The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  Galt’s apartment was just inside the front door to the building on the ground floor, and he decided it was a safer place to keep his Harley than the garage. Though he ostensibly, and sporadically, worked as a bouncer, he once boasted to McNeil that he really got his money for gas, rent and beer (his only necessities) selling or brokering crank and dope deals to other bikers.

  The man himself was a giant—a vulgar, terrifying Neanderthal with an enormous gut, a voluminous, unkempt beard and a shaved head. He dressed perennially in black—T-shirts and leathers, boots and chains. If he bathed at all . . . but no, he couldn’t have and smelled the way he did.

  The only problem McNeil had with turnover in his building were the units adjacent to Galt’s—over the years, the average tenancy in these units—despite the great location, the cooperative landlord, the reasonable rents—was ten months.

  Finally, one happy day eighteen months ago, Galt had suddenly disappeared. McNeil didn’t receive his rent check by the tenth of the month, which was the statutory grace period. He immediately served written notice and filed to evict. Under normal conditions, in San Francisco McNeil would have had to wait six months or more before any action would be taken on the filing, but the unprecedented support of every other tenant in the building—all of whom personally showed up for the hearing—convinced the judge that this was an extraordinary situation, and he ruled in McNeil’s favor.

  When he opened the door to the apartment, even McNeil—who’d expected the worst—wasn’t prepared for the damage. The place was totaled. Eventually, it took a crew of four men forty-six days to restore the apartment to habitability. The removal of debris alone was a weeklong process. After that, it had to be cleaned, deodorized, cleaned again. McNeil had had to install new hardwood floors and drywall, new lights and fixtures, all new kitchen appliances. Finally, after the new paint was dry, when the work was all done at a cost to McNeil of thirty-one thousand dollars and change, he put it on the market for twenty-four hundred dollars a month, and had eleven qualified renters the first day.

  Then Galt returned.

  He hassled McNeil for a few months, came to his house a few times, once with some biker friends, scared everybody, made a big stink, eventually went away. And Rich had thought the nightmare was over at last.

  But three weeks ago, after all this time, Galt had resurfaced, and in a guise beyond McNeil’s worst imaginings. According to the complaints, both civil and criminal, filed in the courts, Galt came home to shock and dismay that he had been put out of his castle.

  Contrary to his landlord’s sworn statements, he had not abandoned the property. As Mr. McNeil well knew, he’d had to leave with his Harley on an emergency road trip to Kentucky to care for his dying mother. Before he left town, he had paid McNeil twelve hundred dollars in cash for three months’ rent in case he had to be gone that long. Upset, worried about his mother’s health, in a hurry to be back at her side, he had not concerned himself about a receipt for the transaction—he was a man of his word, and assumed McNeil was as well. They’d had a relationship for years. It never occurred to him that either one of them would cheat the other.

  He was stunned upon his return to find that Rich McNeil had stolen his money, taken away his home, disposed of all his treasures. After all, Galt had been a solid, rent-paying tenant—he had never, not once, missed a rent payment! And now he was ruined, with no place he could afford to live in the city he loved.

  McNeil had obviously been driven to this inhuman fraud by simple greed—after all, he stood to make, he was currently making, two thousand dollars more every month on Galt’s apartment alone. It was a horrible travesty.

  So Galt, through his attorney Dash Logan, was appealing the eviction ruling. He was also suing McNeil to get his apartment back at the old rent, to restore his lost property, to compensate him for mental anguish, the pain and suffering he’d endured, for his attorney’s fees and for punitive damages—to the tune of a million dollars.

  What made it worse for Hardy’s client, though—far worse—were the criminal charges.

  Like everything else in San Francisco, rent control was a political issue. And in her election campaign three years before, Sharron Pratt had made it clear that she hated slum landlords nearly as much as she loved the homeless. Her administration had pledged itself to protecting the rights of the poor, the unempowered, the disenfranchised masses. Besides which, renters in the city constituted a huge voting bloc.

