The 13th Juror

by John Lescroart

  Hardy watched his wife walk from the back of the restaurant, noticed the heads at the bar turning. One of the problems he had had when he was starting to fall in love with her had been her looks—they were too good. He knew it was easy to get fooled by a pretty face. It had happened to him before.

  And even though he had known Frannie since she was a young girl—Moses’ kid sister—once he started connecting with her, letting himself really see her, he made himself put on the brakes. Not for too long, but enough to persuade himself that at least most of what he loved about her wasn’t on the outside. He had to admit, though, that even after three years, a lot of it still was.

  The waiter was there, holding her chair out for her. The little amenities.

  “What are you smiling at?”

  “I’m shallow. I have no depth. I wonder if our relationship is purely physical.”

  Frannie daintily popped a bite of calamari into her mouth. They were by the window at Mooses’, looking out through the sunshine onto Washington Square. “Well, some of it, anyway.”

  They hadn’t discussed it, but they had both felt they needed to go someplace nice—light, upscale, carefree—to wash away the tastes of their mornings.

  She reached across the table and touched a finger to Hardy’s cheek, trailing it along his jawline. Picking up her glass, she swirled the Chardonnay, staring into it. “Wine two days in a row. You think Vincent will be all right?” Their son was living on breast milk and a few squashed bananas.

  Hardy told her he didn’t think Vincent would notice. It wasn’t as if she was out pounding herself into the ground with alcohol.

  “I know. Sometimes I just worry.” She put the glass down, scratched at the tablecloth. But she wasn’t really worried about Vincent—it was something else and Hardy was fairly certain he knew what it was.

  “Pretty bad?”

  She nodded. “You look around here, and you see all these people being so happy, and then back there, in the jail . . . It kind of makes you wonder what’s the real world.”

  Hardy covered her hand with his own.

  “I mean, how isolated are we?” she asked.

  The waiter lifted the empty plate from the middle of the table. He removed some nonexistent crumbs from the starched linen tablecloth with a small rolling hand-brush. Someone began playing classical music—expertly—at the piano by the bar.

  19

  By Friday Hardy felt that he’d covered a lot of territory and uncovered very little. Freeman had been his usual unenthusiastic self about the ATM, although he did admit—grudgingly—that it might be helpful at some point.

  Freeman’s attitude made Hardy decide that there was a real disadvantage in believing your client was guilty. He was trying to keep his own mind open. He had verified Lightner’s opinion—about the battery passing through generations—with several other published and unpublished authorities. Their explanations were all consistent—Jennifer had seen her mother beaten at home. Her mother took it and took it, possibly without complaint to the children. So that behavior became Jennifer’s expectation of married life—if it wasn’t there, things just wouldn’t feel right. Intimacy couldn’t begin.

  So, Hardy thought, Larry had been beating Jennifer. Without a doubt, so had her first husband Ned. According to Lightner’s theory she would have had a difficult time marrying either of them if they hadn’t gotten at least a little tough with her during courtship—they wouldn’t have felt like husband material.

  Whether or not it could be proved in a court of law, Terrell’s scenario of Jennifer injecting Ned with atropine was plausible. And—Hardy had to believe—if she killed Ned, it was a possibility that she killed Larry, too.

  Next was, if Jennifer did kill both men, at least she had a good reason, though Hardy had a hard time with any kind of premeditated murder. Jennifer, on her part, still hadn’t budged an inch on her denial of abuse, which continued to infuriate David Freeman, signed affidavit or no.

  Freeman was afraid he would lose and that the decision would be upheld on appeal. But he was hamstrung—he couldn’t bring up BWS at all. If he did he was all but admitting that Jennifer did it and in the process even saying why, in spite of the details.

  Hardy had finally located brother Tom at a construction site near the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Struck out during the day, Hardy returned to the site after work hours wearing dirty jeans and carrying two six-packs of Mickey’s Big Mouth and got him to talk for twenty minutes.

  Hardy verified what the mother, Nancy, had said—Jennifer and Larry did not visit the family since a few months after the wedding. Tom had been seventeen at the time. Hardy could see that it had hurt the boy back then, although now the man covered it with bluster.

