The 13th Juror (10 page)

"That shit!"  Rhea picked up the plastic cup that held her plastic utensils and her disposable razor blade and her toothbrush and threw it against the bars.

"Rhea, stop!  Please stop."

She did stop raving, stopped swearing.  But when she did it left her standing at the edge of her cell, where she crumbled to the floor, crying quietly.

After a minute or two Jennifer uncurled herself from her cot and went to the side of her cell.  "He couldn't get bail?"

Rhea shook her head quietly, back and forth.  "He said it would be a couple of days at the most.  Now he says without me his income is down and it's taking longer.  How do you like that?  Without me his income is down!"  She lapsed again into quiet tears.

"How much would it take?" Jennifer asked.

The crying slowed, went to sniffles, stopped.  "What?"

"How much did you say your bail was?  Five thousand?"

She nodded.  "Why?"

Jennifer sat on the floor, knees up, arms wrapped around them.  She had already learned a lot about the working of the jail.  Clara knew a lot, so did Mercedes.  If you had the stomach and the money for it, if you were desperate enough, guards could be bribed, things could be done.  It had happened before, many times.

"I don't know for sure," Jennifer said, "but maybe I can help him get it."  She spoke as quietly as she could, venturing a glance over to Rhea.  If anyone else heard her, she wanted to be able to deny having said anything.  But Rhea was listening, her mouth half open, disbelieving.  "Of course you'd have to help me if you could."

12

Halfway out from Van Ness to the beach, Miz Carter's Mudhouse had been a landmark on California Street for half a century.  The "mud" was coffee, sometimes thick as Turkish, and before espresso caught on with the yuppies in the late seventies the Mudhouse was the best place for java in the western half of the city.  Miz Carter's daughter, Louanne, still made her mud the old way, loose ground beans stirred into boiling water, then strained as it was poured.  The stuff could jolt you right up.

Which Hardy needed.  He and Frannie had been awakened no fewer than six times by their two young darlings doing their tag-team number, Rebecca with an ear infection and low-grade fever, Vincent wanting to be fed.  It was fun, but all and all, the Hardy's agreed they'd had better times.

Glitsky's description of Walter Terrell — white guy, brown hair, mustache — wasn't exactly on the money.  He was swarthier, Mediterranean somehow, not like the guy Hardy had been thinking about from school.  Hardy had put his briefcase on the table to identify himself, and Terrell came and slid in across from him.

He was younger than Hardy had expected, maybe thiry-two or thereabouts.  At forty-one, Hardy didn't feel old, but it was disconcerting that so many people he worked with were starting to be so much younger, and that he noticed it.

Terrell wore new Reeboks, a worn pair of Levi's and an ironed dress shirt with thin maroon stripes under his Member's Only jacket that fit him neatly.  In spite of Glitsky's feelings about Terrell and his theories, the guy must have put together some kind of record if he'd already made Homicide.

After he'd had his coffee poured, Terrell took a sip and shuddered, adding sugar like there was no tomorrow.  "What kind of name is Dismas?"  He tried the mud again.  He kept stirring.

Hardy explained for the thousandth time that Dismas had been the name of the good thief on Calvary.  He did not mention that he was also the patron saint of murderers.  "Only thing I can figure, my folks wanted to punish me for some reason.  When I think they could have named me Bill, or Jack…"

Terrell's face cracked.  "Yeah, I know, anything but Sue."  Trying his coffee again, he finally put his spoon down.  "This stuff's awesome," he said.  "People drink this every day?"

"Every day."

"Awesome."  He motioned to Hardy's briefcase.  "So'd you check out Ned?"  Hardy nodded.  He'd gone over the coroner's exhumation report on Edward (Ned) Hollis last night after they'd put the kids down, further endearing him to his wife, who after a day with no adult company had more or less expected him to share the evening with her.

The smile and the aw-shucks manner weren't entirely convincing.  This was one smart cop.  He could be as friendly as you please, but he wasn’t going to be sandbagged by any smarty-pants defense attorney, even if he happened to be a friend of Abe Glitsky.

But Hardy merely nodded again.  There was no battle to be won here.  "I'm trying to get a handle on Ned, I suppose.  Jennifer doesn't seem to have much to say about him.  They found the atropine?"

