The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

“Really, though,” Hardy said, “not for too much longer.”

  “This is just a fucking travesty,” Hal said.

  Hardy met his angry gaze with one of his own. “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  Nelson’s bulk appeared at the table beside them. “Mr. Hardy, Ms. Wu, his honor would like to see both of you in chambers.”

  They exchanged a worried glance, excused themselves and walked back out through the bullpen. Nelson knocked on the judge’s door, got a “Yes?” and pushed it open.

  This time, they had room to enter and even to sit on two of the three chairs that had been placed in front of Johnson’s desk, where the judge sat without his robes, in shirt and tie. Much to Hardy’s surprise, he looked up from the document he was perusing and greeted them more or less genially. “I’ve asked Mr. Brandt to join us as well, and I’d prefer to say nothing until he arrives.” He went back to his document, occasionally taking a note or striking a phrase.

  Brandt didn’t keep them waiting long, and as soon as he’d come in and sat, Johnson adjusted his glasses and began to speak. “I want to thank you all for coming by. You’ll notice that I have not asked the court recorder to join us. This is because I’d like this meeting to be off the record. Does anyone have an objection to that?”

  No one did.

  “As all of you I’m sure realize, this has been an acrimonious case from the outset. I’ve spent the last hour and a half here at my desk thinking about what we’ve seen and heard about this minor Andrew Bartlett, his attempted suicide, and so on. It’s led me to wonder if perhaps some of the earlier defense motions and strategies presented in this case might have antagonized the court to a degree that is incompatible with the interests of justice. The fact of the matter is that I’ve been very angry and remain very angry at what I’ve taken to be deliberate manipulation of the court.”

  “Your honor . . . !”

  “That’s all right, Ms. Wu. I’m not accusing you of anything now. I’m pretty well over it.” He took off his glasses and laid them on the desk in front of him. “Mr. Hardy, your representation in the courtroom this morning was, as you pointed out, compelling and highly relevant. However, as I tried to make clear about half a dozen times, I wasn’t going to allow this hearing and the reason for it to become bogged down in the question of Mr. Bartlett’s innocence or guilt. But now we’ve heard from all the defense witnesses, and Mr. Brandt, I understand you won’t be calling anyone?”

  “That’s correct, your honor.”

  “All right, then, for all practical purposes, we’re finished with the seven-oh-seven. All that remains is for me to render my decision, which I’ve prepared and plan to deliver at the proper time. For my own peace of mind and, frankly, to preserve the integrity of the court, I wanted to share that tentative decision with all of you now, before we go out on the record.”

  He replaced his glasses then and opened the document that was on the desk in front of him. “The court finds that the minor was seventeen years old at the time of the alleged offense and that the offense falls within Welfare and Institutions Code 707(b). The court finds as follows: the minor is not a fit and proper subject to be dealt with under the juvenile court law.”

  He looked up, noted Hardy’s and Wu’s looks of frustration and defeat, went back to his text. “The court finds that the minor is not amenable to the care, treatment and training programs available through the juvenile court based on the degree of criminal sophistication exhibited by the minor for the following reasons: the minor eluded a vigorous anti-weapons campaign at his school for several months before the alleged incident, and carried a loaded gun concealed on his person . . .”

  For the next several minutes, Johnson didn’t look up as he read from the notes in his folder, finding that Andrew “is amenable to the care, treatment and training programs available through the juvenile court” for the second, third, and fourth criteria, and giving his reasons. So Wu had won three out of four, Hardy was thinking, not that it mattered one whit for their client.

  “As to the fifth criterion,” Johnson finally intoned, “the court finds that the minor is not amenable . . . the minor is an unfit subject to be treated in the juvenile justice system. The matter is referred to the district attorney for prosecution under the general law. The matter shall be set for arraignment in the adult court.”

  When he finished, he took a breath and removed his eyeglasses. “That’s where we are,” he said. “I wanted all of you to understand my position on the law, my reasoning and my ruling. That will be the ruling of the court.”

