A Plague of Secrets (14 page)

Arriving at the premises
, Hardy convinced Bracco to let him sit with his clients in their kitchen in return for a vague promise that they might have something to say to the inspectors.

Maya set her mug of coffee down on the countertop. “Even if he did call me, that doesn’t mean I went and saw him afterwards, does it? I don’t even know where he lives. Lived.”

“So you couldn’t have gone there,” Hardy said. “You’re absolutely sure you didn’t go there, right?”

“Well, yes. Of course. I don’t see why there has to be a connection between him calling me and me going to see him. He just wanted to talk about Dylan and if anybody suspected him.”

“Because you all used to be friends,” Hardy said in a low voice.

The police had let them give the children to a neighbor-Harlen hadn’t made it there yet-to take to school. They were probably just as happy not to have the kids underfoot anyway. The three of them-Joel, Maya, and Hardy-sat around the island stove in the Townshends’ ultramodern, supergourmet kitchen. Every appliance, from the refrigerator and stove to the toaster and coffeemaker, was of brushed steel; every flat surface a green-tinged granite. Outside the wraparound back windows the storm swirled and eddied around them. The lights had already blinked twice as gusts of wind hammered at the glass.

Along with two other search-specialist cops Bracco and Schiff were somewhere back or up in the house behind them. Occasionally the disembodied voices from one or more of these people would carry in to the trio in the kitchen-thrumming undertones of a somehow undefined menace and conflict. The uniformed officer left at the door of the kitchen to watch them didn’t appear to be either interested or listening.

Nevertheless, they kept their voices low. “It made perfect sense to me, Dismas. Even if it doesn’t to you.” She motioned back toward the rest of the house. “Or to them.”

Hardy nodded. “Although you must admit,” he added, “that the timing doesn’t look too good. He calls you the day he’s killed.”

“I can’t help when he called me,” Maya said, “or what he wanted to talk about. And it wasn’t like I spent a lot of time talking to him. He was mostly afraid somebody, like those inspectors, might think he had something to do with Dylan, you know? And had I heard anything? He was worried.”

“I know. That’s what you said. And it looks like he had reason to be. Look,” Hardy said. “As long as you didn’t go there, and they can’t prove you did…”

“Come on. I told you. I was at church.”

“For two hours?” Joel asked.

“I didn’t time it, Joel. As long as it took. I don’t know.”

“It’s all right.” Hardy held up a hand. “If you were at church, that’s where you were. All I’m saying is if that’s the case, there’s nothing Schiff and Bracco can do. If you weren’t at Levon’s, you weren’t there. End of story.”

Maya stared hard at her husband. “That’s what I’m saying, Joel. And there’s no dispute about whether I was there, so the phone call doesn’t matter anyway.”

No doubt, Joel wanted to help his wife, but he obviously didn’t believe yet, as Hardy had come to, that Maya could possibly be going to jail, maybe in the very near term-possibly today.

When Hardy had arrived, he’d asked what had changed in their investigations that Bracco and Schiff needed to serve a search warrant on his client first thing in the morning. They had told him about the call from Levon’s cell phone to Maya’s home number. After a flustered minute she’d admitted not only to her past friendship with Levon and the connection between Dylan, Preslee, and herself, but that he had in fact called her yesterday, out of the blue. Before that she hadn’t heard from him in a couple of years.

The good news from Hardy’s perspective was that now he felt sure he understood in a general way what the blackmail had been about. The specifics might not ever be forthcoming, but given Levon and Dylan’s criminal conspiracies, and the fact of Maya’s close friendship-and perhaps more-with at least one of them, it was pretty clear that she’d gotten herself involved in some kind of illegal activity, that she’d made deals with each of them to keep herself off the radar.

The bad news, of course, was that her involvement on any level with two men murdered within the same week made her an extremely attractive candidate as a suspect in the killings.

