Hardy 11 - Suspect, The

by John Lescroart

  Something was going on behind Juhle in the living room, and suddenly Gorman straightened all the way up. "Hey! Wait a minute! What are you doing?" Boosting himself up from the counter, he was across the kitchen before Juhle could even stand. In the middle of the living room, the medical examiner's assistants with the gurney and its body bag had stopped at the interruption. "What are you doing?" Gorman demanded again.

  Juhle stepped in front of him. "They're taking the body downtown, sir. The medical examiner is going to need to do an autopsy, then . . ."

  "You mean he's going to cut her up?"

  "To determine the exact cause of death, yes."

  "But . . ." Gorman turned from Juhle to the men pushing the gurney, then back to the inspector, a low-wattage panic now evident in his eyes. "Why do you have to do that? I told you she had pills upstairs. If she'd been drinking and then got in the hot tub . . ."

  "That's one way it might have happened," Juhle said, "yes."

  "Well, what else?"

  "She might have slipped getting into the tub. There's a good-sized bump on her head."

  This news seemed to confuse Gorman, but he shook his reaction off. "That doesn't matter. What matters is she's dead! If she killed herself or it was an accident, what difference does it make?" He brought a hand back to his face, rubbed at the birthmark. "Jesus Christ, this is unbelievable. She's just now dead. It's only been a few hours. Don't you understand that? You don't have to cut her up. It won't make any difference."

  Juhle wondered if Gorman could in fact be so clueless, or if this was some kind of an act. Every schoolchild knew that homicide victims got autopsied. Juhle had been playing his role as understanding cop comforting a victim’s relative up until now, but this was the time to bring some reality into the discussion. "Mr. Gorman," he said, "surely you realize it makes a difference if somebody killed her."

  Gorman opened his mouth and started to say something, then decided not to. His shoulders sagged, he shook his head from side to side. "God help us," he said.

  3

  After getting up at dawn and hiking out from Tamarack Lake, Gina Roake drove to her Pleasant Street condominium on Nob Hill in under four hours. By noon, she had unpacked and stowed her gear, showered, and changed into her work clothes—a light mauve business suit and black low heels.

  As she came out the doors onto the sidewalk in front of her building, Gina discovered that, somewhat to her surprise, she wasn't inclined to go straight to her office. True, that had been her intention since last night, but now that the moment had arrived, something about it didn't feel quite right. She knew that she could go in and report to her partners that she was ready to get back in harness. At that announcement, right away they would probably be able to throw her some work on cases they were handling, get her back up to speed, give her some billable hours.

  But Gina knew that those hours rightly belonged to the nineteen long-suffering and hardworking associates within the firm, each one of whom was expected to amass twenty-two hundred billable hours in the course of a year, a daunting and unending struggle for young attorneys that demanded fifty weeks of eight-billable-hour days. Lunches didn't count; administrative hours didn't count; prep time and research often didn't count; and certainly schmoozing by the water cooler didn't count. Hours were limited and finite, and it wasn't uncommon for an associate to put in twelve hours on the clock in order to bill eight of them. As a partner, Gina was under no illusion that her legitimate role was to garner clients for the firm, and they in turn would provide the billable hours of work that she would then dole out to her associates.

  She was ready to go back to work all right, but damned if she was going to be a drain on the firm's resources. She needed to reestablish her contacts in the city and attract her own clients to the firm—to do otherwise would not only be unfair to her associates, it would put her in a subservient position vis-à-vis her partners, and she wasn't going to let that happen.

  By the time she got to the corner, she'd made up her mind and when the cab pulled over to pick her up, she slid into the backseat and said, "Hall of Justice, please. Seventh and Bryant."

  In terms of longevity in the city, Lou the Greek's wasn't exactly Tadich's or Fior d'Italia, or even Original Joe's or the Swan Oyster Depot. Nevertheless, with forty-plus years in its same location across the street from the Hall of Justice, it had its full complement of tradition, albeit in a slightly less savory vein than those other famous eateries.

