‘Yeah, well, sorry is a big help. Look at the evidence Struler got, and then why don’t you explain to my bosses how it was that I didn’t find any of it. Like by the time I hit Fowler’s office, after clearing it with my lieutenant because I thought it might be a touch sensitive, why there wasn’t anything left to find.’
‘It wasn’t only in his office.’
Glitsky’s voice went real low. Almost a whisper. ‘You know, Elizabeth, I don’t care if it was in the Amazon rain forest. We’ve got a homicide team upstairs that works on homicides. We get you your evidence, without which you don’t have a job anymore. You got a new protocol, fine, you go for it, but it’s a two-way street.’
‘I understand that. Look, Abe, I’ve apologized. It won’t happen again. I’m really sorry.’
Glitsky nodded. Sometimes you let them have the last word, let them think it’s all settled and forgotten.
‘Just tell me you didn’t sleep with him.’
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘It’s my business.’ Hardy lowered his voice into the telephone. ‘Especially if it was last September. And you know it.’ He was in his office. Halfway through the file, he remembered Jane.
He imagined her in her kitchen at her house – their old house – on Jackson Street, sitting on the stool, maybe a glass of white wine nearby. Hearing forty, twice divorced and suffering through the apparent decline in her market value that came as such a shock, Jane was still very attractive. Also intelligent, self-reliant, why was it men didn’t see it? If they were her age they wanted a relationship and went – as Hardy had (and she had pointed it out to him) – for the younger women, the tighter, the firmer, the more fun. They could dream again with the young ones, pretend they were younger, too. Build a new life halfway through their old one. The older men knew you’d been around. You didn’t have to play games. Everybody had sex. It was an itch to be scratched. Dinner, cognac, orgasm. Thanks a lot. You’re a great kid. Or the young guys who dug the experience of an older woman, but never a thought of settling down with one…
Hardy had heard and read about all the stages. Jane had to be lonely as hell most of the time. Even with Chuck Chuck Bo-Buck, the latest.
But not, he hoped, please not with Owen Nash.
‘Jane.’
‘It wasn’t anything,’ she said. ‘It was one night.’
Her voice sounded dead.
He had filled twenty pages of yellow legal pad. It was nearly midnight and he rubbed his eyes, the swelling around them having turned a faint purple now, the throbbing continuous but bearable. He had been letting his mind go, jumping from issue to issue and following the flow, tearing out sticking tabs and placing them on pages by subject: Venue. Bail. Evidence. Theory. Jury.
He thought he had to take another shot at getting Andy out on bail. Even if they set it for a million dollars, he couldn’t let him stay in the clink. He knew he could ask the Court of Appeal to force Braun to set some reasonable bail and eventually they would do it. Drysdale would know that, too. Maybe he could talk to him and get some concessions without the procedural hassles.
After that, the first thing he would do would be to make a motion for judicial review of the evidence, which, now that he’d reviewed most of the file, still struck him as very light. Everything was circumstantial.
Perhaps bolstered by Andy’s unsupported alibi, his lies (or one lie told many times) and the enormity of the risk he’d taken in defense of May, the evidence still didn’t put him on the boat. Without that, Hardy didn’t see how anyone could vote to convict.
Juries had been known to do almost anything, but he thought an impartial judge, if he could find one, would throw this thing out as a turkey.
Pullios and her personal grand jury notwithstanding, the system at least tacitly contemplated abuse of the indictment procedure, and so authorized a judicial review of the indictment to insure there was sufficient evidence to go to trial. It was not, after all, in the system’s own self-interest to bring a case to trial where there was no evidence. Hardy thought maybe he could get Andy off there. It at least was worth a try.
If that didn’t work, he thought he would try to get out of San Francisco. His own file, from the time of the original Chronicle blurb when he and Pico had found Owen Nash’s hand, contained over sixty-five articles from both local and national publications on the case. Nash, Shinn, himself, Freeman, Fowler. And it was the kind of story people tended to read and remember, or stop what they were doing to listen to on the radio or watch on television.
At least he was coming to the theory he would use in defense. You needed a defense theory. He’d done enough prosecuting to know that those defense lawyers who just refuted his evidence, who debated his conclusions, got themselves beaten. What you needed was your own affirmative defense. Come out fighting, the voice of outrage at unfair accusation.
It had come to him today, and he thought it had some real legs. It also appealed to him because it gave things a personal edge – Pullios had done her job backward. The way it was supposed to work (he would argue) was that evidence is fairly gathered from all quarters by the police investigating the crime. When that evidence reaches some critical mass an indictment is sought and an arrest warrant is issued. None of that had happened in Fowler’s case.
Hardy thought he could make a case to the jury that someone, Locke or Pullios or whoever, had fastened on Andy Fowler out of personal animus, out of anger at his professional lapses. It was a political vendetta based on his conduct on the bench but not because the evidence pointed at him.
Hardy had never before called Glitsky as a witness for the prosecution on any of his cases, but now he wrote his name under a new tab… the investigating officer of record as a witness for the defense. That ought to jolt old Betsy.
And he knew there was a further step he had to take, if he believed the judge was innocent. For that he was ready to use Jeff Elliot and Abe Glitsky and anyone else. Someone had killed Owen Nash. But juries were imperfect. They could make a mistake and convict Andy. Hardy’s best hope of getting Andy off was to find out who had done it.
A tall order that, since evidently it hadn’t been any of the suspects so far- Shinn, Farris, Mr Silicon Valley. But there was an ‘X’ out there. Jane? Impossible. A one-night stand, she’d said. She’d said… No. He knew Jane, she couldn’t kill anybody. Besides, why would she have told Jeff Elliot she’d met Nash that once if she’d seen him since and it was an affair? Why open that door? Unless she figured it would come out anyway and she wanted to look like she had nothing to hide. No, ridiculous. Jane had no motive.
Farris? He was numero uno with Nash gone, or in a position to be the power behind the new man in charge, all his show of grief notwithstanding.
He sat back in his chair and stretched. Enough already, picking at straws. Abe hadn’t even looked yet at May’s other clients – the three men Hardy had discovered through the phone records. There was a whole universe of potential suspects. One of them, someone, had to have made a mistake but he wasn’t likely to discover it practicing this sort of armchair reverie. He had to get someone moving on it.
He lifted the last dart from his desk and pegged it at his board where it stuck four inches below the bull’s-eye.
Jane… had Andy known about Jane and Owen? Could that have been reason, another reason, for Andy to have killed Nash?… It might have been the last straw, Andy broken up over Nash – the ‘famous son of a bitch’ -stealing his May, and then he’s almost over that, maybe, when five months later he finds out the guy had also fucked his daughter and boom, over the edge…?