The 13th Juror dh-4

by John Lescroart

  "And then," Freeman was continuing, "I come in to check on the progress made by my hand-chosen ace investigator and he is throwing darts. Am I the only one that feels some pressure here? I think that's a fair question. Two months for a capital case. It's unheard of."

  It's been five months since the original arraignment."

  "So what? Who knew she was going to get found in Costa Rica? Does Thomasino think we were preparing for trial all that time? Whose side are you on, anyway?"

  "As always, I'm on the side of justice and truth, but it's not going to trial in two months. It's just beginning jury selection."

  Freeman, of course, knew this, but Jennifer's trial was going to begin more quickly than he wanted it to and there wasn't anything he could do about it. Hands jammed into his pockets, he stood near the window and studied buildings across the street. "I need a lever. Christ, Diz, I need something."

  "Just this morning didn't I hear you tell some reporters that this thing was such a turkey it wouldn't even make it to trial?"

  "You could write a book on what I've told reporters. You'd be surprised."

  "I doubt it."

  "I've had it work. Some rookie Assistant DA reads in the papers that I've got this blockbuster secret evidence that'll blow the trial wide open and next day I'm down at the Hall pleading a manslaughter on what should have been a righteous Murder Two. But in this case…" He trailed off, shaking his head. "In this case, we've got Jennifer and Jennifer's weapon and Jennifer's presumed motives. We're very much going to need somebody else to point at."

  "The famous other dude." Hardy came around his desk and flipped through some pages of his yellow pad. "That's all I've been doing, David. The problem is, there hasn't been what you'd call a run on them. In the meantime, maybe it'll ease your mind to know I'm not just shooting darts to pass the time. I have an appointment on another matter. Actually the appointment was for about fifteen minutes ago, but Mr. Frankl is late."

  At the window, Freeman half-turned. "Who's Frankl?"

  "My DUI. Wants to go to trial."

  "The guy with the 1.6?" In California, a blood alcohol level of. 08 got you convicted for drunk driving. If that fact was undisputed you were guilty.

  Hardy nodded. "He says he's thought up a defense."

  "To a DUI? I'd like to hear it. It could make us rich."

  The telephone buzzed on Hardy's desk. "That's him now. I'll keep you informed."

  Freeman was at the door, going out, when Hardy picked it up. But it wasn't Mr. Frankl. It was Sam Bronkman from the Mission Hills Clinic and he had just remembered something personal regarding Larry Witt that Hardy might be interested in.

  *****

  Late in the day Hardy parked in the long shadow of the Mission Hills Clinic. The evening breeze whipped at his jacket as he got out of his car and prepared to cross the picket lines again. Same people, same building, same wind.

  There was no one in the darkened waiting room at OB-GYN, and the blinds behind the window at the reception area had been pulled. Hardy felt all his muscles go tight, almost turned to walk out, then made himself knock on the glass. He was here. Might as well make sure.

  There was a slit in the blinds and they blinked open. Sam smiled, waved, pointed at the door to the inner offices and closed the blinds down again. Hardy crossed the room.

  The door cracked and Sam's head appeared, a turtle poking out of its shell. Grabbing Hardy's arm, he pulled him through. "All clear," he said. "You wouldn't believe. We close at four-thirty. People come here at five, expect to waltz right in. Keep the desk open and you're here all night."

  Sam, chattering, led the way to an employee's lounge – plastic yellow chairs, white metal tables, vending machines, a microwave. It was an inside room with no windows, and it was empty. They sat at one of the tables.

  "I should have remembered when you were here last time, especially when you mentioned the personal stuff, but" – Sam snapped his fingers in the air – "the brain, sometimes it goes on hold. One minute you're there, the next" – the hands described a mushroom cloud – "woosh, nobody home."

  "That's all right, Sam. I really appreciate you calling, whenever you remembered, and you did remember something?"

  Sam nodded elaborately. "Over the weekend. Did you read that article about that senator who wouldn't let his daughter have the abortion? Well, anyway… I was at Jason's – he's my friend, Jason – and I was reading it and suddenly, it was like, I don't know, a vision or something, just" – again the hands fluttered – "whammo, there it was."

