“What’s that?”
“Ro’s arm.”
“What about it?”
“It’s in a cast. Still. Righteously broken in the fight with you, was it not?”
“All right.”
“All right, so you told me that Janice Durbin was strangled, didn’t you? Manual strangulation, not a ligature.” Ligature was a strangulation device, such as a rope or a belt.
Bracco stopped and leveled his gaze at his boss, waiting for the impact of his words to kick in. He didn’t have to draw the picture any more clearly. Every homicide cop knows how extraordinarily difficult it is to strangle someone to death, even under the best of conditions, using both of one’s hands. The struggle tends to be violent and protracted. The idea that someone could do it one-handed, while probably physically possible for a very strong and committed person, was close to far-fetched. When he was sure from his lieutenant’s change of expression that Glitsky had understood his point, Bracco went on, pressing it. “Did Strout find any signs she’d been knocked out before she got strangled? Lacerations or abrasions or bruises to the head?”
“I’d have to check to be sure, and I intend to, but my memory says no.”
Bracco leaned back in his chair. “So Ro is holding her down with his knees,” he said, “and she’s bucking and kicking under him and he never hits her to knock her out—I mean, he’s got a heavy cast on, right? And instead he’s got her by the neck and strangles her with one hand? This, when we know he’s in possession of a gun because that’s what he killed Lewis with, and he doesn’t use that?”
25
Shaken more deeply by Bracco’s objections to Ro as Janice’s killer than he cared to show, Glitsky walked down to the third floor, where he would sometimes drop in on Treya in the middle of the workday just to say hello, share a few bons mots, touch base. Today he made it as far as the hallway that led to the DA’s office and nearly stopped at the outer door to Farrell’s lair—Treya’s office—noticing that her desk was still unoccupied—no replacement, yet, anyway. Standing in the outer doorway, he heard Farrell’s voice emanating from inside. In a few steps, he passed Treya’s workstation and stood in the open doorway where he saw Farrell sitting on one of the couches, a telephone to his ear. “No, I have no comment,” he was saying. “No, sorry, no comment. I’m afraid I’m not going to talk about that.”
Glitsky knocked once on the doorjamb. Farrell looked up and, indicating the telephone, shook his head in disgust, and then waved Glitsky in and motioned him to one of the chairs while he continued listening and then said, “I’m sure, but we’ll just have to see how that turns out . . . well, no . . . I mean, yes, of course, you’re going to do what you have to do. But the same is true of me . . . I know, and I’m sorry about that, but I’ve got an appointment that’s just showed up here and I can’t really say any more at this time ... All right . . . All right, thank you.”
Farrell hung up, flipped the bird at the telephone, then looked at Glitsky, who had not yet sat down, and said, “Some son of a bitch leaked the grand jury. That, if you didn’t guess,” he added, gesturing at the phone, “was Marrenas.”
“She’s getting around today,” Glitsky said. “Twenty minutes ago, she was talking to Darrel Bracco, but not about the grand jury.”
“Well, then, she must have talked to somebody in between, because what you heard just now was all grand jury all the time. She even had the strategy of combining the cases so we’d get to specials and beat the bail problem.”
Glitsky walked over to Farrell’s library table, knocked the wood on the top of it a couple of times, thinking, then turned around. “It couldn’t be Chomorro. I wouldn’t pick him as capable of doing that. He couldn’t give us our warrant, but I got the impression he was on our side.”
Farrell, nodding in agreement, said, “But remember who was in his office when we got there, just having a nice little chat?”
“Baretto.”
“That’s the magic word. You win a hundred dollars.”
“You think he called her? Marrenas?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter who called who. There’s a lot of candidates. Someone in the clerk’s office, a bailiff, a court reporter. The point is she’s got it and she’s going to print it, which means Ro and Denardi will know, if they don’t already by now.”
“Well, so they know. So what? It wasn’t the original plan, but it shouldn’t make any real difference.”
“No?”
“Not really. I don’t see how it could, anyway.”
