The Hearing (4 page)

“No.”

“I hope not.”

“And I’m not here to spring her killer.”

“Okay. Then what’s this about?”

Hardy calmly and briefly stated the reason for his visit, his connection to Cole’s sister Dorothy, the rest of it. “His sister’s worried that he slipped through the cracks when they brought him in and the paramedics never got around to diagnosing him as a heroin user. Anyway, the point is he’s got to get into detox pronto or he’s going to have a bad week.”

“Really? That would be sad.”

“Well, anyway . . .”

“He was drunk, Diz. We’ve had him up here since last night, mostly puking his guts. We’re still talking to him.”

“Yeah, but now it’s been what? Eighteen hours? He might still be hungover, but he’s dry. All I’m saying is we
know
he’s a junkie. He’s got to get in a program.”

But Glitsky was shaking his head. “No. I’m not buying into that scam.”

“What scam?”

“Couple of days on the county in a nice soft hospital bed. That’s not happening. He was drunk, that’s all.”

This was not the response Hardy expected. Abe was a due process freak—he played by the rules. Maybe, Hardy thought, it was the other thing, the dark room, whatever else was eating him. He started to debate. “C’mon, Abe, how can you know . . . ?”

Glitsky slammed his palm flat on his desk, raised his voice. “He was drunk! That’s all he was, all right? We Mirandized him, he’s talking, we’ll book him when we’re through. You hear me? Just leave this one.”

Stupefied, Hardy sat back in his chair. “What’s going on, Abe?” he asked quietly. “I can’t just leave it. You know that.”

“He killed Elaine.”

“Okay. And we hope he burns in hell for it. But his sister told me he was probably already in withdrawal this morning. He’s got to get some treatment.”

Glitsky remained unmoved. “When they process him in, they’ll give him the standard tests. If it’s heroin, they’ll know soon enough.”

“When will that happen?”

A shrug. “When we’re done here.”

Hardy took that in. “You mind if I ask what he’s doing here right now?”

“Answering questions.” Glitsky came forward in his chair. “And FYI, he waived an attorney. Though maybe if he’d known it was you . . .”

“He doesn’t know me.” Hardy sat back, shifted angrily in his chair. “You’re sweating him, aren’t you?” He glanced toward the door, came back to the lieutenant. “If you were sitting where I am, Abe, you’d tell me something was wrong here. That I wasn’t doing my job right. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.”

Glitsky’s face was a slab. He said nothing.

Hardy sighed. “Have you videotaped a confession?”

A crisp nod. “I believe we’re in the process of doing that very thing.”

Hardy’s blood was running now. He spoke carefully. “So if I’m moving ahead and getting him processed into a program, you’re telling me I’ve got to go around you, is that it? Maybe a judge? Get a writ?”

Glitsky stared over his desk. “You do what you’ve got to do.”

“I intend to.” Hardy paused. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“It’s possible.” The lieutenant looked through him. “Talk to you.”

The visit was over.

Glitsky’s conscience was a mangy dog gnawing at his insides.

After Hardy left, he remained sitting behind the desk in the dim confines of his office for over an hour, until the quality of the light shifted. Outside, it had come to dusk.

He rose, went to his door, opened it and looked out into the homicide detail. The workday had ended, but the door to the interrogation room was still closed. He heard voices behind it. Ridley still had Elaine’s killer in there.

He surveyed the detail. The old school clock over the watercooler said it was six-fifteen. Wearing headphones, head down over his desk, Marcel Lanier moved his lips and jabbed corrections with his pencil as he ran his interview tape and proofed it against what the transcriber had typed. Paul Thieu, who already knew everything anyway, had his nose in a book with what looked like Cyrillic script on the jacket—he was working a Russian mafia-related homicide and Glitsky thought he probably wanted to conquer the language before the case got too far along.

Neither of the inspectors looked up.

Nobody had messed yet with his door, either.

He closed it behind him and pushed in the lock. Flicking on the light, he got in his chair and pulled out his junk drawer, lifted out Elaine’s picture. He couldn’t look at it for long. He realized that his daughter wouldn’t exactly be proud of how he’d handled things so far. But he’d told himself, when he’d given Ridley his marching orders, that this was an instance of bad things happening to bad people. Karma.

