The Hearing

28

Isaac Glitsky was adamant. 'He's not going out anywhere. Doctor's orders.'

'But yesterday-'

'Yesterday,' Jacob interjected from behind his brother, 'he snuck out. Made believe he was going to bed, sent us out to have a nice day, then went out and tried to kill himself. Can you believe that?'

Hardy nodded. 'Sounds like your father.'

'He's been asleep for twelve hours,' Isaac said. 'His body wants to recover even if he doesn't.'

Hardy was confused. 'I thought… he told me… I mean, they let him out.'

'To go home, maybe putter around in the house, avoid stress. That's all.' Isaac had his arms crossed over his chest. 'Let me guess, he left that part out.'

'He said he was fine. Cleared. Ready to rock and roll.'

'Which he is not,' Jacob said. 'Maybe in a week.'

'Maybe.' The older brother wasn't making any promises. 'The heart's got to heal before he stresses it again. You'd think that would occur to him.'

'You'd think so,' Hardy agreed. He shook his head, frustrated. 'I love your father, but the man can be a moron. Tell him I said so, then sit on him if you have to.'

Glitsky might be reluctant to call Treya, but Hardy had no problem with it. It had occurred to him that, since everybody was essentially working to the same end, it made sense that everyone do it in the same place. He'd called her at Rand and Jackman first thing this Friday morning and she had agreed. She'd be delighted to come to his offices and help facilitate the work of the associates. She might even have some ideas of her own. Hardy told her he'd be happy to use them.

Amy Wu stood an inch over five feet tall. She had large enough breasts so that people rarely noticed the bit of thickness at her waist. Half-Chinese and half-black, she had an unusual and extraordinarily compelling face. Under a small and flattened nose, her sensuous lips might have been collagened but were not. Her complexion was dark honey, small-pored, unlined. She was twenty-six years old and had never bought a drink in her life without someone asking for her identification. There was a heaviness to the lids under dark brown, almost liquid eyes, although she was rarely taken for an Asian. Thick, straight, shining black hair cascaded a few inches past her shoulders. At the office, she dressed in a woman's business suit, but today she was in jeans and hiking boots, a black turtleneck sweater.

She'd already spoken to five students who had been in Elaine's moot court class. They had all directed her to a single student. Muhammed Malouf Adek was more than happy to talk to her, as what young man would not be. He was sitting on the floor in one of the hallways at Hastings, a book open on his legs. He was eating an apple. Amy hovered over him until he looked up. 'What are you studying?' she asked, smiling down.

In fifteen minutes, they were in the cafeteria. She told him a version of the truth about who she was and the general reason she was here – to talk about Elaine. It didn't seem to bother him.

'People say that you and she were close at one time.'

He shrugged. 'She was my teacher.'

'I'd understood it was a little more than that.' Her eyebrows went up ingenuously.

'All right. They have a mentor program here. I signed up for that. I was doing poorly in my other courses.' Muhammed looked at her with a kind of challenge in his eyes.

She pegged his age at perhaps a year older than she was – maybe he was even thirty, which was slightly old for a law student. But his eyes were too bright, too hard and piercing. His beard was short, extremely thick, almost like wool. His teeth were white, but very uneven, and his hygiene was poor – he hadn't washed his hair in a while; his jeans looked as though they would stand up by themselves; it appeared he'd worn the brown shirt for most of the week.

'And you became friends?'

'I don't know about that. We did not go out.'

Amy wrinkled up her face, confusion all over it.

He couldn't take his eyes off her. 'What's the matter?'

'Only that I've heard differently. I wanted to talk to somebody who knew Elaine pretty well, and if that's not you…' She made to get up.

He gripped her arm above the wrist. 'We had coffee a few times,' he said. 'But there wasn't anything… between us.' Realizing what he'd done, he released his grip. 'What do you want to know about Elaine for, anyway? She was not what she pretended to be.'

'And what was that?'

He hesitated, decided against answering.

'Muhammed,' she said. 'You've heard she died last week, haven't you?'

He nodded. 'It was the will of Allah.'

