The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  “It’s just more rope, Mr. Freeman. He’s hanging himself.”

  “Let me make myself clear,” Freeman said. “The direction he’s going now, the way he gets Burgess off is by accusing you three men of complicity in Elaine’s killing, and I’m thinking the judge is going to let him do it.”

  Torrey pulled himself up to his full height in his chair. “That’s the most ridiculous—”

  “It may be, but Hill’s going to let it happen. Unless all of you have solid alibis for the time of the murder . . .”

  “Oh, please . . .”

  “You think I’m joking? You think it won’t get to there? Do you know what you were doing that night, for example?”

  Torrey shook his head with disgust. “As a matter of fact, it so happens that because of Elaine’s murder, I remember that night specifically. I had dinner with Sharron Pratt. Until very late.” He met Freeman’s gaze, challenging. “But even if I hadn’t—”

  Freeman interrupted. “If you hadn’t, there’s still Visser and Logan, or even some third party, to say nothing of all this”—he pointed down at the newspaper—“all this hatchet work. What I’m suggesting is that you can end it all this morning. Drop the charges, at least the specials, against my client, and Mr. Hardy pleads it out. The whole thing goes away.”

  Torrey stared across the Desk in disbelief. “You’re suggesting that I let a murderer go to save myself some personal aggravation? Do you really think that’s what this office is all about?”

  “Let’s not open that can of worms,” Freeman snapped. “I said when I got here that this was a courtesy call. I’ve extended the courtesy.”

  Torrey’s tone was ice. “A blackmailer’s courtesy, counselor. There is no connection between me and the death of Elaine Wager. None at all. And this thinly veiled threat about what you or your partner might accuse me of isn’t going to fly around here. Because that’s what it is,” Torrey fumed. “Blackmail.”

  “I’m sorry you see it that way.” A modest disappointment. “It’s your funeral.”

  On the way out to the courtroom, Freeman enjoyed a private chuckle. Of course the offer he’d made was stupid on the face of it. No matter what, at this point Torrey couldn’t risk lowering the charges on Cole, but Freeman thought it was beautiful to wave the temptation in front of his face.

  And Torrey for his part probably was thinking that Freeman’s senility was by now well advanced. He possibly wasn’t even aware that he’d given the old man his alibi, which had been the whole point of the exercise.

  * * *

  Contrary to expectations, Hardy did not begin the day with Dash Logan, but first asked the Cadaver’s permission to call on Elaine Wager’s paralegal for a couple of questions to establish the provenance of some documents, labeled Defense G, which would prove critical in his examination of Mr. Logan.

  So when Dash Logan took the stand, he looked quite a bit the worse for wear. He’d been out partying until late, in the course of the night finally revealing to this knockout—Amy something—that he’d been in L.A. on the night of Elaine’s murder. All that talking and spending, pretty sure he was going to get over with her, and then she’d excused herself to go to the bathroom and never come back. After that, he’d had to deal with this morning’s news that the police had been and were still searching his office, this time in overt connection to Elaine. They were going through everything file by file. Patsy, God forbid, was there. He was sure that after last time, after the long weekend he and Visser had put in sterilizing the place, they would find nothing, but it was still nerve-racking.

  He hadn’t slept worth a damn, and the coffee hadn’t done nearly enough, so he’d decided he needed a few lines to calm his nerves, but it had been so early—he didn’t dare snort up in the Hall of Justice—that now he was just about back to straight.

  On the witness stand. And here came that son of a bitch Hardy again, a pit bull with a mouthful of his leg.

  “Mr. Logan, yesterday you told the court that you were professionally acquainted with Elaine Wager, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes. I was.”

  “Do you recall the last time you saw her?”

  “Yes. I saw her in my office sometime in the middle or late January.” He went on answering questions that explained a bit about her special master duties, his lack of cooperation with the police and his purported reason for it.