Now he was trying to sell himself on the idea that it wasn’t as though he’d been actively complicit in torture, but it wasn’t easy. Though it truly had been Glitsky’s intention to “sweat” the young man in the interrogation room, this might be cruel but it wasn’t unusual—homicide inspectors did it frequently. Under the stressful conditions in that closed-up space, a suspect occasionally would waive his rights to an attorney, or tell a story that he’d later wished he hadn’t. Once in a while, as in Burgess’s case, he would even confess under conditions that might not qualify as legally coercive.

But now he realized that it had gone on long enough. He’d better go and tell Ridley to end the interrogation, get the suspect in the system. Burgess had killed Elaine. There was no doubt about that, and it was important that no screwup create a hole he could slither through.

He stood, grabbed his leather jacket, opened his door again. If Ridley had gotten the impression because of Abe’s obvious hostility to Burgess that the suspect should be sweated beyond human endurance, Glitsky would have to try and correct that. There was an important difference, he knew, between wishing pain and suffering on someone and making him experience it.

It was called civilization.

S
harron Pratt, the district attorney of the city and county of San Francisco, sipped a preprandial newfangled cocktail concocted from gin and chocolate liqueur and served in a tall blue martini glass. Perched on a high stool at one of the financial district’s power restaurants, Sharron cut an elegant figure in her tailored blue suit. She wore her hair shoulder length and made no effort to hide the gray that had once lightly peppered and now dominated it. Lightly made up—a touch of mascara and a subtle shade of lip gloss—she was very easy to look at. Rimless bifocal eyeglasses added a few years to her true age of forty-four, but behind them, green-flecked eyes sparkled youthfully. Her wide mouth animated her face, the plane of her cheeks was well defined, her skin smooth. Even with the added gray and the no-nonsense glasses, she was a woman who’d come into herself as she’d aged, and was now far more handsome than she’d been a decade before.

But internally, she suffered from a great discontent. Since the upset victory resulting in her election three years before, Sharron Pratt had suffered a steady decline in popularity. Now, with her chance for reelection coming up in November, she had eight months to recoup the eleven points which the latest poll told her she had lost.

“I don’t understand how this has happened, Gabe. I really don’t.”

Gabriel Torrey, her chief assistant D.A. and political mentor, was methodically breaking apart the pistachios from the bowl on the bar, gathering the nuts onto his napkin. When he’d accumulated somewhere between eight and a dozen, he would pop them into his mouth, washing them down with nonalcoholic beer.

Torrey had no trouble understanding what had happened to Sharron Pratt’s fans. Conveying it to her was the difficult part.

He shrugged, cracked a nut, keeping a casual tone. “Crime’s up, Sharron. Convictions are down. That’s the short answer. People are tired of it.”

“I’m tired of it, too, Gabe.” Pratt leaned forward on her stool, moved a hand onto his sleeve. “But the damn police are so hostile and we can’t seem to get any coverage . . . what?”

Torrey was shaking his head. “People are impatient with the excuses, too, Sharron. It’s been three years. People are thinking that if you haven’t been able to fix things in that time, you’re not going to.” He’d only cracked two shells, but he threw the nuts into his mouth early. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news here, but the agenda you got elected on last time just hasn’t played in the real world.”

“It would, though. If everyone would just get behind it.”

Torrey knew he had to answer with a great deal of care. This woman might be his bedmate at widely spaced intervals when the stars were aligned just right, but every day she was, after all, his boss. Traditionally she did not warm to philosophical argument.

She’d worked the legal trenches in San Francisco for years—social worker, public defender, lawyer for various civil rights coalitions—and she knew what played in this town. Her election had confirmed that the people were behind her. They were ready for a change. No more white guys prosecuting minorities. It was going to be a new age.

She had won by, among other things, promising to do all she could to stop police brutality. Stop prosecuting victimless crimes. Don’t charge petty drug users or prostitutes. Institute counseling and rehab programs for people whose emotional and substance problems caused them to break the law.