'Well, yes, but it was maybe a little more than that. Somebody killed her.'

He sat up abruptly. 'That was not me. They arrested that other man.'

'I know. No one is saying it was you. I'm not saying that.' She smiled again. 'Please, Muhammed, we're just talking, all right?'

'But what are we talking about?'

'We're talking about who she was.' She leaned in closer to him. 'We were thinking of some kind of a memorial, maybe a statue, something like that. It will be very nice, out in the lobby, as a tribute to her.'

'To Elaine?' Amy realized that Treya had chosen a perfect cover story for them. Clearly infuriated, Muhammed's eyes were burning.

'Yes. Elaine. But you know, it's political. We would not want to go to all that trouble and expense if there was some embarrassing… if she-'

'She was a whore. A liar and a whore. She believed in nothing.'

'Well, surely-'

He slammed the table. All around the room, other students looked up, startled out of their studies. Muhammed was oblivious of it. 'She pretended to be coming to Islam. I would read from the Koran, and she would nod, pretending. "Yes," she would say, "that's interesting. That's good." But it was all false. She was white inside. She sold her body for their money, for her doctor's money.' There was spittle on Muhammed's lips. His breath came in ragged little gulps.

'When was the last time you saw her?'

'She was here,' he rasped. 'She was always here.'

'Here at the school?'

'Yes.'

'But I mean alone. Did you see her alone after she got engaged?'

'I told her she had to stop. It was all a lie. She was tormenting me.'

'Stop what? You mean call off her marriage?'

'No. Teaching here. Coming here.'

'That was tormenting you?'

He nodded. 'Every time I saw her. I knew she was laughing at me that I had believed her. I told her she had to stop.'

'When was this?'

'This new semester. Just now.' He gripped her hand again, so hard that it hurt her. 'You must not make this thing, this memorial. She was a whore. She was laughing at Allah and, of course-' The eyes. The eyes were crazy. He laughed. 'That is what happened, you know. He put an end to that.'

'Abe? Are you all right?'

'I'm under house arrest. My boys.'

'Dismas said you were in bed.'

'That would be accurate, but the prescription wasn't bed rest. The doctor just doesn't want to see me out walking the streets, but he'd actually like me to move around a little here.'

'But today? Your heart-'

'Is pumping away even as we speak. I'm sorry I didn't call you earlier myself. I just woke up.'

'That's a long sleep. It's almost eleven o'clock. Are you sure you're OK? Something else didn't happen, did it?'

'No, nothing happened.'

'Really?'

'Really. How are we doing on our work?'

'It's moving along, but I'm not calling about that. I'm calling about you.'

'I'm fine. This is routine. Honest. A couple more days and I'm dancing.'

'But not till the doctor says so, OK?'

'My jailers will see to that.'

'But you yourself?'

'Me myself, too.'

'Would you promise me?'

'I promise.'

It seemed forever before she spoke again. 'All right, then,' she said. 'All right.'

Treya knew that Jonas Walsh took Friday afternoons off, so she had called him at home Thursday night to prevail upon him to let somebody from the firm come by the condo he and Elaine had shared in Tiburon and look at Elaine's things the next day. She wasn't demanding as a matter of law, but requesting as a favor, as a friend. Elaine might have left something lying around that might prove useful to their investigation.

He didn't like it, but the question of what he was going to do with Elaine's belongings was still unresolved. And Treya knew that after his apology in the R &J offices here last week, that she had some leverage. He'd let them look.

She was right.

But that didn't mean he had to be pleasant about it. Walsh shook hands perfunctorily with Curtis Rhodin, but made no effort to try to be friends. 'This is a total waste of some very valuable time.'

Treya had briefed Rhodin about what to expect from Walsh. In any event, it was unlikely the greeting would have thrown Curtis, who was no wimp, off his stride. He exuded confidence and savoir-vivre. At six-three, he towered over the other man. There was no sign of fat on his body, although he carried two hundred pounds to Walsh's one seventy. The charcoal Brioni suit had set him back nine hundred dollars, but he fitted into it so perfectly that it might have been his day-to-day lounging attire. His face was long and slender, his eyes somber. If Modigliani had painted men, Rhodin could have been one of his subjects.