  The last time Tom himself had seen the Witts had been Christmas Eve. No one had mentioned that before and Hardy asked why not.

  Tom had shrugged it off. Why would anybody care? He’d gone by his parents’ home during the afternoon, had a few beers, and his mother had started moaning about Jennifer and the grandchild she never saw. She’d bought Matt this great present and he wasn’t even going to come over to see it.

  Tom had gotten pissed off. He drove his motorcycle over to Olympia, intending—he said—to kick a little ass, but by the time he got there, he figured there wouldn’t be any point. He wasn’t going to change them. He’d dropped off his own Christmas present—a Wiffle ball and bat—with his nephew, said Merry Christmas to his sister, told her she really ought to go by their parents’ so Matt could get his present from his grandmother, then left.

  And, he added—no surprise, they didn’t come.

  But here, Hardy thought, might have been the catalyst Glitsky had been talking about. Out of the blue, Tom might not wake up one morning and say “I think I’ll go kill my brother-in-law,” but he sure as hell might do it three days after being snubbed during the holidays, touching off years of resentment.

  Walter Terrell sat in with them while they went through the physical evidence, and stood over them in the evidence lockup while Hardy and Freeman checked off the computer list with the items that came out of the bags.

  There was Larry’s bloodstained shirt. All the other clothes. The stuff that had been in pockets—Larry had a comb, a small Swiss Army knife, keys, some coins including a quarter painted with red nail polish.

  “Larry hung out in bars?” This didn’t fit Hardy’s profile so far.

  Terrell shook his head. “No sign of it.”

  “That’s a bar quarter.” Freeman and Terrell both looked at him blankly. “For the jukebox,” he explained. “You paint your quarters red, you feed the box, you don’t get charged when they come collect.”

  Freeman was unimpressed. “So he went out for a drink on Christmas Eve. Maybe. I’ve had quarters like that turn up in my pocket. Means nothing.”

  But pickings had been so slim that Hardy wanted to keep grabbing. “Two days before he gets killed, anything he did means something.”

  Freeman didn’t respond. He had already moved the pile of coins to the side, going on to what looked like a bag full of trash. “What’s this stuff?” Forensics had picked the room clean and bagged whatever might have interest, in this case the contents of the bedroom wastebasket—used Kleenexes, used Christmas ribbon and wrapping paper, the kind of plastic bag they wrapped shirts in at the dry cleaners. “This is evidence?”

  Terrell pushed another bag toward Freeman, answered wearily, “You know the drill, sir. It’s here if you want to use it. It’s your decision what’s important.”

  Freeman pulled the bag nearer and slid the gun out onto the table. He picked it up, checked its serial number against the prosecution’s proposed exhibit list, smelled the barrel. He checked the fingerprint report and his eyebrows went up. “They didn’t find her prints on the gun?”

  “The clip.” This wasn’t any surprise to Terrell. He pulled another bag and pushed it to them. “She wiped the gun.”

  “Somebody wiped the gun.” Freeman gave him th
e bad eye.

  And Terrell shrugged. “If you say so.” It was getting late on a Friday afternoon, and the room in the basement of the Hall of Justice didn’t have the best ventilation.

  Freeman tipped up the bag, expecting the clip to fall out. Instead they were all looking at another gun. “What the hell is this? Where’s this on the list!?”

  Terrell read from the list. “Bag 37. Dumpster contents. Want to see the egg cartons we found with it?”

  “Yeah, but what the hell is it?” Freeman repeated. “Why is it here?”

  Terrell was holding up his hands. “It was there. Now it’s here. How should I know?”

  “But it’s a gun.”

  Terrell reached over and picked it up. He put on his official voice. “Sir! Please, calm down.”

  “I’m calm enough!” Freeman sat back in his chair. “All right, son, I’m calm.”

  Terrell explained. “It’s a toy gun. It’s a good toy gun, but it’s plastic. See? That’s all. As far as I know it’s got nothing to do with the evidence in this case.”

