But Freeman barely rose to answer the question. “No challenges, Your Honor.”
Fowler paused a minute, his face darkening. “Mr. Freeman?”
Freeman was still fiddling with his binders, laying out papers, whispering to May. “I said no challenge, Your Honor.”
The judge seemed to be moving things around behind the rim of his desk. He leaned back in the high chair, arms straight out before him. His frown was pronounced. The instant passed. “Would defense counsel approach the bench, please?”
Hardy became aware of a growing stillness in the courtroom as Freeman pushed his chair back, patted May on the shoulder and stepped up before the judge. Fowler leaned over and there was the briefest of whispered exchanges, after which he straightened up, hit his gavel and announced a recess. He would see Mr. Freeman in his chambers.
“What the hell is going on?” Pullios asked Hardy.
“I don’t have a clue. Maybe they’re trading stock tips again.”
Jim Blanchard from the Tribune came up and touched Elliot on the shoulder. “You got a call upstairs. Some girl.”
Jeff had been trying to get Hardy’s attention since the recess was called. He knew there was an element of cheating in it but he had to get caught up, since he hadn’t given five minutes of thought to anything but Dorothy Burgess since Thursday night. He thought he would use Hardy to catch up, grab back the inside track he seemed to have lost to both the local and national media over the long weekend.
And now it looked as though something between Freeman and Fowler was happening right here at the outset. He wanted to be here when the judge returned to court, see if an explanation would present itself.
But Dorothy—it had to be Dorothy—was the priority. There would be other stories. He would not have traded the last four days for anything—not for his job, not even for the use of his legs.
Hardy and Pullios appeared to be in some kind of argument. He wasn’t going to get anything out of them, so he grabbed his crutches and awkwardly crabwalked out of his row in the gallery, then out the doors.
In the reporters’ room he picked up the telephone. “This is Jeff Elliot,” he said.
“Mr. Elliot,” she said. “This is Ivana Trump. You’ve got to stop pestering me.” Jeff lowered himself into the school desk. Dorothy’s voice got lower. “Jeff, you’ve got to get over here. You’re not going to believe what I found.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure what it means, but Maury’s been out all morning and I finally got to typing up the paperwork on that story you were working on, the May Shintaka bail?”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve got to come see this, the collateral on the bail loan. You said you needed a paper trail, someplace to start. This looks like the trailhead. But you realize you’re going to have to pay for this information.”
“Of course.”
“It won’t be cheap.”
He smiled, remembering the bartering system they’d developed over the weekend to pry secrets from each other—secrets they couldn’t wait to tell. “I’ll be ready,” he said.
Andy Fowler sat back down, banged his gavel, and continued the trial until September 14, at nine-thirty.
“Your Honor!” Pullios was up.
“Counsel?”
“Permission to approach the bench?”
The judge nodded and motioned her forward. She walked firmly, with none of her usual sway. “What is it, Elizabeth?”
“Your Honor, with respect, the state would be interested in the substance of your conference with defense counsel.”
Fowler, gravitas intact, glared down from his elevated position. There was no love lost between these two. “With respect, Counsel, what I do in my chambers is none of your business. But—” He leaned forward with his hands folded in front of him—“but you’re right, we must avoid even the appearance of impropriety. You think defense counsel and I are colluding?”
“No, of course not, Your Honor, I—”
“But you think it may look like that to others. I appreciate your concern. Do you read the newspapers, Elizabeth? Watch television?”
Pullios stared at him. “Yes, Your Honor, occasionally.”
“You might have noticed that this Owen Nash murder has attracted more than a modicum of publicity.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Well, in keeping up with this story over the past week or so, it occurred to me that a fair trial might be hard to obtain in San Francisco. I was quite certain defense counsel would move for a change of venue. And, as you’ve no doubt noticed, Mr. Freeman made no such motion. I wanted to make it clear to him that this strategic decision—if it backfires—could not be used later on as grounds for a mistrial. How’s that?”
“That’s very fine, Your Honor, thank you. No disrespect intended.”
Fowler allowed himself a chilly smile. “Of course not, Counsel. An honest question.”
After Fowler left the bench Pullios stomped out of the courtroom, leaving Hardy to gather their papers and eventually follow along. Freeman came over to the prosecution table and told Hardy he hoped there were no hard feelings about their initial meeting in the visitors’ room at the jail.
“None at all.”
“You know, if you wouldn’t mind a little free advice, I wouldn’t recommend using my client’s little slip about being on the Eloise. She really wasn’t there.”
Hardy smiled. “That seems debatable, doesn’t it?”
Freeman had his hands in his pockets, his leg thrown casually over the corner of Hardy’s table. “I’ve listened to the tape several times. The way you phrased it, it will come out as a trick question. It will only cast the prosecution in a poor light, make the playing field uneven.”
“Well, we wouldn’t want that.” Hardy finished picking up the papers, closed the briefcase. “Thanks for the tip,” he said. “I’ll pass it along.”