'If you've got somewhere else you need to be, Doctor, I'll be fine here on my own.' They were in a large, bright living room with sparse, almost antiseptic modern furnishings and floor-to-ceiling windows. The condo was set on a hillside overlooking the yacht harbor. The sun was out brightly here twenty-five miles north of the city, and from where they stood in the living room, the panorama was breathtaking – the Marin headlands and Mount Tamalpais on the right, Angel Island and the graceful though largely unsung Richmond Bridge in front of them, a glittering white-capped bay under a robin's egg sky. 'This is beautiful,' Rhodin said. 'I couldn't get any work done if I lived here.'

'This isn't where I work,' the doctor replied, 'and I hope the view won't be too distracting today. I don't really understand all this continuing investigation into Elaine's murder. They've got her killer in jail, for Christ's sake. I'd like to see an end to it.'

Rhodin nodded understandingly and tried to sound prosecutorial. 'We're on the same page, then. But we need to make sure some surprise doesn't come up during the trial. To tell you the truth, I don't even know what I'm supposed to be looking for. If you've got other plans, that's fine, but if not and you'd like to show me where to look, it might move the process along.'

Reluctantly, Walsh led him into the back of the condo, past the gourmet kitchen – a granite counter-top with dishes piled on it, more dishes stacked in the sink, a strong odor of garbage. There was an office to his left down a short hallway – two desks, two computers, some file cabinets. The bedroom was a few steps further along on the right and Walsh showed him in. He hadn't made the bed and made no apology for it. 'That's her closet,' he said, pointing. 'The near one is her dresser. I'll be in the office.'

Left alone, Rhodin went to work. In spite of what he'd told Walsh, he had received a reasonably specific laundry list from Hardy and Glitsky the day before. Mostly, it was stuff he'd expect to find in the office – a Rolodex file, maybe, or old checkbooks and financial records, perhaps a diary. But there might be something elsewhere – it was worth looking everywhere.

Curtis Rhodin was a methodical man. He had known Elaine only slightly – she was older and a partner at Rand and Jackman and light years from him on many levels – and it felt strange to be going through her things, but he knew what he was supposed to do, and he was going to do it.

She had a lot of dresses, thirty pairs of shoes. There was a smaller, built-in set of drawers in her closet containing sweaters, blouses, exercise clothes. At the bottom of the lowest one, under a pile of sweatshirts, he found a smallish, flat white box. Taking it out and opening it up, he recognized it for what it was – Elaine's collection of meaningless memorabilia from her past.

Rhodin smiled to himself. He had a similar stash himself, although his was a cigar box in which he kept twenty or thirty stupid items that he just couldn't bring himself to discard – a jade rock he got diving off Big Sur, a guitar pick from a B.B. King concert he'd gone to in college, his first pocket-knife, a diamond tie tack in case they ever came back in style, a signed Willie Mays rookie year baseball card. Junk. But priceless junk.

Elaine's box wasn't all that different really, considering she was a woman. There were several pins for various political campaigns – her mother's, Chris Locke's, Sharron Pratt's. A man's college ring. A garter. A.38 caliber bullet. A packet of business cards with a rubber band around them. Many coins from different foreign countries. He closed the box back up – this was coming back with him.

A framed picture of Elaine's mother rested on top of her dresser next to the lamp. In the drawers, he found underwear, socks, foldables. Condoms. The top right drawer, however, contained nothing at all, and this straightened Rhodin up in surprise. He walked across to the office and asked Walsh if he could come in for a minute. Sighing, putting down his magazine, the doctor labored up and followed him. 'Do you know what she kept in this drawer?' Curtis asked.

Walsh looked, shrugged. 'I guess not much. Did you just take something out of it?'

'No, it was like this. Was it always like this?'

Another shrug. 'I don't know. I didn't go through her drawers.'

'No, of course not,' Rhodin said, 'but there was nothing at all in this one. That seems a little odd, doesn't it?'

'I don't know,' Walsh repeated. 'I didn't take anything out of it.'

