John Lescroart (9 page)

S
ick of conjuring with imponderables, Hardy called a fifteen-minute recess for himself. He stood up, stretched and walked to the window. Late afternoon, a listless gray day downtown. He and Frannie had their traditional Wednesday Date Night scheduled to begin in a couple of hours, and Hardy was tempted to call it a day and go wait for his wife at the Shamrock, discuss some philosophical conundrums with his brother-in-law Moses, who would be working behind the bar. He could have an early cocktail on the theory that it was always five o'clock somewhere.

He wasn't getting anything done here, that was for sure.

His reaction to Monday's problems with Glitsky and the jail had settled uneasily enough, but after his visit with Cole Burgess yesterday, the whole business lay curdling in his stomach. Something was very wrong, but he really didn't want to get involved any further. He was too close to it, one way or the other. Also, he didn't want to risk a serious rupture in his friendship with Abe over a lowlife such as Cole Burgess—to say nothing of the logistical problems he'd doubtlessly have with his friends Jeff and Dorothy, and her difficult mother.

When the dust cleared, he was all but certain that Cole would cut some kind of deal and get low double digits in the state prison. Every homicide was a manslaughter to Pratt's trial-shy prosecutors. Even the public defender called the city's system a “plea bargain mill.” Best case, Cole might even get out of San Quentin with his habit broken. In any event, it wasn't Hardy's problem.

What
was
his problem right now, though, was Dash Logan. The damned guy was proving harder to contact
than the Pope, and Hardy's client Rich McNeil was understandably losing some patience.

In the mid-eighties, McNeil had just turned fifty and decided to invest his 401K money in San Francisco real estate. He could have done better with Microsoft, but back then the stock market made him nervous. In any event, he wasn't complaining. The sixteen-unit apartment building on Russian Hill had cost a hefty million five when he purchased it for a quarter million down; its most recent appraisal pegged its value at six million plus. Rich was now sixty-four years old, primed to sell the thing and retire.

So here he was, this nice guy and good citizen who'd worked and saved the way good Americans were supposed to, and instead of some carefree years of leisure, he was suddenly looking at some very serious trouble.

A year and a half ago, he'd finally succeeded in evicting Manny Galt, who'd been a tenant in the building for nearly ten years. The tenant from hell, as it turned out.

The first sign of trouble was when he painted his entire unit, including the windows, black. When McNeil had demurred, politely requesting Galt at least to leave the outer windows clear, Galt had not so politely declined. It was his fuckin' place, he said, McNeil could go piss up a rope.

To say that San Francisco's rent control laws favor tenants over landlords is to say that Custer favored Southern belles over the Ogalala Sioux. So when Hardy's client explored the possibility of evicting Mr. Galt over the paint job, he found that this would be legally impossible. Galt had his five rooms, he paid his four hundred dollars every month, and as far as the law was concerned, that apartment was
his,
and at that price, until he gave it up on his own.

Which he wasn't inclined to do.

Over the years, Galt's one unit became a constant source of dissatisfaction to the other tenants as well, and a regular feature of McNeil's life became dealing with complaints about loud noises, awful odors, unsavory people.

Galt's apartment was just inside the front door to the building on the ground floor, and he decided it was a safer place to keep his Harley than the garage. Though he ostensibly, and sporadically, worked as a bouncer, he once boasted to McNeil that he really got his money for gas, rent and beer (his only necessities) selling or brokering crank and dope deals to other bikers.

The man himself was a giant—a vulgar, terrifying Neanderthal with an enormous gut, a voluminous, unkempt beard and a shaved head. He dressed perennially in black—T-shirts and leathers, boots and chains. If he bathed at all . . . but no, he couldn't have and smelled the way he did.

The only problem McNeil had with turnover in his building were the units adjacent to Galt's—over the years, the average tenancy in these units—despite the great location, the cooperative landlord, the reasonable rents—was ten months.

Finally, one happy day eighteen months ago, Galt had suddenly disappeared. McNeil didn't receive his rent check by the tenth of the month, which was the statutory grace period. He immediately served written notice and filed to evict. Under normal conditions, in San Francisco McNeil would have had to wait six months or more before any action would be taken on the filing, but the unprecedented support of every other tenant in the building—all of whom personally showed up for the hearing—convinced the judge that this was an extraordinary situation, and he ruled in McNeil's favor.

When he opened the door to the apartment, even McNeil—who'd expected the worst—wasn't prepared for the damage. The place was totaled. Eventually, it took a crew of four men forty-six days to restore the apartment to habitability. The removal of debris alone was a weeklong process. After that, it had to be cleaned, deodorized, cleaned again. McNeil had had to install new hardwood floors and drywall, new lights and fixtures, all new kitchen appliances. Finally, after the new paint was dry, when the work was all done at a cost to McNeil of thirty-one
thousand dollars and change, he put it on the market for twenty-four hundred dollars a month, and had eleven qualified renters the first day.

Then Galt returned.

He hassled McNeil for a few months, came to his house a few times, once with some biker friends, scared everybody, made a big stink, eventually went away. And Rich had thought the nightmare was over at last.

But three weeks ago, after all this time, Galt had resurfaced, and in a guise beyond McNeil's worst imaginings. According to the complaints, both civil and criminal, filed in the courts, Galt came home to shock and dismay that he had been put out of his castle.

Contrary to his landlord's sworn statements, he had not abandoned the property. As Mr. McNeil well knew, he'd had to leave with his Harley on an emergency road trip to Kentucky to care for his dying mother. Before he left town, he had paid McNeil twelve hundred dollars in cash for three months' rent in case he had to be gone that long. Upset, worried about his mother's health, in a hurry to be back at her side, he had not concerned himself about a receipt for the transaction—he was a man of his word, and assumed McNeil was as well. They'd had a relationship for years. It never occurred to him that either one of them would cheat the other.