Terrell pointed a finger at the briefcase.  "That what it says?"

'Yeah, but so what?"

It was the first time Hardy had surprised him.  "What do you mean, so what?"

"They find a concentration of atropine on the front of the right thigh?  Which indicates it might have been injected?"

"Right."

"All right, we'll grant that, but what's to say Jennifer injected him?"

Terrell tried the coffee again, ignoring its awesomeness.  "He didn't shoot himself up.  Atropine doesn't make you high."

"Okay, but again, so what?  Maybe he was trying to kill himself.  Maybe he succeeded.  What I'm asking is if there's anything I'm missing here, because I don't see why this got charged as a murder."

Terrell was visibly holding himself back.  His face was becoming flushed.  "This got charged as a murder 'cause it
was
a murder.  Your Jennifer aced him for the seventy-five grand."

Hardy tried to keep it loose.  "I'm not saying she didn't.  I'm just wondering what proof… if you've got any proof that she was the one who gave Ned the shot?  I mean, how do you even know she was in the room?"

"She was in the room.  She got him tanked up on booze and coke 'til he passed out, then she bonked him with the needle.  Now he's dead, the coroner finds lethal coca-ethylene and forgets about scanning for whatever else might have killed him, like the atropine."  He stabbed a finger on the table.  "That's what happened, Mr. Hardy.  You can bet on it."

Getting back to "Mr. Hardy" wasn't a good sign, and it wasn't Hardy's intention to alienate the inspector.  "I'm not saying it didn't.  The DA bought it — they charged it.  But it seems to me they had to have more."

On the defense now, but softening slightly, Terrell the new homicide cop was anxious to show he'd done it right.  "There was more, they did get more.  I got 'em Harlan Poole, didn't I?"

"Her lover, the dentist?  How'd you get to him?"

"I saw his name in a couple of statements Jennifer made in Ned's file.  So I went and talked to him."  Eager to explain his technique, Terrell leaned forward across the table.  "The thing about this police work is sometimes, you know, you got to have some intuition.  I mean, sometimes you just
know
what went down, right?  So you go on that, tweak things a little, and you get somewhere."

"And you tweaked Poole?"

Terrell obviously enjoyed the memory.  "Wasn't much of a tweak.  The guy's successful, maybe forty-something, wife and three kids.  I told him if he cooperated, told us what he knew, we'd try to keep a low profile on him.  Guy cracked like a nut."

"And said what?"

"Said he missed the atropine one day after Jennifer had been in the office for a little late night nookie.  Evidently they did it in or on — that guy and his wife don't do it much that way anymore.  Anyway, he didn't put it together until hubby Ned turned up dead, and then he figured Jennifer had done it and it scared the piss out of him, so gradually, he says, he dumped her."

"Because he thought she'd killed Ned?"

"Yeah, because she killed Ned."

Hardy sat back.  To grab some time, he lifted his cup and knocked back the dregs, making a face.  There was a crucial something missing here.  "Let me get this straight," he said.  "When Ned turned up dead, Poole concluded that Jennifer had killed him, is that right?"

Terrell nodded.

"Well, isn't that a bit of a leap?  I mean, he must have had some kind of hit this was on her mind — something?  Right?"

"Sure.  She'd talked about it."

"Talked about killing Ned?"  Hardy shook his head.  "If Poole got scared off afterward, why didn't he see it coming and dump her before?"

Terrell was engaged now, thinking it through, elbows on the table.  "I guess he didn't see it coming.  She didn't talk about it as a plan or anything.  I think afterward he just put it together."

"But why?  Why would it even enter his mind?"

"Because she'd talked about leaving him, about wouldn't it be wonderful if he died, the insurance, all that."

"Leaving him and wishing he'd die aren't  the same as actually killing him."

"Okay, but she'd tried to leave him before — a couple of times — and he'd come after her and beat the shit out of her."

Bingo.  "Ned beat her, too?  Is there any proof of that?"

"You mean did she report it, anything like that?  Get serious."

This was good stuff, and possibly true, but Hardy was more than half-certain that all of it was inadmissible because it was hearsay, and twice removed hearsay at that — Dr. Poole saying that Jennifer had told him that Ned had beaten her.  Nevertheless, it was a psychological bombshell.  If it was true that Jennifer had killed Ned because he was beating her — to stop him and to get the insurance she could figure she was entitled to — who wouldn't believe she had done the same with Larry?

