The Hearing

by John Lescroart

  7

  Shairon Pratt chose the moment with some care. She had been invited to give a talk at the Commonwealth Club on her tenure to date as District Attorney, the office's most notable successes and failures, the evolution of her philosophy on criminal justice, and her plans for the future. Quite a few members of the media were on hand, as well as many of the city's business and political elite. It was an ideal setting – quite a bit more high-toned than a Hall of Justice impromptu press conference, a slam dunk of a photo op, a chance to explain her absolutely unexpected position shift in word units longer than sound bytes.

  Because it had been playing so well in the business community and the newspapers for over two years, she began with a recap of her office's continuing high-moral-tone campaign against Gironde Industries, the French company whose winning low-ball bid for the $25 million airport baggage carousels had rocked the Board of Supervisors and infuriated many of the largest and most well-connected construction firms who did business in the city.

  A foreign company like Gironde wasn't about to be able to fulfill their contract without working with armies of local subcontractors – sheet metal workers, tile layers, painters, electricians, brickmasons, and so on. These companies, in turn, named by Gironde in their proposal, had all guaranteed that they were in compliance with the city's minority subcontracting quota.

  Gabe Torrey understood business far better than Pratt did, and he had alerted her to the likelihood of fraud in the negotiations. Gironde simply couldn't do the job for the amount that they had bid otherwise. Torrey's opinion was that Gironde hired subcontractors for the proposal period, then laid them off immediately thereafter; that none of the subs had anywhere near the mandated number of women or minorities; he'd bet that many had women or minorities as titular owners and were paid minimum wage. Gironde would put people on the payroll, then give them a handful of cash to stay home and lie about working on the project.

  Pratt had taken it from there.

  And the District Attorney's office had gone to work with a vengeance, convening a grand jury, subpoenaing witnesses, obtaining search warrants on the offending subcontractors, seizing their records without warning, bringing the frauds to light time and again.

  It developed into a major story – reporters soon discovered that Gironde had human rights violations reported on jobs they had worked on in Senegal, in the Caribbean, in the Philippines. The owner of the company, Pierre Coteau, owned another company that sold animal furs. How, Pratt demanded, could a benevolent and liberal San Francisco award a contract to such a despicable company?

  At the request of the Board of Supervisors, Gironde was now preparing a revised second bid with a new list of subcontractors. But the feeling in the Board and in the city at large was so strong against them, and in favor of Pratt on this issue, that no one believed they would keep the job. 'And,' Pratt concluded, 'this is the kind of law I will continue to practice in my second term. These are the kinds of people I will prosecute – those who would unfairly take jobs from the honest citizens and hard-working business people of this city.'

  The applause washed over her. She loved Gironde. It was the perfect San Francisco prosecution. Not only was the issue one of high moral tone, it had opened the coffers of local contractors who before Gironde would not have given her the time of day.

  And now, having reminded everyone of that, she moved to crime with the usual pablum that her staff had spun from the statistical flotsam garnered from any number of often conflicting sources, taking whatever numbers made her look best.

  They'd had setbacks early on, she admitted, but the numbers on violent crime were down in 'the last several months' – actually only in January, but this number had been down enough that Sharron could bring in November and December, when crime had actually been up, and the average would still be less than it had been in the late summer and early autumn.

  They were sending more criminals to jail. This was true because the DA's prosecutors were accepting pleas in exchange for shorter jail terms rather than taking criminals to trial. This speeded up the process and let felons out of jail sooner, but Pratt could say they were sending more bad folks to the slammer.

  She followed up by stating that she was accomplishing all of her good works in spite of the continuing lack of cooperation from the police department. During her last election campaign, she'd fashioned some minor, unproven and isolated allegations of police brutality into a major plank of her platform. She was going to seek out and prosecute bad cops. She was going to create a task force. She was going to bust the 'good old boy' network of redneck cops, never mind that the San Francisco police department was fully integrated as to gender and race at all levels of command, and also had fewer police brutality incidents or complaints than any other city of comparable size in the United States.