  The whole "eatery" designation was something of a misnomer. Certainly, anyone drawing up a business plan for the place in today's world would be hard-pressed to attract investors with a menu that included only one item per day—the Special—and very few appetizers besides the occasional edamame or dried wasabi-coated peas.

  Forget about lunch standards everywhere else, such as chicken wings or hamburgers or fried calamari or garlic fries or, God forbid, salads or other raw green stuff—the regulars at Lou's referred to martini olives as the vegetable course. Instead, Lou's wife, Chui, sought on a daily basis to meld the disparate culinary cultures of her own China and her husband's Greece with original and, it must be admitted, creative dishes such as Sweet and Sour Dolmas, or Pita Stuffed Kung Pao Chicken, or mysteries such as the famous Yeanling Clay Bowl. Whatever a yeanling was.

  Often edible, but just as often not, the food was not why people gathered at Lou's. Like so many other restaurants, Lou's location was the key to its success. If you had business with the criminal justice system in San Francisco, Lou's was where you ate. It didn't matter that it was stuck down in the basement of a bail-bond building, that it always smelled a little funky, was darkly lit and ill-ventilated. It wasn't fifty yards from the front door of the Hall of Justice, so juries on their lunch breaks, cops, reporters, lawyers and their clients, witnesses, snitches, families of victims, and visitors to the jail—a vast, often unwashed and unruly, certainly boisterous clientele—filled the place from the first legal drink at 6:00 a.m. until last call at 1:30 a.m.

  Now Gina Roake, fresh from her cab ride, walked down the six steps from the street and waded into the surging tide of humanity on the other side of Lou's black-painted glass double-doors. The crowd did not intimidate her. This was her milieu. Smiling, jostling, pushing her way inside, she cleared the immediate crush and across the room saw her firm's chief investigator, Wyatt Hunt, sharing a four-person booth with another man. In ten seconds, she was standing over them. "If I joined you, would I be interrupting important business?" she asked.

  "Not at all," Hunt said. "We haven't even ordered yet."

  "You're sure you wouldn't mind sharing half your bench with an old woman?"

  Hunt leaned forward and back, looking around behind her. "No problem," he said. "Where is she?" But, grinning up at her, he slid in to give her room, then pointed across the table. "You know Devin Juhle, I believe. Homicide."

  "Sure. How are you, Inspector?"

  "Better now that it's not just me and Wyatt. He's decent company for about fifteen minutes, then usually starts to babble."

  "It's when I start using longer words," Hunt explained. "Devin gets confused."

  "He uses them in the wrong context. He needs to take a course or something. I tell him it's no good using big words if you don't know what they mean."

  "Teleological," Hunt said.

  "A perfect example." Juhle turned to Gina. "As you can see," he said, "you're not interrupting." Then to Hunt. "And no way is that a real word."

  "Teleological." Hunt held out a hand across the table. "How much?"

  "Lunch." You re on.

  "Spell it for the record."

  Hunt strung out the letters, then said, "Gina? Word or no word?"

  She made a reluctant grimace across at Juhle. "I think it's a word, Inspector. Sorry."

  "It is a word," Hunt said. "It means 'relating to design in nature.' Like a teleological argument. Man started to walk upright because he got out of the trees and started hanging out in tall grass, where he had to stand
to see over it. Which got him—us, I mean, the human race—to walking."

  "Imagine that," Juhle said. "I never would have guessed." Across the table, Juhle sotto voce'd to Gina: "We're getting into the babble phase I told you about."

  Fifteen minutes later, they were all having the Special—pot stickers stuffed with taramosalata—which was not particularly, by unanimous opinion, Chui's greatest triumph. But by now they weren't paying any attention to the food anyway.

  ". . . just a feeling in my gut," Juhle was saying, "but anytime you've got a murdered spouse and a mega-million-dollar estate, you've got to think maybe the husband, huh?"

  Gina said, "Do you have anything on him?"

  Juhle shook his head. "It's too soon. We don't even know time of death yet. But if there was foul play, and the bump on the head looks an awful lot like there was, then it was either him or somebody else she knew pretty damn well."

