The Hearing

by John Lescroart

  'How do you do that?'

  No signal, and Dash changed lanes, accelerating to fifty. He passed two cars, ran a red light, swung back into his original lane. He pinched his nose with his thumb and forefinger, sniffed back. 'How do you think all those guns in the lock-up get inside the Hall?'

  'They're evidence. I've brought a bunch in myself in my time.'

  'Right. And what defines evidence?' Dash let him work it out.

  It didn't take him long. 'An evidence tag.'

  'Correct. A little piece of paper that says evidence on it. You want to bring a bazooka inside the Hall, you put a tag on it, walk right around the metal detector, tell the guard to have a nice day. If we weren't the good guys, I'd say it really wasn't fair. Whoa!' Suddenly, he braked hard and pulled into a spot at the curb. 'Jupiter already.' He flashed a grin at his passenger. 'No wonder they call me Dash.'

  Gabe Torrey hung up and immediately started to punch in the numbers for Sharron's direct line, but decided this was important enough to warrant a visit. In half a minute, he was in the anteroom outside her office, where Madeleine, Pratt's secretary, waved him in as a matter of course.

  The District Attorney of San Francisco was hard at work – even Pratt's enemies conceded that she was a tireless workaholic. The complaint, if there was one, was that often her work produced no tangible results. But she put in the hours, no one denied that.

  She was sitting at the computer next to her desk, her fingers flying over the keys. Hearing the door, she looked over. Torrey saw the telltale ghost of displeasure and impatience playing on her features, but then it flitted away. She didn't like being interrupted, but since it was him.

  He closed the door behind him. 'Interesting news,' he said.

  'I hate that word, interesting.' With a sigh, Pratt pushed back from the computer. 'You might as well just say bad. Somebody tells you about a movie and says it was interesting, do you want to go out and see it? Never. And if you do, guess what? It sucks.'

  Torrey heard out the tirade. 'Is this a bad time?' he asked mildly.

  'Not particularly. I'm just trying to get this article written for American Lawyer.'

  They had discussed this over the weekend – the magazine was getting input from DAs around the state on the question of how various communities were handling the problem of so-called 'victimless crimes', such as prostitution and drug abuse. Sharron's position was that, basically, you didn't prosecute them, and since the legal community in the state was aware of this, Torrey had been under the impression that he'd convinced her to farm the task out to one of her junior staff people.

  'So you are writing it yourself.'

  There was no defensiveness in her answer. She had made her decision and it was the right one and that was that. 'I told you I thought it would be better me-'

  'Than somebody else who couldn't express it as well.'

  'Exactly. I'd just wind up doing it over myself anyway. And if my name's going to be on it-'

  'I know. We've been over this. You're wasting your time with this detail work. That's why you have a staff.'

  'I'm wasting my time reading incompetent drafts, Gabe.'

  'So hire a good writer.'

  'I'm a good writer,' she snapped. 'I know what I want to say and I say it well.'

  He was never going to win. He nodded with resignation. 'We agree to disagree, OK?'

  'Fine.' She bit off the word.

  This wasn't the best start for what might prove to be an important and controversial meeting. Torrey considered taking her dismissive tone to heart and making his exit. Leave her to her damned article.

  He could come back to it tonight, when she'd be more receptive after a drink or two. But he didn't get a chance to move before she said, 'So what's the interesting news?'

  Torrey had no choice. He willed all trace of the earlier tone out of his voice, and delivered it flat. 'Dismas Hardy called me ten minutes ago. He wants to deal.'

  Pratt looked at him. 'Actually,' she said, 'that is interesting. What does he want?'

  'Murder two.'

  'Murder two?' Clearly, it surprised her. She barked a cold laugh. 'He wants to go from death to murder two? The man's got a tremendous imagination. What did you tell him?'

  'I told him I had to talk to you.'

  Pratt fixed him with a hard eye. 'That's a nice flattering answer, Gabe. But what did you really tell him?'

  'That's really what I told him.' He pulled a chair around and sat. 'I said that since you'd made this particular case a campaign issue, it wasn't going to be that simple.'

