Hardy was shaking his head. She reached a hand across the table to him. "No, no. No, listen. It was the week after Christmas, no traffic, no one around, and here's this man walking up the street, he's wearing this heavy trenchcoat, looking like he's checking house numbers. I almost stop and ask can I help him but I didn't want to be late so I keep going by." She stopped talking, staring at Hardy. "It really could have been him, the one… I mean, somebody had to do it…"
"Did you notice if this man had a gun?"
"No, I'd have-"
"Do you have any idea why somebody who didn't know Larry personally would want to kill him? Or your son?"
Her eyes stared into the space between them. "If you find a yes to any questions like these, Jennifer, then we can usefully talk about him again, but I'm afraid he isn't going to do us any good right now."
"But it might-"
"When it does," Hardy said, "then we'll look at it. Okay? I promise."
Hardy reminded himself that he wasn't here to upset her. He had felt, though, he should tell her they were going capital. It was still going to be essentially Freeman's case but it wouldn't hurt to collect more impressions of Jennifer. "Let's go on to anything else about that morning, anybody else who might have seen you."
"But that man, he might have been…"
Hardy patted her hand, held it down on the table. "Let's move on, okay?"
She pulled her hand away. "You've got to believe me, I didn't do this. If it was that man…"
"If it was that man," he said. "There could have been somebody, all right, he might even have shot Larry, but he also might be anybody – a neighbor, a tourist, a guy just taking a walk."
She glared at him. "He had his hands in his pockets, both hands. He might have been holding a gun."
Hardy almost said, Forgetting, of course, that your husband was killed with your own gun. He slowed himself down. "Let's stop. Look, we're not here to argue. We'll come back to the man later. For now we've got to leave him, he's not going to help us unless he lives near you and we can find him. Now I'm trying to find something to hang your defense on, and he's just not it."
Her face went all the way down to the table, within the circle of her arms. Her body was shaking as she rolled her forehead back and forth.
"Did you do anything unusual at all on your run? Anything you might already have told the police? Or forgotten to tell them?"
She stopped the rocking. As though struggling with its weight, she raised her head, sighing again. "They didn't ask any questions like this," she said. "I didn't think… I mean, I didn't know they thought I was a suspect. They misled me, they never asked any of this."
Hardy said quietly, "I'm asking now, all right? Let's try to get something."
Jennifer nodded, then recalled that she had stopped at the automatic teller at her bank on Haight Street. Which seemed odd to Hardy. "You left to go running and happened to have your ATM card with you?"
"What's so strange about that?" And she explained that most of her running outfits had Velcro pockets and as a matter of course she grabbed her house key and her change wallet – in which she kept her ATM card – whenever she left the house. She told Hardy that on that morning she had walked down her block, passed the man in the trenchcoat, started running for a couple of blocks, then stopped for cash – "It was the Monday after Christmas, we hadn't been to the bank for three days."
At least it was someplace to start.
In some ways Hardy's involvement with Jennifer Witt was easier to explain to the client than it was going to be to his wife.
After the successful conclusion of his first murder trial – defending former Superior Court Judge Andy Fowler – Hardy had been surprised to find himself something of a property in the small world that was San Francisco's legal community. Trial lawyers – men and women who were good on their feet in front of a jury – were, it seemed, in great demand. Even in the large corporate firms, the final outcome of all the work done by offices full of bean counters and number crunchers, library rats, technical brief writers and legal strategists, paralegals and lesser staff often came down on the shoulders of the person in the firm who could convincingly present it all in front of a judge or jury or both.
Since most corporate attorneys rarely if ever saw the inside of a courtroom, many firms hired trial lawyers the way baseball teams purchased designated hitters – the role was limited, but if it came up it was far preferable to having the pitcher come to the plate with the game on the line.
Because of the sensational nature of Judge Fowler's trial and of Hardy's own role as an unknown, underdog, first-time defense attorney, it seemed that Hardy had unwittingly been auditioning for half the firms in the Bay Area. When the verdict came down in his client's favor, his phone had started ringing.
Another event that had coincided with the end of Fowler's trial had been the birth of Hardy's and Frannie's son, Vincent. So for the first month Hardy had begged off many of the interviews, pleading his new fatherhood, Frannie's desire to have him at home for a while.
Now, three months later, he had visited eleven firms, riding elevators to plush offices in his only three-piece suit, going out to fine lunches with men and women with whom he felt no connection whatever – nice people, sure; smart, well-turned out, confident, financially secure, socially aware, all of the above. But no one to whom he was drawn as a human being.
Seven of the firms had offered him positions, with salaries ranging from a low of $83,000 to a high (Engle, Matthews amp; Jones) of $115,000. All of the offers put him well onto the partner track, crediting him with up to six years of previous service. This meant that within, at the most, another three years (and at the least, one), he would become a partner in any of the seven firms and could expect annual compensation in the realm of $300,000 to $500,000.
Frannie had brought an insurance settlement to their marriage. Hardy, aside from the fees in the Fowler trial that had run to low six figures, owned a one-quarter interest in the Little Shamrock bar. Their house payment was under six-hundred dollars a month. So Frannie and Hardy were not hurting. Nevertheless, the kind of money the big firms were waving in his face was not pocket change, was even tempting.
Their house in the Avenues was already, with the addition of the two children, starting to feel pinched. The could see moving up; they'd even discussed it casually after Hardy had received the first couple of invitations. It had become more or less understood that Hardy would choose one of the firms, get a linear job, be an adult.
But he just hadn't been ready to commit to any of the firms – something better might come up, some people he felt better about being associated with. So in the interim he borrowed an empty office and paid a nominal rent in the building owned by David Freeman, which was where he had been, essentially twiddling his thumbs, when David Freeman himself had called up with the Jennifer Witt referral.
"It's probably going to be a fair amount of money," Hardy said.
"But it's another case. It's not a job."
"And I'm not even really on it. It's Freeman's case."
"But there's something here for you."
Hardy's hands, crossed in front of him at the table, came open. "Maybe. There might be."
Frannie was trying to understand, and he couldn't blame her for being a little upset. He might argue to himself, and tell her that he wasn't really changing the basic plan they'd discussed, but they both know that wasn't true. Working as a member of a defense team in one potentially lucrative case was not even remotely comparable to going to work as a senior associate in one of the city's prestige law firms, and Frannie wasn't being conned by it.