The defendant, Cole Burgess.”
“So they were friends,” Hardy said, “or at least knew each other well. Now, Mr. Feeney, please try to remember. This is important. When you heard about the arrest of Cole Burgess, did you recall his friendship with Cullen Alsop?”
“Your honor, please. What is this about?”
Hill raised his glance and directed it behind Hardy. “Is that an objection, Ms. Pratt?”
“Yes, your honor. Relevance?”
“Overruled.”
But this time, Pratt wasn’t going to let it go. “Your honor, if it please the court . . .”
“Well, it doesn’t, Ms. Pratt. I’ve ruled on your objection. We’re not under the same strictures as a formal trial here, and this is a capital case. I see an argument that Mr. Hardy is trying to complete here, and I’m inclined to let him keep trying.”
Still, Pratt couldn’t sit down. “It’s taking him a very long time, your honor.”
“Not as long as the appeals if I get it wrong, counselor. Now, please.” He turned to the court reporter again and had her read back the last question. When Feeney had heard about the arrest of Cole Burgess, did he have occasion to recall the name in connection with Cullen Alsop?
The witness answered in a quiet voice. “Actually, no, not until I heard of Mr. Alsop’s arrest a couple of days later. Then I remembered.”
“You remembered that they were friends? That there was a connection between the two young men?”
“Yes.”
“Did you mention this connection to anyone?”
A look of chagrin. “I’m sure I did. Burgess was a hot case. I remember I was in the coffee room and Mr. Torrey was in talking about it, just generally, Ms. Pratt’s new policy plans. I made some wise-guy crack about all this interconnected drug culture, that we’d just arrested this other kid Alsop again. It just came up.”
Hardy glanced up at Hill, said he had no further questions.
It had been an exceptionally long morning, and Hill finally called the lunch recess, and a bailiff came over immediately to get Cole. “You guys aren’t having lunch with me?” He seemed pathetically sad, and Hardy understood why. During trials, he’d usually try to eat lunch in one of the holding cells with his clients, keep them informed of what was happening, try to keep them from freaking o
ut any number of ways. Hardy said he was sorry and promised Cole that it wouldn’t happen again.
Cole gave his mother a quick wave over the railing, and then he was marched out. Hardy spent a couple of minutes consoling Jody, then making lunch plans with Jeff and the musketeers. Glitsky and Treya had already gone. Gina Roake was leaning over the bar rail, discussing something with Freeman.
Hardy started gathering his papers, and Freeman pushed out his chair, stood, stretched and came around the front of the table. “How’d you get that with Feeney?” he asked. “It was a thing of beauty.”
“I had a vision.”
“You didn’t know?” A rebuke.
“I knew they’d been arrested together. I just couldn’t prove that Torrey knew.” Hardy shrugged, nonchalant. “Easy, David. It worked out. Sometimes you take a risk. It seemed worth it.” He plopped his stuff into his briefcase. Over to his right, he noticed a little conference continuing at the prosecution table.
He lowered his voice. “You know the other complaint we been talking about?”
This was Freeman’s letter to the state bar association complaining about Torrey. David, Hardy and Gina had discussed it over the past weekend and decided that they really had nothing. Compelling coincidences, but nothing resembling real evidence. Reluctantly, they’d decided to table the issue until after the Burgess hearing at least.
“Maybe we want to move on that after all.”
Freeman moved in closer. “Move how? We agreed we don’t have anything.”
“Not quite true, David. We’ve got the bare facts. Torrey’s screwing with at least two cases.”
“Maybe, but we can’t prove it yet. And we can’t prove he’s getting anything for it. The bar’s going to need . . . what?”
Hardy was shaking his head. “Forget the bar. We’ve got to have Hill see it. He’s never going to believe the D.A. suborned perjury to win this case as long as he thinks Torrey plays by the rules. It’s just too big a leap. But if we can convince him that they fudged one piece of evidence, then he’s going to have to take a hard look at the rest. We’ve got to get him to consider what we know.”
“Or think we know.”
“Close enough, yeah. We can’t convince the bar, but maybe we can use it here.”
This appealed to David, but he didn’t see how it could happen. “So what are you saying? We’re not going to get our two cases introduced here. There’s really no relation at all.”
“I’m not suggesting that, and we don’t need it anyway. There’s other ways Hill might get the message. He might read about it, say, in the papers.” He gestured toward Jeff Elliot, still talking with Gina in the row of seats behind them. “We’ve got a guy here who’s been known to get the word out.”
Freeman being who he was, Hardy didn’t have to draw him a more detailed diagram. David’s eyes took on a sparkle with the possibilities. This was his kind of game, playing all the angles, in and out of the courtroom.
“All we’ve got to do,” Hardy continued, “is plant the seed. Hill doesn’t have to believe it. He’s just got to acknowledge it’s something Torrey’s capable of.”
David still didn’t think so. “Even if he were convinced of it personally,” he said, “without some kind of proof he’s never going to let it affect his ruling.”
“Probably not,” Hardy said. “But on the other hand, how could it hurt? It’s something, and otherwise we’ve got nothing.”
Freeman considered for another moment. “You put it like that, it kind of grows on you. By the way,” he added, “I should be happier about it, but I’m afraid you owe me the two hundred.”
Hardy looked up. “Not ’til the end of the day.”
“No, I bet not. Torrey’s not calling any more witnesses.”
Hardy studied his partner as though he’d lost his mind. “Of course he is. He’s got another twelve names on his list. He hasn’t even touched the crime scene.”