  "Why do you say that?" Hunt asked.

  "She was naked," Juhle said. "She's not having wine and getting naked with whoever he might have hired to get rid of her, I don't care how cute he was."

  "Does this guy have a lawyer?" Gina asked.

  Juhle started to pop a pot sticker, then thought better of it and put it back on his plate. He shook his head. "Again, too early."

  "It's never too early."

  "We don't even have a murder yet, much less charged him with it."

  "But you talked to him this morning? And you let him tell you all this stuff?"

  "I didn't twist his arm."

  "And about money, and being resentful of his wife, and spending all last weekend just thinking about how much he hated her? Somehow I think that if a lawyer had been with him, he would have toned things down a notch or two."

  Juhle pulled down the sides of his mouth, erasing the smile that had started there. "He might have, at that. But fortunately, no offense, he didn't think to call one."

  Hunt spoke up. "In his heart, Devin already thinks he's guilty."

  "I'm getting that impression," Gina said.

  "Not true," Devin said. "I'm in wait mode, that's all."

  "Are you going to talk to him again?" Gina asked.

  "Probably later today, if he's where he should be."

  "As opposed to ... ?"

  "His house." Juhle was matter-of-fact. "Hey, I went upstairs with him so he could get some fresh clothes. But no way he spends any more time at his house until we're through with the place."

  "So where's he staying?"

  "The Travelodge down on Lombard. It's close enough."

  "And you're going down to see him there?"

  "That's my plan."

  "And he still won't have a lawyer?"

  This time, Juhle's smile stayed. "If my luck holds," he said.

  Gina hated it when cops played these silly territorial games. For Juhle's benefit, and mostly just for the fun of it, she decided to put a little of the needle in. She turned to Hunt. "Just as good citizens, Wyatt, we ought to get in touch with this guy and give him a heads up."

  "Hey, come on!" Juhle put some humor in it, but not all that much. "Give a poor cop a break. Besides, he gets lawyered up, I'm really going to think he's guilty."

  "Having a lawyer means he's guilty?" Gina asked.

  "No. Of course not. How silly of me." Juhle remained genial. "You're absolutely correct. Perish the thought."

  "Don't be fooled," Hunt said. "He doesn't agree with you."

  "I'm picking that up, Wyatt."

  Juhle stabbed one of the awful pot stickers with his fork and picked it up. Staring at it for a second, he again put it back down on his plate. Gina's casual dig at him had obviously struck a nerve. "Let's put it this way. He hasn't been charged with anything yet. If the autopsy comes back looking like someone murdered his wife, I would hope that he'd want to cooperate in every way he could to help us find the killer. If he's got a lawyer there with him, running a screen every time I ask him a question, I'm going to wonder about what's going on with him a lot more than I would if he just sat and talked to me."

  "But you admit you're trying to get him to implicate himself."

  "No." Then patiently, "I'm trying to get at the truth. If he's innocent, the truth—pardon the phrase—the truth will set him free."

  "Only in a perfect world, Inspector. You know that."

  "Okay, granted," Juhle said. "But an innocent guy doesn't call a lawyer before he's even charged with anything."

  Gina thought this was turning into a ridiculous discussion for two old pros to be having. She'd started out totally goofing with Juhle, and now she was enjoying the rise she was getting out of him, so she went on. "He does if he's going to talk to cops and say things that could get misconstrued. That's all I'm saying."

  "And all I'm saying," Juhle responded, "is that to us cop types, that happens and we're going to think the guy's got something to hide."

  "Well, to quote the Beatles," Hunt said, trying to lighten everybody up, " 'everybody's got something to hide ’cept for me and my monkey.' "

  "Thanks, Wyatt," Gina said. "That was helpful."

  Self-effacing, Hunt said, "I try to contribute."

  "I think I got your friend mad at me."

  "Naw. That's just Devin. He's a cop, so he thinks like a cop. It's a whole mind-set they test you on at the Academy. First question is whether you think if a guy's got a lawyer, is he guilty? If you say, 'Not necessarily,' you flunk out."