  Hardy smiled. "There what was, Sam?"

  "Dr. Witt. The same thing."

  "Dr. Witt had a daughter?"

  "No. No way." Sam reached over and slapped Hardy's arm. "No, listen, the personal thing, the connection, is this – there was this girl, Melissa Roman, whose parents told her she couldn't have an abortion, forbade it, you know." He rolled his eyes. "Smart, right? These people, I'll never understand…" A deep sigh. "Anyway, she tried one on herself – an abortion – and it didn't turn out so good."

  "What happened?"

  "What else?" The hands again, including the universe. "She winds up here. Dr. Witt's the pro with female plumbing and he's a volunteer. He calls for an ambulance right away. But before it even gets here she's dead."

  "The parents blamed Witt?"

  Sam nodded. "You got to. They're not going to blame themselves, right? So they need somebody and Melissa's already dead – kind of unfair to take it out on her, wouldn't you say? – so they pick Witt. They decide he's somehow responsible for the abortion that killed their daughter."

  The logic of that couldn't stand much scrutiny, but Hardy supposed it rang true for the bereaved Romans. Hardy was leaning forward now. "How'd they pick on him? When did all this happen?"

  Sam nodded, pleased with himself. "I looked that up today. It was right before Thanksgiving of last year."

  "Which was a month before Witt was killed."

  "Right."

  "What did they do? Threaten to sue him? What?"

  Sam's palms were up again, laying out the whole truth. "I don't know everything. I know Roman came down twice – we had to get security on the scene the second time. Then, right after that, Dr. Witt said he might just quit volunteering, it was too much. Somebody broke his car windows and he was sure it was Roman."

  "Did he report that?"

  "I don't know."

  This was something Hardy could legitimately bring up to Terrell, or even Glitsky. Here was a crime that happened to a murder victim within a month of his death.

  If Larry had reported it.

  "The other stuff," Sam was saying, "if Roman was suing him or the clinic, I don't know. I haven't heard about that, but I'll tell you something…"

  Hardy waited.

  "How about this? If you're planning to kill somebody, you don't also sue him, do you? Maybe that's why I never heard of anything. Otherwise, why wouldn't he just sue the clinic?"

  Interesting question.

  *****

  His house was empty when he got home and he felt the emptiness trying to settle on him, heavy and cold as the city's familiar fog.

  He had lived the better part of ten years alone in this house before he had gotten together with Frannie, and the associations weren't all good – he missed almost nothing from that lost decade. The house, back then, had been smaller (without the nursery), darker (without the skylights), colder. Just plain colder somehow.

  He would get hoem from bartending or a ball game and go to his office in the back, which was now Rebecca's pastel bedroom. He'd take a bottled Guinness from the refrigerator and sit at his desk in the light from his green banker's lamp and read, or shoot darts, or clean his (now unused) pipes, or whittle something. He'd light a coal fire in the grate.

  Everything he did he had done all by himself, even when he was with other people. He hadn't thought he was lonely. He wasn't lonely, he was just alone. And, he now knew, there was a difference.

  Frannie hadn'
t mentioned going out and he'd talked to her after he'd seen Jennifer in the morning. It was possible she'd gone to the market, although they'd just spent a domestic weekend, including a trip to the grocery store on Saturday.

  He didn't know where they were and, against any kind of sense, it worried him. On the drive home he'd been thinking about Jennifer and Larry and the Romans and the medical background sheet Lightner had – intentionally? – left for him to pick up.

  All those thoughts were now gone. He looked down and out the window in Vincent's room, wondering if, even with the July evening chill, they might be in the backyard. They weren't. He fed the tropical fish in his bedroom, looked at his watch, started to call the Shamrock and decided not, checked the time again. He didn't know. There was no note.