  She frowned. 'But it is that simple,' she said. 'There's no way.'

  In fact, Torrey had told Hardy that they would have to work out the details, but in general he thought a reduced charge in return for a guilty plea was a workable idea. After the election, of course. Hardy could waive time for a few months and then, after the dust had settled on the results, they would do the deal. Pratt's administration had grown infamous for its willingness to plead out cases rather than take them to trial. In this regard, it had by far the most lenient record of any jurisdiction in the state. Torrey saw no reason to let the campaign change the basic policy.

  So Pratt's refusal here hit him like a broadside. 'There's no way, what?'

  'There's no way we cut a deal on this. I've gone on the record saying I want the death penalty in this case.' She came around in front of him and leaned back against her desk. 'I can't believe I have to explain this to you. There's no other option, I hope you see that.'

  Her adamance here was what surprised him. Perhaps she just needed him to explain a little further. 'Well, I told Hardy it couldn't be till after the election, of course, but-'

  'Even then!' She brought her face down, directly in front of his. 'Gabe, you of all people. You're the one who came up with the idea. I'm expecting our friends at the Democrat' - a small, alternative newspaper sympathetic to Pratt – 'to start beating the drums for it any day now. People hate the death penalty all right, but I'm confident they'll come to hate this kid more. And this crime.'

  'Well, all that's fine, Sharron, but after the election it won't matter anymore.' He still had to try to bend her. If she would allow Cole Burgess to plead guilty on a lesser charge, then it would be over. And trials, even an apparent no-brainer like this one, were always uncertain. That was their nature. Anything could happen. He got up from his chair, took a half lap of the room. He came to rest and faced her. 'But we've still got Hardy. What if he'll take murder one with specials, LWOP?' This was life in prison without parole.

  But the DA wasn't budging. 'We still ask for death.'

  'Sharron,' he put his hands on her shoulders. 'Listen to me. You can't ask for death if he pleads guilty and says he's sorry. You'll come across as bloodthirsty. If it gets to there after a trial, it's different. The kid's unrepentant, shows no remorse, OK. Otherwise…' He let the word hang.

  It was her turn to walk to the window, separate the blinds, look down onto the street. She stood there a long minute. 'I want to go to trial on this one, Gabe. The evidence is rock solid and it's all with us. The boy did it and people don't like him. When we send him down, they're with us. Even if we don't get the death penalty, and we probably won't, we still get LWOP and look tough. Your instincts were right.'

  He stood in the at-ease position, his head bobbing as though he were in thought. 'All right,' he said.

  She looked back out the window for an eternity. Setting her mouth, she directed a steely gaze once around the room, then finally over to her Chief Assistant. Her voice had a raspy quality, but it was firm. 'That bastard Hardy has impugned the integrity of this office and accused me personally of playing politics with a man's life. No deals.'

  Torrey kept himself from showing any reaction. He knew the look. Argument would be futile. She had made up her mind. Her eyes went back out the window, to the dull gray afternoon. Torrey looked at her for a moment, then bowed slightly from the waist and turned on his heel.

  'The attorney's
room at the jail was a good deal more pleasant than the general visitor's room, where Cole would meet his mother behind a barrier with a dozen other inmates on either side. At ten by twelve feet, it wasn't exactly spacious, but there was room for a table and two chairs with some floor left over for pacing. The far wall was made of opaque glass block, and this seemed to brighten up the room, although Hardy realized that this was possibly an optical illusion -more likely it was the glaring fluorescents overhead.

  Cole sat across from him in his orange jumpsuit. His face was troubled, his brow clouded, his eyes clear. 'But I didn't kill her.'

  He went through it all, as he had with Jody – the difficulty of getting a not-guilty verdict, the seriousness of the special circumstances allegations, the strong physical evidence against him, his own confession.

  His client listened until he'd finished. Then he shook his head. 'No,' he said, 'I didn't kill her. I won't plead guilty.'

