The Hearing

by John Lescroart

  He hated it, hated himself.

  This was why he'd seen this lowlife Cullen immediately. If at least some new evidence came to light that could make the case stronger against Cole Burgess, Ridley would be able to console himself with the fact that he was even more right than he'd been before. It wasn't all going to come down to the confession.

  He'd played that over, both on the physical tape and in his mind, almost continually since they'd busted Abe. In his career, Ridley had sweated maybe half a dozen other suspects into confessions. He kept asking himself whether he treated Burgess any differently than any of those. He couldn't really say he had, except maybe for the heroin connection, the supposed withdrawal. But he'd done the same kind of thing before by simple persistence, by using whatever leverage worked. The pressure applied by a trained, relentless interrogator could be great. This didn't make for false confessions.

  In his experience, while people sometimes would confess to something they didn't do, usually this was when they weren't even suspects in the first place. Some lunatic would walk in or call the station and say that they'd committed some crime. Banks had once seen a man come in and confess to a murder because he'd become enamored of the published pictures of the woman who was actually on trial for the murder and he thought she'd be grateful to him for taking the heat off her, putting it all on himself. Greater love than this. And perhaps later when the guy got out of jail or acquitted at trial (because after all he hadn't really done it), he and the woman could date or get married or something, raise little murder suspects of their own.

  But Ridley believed that the Burgess confession – which he'd carefully wrung out of him – did not fall in this category. He believed that if you had a suspect at the scene of the crime when the crime was committed, with the weapon nearby and physical evidence that gave him a reasonable motive, and that person finally got persuaded to admit he'd done it, it was a virtual certainty that he had. People wanted to confess, to tell what they'd done. This was human nature, although sometimes you had to use a mental cattle prod to get down to basics.

  It was far more a cerebral endeavor than a physical one. And even on the physical plane, it hadn't gone nearly so far as to be cruel and unusual. There was discomfort perhaps – Cole hadn't been on a picnic up here – but Ridley's interview, in his mind and memory, had been a true interrogation, a far cry from the pain-induced confessions of the world's myriad torture chambers.

  Even given all that, though, another link in the chain of culpability was always a nice thing, and Cullen Leon Alsop might have been just that. This was why, late as it was, tired as he was, Ridley had wanted to bring him up here and interview him right away. If he was convincing, if he had something truly substantive to add about the provenance of the gun, maybe tonight Ridley wouldn't toss in bed until the fitful dawn broke.

  Big ifs, and neither had panned out to Ridley's satisfaction.

  Which was not to say that Cullen's evidence wouldn't get a lot of attention. Apparently it did eliminate one of the unanswered questions in the prosecution's case – where Cole Burgess had acquired the gun.

  It also strengthened the argument for murder.

  If he believed it.

  He did believe in the truth of the rest of the facts in this case. That was the irony. He'd been there, sitting four feet across the table from Cole Burgess, when he'd said he'd done it after all. He was sorry. He didn't know why. He didn't really remember. But he did do it. He was sure of it.

  And Ridley had believed him, believed they'd finally come to the truth.

  But now Cullen's vague, unsubstantiated testimony, which seemed to fill a hole, but which was really unprovable testimony of the 'he said, but then he said' variety. And the timing of it bothered him, the snitch appearing at such an opportune moment. It didn't make him doubt that Cole had killed Elaine, but it did make him wonder.

  A yawn overtook him and he stretched like a cat, his whole body. All right, he had to get some sleep. Enough was enough.

  But the interview with Cullen hadn't gone on for too long – maybe fifteen minutes. He should listen to the tape once through and make better notes before copying it for the DA. They wouldn't get the transcript back to him for at least a week, and he wanted a clear memory of what had been said.

  So he rewound the tape, pushed the button, and began listening. After his intro and Cullen's first interruption, the next words he heard were: 'I got a deal going here with the DA, and…'

  He played it again.

