The 13th Juror dh-4

by John Lescroart

Susan nodded. "She may be right." She held Vincent away from her, making a face at him that he rewarded with a beaming grin. "Oh, God, someone like this little guy." She put her shoulder against Moses, leaning into him. "Isn't he cute?"

  Baleful, McGuire put his arm around her. He appeared to be studying the baby. He shook his head. "No, he looks like Hardy. Now Rebecca, my niece, she's cute. She resembles my sister, who in turn looks like me."

  During this witty exchange, Hardy stood up to take the opportunity to kiss his wife, but Moses stopped him. "Uh, uh. No tongues."

  "What do you mean, no tongues? Daddy and Mommy have tongues." It was Rebecca, over to join the party. She looked up at the adults, worried about where their tongues had gone.

  "Uncle Moses is being silly," Hardy said. "Bad. Bad. Bad Uncle Moses."

  McGuire squatted down. "In most societies, Beck, the uncle is revered above all other relatives. The psychic damage your father is trying to do to you by this display is incalculable should you take any of his nonsense to heart." He smiled sweetly at her, gave her a kiss.

  "I still think this guy's cute," Susan said. "Do you mind if I hold him a little longer?"

  Frannie gave her brother a knowing look, said it was okay with her, as long as she wanted.

  There was a little beeping sound.

  "What's that?" Moses asked. "Don't tell me an actual relative of mine has a beeper?"

  Hardy already had it out. "Another family secret bites the dust. Besides, stop calling me a relative. Frannie's your relative." He was squinting at the number.

  "Just let it go," Frannie said. "Call them Monday. We're having a party."

  "This isn't a party," Moses repeated. "It's a lunch."

  "Dismas, just let it go…"

  "Take me a minute." He was moving to the door on the roof. "I just have to see what it's about."

  "Good-bye," Frannie said.

  "I'll be right back. Promise."

  *****

  Hardy got there first, as he had the time before. Unlike the time before though, Freeman was on his way over. It was still light out, hot and now strangely still on the women's side of the jail. Saturday, late afternoon.

  He was struggling to hold his temper. They had frisked him at the door. Normally, to get in the jail, he showed his bar card and the guard, whom he'd seen many times, would buzz him in. This afternoon, though, to see Jennifer, he'd gotten patted down and now they were making him wait in the hot and airless room.

  Two female guards walked with her this time, and she wore a red, not a yellow jumpsuit. She also had leg chains and handcuffs attached to a metal band around her waist. Her hair had been cut, hacked off unevenly so that an inch or two remained all around.

  Her face was blotched, her lips cracked, both eyes with purplish bruises.

  Hardy – jeans and a T-shirt – stood up, and she nearly fell against him, reaching up until her hands were stopped by the chains. She was sobbing.

  "What the hell…! Hardy began.

  One of the guards peeled her off him and got her seated in the chair. "Cut the act, sweetie."

  "You get your hands off my client." The guard glared. The second one had her nightstick out. "Both of you can back off. Now!"

  These women weren't going to be intimidated by a lawyer in blue jeans. But it also availed them nothing to harass Jennifer in his presence, so – grudgingly – they withdrew.

  When the door had closed, Hardy leaned forward. "They didn't do this, did they?"

  She shook her head no.

  "Then who…"

  "Down there," she mumbled, her head down. This wasn't the cowed look she'd shown earlier, Hardy thought, but real fear. Something had obviously happened to her.

  Glitsky's call had filled him in on some of it – Terrell flying down to Costa Rica and handling the details of her extradition. They were coming in to SFO. Hardy and Freeman might want to be at the jail pretty soon after that.

  "What happened?"

  Slowly she raised her head. Unlike many of the inmates here, her eyes were not empty. They were full of pain. Again, she shook her head from side to side, tears streaming over her cheeks. "Everything," she said. "They did everything."

  *****

  He got back to their dark house in the Avenues at 11:45 p.m.. He stopped in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The tropical fish tank gurgled from his bedroom. He sat at the kitchen table, sipping his beer.