Hardy was beginning to get used to it. These trial attorneys played a no-limit game and didn’t go about it according to Hoyle. How could Freeman get the balls to offer such advice? Did he think he was so green he’d be taken in by so transparent a bluff?
But the more Hardy thought about that, the more it made no sense at all. So maybe it wasn’t a bluff, it was a double reverse. Which made it a very effective bluff, if it was one.
Slick, he thought, walking along the hall back to his office. You had to admire it.
What did Freeman really want? He wanted to win. In a circumstantial case like this, if he could cause the prosecution to have doubts about bringing up any evidence whatever, it could only help the defense. On the other hand, on the surface his advice was sound—Hardy hadn’t planned to bring up May’s slip of the tongue, which had seemed to imply she’d been on board the Eloise—because not only was it in itself unconvincing, Hardy didn’t want to introduce into the record his impropriety in visiting May in jail without her attorney present.
But now Freeman had told Hardy it wouldn’t be a good idea to bring it up. Certainly Freeman wasn’t actually trying to be a nice guy, help out the new kid. But his advice was something Hardy had intended to do anyway.
Which meant—what?
“So why are we continuing until tomorrow? What’s the point of that?”
It had been less than five minutes since Pullios left the courtroom and now she sat in her office, door closed. Hardy, entering, had been shocked to see tears in her eyes. He started to tell her it was all right, he didn’t mean . . .
She stopped him and pointed to her eyes with both index fingers. “This is anger, Hardy. Don’t confuse this with having my feelings hurt. That bastard.”
Hardy had thought he’d discuss Freeman and strategy, but that clearly wasn’t going to be on the agenda. “He’s probably continuing it so he can read the file. He just found out he had the case this morning,” Hardy said.
“There’s no excuse for that tone.”
Hardy put her briefcase on the desk and sat down across from her. “Mayb
e he resented having his own motives questioned?”
She didn’t buy that. “You wouldn’t have asked him?”
“I don’t know. I was curious, sure.”
“When you’re curious, ask. It’s one of the rules.”
“I didn’t think there were any rules.”
She looked straight at him. Her eyes still glittered. “There aren’t,” she said.
31
It had turned into this.
Owen Nash stood on a balcony twenty-three floors above Las Vegas, his skin still damp from his shower. A towel was tucked under his protruding stomach, a fresh cigar remained unlit in his mouth. He liked the desert, especially now at twilight. It was still hot and dry after the scorching day, but the water evaporating from his skin kept him cool.
He fixed his eyes beyond the city. The mountains on the horizon had turned a faint purple. From far below, street noises carried up to him softly. More immediately, he heard May turn the shower off in the bathroom. He leaned heavily, with both hands, on the railing.
Sucking reflectively on the cigar, he felt rather than heard the soft tread of her bare feet crossing the rug behind him. After a moment, he felt her behind him, her hands massaging his bare back. He sighed again, started to say something, but May hushed him. She opened her kimono and pressed herself against him, then she led him silently back into the room and pushed him onto the bed.
“Lie down,” she ordered. “You’re getting a back rub.”
She started kneading his shoulders. The muscles were knotted tightly, but May was in no hurry. She knew what she was doing. Gradually, the stiffness began to work itself out. He began breathing deeply, regularly. For a moment she thought he might have fallen asleep, but then he groaned quietly as she moved to a new knot.
Outside, the twilight had deepened. May stretched out on top of him, ran her hand up along his side. “Pretty tense, you know that?”
He nodded.
“You want to talk about it?”
He didn’t answer immediately, just lay with his eyes closed, breathing heavily. “We’ve got dinner,” he said. It was to be their first public appearance together. He thought it was important to her.
May didn’t push. She lay quietly in the growing dark.
“I’ll decide in a minute,” he said.
Even in the dimness, May could make out the lines in his face. His high and broad forehead showed a lifetime of living. His thin lips were tight. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice strangely flat. “I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I think things may be getting a little out of hand.”
May stiffened—she’d been trying to let herself believe that she’d never heard this kind of thing from him. “With us?”
He laughed, pulling her tight against him. “Shinn, please. Well, maybe it is us, but not the way you mean.”
“You tell me.”
“You know the bitch about life is you can’t do everything. You take one road and it means you can’t take another. And either way, you’re going to miss something.”
“Are you afraid of missing something?”
He laughed dryly. “I’m afraid of missing anything. I never felt I had to. I never made any commitment that way. It just wasn’t in my life. Now I’m thinking about it. It scares the shit out of me. I keep thinking you’re going to find out.”
“Find out what?”
“What I am. What I’ve been.”
She pressed herself long against him. “Haven’t we been through that. What do you think I’ve been?”
“I don’t care what you’ve been, Shinn.”
“I don’t care what you’ve been, Nash. Are you worried about those other roads, what you’re going to miss?”
“Not so much. It’s making the change.”
“Nobody’s forcing you.”
“You’re wrong, Shinn. You’re forcing me. But it’s okay. It’s what I want. It’s the only thing I want anymore.”
She tried to believe him.