  “Then why is it here?” Hardy could play the straight man if it came to it. The questions were obvious enough.

  “It’s here because they found it in the same Dumpster as the other gun, the murder weapon. I thought at the time it might be worth holding on to.”

  “The same Dumpster?”

  Terrell nodded. “They both clunked out onto the street. Guy who found ’em, when he saw the real gun, gave us a call.”

  “The garbage man?” Hardy asked.

  “Right.”

  “How does this connect?” Freeman was still sitting back, trying to get a take on it.

  “It doesn’t, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I just had a theory and thought I’d run with it. You never know.”

  Hardy knew this was Terrell’s MO. “What was your theory?”

  “I don’t know. The perp comes in with this gun—looks real, doesn’t it?—maybe he’s doing a burglary, keeps it to threaten people. He gets to the bedroom, sees the real gun, gets surprised by Larry and the boy, panics, boom boom. This was before I fingered Jennifer.”

  “Did they print that gun, the toy?”

  “Sure. Nothing, though. Anyway, I figured they had to be connected, right? But I was wrong. Besides, the guy tells me guns are the number-one toy you find in the garbage sector.”

  “Garbage sector . . . ?”

  “His words. Parents don’t want their kids to grow up violent, so some relative sends them a gun for Christmas or something, they toss it. Second is Barbie dolls. You believe that? Who’d throw away a Barbie doll, brand-new?”

  “Can we stick to the gun?” Freeman was leaning forward now, interested.

  Terrell shrugged. “Hey, you want it, you can have it. Here, check it out.”

  He handed it to Freeman, who gave it the once-over, then passed it to Hardy. “What do you think?”

  “It’s a toy gun in a Dumpster.”

  Freeman mulled it over a few more seconds. “Anything else in this Dumpster you bagged that isn’t connected to anything, Wally? You want to waste more of our time?” Freeman was picking at the bags, lifting them, dropping them. “We got trash, we got toy guns . . . ” He shook his head. “Christ. How ’bout we get to see the clip?”

  Afterward, Hardy went up to homicide and finagled Glitsky into a stop at Lou the Greek’s. Freeman had gone to wherever it was he went on Friday nights—Jennifer was calendared for Monday morning and Hardy thought he was probably up to some behind-the-scenes shenanigans with somebody.

  Now Hardy was trying to convince Abe that Hawaii was where the Glitskys ought to go for vacation, Glitsky saying that Hardy must be out of touch with what policemen made nowadays if he thought Abe, Flo and their three children could spend fourteen days at a Kampgrounds of America site, much less soaking up rays on Maui. He concluded by saying he thought they’d probably go to Santa Cruz for the weekend, maybe the Russian River, spend the rest of his vacation painting the apartment. “If we can afford the paint.”

  “Things a little tight?”

  Glitsky chewed the ice from his tea. “Things were a little tight before my voluntary five percent pay cut.”

  “You got that?”

  “Everybody who makes over fifty grand. And now, after a mere nineteen years on the force, when I have finally graduated to that lofty height, they whack me for getting there.”

  Abe swirled his glass in its condensation on the table, stared at the window. “Just the other day I was saying to Flo—‘Hey, hon, why don’t I volunteer to work two hours free every week next year?’ She thought it was a great idea since we don’t need any money to live anyway.” He drank some tea. “You know what I did? I went in to Frank”—this was Frank Batiste, Glitsky’s lieutenant—“and asked him for a $2,001 pay cut, save the city some money.”

  “And what’d Frank say?”

  “He said he wouldn’t—it wouldn’t look cooperative. I tell him I’m making $52,000—take away the five percent, I’m down to $49,400. My two grand and a buck idea puts me at $49,999. All things considered, I’d rather have the extra $500.”

  “I would have done it.”

  Glitsky shook his head. “No, you wouldn’t. You know why? Because the difference is fifty bucks a month, which after taxes is maybe thirty-five—call it two burgers a week. And for that you get a rep for being difficult. After nineteen years! And guess what happens to difficult guys? Here’s a hint, eighty-five didn’t get to take their voluntary cut—they got pinked.”