  "It was an engagement party." Still dressed in her sundress, hair tousled from sleep, Frannie leaned against the doorpost. "It wasn't just a lunch. Of course, you missed it, so it doesn't matter."

  "Frannie, don't-"

  "No, of course not. Don't bother Dismas. His work is more important than any old family stuff."

  "I didn't say that. I don't think that."

  "Sure you don't."

  He drank some more beer. "You want me to sit down and talk about it? Or you just want to bitch at me?"

  "I think just bitch at you."

  He steadied the beer on the table, looked across at her. Life wasn't as simple as Frannie sometimes wanted to think. She tended to lose sight that there were some things going on in the world beyond tow little kids and Moses' love life. "You're losing perspective," he told her.

  "I'm losing perspective. That's good. That's really good."

  "Thank you," he said. "But you know, this isn't really a good time for me. I don't feel like getting bitched at. I'm out trying to make a living so you can stay here and have the life of Reilly and I'm sorry as hell that sometimes I've got to do things that aren't on anybody's schedule. Things happen, shit happens, Frannie, and I'm supposed to deal with it."

  "Oh, poor thing."

  He stared at her. This had just escalated into a stupid fight. Retreat. He picked up his beer, took a slow sip, then stood and walked back down the long hallway to the living room.

  She didn't follow him. Fine. He grabbed one of the throw pillows and tucked it under his head on the couch, where he would spend the night.

  15

  On July 11, the luckiest day of the year, Hardy woke up in the living room with a sore back. He looked at his watch and saw that it wasn't yet six. The house was quiet, the light subdued.

  He opened the front door and picked up the Sunday paper. Then walking in his socks to the kitchen, he took out the cast-iron pan he'd had since college, put it over one of the burners and laid in a pound of bacon.

  He moved economically, the kinks in his back easing as he crossed the kitchen, quietly opening cupboards, getting the coffee going, mixing up some waffle batter (the Beck loved waffles). The bacon started sizzling, the smell coming up.

  He sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee.

  For the last four months, while Jennifer was an escapee, he'd been working out of the office in David Freeman's building and, truth be told, he wasn't having the best time of his life. He'd gotten several hand-off cases from David or his associates. Perhaps half a dozen he'd gone down and pleaded out. The other two – a disputed DUI and a shoplifting were, in the snail's pace way of these things, moving toward a trial sometime during the century.

  Worse, though, was the feeling that he was simply spinning his wheels, going through the motions. It was similar to being with the DA's office, where you dealt with petty malfeasances and moved them along through the bureaucracy – except here he was often, from his point of view, on the wrong side.

  The other problem, and it loomed large, was that he had gotten himself qualified by the court for the list of approved lawyers available for appointment, and a month ago Leo Chomorro, who had been the presiding judge in his ex-father-in-law Andy Fowler's case, had tabbed Hardy as one of three defense attorneys for a Penal Code Section 187 – murder.

  Where things went south was that Hardy studied the file and decided he'd be good and damned if he was going to spend six months trying to convince a jury that Leon Richman had not in fact sat in his Ford Escort with the other two defendants and fired approximately ten shotgun loads
each into Damon Lapierre, who just happened to be cohabiting with Leon's ex-girlfriend.

  Aside from the fact that Leon had already been convicted of man-slaughter once and been acquitted of murder once, two sawed-offs and one regulation shotgun had been found in the trunk of the Escort. Shell casings were under the seat. Leon had bragged to lots of his friends that they wouldn't be seeing Damon anymore. And four patrons of the Woodshack saw Leon and the other two defendants leave the drinking hole with the less-than-cooperative victim on the night of the murder.

  In short, Leon did it, and Hardy wasn't going to help him get off. Period.

  This hadn't sat well with Chomorro. Did Hardy want to be on the appointment list or didn't he? If he didn't, why was he wasting everybody's time?

  Hardy had almost said that he had no interest in defending guilty people but stopped himself before saying it. Those words would have given him immediate status in the Hall as a legendary horse's ass. Instead he'd mumbled something to Chomorro about a conflict of schedules and the moment had passed. But Hardy knew it would come again, and he knew he'd feel the same way, do the same thing. It wasn't a comforting thing to think.

