The Ophelia Cut

by John Lescroart

  “Objection.”

  “Sustained.”

  Hardy said, “Let me rephrase. Chief, you’ve just said that Mr. McGuire was the only suspect, correct? And you told your inspectors that you expected them to make an arrest, right?”

  “Not in those words.”

  Though it wasn’t a direct answer, Hardy let it pass. “So when they went out with Mr. McGuire’s photos, they knew you expected them to get an identification.”

  “Objection. Speculation.”

  “Sustained.”

  “That’s okay, Your Honor, I think I’ve made my point.” Hardy knew he wouldn’t have to remind the jury about Dr. Paley’s testimony on this topic: a whole body of evidence that police can influence witnesses simply by knowing the correct “answer” to a test, equally applicable in a six-pack identification or a physical lineup.

  Hardy had gotten basically what he wanted out of Lapeer. But he wanted more, felt—especially after the disastrous morning—that he needed more. So he took a breath and asked, “Chief, do you know a San Francisco businessman named Jon Lo?”

  Stier nearly yelled in his disgust and fury. “Objection! The court has already ruled on this issue.”

  “Not in this context, Your Honor,” Hardy shot back.

  “Close enough,” Gomez said. “Sustained.”

  Hardy took another tack. “Chief. You know how to obtain an arrest warrant, do you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “And typically, that involves running the case by the district attorney, who agrees that the case merits prosecution and goes to a judge to file charges and order the arrest of the defendant. Isn’t that the way things work?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And by ‘sometimes,’ Chief, you mean far more than ninety-nine percent of the time, don’t you?”

  “I can’t give you a number.”

  “Out of the hundreds of arrest warrants that get issued in San Francisco every year, you know for a fact that all but a handful go through that process, don’t you?”

  Lapeer had to admit that she did.

  “But that’s not what happened in this case, is it? Here, you bypassed the district attorney and had your inspectors go directly to a judge so they could arrest Mr. McGuire with no assurance whatsoever that the DA would file charges against Mr. McGuire based on the evidence you’d gathered thus far. Isn’t that true?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Yes, I could, Chief. And outside of the desire to get your name in the paper, appease some powerful local politicians, and have Mr. McGuire spend a couple of days in jail, there was no reason to do that, was there?”

  “Objection. Argumentative.”

  “Sustained. Mr. Hardy, you can probe this area, but please control the tone of your questions.”

  Swimming against the current, Hardy went on in the same vein for another five or six minutes. By the end of the questioning, he had not made a dent in the evidence—the blood, the eyewitnesses, the motive, and the shillelagh that formed the core of Stier’s case. However, he was at least reasonably certain that no juror doubted Lapeer had pressured her inspectors to make an arrest for political reasons.

  Maybe, Hardy told himself, maybe that was something.

  42

  AS SOON AS Hardy excused Lapeer, the judge called the early-afternoon recess, and Gina Roake got up from her seat in the back of the courtroom. She walked up the center aisle until she got to the first row, where Susan Weiss had been sitting day after day since the beginning of jury selection, the very picture of the steadfast wife, hanging in there in support of her husband, while Moses was in the midst of deep conversation with his two attorneys, all three of them apparently buoyant after Hardy’s handling of the chief of police.

  Gina, despite herself, was impressed that Hardy got in as much as he did. She’d spent the entire weekend in the office with him and Amy. After receiving Stier’s motion to suppress the third-party-culpability question, they all knew they would be in deep trouble when court reconvened this morning. Hardy had been hoping against hope that Wyatt Hunt or blind fate would pull a rabbit out of the SODDIT defense hat.

  Maybe they’d be able to identify one particular bodyguard among Lo’s entourage who seemed plausible as a true suspect in the murder. Maybe Goodman, under the pressure created by Hardy and Hunt that had impelled him to call his own attorney, would crack and confess to the crime. Maybe Tony Solaia would be found and brought back to testify and possibly incriminate himself.

  But, of course, none of those things happened.

