John Lescroart - A Plague of Secrets

“Like who?” Hardy asked.

“Jeff, God bless him, didn’t want to name names to me. But at least one judge, more than a couple of city department heads, several prominent educators, two supervisors, a few actors and like that, public personalities, and, oh yeah, some DAs…”

“You want to talk screwed,” Hardy said. “Just on the innuendo, those DAs are screwed. At least the ones that didn’t have the sense to get medical marijuana cards.”

“Yeah, heads are gonna roll for sure. If I still worked here, I’d swoop and scoop ’em up cheap and get ’em on our payroll.”

“You’re still working here, Wes. Don’t worry about that.”

“I’m not worried about getting fired, Diz.” He looked sideways down the couch. “Tell you the truth, I’m just embarrassed as all shit to have exposed the firm like this. You and Gina don’t deserve it, and it doesn’t exactly put on the best face for the associates, either, does it?”

Hardy waved that off. “Wes, it’s marijuana in San Francisco in the twenty-first century. It’s going to blow over in a week, maybe two. I appreciate your feelings but truly, nobody really cares.”

“They will if this murder turns out to be about a little benign weed.”

“It won’t come down like that. Whoever shot Dylan, he didn’t steal any of it.”

“How do you know that?”

“He was still wearing his backpack, which was full of it. How about that?”

“How about if he also happened to be pushing a shopping cart loaded with the stuff and the shooter ran off with that?”

That proposal stopped Hardy short for a second, but then he shook his head, banishing the unwelcome thought. “That didn’t happen, Wes. Look, worst case, if the Chronicle does the story, it’ll sell a few papers, but it’s a nonissue to everybody else.”

In fact, it wasn’t a nonissue to at least one San Francisco official-the newly minted special assistant United States attorney, Jerry Glass.

The previous U.S. attorney in San Francisco, construed by the attorney general’s office to be too liberal, had been one of the notorious Alberto Gonzalez fires. Upon taking office his replacement wanted to waste no time establishing his credentials as a hard-line prosecutor, aligned four-square against the permissive culture of the city that Herb Caen, the legendary columnist for the Chronicle , had christened Baghdad by the Bay. For some years after his graduation from law school, Jerry Glass had been an assistant district attorney in Orange County, following his boss the district attorney to Sacramento as a speechwriter during the first appointments of the Schwarzenegger era, eventually catching on as an assistant director of one of California’s dozens of bureaucracies, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

Glass, thirty-five by now, was a well-built though slightly overweight, plain-looking specimen with an office worker’s pasty complexion. He shaved close and wore his light brown hair short, parted low on the right. He trimmed his sideburns up around the top of his ears. He was also aggressive and ambitious and had seen his ABC assignment-accurately-as a dead end. He’d had résumés out and was in a holding pattern when his ex-boss, now an assistant attorney general in Washington, D.C., tapped him for the San Francisco job, and he jumped at it. With this plum in his lap Jerry had no intention of following in the footsteps of his predecessor and, among other priorities, set to work immediately making efforts to shut down the city’s medical marijuana parlors, of which there were dozens. This was always a somewhat delicate endeavor, since the state of California, as well as the city and county of San Francisco, either sanctioned or at the very least turned a blind eye to these so-called compassionate use facilities.

But Jerry was there to enforce U.S., not local, law, and the use of marijuana was a federal crime. He got his name in the paper several times during his first year in office for busting some of the medical marijuana folks, but except for burnishing his conservative credentials-not exactly a plus in the San Francisco cultural environment-these actions did little, if anything, to raise his profile.

And suddenly, here in his office this cool Wednesday afternoon, all by herself, was Debra Schiff. He’d run into the very attractive homicide inspector a couple of times at the bar at Lou the Greek’s and he’d planned to meet her there some more if he could, but here she was now, telling him about this murder of a coffee-shop manager out in the godforsaken Haight-Ashbury.

To date, Glass had only been aware of rumors and what he’d read about this particular murder in the papers. Astoundingly, he thought, Schiff was telling him with a straight face that she and her partner, Bracco, hadn’t brought up the dope connection to the news media before because it simply didn’t occur to them that it might be of some special importance-since apparently no marijuana had been stolen, it couldn’t have been part of a motive in the case.

She waved off his objection. “No, listen, Jerry, there’s always dope somewhere in a homicide picture. A roach in the drive-by car, some paraphernalia around a DD”-domestic disturbance-“gangbangers loaded up with coke or heroin. So it’s always there someplace. You don’t comment on it any more than you’d talk about the weather. ‘In other news tonight,’ she said in her best anchor voice, ‘Shawahn Johnson was shot seventeen times in an apparent drive-by shooting in Hunters Point when the fog was in.’ Generally, we don’t mention the fog.”

“But this fellow, Vogler, he had an entire marijuana garden in his attic, didn’t he? Thousands of dollars’ worth, right?”

“Right. But again we didn’t have any reason to believe that was part of our case at the outset. We handed the dope part over to the narcs and that might have been the end of it.”

“But for what?” Glass adjusted his spectacles.

For the next few minutes Schiff ran the highlights of their investigation. “The bottom line, though,” she concluded, “is that we think… in fact, we’re morally certain that Maya, Jansey, and Robert Tripp have lied to us, in some cases more than once. We have motives for each of them, both alone or possibly together in the case of Jansey and Tripp, but almost no evidence and certainly nothing we can use to bring any leverage to bear on getting anybody to talk. We’re pretty sure, for example, that Vogler was blackmailing Maya, and that Jansey may have known about that, but if they both say, ‘No he wasn’t,’ we’re stuck.”

“You can’t just lean on them harder?”

“We could, but as I say, it’s kind of pointless without some new leverage, some change in the status quo. There’s no physical evidence that’s very compelling.” She shook her head. “Besides, we’ve already gone back and talked to all of them at least twice, but Jansey and Tripp are at the very least well-rehearsed, and Maya’s got herself a lawyer. Plus, you know, we’ve got to walk a little easy around her anyway.”

“Why’s that?”

“The whole political thing, which I hate, and Darrel hates, but there you go. The plain fact is, Darrel and Harlen Fisk used to be partners, and she’s Harlen’s sister.”

Jerry’s eyes lit up. “Are you talking Supervisor Fisk?”

“Right.”

“Which also makes her the niece of Mayor West?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

Jerry Glass pulled himself up straight in his chair, his attention now riveted. “Is Mr. Fisk interfering with your investigation? Is he talking to your partner?”

“Not that I know of, no. That would be a little awkward, even if…” She stopped.

“What?”

“Well,” she said, “Harlen, among many other names you might recognize, was one of Vogler’s regular customers.”