John Lescroart - The First Law

"Maybe nothing, except when there's something like fourteen plaintiffs asking around thirty million dollars."

"Again, I ask you, what does that prove? Hell, you know. Somebody's always suing us. Brutality, invasion of privacy, stealing candy from schoolkids, you name it."

"True enough," Glitsky said. "You're probably right. Panos is a saint."

"I never said that." But Glitsky still had a look, and Gerson said, "But what?"

"Only that I'd think hard before I gave him point in any homicide investigation."

"He's not point. He had leads, that's all. The poker players."

Glitsky locked his ringers on the desk. Said nothing.

Gerson raised his voice. "And in fact the names he gave us took my boys someplace. You got a problem with that?"

"Not at all."

"So? What, then?"

"So, the usual suspects, huh? Two guys with sheets."

"Three, as it turns out. Randy Wills isn't any choirboy, either. So yeah, the usual suspects. Happens every day."

"No question about it." Glitsky turned a neutral face up at him. "Your boys find any evidence to go with their suspects?"

"They'll be getting warrants."

Glitsky clucked, then nodded, all understanding. "They looking at anybody else in the meanwhile?"

"Why do they want to do that when the guys Panos gave us look good for it?"

"You're right," Glitsky said mildly. "Waste of time. That'd be stupid."

Perhaps correctly, Gerson must have gotten the impression that Glitsky was including him among the less intellectually gifted. He'd burst in here ten minutes ago holding the high moral ground and for the past several minutes had been drifting into the lower regions, and losing territory even there. It didn't appreciably improve his attitude.

He stood up.

"Well, you know," he said, "stupid or not, I'm running the detail now. I'm calling the shots with my troops and what I came up here to tell you still goes. Silverman is my case. I'm controlling the investigation. Yesterday I'm a good guy and bend a little and you take advantage of it, hiding behind your old man. Well, I'm telling you now. You keep you and your father out of it, all the way out, or I'll haul your ass in before the deputy chief. Don't think I won't." His voice was rasping now, low-pitched with anger and the need for control in the cramped room. "In fact, you might want to remember that every homicide in the city is my case now and my guys work for me."

Glitsky knew he could a draw a punch with one sarcastic word and it hovered temptingly on the tip of his tongue. There'd be a great deal of pleasure in it. But he only leaned back, crossed his arms, and nodded. "I got it," he said.

David Freeman had to be at his office at 1:30 p.m. to hold the hand of another of his co-plaintiffs being deposed in the Panos lawsuit. Yesterday they'd started at 10:00 a.m. with a gentle, turbaned professor of Comparative Religion at City College. In his mid-fifties now, soon after the terrorist attacks Casif Yasouf had been walking back to his car, parked at the Downtown Center Garage, from a meeting at the St. Francis Hotel, when he had the bad luck to run into Roy Panos, in uniform. The assistant patrol special was abusing a homeless man in an alley, kicking him and his shopping cart down toward the western border of Thirty-two.

Mr. Yasouf's version of events was that he'd simply tried to intervene as a citizen, telling the policeman that he didn't have to use such tactics. Panos, he said, had then abandoned his pursuit of the bum and turned on him, lifted him easily by his shirt, slapped his face hard twice and told him to take his rag-head ass back to Arabia. Frightened and bleeding, Mr. Yasouf finally fled. He reported the incident to the regular police the next morning, complete with Panos's name from his tag. Two days later he abandoned the complaint. Again-his version-because someone had set fire to his car.

That deposition hadn't finished up until twelve-thirty the next morning and by the time Freeman had gotten back, walking as always, to his apartment at the foot of Nob Hill, it was after 1:00 a.m. and Gina Roake was asleep in his bed. It had been their bed now, since a few weeks after his physical confrontation with Nick Sephia.

About a year ago, things had started to change with Freeman and Roake. Before that, Freeman had maintained a discreet and rotating harem of up to a dozen women. He was, after all, a wealthy and successful old man with an established, urban, sophisticated lifestyle that did not include the sort of entanglements that he believed were the unvarying attendants of exclusive physical relationships. He had always kept an armoire of women's robes for his visitors. The medicine chest was well-stocked-toothbrushes, creams and so on.

Roake was, at forty-eight, not exactly a babe in the woods herself. She, like Freeman, had had several longstanding but essentially casual relationships, and had never been married. They had seen each other in professional and social settings-courtrooms, fund-raisers, restaurants, even the occasional judge's chambers-for years, but had never shared more than pleasantries.

Freeman had a long-standing tradition that whenever he won a large case, he would celebrate alone-a fine meal at one of the city's restaurant treasures with an old and noble wine, then a final cognac or two at the Top of the Mark, or one of the other towers-the St. Francis, the Fairmont. That night, at the Crown Room in the Fairmont, he sat savoring his Paradis at a small table by the window overlooking the Bay side. He appreciated the walk of the shapely, grown-up woman as she got off the elevator, unavoidably registering that she appeared to be alone. It didn't matter, he told himself. This was not how he met women, ever.

He'd been playing the case over and over again in his mind throughout the night, all the high points up to and including the glorious moment of the "Not Guilty" verdict. People had no idea what a rare and lovely thing it was, even in San Francisco, to get a defense verdict. The best defense lawyers in the world won maybe five percent of their cases-Freeman himself hovered around fourteen percent, but he believed himself to be an almost unparalleled genius. And he was right.

Except now the case was over. There would be no need, even, of an appeal. His mind, consumed by its strategies for most of a year, was suddenly empty. He felt a mild euphoria and with the meal and wine, a deep physical contentment. The cognac was the essence of perfection. He stared out the window, over the sparkling lights.

He turned back to the room. The woman had materialized in front of him.

"David? I thought that was you."

Still half in reverie, he smiled. "Gina. Hello. What a pleasant surprise."

"I don't want to bother you if you're busy," she said.

"Not at all, at all. Please, join me if you'd like."

She'd sat and they had talked until last call, after which she took a cab home. In the next month, he asked her to lunch nine times-he preferred lunch dates because there was less expectation of automatic intimacy than with dinner. Either party, in the get-to-know stage, could back out without embarrassment or loss of face. In that way friendship, which in Freeman's opinion was always preferable to physical attraction, could be preserved.

In Roake's case, though, a strange thing happened. By the time it became obvious that they'd be sleeping together, he'd stopped seeing anyone else. Before he asked her to his apartment for the first time, and without any kind of agonizing analysis, he got rid of the contents of his armoire, the other feminine accoutrements. Then slowly, over time, she'd started leaving articles of clothing of her own at his place until she had her own drawer in his bureau and the entire armoire all to herself. She hadn't spent the night at her own apartment now for three months.