Except that, according to her, she’d never been to Levon’s home. “Maya,” Hardy now said, “it might be helpful if you could write down as much as you can remember about the phone call. Just to give it added credibility.”

The police packed up and left, taking with them a lot of clothing, their computers, phone books, and financial records. Joel was on the phone in his office calling his place of business to see if perhaps the police had been there, and trying to decide how to reconstruct the financial records the cops had carted off. Hardy and Maya had just sat down in the kitchen when the doorbell rang, and Maya got up to answer it.

She came back in trailing her brother, who parked his bulk on a counter chair and sighed. “I don’t like this, Diz.”

“I can’t say I’m wild about it either, Harlen. But if she’s never been to Levon’s…”

“Yeah, but you can’t prove a negative.”

“True, but luckily, the burden of proof isn’t on us. It’s on Darrel and Debra.”

The doorbell rang again, and again Maya went out to answer it.

“You think she’s telling the truth?” Fisk asked, his body language saying he didn’t.

“She’s my client,” Hardy said. “I have to believe her. If there’s no evidence placing her at Levon’s, no blood on her shoes or clothes…”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No, but-”

Maya’s returning footsteps closed out the discussion as Hardy turned to see her coming back into the kitchen. “It’s your investigators,” she said. “They’re wet and said they’re good waiting out in the lobby. You asked them to come out here?”

Hardy shrugged, standing up. “I didn’t know what was going down exactly when I called them. I knew your children needed rides to school. But sometimes cops serving search warrants get carried away. It never hurts to have backup. Witnesses tend to keep things copasetic. Although it doesn’t look like that’s needed today. I’ll go and talk to them.”

Out by the front door Wyatt Hunt stood dripping in hiking boots, jeans, and a Giants slicker, and Craig Chiurco looked a bit more well-defended against nature with a natty tan trench coat. But the weather wasn’t foremost on their minds. They didn’t even notice Hardy as he approached them, so intent were they on their conversation, whispering back and forth.

Until he stopped two feet away from them, and hearing Chiurco’s last words, “… don’t have to say anything about it?” Hardy said, “About what?”

Hunt shook him off. “Nothing.”

“Ah, the famous nothing.”

“You don’t want to know, Diz,” Hunt said. “Really.”

“I like knowing stuff,” Hardy countered. “It’s one of my hobbies.”

“You really might not want to know this, Diz. I promise. The only way you want to know this now is if it comes out some other way later and you didn’t hear it here first.”

“You’re saying I’d be pissed?” Hardy leaned in toward them and lowered his own voice. “Maybe I should get to decide. I hate surprises later. So I decide yes now.”

Hunt motioned off with his eyes behind Hardy, over toward the kitchen. He stopped, turned to Chiurco, and shrugged, then shook his head. To all appearances, he had a bad taste in his mouth.

“You’re the boss,” Chiurco said. “Your call.”

Hunt hesitated another moment, then finally let out a long breath. “Craig saw her.”

“Who?” Hardy asked, his empty stomach suddenly bunching up on him. For of course he immediately knew who, and when, and where.

Two minutes later they were all back in the kitchen. Joel had appeared from his duties elsewhere in the house and now stood over by the sink, holding Maya’s hand. They’d all been in a spirited conversation talking about something but stopped when a firm-jawed Hardy trooped in with Hunt and an especially disconsolate Chiurco in his wake.

Without any preamble Hardy looked around to Joel and Harlen and said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to speak to Maya alone for just a minute if I could.”

Joel, on edge in any case and perhaps emboldened by his interactions over the past hour or so with the police, moved a half-step over in front of his wife, protectively. “That’s not happening. We’ve already told you our decision on that. We’re fighting this together, Maya and me, all of it.”

“All right, then,” Hardy said. “But if that’s the case, I have to tell you that you’ll be doing it without me.”

“Fine,” Joel said. “We didn’t-”

Maya held up her own hand. “Wait!”

“Maya.” Joel, warning her, scolded her back into her place.

