Hardy 03 - Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  Maybe it was being awakened from a good sleep, but he realized he was in a foul humor.

  Andy Fowler’s appearance didn’t pick him up any. The judge hadn’t changed out of his tuxedo. He had his trim body, his thick hair, his guileless smile so different from Hardy’s weathered one.

  These good-looking older guys — who were they trying to kid? Suddenly he saw a different man than the Andy Fowler he’d known — vainer and shallower, the august presence and appearance not so much a reflection of an enviable and confident character as a costume that concealed the insecure man within.

  Coming back through the bar, the judge checked himself in the mirror. A man who checked his hair in a burning building had his priorities all wrong.

  Hardy gave a small wave, and Andy brought up the stool next to him, ordering an Anejo rum in a heated snifter. There was a moment of cheerful greeting, ritual for them both, but it subsided quickly. Hardy reached into his pocket, took out the paperweight and laid it on the bar between them. He gave it a little spin.

  There it was — Andy’s Fowler’s whole world in an orb of jade. There was no more avoiding it. ‘May Shinn gave this to you, didn’t she?’

  Fowler had his hands cupped around the amber liquid. There was no point in denial anymore. ‘How’d you find out?’

  ‘Phone records.’ He told him how he’d made the discovery, put the jade jewelry — his paperweight, Nash’s ring — together. ‘Anyway, there were a dozen calls to your number, maybe more.’

  ‘That many?’ Did he seem pleased?

  ‘What’s happening here, Andy? You can’t be on this case.’

  ‘It’s going to come out now, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t see how it can’t.’

  ‘Who else knows but you?’

  Hardy sipped his porter. It wasn’t the direction he’d expected. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean who’s put it together, Diz?’ He brought his hand down on the bar, a gavel of flesh. ‘Goddamn it, what do you think I mean? Who else knows about this?’

  Hardy stared into the space between them. They were the first harsh words the judge had ever directed at him. Immediately Fowler put his hand over Hardy’s. ‘I’m sorry, Diz. I didn’t mean that.’

  But it was done. All right, he was stressed out. Hardy could let it go, forget it, almost.

  Fowler raised his snifter, took a sip, put it down. His voice was under control again. ‘I guess what I’m asking is, what happens now?’

  ‘I’d say that depends on what’s happened before.’

  Fowler nodded. ‘So nobody else knows.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  Everybody was a poker player. It was all check, bet, raise. ‘Okay. Why don’t you tell me about it? We’ll go from there.’

  The bartender was coming down the bar toward them. ‘Double it up here, would you?’ Fowler said. ‘And give my friend another pint.’

  * * * * *

  They were at a large corner booth, nobody else within twenty feet, at right angles from each other, almost knee to knee, the older, good-looking man in a tuxedo, and the other one, maybe a construction worker, probably the man’s son. Definitely they weren’t lovers— in San Francisco two men alone were always suspect. But the body language was all wrong for that. They were close, involved in something, and it was putting a strain between them.

  ‘It was at one of the galleries down by Union Square. I’d had lunch at the Clift and the sun was out so I thought I’d walk a little of it off, maybe drop in at Magnin’s and visit Jane. I so rarely get to see downtown in the daylight.

  ‘The place was empty except for the saleswoman — she turned out to be the owner — and May. I don’t know what made me stop. They were showing some erotica — I guess that’s what got me to look, but then I saw this Japanese woman standing there, her face in profile, and I walked in. We got to talking, probably talked for half an hour, analyzing all this stuff. It was erotic, I admit, discussing all these positions and anatomies, alone with a beautiful woman you had just met.’

  ‘So you picked her up.’

  ‘If only it had been that simple. I hadn’t done anything like that in thirty years, Diz. When you’re a judge…’

  Hardy drank his porter, waited. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘She left, said it was nice meeting me but she had to go. I stayed around a little longer and thought that was that.’ He paused. ‘But it wasn’t. I found I couldn’t get her out of my mind, kept picturing her in some of the positions. Sorry, I know it’s not my image.’