  When he’d finished, Hardy went to his table and retrieved a thin stack of paper, bringing it forward to the witness box. “You have heard the previous witness, Ms. Ghent, identify these pages, Defense Exhibit G, as being included in a folder given to her by Elaine Wager after she’d come from your office a few hours before she was killed. Can you identify these pages for the court?”

  He stared at them for a long moment, flipping through the pages, the sight of which cramped up his stomach.

  “Mr. Logan?”

  “They look like photocopies of my business ledger.”

  “They look like them, Mr. Logan? Take your time and go through them carefully. Surely you are familiar with the checks you write?”

  He stared at the pages for October and November, but he didn’t understand how he could be looking at what he was seeing. There had only been that short period of time when, okay, he’d made a few errors. He’d let the partying get a little out of hand and wasn’t following the business details as closely as he should have. Patsy had made some checks out to Gabe personally instead of writing them to the usual account, and he’d signed them and mailed them off.

  Patsy, the idiot, had remembered to block the carbon that went all the way through to the ledger on the bottom, but she’d filed the duplicate checks—the NCR copies—in the physical files under Gironde.

  He and Visser eventually found them and removed these check receipts from the file, then voided some bogus lines in the ledger. He specifically remembered doing it.

  Now he answered the question. “It’s a copy of my business ledger, all right, but somebody’s erased some of the entries. It’s not right.”

  “It’s not right?”

  “No.”

  Hardy nodded as though he expected this answer. He moved back to the defense table and took another folder forward. “All right, then, how about these pages, Mr. Logan? Do these look any better?”

  Rattled enough to begin with, Logan was so happy to see the pages he’d doctored that he didn’t think to ask where Hardy had gotten them—which was through Glitsky after the police search of Logan’s office last night. The ledgers had been the first thing they had copied. Logan studied the pages for a while, then said that yes, this looked more like his ledger.

  “Looks more like it? Is it or isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Hardy had it entered as Defense H, then came back to him. “Mr. Logan, looking again at these business ledgers, Defense Exhibits G and H, you’ll notice that there are six entries in the latter that were originally made out to various business payees and then voided. Can you explain these entries?”

  “My secretary screwed up. I don’t know.”

  “In Defense H, these same entries are blank, as you noticed. How do you explain that?”

  A shrug. “I don’t know that either. Somebody could have whited out the entry, then copied it. So it would look blank.”

  “Or the record of the original checks was purposely kept out of the ledger. Isn’t that really why they were left blank, Mr. Logan? Isn’t it true that the voided entries are fallacious, intended to camouflage the real payee on these checks after the fact?”

  “No. What are you talking about? Give me a break, would you?”

  Pratt had been forebearing with her objections for quite a while and finally she decided she had to get back on the boards. “Your honor? If this line of questioning is even tangentially related to the death of Elaine Wager, I fail to see it. Do you?”

  Judge Hill scowled. “I’m taking that as another relevance objection, counsel. Mr. Hardy, I’m inclined to sustain thi
s one unless you can bring me some closure. Where is this going?”

  “This is going to the original payee on these six checks, your honor. We have gone to great lengths in this hearing to draw the inescapable conclusion that Mr. Logan and Mr. Visser have colluded in illegal activities together, possibly even the delivery of uncut heroin to Cullen Alsop, which caused his death. Ms. Wager’s discovery of these illegal activities—”

  “Your honor,” Pratt interrupted, “not only is the conclusion far from inescapable, it’s demonstrably false. Elaine Wager couldn’t have discovered anything about Cullen Alsop’s death. He died a week after she did.”

  “And she was killed”—Hardy raised his voice—“because she discovered something Mr. Logan was trying to keep covered up.” The gallery came to life behind Hardy, but he spoke loudly through it. “Something she found in his office while she was working there in her court-appointed role as a special master—”

  “Your honor!” Torrey was on his feet, interrupting even more loudly. “This is inexcusable. We’ve seen no evidence for any of these outrageous accusations. Now Mr. Hardy is simply arguing, creating some grand conspiracy out of whole cloth when he hasn’t been able to produce one document or any other shred of evidence. These are monstrous charges against Mr. Logan and who knows who else. We have to see some evidence, some actual proof of all this illegal activity, this conspiracy to cover up and commit murder. If he doesn’t have it, it’s time to call this to a halt.”

