Dawn Patrol

100

Downtown San Diego is surprisingly small.

You can easily walk around it in the better part of an hour, and it might be the only major city in the country where a healthy person can walk from the airport to downtown with no problem.

That walk would take you along the bay that borders downtown on the west and south, and created the city. Mexican explorers stopped in San Diego back in the 1500s for its excellent harbor and left behind the usual mixture of soldiers and missionaries that defined most of Southern California until the Anglos took it in 1843. By the 1850s, a fleet of Chinese junks fished for tuna from the harbor, but were later moved out by Anglo and Italian fishermen.

Downtown was pretty sleepy until the big real estate boom of the 1880s, when town fathers like the Hortons, Crosswhites, and Marstons built up a legitimate downtown with office buildings, stores, banks, and restaurants. The seedy Stingaree District, with its bars, gambling joints, and brothels thrived between downtown and the southern harbor, and madams like Ida Bailey and gamblers and procurers like Wyatt Earp and his wife made fortunes and gave San Diego the risquй reputation that still clings to it today down in what is now known as the Gaslamp District.

But it was the U.S. Navy that really defined downtown San Diego and still does. From virtually anywhere you stand in downtown, you can see a navy base or a ship. Take that walk from the airport and you'll see aircraft carriers docked in the harbor, navy planes landing at their base on North Island. Sometimes you'll see a submarine pop up from underwater right in the bay and glide into port.

San Diego is a navy town.

Back in 1915, the good city fathers chased all the brothels out of the Gaslamp, but then they had to invite them back when the navy threatened to stop its ships from calling in port, an embargo that would have bankrupted the city.

And it's more than symbolic that downtown's major street, Broadway, ends on a pier.

A few blocks east on Broadway sits the courthouse.

Petra, with Boone in the passenger seat and Tammy in the back, pulls into the parking structure of her office building and finds her designated spot.

Tammy looks great cleaned up in a cream-colored blouse over a black skirt that Petra bought for her in the ladies' department at Nordstrom, which is really no surprise. What did surprise Petra was how good Boone could look.

She didn't think he owned a sports jacket, never mind the tailored black suit with a crisp white shirt and a sedate blue tie.

“Wow,” she said. “I had no idea.”

“I have two suits,” Boone replied. “A summer wedding and funeral suit and a winter wedding and funeral suit. This is the winter wedding and funeral suit, which doubles as a going-to-court suit.”

“Do you go to court a lot?”

“No.” Nor to very many weddings, Boone thinks, and, even more fortunate, to fewer funerals.

They walk out of the parking structure and walk the two blocks to the courthouse.

The courtroom is small and modern. On the third floor of the Superior Court Building here in the downtown area, the room is painted in those institutional blue tones that are meant to soothe and don't. The two counsel tables are uncomfortably close together, and the witness stand is close to the jury.

The gallery holds only about twenty people, but that's ample space for this morning. An insurance bad-faith case isn't sexy and rarely attracts much of a crowd. A few of the courthouse regulars, trial junkies, mostly retired people who have nothing more exciting to do, are sitting in the gallery, looking bored and vaguely disappointed. An insurance company representative, conspicuous in his gray suit, sits in the front row taking notes.

Johnny and Harrington are there.

Semi-pissed off, because they couldn't find a judge who'd let them take Tammy in before she testified in the civil case. Semi, because they really want to talk to her about the Angela Hart case, but on the other hand, if she's here to fuck Danny Silver, that can't be a bad thing. Let her get deeper into the shit with Silver, so she has no place else to go except to them.

Petra sits at the defense table.

You couldn't tell from her looks, Boone thinks as he slips in and sits down in the back row, that she's been up for more than twenty-four hours, almost shot, and nearly frozen. She looks fresh and focused in a pinstriped charcoal gray suit, her hair pinned up, subtle makeup on her eyes.

Very professional.

Maximum cool.

She turns and favors him with a smile as subtle as her makeup before she turns around to watch Alan Burke, who is just starting his examination of Tammy Roddick.

