But MS was a sneaky thing. It wasn’t like it came up and wopped you upside the head. With his legs, it had begun with pins and needles one morning. His left leg just felt a little bit like it was asleep, like a low-voltage current was passing through it. Then, over the course of a couple of weeks, the feeling not only didn’t go away, it got worse and his leg became a weight he dragged around. Which was when he’d gone to the doctor and the bomb dropped.
The right leg had gone two years later. But since then he’d had five good years, three on Prednisone and then, because he hated the steroid, trying to get along without it. And, he had come to think, successfully.
So successfully that he hadn’t really related it to the MS when he woke up with slightly blurred vision. He ignored it. If he wasn’t looking directly at something, it was nothing.
This morning, though, he’d noticed it a lot. The right eye didn’t seem to focus at all, and there was a brown smudge over half of what he could see through his left eye. He should go to the doctor, but this was the chance he’d worked so hard for. He was the man of the hour.
Once he got a few more things tied up here he’d go see about his vision.
Maury Carter did business out of a building about two blocks from the Hall. There was a black-and-white four-foot-square sign above the doorway outside, bolted up against the old brick, that read ‘Bail Bondsman.’ Inside, a desk for Maury’s secretary took up the big front window. Behind that desk were file cabinets and acoustic baffling that served to separate Maury’s private office from the street.
It was Tuesday afternoon. Jeff had spent most of the morning following up on what he’d missed the day before – May’s bail. It wasn’t a stop-the-presses story anyway -people, even murder suspects, made bail all the time – but it bothered him that he’d found it out on television. He had to keep concentrating on his story, not worry about his eyes.
And the real story now, if it existed and he could get it, was the Shinn/Freeman connection. Along with the fact that May had made bail, he’d discovered Freeman’s billing rates, so Hardy and Glitsky must have been right -there was a source of money somewhere.
But Dorothy, Maury’s secretary, said she wasn’t supposed to talk about their clients, ‘but we can talk about anything else. Maury’s over at the Hall. Do you want to wait? I can get you some coffee.’
Jeff thought she was about the nicest girl he’d met in San Francisco. She wore a print dress and her skin was fair with a few freckles. It occurred to Jeff that she might even think he was okay, in spite of his crutches.
She, too, was from the Midwest – Ohio – and had been out here for four months, living with a girlfriend in the Haight, which wasn’t anything like she’d expected it to be. She was going back to school to get her nursing degree; she’d already majored in bio, so it shouldn’t be too hard, but she was going to be doing it at night and until then this job paid the bills.
Jeff could have listened all day, was even starting to feel comfortable telling her a little about himself. He found himself looking around the growing brown smudge, willing it away in the vision of her, but then Maury came in, who’d actually put up the bond. And the reason Jeff was here came back.
Maury wasn’t going to tell him, though. It was confidential information. They were back in Maury’s part of the office now, behind the partition. ‘But we know how much the bail was.’
Maury had a shiny, deep forehead with white steel-wool for eyebrows. On the map of his face, his nose was a small continent. His ears stuck out and his jowls hung. He leaned back in his chair, feet on his desk, and brought his cigar to his purplish lips. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Blowing out a line of blue smoke, he chewed reflectively on his tongue. ‘Then what can I tell you?’
‘May Shinn put up fifty thousand dollars?’
‘As you say, you know how much the bail is.’
Jeff was fighting a kind of ringing panic attack. He looked down at his notepad and found he couldn’t make out what he’d written there.
‘Bail was half a million,’ he persisted. It was the stress, this circular discussion. He should end it and get out of here. The room was closing in – the cigar smoke, the funny light. ‘Let’s be hypothetical,’ he said. ‘Your normal fee – suppose I’m a client now – is ten percent, right?’
Maury threw him a bone and nodded, blowing more smoke.
‘So if I’ve got bail of half a million, I give you fifty thousand.’
Maury nodded. ‘That would be the fee, yes.’
Was the smoke getting thicker, the light worse? Maybe he was just getting dizzy. He squirmed in his chair, got the blood flowing a little. Then you pay that to the court?‘ It still wasn’t clear. Jeff knew, or thought he knew, this stuff, but suddenly it wasn’t making any sense.
‘No, I pay the court the half million. All of it. Not the fifty thousand, the full half mil.’ Maury pulled his feet down and pulled himself up to the desk. ‘Look, I keep the fifty no matter what. That’s my fee for incurring the risk.
Let’s face it, these guys – my clients – call a spade a spade, they got lousy credit. Hey, are you okay?‘
Jeff heard Maury’s chair move back. It was funny – it felt as though he just closed his eyes a minute, then he’d opened them again. But if his eyes were open, how come he couldn’t see anything? He guessed he was moving his head, trying to scan the room and find a flicker of light.
The panic was taking over. He had to get out of here. He went to reach for where his crutches were, but missed, and knocked them to the ground, now grabbing wildly at nothing, pushing himself from the chair, falling, falling.
Over the ringing that filled his head, he heard Maury yelling, ‘Dorothy! Dorothy, get in here!’
After Farris left, Hardy had put in what he thought was a pretty good afternoon’s work. He pleaded out three assaults – a purse snatching and two robberies. A couple of dope cases were going to prelim. A teenage gang member had ‘tagged’ – graffitied – six police cars, doing $9,000 worth of damage. Hardy was moving toward the opinion that possession of a can of spray paint ought to be punishable, like carrying a concealed weapon, by mandatory jail time. At four-thirty, he left the office and went down to the Youth Guidance Center, where he talked a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl into giving up the name of her thirty-year-old boyfriend who was letting her take the fall for a little friendly welfare fraud.
But, like to a hole in a tooth, Hardy kept coming back to Owen and May Shinn.
The drive back home from the YGC, top down on the Samurai, was over Twin Peaks, down Stanyan Street -and other sorrows – by the Shamrock, then the Aquarium, Golden Gate Park, out Arguello through the Avenues. It gave him enough time to worry it.
The motive thing was a real problem. If they couldn’t sell it to a jury, they didn’t have capital murder, and Hardy couldn’t think of a rebuttal to his own argument: if May had killed Owen for the money, did it make sense for her to leave it to chance that his body would be found? He thought the answer had to be no. Resonantly, obviously, absolutely, no.
So the strategic issue became whether they could keep Freeman from asking the question. He didn’t see how.
But more immediately, and this was what occupied him as he ran the red light on 28th, once that initial chink in the motive worked its way around, would the jury start losing faith in May’s guilt altogether?
He heard the siren and pulled over to the right. It was not yet six o’clock, a glorious night, the warm spell miraculously hanging on. He was surprised when the patrol car pulled in behind him and the cop got out.
‘How you doin’?‘ Hardy asked.
The cop nodded. ‘May I see your license and registration please?’