'But it sure seemed like he might have.' He was back now at Freeman's office, in the Solarium reporting to Treya and Amy. He'd eventually left Tiburon with a cardboard box now about a quarter filled with what he'd collected from the office and the rest of the house, including a copy of the Koran and, of course, the white memento box. On a whim, at the last moment, he'd also thrown in the framed photograph of Loretta Wager. But it was the empty drawer that had captured his interest. 'Any of you guys have a completely empty dresser drawer?'

'Drawers don't get empty,' Amy said. 'They get full about ten minutes after you move in someplace. Then too full. It's a law of nature. He must have cleaned it out.'

Treya disagreed. 'He would never have done that and left it empty knowing we were coming to look through her things. He would have put something back in before we got there.'

Rhodin had his own suggestion. 'Maybe he didn't really imagine that it would make any impression? I mean, it was just an empty drawer. Doesn't mean anything.'

'No,' Treya was sure of it. 'If he emptied it, he would have remembered and it would have seemed significant.'

'Then she emptied it,' Amy said, 'Elaine.'

They were all with their thoughts a moment. Treya finally spoke up. 'If she was leaving him, if they'd had a fight and she walked out one night, she might have just taken a handful of underwear.'

'I've got another one,' Rhodin said. 'In the bathroom, she had a couple of months' worth of birth control pills, but in her dresser she had maybe a dozen condoms.'

Amy had an answer for that. 'So she really didn't want to get pregnant.'

'Or she wasn't being faithful,' Rhodin said.

Treya looked at both of them. 'Or she knew he wasn't.'

'Dash Logan?'

The lawyer looked up from the newspaper he was reading, which happened to be the Democrat. Jupiter was beginning to hop in the long slide of a Friday afternoon, but he was sitting alone in his usual back booth, a bowl of pretzels on the table next to him, a half full glass of beer growing warm at his elbow. The look on his face was welcoming, untroubled. 'You got me.' He ran his eyes down the man who'd addressed him, extended his hand. 'And you'd be Mr Hardy, I presume. Dismas? Was that the name, Dismas?'

'Still is.' Hardy took the hand – a firm grip – and slid in across from him. 'You are one tough man to get a hold of.'

Logan nodded sympathetically. 'I hear that a lot. Sorry. I must be having some kind of mid-life crisis or something. My motivation's just gone in the toilet. I got your calls, though.'

'That's nice. I was starting to think the phone's weren't working.'

'Didn't I say you could always get me here?'

'Yes, you did.'

'Well, then.' He flashed a smile. It seemed genuine enough. Hardy didn't have to remind himself, though, that the greatest con men oozed sincerity – it was their stock in trade. 'Hey, listen, let me buy you a beer for your trouble. If it's any consolation, I would have called you Monday, but I figure now, Friday afternoon, nobody's in when you call them anyway. It'll wait for the weekend, right?' He raised a hand, flagging the bartender. 'Wally, a couple of cold ones, see voo play. What do you drink, Dismas?'

Hardy made an apologetic gesture. 'I've got to stick with water. I see a client at five.'

'And they wouldn't want their lawyer to have a drink in the afternoon? I hear you. Wally? Just one. And some of that stuff fish fuck in.' A grin back at Hardy. 'You know, I'll tell you, that's why I stopped working out of my office.'

'Why's that, Dash?'

'Why? 'Cause when clients come to an office, they see the trappings, you know? You've got the secretary and the law library and the phones and all that shit – which is just what it is, shit – and they get so they expect the rest of the package that goes with it. Hey, thanks, Wally. Here's looking at you, Dismas.' He held up his new glass of beer and touched Hardy's glass. 'So anyway, I'm not that guy. Used to try to be, but it didn't work. So people would come in with these expectations and I'd dash 'em. They wanted a different kind of lawyer and God knows there's enough of 'em. But if they want me – and a lot of folks do – they can come down and meet me here and they know what they're getting. No frills, maybe, but no bullshit either. And most of 'em, end of the day, they go away happy. So,' his limpid blue eyes fixed Hardy over the rim of his beer glass, 'I'm assuming you've reconsidered on settling with McNeil.'

