John Lescroart

by The Hearing

Lacey didn’t respond.

  Pratt took a breath and softened her tone. “And yet I notice you have rather loudly stayed silent, while your colleagues over at the Chronicle, particularly Jeff Elliot, have been having a great deal of fun at my expense.” She picked up the receiver, spoke in a still more measured tone. “I certainly don’t mean to tell you how to run your paper, Chad, but I was under the impression that you were in my camp. Have I offended you in some way? If I have, I’m sorry, but I’ve kind of been waiting for you to step up.”

  She heard his sigh over the line. “Well, we’ve had some problems, Sharron. I suppose I should have called you sooner.”

  “About what? What kind of problems?”

  The publisher paused. “Well, frankly, some of my reporters . . . as you know, Sharron, we haven’t been much in the death penalty camp here over the years.”

  “Well, neither have I, Chad. But this is a special case.”

  “I know it is, Sharron. I am on your side. The thing is, we’re having some trouble figuring out how it’s so special and then what kind of spin to put on it. I had to personally kill the first article I got on it. You know why? Because it sounded a lot like Jeff Elliot’s ‘CityTalk.’ ”

  “Who was it? Whoever it was, he works for you, doesn’t he? If he doesn’t write what you want, it seems like you’d have some leverage.”

  “It doesn’t matter, the individual. He’s a good reporter, he’s been on your side a lot. He doesn’t like this, that’s all.”

  Pratt pursed her lips, stripped off a piece of Scotch tape from the dispenser on her desk, began dabbing at imaginary spots on her skirt. “I’ve got an idea, Chad,” she said. “Why don’t we do an exclusive interview, you and me, one on one. The spin is that while in general the death penalty is the wrong penalty, it is the only remedy for a hate crime such as this one. This was a hate crime, make no mistake. And I believe, Chad, that a hate crime like this calls for blood vengeance.”

  She could almost swear she heard him thinking about it. “That might play,” he said at last.

  “Damn straight,” she replied. “The two of us, we can make it play. It has to play.”

  Treya was supposed to start on Mr. Jackman’s project—the Grayson matter—on Monday morning, but the firm had been excused to attend Elaine’s memorial. In the aftermath of Glitsky’s collapse, she had been unable to make herself come in for the rest of the day. She knew that under other circumstances, this would have been inexcusable. She herself would not have condoned it. And to make matters worse, the time she’d spent at home had been wholly unproductive. Now it was Wednesday afternoon.

  Mr. Jackman, at least, seemed to understand, but she felt awful about it. Yesterday she did come in, but she worked only about six hours, all of it on Grayson. Mr. Jackman had been right, it was about the most tedious number crunching she had ever experienced. After her sleepless Monday night, she had made almost no headway and finally she realized that if she was going to call on Lieutenant Glitsky at the hospital that night—which after her behavior seemed a sacred duty—she would need some rest first. So she’d signed out early again.

  She’d come in this morning with a new resolve, went directly to the abandoned associates’ room that was her work space for the new project—seventy-four cardboard boxes filled with data stacked along the walls, in the bookcases, everywhere—and began where she’d left off the night before—on the third manila folder in the first box.

  And could not do it.

  In four and a half hours, she estimated that she’d done twenty minutes of useful work. At twelve-thirty, she checked her watch, looked at the pages spread out before her, and got out from behind the desk.

  His secretary was at lunch, the gatekeeper’s desk deserted. His door was open a crack. She heard him talking on the telephone. The conversation wound to a close and she knocked on the door and pushed it open slightly further.

  “Mr. Jackman? Excuse me? Can I bother you a minute?”

  He looked up, surprised. His hand was still on the phone and now he stopped, placing the receiver back into its cradle. “Ms. Ghent? What can I do for you? How’s Grayson coming along?”

  She steeled herself and told him the truth—that it wasn’t the project, it was her. She was wasting the firm’s time these past few days, and after he’d been so kind to her . . .

  He stopped her. “What’s really bothering you?” he asked.