  The gallery’s volume swelled and Hill gaveled it quiet, then glowered down over the edge of the bench. “Mr. Hardy, Mr. Torrey’s right. If you’ve got some proof of any of these accusations, the court needs to see it now.”

  Hardy stood alone in the center of the courtroom, in the now-dead stillness. “Of course, your honor,” he said, turning back to David and Cole at his table. He grabbed the folder David held out for him and walked back before the bench. His footfalls echoed.

  As expected, Glitsky had come into the Solarium first thing in the morning. He had, in fact, noticed the picture of Loretta Wager that Hardy had left out on the table. And seeing it had jogged his memory—it was the one item in the box that he hadn’t had the heart to really look at. Which is what he did then, taking the cardboard backing out of the frame, discovering the NCR copies of checks that Elaine had hidden there after she’d removed them from Logan’s office.

  Hardy was now presenting them to the court. “Your honor, I submit for the court’s inspection Xerox copies of Mr. Logan’s supposedly voided checks, numbers 314, 322, 337, 343, 351 and 374, all referenced to various subcontractors with Gironde Industries, with which I’m sure the court is familiar. And all of these checks are made out to the same payee.” He turned and faced the prosecution’s table. “Gabriel Torrey.”

  After the uproar in the courtroom passed, Pratt, especially, wanted to retire to discuss this startling evidence in the judge’s chambers. If she thought this was going to somehow play to her advantage, Judge Hill, his ire now truly aroused, disabused her of that notion.

  Hardy was glad to see that he didn’t have to draw a map for the judge. Just inside the door to his chambers, the Cadaver didn’t even bother shucking himself out of his robes, but spun on the assemblage with a hail of invective as the court reporter struggled to set up and record what he was saying. The chief assistant district attorney’s involvement in any scheme like this was unconscionable and probably criminal. The judge opined that it might be a good idea for Torrey to get himself a good attorney of his own.

  “Your honor, there is a simple explanation. I—”

  Hill cut him off. “I’m not interested. Whether or not you have done anything unethical or even criminal is beside the point, and I’m predicting you’re going to get all the chance you need to explain everything you’ve done.” He whirled now on the district attorney herself. “And in any case, Ms. Pratt, the appearance of impropriety is so strong, I’m surprised that you let your deputy proceed at all in this matter. No, I’m more than surprised. I’m appalled. Can it be you had no knowledge of your chief assistant’s involvement in any of this?”

  Pratt’s face had gone from crimson to pale, from rage to a tight-lipped, controlled panic. She seemed unable to respond at all, but it didn’t matter as the judge turned again. “Now Mr. Hardy.”

  Reluctant to throw any water on the judge’s blaze, the defense team had been doing a fair imitation of a couple of statues over by the window, and now at the summons, Hardy came forward a step or two and assumed an at-ease position. “Yes, your honor.”

  “It appears that you’ve produced your smoking gun linking Mr. Torrey here to his friends outside in the gallery. I’m willing to buy that there was something to hide at Mr. Logan’s office, and that Ms. Wager found it. For the sake of argument I’ll even concede the possibility of criminal collusion—destroying the checks, the copies, cooking the ledger entries. But here I must caution you—we are engaged in a hearing on a charge of murder—”

  “Your honor, excuse me.” Hardy found it difficult to believe that Torrey had the brass to speak up and interrupt at this juncture, but the man’s arrogance apparently knew no bounds. He didn’t wait for the judge’s acknowledgment, either, but went straight to his point. “The court ought to know that I talked to Elaine about this problem several weeks ago, just after her first time at Logan’s, when, in fact, she did run across the check receipts by mistake. She knew she had no legal reason to have seen them. She came to me because we used to be friends.”

  “More than friends,” Freeman corrected mildly.