Her administration was going to be known not for enforcing outmoded laws but for doing what was right. And Sharron Pratt always knew, without doubt, what that was—no matter what, she was on the side of the angels.

But if Torrey wanted to get Sharron elected again, he was going to have to get her to bend, except Torrey knew—to borrow from an old song—that Pratt was an oak, not a willow. She did not bend.

Maybe, though, he could get her to acknowledge that a private moral position did not have to be reflected absolutely in the political arena. Maybe there could be a gray area, although gray areas, too, God knew (or at least Torrey did), were not Pratt’s long suit. “I don’t know,” Torrey began again. “Maybe people didn’t realize how the results of your—our—programs would affect them.”

Pratt’s nostrils flared and her vibrant eyes flashed. “What do you mean by that, Gabe?”

“Well, let’s take the homeless, for example. Now, being homeless is not a crime in itself.”

“Not a crime at all.” Pratt employed a crisp school-marmish correction almost as a verbal tic.

But Torrey was used to her, and her response didn’t slow him down. “And no one’s saying it is. But you’ll recall one of your campaign issues was that we treat the homeless with respect, and that seemed to strike a positive chord with the voters.”

“Absolutely, as well it should.”

Also, Torrey was thinking, remove the word “should” from her conversation and his boss would become functionally mute. “Yes, well, in practice you have to admit the policy caused some problems.”

This, Torrey knew, was a whopper of an understatement. After Pratt had been swept to power on a tide of benevolent humanity, she formed a coalition with the mayor and several supervisors and, to a great deal of positive press, announced to the country that under this administration, San Francisco would be a haven for the homeless. No longer would the police hassle the poor and downtrodden. There would be no more rousting. There would be city-funded programs for free meals. Armies of volunteers would move out from the soup kitchen base and take sandwiches to the hungry where they lived.

In short order, this utopian policy resulted in a mass migration of many of the nation’s chronically unemployed to the City by the Bay. Within months, camps of vagrants, drunks, the psychologically impaired and drug addicts had essentially taken over Golden Gate Park, Dolores Park, any number of neighborhood green areas. The downtown streets became gauntlets of panhandlers, drunks in doorways, public urinators. And then, as the worst became bolder, polite requests for spare change became belligerent demands and gave way to intimidations, purse snatchings, shakedowns and muggings.

“But those weren’t the homeless we were trying to help,” Sharron said. “They were the criminal element, that’s all. People needed to see that. We just need to educate them.”

Torrey was shaking his head. “No, Sharron. They’ll never see it. They think you let the bums in. You ruined the tourist industry.”

Pratt straightened her back and lifted her martini glass to her lips. She sipped contemplatively. “Is it too late?”

“Let me ask you one, Sharron. Are you sure you want to keep doing this? That you want to run again?”

“That’s two.” She smiled halfheartedly, lightly touched Torrey’s arm again. “Do I want to keep doing this?” she repeated. “We’ve done a lot of good, Gabe, haven’t we?”

Again, Torrey crafted a careful response. “I think we’ve changed the agenda in a positive way, Sharron. People are thinking about the office—the district attorney—in a way they never had before, now more as a force for social, maybe even moral, leadership. And all that’s to the good.”

“But . . .”

Torrey popped a couple of nuts. “But the fact remains that most of the electorate seems to have returned to the theory that the main role of the district attorney is to prosecute people who break the laws. And that’s never been your forte. You want to help people. That’s always been what’s driven you. Which is why I ask if you want to keep doing this.”

She sighed, considering. “It’s a bully pulpit, Gabe. We’re way ahead of the curve in our thinking. We knew that going in. We can’t just keep building more prisons and throwing more people into them. We’ve got to—”

Torrey put his hand on Pratt’s arm, stopping her. They had to educate the masses, and the criminals, and the victims, and do counseling, and rehab, and yada, yada, yada. At some point, before he’d come to work full-time in the Hall of Justice and become immersed in the stupidly hopeless march of crime through the system, he’d even believed a good portion of it. But that day was in the past.