  Hardy started over quietly, hummed along in low for a while before he blew it out and got loud. He paced the room, slammed his fist on the table a few times, damn near threw a chair. He would have done cartwheels if he thought they might have had an effect.

  'I'm sorry,' Cole said when he finished. 'I can get a public defender if you don't feel you can stay in. But I'm not pleading guilty. I didn't do it.'

  For which, ultimately, there was no argument.

  The events of the day had beaten Hardy down. He told himself that his biorhythms were low now in the early dusk. He'd perk up any minute. When Torrey got here, his adrenaline would kick in, as it had with Rich McNeil this morning, then with Glitsky at the hospital. As it had a couple of times in his grueling session with Jody Burgess, and then again with Cole, to say nothing of each of the three times he'd left increasingly curt messages for Dash Logan to please get back to him if his busy schedule allowed.

  He brought a hand up to his eyes. Had all those disasters occurred during this one day? Did he have any adrenaline left?

  And now he had to face Gabriel Torrey and tell him Cole wouldn't plead. He was sitting in front of the Chief Assistant's power desk in the same old room he used to love back in his own prosecuting days during the Civil War. He'd come in here just at this time of the evening and sit around with his boon colleagues, arguing the law and their strategies with his old mentor Art Drysdale.

  The good old days.

  This wasn't them anymore.

  After Jody, he'd felt cocky. If he could convince her, he could convince anybody. He could just wriggle out of this entire dilemma. Cop a plea for Cole, get the boy in a rehab program in prison, collect a nice fee for his efforts and move on. It was an impossible case to try anyway. So he'd called Torrey and set up this meeting before discussing it with his client. A mistake.

  And now he was on the DA's turf, in an entirely different mode than he'd intended.

  A side door opened and here was the man himself, professional, even cordial. 'Diz,' he began, proffering a hand. 'I want to start out by apologizing for the other day in court.' A self-effacing smile. 'I've got a short fuse. I was protecting my boss. I'm sorry.'

  Hardy was on his feet, shaking the man's hand. 'It happens. I got a little emotional myself.'

  Sometimes – and this was one of those times – it bothered him when he went along with his natural inclination to be a pleasant person, to adhere to social conventions. When he'd been younger, he didn't remember this as one of his primary character traits. Now, he tended to be rude only when it served a purpose. He wasn't sure this was an improvement over the earlier model.

  He took his seat while the Chief Assistant went around the Desk and got himself settled. 'So,' Torrey began without any more preamble, 'I was in with Sharron after our phone call.'

  'Well, about that…' Hardy didn't want to waste any more time on this. Cole wasn't dealing. There was nothing to talk about. If Torrey hadn't appeared cooperative as he made the appointment, he'd have phoned it in. Now, though, he felt as if he at least owed him a personal explanation.

  But before he could say anything else, Torrey kept on. 'I'm afraid she wasn't inclined to deal.'

  This was a far cry from what he'd been led to believe. Torrey had told him he was sure they could work something out, and he had to wonder what had happened. He cocked his head. 'At all?'

  Torrey shook his head.

  'She won't even go to life without?'

  No response.

  'This from an administration that has never even asked for LWOP before, much less death?'

  'Right.'

  Hardy brought a finger to his jawline and scratched at it. That's pretty raw.' The offer didn't matter at all, of course – Cole wasn't going to take anything that involved a guilty plea – but Hardy felt his blood beginning to boil. He turned down the volume on his voice. 'So me coming here to see you tonight, this was in the line of a joke? I'm supposed to go back to my client with that?'

  Torrey spread his hands. Hardy found himself thinking of the William H. Macy character, the slimy car salesman in Fargo. 'Sharron has strong feelings about this case. She said it was a matter of principle.'

  Hardy's bile continued to rise. His pulse pounded in his ears. He knew that if he remained seated here across the desk from this liar, his commitment to la politesse was going to be tested. And found wanting.

  He didn't believe he could endure any more conflict today.

