‘There aren’t any trails, Diz. I’ve looked.’
‘What if I find you some? What if these phone calls turn into something?’
‘What if, what if.’
‘It’s up to you,’ Hardy said.
It was one-thirty, and Hardy had read most of the file. He was in Visitor’s Room B, the mirror image of A. Fowler entered, upbeat. As soon as the guard had gone back outside, he stuck out his hand. ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘Welcome, Counselor.’
Hardy ignored the hand and cut to it. ‘Andy, I can’t represent you if you lie to me.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about this file, which I’m about two-thirds of the way through.’
The euphoria of his first win faded almost as soon as he’d picked up his copy of the file from reception in the D.A.‘s office. He had taken it downstairs. Sitting on a bench in the hallway, he was immediately caught up in the grand-jury testimony of a prosecution witness named Emmet Turkel, whose name jumped out at him because he’d never heard it before.
This is Peter Struler, Badge Number 1134, Investigator for the District Attorney of San Francisco. The date is July 13, 1992 at 2:40 in the P.M. No case number is assigned. I am interviewing a gentleman who identifies himself as Emmet Turkel, a resident of the state of New York, with a business address at 340 W. 28th Street in Manhattan.
Q: Mr Turkel, what is your occupation?
A: I am a private investigator.
Q: In your capacity as a private investigator, have you had occasion to work for a man named Andrew Bryan Fowler?
A: Yes. Mr Fowler is a judge in San Francisco.
Q: And he retained you?
A: Correct.
Q: To do what?
A: Well, the judge was upset because a woman he knew, May Shinn, had stopped seeing him. He wanted to know why.
Q: Hadn’t she told him why?
A: Well, yes, I suppose what I mean to say is that she’d told him why, that she was seeing someone else. The judge wanted to know who it was.
Q: The person she was seeing now?
A: Yes.
Q: She didn’t tell him who it was?
A: No. She said she was seeing someone else and that they – she and Fowler – had to break up. That was his word, break up. I make that point because the relationship wasn’t exactly typical.
Q: In what way?
A: I mean, you don’t say you’re breaking up with someone if you’re being paid by them.
Q: And the judge was paying Ms Shinn?
A: That’s my understanding, yes.
Q: For sex?
A: Sex, companionship, whatever. She was his mistress.
Q: And what did you discover?
A: I discovered the man was Owen Nash.
Q: And what did you do with that discovery?
A: I reported it to my client, Judge Fowler.
Q: And when was this?
A: Oh, middle of March, thereabouts. I could give you the exact date.
Q: That’s all right. Maybe later. I have one more question. Did you find it unusual that someone from California would come to you here in New York and offer you a job out there?
A: Not really. It happens when you want to keep things closed up. I knew the judge from work I’d done for other clients over the years. I’d testified in his courtroom a couple of times, like that. So he knew to look me up. And then he didn’t want anybody in town – in San Francisco – even a P.I., to know about his relationship with Shinn. I guess he figured it would look bad. So he came to me.
Fowler crossed his hands in front of him on the table. His face was serious. ‘How did they find Turkel?’
‘I don’t know, Andy, but that’s not the issue. If I’m representing you, you’ve got to tell me everything. How do you explain this?’
Behind Turkel’s deposition testimony in the notebook were a couple of xeroxed pages from Fowler’s desk calendar. On the page for March 2, the name Owen Nash was written, circled, underlined. On May 16, a note read: O.N. – tonight. The Eloise.
‘I thought you didn’t know Owen Nash.’ Hardy’s tone was more a prosecutor’s. So be it. If Fowler was guilty and lying on top of it, he wanted nothing to do with it.
‘I said I’d never met him, Diz. I knew who he was.’
Hardy stood up, walked to the window, looked out at the high clouds and shook his head. ‘Not true, Andy. You said you only found out it had been Owen seeing May after he turned up dead.’
The judge didn’t seem too shaken. ‘Did I? I don’t remember.’
Hardy sat back down across the table. ‘Andy, look. You’ve got to remember. Did you tell anyone else you didn’t know Nash, hadn’t met Nash, whatever it was?’
‘I don’t know. Probably while they were questioning me about the bond. I’d have to say yes.’
‘Jesus,’ Hardy said. He was flipping through the binder. There were tabbed sections with other names he hadn’t looked at yet. He was starting to get the feeling most of them would be impugning the judge’s character. They were going to sling mud, and Andy had given them the shovel.
‘I never thought they’d dig up Turkel, Diz. And when you tell a lie, you’d better stick with it. It doesn’t look good, I know, but it doesn’t mean -’
Hardy waved him off. ‘So why’d you tell the lie in the first place?’
Fowler held up his palms. ‘For the same reason I went to New York for Turkel, Diz. It looked terrible. Embarrassing. I knew damn well how it would look if it came out.’
‘And that’s so important, isn’t it? How it looks?’
But Andy Fowler hadn’t been a judge most of his life for nothing. His jaw hardened. ‘You don’t give it all up at once, Diz. You conserve what you’ve still got.’
‘So what do you still have, Andy? You tell me.’
‘I’ve got nothing putting me on the boat. Why would I volunteer something that would tie me to Owen Nash?’
‘How about because you had to lie to evade it? Innocent people don’t lie -’
‘Don’t give me that, Diz. Of course they do. Innocent people lie all the time, and you know it.’
Hardy knew he was right. ‘All right, Andy, but you’ll agree it gives the appearance of guilt, and appearance is going to matter to the jury.’
Fowler nodded. ‘It was one consistent lie. The fact that I told it several times is explainable. I wanted to hide an embarrassing truth, but, as I tried to say, it doesn’t mean I killed anybody.’
‘Andy, we’re not talking embarrassment here anymore.’
‘I know, I’ve accepted that.’ The judge stared out the window, looked back to the closed door. ‘They do like to bring down the mighty, don’t they?’
‘That’s not the issue either, Andy.’
Fowler pointed a finger. ‘Don’t kid yourself, Diz. That’s the issue.’
‘Let’s get back to the facts, Andy. So where did these notes come from?’
Fowler pulled the binder over in front of him. ‘That’s my calendar, my desk at the office here.’ He thought a moment. ‘The day I retired, when the story about May’s bail came out. I stayed away from the office to let things blow over. Remember?’
Hardy remembered.
‘They must have moved awfully fast. I went in and cleaned out my stuff the next week. Somebody must have had an idea back then I’d killed Nash.’
‘Pullios,’ Hardy said. ‘Sounds like her. Get a theory and find the evidence to back it up. Somebody ought to tell her she’s doing it backward.’ Hardy pulled the binder back in front of him, getting an idea. ‘This means they went into your office without your permission, maybe without a warrant?’
Fowler shook his head. This was familiar ground for him. ‘Don’t get your hopes up, Diz. It’s probably admissible. In California employers own their offices. In my case, the City and County had a right to enter my room in the Hall of Justice at any time. That’s why I had my own desk brought in. It’s my personal property. If I lock it, they need a warrant to get inside. But anything on top of it is fair game.’ He brightened up. ‘It’s not a disaster, Diz. We can make the point I didn’t take anything with me, I had nothing to hide.’