“No!” She turned her gaze to Hardy. “Dismas, can’t you just say whatever it is in front of Joel? We are in this together.” She turned to her husband, met his eyes. “We really are, Joel. But”-coming back to Hardy-“but I’ll go talk with you if you need me to. If that’s the only way.”

“There’s no only way, Maya. There’s no one way. There’s just the way it’s worked for me. The way I do it.”

Joel, adopting a reasonable tone, said, “Mr. Hardy, all right. Maya wants to keep you on, we’ll play it your way if you need to. But I’m telling you that you can say whatever you need to in front of me. And Harlen, for that matter. He’s family too.”

Hardy, exhausted from the lack of sleep and the postadrenaline slump after what he’d just heard from Chiurco, felt his shoulders sag, and this tweaked the crick in his neck anew. This was not the way the practice of law was supposed to work. To be effective you had to maintain control over the client, the family, the flow of information. And now he was feeling it all inexorably swirling away from him. “I very much appreciate all of your cooperation with one another,” he said, “and your mutual trust. But as I’ve told you, this is just not how I do it. I’ve got to talk to Maya first and alone. She’s my client and I’ve got no choice.” He turned to her. “Maya?”

She looked around at the room full of men, brushed her husband’s arm, and moved around him. “We’ll be right back,” she said.

“He’s sure?” she said.

“He said he’s one hundred percent sure. You’ve got a memorable face, Maya. You passed right by him as he was going in.”

“I don’t remember him.”

“No,” Hardy said, “maybe you don’t.” Thinking that it was probably because she had just killed someone. “But you were in fact there, weren’t you?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Maya?”

She looked up at him. “I didn’t think anybody would believe me if said I went there but he wasn’t home. But that was what happened.”

“Why did you go there?”

“He asked me to. He told me he needed to see me. That he’d tell about me and Dylan and him if I didn’t.”

“Just like Dylan?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what Dylan threatened you with if you didn’t come down too.”

“No. That was different. That was the shop. I already told you that.”

Hardy took a beat. “You also told me you didn’t go to Levon’s.”

Again, silence. Finally, “So what are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you going to tell the police?”

“No. Of course not. I’m on your side here, Maya. We can’t let the police find out about this at all. We’re just lucky it was my investigator who saw you. He’ll never tell a soul. I’ll never tell a soul. And there is no way we can ever be made to testify against you. But I think it’s time we stop answering any more questions at all. Someone wants to talk to you, you refer them to me.”

But no sooner had they walked back into the kitchen than Maya walked and then ran the last few steps up to her husband, hugged him, and started crying.

“Hey. Hey,” he said, holding her. Then, at Hardy, “What did you say to her?”

Hardy stood his ground. “There were things she had to understand. She’ll be all right.”

“She’ll be all right! She’ll be all right! Look at her. She’s crying now, for God’s sake. She’s not all right at all.”

“I’m sorry,” Hardy said. “I didn’t mean to make her cry.”

“Well, whether or not you meant it…” He brushed his hand down over her hair. “It’s okay, babe. It’s okay.”

She pulled away and looked up at her husband, her voice breaking, hysteria coming on. “It’s not okay. It’s not going to be okay. Maybe not ever again.”

“Sure, it will. We’ll get through this and-”

“No, Joel. You don’t understand. I was there. I was
there
.” She turned and pointed to Chiurco. “He saw me. Oh, God! Oh, God! I’m so, so sorry.”

Three days later, after the lab confirmed that both Maya’s fingerprints and DNA were on the doorknob of Levon’s apartment, Schiff and Bracco took Maya into custody.

There were Superior Court
judges Hardy liked a lot, and a very few that he’d prefer to avoid if at all possible, but only one he actively despised, and that was Marian Braun.