  Hardy shrugged. ‘Everybody needs love, Andy.’

  ‘That sounds good enough when you say it. Try denying it, though, try burying it under your work and your image and your public life until you really believe you don’t need it anymore.’

  ‘I did it after Michael, and Jane.’

  ‘So you know. You tell yourself your life is just as good, just as full. It’s not like you don’t do things, but you’re so alone. Nothing resonates.’ Andy got quiet and stared outside at the empty street. ‘So a couple of days later,’ the judge went on, ‘I came back to the gallery and asked the owner if she remembered the woman I’d spoken with. She said she was a regular client.’

  ‘So she does deal in art?’

  ‘Who, May? No, she collects some, but I wouldn’t say she deals in it. Anyway, the owner knew her, but she wouldn’t tell me her name, even after I told her who I was. Not that I blame her. As we know, there are a lot of nuts out there, even among my colleagues. So I gave her my card, asked her to have this lady call me. She said she would.’

  ‘So you got together.’

  ‘No. Not yet. She didn’t call.’ He swirled his rum, put it back on the table untouched. ‘But I wanted her, I didn’t know her at all and I didn’t care. I had to see her again. I don’t know what it was.’

  The vision of Celine Nash danced up before Hardy’s eyes and he drowned it in porter. ‘Okay, what?’

  ‘I gave it a week, then I went back in and bought one of the wood-cuts, forty-five hundred dollars, and told the owner to send it to May.’

  ‘That’ll eliminate the riffraff element.’

  ‘The money wasn’t important. I’ve got money. In any event it got her to call and thank me, and I told her I wanted to see her and she still said no, she couldn’t do that.

  ‘I asked her why, was she married, engaged, not interested in men? No? At least tell me why. So she agreed to meet me for dinner. And she told me.’

  ‘Her profession?’

  ‘What she did, yes. She was scared, me being a judge, that I’d bust her.’ He laughed, clipped and short. ‘I had to promise her immunity up front. I did want her, Diz. What she had done made no difference to me. I told her I wasn’t interested in that kind of relationship, paying her —I liked her, I wanted to see her, take her out legitimately. She laughed. She didn’t do that. So I asked if I could see her at all, under any conditions.’

  ‘Jesus, Andy…“

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t groveling. It was more good-natured negotiating.’

  ‘So what’d the negotiating get to?’

  The judge focused across the room. ‘Three thousand dollars.’

  Hardy swallowed, took a long drink, swallowed again. ‘Three thousand dollars? For one time?’

  ‘No, per month.’

  ‘You paid May Shinn three thousand dollars a month?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lord, Lord, Lord.’

  ‘After the first couple of months I would have paid anything. Don’t laugh. I fell in love with her, Diz. I still love her.’

  ‘Andy, you don’t pay somebody you love.’

  ‘The money was never discussed after that first night. I thought she was coming around.’

  ‘To what? What could she be coming around to?’

  ‘To loving me.’

  It was so simple, so basic, so incredibly misguided, Hardy didn’t know what to say. ‘What a
bout her other clients?’

  ‘She dropped them all, almost immediately. That was one of the things that gave me some hope…’

  ‘That she would love you?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘And then what? You marry her and have a happy little family?’

  Fowler shook his head. ‘No, I never thought we’d get married. She made me happy, that was all. She was there for me. She filled up that space. I thought I was doing the same for her.’

  ‘But you weren’t.’

  ‘For a while I’m sure I was. She started cooking me meals, making special dishes, giving me presents — the paperweight, for example — things like that. Then four or five months ago it just ended. She called and said we couldn’t go on.’

  ‘Owen Nash?’

  ‘I assume so. I didn’t know it then. She said to just make believe she had died. But she was happy, I shouldn’t worry. I shouldn’t worry…’

  Hardy sat back into the leather of the booth. All this tracked with Andy’s malaise over the past months, his explanation to Jane about a friend dying. Frannie and Jane had both, independently, been right. A woman had broken a man’s heart, the oldest story in the world.

