The Hearing

by John Lescroart

'Yeah.'

  'I thought you were having all kinds of tests and stuff today.'

  'That was this morning. It all went like a top, in case you were wondering.'

  'I haven't thought about anything else all day,' he said. 'Except just now I was sure you were dead.'

  'Nope,' he said. 'But somebody else is.'

  'Who's that?'

  'Cullen Leon Alsop, former famous snitch. Diz, you still there?'

  'Yeah. How?'

  'OD. Uncut heroin. He got OR'd' – released on his own recognizance – 'yesterday afternoon and I guess he thought it'd be fun to go out and celebrate.'

  'How did you find out?'

  'Ridley Banks called me here. He was slightly upset. This kind of majorly complicates Cole Burgess for him and it's been a mess from the beginning. He didn't like it when Cullen came up with the gun story before and he doesn't like this even more.'

  'I don't either.'

  'I didn't think you would. Which is why I wanted you to know right away.'

  'Would he talk to me? Banks?'

  'He's a public servant. I don't see why not.'

  'Perhaps because the last cop who talked to me got himself suspended? That would be one reason.'

  'Maybe you can wear a disguise?'

  'Or fake a heart attack, appear feeble and harmless. Speaking of which, I appreciate the call, but are you sure you should be working already?'

  Glitsky didn't say anything for a long while. Then, 'Maybe somebody else did kill her, Diz. I'm going to find out.'

  'Not if you die first.'

  'Then I'll make sure I don't.'

  The thing about Freeman that Hardy found so continually impressive was not only that his personal arsenal was so huge, but that he could pull out any weapon from it at the moment of its peak effectiveness. At the precise instant, he'd managed to become both Rich McNeil's drinking buddy and his father confessor, even going so far as to pull the curtain again to shield them.

  After Hardy pulled it back, he saw that Freeman had ordered a second bottle of Pinot Grigio and they'd already put a significant dent in it, the two of them having moved from hostility to something approaching intimacy in about a quarter of an hour. McNeil was leaning back into the wall of the booth, the earlier tomato-red flush of anger having softened to a rosy glow. He'd loosened his tie, undone his top button.

  Hardy got settled in next to him and poured himself some ice water.

  'Rich was just telling me an interesting story,' Freeman said. 'Do you know Gene Visser?'

  'Used to be a cop? Sure, though I don't know what he's doing lately.'

  'Now he's a private eye. You'll never guess who he works with.'

  Hardy could figure it out. His eyebrows went up. He turned to Rich. 'How did you meet him?'

  McNeil lifted his glass, drank off another half inch. 'He came to me one day last week at the office. Said he'd been doing some work for Mr Logan, didn't want to see us get involved in a lot of ugly accusations.'

  Freeman chuckled without mirth. 'We can bring this to the bar, and I'm going to. But I'm sorry, Rich, you go on.'

  The expression was apologetic. 'I should have told you, Diz. I just thought it would be easiest to bail out. I'm just so tired of all this.'

  'What?'

  McNeil sighed from his shoes. 'Fifteen, eighteen years ago, I fucked up, got involved with another woman. My secretary. Stupid, stupid, stupid.' Pure disgust. He sipped wine. 'Anyway, I did it. She got pregnant, had the child. Sally found out. It was awful, but we worked it out. It was awful,' he repeated. 'And the girl, Linda… hell, it wasn't her fault… anyway, I wound up having to let her go, essentially paid her off out of our own savings, got her set up with another job…'

  'And now she's blackmailing you?'

  McNeil shook his head. 'Not her, Diz. But the main thing Sally and I wanted to do was keep it from the kids, you know. I'd made a mistake and I was paying. Believe me, I was paying. But it wasn't going to ruin our family.'

  'And Visser found out about it?'

  A nod. 'He must have gone digging around in my old company for dirt on me. There had been rumors, probably some resentment. I left a couple of years afterward, but people remembered. And now…' He shrugged helplessly.

  'So Visser threatened to tell your kids and drag Linda and her kid through it if you didn't settle.' Hardy sat back, considering. 'You know, Rich, it's not as though this kind of thing is going to make headlines. You had an affair, you and your wife worked it out, you're sorry.'