She looks good. Just enough like a stripper to believe that she was with Silver Dan the night his warehouse burned down, not enough like a stripper to lose credibility. She's wearing a lot less eye makeup, but those green cat eyes still jump out at you. And she's calm.

Ice.

Alan Burke always looks good. Hair combed straight back like a blond Pat Riley, his skin tanned from surfing but glowing from the SPF lotion he uses religiously. Alan may be the last guy left in the Western world who still looks good in a double-breasted suit, and this morning he has on a navy blue Armani, a white shirt, and a canary yellow tie.

He's smiling.

Alan is always smiling, even when things are going bad, but especially when he's shredding an opposing witness. But he has a friendly witness now, one who's about to kill his opponent for him.

Dan Silver sits beside his lawyer at the plaintiff's table, giving Tammy the stink eye. Dan is one of those guys who never look good no matter what you dress them in. If it's true that the clothes make the man, then nothing can make Dan Silver. He's forsaken the cowboy rig this morning for an ill-fitting suit, tight across the shoulders but baggy against his trunk. The suit is a greenish gray, which does nothing to help Dan's sallow skin, bad complexion, and heavy jowls. His hair is in an old-fashioned pompadour with a little ducktail, a statement that things were better in the 1950s. Now he sits at the plaintiff's table and glares at Tammy.

Silver's lawyer is the infamous Todd “the Rod” Eckhardt, a plaintiffs' lawyer known around the greater San Diego Bar community for his shameless willingness to sue anybody for anything. Todd has sued for all those reasons that make the general public loathe and despise lawyers- the hot coffee spilled on the lap of a driver doing seventy in a thirty-five-mph zone; the “food product” that came out of a microwave hot; and, Boone's personal favorite, a lady of the evening who sued a blessed-by-nature john for neck injuries that would prevent her from ever effectively again carrying out her trade and earning a living.

So Todd the Rod is a millionaire many times over and doesn't try to disguise the fact. He comes into depositions and hearings with a valet- yes, a valet-who looks like he came out of some 1940s British black-and-white film about exploring the Irrawaddy or something, carries Todd's briefcases and Red Files, and helps him off with his coat. Todd leaves him at home for trials, however, lest it provoke jealousy from the jurors. At the trial level, Todd is strictly a man of the people.

His only saving grace as far as Boone is concerned-and Todd has tried to hire Boone on several occasions-is that Todd is perhaps the homeliest human being ever to waddle into a courtroom. Todd would have to approach obese from the upside-looking at Todd, it's hard to believe that he has a skeletal structure, more like he's a single-cell-well, a fat single cell-organism with a shock of white hair, bug eyes, and a very large brain. If you propped Todd up beside Dave the Love God, you could only come to the conclusion that extraterrestrials do roam the earth, because these two specimens could not possibly spring from the same species. Todd doesn't sit down; he sort of oozes into a chair and assumes a slouching posture that makes you think he's Play-Doh that some negligent child left out in the rain. Greasy sweat runs out of his pores like an oil leak. He's disgusting.

Todd the Rod got his sobriquet back in the nineties when a lot of San Diego beachside houses were collapsing. Todd would stick a metal rod into the dirt of the building pad, pronounce it “improperly compacted,” file suit against the contractor, the city engineers, the building inspector, and the insurance company, and usually win.

Alan has a different version of how Todd got his name. “Don't let his prehuman appearance fool you,” Alan told Boone before a trial against Todd a couple of years ago. “If you give him the slightest opening, he'll jam a rod so far up your ass, it will come out your mouth.”

So Alan has no intention of giving Todd the Rod an opening. In fact, he's getting ready to counterjam the rod. He asks Tammy the usual warmup questions-name, address-and then gets right into it.

“And where were you employed at that time?” Alan is asking.

“Silver Dan's,” Tammy replies.

“What did you do there?” Alan asks.

“I was a dancer,” Tammy says, looking calmly at the jury.

“A dancer.”

“A stripper, ” Tammy says.