  Rebecca, appearing silently at his elbow, interrupted his thoughts. "Hi, Daddy. Why are you up so early?"

  He put his arm around his adopted girl – the natural child of Frannie and her first husband Eddie Cochran. Eddie had been killed on the day Frannie had found out she was carrying Rebecca.

  Hardy pulled her closer to him. He couldn't imagine that a blood tie would make any difference. Rebecca was his daughter. He lifted her onto his lap and she snuggled into him for six seconds before she started squirming, which was close to a world's record. "Why are you up so early?", he asked.

  This was a serious question, carefully pondered. "Daddy, you know I always get up early."

  "And that's why you did today?"

  The Beck nodded. "Mommy's still sleeping," she whispered. This, apparently, was confidential information.

  "Let's let her, okay. We'll have a little special time, just you and me together. How about some waffles?"

  "Maple syrup?"

  Hardy tugged gently at her hair, kissed the top of her head. "Okay, maple syrup head, maple syrup."

  *****

  Frannie and Hardy sat on a crumb-strewn blanket in the shade of the overhanging addition to their house that they had built when they'd discovered Vincent was on the way. The lawn was deep and narrow, flanked by four-story apartments, but to the east, over their redwood fence, on this clear day they had a view all the way downtown – the Transamerica Pyramid, Coit Tower, the Bay Bridge, the East Bay hills. It was a fine backyard for the six times a year it was warm enough to use.

  Rebecca, preoccupied, was building something in her turtle sandbox. Vincent slept in the porta-crib they had brought down for the occasion.

  They had kept from acknowledging the fight all morning, then through the lunch with the kids. Now, in the long slow slide of the warm afternoon, it lay heavily between them. Hardy stared across the distance. Frannie picked at the crumbs.

  Finally she reached over and put her hand on his leg. "I just didn't think it was fair to Moses."

  Hardy covered his wife's hand, relief flooding through him. "I love you, you know."

  "I know."

  "I didn't know about Moses and Susan. As he kept saying, it was just a lunch."

  Frannie was silent. Then: "He wanted to surprise us. I think it kind of hurt him."

  "I'll call him, tell him it worked. I'm pretty surprised. They're really getting married?"

  Frannie nodded. "September."

  "And having kids, all that?"

  "That's what they said." She moved over against him. "I was just upset."

  Hardy let out a long breath. "What do you want me to do in that situation? Of course I care about your family, but sometimes-"

  "No, don't start that again, please. That's what you said last night. Every time the job calls, you don't have to drop everything and run."

  "I haven't been doing that. At least not for the last four months. Not really since Andy Fowler."

  "But now here's another murder trial and it starts again."

  Hardy took a beat. He wasn't going to let this escalate again. Fights with Frannie made him physically sick. "Murder trials are serious, Frannie. Murder trials are not like too many other things. This is not just a job. This is, after all, somebody's life, and you get to know them and then they call and need your help, what do you want me to do? What do you think I should do?"

  With her free hand Frannie picked at some more crumbs, brushed the blanket. "Do you really think I've got the life of Reilly here, raising the kids, not working?"

  "Is that an answer to 'What do you think I should do?'"

  She was still looking down, smoothing the blanket. "No. I think that's an entirely different question."

  "Okay, I'll do yours first. I'll give you the short answer. The short answer is no."

  He felt her shoulders give. "The long answer is we think the kids should have a parent at home as long as we can afford it, and we can, so you're doing it as long as you want to be."

  "I do want to be."

  He squeezed her hand. "No problem. If you get tired of it, we'll do something different, okay? Maybe I'll stay at home."

  Frannie gave him a look.

  "Hey, it could happen. The point is, sometimes I've got to do things when I've got to do them, not when it's convenient. Yesterday was one of those times. You think I'd rather go down to jail on a Saturday afternoon than hang out and eat ribs with you and the Mose?"