“How about if Ro gets to one of the grand jurors first or to Amanda or even to me?”
Glitsky leaned back against the table. Pensive, frowning, he scanned the room, settled back on Farrell. “You could call Marrenas back and tell her she got it wrong. Whoever told her, they got it wrong. You’ve thought about it since you hung up and she really needs to know you’re not going to the grand jury. Period. The strategy of combining all the cases is flawed. There’s not enough evidence. It just couldn’t work. You’re waiting until Ro’s retrial.”
“And then what?”
“Then you go to the grand jury anyway.”
“You’re saying I lie?”
“No. God forbid. You just changed your mind again after you hang up with her. Oops, sorry. You forgot to tell her that part.”
Farrell settled back into the couch, put a hand to his temple, rubbed at it. “Just to spin it out,” he said. “So I go to the grand jury and get my indictment and arrest Ro, whereupon Marrenas then tells the whole world that I flat-out knowingly lied to her. What’s that do to my credibility with the fourth estate?”
“Who cares by then? You’ve got your indictment. Ro’s in jail. He doesn’t kill anybody else in the meantime. Sounds like a winner to me.”
Farrell shook his head. “I can’t lie, Abe. I’ve got to leave it at ‘no comment.’ It’s a secret proceeding, for Christ’s sake. I can’t talk about what I’m doing with it. That’s the whole point of the damn thing. And why? So grand jury witnesses don’t get threatened or worse by the lowlifes they’re testifying against. So I can put on my cases without fear of reprisal, which let me tell you, I’ve got a shit-load of right now. I mean true, actual fear. If I didn’t know they had a twenty-four-hour tail on Ro, I think I might be completely paralyzed.”
“Well, on that,” Glitsky said. “The first shift already lost him.”
Ro and Eztli were a little high, laughing at how easily they had eluded the more-than-obvious city vehicle that had been parked on the street since early morning. Ro had simply lain down on the floor in the backseat while Eztli pulled out of the driveway, waved to the cops, and drove off in the 4Runner on his mid-afternoon errands. Three blocks out, he had pulled over and Ro had gotten back into the passenger seat. If it wasn’t so funny, they agreed, it would be pathetic.
Now they were in a warehouse in the industrial area just north of San Bruno, another Peninsula suburb. Later that night, the warehouse was going to be the venue for about six rounds of pit bull fighting that would begin around eight and go on until past midnight, but Ro had gotten a call from Tristan Denardi earlier in the day reporting on his private investigator’s lack of progress locating Gloria Gonzalvez, and Ro was quickly losing his patience. This woman had to be found and neutralized, or he was going to go back to prison. And if Denardi wasn’t going to be able to find her, Ro had to make it his own business.
So he’d discussed the problem with Ez, and as usual, the man had a sound, workable idea of how to get some results. Eztli had long ago developed a relationship with Lupe García, who not only ran the dogfights, but was the go-to guy in the Bay Area Guatemalan community if you wanted to borrow money or bet on almost anything or buy a weapon or drugs or get a woman to be your maid or your sex slave or both.
When Ro and Eztli caught up with him, escorted by two of his bodyguards, Lupe was in the inner shell of the warehouse, a huge, prefabricated sheet-metal space very much like the inside of a circus tent, complete wi
th bleachers surrounding the ring, fourteen feet in diameter, where the fighting took place. Lupe was hosing down the carpeting that the dogs needed for traction, cleaning it from the previous night’s fights. He could have farmed out this work—certainly it was far beneath his station—but he liked to get down on the floor with the smells and the damp and the blood.
Ez and Ro and the bodyguards waited while he finished up, turning off the hose, drying his hands on a towel and coming over to them, a warm smile of greeting on his face. Lupe wasn’t a big man. Perhaps five foot eight and wiry, he wore long hair pulled back and blue jeans and cowboy boots and a canvas jacket over a plaid shirt. A heavy-looking silver cross hung off his left earlobe. Tattoos covered the backs of his hands and disappeared into his shirtsleeves. He and Eztli greeted each other with clasped hands and one-armed hugs.