  She drew a long breath and stared across at him. “That I can’t seem to get focused on anything. Except Elaine.” The rest of it—Glitsky and her feelings there—was too nebulous to mention. She pressed on. “The talk you and I had last week about her enemies, that you knew about some of them.” She paused, looked down at her hands, back up at him, told him she’d gone to visit Glitsky at the hospital. “I felt like I’d made it happen somehow.”

  “What? His heart attack?”

  A nod. “It sounds ridiculous, I know.” She shrugged. “I just felt I had to make sure he was all right.”

  “And was he?”

  “He seemed fine.” Wonderful, in fact, but she merely nodded again. “But he’s still worried about the case.”

  Jackman’s face grew grave. “Did he say why? Or give any reason?”

  She thought of what he’d said—it was as though Elaine were finally talking to him—and knew there would be no way to communicate that. “Nothing specifically, but the reason is all wrapped up around Cole’s confession—he thinks it’s internally inconsistent, maybe inadmissible.”

  “To the point that it’s completely invalid? Not just inadmissible but untrue?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  He cocked his head, intent. “But what do you think, Treya?”

  She hadn’t worked it through completely yet, although she found it compelling that a veteran cop like Glitsky would believe it enough to get laid off over it. “I think it’s a gap worth closing.”

  “And that isn’t happening with the police? With Glitsky?”

  Treya still resisted giving it up. Glitsky’s position as a lieutenant of homicide was the font of his power and she found herself reluctant to undercut that. So she temporized. “Well, you know. They’ve got a suspect in custody who’s been charged with the crime . . .” She left the conclusion unstated. “The point is, he’s doing it on his own.”

  “Eliminating any other possible suspect but Burgess?” Jackman rocked in the chair behind his desk.

  “Yes.” She hesitated, leaned forward. “Which brings me to what I wanted to say.”

  He waited.

  “I’m probably the best source of what Elaine may have been working on.”

  “And this means?”

  “I think I could be valuable to an investigation, if the lieutenant’s interested.”

  Jackman drew in a lungful of air. “Interested in what, precisely?” he asked carefully.

  “If you’ll forgive me speaking up, sir, Elaine was one of this firm’s premier assets. It seems to me that it’s in the firm’s best interests to make sure that her murderer doesn’t get off.”

  “The firm’s best interests,” he said dubiously. “In what way?”

  “Cole Burgess took something from you, sir. The lieutenant doesn’t want him getting away with it, and I don’t believe you would stand for it, either.”

  She knew that she’d hit the right chord. Someone had stolen from him, from everything he’d built up from scratch, and nobody was going to get away with that. For a moment, her boss’s eyes were alight with intensity, and she realized that it had become personal now—somehow she’d made him see that. “You do what you have to do,” he said finally. “Bill it to admin.”

  She stood up. Her employer, too, got out of his chair and came around the desk. Now he stood perhaps a foot in front of her. She looked up into his face. “What bothers me,” she said evenly, “is that I didn’t even know she had enemies. I know we confided in one another. I think she would have told me.”

  Jackm
an drew back half a step. He folded his arms and stared out at something beyond her right shoulder. “Maybe enemies is too harsh,” he said. “More like competitors. She was strong-willed, vibrant. She wanted her way and got it. People were jealous of her, thought her aloof and arrogant. That she was unaware of that reaction—maybe even of the people themselves having it—only made it worse. Perhaps you’ve experienced some of the same thing yourself? Even here at the firm?”

  And, of course, he was right. She acknowledged the truth of it with a small smile.

  “I know she could rub people the wrong way, so in that sense, yes, she had enemies.” Jackman’s face suddenly set itself in ice. “I was one of them.”

  24

  It was closing in on dusk, and Ridley Banks was back at the same crime scene to which he’d been summoned just after dawn.

  He’d had a busy day, putting a greater concentration of investigative fieldwork into the past ten hours than he normally would get to in a month. The results were mixed, as they almost always were in homicides anyway. But they were also, in his opinion, provocative in the extreme.

