John Lescroart - A Plague of Secrets

“Jerry Glass,” Schiff said. “I fucking love that guy.”

Dismas Hardy hadn’t thoughtto bring his trench coat to work with him this morning, and on general principles he’d be damned if he was going to take a cab from his office the dozen or fewer blocks to the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue. But now he was paying for his stubbornness, leaning into the teeth of a minigale as he walked, suitcoat buttoned up, hands in his pants pockets.

After the ten-thirty A.M. emergency cries for help, first from Maya and then minutes later from Joel Townshend, Hardy had immediately placed his own high-priority call to Jerry Glass, who did not seem inclined to discuss much about the forfeiture situation on the telephone-“It pretty much speaks for itself” was all the explanation he was ready to volunteer. But Hardy had an ace or two up his sleeve, as well, in the person of his former DA friend and mentor Art Drysdale, now one of the Grand Old Men of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and ten minutes after Hardy got off the phone with Art, Glass called him and told him he’d give him some face time if they could do it in Glass’s office in the next half hour.

Hence the hike.

But the exercise did serve a couple of small purposes. It gave Hardy time to think. And walking into the gusts and grit really pissed him off.

Now, as he walked down the perennially sterile hallway on the eleventh floor, Hardy found himself forcefully reminded of the last time he’d been down to this neighborhood on business. It had been directly across the street in the State Building. At that time, probably the best part of six years before, he’d essentially been accused of setting fire to his own home for the insurance. An arson inspector and a couple of detectives had three-teamed and threatened him with arrest until he’d called their bluff and simply walked out on them in the middle of the interview.

He wondered, not for the first time, if there was some kind of bland but powerful psychic karma in these two governmental edifices-one federal and one state-that attracted heartless, deceptive, self-righteous bureaucrats. For all of his dislike of the physical layout and general tone of the Hall of Justice at Seventh and Bryant-which is where he normally did his business-no one could argue that the place didn’t thrum with almost the very heartbeat of humanity in all of its flaws and grandeur. By contrast these fat faceless rectangles of glass and granite-the halls were silent-seemed the embodiment of the anonymous power of the state to harm and to meddle wherever it saw fit under the rubric of enforcing the rules.

An aphorism of someone he’d once known sprang to his mind: The essence of fascism is to make laws forbidding everything and then enforce them selectively against your enemies.

It wasn’t that bad, of course. Hardy had several friends, including Art Drysdale, who worked in one or the other of these buildings. But he himself avoided them whenever he could, all but unconsciously. And getting to Glass’s outer office, he could neither ignore the bile that had risen in his gut nor the frisson of what felt like fear tickling at the base of his brain.

Glass evenly carried twenty extra pounds on a frame about the same size as Hardy’s. Today he wore a gray suit, white shirt buttoned tight at the neck, a light blue tie. With some effort he shook Hardy’s hand over his desk, then sat back down and indicated either of the two beige faux-leather chairs facing him.

Hardy generally thought it best to start out civilly. “I appreciate your taking the time to see me.”

Glass turned a hand up. “Art Drysdale’s a legend, Mr. Hardy. He recommends that I talk to you, that’s what I do. Although I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to help you.”

“Well, then we’re a bit in the same boat.”

“How’s that?”

“I think this forfeiture action you’re contemplating is going to turn out to be an embarrassment and a mistake. I don’t know how I’m going to help you avoid making it.”

Glass’s mouth tightened, the lips conveying a mild distaste. “I’m not just contemplating going forward with the forfeiture process, Mr. Hardy. I’ve got plenty of grounds and it’s a pretty cut-and-dried precedent. You deal in drugs, your profits and whatever you buy with your profits are subject to forfeiture.”

“Fair enough,” Hardy said. “But my client hasn’t been dealing in drugs. One of Maya Townshend’s employees evidently sold marijuana out of her coffee shop, but she didn’t know anything about it.”

“No?”

“No.”

“And you’re sure of that?”

“It’s not a question of whether I’m sure of it, which I am. It’s a question of whether you can prove it, which I don’t see how you can.”

“Well, that’s another matter and what I’ve already convened the grand jury about. As I’m sure you know, I can’t talk about what goes on in those proceedings at all. But as to whether your client knew this was going on-and let’s leave for a minute the question of whether she was profiting from the sale of this marijuana herself-it would be hard to imagine that she didn’t.”

“And why is that?”

“Because Bay Beans West has been the subject of no fewer than twenty-three nuisance calls from neighbors in the past five years. Almost all of them concerned flagrant marijuana use, much of it in front of children and adolescents. The nuisance complaints were, of course, conveyed not just to the manager of the business but to the owner of the establishment, who happens as well to own the building. Beyond that, and leaving out the stabbing that took place in the alley behind the place two years ago, to say nothing of the murder last week, would you care to guess how many citations for marijuana smoking have been issued in the past twenty-four months on the street directly in front of the coffee shop?”

“ In front of isn’t in .”

Glass waved that objection away. “Forty-three. Forty-three tickets. The place is a well-known dope den, Mr. Hardy.”

“Be that as it may, sir, and I’m not denying it, the fact remains that my client didn’t know much about it. She rarely went there. She was a silent partner in running the place, that’s all.”

“She knew it well enough to have her civil lawyers come to the Zoning Commission when some neighbors tried to lift her business license three years ago. It went all the way to the Board of Supervisors, Mr. Hardy, and some say that if it weren’t for her brother, they would have shut her down then.”

This was completely unexpected and bad news to Hardy. Neither Maya nor Joel had mentioned anything about it to him. “Okay,” Hardy said, conceding the point, “but this is marijuana on Haight Street. You can get it in any doorway. You can’t seriously claim that BBW was the source or even a major contributor to all these tickets.”

Glass sniffed his displeasure. “Your client is the sister of one of our supervisors and the niece of the mayor. And mustn’t that be nice?” His lips turned up, but no one would have called it a smile. “Your client certainly knew the kind of place they were running, believe me. It’s a plain and simple narcotics operation, complete with the gun that’s the purported murder weapon for the latest problem there, huge amounts of cash-far more than you’d expect in a coffee shop-and substantial quantities of marijuana on the premises.”

Hardy took in this information in silence, masking his concern with a nonchalant posture-sitting back now, arms on the chair rests, his foot resting over its opposite knee. “Mr. Glass,” he said, “I’m not here to dispute whether or not the place was a source for marijuana. Obviously, it was. But it’s a long stretch-even if my client knew about it, or had a hunch about it, or anything like that-it’s a hell of a long stretch to prove that she profited from the dope at all. Do you know who Joel Townshend is? He doesn’t need dope money, believe me.”