The history between the two of them was so extreme that it included a contempt violation and actual jail time for Hardy’s
wife
. He honestly believed that he might prevail on appeal, should it come to that, if he argued that Braun should have recused herself when she discovered that Hardy was going to be defending a murder suspect in her courtroom. Of course, the flip side of that was that if Hardy was worried about the impossibility of getting a fair trial from Braun, he could have exercised his 170.6.

That section of the California Code said that any lawyer assigned to trial could excuse one, but only one, judge, without giving any specific reason. The lawyer was sworn and simply declared under oath that he believed the judge to whom he’d been assigned was prejudiced against himself or the interests of his client to the point he thought he couldn’t get a fair trial.

That was it-no hearing, no evidence. The declaration itself caused the judge to be removed forever from the case. And challenges were reported to the judicial council. Obviously, a judge with too many challenges acquired the unfavorable attention of that supervisory body.

But the move had its price.

First, the courts hated challenges. They not only dinged one of their colleagues, however deservedly, but screwed up the scheduling for everyone else, because another judge had to take the case, and someone had to take their cases, and so on. And even if the judges personally despised the object of the challenge, they despised more the hubris of a mere lawyer who dared to suggest that one of their own tribe might not be fair.

So if Hardy exercised a challenge, he would likely immediately find himself in the courtroom of the most antidefense judge that the presiding judge could find available, and that judge would have an additional motive to make Hardy’s life as miserable as he or she possibly could. Hardy knew he challenged at his peril.

So Hardy elected to roll the dice with Braun. Call him superstitious or crazy-he’d also pulled Braun for his last murder trial, nearly four years before. She hadn’t liked him any better then, nor he her. And that trial had never been given over to the jury because a key prosecution witness had changed his testimony at the eleventh hour. Nevertheless, Hardy’s client had walked out a free woman, Braun or no Braun. He’d already proven that he could win in her courtroom, and if he could do it once, he could pull it off again.

Now, as he sat in Department 25 on the third floor of the Hall of Justice, waiting for his client’s appearance in the courtroom, Hardy found himself marveling anew at the thought that they were about to begin a full-blown murder trial. He felt vaguely responsible and not-so-vaguely incompetent that things had come to this point. Surely a better lawyer could have closed the case after the PX-the preliminary hearing-which they’d had a little over four months ago, within two weeks of Maya’s arrest.

At the end of that fiasco, Maya had been held to answer. In Superior Court he’d filed the pro forma 995, which called for the dismissal of the two first-degree murder charges against Maya on the grounds that the prosecution had failed to present even probable cause to suggest she’d committed these crimes.

Hardy had even permitted himself a flicker of optimism. There might have been technically enough evidence to justify a trial, but surely the court had to see the same weaknesses in the evidence that he himself saw. That was why Hardy had demanded, as Maya had a right to do, that the prelim take place within ten court days of her arrest. He had felt that on the evidence, he might win, and in any event, the case wasn’t going to get any better for the defense. But now, here he was in Braun’s court.

He’d been wrong.

The other, political, reason that he’d pressed for the speedy PX was that Maya’s arrest had set off a news frenzy in the city that Hardy thought could only get worse over time, and in this he was right. The secret grand jury investigation that Jerry Glass was conducting on the U.S.-attorney front, along with the public threats of forfeiture of the properties of one of the town’s major development and political families, had by now neatly dovetailed into a narrative that had captured the public’s imagination, as Hardy had suspected it would.

Knowing that the body politic of San Francisco in general, and probable members of jury pools specifically, tended to have little sympathy and lots of hostility and envy for the two aligned, and-in the public eye, generally malignant-classes of developers and politicians, Hardy had wanted to hurry up with a jury trial before every single person in San Francisco had been so exposed to innuendo, insinuation, and the venom of the press that they had all long since made up their minds. Juries didn’t always return verdicts based on the facts; sometimes they voted their prejudices. So, given the dearth of evidence for the actual murders, he’d believed back in October that a quick defense was his best chance to free his client and cut short the debate about the kinds of people the Townshends and other developers and power brokers must be.