  The victim had been found dead in room 412 of the Excelsior Hotel at Sixteenth and Mission. In spite of its name, the Excelsior is not a hotel in the usual meaning of the word. Rather, its clientele rent rooms by the week or the month, and these tended to be casually bartered by its inhabitants mostly for drugs, but also for sex, booze, clothes, money.

  There was no current guest registered to the room containing the body of Cullen Leon Alsop. The door had not been locked when he’d been found. Still, the homicide team upon its arrival had little trouble identifying him—his wallet bulged in the back pocket of his jeans, which he was still wearing. He also had his jail release and OR papers on him, stuffed into the front pockets. So it was Cullen, all right, and Ridley’s name was on one of the sheets, so he got looped into the call.

  The inspector spent a few hours at the scene, asking questions of the crime scene investigation unit. He then decided it would be instructive to wait for John Strout’s arrival. He wanted to talk to the coroner before things moved too far along. Because while people died quite often from heroin overdoses in the city—especially in this neighborhood—there was too much coincidence in this case for Ridley’s liking.

  The sergeant with the CSI team was of the opinion that somebody else had been with Cullen and then, not too surprisingly when he realized what was happening, fled. He was surprised, though, that he’d left the Baggie with a reasonable amount of white powder still in it on the small table next to the bed. This stuff was far more valuable than gold to any addict—it was unprecedented in the CSI sergeant’s experience that this much would be left behind, regardless of what had occurred in the room. Cullen also had six hundred and fifty-four dollars in cash, a couple of joints and a matchbook from a bar called Jupiter jammed into his other front pants pocket.

  When Strout came, he was his cautious, but helpful, self. After he’d examined and autopsied the body and all forensic evidence relevant to it, the coroner would eventually release his opinion on the official cause of death. Before that, Strout wasn’t going to be hurried, nor was he inclined to make any official pronouncement before he had time to analyze all of his facts. But there were a few informal opinions he could share with an inspector of homicide to guide him in his investigation.

  The first was that the residue left in the bag appeared to be an unusually pure form of heroin, possibly almost uncut China White. Strout told Banks that if this was a representative sample of the latest stuff to hit the street, they could expect half a dozen overdoses, maybe more, in the next couple of days. Neither Strout nor the CSI team could see any sign of struggle, and that, combined with the probable cause of death, suggested to Strout that this was most likely an overdose situation. An accidental suicide, not a homicide.

  Banks couldn’t shake the feeling that in this the coroner was mistaken.

  Over the next two hours, he talked to everyone who’d been in the building and who hadn’t managed to escape before the word got out that the police were on hand. Of the twenty-seven people he interviewed, fourteen admitted to knowing Cullen at least by sight, but none of them had seen him come into the building. None admitted to knowing he’d been there last night.

  The “manager” was a toothless mid-fifties gnome in a lime green bathrobe and combat boots. He had no idea how that poor boy had gotten into the room. It was vacant. See? He still had the key! Far more concerned with getting reimbursed by the city for the room’s rent during the time the police kept it closed off as a crime scene than he was with the death, the manager had not seen or heard anything unusual in the past couple of days. Of course, he would have said the same thing if he had personally witnessed the Second Coming.

  In the next four hours, Ridley had first called his old mentor Glitsky in the hospital. After that, cursing himself for everything he was and everything he’d done in the past ten days, he’d gone back to the beginning, and remembered the matchbook from Jupiter. Armed with a mug shot, he got to the bar at around two-thirty, and five people, including the bartender, a lawyer, a private investigator and two random daytime drinkers recognized Cullen’s face. Yes, he’d been there, had a few drinks, seemed impatient, but didn’t cause any trouble.

  Ridley was glad to run into some cooperative witnesses. The five of them had been helpful, sitting in a circle around him at the bar trying to help him connect the dots. The lawyer and the private eye—Logan and Visser—were sure that they had left the bar before the victim had, so they couldn’t vouch for when he left, but the other three witnesses came to an agreement that Cullen had left at a little after dark.