  Now he looked to each of the three lawyers in turn. “However, in view of Mr. Hardy’s representation, and in the interest of justice and simple fairness, I’m not going to issue this ruling today. I’m going to take the matter under submission for one week, during which time you, Mr. Brandt, will discuss the matter with the district attorney and determine if he chooses to pursue the matter further, and to what degree. In the meanwhile, since Mr. Bartlett remains a minor until I formally declare him to be an adult, I intend to release him from his detention into the care of his parents until next week when I deliver my ruling.”

  Brandt, having won the hearing on its merits only to have the victory snatched from him, raised a hand and spoke. “Your honor, with respect, you can still issue your ruling today. The DA will be reviewing the case as a matter of course and will—”

  But Johnson stopped him. “You’re forgetting the special circumstances, Counselor. The minute I declare Mr. Bartlett an adult, he remains in confinement, and that doesn’t seem right to me. There’s no bail by statute in a special circumstances case. If I say he’s an adult today, he goes downtown today. And it’s my feeling that he’s already been locked up too long. If he’s innocent, one day is too long.”

  “Thank you, your honor,” Wu said.

  But he turned on her, too. “There’s nothing to thank me for, Counselor.” He tapped the document on his desk. “This will be my ruling. It goes into effect when I deliver it, one week from today. Meanwhile, your client doesn’t leave the jurisdiction. He’s under his parents’ care and guidance the entire time. There will be a number of strict conditions. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, your honor. Of course.”

  “Of course.” Johnson was clearly sick of the whole thing. He looked at his watch and stood up. “If there are any more comments, I’d prefer not to hear them. My decision is my decision and it’s final. Now I’d like to go out and put it on the record.”

  33

  Jason Brandt wasn’t as disappointed as he’d let on with Johnson’s decision on Andrew Bartlett. In fact, as he listened to Dismas Hardy’s representation to the court that morning, he’d realized that if even most of what his opposite number in the courtroom was saying proved to be true, he could be prosecuting an innocent man. And since it was all verifiable, why would Hardy lie? Then when the judge had ordered him to confer with the DA on the further disposition of the case, it removed any onus from him. He’d won the 707 hearing on its merits and that was the task he’d been assigned.

  Now that was over.

  Johnson had made his decision and anything he and Amy Wu might do outside of the courtroom would be irrelevant to the case. Technically, he should possibly wait to see her until the ruling next Wednesday, but there was just no way he was going to do that, not now. He’d take the risk, and if one of his bosses didn’t like his timing, he had an answer that he knew would fly—they hadn’t started until after the ruling. They would not be adversaries in the courtroom again.

  But after they’d adjourned at the YGC, he’d had no opportunity to talk with her in the courtroom, set up a time they could get together. She, Hardy, Andrew and the Norths had been celebrating quietly around the defense table, and he had caught her eye for an instant—a message or a promise—then left by the back way. He’d called Jackman’s office and Treya told him she could squeeze him in at a little after four o’clock, which meant he couldn’t waste a moment, so he didn’t.
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  When Brandt came in, Jackman stood, came around his desk and shook his hand, which Brandt took as a sign of enhanced recognition and even of approval. They sat on either end of the low settee in front of the coffee table. Jackman asked him what was so important and Brandt gave it to him in under five minutes.

  “We can check this out pretty quick,” the DA said in his quiet tone. He stood again and went over to the door. “Treya,” he said, “is there a chance you could get me in touch with your husband right away?”

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  “Just transfer him to my line.” Jackman came back into the office, went back to his desk, and the telephone rang once before he picked it up. “Abe. We’ve had a question come up here. There’s a young man in my office, Jason Brandt, who’s been prosecuting the Andrew Bartlett case up at the YGC. Mike Mooney and . . . Right. That’s right, it’s Hardy’s case, too . . . You are? Well, the judge has postponed his ruling until he knows more. I’m thinking you might be able to tell Mr. Brandt what you’ve got and he can report back to me . . . Right, on Mooney, too, but all of it. Thanks.”