  The District Attorney's office, Pratt concluded, was functioning 'with an efficiency that is the envy of every other bureaucracy in the city and county of San Francisco'.

  She looked out over the crowd, deciding that she had them, that the time was ripe. Lifting some pages from the podium, she dropped them onto the table next to her. 'All that said,' she continued, 'it must be admitted now that, with hindsight, I can see that some of the outreach programs, initiated by my office in the early days of this administration, and with the best of intentions, may not have achieved the success that I hoped for.'

  A palpable sense of expectation swept the room. Suddenly people were sitting up straighter, paying attention. She paused significantly, lifted her chin, steeled her gaze. 'In preparation for coming to talk to all of you today, late last week I had written the usual political speech to tell you how well we're doing. And in fact, as I've indicated, there are areas of success to which we can point with pride. Now, though, I'm going to leave my prepared remarks. Please bear with me as I speak from my heart.

  'Last weekend, the city suffered a terrible loss. I'm speaking, of course, of Elaine Wager, not only the daughter of our late beloved senator, but in her own right one of the great lights in the city's firmament.' Pratt paused for a sip of water, gathered herself, and went on. 'One of the most difficult lessons I've had to learn on the prosecution side of the bar is that there is real evil cast among us. My training and background has led me to try and understand the causes of anti-social behavior and to seek solutions through incarceration, yes, but also through counseling and education. I remain proud of the programs we've adopted that seek to temper justice with mercy, that have tried to inject compassion and understanding into the judicial process.

  'But the events of the past few days have brought home some hard truths and today I am here to deliver a message that may have become blurred in my administration's zeal for fairness, tolerance, and empathy for desperate people who are driven to desperate acts. And that message is this: people who break the law in San Francisco are going to be punished.'

  Pratt let the substantial round of applause wash over her, took another sip of water, then waited for silence. When it came, she spoke in a voice thick with conviction – it was time to go into campaign mode. 'There are those who say that I am soft on crime, that I am too compassionate to fulfill the duties of District Attorney. To those people, let me announce what may be correctly interpreted as a sea change in the policy of this administration.

  'The police have arrested a man – a homeless man, a drug addict – who has confessed to the murder of Elaine Wager, a murder in the course of which he took her purse, jewelry, and other possessions. California law defines murder in the commission of a robbery as a special circumstances crime and prescribes only two possible penalties – life in prison without the possibility of parole, and death.'

  Pratt was aware of the drama of the moment. The silence in the room was perfect – even the waiters were still, hanging on her conclusion.

  'I want there to be no mistake. It is the intention of the District Attorney to seek the death penalty in this case. This is the word I'm putting out to the criminal elem
ent in this city, the line that today I draw in the sand – street violence, all violent crime, stops here. The law will be enforced. For as long as I remain District Attorney, here is the policy of my office: if you are unfortunate or dispossessed, mercy will still have its place…' her hands gripped either side of the podium as she looked out over the multitude, 'but if you break the law, justice will trump mercy every-' she brought down her fist, 'single-' again, the fist, 'time.'

  After a short stunned silence, a man at one of the front tables began to applaud and it was as though a dam had broken. The ensuing ovation brought the entire dining room to its feet.

  8

  Sick of conjuring with imponderables, Hardy called a fifteen-minute recess for himself. He stood up, stretched, and walked to the window. Late afternoon, a listless gray day downtown. He and Frannie had their traditional Wednesday date night scheduled to begin in a couple of hours, and Hardy was tempted to call it a day and go wait for his wife at the Shamrock, discuss some philosophical conundrums with his brother-in-law Moses who would be working behind the bar. He could have an early cocktail on the theory that it was always five o'clock somewhere.

  He wasn't getting anything done here, that was for sure.

