John Lescroart: The Suspect

Gorman opened his mouth and started to say something, then decided not to. His shoulders sagged, he shook his head from side to side. "God help us," he said.

After getting up at dawn and hiking out from Tamarack Lake, Gina Roake drove to her Pleasant Street condominium on Nob Hill in under four hours. By noon, she had unpacked and stowed her gear, showered, and changed into her work clothes-a light mauve business suit and black low heels.

As she came out the doors onto the sidewalk in front of her building, Gina discovered that, somewhat to her surprise, she wasn't inclined to go straight to her office. True, that had been her intention since last night, but now that the moment had arrived, something about it didn't feel quite right. She knew that she could go in and report to her partners that she was ready to get back in harness. At that announcement, right away they would probably be able to throw her some work on cases they were handling, get her back up to speed, give her some billable hours.

But Gina knew that those hours rightly belonged to the nineteen long-suffering and hardworking associates within the firm, each one of whom was expected to amass twenty-two hundred billable hours

in the course of a year, a daunting and unending struggle for young attorneys that demanded fifty weeks of eight-billable-hour days. Lunches didn't count; administrative hours didn't count; prep time and research often didn't count; and certainly schmoozing by the water cooler didn't count. Hours were limited and finite, and it wasn't uncommon for an associate to put in twelve hours on the clock in order to bill eight of them. As a partner, Gina was under no illusion that her legitimate role was to garner clients for the firm, and they in turn would provide the billable hours of work that she would then dole out to her associates.

She was ready to go back to work all right, but damned if she was going to be a drain on the firm's resources. She needed to reestablish her contacts in the city and attract her own clients to the firm-to do otherwise would not only be unfair to her associates, it would put her in a subservient position vis-a-vis her partners, and she wasn't going to let that happen.

By the time she got to the corner, she'd made up her mind and when the cab pulled over to pick her up, she slid into the backseat and said, "Hall of Justice, please. Seventh and Bryant."

In terms of longevity in the city, Lou the Greek's wasn't exactly Tadich's or Fior d'Italia, or even Original Joe's or the Swan Oyster Depot. Nevertheless, with forty-plus years in its same location across the street from the Hall of Justice, it had its full complement of tradition, albeit in a slightly less savory vein than those other famous eateries.

The whole "eatery" designation was something of a misnomer. Certainly, anyone drawing up a business plan for the place in today's world would be hard-pressed to attract investors with a menu that included only one item per day-the Special-and very few appetizers besides the occasional edamame or dried wasabi-coated peas.

Forget about lunch standards everywhere else, such as chicken wings or hamburgers or fried calamari or garlic fries or, God forbid, salads or other raw green stuff-the regulars at Lou's referred to martini olives as the vegetable course. Instead, Lou's wife, Chui, sought on a daily basis to meld the disparate culinary cultures of her own China and her husband's Greece with original and, it must be admitted, creative dishes such as Sweet and Sour Dolmas, or Pita Stuffed Kung Pao Chicken, or mysteries such as the famous Yeanling Clay Bowl. Whatever a yeanling was.

Often edible, but just as often not, the food was not why people gathered at Lou's. Like so many other restaurants, Lou's location was the key to its success. If you had business with the criminal justice system in San Francisco, Lou's was where you ate. It didn't matter that it was stuck down in the basement of a bail-bond building, that it always smelled a little funky, was darkly lit and ill-ventilated. It wasn't fifty yards from the front door of the Hall of Justice, so juries on their lunch breaks, cops, reporters, lawyers and their clients, witnesses, snitches, families of victims, and visitors to the jail-a vast, often unwashed and unruly, certainly boisterous clientele-filled the place from the first legal drink at 6:00 a.m. until last call at 1:30 a.m.

Now Gina Roake, fresh from her cab ride, walked down the six steps from the street and waded into the surging tide of humanity on the other side of Lou's black-painted glass double-doors. The crowd did not intimidate her. This was her milieu. Smiling, jostling, pushing her way inside, she cleared the immediate crush and across the room saw her firm's chief investigator, Wyatt Hunt, sharing a four-person booth with another man. In ten seconds, she was standing over them. "If I joined you, would I be interrupting important business?" she asked.

"Not at all," Hunt said. "We haven't even ordered yet."

"You're sure you wouldn't mind sharing half your bench with an old woman?"

Hunt leaned forward and back, looking around behind her. "No problem," he said. "Where is she?" But, grinning up at her, he slid in to give her room, then pointed across the table. "You know Devin Juhle, I believe. Homicide."

"Sure. How are you, Inspector?"

"Better now that it's not just me and Wyatt. He's decent company for about fifteen minutes, then usually starts to babble."

"It's when I start using longer words," Hunt explained. "Devin gets confused."

"He uses them in the wrong context. He needs to take a course or something. I tell him it's no good using big words if you don't know what they mean."

"Teleological," Hunt said.

"A perfect example." Juhle turned to Gina. "As you can see," he said, "you're not interrupting." Then to Hunt. "And no way is that a real word."

"Teleological." Hunt held out a hand across the table. "How much?"

"Lunch." "You're on."

"Spell it for the record."

Hunt strung out the letters, then said, "Gina? Word or no word?"

She made a reluctant grimace across at Juhle. "I think it's a word, Inspector. Sorry."

"It is a word," Hunt said. "It means 'relating to design in nature.' Like a teleological argument. Man started to walk upright because he got out of the trees and started hanging out in tall grass, where he had to stand to see over it. Which got him-us, I mean, the human race-to walking."

"Imagine that," Juhle said. "I never would have guessed." Across the table, Juhle sotto voce'd to Gina: "We're getting into the babble phase I told you about."

Fifteen minutes later, they were all having the Special-pot stickers stuffed with taramosalata-which was not particularly, by unanimous opinion, Chui's greatest triumph. But by now they weren't paying any attention to the food anyway.

"… just a feeling in my gut," Juhle was saying, "but anytime you've got a murdered spouse and a mega-million-dollar estate, you've got to think maybe the husband, huh?"

Gina said, "Do you have anything on him?"

Juhle shook his head. "It's too soon. We don't even know time of death yet. But if there was foul play, and the bump on the head looks an awful lot like there was, then it was either him or somebody else she knew pretty damn well."

"Why do you say that?" Hunt asked.

"She was naked," Juhle said. "She's not having wine and getting naked with whoever he might have hired to get rid of her, I don't care how cute he was."

"Does this guy have a lawyer?" Gina asked.

Juhle started to pop a pot sticker, then thought better of it and put it back on his plate. He shook his head. "Again, too early." "It's never too early."

"We don't even have a murder yet, much less charged him with it." "But you talked to him this morning? And you let him tell you all this stuff?"