Hardy wanted to tell him he already had. Instead he said, ‘The rationalization maybe moves it out of disbarment range, Andy, but you and I both know it’s still unethical. You know the defendant – hell, you’ve been intimate with the defendant. If that’s not a conflict…’
What could he say? Andy knew this as well as he did. ‘You’ve got to take yourself off the case.’
‘If I did, I’d have to give a reason and I can’t do that.’
Hardy’s drink was gone. He picked up the glass, tried it, put it down. ‘You could retire.’
‘Right now, without notice?’
‘The trial isn’t tomorrow, Andy. There’s plenty of time. It’ll get reassigned. The phone records in the file aren’t strictly relevant to the murder. The police only asked for June twentieth. The rest doesn’t have to be there.’
This was not ethical either, and Hardy wasn’t sure he could do it. The file was the public record. Tampering with it, suppressing potential evidence – even if its relevance hadn’t been demonstrated – was a felony. Still, he wasn’t telling Andy he’d take the earlier phone records out, not in so many words. And if he didn’t say it explicitly, he didn’t say it at all. That was this game, and Andy Fowler played it, too.
Hardy, with the problem of where to draw the line between personal loyalty and the public trust, knew he had to get Fowler off the case and he didn’t want to blow the whistle on him. If a white lie could accomplish both results he thought it might be worth telling. He also thought it might not be. How many venial sins make a mortal sin? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
‘Dismas, I’m only sixty-two, I’m not ready to retire -’
‘You know, Andy, you’ve got to cut your losses, and you’re going to have ’em. At least you’ll still have your reputation. Maybe you’ll get a call to the federal bench.‘
They both got a wry smile at that. They were making last call, the lights coming up, the music going down.
Hardy had to push it. ‘I’ve got to know by the morning, Andy. I’m real sorry.’
Fowler patted his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry I put you through this, Dismas, although I’m glad it was you who found out. Anybody else…’
‘Andy, we’ve been friends a long time, but in this case I am anybody else. I’m just giving you one day to correct an oversight. But it’s got to get corrected, one way or the other. I want to be clear on that.’
The judge was relaxed again, the situation worked out. ‘It’s clear, Diz, it’s clear. Don’t you worry.’
34
David Freeman had a tradition he’d carried over from his days in law school. Whenever he scored what he considered a clear-cut victory he would celebrate it immediately. His theory was that you never knew when or if you’d get another one, and you’d better savor every drop of satisfaction from the one in hand before it was swept away into the river of your past.
So Tuesday night, after he’d arranged to have the boys and their father meet him at one-thirty the next day for a press conference in his office, he’d called a cab and taken it back to the Fairmont.
After booking a room there he took the outside elevator to the Crown Room and ordered a bottle of Paradis cognac, which went by the snifter at $12.50. The bottle set him back $350 but he could save it and take it home, a trophy for the job well done. He arrived at the Crown Room just after ten and stayed until it closed at two, putting about a six-inch dent in the bottle, sitting at one of the north-facing windows, watching his city sparkle beneath him, a Nob in his own castle.
Which explained why he wasn’t up anywhere near nine-thirty. If he had been, if he’d somehow gotten to Chris Locke and let him know that the May Shinn case couldn’t go to trial, that her alibi was rock solid, then he might have saved Superior Court Judge Andrew Bryan Fowler the trouble of announcing his early retirement, effective September 1.
In a computerized age, Jeff Elliot considered this manual search for title to a piece of property the most unnecessarily tedious job he’d ever done. Yesterday, after only two hours at it, his blurred vision had forced him to give it up.
Now, three hours into it again, not yet noon, he was having second thoughts, wondering if it could really matter. He’d thought of all sorts of plausible reasons to talk himself out of the search, not the least of which was that May Shinn herself might easily have accumulated enough for a down payment on $500,000 worth of real estate.
He remembered stories in Playboy and Penthouse when he’d been in college, about coeds who’d turned to hooking and pulled in $10,000 a month. Even allowing for the hyperbole of the publications, he knew it was possible for a high-class girl to make $200 a night, plus all her normal living expenses. So a smart one could save $4,000 a month, $50,000 a year. A little administrative acumen could provide a shelter for tax purposes – interior design, import/export, licensed sexual therapist.
He’d seen May Shinn in court in her tailored suit. It required no leap of faith to think she had the collateral for her own bail – she’d had the cash to pay Maury, after all. Why not the rest of it?
But – what if she didn’t?
And, as always, it was that possibility that pulled him along. The chance that under the obvious and the plausible, there might lurk the secret, the hidden, the dangerous – the story.
The title clerks could have been more helpful. But they were busy with their own work, with realtors they saw more often. He was a nosy crippled guy who didn’t even know what to ask for. So, like good bureaucrats everywhere, the clerks volunteered nothing.
But the learning curve was kicking in. Even if you knew the city – and Jeff wasn’t yet up to speed even there – the search took some getting used to. There were huge grid books that divided the land into areas that seemed to bear little relation to current neighborhoods. At first glance, street names were useless in determining which grid book – out of more than a hundred – held your property. But he felt he was closing in.
The collateral was a six-unit apartment building three blocks up Powell from Washington Square. After his frustrating search of records the day before, Jeff had come up with the idea that he could just stop by the place and ask one of the tenants who owned the building, and he and Dorothy had tried that.
The one person who’d been home – a mime artist who was preparing to go out and work the streets, whiteface and all – told them she sent her rent checks to a management company.
Jeff thought it unlikely that he’d befriend another secretary who would divulge private records to him, and decided that if he wanted the story he’d have to work for it, like always.
He estimated the books weighed fifteen pounds each. Up close, they smelled like wet newspaper. He had to wait in line, return his previous request, using only one crutch, holding the title book in his other hand. He’d gone through twenty-six books so far, but the closest plot in the last book ended a couple of blocks north of his site.
Why couldn’t you just type an address into a computer and push a button? He’d never figure it out.
Jane was furious. ‘You didn’t have to tell anybody! Daddy’s whole life is the bench. How could you do that to him?’
It was close to one o’clock. Jane had had her own early lunch with her father and he’d told her all about it. Hardy wasn’t too thrilled to learn that the judge had told his daughter, since he himself had elected to treat the entire sensitive subject on a need-to-know basis, hoping no one would.
Frannie hadn’t liked it either. ‘You can’t tell me? What do you mean, you can’t tell me? I’m your wife. We tell each other things, remember?’