  This morning, Hardy—against Gina’s prediction that the judge would not allow him to call Lapeer, as she had disallowed any mention of Lo and Goodman—had not only gotten her onto the stand but done a creditable job of demonstrating the pressure that Goodman had brought to bear on her and that she had in turn passed on to her inspectors. Hardy had given the jurors a clear reason to believe that the eyewitness testimony was tainted.

  Long shots all, but a vigorous and creative defense.

  And one, Gina believed with all her heart, that had no chance.

  Now there would be nothing left but the closing arguments, and then the jury, having no real alternatives to consider, would come back with a guilty verdict.

  Yesterday afternoon, late, after Wu had gone home, Gina and Hardy had shared an Oban in the solarium, kicking around their options. Finally, Hardy sat back, his feet on the huge round table, upended his glass of Scotch into his mouth, and—joking around—said that if they got shut out on the motions tomorrow and wound up with essentially no affirmative defense, there was only one last thing that could be done. And Gina would have to do it. Except for the minor flaw that the idea was insane. They’d had a laugh about it.

  But then afterward, back home, Gina got to pondering both the flaws and the enormity of Hardy’s insane idea, and she hadn’t slept one minute.

  Now she was up to where Susan sat in the first seat on the center aisle of the gallery, eyes glazed and forward, hands crossed in her lap. Tapping her gently on the shoulder, Gina felt the need to introduce herself again. After all, they had barely met. Then Gina whispered in a tiny voice, “I wonder if we could talk for a minute outside.”

  EVEN WHEN WORKING a case as sensational as the Jessup killing, Homicide inspectors never ran out of other work.

  Now Paul Brady sat in one of the interrogation rooms just off the Homicide detail with a suspect named Leon Brice.

  Leon was nineteen years old. He was in the stolen-cell-phone business generally, but he had run into some bad luck with his latest victim, a twenty-three-year-old Stanford Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering named Jason Eichler. Actually, it had been worse luck for Jason, who was now dead, but things didn’t look good for Leon, either, who, when he’d been apprehended, was in possession of no fewer than six cell phones, one of them belonging to Jason’s girlfriend, Lily Faraday.

  The way it had gone down—Lily’s testimony—was that she and Jason were at Rome Burning on Saturday night. Lily had put her brand-new four-hundred-dollar phone down on the table for the time it took her to turn her head and order another drink, and when she turned back, it was gone. Later that night, Jason had run the GPS app to locate the phone and texted a message to it, offering a reward.

  Yesterday at around eleven A.M., Jason had gotten a call from Lily’s phone offering it in exchange for the reward, which was how much again? Jason said a hundred dollars, and the voice on the phone described himself: “Black, Afro, five-ten, one-sixty, nice grill on my mouth, black tennies, camo cargo, black T-shirt, standing at the corner of Leavenworth and Ellis. You won’t miss me.”

  Rather than making any attempt to notify the authorities, who Lily believed would do nothing anyway—“For a cell phone? I’m sure”—the chivalrous, brilliant, and utterly clueless Jason drove down to the meeting place, one of the most godforsaken intersections in the city, with Lily; saw Leon standing in a small posse of guys; then pulled over.

  After telling Li
ly to take off in the car if there was any sign of trouble, Jason got out, waited for her to get in the driver’s seat, then crossed the street to conclude the transaction. When Leon produced the cell phone, before Jason gave him the money, he said he wanted to make sure the phone worked, so he stood there, surrounded by gangsters, punching in apps and phone numbers, waiting for answers from a couple of his friends, including Lily, who screamed at him to give the guy his goddamn money and get the hell out of there.

  Next—Lily had rolled the window down and heard the entire exchange—Jason decided that since he had the phone in his possession and Leon had no rights, since he had stolen it, he was in a good bargaining position. Reaching for his wallet, he pulled out a twenty.

  That led one of Leon’s confreres to grab at the wallet, after which things got out of hand quickly, with punches being thrown and cell phones clattering out onto the street. Jason, a triathlete as well as a scrappy and skilled fighter, kicked at a couple of the guys, swung at a few more, then went to grab for his wallet, which they’d torn from his hands and was now on the street.