  Torrey shrugged that away, although Pratt once again seemed to take it almost as a blow. “The point is I’ve got the notes of that meeting in my minute file. You’re welcome to send somebody up and check right now. So there wasn’t anything to cover up. And just for the record, your honor, I’m aware of what it looks like, but Dash isn’t the world’s best bookkeeper and his secretary . . . in any event, the money was payment for personal gambling debts—”

  Hardy couldn’t restrain himself. “Oh, for the love of God . . .”

  But Hill held up a hand, spoke up. “This is eighteen thousand dollars we’re talking about, Mr. Torrey.”

  “Yes, your honor.” He hung his head briefly in a show of embarrassment or contrition. “I’ve spoken to Ms. Pratt about it. We’ve decided I ought to seek some counseling—”

  Hill’s expression curdled in distaste, but he wasn’t going to pursue this line any further. “Well, as I’ve said, Mr. Torrey, you’ll have ample opportunity to bare your soul and transgressions over the coming weeks. But, Mr. Hardy, this does bring me back to my topic.” He inhaled deeply. “The fact is that we’re here to determine if the evidence says that your client ought to go to trial for Ms. Wager’s murder. The evidence,” he repeated solemnly. “And I must tell you that to this point the evidence remains overwhelming, simply overwhelming, against Mr. Burgess. I trust you haven’t lost sight of that.”

  “No, your honor.”

  “So you wish to continue with your case in chief? If you want to make a motion to relieve the D.A. and substitute the A.G., I’ll hear it. But I still haven’t heard anything casting doubt on Mr. Burgess’s guilt.”

  “We have a few more witnesses, your honor, yes.”

  The Cadaver wasn’t even sure that he’d heard right. Certainly, he conveyed to everyone in the room his belief that no one Hardy could call would make any difference to the evidence already arrayed against Cole. But it was still a capital case and the prosecution had proven itself inept and possibly—hell, probably—venal if not pathetic. If Pratt lost a slam dunk of a case like this after making it a political barn burner, it would serve her right. Maybe she’d learn something, although Hill doubted that very strongly. “All right,” he said to Hardy at last. “But they’d better be talking about evidence in the Wager murder case. Keep them on point or I’ll dismiss them out of hand. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Yes, your honor,” Hardy said.
/>   As he answered questions about his rank and professional duties, Paul Thieu sat upright in the witness chair—confident, alert, professional, cooperative. Hardy knew that he had not slept a wink in more than twenty-four hours, yet his eyes were clear, his face shaved, his coat and slacks crisply pressed. The man was a marvel.

  And now it was time to get to the meat of it. “Sergeant Thieu, as a homicide inspector, can you explain how you are involved in this case before the court today?”

  “Sure. Another inspector in the detail, Ridley Banks, has been missing now for over ten days. The presumption is that he has met with foul play. One of the witnesses in this case, Gene Visser, admitted on the stand here that he’d talked to Inspector Banks, apparently on the night he disappeared. We believed that meeting concerned the murder of Elaine Wager, but we didn’t know exactly why Inspector Banks had asked for it. Based on that, and since Mr. Visser was the last person to see him, I requested a search warrant on Mr. Visser’s place of business.”

  “And what were you looking for?”

  “I guess the best answer is anything we could find that might relate to this meeting, including documentary evidence to verify whether it actually took place and how long it lasted.”

  “Inspector Thieu, when did you conduct this search?”

  “Well, we began this morning at around seven o’clock, and I believe it’s still going on.”

  “Thank you.” Hardy turned and walked back to the defense table, under which he’d placed the cardboard box from the Solarium. Reaching down, he pulled out a large Ziploc bag which contained a gun and brought it forward.

  The gallery, seeing what it was, began its buzzing again, and kept it up as Hardy got to the stand. He raised his voice slightly. “Now Sergeant Thieu, do you recognize this gun?”

  Thieu took it, looked at the evidence tag, checked inside and nodded. “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Would you please tell the court about it?”