  McNeil looked across the table. 'I know. That's what David was saying, too. It was just that after all this time, hearing it from Visser, knowing the kind of person Manny Gait is, what else he might do… I panicked, I guess.'

  'Totally understandable,' Freeman was controlling the moment and this was precisely where he wanted McNeil. 'Anyway, Diz, I suggested that he and Sally just gather the family together – maybe not the grandchildren, but the kids. They should just – simply, honestly, humbly – lay it all out for them.' He poured out his heart across the table. 'They'll understand, Rich, I promise you.'

  'You know. I see it now. I think they would.'

  'Of course they would.'

  McNeil had his hand on his forehead as though rubbing away a headache. He wore his feelings like a billboard – it was all going to work out at last. Finally he looked up. 'So both of you guys, you think I should just wait?'

  'A few weeks, that's all,' Freeman said.

  Hardy added, 'You can always settle. It never has to get to the criminal trial.'

  'That I really don't want. I'd sell the building before that.'

  'That's the right decision,' Freeman said forcefully. 'Nobody could blame you. But let's not breathe a word of it until when… let's say March first? Three weeks. How's that sound?'

  McNeil gave the decision its due, then nodded. 'I can do that.'

  Images, smells, feelings were beginning to break through the fog. Cole didn't remember the last time he'd felt any kind of hunger except the craving for g. But after this morning's meeting with his hard-ass lawyer, they took him back to his cell and he realized he was ravenous. He'd gotten his pill from the orderly, then had his four slices of white bread, glass of milk, orange juice, two sausages, two eggs for breakfast only three hours before, but now he was counting the minutes until eleven thirty, when they'd bring up lunch.

  As a capital murder defendant, he was still separated from the general population, in a sort of wing with six cells, three on each side of a ten by twenty foot common area which they were rarely permitted to use. He was in front right, with only one 'neighbor'. Cole didn't know his name. He thought of him as Jose, a tattooed rail of Mexican steel who spent all of his time doing push-ups, then watching the public television which was left on sixteen hours a day above the common area in the center of the pod of cells.

  There was some game show on now, and he stood at the bars for one of the segments between commercials, then gave that up. Jose was doing push-ups again, and Cole watched him for a while before deciding that this wouldn't be the worst way to spend some time. He dropped himself and ripped off ten before it got a little difficult. By twenty he was done, his biceps and chest muscles, such as they were, screaming at the exertion. He looked over and Jose was still methodically pumping, his head craned up to the side to follow the TV.

  Cole lay on the cold concrete, catching his breath. Loathing what he'd become.

  It didn't even feel like a memory. He could close his eyes and recall it perfectly, the sense that he was sixteen -yesterday – he and Steve Polacek in his garage, their huge twenty dollar bet over who'd be the first to press his weight. A hundred thirty-one pounds, that was Cole. Polacek was seven pounds heavier, wanted a handicap.

  For a while, he remembered, their warm-up had been fifty push-ups. Fifty! He couldn't bring back who'd won the bet -if either of them had ever made it to their weight. Probably both – that was the way they were back then.

  But he remembered the garage. They never p
arked cars in it, not even in the winter. Just his dad's tools on the wall, the workbench, the ping-pong table in the middle. Bikes and skates, skis and balls and sports equipment all over the place. Pretty good jock family up till his dad died. His sister Dorothy training with him that whole last summer she was home before she went to college. They were going to ski cross-country from Des Moines to Iowa City when she came back on Christmas break.

  Cole lifted his cheek off the floor, pulled his arms up to beside his shoulders, pushed. This time, even the first few were hard. Eight.

  Turning onto his side, he sat up, then pulled his mattress off its concrete pad, onto the floor. He rolled onto it, hooked his hands behind his head, tried a sit-up. Once upon a time he could really do sit-ups – sixty in a minute. Polacek couldn't touch him.

  Again he started fast. Again he faded quickly, but he forced himself through fifteen and on to twenty. He wasn't going to accept less than twenty, although the last couple felt like they ripped something inside him. But he got to it, turned on his side away from Jose, gulped for breath, closed his eyes.