  Jackman hung up. “You know where you’re going?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then go.”

  In the improvised computer room next to his office, a harried and exhausted Glitsky was bringing Brandt up to date between taking the reports of his people in the field and answering the questions of his workers. The clock on the wall read 4:40.

  “I know. Hardy has already left me three messages about the slugs at Mooney’s, but I’ve got other priorities at the moment. We don’t have any of those slugs. We didn’t find any the first time. I don’t think it’s likely we’ll find them next time we look either.”

  “But do you think, personally, that Mooney was one of the Executioner’s victims?”

  Glitsky’s lips pursed. “You don’t?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, start knowing. I’m not saying we can prove it yet, but it’s a dead lock as far as I’m concerned.”

  “And Bartlett?”

  “I don’t know from Bartlett,” Glitsky said. “Wrong guy, wrong place, wrong time.”

  Phones were ringing all over the office, and somebody from outside in the reception area called in, “Chief, your line.”

  Glitsky picked up the receiver, then pulled a pad over and wrote, furiously taking notes. “How many times?” he said. “What’s the name? Anybody see him? Enough for a composite? Do they video the visitors down there?” Glitsky’s mouth went tight. “Yeah, that sounds right. Okay. Keep checking.”

  He hung up, raised his voice. “Everybody listen up,” and the other noises in the room stopped. “That was Darrel Bracco down at Corcoran. Lucas has got a son, Ray Welding, visited him in prison forty times in the last three years. No address, no listing. Bracco’s requested the phone calls from the pay phone at his father’s block and they’re going to fax it up direct. Sarah,” he turned to Evans, “you pick three people. I want every four one five, four oh eight, five one one, six five oh”—all the telephone area codes for the Bay Area—“every one reversed for names and addresses. This might be the guy.”

  “This guy, Welding, the dad.” Brandt, wanting to contribute, couldn’t stop himself and spoke to Glitsky. “If he won an appeal, he must have had a lawyer. The lawyer would know the son, wouldn’t he? Where he lives?”

  “He might,” Glitsky said. “But he won’t talk to us. We’re the cops, remember, the bad guys.”

  “But if the son’s the Executioner?”

  Glitsky didn’t answer because someone else told him to pick up the phone. This time he listened without writing or saying much, and by the time he put the phone down, the room had hushed. His head hung, chin to chest. He slowly fisted the table in a black fury.

  Everyone waited until he raised his head. “The last local juror,” he said. “Wendy Takahashi, maiden name Shui. The one that just moved last month.” Which was why they hadn’t been able to locate her sooner.

  “She’s already dead?” someone asked.

  “Before we got there,” Glitsky said. “Maybe just before. Belou’s been standing outside her place since about two, protecting a dead woman.” Glitsky’s eyes, opaque with fatigue and anger, were glazed over.

  Brandt wandered out to the reception room, stopped next to a uniformed officer. “What did he mean, the last local juror?”

  The man, studying a computer printout, answered like a zombie. “There were six locals. Mooney, Reed—that’s Cary—Montrose, Wong, Tollman, and now Shui/Takahashi. She was the last one.”

  The mention of Mooney as the first Executioner victim did not escape Brandt’s notice. “What about the other six?” he asked.

  “Four moved away, two died. We’re trying to find the four. We figure the other two—the dead ones—are out of immediate danger.”

  Wu got back to the Sutter Street office and, after accepting congratulations from the small group gathered in Hardy’s office, excused herself to go and call Brandt back at the YGC. He wasn’t in and she left a message that she wanted to see him, with her work and home phone numbers. Maybe, she said, they could even have dinner later tonight. Start over and take things more slowly. In the flush of confidence she was feeling after Johnson’s decision on Andrew, she allowed herself to believe that sometimes the right thing could happen in this world.

  But Brandt wasn’t at his office. She’d have to wait a bit longer.