  Leon leaned for the wallet at the same time, Jason pushed him and he went down, Jason went to punch him, and then there was a shot, and another shot, and the brave and foolish Mr. Eichler went down and did not get up. Lily, following Jason’s instructions, slammed on the accelerator and fishtailed the BMW down the street.

  Now Leon was regaling Brady with his version of events. “So I’m walking down the street, minding my own business, I see like six, eight phones just lying there. That’s where I got ’em. What am I gonna do? Leave ’em sitting there? I don’t think so. Leon Brice’s mother don’t raise no fools.”

  “There wasn’t a body—a dead body—anywhere near these phones? They were just sitting there in the street?”

  “I never seen no dead body.”

  “How about the witness who described you and what you were wearing, by your own description, and has picked you out of a lineup with a positive identification?”

  “What? She white. I’m black. That ain’t likely holding up.”

  “What about the gun you had on you when they picked you up? You find that too lying in the street?”

  “It was in the street.”

  “Where you’d just thrown it, Leon. Where your arresting officer saw you throw it.”

  “That just ain’t true. I ain’t never carryin’ no piece. You can ask anybody.”

  Brady knew it was going to be a long couple of hours before he got anywhere substantive with Leon, and it wouldn’t hurt to let their suspect sweat for a while in the tiny booth. Besides, outside the window, Lee Sher had come over with a very pretty woman of about his age and was giving him the high sign to come out.

  “You keep thinking up things you think I’ll believe, Leon,” Brady said. “I’ll be back in here with you in a little while.”

  “Hey,” Leon said. “How about a Coke? I could use a cold Coke.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Brady opened the door into the blessedly cool main room, turned, and made sure he’d closed and locked the door.

  “Paul.” His partner looked a bit sick to her stomach. “This is Gina Roake, one of Dismas Hardy’s law partners. The McGuire case. She’s got a statement she wants to make.”

  FOR A LONG moment after Sher turned off her tape recorder, the two inspectors on either side of their back-to-back desks were silent. Until finally, Sher said, “I’m a little appalled here, Ms. Roake, by how sleazy this is.”

  Brady nodded in agreement. “You expect us to believe this?”

  “I don’t care whether or not you believe it. It’s the truth.”

  “I don’t think so,” Brady repeated.

  “Well, you’re welcome to that reaction, of course.” Now that Gina had told her story, her fatigue rose up and almost turned her legs to jelly. She all but held herself up against the side of Sher’s desk. “But whether you believe it or not, you are obligated to convey it to the district attorney.”

  “I don’t think so,” Sher said.

  Brady added, “It’s a little late for discovery. The trial’s almost over.”

  “ ‘Almost’ is the operative word, Inspector. I’ve just come from the courtroom, and they haven’t delivered closing arguments yet, probably won’t until tomorrow. You have new evidence in this case. It’s not my place to tell you what to do, but you know as well as I do that you’ve got to give this to the DA, and the DA has to give it to the defense. Under Brady”—here Gina broke a small smile—“and with your name, I know you’ll be familiar with Brady, you don’t have a choice.”

  Gina was referring to Brady v. Maryland, a Supreme Court decision declaring that the defense had a right to any prosecution evidence that might cast doubt on a suspect’s guilt. The DA had to hand over absolutely everything—evidence, testimony, background, interviews—that might serve to exculpate the defendant.

  “You know,” Brady said, softening his tone, hoping to reason with her, “if you testify to this, it would be perjury, ma’am. You could go to jail.”

  “It wouldn’t be perjury.” Gina remained calm, resolute. “It’s not perjury,” she repeated. “Because it’s the truth.”

  Sher leaned toward her. “And you haven’t mentioned this until now? How could you, a lawyer, have done that?”

  “Being a human being,” Gina replied, “I kept hoping it wouldn’t be needed. But today the defense case pretty much blew up. As to why I wouldn’t want to bring it out at all, that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? It’s going to cause severe pain and suffering to his family, on top of everything they’ve been through.”

  Sher turned to Brady. “This is unbelievable.”