“Let’s keep this discussion on point,” he said a little more firmly than he’d planned. But before his boss could react negatively, he pressed on. “We’ve tried to raise the moral bar, Sharron. We’ve done the right thing time and time again. But the polls are telling us that the people aren’t getting the message, or it’s not the one they want. Now the question is, do you want to go ahead? And if you do, I really think the wise move would be to consider”—he paused—“refining your position slightly.”

Her mouth twisted in distaste. “No.”

He almost said, “Well, that was a delightful exchange of ideas.” But the words that came out were, “No what? You don’t want to go ahead?”

“No. I don’t want to quit. I’ve worked hard for this position, for the people’s trust. I am the absolutely best person for district attorney. And let’s not forget that I’m running the office the way it should be run.”

Torrey brought a hand to his mouth to hide the grimace. That old “should” again. Pratt’s vision was at least entirely, self-righteously consistent, he thought: never mind the way things actually were. Pratt had a vision of a better world, and the people who didn’t share it were stupid, damned, ignorant, venal, criminal, clueless or all of the above. Therefore, they didn’t count. But her adviser had to try to get Pratt at least to realize that their votes did. “Okay,” he said. “Then maybe it’s just a question of perception.”

Pratt’s bright eyes sparked. She liked this direction. “Of what?”

“That you’re soft on crime.”

The spark turned dark. “That’s rubbish. I
hate
crime. Why do you think I ran for the job in the first place? It’s criminals—the people—that I don’t hate. I try to understand them, see what happened, how they got—”

He brought some more pressure to her forearm. “Sharron. Perception, okay?”

A show of reluctance, then she nodded. “Go on.”

“The killing of Elaine Wager by this vagrant.”

“That is so horrible. I loved Elaine, Gabe.”

“Everybody loved Elaine, Sharron. That’s my point. Here’s a much-loved, well-known community figure, daughter of a popular ex-senator, and African-American to boot. She is brutally murdered by a homeless white man for a few coins in her purse. Are you seeing where I’m going with this?”

To his satisfied surprise, he saw that his idea had clicked with Sharron.

“And one other thing,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to try the case myself.”

This did bring a clearly visible reaction, almost a start. “But I need . . .” She slowed herself down. “Why would you want to do that, Gabe?”

Torrey had stopped chewing his nuts. He put down his glass, met Sharron’s eyes. “When she first came up . . .”

“This is Elaine?”

He nodded. “When Chris Locke was D.A.”

Her mouth tightened. In private, Sharron referred to Locke’s administration as “the Neanderthal years.” Since her own election, she had purged the office of all but a very few of Locke’s old prosecutors, and it was no secret that this was part of the reason that now her office couldn’t seem to convict anyone. She’d had to let them go for their political incorrectness, to say nothing of the general culture of incorrigibility. Locke had been black but he’d hired, in Pratt’s view, far too many white males who’d adopted a macho “win at all costs” mentality that had infected the office—getting convictions, sure, but at what cost?

Sharron’s own motto was: “There’s more to being a prosecutor than getting convictions.” To which the Locke crowd tended to respond, “Oh yeah? Like what?”

So any mention of Chris Locke and his administration put Sharron Pratt on the defensive, and it was immediately apparent that she was on it now, the fingers of her right hand thrumming uneasily on the bar.

Torrey carefully reached over and covered her hand with his. “Elaine was having an affair with Locke.”

“With the D.A.? While she worked for him? How much younger was she than he was? God, that man!”

Torrey suppressed his desire to point out to his boss that the two of them—he and Sharron—were in precisely the same relationship that Elaine and Locke had enjoyed. There would be no point—Sharron would be hard pressed to see any similarity, in spite of the fact that in both cases the D.A. was sleeping with an assistant D.A. But Locke had been a predator of gullible young women; she was nothing like that. She and Torrey had a mature relationship between equals, and that could not have been true with Locke and Elaine.

Instead, he waited her out in silence. Then: “In any event, after Locke was killed, she needed a shoulder to cry on, and we—”