  He wasn't going to sit around waiting, letting the old emptiness fill him up. It was something he'd put behind him, and its sudden reappearance spooked him. Were the kids all right? Had Frannie run out quickly to the emergency room, not even having time to jot something on a pad? He walked from the kitchen to the front door down the hallway and back through the inside rooms, telling himself he wasn't looking for drops of blood on the floor.

  In his bedroom he shucked his suit and put on shorts, a sweatshirt, tennis shoes. He had a four-mile circle he ran from his house, out to the beach, across Golden Gate Park, along Lincoln back to the Shamrock at 9^th Avenue, then home. It took him about forty-five minutes.

  He looked at his watch. He'd be home by seven. He wrote a note and left it on the kitchen table under a salt shaker. At least Frannie would know where he'd gone.

  *****

  In the kitchen, Frannie greeted him with a kiss. She was stirring her white clam spaghetti sauce and humming. Rebecca was pouring water from a watering can, getting almost half of it into the different-sized pans she'd arranged on the floor. Vincent was in his baby seat next to her. The windows were steamed with the boiling water. The sun was still up. In his house there was nothing empty or spooky or sinister.

  Hardy went in to shower, berating himself for his paranoia, wondering how he got to be so old.

  22

  On Wednesday at a little after noon there was the sound of something being thrown, clattering against bars onto the floor in the jail behind where Jennifer sat on the bench in the visitor's area. Startled, Frannie nearly left her chair. Sitting back down, she forced a smile. "I hate that kind of noise. I always jump a mile."

  "It doesn't really bother me anymore. I guess I'm used to it." Jennifer looked down at her hands. "Larry used to throw things sometimes, so by the time I heard the noise it meant most of it was over."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know, the tension, waiting for him to blow up. It was almost a relief when it came."

  Frannie put her hand on the Plexiglas. Jennifer put hers up against it. It had developed between them, some kind of signal, a touch by proxy. This was their third meeting. The hands remained in place. Frannie stared at the hands, at her wedding ring. Her face paled.

  "Are you all right?" Jennifer asked.

  "I'm fine. Sometimes just…"

  "What?"

  "I'm sorry. Moment of weakness. It's nothing." Then smiled again, weakly. "I don't know what it is."

  "You look sad."

  Frannie nodded. "That's what it feels like. Like all at once things have sort of stopped" – she searched for the right word – "resonating, I'd say."

  "Maybe it's just the postpartums. They can go on six months, you know, sometimes longer. After Matt," she paused, surprised by the name, from out of nowhere. A deep breath, pushing on, " after Matt, first there was euphoria, then this black hole that didn't want to go away."

  Frannie shrugged. "Maybe. I don't know. I don't feel like it's that." She brought her hand back down to her lap. "I wanted to tell you – you know, my first husband was killed too?"

  Frannie then told Jennifer about it, about twenty-five-year-old Eddie Cochran – Frannie's husband and Hardy's friend. Hardy had helped expose the murderer, and five months later they – Hardy and Frannie – had gotten involved, married.

  Frannie told her about some bad moments since they'd gotten together. Guilt perhaps. Timing questions. But this, Frannie's sadness, seemed to strike a deeper chord somehow.

  "Everything's been so kind of rushed, you know?"

  Jennifer listened, rapt, her eyes glistening. Another woman had problems, had sadnesses. It was some comfort to know she wasn't so alone.

  "It's just first there was Eddie, then Dismas and me. Then all of a sudden I'm married again and Rebecca is being born. Next, before I've really given any thought to those changes, I'm pregnant again and having Vincent. And now… now I've stopped for a minute and I look back and it's like I've been running like a crazy person, as though I'm maybe running from something. Does this make any sense?"

  Jennifer nodded. "Yes. Sometimes I think the trick is to just keep running so you don't have to stop and think about it. Once you stop, then…"

  Taking a long moment, Frannie leaned forward, her elbows on the table. "Today I was sitting rocking, feeding Vincent, and all at once I'm crying. Really sobbing. Now why would that come over me when I look at my life and I'm fine? I'm happy day to day, Dismas and I are good. I love the kids. I don't get it."

  "You miss your first husband, Eddie?"

