He came around the desk, opened his briefcase, started removing the work he’d taken home and ignored – some stuff he’d let slide while concentrating on May Shinn. Moses had come over, worried about Rebecca (and about Frannie and probably Hardy, too) and had stayed to eat with them and hang out.
‘I read it,’ he said.
‘I’m surprised Elliot didn’t get the news about the bail.’
Hardy stopped fiddling. ‘She made bail? I had a feeling she’d make bail. Freeman put it up?’
Pullios closed the paper, placed it back down on her lap. ‘I don’t know. We can subpoena her financial records if we can convince a judge that we think she got it illegally.’
‘Not Barsotti.’
‘No, I gathered that. We’ll look around.’
‘How about prostitution? Last time I checked, that was illegal.’
‘Maybe. It’s a thought, we should check it out.’ She recrossed her legs. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I came by to apologize again. I was out of line. It should have been your case. I’m sorry.’
Hardy shrugged. ‘There’ll be other cases.’
‘Thank you.’ She didn’t try her smile or her pout. “Cause we’re going to be busy.‘
‘I don’t know,’ Hardy said. ‘We’ve got two months now and I’ve let all this stuff back up.’ He motioned around his office.
Now she was smiling, but he didn’t get the feeling it was for any effect. ‘You believe we’re going out on a prelim in two months?’
‘I got that general impression.’
Pullios shook her head. ‘We’re not letting that happen. There’s no way Freeman and Barsotti are putting this thing off until next year. I talked to Locke after the arraignment, and he okayed it – we’re taking this sucker to the grand jury on Thursday. Get an indictment there, take it into Superior Court and blindside the shit out of the slow brothers.’
‘Can we do that?’
‘We can do anything we want,’ she said. ‘We’re the good guys, remember.’
‘I don’t want to rain on this parade, but isn’t there some risk here? What if the grand jury doesn’t indict?’
Pullios rolled her eyes. ‘After you’re here awhile, you’ll understand that if the D.A. wants, the grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. Besides, the grand jury always indicts for me. We’ve got everything Glitsky had, which ought to be enough. But if it isn’t, Ballistics says the gun is the murder weapon. But one thing…“
‘Okay, but just one.’
She smiled again. They seemed to be getting along. ‘No leaks on this. This is an ambush.’
David Freeman knew his major character flaw – he could not delegate. He couldn’t even have his secretary type for him. He’d let Janice answer the telephones, okay, put stamps on letters if they were in the United States and less than three pages – more than that, he had to weigh them himself and make sure there was enough postage. He did his own filing, his own typing. He ran his own errands.
He was, after Melvin Belli, probably the best-known lawyer in the city. He had seven associates but no partners. None of the associates worked for him – recession or no – for more than four years. He burned ‘ em out. They ’d come to him for ’trial experience.‘ But if you were a client and came to David Freeman to keep you from going to jail, he wasn’t about to leave that up to Phyllis or Jon or Brian or Keiko – he was going to be there inside the rail himself, his big schlumpy presence personally making the judge and jury believe that you didn’t do it.
His deepest conviction was that nobody, anywhere, was as good as he was at trial, and if you hired the firm of David Freeman & Associates, what you got was David Freeman. And you got your trial prepared – somewhat -by associates at $135 an hour. When David got to the plate – and he personally reviewed every brief, every motion, every deposition – the price went up to $500, and trial time was $1,500. Per hour.
It was his pride, and he knew he carried it to extremes. This was why private investigators existed – to do legwork. But no one did legwork as well as he did. One time, when he’d just started out, he’d hired a private investigator to talk to all possible witnesses in a neighborhood where a woman had supposedly killed her husband. The woman, Bettina Allred, had contended she’d had a fight with her husband Kevin, all right – she’d even fired a shot into the wall. Terrified of herself and her own anger, she’d run from the apartment to go out to cool off. While she was gone, she said, someone had come in and shot her husband with his own gun. So the private investigator David hired had talked to everybody in the apartment and they’d all heard the fighting and she’d obviously done it. Except the P.I. hadn’t talked to Wayne, the thirteen-year-old son who hadn’t even been home during the relevant time. When Freeman doubled-checked as he always did, he decided to be thorough – as he always was – and found that Wayne had been hiding terrified in the closet and when Mommy had run out, he’d taken the gun and shot his daddy. He’d had enough of Daddy beating up on him and Mommy.
Since then, Freeman had done his own legwork. Though it was his precious time, he only charged his clients the $65 an hour he would have paid a private eye. It was, he thought, one of the best bargains in the business.
No one in May’s building had seen or heard her on Saturday. Now he was going up the other side of the street, ringing doorbells, talking to people.
‘You see the turreted apartment on the corner, up on the top over there? Anything at all? Shades going up, blinds being pulled? How about a shadow? Yes, well, it’s confidential, but it has to do with a murder investigation, Jesus, don’t tell my boss. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
The French deli across the street. The cleaners on the opposite corner. Nada, nada, nada. If May had been home, as she claimed, she had been invisible. Of course, he didn’t believe she’d been home, but as he’d told her, what he believed was irrelevant.
He was on the fourth and last floor of the building directly across the street from May’s. His feet hurt. He was considering rashing his billing rate for this work up to $75 an hour. He rang the bell and listened to it gong for a moment. No one answered. There was one other door down the hall, and it opened.
‘Mr Strauss isn’t in. Can I help you?’
Mrs Streletski was a well-dressed elderly woman and he gave her his spiel. She invited him in and forced him to drink a cup of horrible coffee. She was sorry she couldn’t really help him. She’d been out of her apartment for the last ten days – in fact, she’d just gotten back from visiting over in Rossmoor. She was considering moving into Rossmoor with Hal. They did so much there. It was an active place, even if you were a little elderly, no one treated you like you were old. There were lots of classes, movies, lectures. It was a fun place, a young place.
Mrs Streletski showed Freeman that you couldn’t see anything of May’s building from her window. He thanked her for the coffee and left his card so that Mr Strauss, who lived alone next door, could call him when he got in if he had the time.
‘He’s not home very often, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘He travels a lot. He’s always working. He got divorced last year and I think he’s very lonely. We’ve played Scrabble a few times and I tried to get him to go out with Hal and me, but I think he misses his wife and his boys.’
‘Well, if you could have him call me, he might have been home, remember something.’
She said she would. He thanked her and started walking down the steps, thinking that even when you didn’t get anything, this was probably worth more than $75, call it $100 an hour.
‘Two months before you even set a date for a preliminary hearing?’
Hardy was biting his tongue, held to the stricture not to leak anything about Elizabeth’s upcoming appointment with the grand jury. Ken Farris, in the interview room down by the evidence lockers, wasn’t happy, and Hardy wondered how far he could go to make him feel better. ‘We’re working on something.’ Lame, he knew.