Freeman chewed on a pencil, looking out the sliding glass doors to the little courtyard, enclosed on the other three sides by the bricks of the surrounding buildings. A pigeon pecked on the cobbles.
May was sitting next to him at the marble table in the conference room. There was a fresh spray of flowers in the center of the table. The room smelled faintly like a walk-in humidor. “Did you ever go out?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that night. You said it was supposed to be your first public appearance. I just wondered how it went.”
She seemed to gather inside herself, as she’d done before. Freeman wasn’t sure he’d call it a visible withdrawal,but it was somehow palpable. He would have to try to define it better, get her trained not to do it, whatever it was, in front of a jury. “No,” she said finally. “No, we never met any of his friends.”
She raised her eyes, seeing how he took that. Perhaps emboldened, she added, “He . . . we never needed to, we were enough for each other.”
Hardy reached a hand out over his desk. “Those the phone things?”
Glitsky held what looked like a small booklet of yellow paper. He passed it across the desk. “I think some clerk got carried away. I just asked for June twentieth. I think they gave us the whole year.”
“Well, how’s the twentieth look?”
“Good. For us. Not so good for Shintaka.”
Hardy intended to merely glance at the printout—he had his binder open, ready to put it in. Given it was half a year, there weren’t all that many calls, maybe fifteen pages, each of them five inches long. He began flipping through quickly. “Look at this,” he said.
Glitsky nodded. “I noticed. No calls to Japan.”
Hardy looked up. Glitsky, he knew, rarely missed a trick. “You’re no fun, you know that.”
If May did business in Japan, it made sense she would at least occasionally need to call there, especially if she were planning a trip. Even if she did most of her work by fax, Hardy thought he could reasonably expect one or two calls. “Well, it can’t hurt. You check any of these?” Hardy was scanning the pages, turning them backward, now on March.
“No, I checked the twentieth. I just happened to notice Japan. You want, I can assign a guy.”
“No, I’ll . . .” Suddenly Hardy’s eyes narrowed. He stopped flipping.
“What?” Glitsky asked.
“Nothing.” He closed the pages and put them on his desk. “I just remembered I’ve got to pick up some stuff for the Beck.”
“You’re a good daddy.”
“I know. I amaze myself.” He tapped the pages, back to business. “I’ll go through this stuff. Thanks.”
Glitsky stood up. “Thank you. That is not my idea of a good time.”
Hardy kept it loose. “God, they say, is in the details.”
“Wise men still seek Him. Want me to get the door?”
“Please.”
He hoped he was wrong, but he didn’t think so.
Hardy wasn’t great at math, but he had a natural affinity for numbers, especially telephone numbers. He hadn’t called the number on the March listing recently, but as soon as he saw it, he knew that at one time he’d known it.
He grabbed the pages and looked back to the beginning. The number appeared in February, too, more frequently. Twice a week in January. Eighteen total calls.
Maybe the number had changed, but Hardy didn’t think so. He picked up the telephone on his desk and dialed the number. There were three rings.
“This is 885-6024. Please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you.”
Hardy’s mouth had gone dry. His left hand gripped the paperweight so tightly his knuckles were white. The paperweight!
He thought of Owen Nash’s jade ring, the distinctive filigree, the animal motif. Frannie’s early theory. For a second he couldn’t think of what to say. The tape hissed blankly in his ear. He forced himself to speak into the home answering machine of Superior
Court Judge Andrew B. Fowler.
“Andy,” Hardy said, “this is Dismas. We’ve got to talk. I’m going by your office now, but if I haven’t reached you by the time you get this, please call me immediately. It’s urgent. It’s extremely urgent.”
PART THREE
32
Casually as he could muster, Hardy put the paperweight into his pocket and walked out past the other suites in the D.A.’s office. Thinking “not now,” he saw Jeff Elliot coming out of the elevator and turned to duck into the criminal investigations room just outside the D.A.’s doors. He wasn’t quick enough, though. He heard his name called and stopped, caught, hands in his pockets.
For a reporter Jeff had a knack of seeming to be sensitive, even reasonable. Maybe, Hardy thought, it was the crutches, that and the grin. To say nothing of today’s puffiness, the indoor sunglasses. You wanted to help the guy.
“Bad time?”
Hardy nodded. “A little.”
“You go ahead then. I’ll talk to Ms. Pullios.”
There was a perverse satisfaction in Elizabeth now being the attorney of record. Naturally she would be a valuable source. But Hardy felt that, at the very least, he ought to have some control over the flow of information to the Chronicle. This wasn’t in the office hierarchy and he didn’t want to give her a freebie on what she most craved—ink. “I’ve got a minute, Jeff. What can I do for you?”
“Can we talk somewhere? I need to go off the record.”
They walked back into the D.A.’s hallway and Hardy unlocked one of the waiting rooms, provided for the families of victims, witnesses, the odd conference. There was a yellow couch—the city favored green and yellow— and matching armchair. A picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in a special limited edition of three and a half million livened up the wall space.
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