They spoke in Spanish, of course. Lupe reminded Ro of any number of La Eme gang members from prison. They hadn’t been particularly interactive with the Caucasian population, but none of that seemed to be in play here. As Eztli explained both Ro’s presence and the nature of their business, Lupe glanced over from time to time with an expression that indicated acceptance. From his attitude alone, Ro had obviously been in prison, and he was putting up not only the up-front thousand dollars to Lupe for his trouble—beaming as Eztli gave him the envelope—but the other five thousand to the person or persons who gave him the whereabouts of the woman who, ten years before, had been Gloria Gonzalvez, one of the two key witnesses in Ro’s trial.
Back in their car, on the surface streets back toward the freeway, Eztli drew deeply on the joint and said, “I like Lupe, but I’ve got to believe we were smart not to be carrying the other five thousand with us. You saw his reaction to that kind of reward.”
“I get the feeling if we had given it to him,” Ro said, “he would have thought about keeping it.”
“Not just thought about it.” Eztli’s shoulders heaved a bit with his low, rumbling laughter. “He’s probably trying to figure out how to get his hands on it right now. But that’s not our worry. He’ll have an army of guys working the problem by tomorrow.”
“How long did he think it would be?”
“He’d be surprised if it was more than a week, word gets out. That’s a lot of money for these guys.”
“It’s a day or two of Denardi,” Ro said. “Nothing.”
“Well, there you go.” Eztli took another, long hit, and let out the smoke. “Different worlds.”
When he’d been in private practice, Farrell had availed himself of the superb gatekeeping services of his firm’s indomitable Phyllis. For the past half dozen years, he’d never picked up a phone in his office without a very clear understanding of who was on the other end. Since he’d come on as DA, Treya had performed the same function.
In the short time she’d been gone, the phones had become one of Farrell’s more constant problems. He really had to get another person sitting out there at the reception desk, but in spite of his warning to Treya that he couldn’t guarantee her job when she got back, what he wanted was to have her out there again as soon as she felt it was safe.
And he really didn’t want to promote someone on a temporary basis to cover his phones and, to some extent, share his secrets, mostly because once they were in, they might make a stink and try to fight to stay and piss around with the union when Treya reappeared; but also because he was starting to get some appreciation of the value of trust. And he trusted Treya. The person he chose to sit in for Treya might very well turn out to be a spy of some kind for his political enemies. Or at least able to be turned.
Farrell didn’t want to risk it.
But now the phone was ringing on the table in his office and he didn’t know who it was and he really couldn’t justify not picking it up. And so, sighing, that is what he did. “DA’s office,” he said. “This is Wes Farrell.”
“Mr. Farrell”—an unmistakable voice—“I’ve heard some very disturbing news. This is Cliff Curtlee.”
“Mr. Curtlee. How are you?”
“Well, not too goddamned well, if you want to know the truth. I thought we had some kind of an understanding, you and I.”
“In what way?”
“In the way that you were going to cut out all this bullshit surrounding my boy. I thought it got all worked out pretty well at that charade of a hearing last week, Ro’s back out on bail, when I know goddamn well you could have gone in and told the judge no way. So, given that bail got granted, I thought we—you and me—we were still working within the bounds of our understanding. That you had to do what you had to do politically, but that basically Ro stays out of jail until the retrial. Wasn’t that it? I know it was.”
“Well, not exactly . . .”
“Yeah, but close enough. Now it’s unconscionable what that madman Glitsky put my boy through when he arrested him, but even then, okay, he’d had his shot and it didn’t work and I thought with you riding just a little bit of herd on him, that would be the end of it until we got back to the retrial, whenever that turned out to be. And then next thing I know, my lawyer and Theresa and I are sitting with Ro through another interrogation.”
“That was a police decision, sir. Not mine.”
“All right, all right. I’m not going to split hairs with you on that. But what I am concerned about, and the reason I called you directly, is one of my reporters here told me that you’re planning on using some kind of fancy legal strategy to go to the grand jury and get my boy behind bars again.”