'Actually, not.' Hardy sat back and enjoyed Dash's reaction, the quick snap in the mellow facade – a blink of an eye – then the impressive return to how he'd been. 'I'm here on another matter entirely. Do you know a kid named Cullen Alsop?'

Logan appeared to think about it. 'Some cop – Banks, I think his name was – was asking about him in here the day before yesterday. OD, wasn't it?'

'Yeah. Looks like.'

'So this boy Alsop,' Logan asked, 'was he your client?'

'No,' Hardy said. 'My client's Cole Burgess.' If the name registered, Logan didn't show it. 'Elaine Wager?'

His face fell. 'Oh, Elaine.' Logan had sympathy down pat. He clucked. 'Such a shame about her.'

'It was,' Hardy agreed. 'Though I'd understood the two of you had had some problems.'

'No, noth-' The smile. 'You don't mean that special master thing? That was nothing to do with Elaine.'

'Really? I heard she might have taken it that way.'

He shook his head back and forth. 'No. That was all for the benefit of the cops. They call me down here-'

'The police do?'

'No, no. My office.'

'I thought you didn't have an office.'

'Hey, what am I, stupid? No, I keep an office. I just don't use it much. So anyway, I'm down here having a couple of brewskis, my girl calls all in a panic. The cops are there, they got a warrant, they're doing a search. Well, I go a little ballistic and who's gonna blame me?'

Hardy lifted his shoulders ambiguously.

'So I'm smack in the middle of something in the female line here and I've got to run uptown, rush hour. Time I get there, I'm not feeling my most cooperative. Now Patsy, my girl, she makes a nice presence at the door – you know what I'm saying? – but she's a little weak on the business side, filing, stuff like that. So I say to the search party, "Fine. You're showing me this kind of respect, you're treating me like I'm vermin, you can go find the shit yourselves."' He wore his apologetic look again, his voice back to calm and reasonable. 'So that's all it was with Elaine. She got in the middle of it, that was all. 'Nother couple of weeks, I would have gotten back to her and told her I was sorry. If she hadn't gotten herself shot.'

The recitation seemed to tire him out. His expression went strangely blank, then he recovered, grabbed a pretzel, picked up his beer glass and drank. 'But how'd we get on Elaine? You were asking about the OD.'

'Cullen.'

'Right, Cullen, OK. And the guy who killed Elaine. Your client.'

'Cole Burgess. Cullen snitched him out. He was the source of the murder weapon.'

'And I'm supposed to know these guys? How do you get to that?'

'I don't, really. I went by the Hall today to see if I could get my hands on some early discovery on Cullen since Cole's prelim is next week. Cullen had a matchbook from here on him.'

'Yeah, that's what Banks said.'

Hardy shrugged. 'You'd told me you hung out here. I thought there was a chance you might have known him.'

Logan couldn't believe it. 'Dismas, turn around, would you?'

Hardy did.

'How many people you see here?'

Hardy did a quick count. 'Thirty-five, forty.'

'That's about right.' Logan popped another pretzel. 'At four o'clock. You know how many people are jammed in here come nine or ten? You can't take a deep breath 'cause there's no room to put it. So the odds of me knowing one guy…' He let the sentence drop, shook his head at Hardy's optimism. 'Forget it.'

'Well, I thought I'd ask,' he said. 'Couldn't hurt. Thanks for your time.' He started to get up.

Logan stopped him. 'But the McNeil thing. You're really going ahead on that? My guy still might settle, but who knows for how long? I think you're missing a bet.'

'That could be.' Hardy conveyed that clearly he believed it was the least of his worries. And in spite of all his talk about Cole and Cullen, carrying that message to Logan was the primary reason for his visit here. Maybe the news that McNeil wasn't going to settle would flush something. He smiled politely. 'It wouldn't be the first time.'