  But now, that story told, the judge had to move on. He took a gulp of his rum. ‘So that’s it, Diz, now you know.’

  ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘That’s what Eve said after she ate the apple. It was too late then, too.’

  Hardy leaned forward again, arms on the table. ‘You can’t be on the case, Andy. I just don’t understand how it could have gotten this far.’

  The answer — the same one that Fowler had given Freeman earlier in the day — was that it had come a step at a time: the Muni-Court arraignment with no chance of getting to Fowler’s courtroom anyway, then the grand-jury indictment leaving only one chance in six it would come to him, then his decision not to go and beg off privately to Leo Chomorro because that Hispanic Nazi would use the Fowler/Shinn relationship as political ammunition against Fowler. Andy didn’t mention the ace-in-the-hole that hadn’t worked — Freeman challenging out of his courtroom. He didn’t have any intention of opening that can of worms. So far, no one else knew he had hired Freeman, and he intended to keep things that way.

  ‘So then I figured if, after all that, it dropped in my lap, well then, it was fate. You know there’s going to be prejudice against her being Japanese, her profession. At least I could give her an even playing field. I could have helped her. She might have come back to me. There was no reason it had to come out. There isn’t now. I wouldn’t obstruct justice, Diz. I just wouldn’t do it.’

  Hardy wanted to tell him he already had. Instead he said, ‘The rationalization maybe moves it out of disbarment range, Andy, but you and I both know it’s still unethical. You know the defendant — hell, you’ve been intimate with the defendant. If that’s not a conflict…’

  What could he say? Andy knew this as well as he did. ‘You’ve got to take yourself off the case.’

  ‘If I did, I’d have to give a reason and I can’t do that.’

  Hardy’s drink was gone. He picked up the glass, tried it, put it down. ‘You could retire.’

  ‘Right now, without notice?’

  ‘The trial isn’t tomorrow, Andy. There’s plenty of time. It’ll get reassigned. The phone records in the file aren’t strictly relevant to the murder. The police only asked for June twentieth. The rest doesn’t have to be there.’

  This was not ethical either, and Hardy wasn’t sure he could do it. The file was the public record. Tampering with it, suppressing potential evidence — even if its relevance hadn’t been demonstrated — was a felony. Still, he wasn’t telling Andy he’d take the earlier phone records out, not in so many words. And if he didn’t say it explicitly, he didn’t say it at all. That was this game, and Andy Fowler played it, too.

  Hardy, with the problem of where to draw the line between personal loyalty and the public trust, knew he had to get Fowler off the case and he didn’t want to blow the whistle on him. If a white lie could accomplish both results he thought it might be worth telling. He also thought it might not be. How many venial sins make a mortal sin? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

  ‘Dismas, I’m only sixty-two, I’m not ready to retire —’

  ‘You know, Andy, you’ve got to cut your losses, and you’re going to have ’em. At least you’ll still have your reputation. Maybe you’ll get a call to the federal bench.‘

  They both got a wry smile at that. They were making last call, the lights coming up, the music going down.

  Hardy had to push it. ‘I’ve got to know by the morning, Andy. I’m real sorry.’

  Fowler patted his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry I put you through this, Dismas, although I’m glad it was you who found out. Anybody else…’

  ‘Andy, we’ve been friends a long time, but in this case I am anybody else. I’m just giving you one day to correct an oversight. But it’s got to get corrected, one way or the other. I want to be clear on that.’

  The judge was relaxed again, the situation worked out. ‘It’s clear, Diz, it’s clear. Don’t you worry.’

  34

  David Freeman had a tradition he’d carried over from his days in law school. Whenever he scored what he considered a clear-cut victory he would celebrate it immediately. His theory was that you never knew when or if you’d get another one, and you’d better savor every drop of satisfaction from the one in hand before it was swept away into the river of your past.