  Ridley himself hadn't made any deal with Cullen. The DA hadn't mentioned a deal to him. The message from that office had been that an inmate at the jail had information on the Cole Burgess case and Ridley might want to interview him. But no one had said they had made a deal, although it seemed as though Cullen was under that impression.

  One thing was for sure – Ridley was going to look into it and find out.

  'Mom?'

  Treya was in her tiny breakfast nook – six elongated windows in a semi-circle off her slightly-larger kitchen. There was one light in the nook, off now, a fan under it, spinning gently, although the night outside was cold and the house cool. She was sitting on the first four inches of her chair, ramrod straight, both palms flat on the table. She might have been trying to make it levitate.

  'Mom?' Raney stood silhouetted in the dim light from somewhere in the back of the duplex. She was already taller than Treya's five feet seven, skinny with no hips and just-budding breasts. She wore her hair shoulder-length and had it tied off to one side in a kind of pigtail. Tonight she'd worn jogging shorts and a Giants sweatshirt to bed. 'Is everything OK?'

  Treya had tucked her in nearly an hour before and come out here, turning out lights as she went. She poured herself a glass of tap water, sat down at the table, hadn't moved.

  'Oh, I'm fine.' Treya often thought that it was her fate to exist in a limited world with a single acceptable public posture, crisp and, when possible, cheerful efficiency. All the rest of her feelings, emotions, aspirations, and opinions had best remain unspoken, unexpressed. It was safest that way, where nobody could fault you for a bad attitude, an unguarded remark. She had always most keenly felt this need for control in the presence of her daughter. In this complicated world, Raney didn't need a role model who complained, who couldn't cope, who might die like her dad had. Raney needed strength, all of Treya's strength. She didn't need to see anything else.

  Treya put a false brightness in her tone. 'But what is my girl still doing on this side of dreamland on a school night? You're going to be dragging come morning.' She started to force herself up, ready to tuck her in again.

  'I've been standing here in the kitchen for ten minutes, Mom. You haven't moved a muscle. What are you thinking?'

  Another smile. 'I guess I just don't know, hon, to tell you the truth. I don't suppose I'm much for thinking this time of night. Maybe I was sleeping sitting up.'

  'Your eyes were open. You were just staring straight ahead.'

  'Well…' An embarrassed shrug. She sat back down, tried to smile, although it came out a little crooked.

  Raney moved up next to her and put her arm around her shoulders. Keeping it there, she pulled a chair up close and sat in it, then laid her head against her mother's. 'Are you sad about Elaine?'

  Treya didn't know if she trusted herself to talk. She cleared her throat, forced a matter-of-fact tone. 'People die, girl. The living have to carry on.'

  For an answer, she felt her daughter's arm tighten around her shoulders. She felt her lips kiss her temple. 'I love you, you know.'

  She let out a deep and labored breath. 'There was a policeman at the service this morning,' she said. 'Lieutenant Glitsky.'

  'About Elaine?'

  She nodded, waited, whispered, 'He was her father.'

  Raney straightened up. 'I thought her father was dead.'

  'No,' she replied. Another sigh. 'It's a long story, but her mother – the senator, Loretta Wager? Well, she and Lieutenant Glitsky were lovers when
she was young, before she got married.' She paused. 'Just before. Anyway, Loretta was pregnant when she got married, and she made her husband believe that Elaine was his.'

  'Did she tell Lieutenant Glitsky?'

  'No. Not till much later, just before she died.'

  'You mean all that time he didn't know his own daughter?'

  'Right.'

  That's horrible. I'd be so mad if that happened to me.'

  Treya wasn't much in the mood, but she had to smile. 'Well, that's yet another great thing about being female, girl. You generally know it when you have a baby.'

  'But Elaine didn't know it either? Didn't know her own dad?'

  'No, not until after her mother died. She'd left her a letter.'

  'A letter? About something like that?' There was a lengthy silence. 'So then what did she do? Elaine. Did she go and see him?'

  'No. She didn't think it was her place. She thought he should come to her. Which he never did.'

  'Never?'

  She shook her head. 'It never happened. He's just a cold man. He didn't care.'