  Her in basket was filled to overflowing with work—mail that she’d neglected, returned materials from word processing and her secretary. On the top was the most recent draft of the notice rule memo she was writing for Farrell—billable work—and she lifted it up from the pile, kicked back from her desk, put her feet up and began to read it over.

  Ten minutes later she was back in her working hunch, red pen in hand, scratching out and rewriting, when somebody knocked at her door. “Come in.”

  “You’re working,” Hardy said.

  “That’s what you pay me for. What’s up?”

  “I’m going down to the Hall, see if I can find Glitsky and get a word with him. Maybe get a commitment on some action with the Mooney scene.”

  “You want me to come with you?”

  “Actually, I was going to suggest that you give yourself a break. As managing partner, I wanted you to know that I’ve declared today a clear win for the good guys. And they’re not so common you want to ignore them, ever. David Freeman, lesson six. So it’s your sacred duty to take the evening off and savor the victory.”

  “David Freeman never took time off.”

  “Not true. Every time he won, he burned the city down.”

  Wu glanced down at the draft on her desk, let out a sigh. “I don’t consider this over yet, sir. Not till next Wednesday. If then.”

  “It’s over,” Hardy said. “Jackman hears that the Salarcos never heard a shot, my guess is that even without scuffed slugs from Mooney’s, he’ll never go forward. Andrew’s home tonight, Wu. You’ve got to call that a win.”

  “All right, but it wasn’t a win for me.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You’re the one who found everything that made the difference. I just made problems we shouldn’t have had at the outset. Then made them worse as we went along.”

  Hardy stood a minute in the doorway, then took a step in and closed the door behind him. “Look, Wu” he said, “this was your first major case. So you weren’t perfect. Nobody is. The point is, do you think you learned anything?”

  Gradually, she softened. Nodded her head in acknowledgment.

  “Okay, then. Your client’s free, your team just took the flag, your boss is telling you to take the rest of the day off, and you’re splitting hairs about how we didn’t really win and it wasn’t really you and how it could have been better? Don’t do that. It could always be better, but you ought to recognize when it’s good enough, don’t you think?”

  She sighed again, glanced at her
in box, finally looked up and gave him a chagrined smile. “All right.”

  “You can go back to punishing yourself tomorrow. I won’t stop you. But tonight, give yourself a break and get out of here.”

  Hardy was right, she thought. You had to take these moments when you could.

  It was a bit after five, suddenly warm and still now after all the spring wind, with an almost buttery softness to the air and the light. She parked just off Chestnut and decided to stroll along the avenue, letting her senses dictate where she’d stop, what she’d buy for a private celebration dinner at home. She’d open all the windows to let in some of the outside, then sit alone at her table with her view of the bridge and some great bread and selections of the awesome take-out Marina food and fresh flowers. After, she’d curl up in her chair and read or put on some music or both, and Jason would call or he wouldn’t, but either way there would be tomorrow and if it was meant to be, it would be.

  It took her most of an hour, dawdling along, stopping in at half a dozen shops, chatting with the merchants and even some of the other customers. She bought daffodils and some fresh Asiago cheese bread, marinated artichoke hearts, a spinach salad, some pot-stickers, an early pear.

  The staircase up to her apartment was suffused with still-bright sunlight as she walked up. When she got to the fourth-floor landing outside her door, she stopped and took another moment to look down over the neighborhood, then the view beyond—the dark green cypresses in the Presidio, a hundred pleasure boats on the bay.

  What a gorgeous place!

  Suddenly, for perhaps the first time in her adult life, she realized that she felt blessed and even lucky.

  She put down the bag of food and flowers. Taking her keys from her purse, she inserted the house key into the door, picked up her groceries again and walked inside. Closing the door behind her, she threw the deadbolt and set the chain lock.

  Behind her, a male voice said, “Turn around slowly and move away from the door.”

  The after-work crowd at the Balboa Cafe wasn’t quite as thick as the after-dinner mob, but Jason Brandt still felt fortunate to get a seat at the bar. He laid a twenty-dollar bill down and ordered a beer.