  He knew where they were coming from. It didn't matter anyway. He noticed that his knuckles were white on the sides of the chair as he stood up. 'Well,' he said, 'as long as it's a matter of principle…'

  20

  Glitsky thought they certainly liked to keep those beds empty in the ICU in case somebody got admitted who needed one.

  He hadn't had a heart attack in all of about a day and a half, so by hospital lights he guessed he was out of immediate danger, although it didn't seem so to him. They moved him to a semi-private room at a little before five in the afternoon. He had been sharing his thoughts about this with his new roommate, Roy, an elderly gentleman who was getting over pneumonia – trying not to sound too querulous, but voicing the opinion that maybe it was a little soon to be off the monitors.

  Roy chuckled drily. 'Last time I was here -I got COPD,' he explained, tapping his chest, 'bad lungs, so I'm in here all the time now. But last time, I passed out at home just after I punched nine one one. It took the paramedics a while to pick me up and so anyway by the time I got admitted to the emergency room, I was DOA. Dead, right?'

  'Dead?'

  'Right. So they slapped me around with some CPR, got me breathing again and gave me a new oxygen bottle. So I called my brother to tell him where I was and by the time he got down here, they told me to go on home. Home! I'm dead an hour ago and they send me home. What's that about?'

  This was all new to Abe, but he was getting the hang of it – bemused resignation seemed to carry the day. 'Managed care. That's my guess.'

  Roy shook his head. 'My brother wouldn't let them do it. Made a big fuss, wondered if anybody thought it possible I might stop breathing again, since I just had. Eventually they let me stay overnight.'

  'One night?'

  A shrug. 'Hey, I lived through it. No hard feelings, because what would be the point? Is anybody going to care? So my doc comes in and says, "See?" I could have gone home after all.'

  'Nice of him.'

  'Hell of a guy,' Roy agreed. 'Probably figured a little guilt never hurts. Maybe next time I get admitted dead I wouldn't push so hard for a bed.'

  'You were actually DOA?'

  'Yeah, I saw it on my chart. Admitted two nineteen. DOA. I love that, telling people I died.' He broke a smile. 'I'm in my resurrection phase now, though I've been disappointed to discover it's pretty much the same as last time around.'

  They fell into a silence for a while, until Glitsky shifted in his bed and sat up straighter. 'You mind if I ask you something, Roy?'

  'Shoot.'

  'Did you see any white light or anything like that whil
e you were dead?'

  He thought about it briefly. 'You know, I can't say I did. One minute I'm dialing nine one one and then I'm in the ER here with a tube down my throat and somebody pushing on my chest. How about you?'

  'No. I wasn't dead. Heart attack,' he explained. 'I didn't see anything either, though.'

  'My wife died of a heart attack,' Roy said. 'They gave her all the tests and everything and told her it hadn't been a bad one. She was fine. She ought to come get another check-up in a week, but meanwhile she didn't need to be in a hospital. She should stop smoking and lose a little weight, change her lifestyle, which she didn't get much of a chance to do, seeing as she died about two hours after she got home.'

  'I'm sorry,' Abe said.

  'Hey.' Roy lifted his shoulders. 'Mangled care.'

  Glitsky hadn't seen his oldest boy, Isaac, for the winter break. With a group of his friends, he was skiing at Mammoth for the first week, then they were all going to the Grand Canyon until school started again. He told his father he'd try to make it back up for spring break, but everybody was talking about a road trip up to Chico State, a college in the northern foothills of California which was getting itself something of a reputation for throwing a week-long revelry – Lauderdale West. Naked chicks, loud music! Dancing and fights and all-night raves. Vandalism, riots, rivers of beer!

  Or Isaac could come home to the spring fog and watch TV in their duplex while his dad went to work.

  Tough choice.

  But now, no planning for it, here he was coming through the door to Abe's room. He seemed bigger somehow, but then he always did after an absence. His head was shaved – a shock – but Glitsky realized at a glance that it looked powerful and terrific. There was a lot of his mother in the face, though without her coloring – Isaac was a few shades darker than Abe or the other boys. The words came without warning, as did the gloss over his eyes. 'Oh my beautiful boy.'