“But she stayed there most of the night, is that right?”
“Right.”
“Until what time, would you estimate?”
“Well, we’d already closed up the rest of the back room, so it was after midnight. Say twelve-thirty?”
“Twelve-thirty on the night she was killed,” Hardy repeated, glancing up at Hill. “And was she there with another person the whole time?”
“Yes, sir. They met at the front door and came back together.”
Hardy stepped away to the side of the witness box. “Now, Mrs. Gold, I’d like to ask you to take your time and look carefully and tell me if you recognize that person—the person who sat arguing with Elaine Wager on the last night of her life. Is that person in this courtroom?”
“Yes, sir,” Mrs. Gold said with no hesitation, raising a hand and pointing. “Right there, at that table. The woman, not the man.”
“Mrs. Gold, are you pointing to Sharron Pratt, the district attorney of San Francisco?”
“Is that her name? Yeah, whatever, that was her.”
40
Stunned by Estelle Gold’s testimony, the courtroom collectively seemed to suck in its breath. Pratt herself opened and closed her mouth several times, until she finally got to her feet and managed to speak. “I did not kill her,” she whispered. Then repeated, more strongly: “I did not kill her.”
From his spot in the middle of the courtroom, Hardy spoke gently. “No, I don’t think you did, Ms. Pratt.”
“But then . . .” Hill all but stammered up on the bench. “Mr. Hardy?”
“The defense calls Gabriel Torrey.”
In spite of everything, the chief assistant gave no sign that he was beaten yet. He sat straight-backed in the witness chair, his face set but by no means fearful. If anything, he appeared ready for a fight.
Hardy stood squared off five feet in front of him. “Mr. Torrey, did you meet with Elaine Wager on the night she was killed?”
“No, of course not.”
“No? Was that because you were, in fact, out with Ms. Pratt the entire evening?”
“No. I wasn’t out with Ms. Pratt.”
“That’s right, you weren’t. If you had been, Estelle Gold would have seen you at David’s Deli, isn’t that right?”
“I guess she would have, if she saw Sharron, as she said.”
“But just this morning, didn’t you tell my associate David Freeman that you specifically remembered that you had spent the entire evening of Elaine Wager’s murder with Sharron Pratt?”
For the first time, there was the slightest hesitation. “So what if I told him that?”
“So it’s not true?”
“No.”
“It was another lie, you mean?”
A sardonic snort. “When did I stop beating my wife, is that it? The answer is that I wanted to get rid of him. He’s a pest. I told him whatever would serve that purpose.”
“All right.” Hardy cast a glance at Judge Hill, then came back to Torrey. “Will you then please tell the court, and truthfully, what you were doing on the night of Elaine Wager’s murder?”
“I was at my apartment, alone.”
“And what is the address of your apartment?”
“564 Bush Street.”
Hardy repeated the number. “And how many blocks is that from Maiden Lane?”
Torrey shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never counted them.”
“Interesting,” Hardy said. “I’d have thought you would have. I did this morning. It’s three blocks.”
Puffed up in his arrogance, Torrey turned to the bench, queried the judge. “Your honor? Was that a question? This is ridiculous. I’d like to be excused.”
But Hill wasn’t buying that. “I don’t think so, Mr. Torrey. Mr. Hardy, continue.”
“Thank you, your honor.” He came back to his witness. “So you spent the entire night at your apartment three blocks from Maiden Lane, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“You never left your apartment, not even once?”
“No.”
Stymied, fighting his frustration, Hardy took another tack. “Isn’t it true, Mr. Torrey, that Mr. Visser supplied you with a firearm?”
This brought an actual laugh. “Absolutely not. I don’t own any firearms. Never have.”
“You did not get any weapon from Mr. Visser, is that so?”
“That’s right.”
“You realize that your friend Mr. Visser is going to give you up for immunity, don’t you?”
This wasn’t any kind of reasonable question, but no one objected, and Hardy had had enough. He wanted to bring this all home to Torrey.
And, in fact, the reality of Hardy’s point did slow him down. It showed on his face.