“I can’t comment on that, sir. Grand jury proceedings are confidential.”
“So you’re not going to confirm to me that you’re planning on taking a case to the grand jury and yanking Ro back into jail?”
“I’m neither going to confirm or deny it. I’m not going to comment.”
“Well, you’ll understand if that makes me feel just a little bit as if you’re going to go ahead and do it.”
“It’s no comment, sir. Either way. I can’t undermine the foundation of how the grand jury works.”
“My reporter had it on very good authority,” Curtlee said.
“Well, whoever told her has a big mouth. You want to tell me who that was?”
“Even if I did know, and I don’t, I couldn’t reveal my reporter’s source. You know that.”
“Well, then,” Farrell said, “I guess we’ve both got our secrets.”
A silence hung on the line. Then: “I want to make something very clear to you, Farrell. You and I had a deal about my son not going back to jail . . .”
“Not saying we did, sir, but if we did, that was before he started killing people.”
“Oh, make some sense, Farrell. You believe that?”
“The evidence inclines that way.”
“Fuck. There’s no evidence or Glitsky would have his ass in chains already. So don’t give me evidence. So here’s what I’m saying to you. I don’t want this grand jury thing to move forward. It would be a bad thing for you personally if it did.”
“Are you threatening me, Cliff? ’Cause we’ve done some very recent research into the legal penalties for making threats to officers of the court.”
“Now you’re threatening me. All I’m saying is you’ll be happier if this grand jury thing stops right now. Assuming it’s going on, of course. And if it’s not, then there’s nothing either of us has to worry about.”
Eztli and Ro were stationed at the bar at MoMo’s, a popular eatery where they’d just had lunch across the street from where the Giants played ball. Eztli didn’t drink much, but here in the early afternoon Ro had already put away four shots of Jack Daniel’s and a couple of draft beers along with sharing two joints of Eztli’s very good marijuana. Still, the younger man seemed little the worse for wear.
Ro was chatting up one of the cocktail waitresses named Tiffany, a fresh-faced, young, tawny-haired woman with a terrific smile and an aggressive bosom. “No, it’s absolutely true,” he was saying. “I was away for nine years.”
“No way.” She looked past him at Eztli. “Is this the truth?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “And finally released on appeal.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “I mean, it’s cool and all that they finally let you out, but nine years! How could you have stood that?”
“I just kept telling everybody who’d listen that I was innocent,” Ro said. “I guess I just never lost faith that this is maybe the one country in the world where if you’re truly not guilty, you can finally get to some kind of justice. Sometimes it takes a while, but I’ve got to believe that the system really does work.”
Tiffany touched the back of his hand, resting there on the bar, with a well-lacquered perfect fingernail. “Well, you are way more together around it than I think I could ever be. If it were me, all I’d think about was how much of my life I’d lost. I’d be just so incredibly bitter, I think.”
“That’s one way I could be, I suppose, but really, think about what a waste that would be. I mean, look at me now, sitting in a terrific restaurant in the world’s greatest city, young and healthy, having a conversation with a beautiful woman . . .”
“Oh, now . . .”
Ro held up his good hand. “It ain’t braggin’ if it’s the truth, dear. I hope I’m not being too forward, just stating an obvious fact. And my real point is I don’t want to spend one day of my life looking back in regret. All that other stuff is behind me. I’d rather be looking forward with hope. And life is so good right now, my goal is to work like the devil to keep it that way forever. Are you allowed to drink if you’re still on your shift? Can I buy you one?”
She tossed her hair and favored him with a megawatt smile. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” Again, she brushed the back of his hand with her fingers. “Back in a second,” she said, “I’ve got to run, check my tables.”
After she’d moved off, Ro turned to Eztli. “You were right. I thought if I mentioned prison, she’d run like the wind.”
He shrugged. “Some do. Most don’t. Depends on how you play it.”
Damage Page 22