  His reaction to Monday's problems with Glitsky and the jail had settled uneasily enough, but after his visit with Cole Burgess yesterday, the whole business lay curdling in his stomach. Something was very wrong, but he really didn't want to get involved any further. He was too close to it, one way or the other. Also, he didn't want to risk a serious rupture in his friendship with Abe over a lowlife such as Cole Burgess – to say nothing of the logistical problems he'd doubtlessly have with his friends Jeff and Dorothy, and her difficult mother.

  When the dust cleared, he was all but certain that Cole would cut some kind of deal and get low double digits in the state prison. Every homicide was a manslaughter to Pratt's trial-shy prosecutors. Even the public defender called the city's system a 'plea bargain mill'. Best case, Cole might even get out of San Quentin with his habit broken. In any event, it wasn't Hardy's problem.

  What was his problem right now, though, was Dash Logan. The damned guy was proving harder to contact than the Pope, and Hardy's client Rich McNeil was understandably losing some patience.

  In the mid-eighties, McNeil had just turned fifty and decided to invest his pension plan money in San Francisco real estate. He could have done better with Microsoft, but back then the stock market made him nervous. In any event, he wasn't complaining. The sixteen-unit apartment building on Russian Hill had cost a hefty $1.5 million when he purchased it for a quarter million down; its most recent appraisal pegged its value at six million plus. Rich was now sixty-four years old, primed to sell the thing and retire.

  So here he was, this nice guy and good citizen who'd worked and saved the way good Americans were supposed to, and instead of some carefree years of leisure, he was suddenly looking at some very serious trouble.

  A year and a half ago, he'd finally succeeded in evicting Manny Gait, who'd been a tenant in the building for nearly ten years. The tenant from hell, as it turned out.

  The first sign of trouble was when he painted his entire unit, including the windows, black. When McNeil had demurred, politely requesting Gait at least to leave the outer windows clear, Gait had not so politely declined. It was his fuckin' place, he said, McNeil could go piss up a rope.

  To say that San Francisco's rent control laws favor tenants over landlords is to say that Custer favored Southern belles over the Ogalala Sioux. So when Hardy's client explored the possibility of evicting Mr Gait over the paint job, he found that this would be legally impossible. Gait had his five rooms, he paid his four-hundred dollars every month, and as far as the law was concerned, that apartment was his, and at that price, until he gave it up on his own.

  Which he wasn't inclined to do.

  Over the years, Gait's one unit became a constant source of dissatisfaction to the other tenants as well, and a regular feature of McNeil's life became dealing with complaints about loud noises, awful odors, unsavory people.

  Gait's apartment was just inside the front door to the building on the ground floor, and he decided it was a safer place to keep his Harley than in the garage. Though he ostensibly, and sporadically, worked as a bouncer, he once boasted to McNeil that he really got his money for gas, rent and beer (his only necessities) selling or brokering crack and dope deals to other bikers.

  The man himself was a giant – a vulgar, terrifying Neanderthal with an enormous gut, a voluminous, unkempt beard, and a shaved head. He dressed perennially in black – T-shirts and leathers, boots and chains. If he bathed at all – but no, he couldn't have and smelled the way he did. The only problem McNeil had with turnover in his building were the units adjacent to Gait's – over the years, the average tenancy in these units – despite the great location, the cooperative landlord, the reasonable rents – was ten months.

  Finally, one happy day eighteen months ago, Gait had suddenly disappeared. McNeil didn't receive his rent check by the tenth of the month, which was the statutory grace period. He immediately served written notice and filed to evict. Under normal conditions, in San Francisco McNeil would have had to wait six months or more before any action would be taken on the filing, but the unprecedented support of every other tenant in the building – all of whom personally showed up for the hearing – convinced the judge that this was an extraordinary situation, and he ruled in McNeil's favor.

  When he opened the door to the apartment, even McNeil -who'd expected the worst – wasn't prepared for the damage. The place was totaled. Eventually, it took a crew of four men forty-six days to restore the apartment to habitability. The removal of debris alone was a week-long process. After that, it had to be cleaned, deodorized, cleaned again. McNeil had had to install new hardwood floors and drywall, new lights and fixtures, all new kitchen appliances. Finally, after the new paint was dry, when the work was all done at a cost to McNeil of thirty-one thousand dollars and change, he put it on the market for two thousand four hundred dollars per month, and had eleven qualified renters the first day.