  The clang of the outer door to the common room jolted him up. Cole had dozed through the twenty minutes that inmates were allowed out into the common room every morning. Two guards with the trolley holding the lunches banged again on the outer door. 'Back in your rooms, girls!'

  When everyone was back where they belonged, the guard entered his code into the box outside and all the cell bolts slammed into place. Seeing the mattress on the floor with Cole cross-legged now on it, the guard distributing the trays couldn't resist a little moment of clever repartee. 'Having a picnic, Alice?' he asked. 'Nice day for it.' He slid the tray under the door.

  Cole barely heard and didn't care.

  Eric was the social worker who passed out the pills -he stopped at the door. This was the first dose Cole had told him he was going to miss – he'd get his usual come dinnertime again – and Eric wanted to check to make sure Cole was comfortable with the idea. He was.

  Then, finally, the food. If Cole thought he'd felt a jab of hunger before, it was nothing compared to now, with another of the jail's full-fledged meals actually in front of him. All the meals he'd had so far included four slices of white bread and four pats of butter. The butter was soft, warm, and he smeared one of the pats onto a piece of the bread, folded it over, and put it all, whole, into his mouth. While he chewed, he looked down at the tray. Today, lunch was two thick slabs of meatloaf with gravy, mixed peas and carrots, mashed potatoes and more gravy, canned peaches in a plastic bowl, milk and two chocolate chip cookies.

  The bread went down. Cole stabbed at the meatloaf so hard that he broke his plastic fork. It didn't matter. He used his spoon, shoveled in a few more bites, began to savor, to taste – prodded by the mnemonic smell of the gravy, to remember.

  Polacek's kitchen. A winter day, later afternoon, snow outside. An after-school snack before hockey, Polacek's mom pouring reheated gravy over bread and cold meatloaf.

  Polacek. He hadn't thought of him in years, and now he found himself wondering where his old best friend was. Certainly no place like here. He probably had a job someplace, maybe even was married. Polacek with kids? Imagine.

  The last year of high school they had stopped being friends over the dope – marijuana, then. Polacek really believing it was the killer weed. Didn't want any part of it. So Cole started hanging with the other guys – Reece, Baugh, Neillsen, Parducci.

  Baugh was the best of them. He had even been friends with Polacek before, as Cole had. The good students through grade school, Little League, Boy Scouts. Then, after Cole's dad died, when Cole had been trying to get through that darkness, Baugh turning him on the first time. No doubt he had good intentions – that was who Baugh was – trying to make Cole feel better about life with his sister gone away to college, his dad gone for good. Hey, life isn't easy. People need to laugh, get high, forget themselves. It was an unbelievable bummer his dad dying.

  'Marijuana, bfd. Come on, Cole, it's totally harmless. Marijuana never killed anybody.'

  Baugh was dead now four years though.

  Polacek trying to get him to stop a few times, coming around the house, worried about how much Cole was changing.

  Yeah? Well, people change. Cole wasn't hooked on anything. He could stop anytime he wanted. The other guys – Reece, Neillsen, Parducci – his mom kept up with their moms. Last Cole heard, Reece had become a cop back home. He knew Neillsen worked at GM. Parducci was still playing ball, second year in Triple A, might make the bigs.

  Telling himself, soaking up his gravy, 'Didn't hook any of them. Didn't hook me either. Not the marijuana.'

  Another flash – the last time he saw Polacek. A party at Notre Dame. Cole had dropped out after a semester and his mom sent him up to visit his old friend, subliminal message that maybe he'd see how great Steve was doing and clean his own act up. Subtle as a cherry bomb. But he'd gone. Cole in his own mind nowhere near any kind of junkie. This is recreation, that's all – the only kind he knows anymore, constant doping. But he can quit anytime.

  He's shocked at Steve, in a frat now, with his alligator shirt, drinking beer, dancing to Hootie. Just like so unaware, so naive. Whereas Cole that night, he was the king…

  There was this girl, somebody somebody. By now he was into cocaine whenever he could get it, dealing a little to cover costs. So he and this girl, they're upstairs in the bathroom. They've got lines laid out and one of the dorks comes in and next thing there's Polacek, angry but calm, laying some trip about him being a guest and abusing their friendship. Cole's got to leave right now! They can't have cocaine in their house. The college could close them down. They could lose their charter.