  “Eighty-five?” The number was higher than Hardy would have thought. How could the city lay off cops? This was almost five percent of the force. “Eighty-five?”

  “Sure. What do we need cops for?”

  “Or health workers.” Hardy mentioned the picket lines at the Mission Hills Clinic.

  “But guess what? The mayor’s still got his driver. You wouldn’t want the mayor driving his own car around, would you? What would people say? How would it look?”

  Hardy drank some beer. “Well, at least he’s got his priorities straight. If it were me, I’d definitely do the same thing—lay off the police and keep my driver.”

  “I’m going to look into setting up my own security business,” Glitsky said. His eye caught something behind Hardy. “And here comes my first recruit.”

  Terrell slid in beside him, across from Hardy. “First recruit for what?”

  “Glitsky Home Security. Armed response in minutes.”

  Terrell took a pull from one of the bottles of Bud he’d brought over. “We get to shoot people, no Miranda? Catch ’em and put ’em down?”

  “Yep. And get paid for it.”

  Terrell was bobbing his head. “I like it. I’m in.” He had another swig, focused on Hardy. “Your partner might be famous, but whew!”

  “That’s why he’s famous—he’s that way.” He looked at Glitsky. “Freeman.”

  “What way?” Glitsky asked.

  “What way?” Hardy repeated mildly to Terrell. “You can speak freely to Inspector Glitsky.”

  “I got an item bagged that might or might not be evidence and the guy goes ballistic on me. I tell him he can use it or not. Hey, I had a theory that might have worked—so? It didn’t, big deal.”

  Lou’s was getting crowded, louder. Hardy elbowed his way to the bar and bought another round. When he returned, Terrell was in the middle of something that sounded familiar.

  “ . . . the Crane thing was at least worth looking into, but it turned out to be nothing, too.”

  “What did?” Hardy slid in, passed the round—two more bottles for Terrell, another iced tea for Glitsky.

  “I was just telling Glitsky about that other thing, the guy in LA you called from the Witt house.”

  “Crane. The guy who was murdered.”

  “Yeah, Crane. Just talking about how theories sometimes pay off, sometimes not.”

  “Most times not.” No argument, just stating a fact, Abe was already chewing the
ice in his fresh drink.

  It drove Hardy crazy, but he preferred not to change the subject if Terrell had discovered a link with Simpson Crane and was going to talk about it. But he couldn’t resist the urge to get in a dig. “Why’d you follow that up? You’ve already got yourself a suspect.”

  Terrell didn’t take any offense. Instead, he smiled disarmingly. “Hey, I love my work. You called it—it was one of those coincidences. You check it out, what do you lose? You can’t tie up a murder too tight, am I right or not?”

  On this everyone was in accord. Hardy sipped his beer, taking his time, not wanting to betray any particular interest. “So what’d you find?”

  “Pretty much what you told me. No connection to Witt.”

  “Well, there must have been some—the number was stuck on his desk.”

  “I mean, sure, yeah, that. But I’m talking the actual hit, they know who did it, or think they do.”

  “So who?”

  “Some local muscle down in LA.” Terrell was into his story, a bottle of beer in each hand, from which he drank alternately and steadily. “This guy Crane was the premier union buster of the nineties—cleared like a half a mil a year making sure all the little people kept getting fucked. They try to organize—he gets ’em fired, figures out a way to make it stick. Time to renegotiate, he’s got everybody scared they’re going to lose their jobs, so they cave. They say the President wanted him for Secretary of Labor but couldn’t pay him enough.”

  “He work for San Francisco?” Glitsky asked, joking. “I think they must be using somebody like him.”

  Terrell shook his head. “Well, nobody’s using him, that’s for sure.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, he’d already killed a couple of unions—meat packers, janitors, like that—small-time stuff, and then he thought he’d take on the machinists.”

  “And somebody important didn’t like it.”

  “That’s the theory.” Terrell held up his empty beer bottles. “Are these things twelve ounces?” He started to get up. “Anyway, they did it right—hired some pro, no paper trail, no indictment. My round this time.”