Driving up from Jupiter to his office, he stopped on 7th Street and this time got lucky with Strout. The coroner, lanky and laconic, knew Hardy from several trials as well as his days as an assistant district attorney. It didn't matter that he was doing defense now. Generally, Strout had no ax to grind over which side the courtroom you called home. He was a scientist who dealt in medical facts, equally useful -or not – to both the prosecution and the defense.

It was near the end of the workday and he came out himself to the lobby to let Hardy back into his office, a large room filled with medical books and a famous collection of murder weapons from antiquity to the present. Many were under glass, but an equal number – including a reputedly live hand grenade on a candlestick pedestal on his desk -were out there for anybody to grab, wield, and use. Hardy could read the upside-down title of the book that was open on Strout's desk: The Golden Age of Torture – Germany in the 15th Century.

'There's a sweet-looking little tome,' Hardy remarked. 'Keeping up on the old research, are you? Are they teaching that in med school now?'

Strout lifted the book, ran a finger fondly over the open page, put the volume back where it had been. 'If you ever wonder why cruel an' unusual punishment made it to the Bill of Rights,' he drawled, 'you don't need to look any further'n this. The stuff people was doin' to one another back then, just as a matter of course.'

'Slightly cruel, was it?'

The coroner chuckled. 'I tell you, Diz, the least of 'em is more'n most people would believe anybody without serious mental problems ever did to one another. And here we got our judges splittin' hairs over what's cruel and unusual, what the foundin' fathers meant. They all ought to read this book, settle their minds on the matter. I mean, this tongue clamp here, for example-'

'John.' Hardy held up a hand. 'Maybe another time, huh?'

'Not your area of interest today?' Strout settled into the chair behind his desk, chuckling contentedly. He reached for the hand grenade and threw it gently from one hand to the other. 'No. Lemme remember. Cullen Alsop.'

'Ten points.'

Strout nodded and came forward. His hands hovered an inch above the desk and he bounced the grenade nonchalantly on the blotter. 'Well, it was pretty much what I thought it might be. Heroin overdose all right, as expected. I asked the police lab to do a quick analysis of the heroin left at the scene, and it's really their report I'm drawin' on more'n anything in the blood itself. But let's just say in laymen's terms that if he used one syringe, which needle marks indicate – he's only got the one fresh one, relatively speaking – then it was very pure stuff.'

'And there's no doubt that was the cause of death?'

'No.' He was bouncing the grenade again, thinking. 'There was some trace alcohol and if we ran down to the C-scan level, odds are we'd find other drugs. But this was heroin.'

'And higher quality than what's on the street?'

Strout lifted his shoulders. 'I don't know. It might be what's on the street now although with each passin' hour, that becomes less likely.'

'Why is that?'

'Because if stuff this pure is out there, we'd have seen at least a few more overdose deaths. You may 'member late last summer, one weekend one of the dealers brought up a new load of brown tar that hadn't been cut? No? Well, it killed seven kids in four days.' Strout clucked in dismay. 'But now, we got Mr Alsop so far and that's all.'

'And that means… what?'

'By itself, nothing definite. But it could mean a few things. One,' he let the grenade fall to the blotter and held up a finger, 'the boy was dealing himself, checking out the product, guessed wrong on its potency. Two,' another finger, 'he knew what it was and decided it would be a painless way to kill himself. And three, somebody else knew what it was and gave it to him.'

'Which would have made it a murder.'

A shrug. 'Out of my domain, Diz. Absent any sign of struggle or motive or anything else, I'm listin' cause of death as accident/suicide. Have you talked to Banks?'

'Ridley?' Hardy shook his head. 'Not since Wednesday night, and not for lack of trying. He hasn't returned my calls. But even Wednesday,' he added, exaggerating slightly, 'I know he didn't like the timing of Cullen's death. The day he gets out, he's dead, he can't testify. So what's the deal, do you think? Somebody set Cullen up to sink Cole, then somebody killed him before he could. It doesn't make any sense.'

'Yeah, but so little does anymore, Diz.' Strout picked up the grenade again, hefted it casually. 'Maybe Banks'll come in with something,' he said. 'I'm sure he's looking.'

Hardy sat with it a minute, then got to his feet. 'Well, thanks, John, you've been a help.'