“Objection,” Todd mumbles.

The judge, Justice Hammond, is a former federal prosecutor, a by-the-book, no-nonsense hard-ass not known for his patience with courtroom antics or his sense of humor. Like most members of the human race, he despises Todd the Rod, but he's keeping his emotions very much in check.

“Overruled,” Hammond says.

Alan continues: “And were you at Silver Dan's the night of October 17, 2006?”

“Yes,” Tammy says.

“And were you there after closing?” Alan asks.

“Yes, I was.”

“Why?”

“I was dating Dan at the time,” Tammy says. “We were going to go out to breakfast.”

“And did you go out to breakfast?”

“Not directly,” Tammy says, looking at Dan.

“Where did you go?”

“Dan said he had an errand to do,” Tammy says, “at a warehouse he owned.”

“And did you go to the warehouse?” Alan asks, closing in. He spots Boone in the gallery and gives him a quick wink before turning back to Tammy.

“We did,” Tammy says.

Alan turns his back to her to look at the jury, then at Dan, then at Todd-just to stick it in a little-then back at the jury. He walks over to the jury box and asks, with the immaculate timing of a really good stand-up comic, “When you went there, did you get out of the car?”

“Yes.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I went inside.”

“And…” Alan pauses to signal the jury that something important is coming up. “… did you see anything unusual?”

Here it comes, Boone thinks. A few more words out of her mouth and we're done. We can all get on with our lives, and I can try to find a little peace inside a giant wave.

Tammy looks straight at Dan, who pulls a little silver cross on a chain out of his pocket and fingers it nervously. Yeah, Boone thinks as he watches this, like Jesus is going to jump in on your side, pull you out of the deep water.

“No,” Tammy says.

Shit, Boone thinks.

Alan keeps the smile on his face, but it definitely tightens up. This wasn't the answer he was expecting. Boone can see Petra's back stiffen, her head straighten up.

Dan Silver just smiles.

Alan moves away from the jury and walks up to the witness stand. “I'm sorry, Ms. Roddick. Perhaps I wasn't being clear. When you went into the warehouse that night, did you see Mr. Silver there?”

“Yes.”

“And was he doing something?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“He was just looking around, checking the back door, that kind of thing,” Tammy says. “Then we went to Denny's.”

She looks at the jurors with an expression of total innocence.

“Ms. Roddick,” Alan asks, his voice edging toward threat, “didn't you tell me that you saw Mr. Silver pouring kerosene on the floor in the basement?”

“No,” Tammy says.

“You didn't tell me,” Burke says, “that you saw him run a twisted sheet into that kerosene?”

“Objection.”

“No.”

“Or hold his cigarette lighter to that sheet and set it on fire?” Burke asks.

“Objection…”

“No.”

“Ob-”

“I have your sworn deposition here,” Burke says. “I can show it to you, if you'd like.”

“-jection!”

Boone sees Petra start hammering on her laptop, bringing up Tammy's deposition transcript. The jurors are literally leaning forward in their seats, totally awake now; the case has suddenly become really interesting, like they see on Law amp; Order.

“Yeah, okay. I told you those things,” Tammy says.

“Thank you,” Alan says. But he's not happy. Torching your own witness, as it were, is never a good thing, because the other side gets to stand up and confront her with the conflict in her own testimony. But it's better than nothing.

Except Tammy says, “Because you promised me money to say it.”

That's not good, Boone thinks.

The jurors gasp. The trial junkies in the gallery sit up with ears pricked. Petra turns in her chair and looks at Boone. Then she shakes her head sadly and goes back to her computer.

Todd the Rod morphs into a semi-vertical position that could be mistaken for an actual human being standing up. “Move for a directed verdict, Your Honor. Not to mention sanctions for gross misconduct.”

Alan says, “Mistrial, Your Honor.”

“I'll see you both in chambers,” Hammond says. “Now.”

Fucked, Boone thinks as he watches Todd the Rod ooze toward the judge's chambers.

Epic macking fucked.