And now, in late February, here they were, with Braun presiding, about to begin exactly what he’d strategized and labored to avoid and yet called down upon himself. He had demanded a speedy trial, and now he was going to get it.

Even moving as quickly as he could, he couldn’t avoid the collateral damage that continued to wreak its havoc on the extended Fisk/ Townshend/West families-Harlen’s, Maya’s, and the mayor, Kathy West’s. It appeared that the U.S. attorney’s power to subpoena-particularly financial records-in capable hands like those of Jerry Glass could be a blunt weapon indeed.

By the time the preliminary hearing had begun, Glass had barely had time to look into the Bay Beans West bookkeeping, much less Joel Townshend’s wider business affairs, and how, if at all, they might relate to one another. But since the marijuana connection with Dylan Vogler was intimately connected with BBW, and this was needed by the State to establish a purported motive for Maya to have killed him, Glass and his conduit Debra Schiff had obviously been supplying the prosecution with whatever they could in terms of questionable financial dealings between the coffee shop and the Townshend household.

This hadn’t hurt anyone too badly during the preliminary hearing-although the money laundering possibility had apparently been part of the court’s decision that a jury should weigh the evidence and reach its own conclusions in Maya’s case-but over the past months, and especially in the past couple of weeks, Glass’s investigators and accountants had finally unearthed what appeared to be a treasure trove of sophisticated financial relationships and arrangements that now appeared to implicate Townshend, Harlen, Kathy West, and some other large players in at the very least questionable, if not to say unethical or illegal, conduct.

Potential kickbacks, preferential treatment, undocumented meetings about matters of public interest in violation of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance.

Very little, if any, of this had been proven yet, except that Glass had succeeded in crippling BBW, and the government was preliminarily close to attaching the entire building as the probable proceeds from a drug operation, although the place itself was still open day to day. Because Maya had a Fifth Amendment right not to answer any questions in the forfeiture proceeding while her criminal case was pending, any final decision was on hold for now, but the questions alone raised a spectre of criminality over Maya and everything she touched.

The BBW accounts were incredibly sloppy. As just one example, Maya had cut Vogler a check from her own personal checking account for $6,000 for emergency repairs from water damage in July and another personal check for a half month’s pay, $3,750, last March. There was no record he had ever given her back the money. There was at least $30,000 worth of checks from Vogler to Maya over the past two years with no explanation at all in their records. The only question seemed to be what precise illegality was being funded by the operation.

Maya told Hardy she’d been busy with the kids’ school and on vacation and hadn’t been able to make it into the store to sign the business checks, but she’d also neglected to reimburse herself from the company account during the many visits when she’d had a chance to do so. She had no idea what the checks from Vogler to her represented. She had left it to Vogler to keep the books. In the current climate this explanation was widely discredited.

The victory for Glass and the accompanying widely perceived truth that the Townshends were in fact in the drug business had then in turn played a huge role in people’s perception of the Townshends, and public opinion shifted away from presumption of innocence. Suddenly, if you did business with Joel Townshend, or Harlen Fisk, or Kathy West-in fact, if you did business with the city-you were going to get cheated. That’s just the way “these people” did things.

Just this morning Hardy had read the
Chronicle
’s editorial and letters page, and it was fully one-third choked with vitriol-Supervisor Fisk and the mayor should quit or, failing that, they should be impeached. The drumbeat was picking up; even in Hardy’s office it was water-fountain talk.

And though none of this had anything to do with Maya’s guilt for the crimes of murder of which she was accused, Hardy knew that it was going to have a lot to do with Paul, aka Paulie, aka “The Big Ugly,” Stier-the assistant DA who’d pulled the case-and how he played the evidence. From an untutored perspective the entire courtroom drama could unfold as a large multi-tentacled conspiracy fueled by drugs and moral turpitude in high places.

Hardy glanced over at his opponent.