  Now Ridley was back where he’d begun, on the streets surrounding the Excelsior. He pulled his shirt out, untied his shoes and adopted a slouch. In a half hour, he’d made a friend who directed him to one of the neighborhood’s salesmen—Damien was parked in an alley a block and a half from the Excelsior, selling prewrapped, packaged, brand-name dime bags of heroin out of a shiny Buick Skylark.

  In another five minutes, whatever streetlights still worked in the city would come on. Ridley looked around to be sure nobody was watching. He reached under his jacket and pulled out his gun and badge and walked up to the car. “Lucky for you, dirtbag,” he said, “I’m in homicide. Get out real slow.”

  Backing up to let the door open, Ridley nearly had his own heart attack. To his right, at the back bumper of the Skylark, stood another bum—his face in the dim light vaguely familiar. He, too, had a gun in one hand. In the other, he held out a badge. He was smiling dangerously.

  Damien had one foot on the pavement when the other man sprang forward in one long step. Grabbing him by the collar, he dragged him the rest of the way out of the car and threw him to the ground.

  “Hey, man,” Damien whined. “My clothes, you know.”

  Both men kept their guns trained on him. “Damien, Damien, Damien,” the bum with the badge clucked sympathetically. “Some people are just never going to learn. Do you not have brains, is that the problem? Are they defective? Can’t you tell a cop yet after all this time? Haven’t you and I done this enough?” He shook his head dishearteningly. “I swear, it’s depressing.”

  He looked over at Ridley, still holding his badge up to avoid any misunderstanding. Then he went back to Damien, still on the ground. “This man here,” he said, indicating Ridley, “is Inspector Banks from homicide.” He flashed a smile, speaking over his own shoulder. “Jan Falk. Narcotics. I tried to get you coming out of Jupiter, but you were too fast. Sorry if I spooked you just now.”

  Ridley was coming back to earth, finally recognized Falk as one of the daytime drinkers from Jupiter. Undercover, and fooled him clean. “I’ll get over it.”

  “You guys going to kiss now or what?” Damien asked.

  Falk smiled at him again, put on a mincing voice. “If we want to, Damien. In fact, we’re going to do anything we want to, and I get the feeling Inspector Banks wants to ask you
some questions. Is that right, Inspector?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, you can ask my lawyer. I didn’t do no homicide.”

  Banks gave Damien a heartless little grin of his own. “I didn’t say you did now, did I?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Falk said. “I’m going to make a phone call now to some friends of mine and meanwhile let you fellows get to know each other a little better. How’s that sound, Inspector?”

  A half hour later, Damien was leaving the alley on his way downtown in the backseat of a squad car. Inspectors Banks and Falk waved good-bye, then went to lean against the bumper of the Skylark to wait for the police tow truck to come and impound the vehicle. By now, they were laughing about it.

  “You were damn lucky I didn’t pop you where you stood,” Banks said.

  “I know. I realized that about a second too late. It just seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. I hate that little pecker. Haven’t seen him in a couple of years.”

  “How’d you know where I was going?”

  “You said Excelsior. Drug overdose. I guessed. I’m made here, so I don’t hang about much, but I saw you and thought it would be fun to stroll through the old neighborhood. And what do you know, we both run into Damien.”

  Ridley phrased it carefully, not wanting to step on a fellow officer’s toes. “He wasn’t very hard for me to find, you know.”

  “No, we figure it takes maybe a half hour for a new guy, one of us, to make one of them. Then we leave ’em alone.”

  “But you just busted him.”

  “That was purely for fun, Inspector. We got twenty Damiens in this square mile. If you hadn’t connected with him, I wouldn’t have done a thing. They’re just literally holding the bags, not worth the trouble. Their only value is maybe leading us to their source, and even at that next level . . .” He shrugged. It was terrible, but it was reality. Every policeman knew that arresting the intermediaries in the drug trade was at best a stopgap measure, a nuisance for all concerned. Between Damien and his ultimate supplier (whom Damien would never meet, or know, or possibly even hear of), there were probably six to ten layers of intermediaries, each taking their money, most cutting the product. “Anyway, you wanted something from him. I thought I might put him more in the mood to be cooperative. You find what you wanted?”