  'Was that why?'

  'Why what?'

  'Why didn't he tell her? Didn't he care?'

  'I would think so.' Treya reached for her water glass and took a drink. 'Why else wouldn't he?'

  She shrugged. 'Maybe the same reason she didn't tell him. He might have thought it wasn't his place. He didn't want to butt in.'

  The simple truth of it rocked Treya and she shook her head. 'No. You'd have to meet him. He's just hard as nails.'

  'Maybe he just doesn't show things. I know somebody like that.' The arm tightened again, and Treya leaned into it. 'So he was there this morning? What happened?'

  She was back to the thought that wouldn't go away. 'I think I might have killed him.'

  At Jupiter, things were hopping.

  At ear-splitting volume with the bass boosted to rattle the bones, Shania Twain was telling her honey she was home and wanted a cold one, and the way the bartender was hopping behind the bar, she wasn't the only one.

  It was a rectangular room, sixteen feet wide and a good bit more than twice that long. The stools at the bar itself were all taken – fifteen men and six women, all of them between twenty-nine and thirty-five, none of them destined to go home alone tonight. Another three or four dozen people stood behind them on the thin stretch of floor between the bar and the booths or in the bullpen opening just behind them. Shoulder to shoulder and hip to crotch, the young professionals drinking here were mostly in law enforcement – police and attorneys, law students and clerks. A smattering of excitement groupies who loved the scene.

  Jupiter was their place. They could let it out here among friends and colleagues. Most of the people here felt that outside, they lived in a constricted powder keg of frustration, tension, even danger. Some of the married ones existed in a constant state of schizophrenia – their daily life in the cop world and their home in suburbia. Jupiter was the decompression chamber that allowed them to survive the passage from the soul-eating, mind-numbing pressure of the one to the soul-eating, mind-numbing boredom of the other.

  Tiny windows, high up in the bare yellow walls, dripped with condensation and gave a subterranean feel to the place. Even in the daytime, with its long and narrow shape, the bar felt like the inside of a submarine, but by night this feeling was especially pronounced. It is illegal to smoke cigarettes in eating or drinking establishments in San Francisco, yet the air was blue and acrid, thick with tobacco smoke. A few complaints had actually been filed from random walk-in do-gooders, but somehow they'd all mysteriously gotten lost.

  Whatever it was that rose from the vats of French fry oil and the hamburger grills back in the kitchen added their own weight and odor to the air. Tonight at eleven fifty-one, the temperature outside was 44 degrees.

  It was 86 degrees – hot – in the furthest of the six booths from the front door.

  In that booth, Dash Logan had removed his coat and draped it over the Naugahyde behind him. The top two buttons on his dress shirt were undone, his tie was loose. Clean-shaven, with a boyish face and perennial smile, he passed in the dim light for mid-thirties. The gold post in his left ear didn't hurt, either. He fancied that the neat, short ponytail and the subtle dye job drew attention away from the fact that the reddish hair was thinning, and he might not have been all wrong.

  Certainly, tonight he was doing all right with Connie, and she couldn't have been thirty yet. He'd had his eye on her since she came in with some secretaries he knew from the Federal courthouse. She was a first timer here. At least he hadn't seen her before, and he would have noticed. And in this showroom, you didn't waste time if some quality merchandise moved itself out onto the floor. He knew one of the girls with whom Connie – he loved that name even – had come in, and before they knew what had hit them, he got himself introduced and bought a round for the bunch of them.

  Connie had undone some of the top buttons on her purple silk blouse, too. She was turned on the seat toward him, and the light material fell tantalizingly away from her breasts. He could just make out the black lace at the top of her bra. She'd had four whiskey sours since she'd come in.

  Just across the table at the same booth, one of Connie's friends had hooked up with another guy – Dash knew him, a young lawyer with the Public Defender's office, married. They had been talking, yelling over the music, about some case for most of the past hour, and it looked to him as though that's where they would stay – her pretending to be interested in his work, him trying to find the guts either to finish what he'd started or to call it a night. Dash thought he probably wasn't up to either.