Despite his flamboyant nicknames Stier was in his mid-thirties, earnest, and, from Hardy’s dealings with him so far, possessed of little personality or sense of humor. The nicknames remained worrisome, though.

It was a truism in the courtroom that what you didn’t know
would
hurt you, and Hardy hadn’t been able to pick up much in the way of gossip or dirt on The Big Ugly, which probably meant he kept his personality-and his possible clever moves and dirty tricks-well hidden until he needed them, when they could inflict the most damage. Of course, it was also possible that the nicknames were sarcastic-that Stier was what he appeared to be, a hard-charging, fair-minded, good-looking working attorney. Certainly, he didn’t look dangerous now, leaning back over the bar rail chatting amicably with Jerry Glass. They were simply two clean-cut, hardworking, self-righteous, ambitious guys doing the people’s hard work-one for the country’s government, and one for the state’s.

Hardy felt a twist in his stomach.

There, also, in the front row, was Debra Schiff, who, Hardy knew, had started to see Glass socially, if not intimately. Leaning around further, Hardy briefly caught the eye of Darrel Bracco, who gave him a quick ambiguous look and then looked away-clearly all along Bracco had not been as gung-ho as Schiff about Maya’s guilt and the wisdom of her arrest, but in the maelstrom that had developed, his doubts, if any, had surely been laid to rest. Still, though, to Dismas the look somehow felt heartening.

Or maybe it was pity.

At a signal from the bailiff Hardy got up and walked through the door at the back of the courtroom leading to the corridor and the judge’s chambers. There, out of the sight of the jury, the bailiff took off Maya’s handcuffs, and Hardy entered with his client, followed by the bailiff, and they took their places at counsel’s table.

In what Hardy thought was a show of judicial nastiness if not downright personal affront to him, Braun had considered denying Maya the privilege of “dressing out,” or wearing normal street clothes when she appeared in the courtroom. For the duration of the trial, she opined, his client would sit next to Hardy at his table in her yellow jumpsuit.

Hardy, insane with rage, had had to file a fifteen-page brief before he could convince Braun that a variety of federal and state cases held squarely that his client had an absolute right to appear in front of the jury in civilian clothes. Dressed as a convict, she would present to the jury an image that was at odds with that of a citizen who was presumed innocent. She must be already guilty of something, went the not-so-subtle psychology of it. She wouldn’t be in jail, wearing that outfit, brought into the courtroom in handcuffs, if she hadn’t done anything at all, if she weren’t a danger to the community. Braun’s position was ridiculous and had been repudiated by courts for a good fifty years. Even so, she had conceded this absolutely undebatable point grudgingly and with bad grace.

The gallery noise behind them abated slightly. Maya gave Hardy a lost look and then scanned around behind her, nodding at her husband in the first row on “her” side of the gallery, or maybe it was that she was relieved not to see her children, who had been living with Fisk’s family all the while she’d been incarcerated.

The whole thing was awful, Hardy thought. Simply awful.

And what made it worse, all but intolerable from his perspective, was that in spite of the lack of evidence he’d finally come to lose almost all of his belief that she was not actually guilty of both murders.

Certainly, he knew, she had done something she was unwilling, under pain of life in prison, to reveal.

Also, while her family and her outside world appeared to be imploding around her, as the weeks had passed, she seemed to have grown more and more acquiescent, and less concerned with her defense, as though she deserved whatever happened to her. She still professed a desire to be found innocent, but mostly because she thought the children needed her. She didn’t want them to have to live with the fact that their mother was in jail, convicted of murder. For herself, though, it didn’t seem that critical an issue.

Hardy stood and pulled out her chair as all the parties rose while another bailiff brought in the jury from their room farther back along the same corridor Hardy and Maya had just used to enter the courtroom. When all the jurors were seated, she sat and Hardy pushed her forward until she was comfortably up at the table. As he’d coached her, she cast a look over to the newly empaneled jury and nodded a few times, making as much eye contact as seemed natural.