  "A little. But I'm used to him being gone. I know he's not coming back. It's not that. It's more that I haven't sorted things. Haven't even thought about it, and here I am in a marriage with two kids and this is my life and sometimes I don't even know how I got here."

  Jennifer scratched at the pitted counter on her side of the glass. "Talk about not knowing how you got somewhere."

  Frannie forced a smile. "Look at me, talking to you here. I've got no business doing any complaining, seeing where you are."

  "It’s okay," Jennifer said. "It's okay. I won't be here forever. Either way – at least I'm out of this place."

  "I don't know how you're handling it."

  Jennifer took a minute, swallowed, then forced her own smile. "It isn't like I've got much choice… He treats you right, does he? He doesn't hurt you?"

  The segue here was unclear. "Who?"

  "Your husband."

  "Dismas?" Frannie shifted her weight on the hard wooden chair. "No, I mean, yes, he treats me very right. He'd never hurt me. He loves me."

  Jennifer gave her a look that seemed to ask what that had to do with it. But she said, "Did Eddie?"

  "Hurt me? No, never."

  Jennifer leaned back in the chair, ran both hands through her cropped hair. "It must be me," she said. "I've always believed it was me."

  "What was you? What?"

  Jennifer sat forward now, hunched. Slowly she lifted her hand and placed it against the glass. Frannie brought up hers, almost imagining she could feel the heat from Jennifer's skin. "Why they always hit me."

  *****

  On the third floor, Dean Powell was listening to another Assistant DA analyze the merits of an aggravated assault.

  The people who worked at the Hall of Justice spoke in a kind of code. San Francisco had a well-deserved reputation as the most politically correct of cities, and you could get yourself fired or worse if you labored for the City and inadvertently happened to use a word that had not been officially sanctioned – or had been officially proscribed – by some group or other.

  The members of the police department and the District Attorney's office were among the most sensitive to irregularities in this area, and so had developed the most sophisticated code for use among themselves. Visitors could spend half a day in the Hall, people chatting all around, and be a hundred-and-eighty degrees off on what they thought they had heard.

  Dean Powell, running for State Attorney General, still had to function as a prosecutor, and especially between now and November he was careful not to use too much of the code himself. Nevertheless, he didn't need a translator.

  "If you ask me," Tony Feeney was telling him
, "we got a stone BDI here. Professional women, some dispute over funding. Both of them Canadians. In my opinion, she'll go sideways like she has the three other times."

  Feeney was another Assistant District Attorney, in Powell's office getting the more experienced man's take on whether he should even bother charging Mr. Duncan J. Dunlap for aggravated assault on his live-in girlfriend Byna Lewes – a "professional woman."

  BDI was the code for a case in which the defendant believed and usually loudly proclaimed to police that the woman he had just savagely beaten or killed had brought the attack on herself. BDI stood for Bitch Deserved It. In this case Dunlap thought Lewes was holding out on him and might be about to choose another pimp. Feeney thought Lewes would "go sideways," which meant she'd refuse to testify or, even better, change her testimony on the stand. And, by the way, both parties were African-Americans, called "Canadians" by members of law enforcement to avoid offending anyone in earshot.

  Byna Lewes had promised to testify against Mr. Dunlap on the three previous occasions when he'd beaten her, and each time she had relented, saying he was truly sorry (this time) and he really loved her. He just needed some help. Maybe the City could help pay for his counseling.

  Powell crossed his hands behind his head. "You ever wonder why we keep doing this?"

  Feeney had no response. He sat across from Powell, hoping he'd be remembered if Powell got lucky and took up residence in Sacramento.

  "How badly was she hurt?" Feeney opened the folder, starting to take out the pictures. But Powell held out a hand, palm up. "Just describe it, Tony. How bad?"

  The Polaroids had been taken by the arresting officer in Byna's hospital room shortly after the attack, before she'd been bandaged. Her left eye was swollen shut, her nose looked broken, there was blood in her hair and over her ear. Feeney went to the police report and saw she'd also had her arm dislocated. "Not bad," he said, about average.