Hardy didn’t let up. “Visser was in on the Gironde scam, too, wasn’t he? And Logan? Once they’re charged with conspiracy to kill Ms. Wager . . .”
“Get a grip. They were both in L.A. that night.”
Hardy turned and faced the D.A. “Well, that would only leave Ms. Pratt, then, wouldn’t it? She was with Ms. Wager . . .”
Torrey considered a beat, then he shrugged. “I don’t know about that. I doubt it.”
Hardy’s eyes stayed on Pratt as the truth hit her—if he had to, and it looked as though it had come to that, her chief assistant, lover and political mentor was prepared to give her up.
And this, finally, was more than she could bear. She came to her feet. “You doubt it!” she all but screamed. “No, you know about that, Gabe. You know it wasn’t me.”
Torrey looked straight ahead with all the expression of a dead man. As Hardy watched, Pratt’s face first broke, then hardened as she finally came to accept what she’d obviously feared and denied for all this time. In ten seconds, before Hardy’s eyes, she aged a decade.
He spoke to her. “You telephoned Mr. Torrey sometime during the night, didn’t you, Ms. Pratt, while you were arguing with Elaine at David’s Deli? After it became clear that things weren’t going well? You weren’t going to be able to convince her to let it go, were you?”
“It was Gironde.” Pratt hung her head and now she raised it. “The minority contracts. That part was sacred to her. That’s what she couldn’t forgive Gabe for manipulating.”
Torrey snapped at her. “Shut up, Sharron. For God’s sake”—he was coming up off the witness chair—“don’t be a fool.”
A brief bitter laugh before she reassembled her face. Now she faced her betrayer calmly. “Were you going to let them pin it on me, Gabe? Do you think I’d sit here and let you do that?”
She came back to Hardy, to the judge. “He lied. It wasn’t gambling debts with Logan—it was kickbacks from Gironde’s competitors. When Elaine came to him the first time—because she’d once liked him—and called him on it, he told her he’d call off the harassments, which turned out to be another lie. That’s when she came to me.”
“Sharron, you can’t . . .”
She ignored him, dead eyes on the judge. Nothing could stop her now. “He wasn’t at his place when I got there that night. He told me that when I called him he’d gotten upset and gone out for a walk to clear his head . . .”
“Sharron!” Torrey not giving up. “Stop. Don’t you understand? There’s still no proof. There’s nothing tying me to the gun . . .”
Withering him with a long stare, she finally spoke without any inflection. “Visser gave you the gun, Gabe, and everybody in this courtroom knows it.”
“There’s nothing—”
She cut him off. “You know how it works.” She shook her head miserably. “They’ll find all the proof they need now. They’ll go through your clothes, match fibers to something on Elaine. There’ll be blood on your shoes.”
Pratt looked to the bench, stopped talking.
In the stillness, Hardy walked solemnly back to the defense table, behind his client, and rested his hands on the young man’s shoulders. “Your honor,” he intoned, “the defense rests.”
41
>
He must have dreamed it, but so often the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing that it had the force of epiphany.
Glitsky, alone, woke up completely alert in his bed on Saturday morning. Before his eyes were really open, he reached for the telephone. Sergeant Ridley Banks hadn’t signed out on a city-issued vehicle on the night he drove out to see Eugene Visser in his office on one of the piers. He’d taken his own car. Glitsky’s dream, or whatever it was, had Ridley pulling into an open spot a block off the Embarcadero. On his first call, Glitsky got the license plate number of Ridley’s personal vehicle, then he called the city tow lot.
Yep, they told him, they had the car. Cost him a hundred and twenty-five bucks if he wanted to get it out.
Glitsky, Hardy, Thieu, a crime scene investigation team, the dragline dredge unit and half a dozen uniformed officers made it a substantial party, but nobody was happy. Contributing to the gloom, a cold storm had blown in overnight, bringing with it a steady rain driven by winds gusting to twenty-five.