He was stunned upon his return to find that Rich McNeil had stolen his money, taken away his home, disposed of all his treasures. After all, Galt had been a solid, rent-paying tenant—he had never,
not once,
missed a rent payment! And now he was ruined, with no place he could afford to live in the city he loved.

McNeil had obviously been driven to this inhuman fraud by simple greed—after all, he stood to make, he was currently making, two thousand dollars more
every month
on Galt's apartment alone. It was a horrible travesty.

So Galt, through his attorney Dash Logan, was appealing the eviction ruling. He was also suing McNeil to get his apartment back at the old rent, to restore his lost property, to compensate him for mental anguish, the pain and
suffering he'd endured, for his attorney's fees and for punitive damages—to the tune of a million dollars.

What made it worse for Hardy's client, though—far worse—were the criminal charges.

Like everything else in San Francisco, rent control was a political issue. And in her election campaign three years before, Sharron Pratt had made it clear that she hated slum landlords nearly as much as she loved the homeless. Her administration had pledged itself to protecting the rights of the poor, the unempowered, the disenfranchised masses. Besides which, renters in the city constituted a huge voting bloc.

And here was a Russian Hill nabob pitted against an unsympathetic biker—it was the perfect opportunity to illustrate just how venal these landlords could be in their immoral pursuit of the almighty buck.

Hardy knew McNeil well and considered his client pretty much a working stiff who'd put in thirty-five hard years behind desks in various management positions, eventually reaching the eminence of executive vice president of Terranew Industries, a biotech firm specializing in the ever-glamorous field of fertilizer products.

But in Sharron Pratt's opinion, Rich McNeil, by the very fact that he'd been successful and invested wisely, was of the landed class, the privileged class. Never mind that he'd earned it—that was irrelevant. And Manny Galt was low class. In fact, in the eyes of many, he was barely a citizen at all. This conflict boiled down to a class struggle. It was as simple as that.

Traditionally, as Pratt knew (and if she forgot, Gabe Torrey reminded her), the Rich McNeils of the world got their way by being in the men's club, by having the money to afford better lawyers, by buying elected officials to do their bidding and dirty work. Well, as Torrey had counseled her, she couldn't let that happen on her watch, no siree. It wasn't going to be business as usual in San Francisco, not while she was district attorney. That's why she'd been elected, to shake up the status quo, to ring in a new age.

She had to make the message crystal clear that her office saw through Rich McNeil's transparent grab for more income, more money that he didn't even need. Pratt had to be the people's protector here, and this was her chance to show the traditional power structure that the old way wasn't going to work. More than a landlord-tenant dispute, this had to be, by her lights, true white-collar crime, the kind that was too often tolerated in our society—and she had committed herself to punish it.

So the city and county of San Francisco brought criminal charges against Rich McNeil—grand theft, perjury, conspiracy to commit fraud. If it went to jury trial, and if he was convicted on all counts, Rich McNeil could be facing four years in state prison.

It was not the retirement he'd dreamed of.

 

Hardy was just turning from the window, intending to throw a couple of rounds of darts, when the telephone rang on his desk. “Dismas Hardy.”

“Dismas?” the voice said. “What the hell kind of name is Dismas?”

“It's the name my parents gave me, the good thief on Calvary. Who is this?”

“The good thief. That's great. Dismas. Dash Logan here. Sorry it's taken so long to get back at you. I've been busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”

Hardy bit back a sarcastic reply. “I won't take much of your time, then. As I mentioned in my messages, I'm representing Rich McNeil and I thought we could—”

A short, barking laugh interrupted him. From the falsely hale sound on the phone, Hardy formed the impression that Logan might already have downed a cocktail or two. “Oh, sorry,” the voice said, “somebody said something.” There were unmistakable bar noises in the background, Ricky Martin and La Vida Loca. “So you're with McNeil?”

“And his fifteen witnesses,” Hardy replied.

“To what?” Another disconnected laugh. Clearly Logan was following another conversation—or
something—going on in front of him. “On me, on me. Jerry, you let him pay I'll break your arm—”

“Look,” Hardy interrupted, “if this isn't a good time . . .”

“No. It's fine, fine. I'm just down here at Jupiter. You know the place?”

Hardy did and said so. A few blocks south of the Hall of Justice, the bar was kind of the up-tempo version of Lou the Greek's. Great fast food, loud music, bartenders with personality—a major hangout of the law crowd, serious drinker division.

“You free? 'Cause I'm here awhile. Meeting a client.” The voice shifted, another focus. “Yeah, you're talking to the duck. I heard it.” Back to the phone. “So? Hardy? What do you say? Come on down, I'll buy you a drink.”

“I've got clients, too, Mr. Logan. Some other time, maybe. But I'd really like to talk with you.”

“Anytime, anytime. You thinking you want to settle?”

“Actually, we're talking more about a cross complaint.”

This really seemed to strike Logan as funny. “
Get out!
For what?”

“That's one of the things I thought we'd discuss.”

“That'll be a short talk.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Hardy heard ice tinkling in his ear. He felt a pulse in his temple. This kind of posturing could go on forever, and he wasn't up to it today. “Mr. Logan,” he began, but again the voice cut him off.

“Dash, please. Everybody calls me Dash.”

David Freeman appeared at his door, and Hardy held up a finger, he'd be right with him. Back to the phone. “So is there a time that might work better for you?”

“I'm here almost every day, this time. Beyond that, it's pretty wide open. But if you're not talking settlement . . .” He let that hang.