John Lescroart: The Hearing

Ridley Banks pulled a toot sweet around the front of the car and got himself standing between his lieutenant and the lights at the head of the alley. There'd been so many accusation of police brutality lately that the media were watching for it at every opportunity. And now his lieutenant was giving them something. Ridley motioned with his head, a warning, then spoke in a whisper. 'Cameras, Abe. Heads up.'

Glitsky was all innocence. 'What?' The poor guy fell.' The suspect lay unmoving at his feet. He hadn't moved after the first rollover. The lieutenant looked over the hood of the squad car to Medrano and Petrie. 'Take this garbage to the detail until he wakes up.'

Petrie looked at his partner again. Neither of them had ever met Glitsky before and he was making an impression-he wasn't one your touchy-feely modern law enforcement community facilitators. The younger officer cleared his throat and Glitsky glared. 'What?'

Petrie swallowed, finally got it out. 'The detail, sir?'

'What about it?'

Medrano took over. 'The guy looks good for medical eval, Lieutenant. We were thinking we'd show him to the paramedics.'

Glitsky knew that this meant the suspect would probably wind up going to the hospital, where there were secure rooms for jail inmates who needed medical care. This prospect didn't much appeal to him. 'What for?'

Medrano shrugged. It wasn't that he cared personally, but the lieutenant's suggestion ran counter to the protocol. He wanted to cover himself. 'Get him cleared before we take him anywhere, maybe start detox before he goes into withdrawal.'

Glitsky had a deep and ancient scar that ran across his mouth, and now with his lips pursed it burned as a whitish gash under the hawk nose, the jutting chin. Glitsky's mother had been African-American, his father Jewish-his visage was dark, intense, hooded. 'How do we know he needs medical care?'

Medrano risked a glance to where the suspect slumped against the door in the backseat. He was at best semiconscious, filthy, still bleeding from where his head had hit the pavement. 'We don't, sir. But the paramedics are here. To be safe-'

Glitsky cut Medrano off. 'He's just drunk. I want him in homicide. You bring him up. That's the end of this discussion.'

Petrie and Medrano looked at one another and said nothing. They were too intimidated to do anything but nod, get the man back into the car and start the drive down to the Hall of Justice.

Ridley Banks bit his tongue. Glitsky was putting out the word that he intended to let this suspect get all the way into withdrawal before he would acknowledge any problem. This would ensure that the man endured at least a little of what was purportedly the worst known hell on earth, and the orders struck Ridley as gratuitously cruel. More, they weren't smart. Neither was the earlier door-opening incident. He knew that if the suspect was in withdrawal from heroin, the paramedics and people at County could set him up in short order. Then the agony of withdrawal could be mitigated. They'd get a better statement from a set-up suspect at San Francisco General Hospital than they ever could from a sick, sweating junkie in withdrawal at the Hall of Justice. If he was merely drunk, he could be in a cell at the jail by mid-morning. Either way, they would have a clean interrogation within a reasonable period of time. Glitsky's orders wouldn't accomplish anything good.

As he watched the squad car backing out of Maiden Lane, Ridley wondered what else might be going on. He and Abe had both known Elaine Wager, worked with her, when she'd been a high-profile rising young star with the District Attorney's office. Ridley himself had found his guts more than ordinarily roiling at the scene when he realized the woman's identity. She was one of their own, part not only of the law enforcement, but also of the African-American, community. Even to Ridley, whose job was homicide, on some level it hurt.

Abe's reaction, though, seemed a long march beyond hurt. Ridley had come to know most of his lieutenant's moods, which generally ran the gamut from grumpy to glum, but he'd never before seen him as he was tonight – in a clear and quiet unreasonable rage, breaking his own sacred rules about prisoners and regulations.

Walking back to where the body lay, the knot of people bunched in the mouth of the alley, Ridley decided to risk a question. 'You all right, Abe?'

The lieutenant abruptly stopped walking. His nostrils flared under piercing eyes – Ridley thought of a panicked horse. Abe let out a long breath, took in another one, looked down toward the body. 'Yeah, sure,' he said. 'Why not?' A pause. 'Fucking peachy.'

Abe made it a point to avoid vulgarity. He'd even lectured his inspectors, decrying their casual use of profanity. His troops had been known to make fun of him for it behind his back. So Ridley was surprised, and his face must have shown it. The lieutenant's eyes narrowed. 'You got a problem, Ridley?'

'No, sir,' he replied. Whatever it was, it was serious. 'No problem at all.'

On that same day – Monday, February 1, at a little after five o'clock in the afternoon, Dismas Hardy placed a call to another San Francisco attorney.

He put his feet up on his desk and listened to the phone ring, was transferred to voice mail, heard the beep. 'Mr Logan,' he began, 'this is Dismas Hardy again. If you're keeping track, this is my fourth call. I'd really appreciate a callback. Same number I left the other three times.'

Hanging up, Hardy stewed for thirty seconds, then stood and walked out of his office on the top floor of the Freeman Building on Sutter Street in downtown San Francisco. His was the only office on the top floor, and he had decided to take the stairs to the lobby a floor below him. Hardy leased his office directly from David Freeman and was the only attorney in the building who did not work for Freeman's firm.

His landlord was pushing seventy. He was short, almost fat, always slovenly dressed; his greatest female admirers, and he had several, would concede that he had a prodigious, nearly mythic ugliness – unkempt hair, eyebrows of white steel wool, a turnip nose scarred by rosacea and alcohol, hanging jowls, liverish lips. But he had a great if unorthodox personal charm. And no one disputed that Freeman was a brilliant lawyer who lived for his work. With Mel Belli's passing, he had assumed the mantle of most famous attorney in the city.

The receptionist's station commanded the center of the lobby. At the phones, Phyllis, an attractive elderly witch with whom Hardy had an off-again, off-yet-again relationship, was handling what appeared to be several calls at once.

Hardy sauntered casually past her station. He even nodded genially as he took a few extra steps toward the long hallway that housed the tiny airless cubicles of the firm's associates. It was all an elaborate ruse – his intention was to go and interrupt Freeman without having to explain himself to the Keeper of his Gate. And for an instant, even as he hung a hard left and strode toward the great man's door, he thought he would make it unmolested.

But it was not to be.

'He's busy, Mr Hardy. He's not to be disturbed.'

Hardy stopped. Phyllis was facing the other way. How could she have seen him? Further proof that she had a personal connection to the devil. She could spin her head around in a full circle like the girl in The Exorcist.

Now she fixed him with Favored Visage No. 1, Stern and Unyielding. He gave her back his winsome, disarming Irish smile, pulled a De Niro. 'Are you talking to me?'

Phones forgotten, her body came around, up and out of her chair in one fluid motion. She was moving not toward Hardy but directly to Freeman's door, to all appearances ready to throw her body in front of it if need be to defend its inviolability. 'He's trying to get a motion written. He was very specific.'