  "How heartening."

  They were crossing Bryant Street at the light. "So," Hunt asked, "what brings you down here? I haven't seen you near the Hall in forever."

  "At least. Maybe longer. I don't even remember the last time I was down here."

  Reaching the opposite curb, they turned right together and started up the block. In front of them, unmarked as well as black-and-white police cars and taxicabs were double-parked in the street all the way up to the front steps of the Hall. Someone had chained a large Doberman to one of the handrails in the middle of the wide and shallow stairs, and his barking competed with the Jamaican in dreads who was exhorting all and sundry to embrace Rasta as their salvation and Haile Selassie as the one true God. A homeless man wrapped in newspaper slept just beyond the hedge that bounded the steps. A full dozen attorney types stood talking with clients or cops in the bright sunshine while regular citizens kept up a stream in and out of the glass doors. "Can you believe? I think I've actually missed the place," Roake said.

  "You get inside, I predict you'll get over that pretty quick. You meeting a client?"

  "No. I'm hoping to latch on to a conflicts case." These cases were very common; the Public Defender's Office would in the normal course of events be assigned to an indigent client who had been accused of a crime. If that suspect committed the crime with a partner, the PD could not also defend the accomplice—it was a conflict of interest. So the court would assign a private defense attorney such as Gina, whose fees the city would pay, to represent the accomplice.

  They reached the steps. Gina stopped, hesitated, gestured to the door. "You going inside?"

  "No. I was just doing some computer searches at home and Devin called to have lunch and I took pity on him. I live just around the corner."

  Again, Gina showed a slight hesitation.

  "What?" Hunt asked.

  She lay a hand on his arm. "I was just wondering if Inspector Juhle happened to mention the name of the husband we were talking about back in there."

  "Sure. It's Stuart Gorman. The writer?"

  She shook her head. "I'm afraid I don't know the name. What does he write?"

  "Outdoors books. Fishing, mostly. I've read a couple of ’em. He's pretty good."

  "A couple of them?"

  "Maybe three by now."

  "I hate him already," Gina said. "I've been trying to finish my one damn book for almost four years, and he's already finished three?"

  "Maybe he started earlier than you."

  "Maybe he's just better at it."

  "Could be th
at, I suppose. Though you're probably a better lawyer than he'd be."

  "If he were a lawyer."

  "Which, based on Devin's talk with him, he's not," Hunt said. "And that in turn leaves you wondering if he's got himself legal representation yet, doesn't it?"

  Now Roake smiled. "No flies on you, Wyatt. The thought did occur to me."

  "You want me to call him and find out for sure?"

  Gina shook her head. "Thanks. I can chase my own ambulances. The man's just lost his wife. Let's go wildly out on a limb and presume for a minute that he had nothing to do with killing her, in which case he's probably—no, undoubtedly—devastated. But I kind of think he'd be better off if he gets somebody before your Devin gets another shot at him."

  "Well," Hunt said. "If I know Dev like I think I do, he'd better hurry."

  4

  At a few minutes after one o'clock, a haggard Stuart Gorman, collapsed in a wing chair next to the television in his hotel room, hung up the telephone. "I can't believe these people."

  Sitting across from him on the front two inches of his bed, his longtime friend and ex-college roommate, Jedd Conley, raised his head. Conley was the first call Stuart made after the police had chased him out of his own house that morning. In spite of being the State Assemblyman representing San Francisco, Conley had cleared his entire calendar for the day and met Stuart at the Travelodge within twenty minutes of checking in.

  Conley had a good face, closely shaved. Both his nose and his six-foot bearing were strong, straight, aristocratic. The broad, unlined forehead under his dark hair could have belonged to a man twenty years his junior, but the youthful look was somewhat mitigated by the lines around a mouth that had perhaps been forced to smile more than it wanted to. Today Conley was wearing a tan business suit with a white shirt and light gold tie. "Who was that?" he asked.