Thieu was down by the dredge, wanting to see how it all worked. Glitsky had satisfied himself on that score years before on a body they’d pulled out of Lake Merced. Now he stood silently by the railing along the walkway above the bay, his hands in his pockets, the collar of his raincoat up around his ears. Hardy the Boy Scout had thought to bring an umbrella, but it had already blown itself inside out once and now wasn’t working as its manufacturer had intended. He, too, was watching the dredge line, the water, silently waiting to see what they might pull up.
The quiet was in itself unnerving. But the increased noise by the dredge—they’d hooked up with something—didn’t lighten anyone’s mood.
Glitsky threw a look at Hardy. It was the type of assignment where you mostly wished you would fail, and they both started moving forward, but slowly. Ridley Banks had a favorite black leather jacket, and that’s what Abe saw first as it came clear of the murky green water. The scar tightened through his lips.
By the time they got to where Thieu stood, the body was hung up on the line at about the water level. They stood a moment, heads hung, sick in their hearts.
“How did you know?” Hardy asked.
Rain was dripping down Glitsky’s face, although he paid it no mind. He motioned behind him. “He left the car he used parked back over there. We knew he’d been to Visser’s, but nobody knew where he’d gone from there when he left. Once I found where the car had been towed from, I realized he hadn’t gone anywhere.” A look down over the railing. “Except there.”
Hardy had a hard time taking his eyes off the body. “I don’t get it,” he said after a while. “Visser didn’t need to kill him.”
Thieu shrugged. “So? He didn’t need to kill Cullen Alsop either. Maybe he found out he liked it. Maybe Ridley told him more than he had to and he felt threatened.”
“Easy, Paul,” Glitsky said. The sight of his colleague’s body had put the young sergeant on edge. “I’ve got a theory,” Glitsky added. “Anybody want to hear it?” He didn’t wait. “These three guys—Torrey, Logan, Visser—they’re splitting up some good money working together, more or less as equals. Everybody’s got their own part in the various scams. Torrey’s using his office. Logan’s scouting up the business. Visser’s the muscle.”
“All right so far,” Thieu said.
Glitsky nodded. “When Elaine came to Torrey the first time, he thought he’d convinced her to forget about blowing the whistle on him, on them all. Maybe even bragged about it to the other two. I’d bet he did.” Glitsky stopped, his eyes following the activity at the water. The crew down below was working to untangle the body from the dragline. From this distance, he couldn’t make out what damage had been done by the sea and its creatures, but the body was now recognizably, undoubtedly, Ridley’s. He pulled his gaze back up, tried to gather his thoughts.
“Torrey bragged to the other guys,” Hardy said, helping him out. Although he, too, was captured by the drama unfolding on the dredge.
“Yeah,” Glitsky said, “okay. So they all knew Elaine was on to their scene. But mostly she was a threat to Torrey, on all kinds of levels. If he got exposed, they were all screwed, but he had the farthest to fall. In any event, when she turned up killed, Visser’s no dummy, he knew it was Torrey.”
“How did he know that?” Thieu asked.
Glitsky blew rainwater away from his mouth. “At the very least, because he’d given him the gun. But then they already had this perfect suspect—I’d given him to them—and Torrey had a history of working the system to all of their advantages, so Visser decided he’d wait and see what happened. Maybe it would all work out. But the other thing that really changed everything was that Visser knowing about Elaine gave him heavy leverage on Torrey.”
Thieu didn’t know the players as well as his lieutenant did, and wanted to get it straight. “Wouldn’t Logan have it, too?”
Glitsky shook his head. “I doubt if Logan knew.”
Hardy added to that. “All he would have cared about was that Elaine was out of their lives. They could keep partying. That’s who he is.”
“Anyway,” Glitsky continued. “Visser’s got this leverage and Torrey makes a mistake. He brokers the deal with Cullen Alsop.”
“Why’s that a mistake?” Thieu again.
“Because from Visser’s point of view, Torrey got an unreliable junkie involved who’s got a better than good chance to screw up an already locked-up case. Maybe Visser even knew Cullen, knew he’d renege, break on cross, something. So anyway, now the new Visser is thinking he’s smarter than Torrey, who before has always been the brains. He decides he knows the best way to save them all from Torrey’s stupid mistake . . .”