  He nodded. “You realize we’re going to go back and check your phone records for that date. And McGuire’s. We’re going to know where both of you were every second that afternoon and evening.”

  “I’m telling you where we were,” Gina said, “and you’re wasting time.”

  AT HER DESK outside of Wes Farrell’s office, Treya Glitsky was wearing a telephone earpiece and whispering into it. “I don’t know what it’s about, Abe, but they’re screaming bloody murder in there. It’s got to be about Moses.”

  “Who’s doing the yelling?”

  “Mostly Brady.”

  She could almost hear her husband break one of his rare smiles. “Gee, wouldn’t it be awful, if in their rush to find something on Moses, they didn’t get around to something else that might have been important?”

  “That’s what this seems like. Whoa!” She looked over at the closed door. “Somebody just hit or threw something.”

  “Is anybody screaming in pain?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You say it’s Gina in there with them?”

  “Yeah. She looks terrible. Well, for her. Still better than the rest of us.”

  “I doubt that,” Abe said, “but what do you think she’s got?”

  “No idea. But it’s got to be huge.”

  “Is court still in session downstairs?”

  “I’d assume so. I could check and let you know, get back to you in five. You thinking of coming down?”

  “It might be fun.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Believe it or not, I’m with Bill Schuyler in the Fed Building. I’m working with Wyatt Hunt, trying to get some kind of line on Tony Solaia.”

  “After this, maybe you won’t need him.”

  “Your mouth to God’s pretty little ear. Meanwhile, if you could find out whether they’re still in court . . .”

  “I’ll get right back to you.”

  IF NOT BONA fide arrows, Hardy thought he had at least a couple of darts left in his quiver. He had the theory about how the blood came to be on McGuire’s boots, and the jury had heard it. The entirely plausible possibility was that Moses had inadvertently stepped in Jessup’s blood while beating him up back in February outside his office in city hall. The blood had worked its way between the sole and fabric—indeed, th
at was where it had been found. Of course, Stier had established the beating in his case in chief to show Moses’s animosity toward Jessup and Moses’s potential for violence. But given the importance of the blood evidence, Hardy wanted to reinforce it now. The only problem was that his witness was Joseph DiBenedetto, of Liam Goodman’s staff, who had not witnessed the beating. So to get anything, what Hardy needed was not just that there had been a beating but that Moses had drawn blood, and to get that, Hardy was wading through a sea of hearsay objections from Stier, most of them valid and most sustained. The young man had been on the stand for the better part of forty-five minutes, and Hardy had just about decided to let him go and concentrate instead on Goodman’s admin, Diane, who had at least met Moses and witnessed the opening minutes in the exchange that led to the beating. Then a chorus of murmurs from the gallery made Hardy stop and turn to see Wes Farrell coming down the center aisle, followed by Inspector Sher, then a stone-faced Gina Roake, followed by Brady.

  “Your Honor,” Farrell said as he got to the rail, “please pardon the interruption. Permission to approach the bench?”

  Gomez looked the question down at Hardy, who was technically in the middle of the examination of his witness. He said, “No objection, Your Honor. In fact, I’ll excuse this witness.”

  “Mr. Farrell,” Gomez said, “you may approach.”

  Farrell, with unaccustomed fury in his eyes, pushed open the low door in the railing. Coming abreast of Hardy, he slowed down and punished him with a flat and hostile glare. Turning his whole body away from the jury, he brought his mouth close to Hardy’s ear and whispered, “This bullshit is beneath you.”

  IN THE JUDGE’S chambers, havoc and anger had been the order of the day. Gomez had no choice—Gina Roake’s testimony had to be heard. Everyone knew that if any evidence were ever discovered or came to light, Farrell would prosecute her for perjury to the fullest extent of the law. Hardy stood, most of the time, mute and in shock. Whatever this was felt and smelled like disaster. He knew that he had joked about the scenario with Gina the night before, but never in his wildest imaginings had he envisioned her coming forward this way, with this story. When at last the meeting in chambers broke up, the principals began moving back toward the courtroom, where court would reconvene in fifteen minutes.