  And here was a Russian Hill nabob pitted against an unsympathetic biker—it was the perfect opportunity to illustrate just how venal these landlords could be in their immoral pursuit of the almighty buck.

  Hardy knew McNeil well and considered his client pretty much a working stiff who’d put in thirty-five hard years behind desks in various management positions, eventually reaching the eminence of executive vice president of Terranew Industries, a biotech firm specializing in the ever-glamorous field of fertilizer products.

  But in Sharron Pratt’s opinion, Rich McNeil, by the very fact that he’d been successful and invested wisely, was of the landed class, the privileged class. Never mind that he’d earned it—that was irrelevant. And Manny Galt was low class. In fact, in the eyes of many, he was barely a citizen at all. This conflict boiled down to a class struggle. It was as simple as that.

  Traditionally, as Pratt knew (and if she forgot, Gabe Torrey reminded her), the Rich McNeils of the world got their way by being in the men’s club, by having the money to afford better lawyers, by buying elected officials to do their bidding and dirty work. Well, as Torrey had counseled her, she couldn’t let that happen on her watch, no siree. It wasn’t going to be business as usual in San Francisco, not while she was district attorney. That’s why she’d been elected, to shake up the status quo, to ring in a new age.

  She had to make the message crystal clear that her office saw through Rich McNeil’s transparent grab for more income, more money that he didn’t even need. Pratt had to be the people’s protector here, and this was her chance to show the traditional power structure that the old way wasn’t going to work. More than a landlord-tenant dispute, this had to be, by her lights, true white-collar crime, the kind that was too often tolerated in our society—and she had committed herself to punish it.

  So the city and county of San Francisco brought criminal charges against Rich McNeil—grand theft, perjury, conspiracy to commit fraud. If it went to jury trial, and if he was convicted on all counts, Rich McNeil could be facing four years in state prison.

  It was not the retirement he’d dreamed of.

  Hardy was just turning from the window, intending to throw a couple of rounds of darts, when the telephone rang on his desk. “Dismas Hardy.”

  “Dismas?” the voice said. “What the hell kind of name is Dismas?”

  “It’s the name my parents gave me, the good thief on Calvary. Who is this?”

  “The good thief. That’s great. Dismas. Dash Logan here. Sorry it’s taken so long to get back at you. I’ve been busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”

  Hardy bit back a sarcastic reply. “I won’t take much of your time, then. As I mentioned in my messages, I’m representing Rich McNeil and I thought we could—”

  A short, barking laugh interrupted him. From the falsely hale sound on the phone, Hardy formed the impression that Logan might already have downed a cocktail or two. “Oh, sorry,” the voice said, “somebody said something.” There were unmistakable bar noises in the background, Ricky Martin and La Vida Loca. “So you’re with McNeil?”

  “And his fifteen witnesses,” Hardy replied.

  “To what?” Another disconnected laugh. Clearly Logan was following another conversation—or something—going on in front of him. “On me, on me. Jerry, you let him pay I’ll break your arm—”

  “Look,” Hardy interrupted, “if this isn’t a good time . . .”

  “No. It’s fine, fine. I’m just down here at Jupiter. You know the place?”

  Hardy did
and said so. A few blocks south of the Hall of Justice, the bar was kind of the up-tempo version of Lou the Greek’s. Great fast food, loud music, bartenders with personality—a major hangout of the law crowd, serious drinker division.

  “You free? ’Cause I’m here awhile. Meeting a client.” The voice shifted, another focus. “Yeah, you’re talking to the duck. I heard it.” Back to the phone. “So? Hardy? What do you say? Come on down, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “I’ve got clients, too, Mr. Logan. Some other time, maybe. But I’d really like to talk with you.”

  “Anytime, anytime. You thinking you want to settle?”

  “Actually, we’re talking more about a cross complaint.”

  This really seemed to strike Logan as funny. “Get out! For what?”

  “That’s one of the things I thought we’d discuss.”