  The problem with youth these days, he thought. In spite of ads exhorting Just Do It! everywhere you turned, they couldn't seem to just fuckin' do anything.

  This waffling right across the table with one of Connie's own friends could ruin the whole vibe. He'd seen it happen – the girlfriend hits her boredom quotient, looks at her watch and goes, 'Oh, Connie, look what time it is. And we've got work tomorrow.' And then they both split.

  But Dash was going pretty good here, telling funny stories, keeping Connie laughing, keeping her drink filled. He had a good feeling about tonight, but he had to act before this dweeb across the table ruined everything. He wanted to yell at the kid: 'Get a clue. She's half in your lap with four drinks in her and her tits falling out of her blouse. What do you think she wants?'

  It was time to make some magic. 'Connie.' He had to lean in closer to be heard. He kissed the side of her cheek, pulled back. 'Sorry,' he said, 'I couldn't stand it anymore.'

  'It's OK.' She was smiling at him. Perfect teeth. Great skin. One of those terrific northern Italian noses. 'That was cute.'

  Cute was good, he thought. He'd take cute. 'So are you a little warm? You want to go outside and cool off?'

  She nodded. 'That does sound good, actually.'

  'Here, I'll get your coat.'

  Her girlfriend noticed. 'Where are you going?'

  Dash leaned across the table. 'Back in five. Promise. Save our places, will you?'

  With a light hand on her back, he guided Connie through the crowd, then outside. When the doors to the bar closed behind them, Dash came up beside her. 'Loud in there.'

  Connie was hugging her arms. 'But cold out here.'

  He had carried both their jackets out, and helped put hers on. 'Better?'

  'Some.' But clearly not enough.

  With no hesitation, he took his own coat and draped it over her. Jupiter was in an industrial neighborhood and the street was wide, with a railroad track down the center of it. Streetlights illuminated the entire block. It was a cop bar – city services tended to work. The street, though deserted, actually looked inviting.

  He held out his hand, she took it and they began to walk.

  He'd parked two-thirds down the street and they stopped to admire his BMW Z3. 'Would you like to sit in it?' He opened the door, let her in, went around to his side. It was a convertible, but the top wa
s up, and inside he turned on the motor and the heat. 'OK.' He put on an accent. 'You want to kick it up a notch?'

  She nearly squealed with delight. 'Oh, you watch Emeril. I love him.'

  Dash was shaking his head. 'Nobody loves him as much as I do. I even love it that there's nobody on the Food Channel anymore except him. Except one other, what is it, the Iron Chef?'

  'Something like that.' Connie was into it. 'But Emeril… let's kick it up a notch. Bam. I love that.'

  He reached over and touched her knee. The skirt had ridden up to her mid-thigh. He popped the glove compartment and took out a small vial of white powder. 'Kick it up a real notch.' In half a minute, he had poured it out onto the mirror from the glove box and arranged it into four short lines. 'Just good old-fashioned nose candy. I don't want to force you to do anything.' One of the lines disappeared up his nose. 'See? Harmless.' Then he made a face, and blew out comically.

  She watched him. He finished the second line. 'You know, some nights I'll get home all wired and turn on the tube and watch like three Emeril's in a row. Now that is loving the man. What I don't understand is how come he doesn't get tired. I do three shows in a row at two a.m. and I'm gonna be dragging, I promise.'

  'Not with that in you.'

  In ten minutes, they were talking about going back to his apartment, which wasn't more than three miles up across Market. 'But what about your friend?'

  'Oh, she drove. We talked about it. If I'm not there, she'll just go home.'

  16

  At seven fifteen on this Tuesday morning, Rich McNeil, bundled in a heavy overcoat, was looking over a guano-stained railing into the green waters of the bay. Further along the railing, a lone Asian fisherman smoked and walked back and forth, pausing every few steps to tug at one of his lines. In the fifteen minutes that McNeil had been waiting, he'd pulled up two small fish and put them in a burlap sack that he had suspended into the water.