  So Tuesday night, after he’d arranged to have the boys and their father meet him at one-thirty the next day for a press conference in his office, he’d called a cab and taken it back to the Fairmont.

  After booking a room there he took the outside elevator to the Crown Room and ordered a bottle of Paradis cognac, which went by the snifter at $12.50. The bottle set him back $350 but he could save it and take it home, a trophy for the job well done. He arrived at the Crown Room just after ten and stayed until it closed at two, putting about a six-inch dent in the bottle, sitting at one of the north-facing windows, watching his city sparkle beneath him, a Nob in his own castle.

  Which explained why he wasn’t up anywhere near nine-thirty. If he had been, if he’d somehow gotten to Chris Locke and let him know that the May Shinn case couldn’t go to trial, that her alibi was rock solid, then he might have saved Superior Court Judge Andrew Bryan Fowler the trouble of announcing his early retirement, effective September 1.

  * * * * *

  In a computerized age, Jeff Elliot considered this manual search for title to a piece of property the most unnecessarily tedious job he’d ever done. Yesterday, after only two hours at it, his blurred vision had forced him to give it up.

  Now, three hours into it again, not yet noon, he was having second thoughts, wondering if it could really matter. He’d thought of all sorts of plausible reasons to talk himself out of the search, not the least of which was that May Shinn herself might easily have accumulated enough for a down payment on $500,000 worth of real estate.

  He remembered stories in Playboy and Penthouse when he’d been in college, about coeds who’d turned to hooking and pulled in $10,000 a month. Even allowing for the hyperbole of the publications, he knew it was possible for a high-class girl to make $200 a night, plus all her normal living expenses. So a smart one could save $4,000 a month, $50,000 a year. A little administrative acumen could provide a shelter for tax purposes — interior design, import/export, licensed sexual therapist.

  He’d seen May Shinn in court in her tailored suit. It required no leap of faith to think she had the collateral for her own bail — she’d had the cash to pay Maury, after all. Why not the rest of it?

  But — what if she didn’t?

  And, as always, it was that possibility that pulled him along. The chance that under the obvious and the plausible, there might lurk the secret, the hidden, the dangerous — the story.

  The title clerks could have been mor
e helpful. But they were busy with their own work, with realtors they saw more often. He was a nosy crippled guy who didn’t even know what to ask for. So, like good bureaucrats everywhere, the clerks volunteered nothing.

  But the learning curve was kicking in. Even if you knew the city — and Jeff wasn’t yet up to speed even there — the search took some getting used to. There were huge grid books that divided the land into areas that seemed to bear little relation to current neighborhoods. At first glance, street names were useless in determining which grid book — out of more than a hundred — held your property. But he felt he was closing in.

  The collateral was a six-unit apartment building three blocks up Powell from Washington Square. After his frustrating search of records the day before, Jeff had come up with the idea that he could just stop by the place and ask one of the tenants who owned the building, and he and Dorothy had tried that.

  The one person who’d been home — a mime artist who was preparing to go out and work the streets, whiteface and all — told them she sent her rent checks to a management company.

  Jeff thought it unlikely that he’d befriend another secretary who would divulge private records to him, and decided that if he wanted the story he’d have to work for it, like always.

  He estimated the books weighed fifteen pounds each. Up close, they smelled like wet newspaper. He had to wait in line, return his previous request, using only one crutch, holding the title book in his other hand. He’d gone through twenty-six books so far, but the closest plot in the last book ended a couple of blocks north of his site.

  Why couldn’t you just type an address into a computer and push a button? He’d never figure it out.

  * * * * *

  Jane was furious. ‘You didn’t have to tell anybody! Daddy’s whole life is the bench. How could you do that to him?’

  It was close to one o’clock. Jane had had her own early lunch with her father and he’d told her all about it. Hardy wasn’t too thrilled to learn that the judge had told his daughter, since he himself had elected to treat the entire sensitive subject on a need-to-know basis, hoping no one would.