  “That’ll be a short talk.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Hardy heard ice tinkling in his ear. He felt a pulse in his temple. This kind of posturing could go on forever, and he wasn’t up to it today. “Mr. Logan,” he began, but again the voice cut him off.

  “Dash, please. Everybody calls me Dash.”

  David Freeman appeared at his door, and Hardy held up a finger, he’d be right with him. Back to the phone. “So is there a time that might work better for you?”

  “I’m here almost every day, this time. Beyond that, it’s pretty wide open. But if you’re not talking settlement . . .” He let that hang.

  “I think that’s premature.”

  “Yeah, but they crank up the criminal charges, it’s going to be much more expensive.”

  “First they have to prove them, which they can’t do.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what everyone thinks. Then they do. Just a friendly reminder.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “I’ll be here.” The line went dead.

  Hardy clutched at the phone, realizing that he’d finally managed to connect with Dash Logan only to fail to discuss anything substantive about his client’s case or even to make an appointment to meet with him. He looked down at the receiver. “Thanks a lot,” he said. “Dash.”

  “Dash. Hmm.” Freeman moved forward into the office. “That would have been the inimitable Mr. Logan, I presume?”

  “Either him or his impersonator,” Hardy said, “and about as cooperative as you’d led me to expect.” Suddenly Freeman’s appearance in his office struck him as the unusual occurrence it was. “So what brings you up here to the nosebleed seats? Don’t tell me—Phyllis quit and you wanted me to be the first to know. No, that couldn’t be it. You’d have brought champagne.”

  “Not that,” Freeman said. “Dear Phyllis is still with us.”

  Hardy shrugged. “Okay, then, I give up.”

  Freeman didn’t answer right away, and that in itself was instructive. Hands in his pockets, he slouched his way across to the window, where he stared down for a moment, then turned and leaned back against the sill. “You may recall this morning we spoke about your involvement with Cole Burgess?”

  “Noninvolvement,” Hardy corrected him. “I was just going down to talk to him at the hospital, get his side of what happened. I did. End of story.”

  “So you’re not representing him?”

  Hardy began to shake his head no, then narrowed his eyes at the old man. “What happened?” he asked, and the questions continued to tumble out. “He tried to kill himself, didn’t he? He did kill himself? No. Somebody else killed him, didn’t they? Tell me it wasn’t Glitsky.”

  Freeman had to chortle. “Easy, Diz, easy. He’s alive as far as I know. But my trained legal mind can’t help but notice that you seem to harbor a little concern for him.”

  “Not really that.” A defensive shrug, then he gave it up. “I came away not exactly convinced that the confession is righteous.”

  “In what way?”

  “He was in withdrawal and they promised him relief. He would have confessed to killing his mother. Hell, he might have actually killed his mother if they asked him to. In any event, it ought to be on the tape.”

  Freeman shook his head knowingly. “No, it won’t. No cop is that dumb. They make the promise off camera, then sweat him on it.” He straightened up and sighed heavily. “Either way, though, whether he did it or not, the boy’s got worse problems than he had this morning.”

  “That’d take some doing.”

  “Well, listen up. Evidently some doing got done.” Freeman filled him in on Sharron Pratt’s speech at the Commonwealth Club.

  By the end of the recital, Hardy had lowered himself down into a chair opposite the couch. His expression was one of shock and disbelief. He finally managed a word. “Death?”

  Freeman nodded. “Unequivocally. And the arraignment is tomorrow morning.”

  “But Pratt’s never even asked for specials before.”

  “She is now. She called it a sea change in her policy. Get tough, get votes.”

  Hardy still couldn’t imagine it. “But he has no priors. They’d never ask for death on a guy with no record.” Freeman had no reply, but Hardy kept arguing. “Death isn’t possible for any number—”

  “It is if she can prove first degree with specials.”

  “But she can never hope to get a jury to do that. Even if he did kill Elaine, he was drunk or stoned or both at the time. Everybody admits that, even the cops. So you got a guy with no priors and serious psychiatric and substance issues. They don’t get death. It’s just not doable.”