  Then Gait returned.

  He hassled McNeil for a few months, came to his house a few times, once with some biker friends, scared everybody, made a big stink, eventually went away. And Rich had thought the nightmare was over at last.

  But three weeks ago, after all this time, Gait had resurfaced, and in a guise beyond McNeil's worst imaginings. According to the complaints, both civil and criminal, filed in the courts, Gait came home to shock and dismay that he had been put out of his castle.

  Contrary to his landlord's sworn statements, he had not abandoned the property. As Mr McNeil well knew, he'd had to leave with his Harley on an emergency road trip to Kentucky to care for his dying mother. Before he left town, he had paid McNeil twelve hundred dollars in cash for three months' rent in case he had to be gone that long. Upset, worried about his mother's health, in a hurry to be back at her side, he had not concerned himself about a receipt for the transaction – he was a man of his word, and assumed McNeil was as well. They'd had a relationship for years. It never occurred to him that either one of them would cheat the other.

  He was stunned upon his return to find that Rich McNeil had stolen his money, taken away his home, disposed of all his treasures. After all, Gait had been a solid, rent-paying tenant – he had never, not once, missed a rent payment! And now he was ruined, with no place he could afford to live in the city he loved.

  McNeil had obviously been driven to this inhuman fraud by simple greed – after all, he stood to make, he was currently making, two thousand dollars more every month on Gait's apartment alone. It was a horrible travesty.

  So Gait, through his attorney Dash Logan, was appealing the eviction ruling. He was also suing McNeil to get his apartment back at the old rent, to restore his lost property, to compensate him for mental anguish, the pain and suffering he'd endured, for his attorney's fees, and for punitive damages
– to the tune of a million dollars.

  What made it worse for Hardy's client, though – far worse – were the criminal charges.

  Like everything else in San Francisco, rent control was a political issue. And in her election campaign three years before, Sharron Pratt had made it clear that she hated slum landlords nearly as much as she loved the homeless. Her administration had pledged itself to protecting the rights of the poor, the unempowered, the disenfranchised masses. Besides which, renters in the city constituted a huge voting bloc.

  And here was a Russian Hill nabob pitted against an unsympathetic biker – it was the perfect opportunity to illustrate just how venal these landlords could be in their immoral pursuit of the almighty buck.

  Hardy knew McNeil well and considered his client pretty much a working stiff who'd put in thirty-five hard years behind desks in various management positions, eventually reaching the eminence of Executive Vice President of Terranew Industries, a biotech firm specializing in the ever-glamorous field of fertilizer products.

  But in Sharron Pratt's opinion, Rich McNeil, by the very fact that he'd been successful and invested wisely, was of the landed class, the privileged class. Never mind that he'd earned it – that was irrelevant. And Manny Gait was low class. In fact, in the eyes of many, he was barely a citizen at all. This conflict boiled down to a class struggle. It was as simple as that.

  Traditionally, as Pratt knew (and if she forgot, Gabe Torrey reminded her), the Rich McNeils of the world got their way by being in the men's club, by having the money to afford better lawyers, by buying elected officials to do their bidding and dirty work. Well, as Torrey had counseled her, she couldn't let that happen on her watch, nosiree. It wasn't going to be business as usual in San Francisco, not while she was District Attorney. That's why she'd been elected, to shake up the status quo, to ring in a new age.

  She had to make the message crystal clear that her office saw through Rich McNeil's transparent grab for more income, more money that he didn't even need. Pratt had to be the people's protector here, and this was her chance to show the traditional power structure that the old way wasn't going to work. More than a landlord-tenant dispute, this had to be, by her lights, true white-collar crime, the kind that was too often tolerated in American society – and she had committed herself to punish it.