Hardy picked it up. “. . . is to make sure Cullen doesn’t testify.”
“So he gives him a bag of China White.” Thieu nodded in appreciation. “I can see that.”
“I bet we’ll know for sure soon enough.” Visser and Torrey had both been arrested just outside the courtroom yesterday. Now, with the appearance of Ridley’s body and whatever forensic evidence it might still have on it, both would be available for questioning for at least the near future. “These rats will fall over themselves trying to save their own sorry asses by giving the other one up, you watch.”
“So Ridley spooked him?” Hardy asked.
“Total blindside, is my opinion,” Abe said. “Caught him completely off guard. Here’s Visser, he just supplied Cullen with the pure smack, and it kills him. Everything had worked perfectly, and now suddenly Ridley’s at his door out of the blue, working without a partner, and he puts Visser on the griddle. Visser’s an ex-cop. He knows he’s made. Ridley pretends things are cool, but he’s not going to go away. There’s nothing else to do, so Visser does him.”
“With the Glock, you think?” Thieu asked.
Glitsky looked down over the railing again. He wiped his whole hand over his eyes. “With something.”
EPILOGUE
In the aftermath of the Cole Burgess hearing, it became apparent that the upheaval from the Elaine Wager case was going to play a critical role in rearranging the city’s political landscape for some time to come. When Judge Timothy Hill ordered both Gabe Torrey and Gene Visser remanded into custody as they sat in Department 20, it signaled the beginning of a new era of judicial activism in San Francisco as well as the end of Sharron Pratt’s career.
The district attorney, humiliated in both the public sector and her private life, did herself even more damage proving that, as Malraux declared long ago, character is fate. She spent nearly two weeks formulating reasons that feebly tried to explain away her own unconscionable behavior on the night of Elaine’s death. Even in San Francisco, these excuses did not play. In early March, abandoned even by her closest advisers and under assault from every imaginable quarter, Sharron Pratt resigned her office and within another week had moved out of the city, reportedly to Albuquerque, where she had family. On the day she resigned, the grand jury formally indicted G
abe Torrey for the murder of Elaine Wager.
The mayor appointed Clarence Jackman—notorious workaholic hard-ass—to fill the position of district attorney until the election in November, which suddenly loomed wide open. Jackman was of course no one’s idea of a liberal, but as usual the mayor had his finger on the pulse of the city, and the appointment was greeted with near universal praise. For his own part, Jackman was persuaded to take the job at least partially because he had a falling out with his partner, Aaron Rand, over the latter’s sexual involvement with Elaine Wager soon after his firm had hired her.
One of Jackman’s first acts as D.A. was to initiate an investigation of his own office’s prior handling of Gironde’s subcontractors regarding their minority hiring practices. Although he found that most were not in strict compliance with the city’s guidelines, none were so egregiously noncompliant as to trigger the claims of fraud that his predecessor had so vigorously pursued. He dismissed the pending cases, then signed and sent out a couple of dozen warning notices. Within two months, the long-delayed airport construction project was at last ready to go forward. Jackman had answered his critics in his usual, no-nonsense style: “Gironde may not be a charitable organization, but it was the lowest bidder for the project and it won the job fair and square. Now let’s let ’em go to work.”
He hired Treya Ghent as his personal assistant—full-time city position with full benefits. Her new employment package gave her seven years’ seniority for the time she’d previously worked at the Hall. Her starting pay was nearly twice what she’d been making as a paralegal with Rand & Jackman.
Dear Mom,
It’s four months today, exactly 120 days. I know you wanted to come down over Memorial Day, but I think it’s better if you don’t visit at all. In person, I’m still not who I want to be. In writing, I’m closer. But having you see me during the process, trying to survive, day to day, it wasn’t working. I’m sorry, but I’m more comfortable with this. I hope you are.
Anyway, I’m letting myself believe that it isn’t going to be too long. Mr. Hardy tells me that with the chronic overcrowding here, the average yearlong only lasts 184 days. They need the cell space. I shouldn’t get my hopes up, except they are. If I’ve only got sixty-four more days, that will be August 2.
The Dismas Hardy Novels Page 50