  "No."

  "Correct, I wouldn't."

  "But you're going to stick with this one, aren't you? Jennifer Witt? Even though she ran away, escaped. Even if she did it?"

  "She's facing the death penalty, Fran. I don't blame her for running away, although I don't think it was very smart. Juries do make mistakes, if they make one here it's pretty terminal. She might be mixed up – hell, she is mixed up, but she's a real person, not just a case."

  "Maybe that's what I'm worried about, Dismas – that she's a real mixed-up person who might have killed two men she's involved with. Plus her baby. Maybe I'm even worried about her finding some reason to kill you."

  He put his arm around his wife. "Clients don't kill their lawyers, Fran."

  This was not a brilliant riposte. Just a week before, a madman who'd been dissatisfied with his lawyers had walked into the offices of one of the City's big firms in the middle of the afternoon and started blowing people away.

  Frannie gave him the eye. "For a minute I thought I heard you say that clients don't kill their lawyers."

  "Not often enough to worry about."

  In the sandbox, out in the sun, Rebecca had started destroying the castle she'd built, kicking, zooming in like a kamikaze. On of the apartments in the building on the right had opened a window and turned up the stereo – Bonnie Raitt was telling the neighborhood that she'd found love right in the nick of time.

  Hardy told Frannie he felt the same way.

  16

  "Why would you take a plea now?"

  Freeman brought in Hardy with the questioning look. After Jennifer's jailbreak they had both expected the DA to take an even harder line on Jennifer, and now Dean Powell had contacted Freeman and hinted at a willingness to take a plea to Murder One – no death penalty.

  Powell spread his arms, expansive and at ease. "Hell, you know, David, we're always ready to talk." He pointed a finger, underscoring the point. "You guys remember that – my door's open."

  "My client says she didn't do it." Freeman was flipping through a Sports Illustrated, barely paying attention. Powell's office was the usual fifteen-foot-square cubicle – two metal desks, file cabinets, a window welded shut with a charming view of the new jail going up thirty feet away.

  Powell's officemate, Paul Bargen, had stepped out for coffee so there would be privacy, to say nothing of room, for three people. "If she offers to pl
ead guilty to life without, of course I'll have to take it to the boss, but I think it's fair to say we'd take such an offer seriously. I heard," Powell went on, "that your client recovered from her amnesia down there in Costa Rica and now wants to throw herself on the mercy of the court."

  "I don't think that's it." Hardy had originally taken the second chair in front of Bargen's desk, but one of the legs was shorter than the others and it listed uncomfortably, so now he was standing. "I just don't think that's it."

  Powell shrugged. "I'd ask her again, just to be sure."

  Freeman had stopped at an ad for a woman's swimsuit – he lifted the page toward Hardy, spoke to Powell. "I thought you wanted a trial. By the way, I'm voting for you."

  Substantiating the rumors, Powell had recently declared his candidacy for State Attorney General, and he now broke out his toothy grin. For a moment Hardy thought he was going to jump up and try to shake both of their hands. "Well, that just delights the hell out of me, David, I can't tell you." He glanced over at Hardy, who kept his arms folded, his face impassive, leaning against one of the filing cabinets.

  Freeman flipped another page, seemed to be studying an editorial that had Barry Bonds in the headline. He didn't look up. "And you don't want a capital trial? Seems to me it would be pretty good copy."

  "That's always true, David, but frankly I don't think I need it. To be perfectly honest, I'd rather use the time to campaign."

  Hardy couldn't help noticing that Powell said "frankly" and "to be perfectly honest" in two consecutive sentences. Powell was lying about something – he obviously didn't think the verdict for Jennifer was all that foreordained.

  But Freeman wasn't showing any cards for free. He scratched a stubbly cheek, turned a page of the magazine, sighed. "It's up to my client." Finally, Freeman put down his reading and made eye contact. "What the hell did they do to her, anyway, Dean? She claims she was raped in jail down there."

  "I truly hope she wasn't, David, but she shouldn't have broken out of here. That was her choice, her risk…"