  Cole' s temper out the window – half the blow wasted now, scattered in the commotion. 'Who gives a shit, Steve? About any of this?' Screaming at him.

  'Everybody here, Cole. Everybody who's trying to make a life.'

  Polacek, the dweeb. Never saw him again, and good damn riddance. The best friend, though, that he'd ever had.

  'Hey, Alice! You done? What's a matter? They put too much pepper in that for you?'

  23

  Ten years ago, when Sharron Pratt had been a city supervisor, she had lobbied to pass an obscure change in the city's law regarding business announcements in the community's newspapers. Previously, if you wanted to file a Fictitious Business Name statement, a Notice of Application to Sell Alcoholic Beverages, a Notice of Foreclosure, or any number of other legal notices, the law required that you publish this information in any newspaper with a paid circulation of at least one hundred and fifty thousand.

  Sharron had persuaded the other supervisors that this law unfairly discriminated against the smaller, more 'community-based' newspapers that proliferated all over the city, and which could receive no revenue from this lucrative market. Largely as a result of her efforts, the law was changed to require filing of these notices in any newspaper with a print run of over ten thousand copies, of which the most well-known in the English language was the Daily Democrat.

  As a practical matter, this change in the law made a millionaire out of Chad Lacey, the Daily Democrat publisher, a friend and political ally of Sharron Pratt. Suddenly Lacey's community bulletin, distributed for free on racks or as a throw-away on driveways mostly in the Haight-Ashbury district, found itself on the receiving end of almost three hundred thousand dollars per year in city money alone. Lacey could now afford to hire a few well-known guest columnists and to pay several full-time reporters. With the paper's new respectability, distribution went into three more districts in the city – the Sunset, the Richmond, Twin Peaks, and the Democrat became the city's premier free newspaper.

  Its print run had grown to twenty-five thousand, and it positioned itself as the voice of the people – the downtrodden, the disenfranchised – the political pals of Lacey and Pratt. Before any papers had been filed in the matter, for example, the Democrat had run a five-thousand word piece on the tragic plight of a powerless an
d law-abiding citizen named Manny Gait, who'd trusted his landlord, paying advance rent in cash while he'd gone to care for his dying mother for a few months. He returned from this errand of mercy only to find himself evicted from his long-time residence, in flagrant defiance of human decency and the city's rent control laws, by a grasping, crooked and heartless developer named Rich McNeil. They'd run a picture of poor Manny on the front page and he had, indeed, looked very sad and downtrodden, sitting there on his motorcycle.

  Now Sharron Pratt stood over her desk and punched numbers on the phone so hard that her whole desk shook. She had the speaker on so her voice would boom slightly on the other end. 'I need to talk to Mr Lacey right now. Yes, a personal matter.' This was their code phrase – Pratt wouldn't call the Democrat under her own name and appear to be giving orders to its publisher. To do so would do fatal damage to the credibility of his objective editorials. She waited impatiently, looking at her watch.

  Less than a minute elapsed. 'I'm here,' Lacey said. 'How are you?'

  'I'm not well, Chad. Not well at all.'

  'What's the matter?'

  'The matter? Oh, let's see. Perhaps it's the fact that last week we talked before my speech at the Commonwealth Club. Do you remember that?'

  'Sharron-'

  'Do you remember telling me you'd make sure this death-penalty decision I announced would get a lot of favorable press, editorial coverage, like that?'

  Lacey didn't respond.

  Pratt took a breath and softened her tone. 'And yet I notice you have rather loudly stayed silent, while your colleagues over at the Chronicle, particularly Jeff Elliot, have been having a great deal of fun at my expense.' She picked up the receiver, spoke in a still more measured tone. 'I certainly don't mean to tell you how to run your paper, Chad, but I was under the impression that you were in my camp. Have I offended you in some way? If I have, I'm sorry, but I've kind of been waiting for you to step up.'

  She heard his sigh over the line. 'Well, we've had some problems, Sharron. I suppose I should have called you sooner.'