John Lescroart: The Oath

The party at the large round table by the door to the kitchen fit in this category. For several months now, in an unspoken and informal arrangement, a floating group of professionals had been meeting here on most Tuesdays for lunch. It began just after the mayor appointed Clarence Jackman the district attorney. At the time, Jackman had been in private practice as the managing partner of Rand & Jackman, one of the city's premier law firms, and the previous DA, Sharron Pratt, had just resigned in disgrace.

Jackman viewed himself mostly as a businessman, not a politician. The mayor had asked him to step into the normally bitterly contested political office and get the organization back on course, prosecuting crimes, staying on budget, litigating the city's business problems. Jackman, seeking different perspectives on his new job, asked some colleagues from different disciplines-but mostly law-for a low-profile lunch at Lou's. This move was startling enough in itself. Even more so was everyone's discretion. Lunch at Lou's wasn't so much a secret as a nonevent. If anyone noticed that the same people were showing up at the same table every week, they weren't talking. It never made the news.

Jackman faced the kitchen door. The coat of his tailored pin-striped suit hung over the back of his chair. His white dress shirt, heavily starched, fit tightly over the highly developed muscles in his back. His face was darkly hued, almost blue-black, and his huge head was perched directly on his shoulders, apparently without benefit of a neck.

Lou the Greek must have gotten a good deal on a containerload or so of fortune cookies, because for the past couple of weeks a bowl of them, incredibly stale, was on every table for every meal. The DA's lunch today had been consumed with the serious topic of the city's contract for its health insurance, and when Jackman cracked one of the cookies open and broke into his deep, rolling laughter, it cut some of the tension. "I love this," he said. "This is perfect, and right on point: 'Don't get sick.'" He took in his tablemates. "Who writes these things? Did one of you pay Lou to slip it in here?"

"I think when they run out of license plate blanks at San Quentin…" This was Gina Roake, a longtime public defender now in private practice. Despite the thirty-year age gap, she was rumored to be romantically linked to David Freeman, another of the table guests.

"No way." Marlene Ash was an assistant DA on Jackman's staff. She'd taken her jacket off when she sat down, too, revealing a substantial bosom under a maroon sweater. Chestnut shoulder-length hair framed a frankly cherubic face, marred only by a slight droop in her right eye. "No way a convict writes 'Don't get sick.' It'd be more like 'Die, muthuh.'"

"That'd be an unusually polite convict, wouldn't it?" Treya Ghent asked.

"Unprecedented," Glitsky agreed. "And it's not a fortune anyway." The lieutenant was two seats away from the DA and next to his wife, who held his hand on top of the table. "A fortune's got to be about the future."

Dismas Hardy spoke up. "It's in a fortune cookie, Abe. Therefore, by definition, it's a fortune."

"How about if there was a bug in it, would that make the bug a fortune?"

"Guys, guys." San Francisco 's medical examiner, John Strout, held up a restraining hand and adjusted his glasses. A thin and courtly Southern gentleman, Strout had crushed his own cookie into powder and was looking at the white slip in his hand. "Now this here's a fortune: 'You will be successful in your chosen field.'" He looked around the table. "I wonder what that's goin' to turn out to be."

"I thought you were already in your chosen field," Roake said.

"I did, too." Strout paused. "Shee-it. Now what?"

Everybody enjoyed a little laugh. A silence settled for a second or two, and Jackman spoke into it. "That's my question, too, John. Now what?"

He surveyed the group gathered around him. Only two of the other people at the table hadn't spoken during the fortune cookie debate: David Freeman, seventy-something, Hardy's landlord and the most well-known and flamboyant lawyer in the city; and Jeff Elliot, in his early forties and confined to a wheelchair due to MS, the writer of the "CityTalk" column for the Chronicle .

It was Freeman who spoke. "There's no question here, Clarence. You got Parnassus sending the city a bill for almost thirteen million dollars and change for services they didn't render over the last four years. They're demanding full payment, with interest, within sixty days or, so they say, they're belly up. It's nothing but extortion, plain and simple. Even if you owed them the money."

"Which is not established," Marlene Ash said.

Freeman shrugged. "Okay, even better. You charge their greedy asses with fraud and shut 'em down."

"Can't do that." Jackman was using a toothpick. "Shut 'em down, I mean. Not fast anyway, although I'm already testing the waters with some other providers. But it's not quick. Certainly not this year. And the Parnassus contract runs two more years after that."

"And whoever you're talking to isn't much better anyway, am I right?" Hardy asked.

"Define 'much.'" Jackman made a face. "Hopefully there'd be some improvements."

Treya put a hand on her boss's arm. "Why don't we let them go bankrupt? Just not pay them?"

"We're not going to pay them in any case," Marlene Ash answered. "But we can't let them go bankrupt, either. Then who takes care of everybody?"

"Who's taking care of them now?" Roake asked, and the table went silent.

The way it worked in San Francisco, city employees had several medical insurance options, depending on the level of health care each individual wanted. It seemed straightforward enough. People willing to spend more of their own money on their health got better choices and more options. In theory, the system worked because even the lowest-cost medical care-provided in this case by Parnassus -was adequate. But no surprise to anybody, that wasn't so.

"Couldn't Parnassus borrow enough to stay afloat?" Glitsky asked Jackman.

The DA shook his head. "They say not."

Gina Roake almost choked on her coffee. "They can get a loan, trust me," she said. "Maybe not a great rate, but a couple of mil, prime plus something, no problem."

"What I've heard," Jackman said, "their story is that they can't repay it, whatever it is. They're losing money right and left every day as it is. And, our original problem, they don't need a loan anyway if the city just pays them what it owes."

"Which it doesn't," Marlene Ash repeated. "Owe, I mean."

"Can you prove that?" Glitsky the cop wanted to see the evidence.

"I intend to," Ash said. "Go back to the original invoices."

"Grand jury." Hardy cracked a fortune cookie.

Ash nodded grimly. "That's what I'm thinking."

"How can they say they'd run up thirteen million extra dollars and never saw it coming?" Roake asked. "That's what I'd like to know."

Jackman turned to her. "Actually, that was fairly clever. They say their contract with the city covers outpatient AIDS treatment, mental health and drug abuse counseling, and physical therapy, and they've been providing it all along without being reimbursed. The key word is 'outpatient.' They're out the money, they've already provided the service, we owe it to them." He shrugged. "They distort the hell out of the contract to get to that position, but all the unions want to read their contracts to cover those services, so Parnassus has some political support."

"So it's a contract language dispute," Freeman said. "Tell them to sue you in civil court."

"We would," Jackman said, "except that we're starting to think-"

"We know ," Ash interrupted.

"We're starting to think," Jackman repeated, giving his ADA a reproachful glare, "that they didn't provide the care they allege. It was all outpatient stuff, after all. The record keeping appears to be uneven, to say the least."