“He’s got the crime, he’s got in his specials. He’s got Cole at the scene with Elaine’s jewelry and wallet and the murder weapon. Guess what? He’s done. He doesn’t even need the confession, although he’d be crazy not to use it. And I think you rocked him a little with Feeney. He doesn’t want to walk into any more walls.”
Hardy flatly couldn’t buy it. “You want to go double or nothing?”
Freeman, sadly, shook his head. “Diz, I wouldn’t take any pleasure in taking your money. If this were the grand jury, it would be over. I still don’t know why he didn’t go to the grand jury, in fact.”
A shrug. “I didn’t fight him on timing. He figured it was a toss-up. Either way we were going to trial.”
The old man clucked in disapproval. “Ah, hubris.”
32
Glitsky chewed on an ice cube, moving his glass of iced tea through the ring of condensation on the table. He was in a booth in the far back at Lou the Greek’s, facing away from the entrance, waiting for his appointment. He couldn’t shake the thought that it had been unwise to decide to meet here. It was too close to the Hall, to the homicide detail. People he knew would see him. Word would get out.
The window at his ear was half below the level of the street outside. He could look up and see a line of blue sky between the buildings. With the nice weather, Lou had opened the windows a crack to let the place air out, get some fresh oxygen into the mix. All Glitsky could smell was Dumpster, though. He lifted his glass, sucked in another cube, chewed some more.
Treya had gone back to Hardy’s building. The big box from Elaine’s condominium was there in the Solarium and she wanted to catalogue everything in it on the chance that something might jump out. The slim chance.
At this point, Glitsky felt they were all grasping at straws. Hardy and Freeman doing their legal hocus-pocus, Treya making lists, Jeff Elliot wanting to take down the district attorney. The kids remained enthusiastic, fascinated by the whole procedure. But they were, after all, lawyers. Hardy had them writing more motions about unconsciousness, temporary insanity, police misconduct. They were more interested in the courtroom strategies that might save Cole Burgess than they were in discovering who might have killed Elaine.
For Glitsky, this remained the focus. Someone had killed his daughter. He owed it to her—and to himself—to discover who it was.
What had begun as simple remorse over his own excesses had ripened into a genuine concern that a combination of malice and stupidity might possibly have ensnared the wrong man. And if it had, it was up to him—he was the only trained investigator on Hardy’s dream team—to run down the right one.
Try as he might, he couldn’t develop any warmth for the idea that it had been Jonas Walsh. The doctor had no alibi, true. He’d fibbed about the state of his relationship with Elaine. He was abrupt, distracted, uncooperative. In short, Glitsky had come to believe, he was in a state of grief, something of which he himself had a visceral knowledge. He recognized it intuitively, and while he would change his mind in an instant if any evidence came to light linking Jonas Walsh with Sunday night in San Francisco, he really didn’t expect that to happen.
Likewise with Muhammed Adek. Glitsky had fifteen years’ experience interviewing killers, and he came away from his Monday interview with the law student convinced that he wasn’t involved. If he’d been less angry, if the sense of betrayal he obviously felt about Elaine had been less acute, maybe he would have felt differently. But even after he identified himself as a cop—administrative leave or not, that’s what he was—Muhammed hadn’t attempted to downplay any of his feelings as killers tended to do. The boy had been in love with her and she’d chosen another man, and while this could be a motive for murder, it didn’t comport well with what Abe thought he knew about the last night of Elaine’s life.
Plus—and this was key—from everything Treya had told him, Elaine would have been far more specific with her on Sunday afternoon if she had been going out to meet with Muhammed. “But she would never have met with him in the first place, Abe. And if she’d s
omehow gotten talked into it, she wouldn’t have just said she was going to a meeting, believe me. She would have mentioned him by name, and not flatteringly. There was no way.”
Glitsky agreed with her. His theory was simple. Elaine’s killer was at least a cordial business acquaintance, maybe a good deal more than that. They’d had dinner, or perhaps done something more intimate. But Abe believed in his guts that the crime wasn’t one of passion. It wasn’t about jilted love or domestic upheaval. It was a cold-blooded contingency that had become a necessity, then been acted on decisively.
He crunched another cube, drummed his fingers on the table, checked his watch. “Come on, Paul,” he said aloud.
“I’m here.” Inspector Paul Thieu, with another man in tow, slid into the booth across from him. “Sorry I’m late. Lieutenant, this is Jan Falk. Narcotics.”
“Abe,” Glitsky said. He reached across the table, shook hands. “Nice to meet you. I assume Paul told you I’m on leave at the moment, maybe forever.”
Falk badly needed a shave and the Dumpster smell seemed suddenly stronger. He wore a roguish grin. “Sometimes I wish I was. No, always I wish I was. Except now, maybe. So what’s goin’ down?”
Glitsky turned to check the room another time. It had filled up nicely for lunch. There was camouflage in the numbers and the noise. Still, he leaned in across the table so he wouldn’t have to speak too loudly. “Paul says you know something about Ridley Banks.”
Falk shrugged. “I don’t know what I know, tell you the truth. Monday I heard he’d gone missing and I remembered him from last week, some OD case in the Mish. Long story how we got together, but he was on to something and I thought you guys—homicide—might be interested, but maybe not. I couldn’t even get a callback.”
Thieu piped in. “The place is a disaster, Lieutenant. You wouldn’t believe it.”
“I bet I would.”
Thieu felt he had to give Glitsky some feel for it. “They haven’t put anybody in your chair, even temporarily. Nobody’s fielding calls, everybody’s out all the time. The car’s driving full speed and nobody’s at the wheel.”