  “Maybe not, assuming he’s got a good attorney.” It was getting dark outside and the room wasn’t bright, but Freeman’s eyes shone in the dimness.

  “Don’t give me that look, David.”

  All innocence, Freeman spread his hands. “No look,” he said.

  “I didn’t say he didn’t do it.” Hardy filled his lungs and let out the air in a whoosh. “I said I thought his confession might have been coerced. That’s not saying he didn’t do it. There’s a lot of other evidence.”

  “I’m sure there is.” Freeman waited, his basset eyes unmoving. “But the death penalty?”

  “She can’t go there,” Hardy said calmly. “That’s just flat wrong.”

  “I thought you might feel that way.” The old man’s poker face gave nothing away—even his eyes had gone flat. “You don’t want the case, I’m on it. But you’re already there, he thinks he’s your client. You’ve successfully defended death penalty cases before. You hate Pratt and everything she stands for, especially this decision.”

  Hardy stood up abruptly, walked over to his desk, tapped it a few times with his knuckles, then turned back to face the old man. “So what am I going to do?”

  Freeman nodded. “I guess that’s what I came up here to find out.”

  9

  Glitsky left the office early, carrying the videotape that contained the Burgess confession tucked into the inside pocket of his heavy shepherd’s jacket. Back home, at a few minutes after five, he walked purposefully through the kitchen and down the hallway to the room on the left that had until recently been Orel and Jacob’s bedroom. Now Jacob was nineteen and living in Milan, the half-black cop’s son actually getting small parts as an operatic baritone. Isaac, Abe’s eldest boy, had left the home, too. He was now a senior at UCLA, majoring in economics, pulling down a four-point. Orel had moved down the hall to Isaac’s old room.

  He walked the few steps over to the VCR, punched the power button, pulled the videotape from his pocket. Suddenly some sense of the place stopped him. His shoulders settled imperceptibly. He laid the tape on top of the television, raised his eyes to glance around the room.

  He closed his eyes, feeling it the way it was only yesterday, though that was four years ago. The two boys had their bunk beds against that wall where the couch was now. And here, at the oak entertainment center, had been the pair of back-to-back desks where they did homework and piled their stuff. There had been junk everywhere—hockey sticks and footb
all pads, every type of ball in the known world, sports and music posters all over the walls. The ineradicable smell, the incessant noise. Isaac still at home, his room down the hall. The growing boys filling every speck of the place with life, with potential.

  And Flo. Flo singing in the kitchen or humming quietly at the living room table where she did the bills. She was always singing or humming. She’d had a beautiful voice, a deep and rich contralto. Glitsky was sure that was where Jacob got his. His wife hadn’t really been much of a softie, but she had loved melodic ballads, show tunes—“Over the Rainbow,” “Till There Was You,” “The Rose.” Her favorite song from the day he’d met her was “Unchained Melody.” It was as though the song were part of her very being. She’d be combing her hair, unaware that she was singing, and Abe would stop whatever he was doing, caught in it.

  He made it a point to keep his guard up, but now, somehow, it had fallen. Standing there in his boys’ old bedroom, inside a memory he never consciously decided to dredge up, he started to allow himself to hear her singing it once again.

  Oh, my love, my darling . . .

  The room came up at him. He put a hand to his eyes. “Lord,” he whispered.

  Blindsided, he found himself over on the couch, wondering what had hit him. At the same time knowing what it was. Finally amazed in some way that these bouts occurred as infrequently as they did.

  It was Elaine’s death, he decided. Stirring up all the other gunk.

  That, and the Treya Ghent interview this morning. That still nagged at him, too—not only the lack of any tangible result about the Burgess case but the reaction he’d had to her.

  The door to his office.

  The foolish, immature way he’d handled the visit from Hardy, who deserved better than that.

  He wasn’t under constant attack here at home. He couldn’t be seen, didn’t have to work so hard to hide whatever might be troubling him. So all of it—Flo and the older kids being gone, Elaine, everything—all of it had bubbled over for a minute. Here, where it was safe. That was all it had been.