Because the argument was compelling, the temptation to compare the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Larry and Ned would be overwhelming, and Hardy found himself hoping that Powell and the prosecution would get caught up in the symmetry and pursue it.  Because it gave her a sympathetic motive in both cases.

But he didn't mention this to Terrell.  Instead, he told him he thought what he had was pretty good.

Friends now, or at least amicable adversaries, they stood by the counter waiting for their change, making small talk, Hardy asking if Terrell had ever noticed the funny coincidences that seemed to happen all the time when you got deep into a case.

"Yeah, I know," Terrell said, "it's weird.  Couple of months ago, I'm still in burglary, I get a call out in the Mission and I go down there and I'm checking out a broken window when another window across the alley opens up and some guy yells, 'Hey, Wally!'  I look up and it's some guy I played ball with in high school.  Amazing, but you're right.  It happens all the time."

Hardy told him about the death of Simpson Crane in Los Angeles.  "Is that strange or what?  Here I'm at a murder victim's house, I find a phone number and call it, and I get another murder victim."

That stopped Terrell by the door.  Maybe he just wasn't primed yet to go out into the swirling fog, but Hardy didn't think that was it.  "How'd you say this guy — Crane? — how'd he get it?"

"They think it was some union job, a professional hit.  Just like Jennifer says with Larry.  Hell of a coincidence, huh?"

Terrell shook his head, almost as though he were trying to clear it, shake this rogue thought out completely.  "No, Larry wasn't no hit.  There wasn't any hit man.  Jennifer did Larry."

Hardy didn't want to smile when he set the hook.  Give this man a theory, Glitsky had said.  "Still, you've got to admit, it's interesting."

Terrell tried to shrug it off.  "Sure, but like I said, this shit happens all the time."

"You're right."  Hardy pushed the door open, steeling himself against the cold.  "You're right, it does."

*     *     *     *     *

A seven-year-old Matthew Witt smiled up in full color and perfect focus.  Whoever had taken the school photos had done a good job, capturing the personality behind the impish face.  Whatever constrictions had worked on Matt in his sterile home, they apparently hadn't defeated him.  There was a real smile in the eyes, some kidlike sense of jauntiness — maybe he'd just said something smart to the photographer and was proud of himself.  But it wasn't a wise-ass look — it was friendly, open.  A nice little boy aiming to please.

David Freeman was in the shower in his apartment and Hardy slumped deep in an ancient red leather chair near one of the living room windows, trying and failing to tear himself away from Matt.  There were lots of other pictures in the folder that he held on his lap, and he had already gone through quite a few when he go to the boy.

He had black hair, neatly combed and parted except for a cowlick.  He was wearing a green-and-white-striped T-shirt with a soft collar, up on one side and down on the other like puppies' ears.  There was a gap between his two front teeth.  Freckles across the bridge of his nose.  Long eyelashes.  The beginning of a dimple.  The laughing eyes were a deep green.

Hardy sat back, pulling at the skin on his face, staring without seeing anything out the window into the fog.  He didn't know how much time had gone by when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

"There's nothing we can do about that."

Freeman, in a frayed terrycloth bathrobe, gave Hardy's shoulder another gentle shake.  He was, at times surprisingly, perhaps sympathetic — the tone said so — but ultimately pragmatic.  If you couldn't affect anything, if you couldn't act, then by Freeman's definition there was nothing to be done.  Hardy didn't agree — it might not produce any tangible result but he thought you could at least grieve.

Barefoot, unshaven, his wet hair in a gray-and-brown mess, Freeman walked across his living room to the breakfast nook, where on a shining mahogany table he had spread his own working papers, legal pads, binders, boxes of cassette tapes.  Currently working a trial, planning for a new one, cleaning up the loose ends and appeals of trials gone by — was this what Hardy's life was going to become?  He got a glimpse of it from Frannie's perspective and wondered if by getting involved with David and Jennifer he was making a mistake.

Then he looked down at Matt.  God… if Jennifer had killed him, even by accident, even if he'd just gotten in the way…

But what if it wasn't that, what if Jennifer were telling the truth?  Then someone else was out there.  Someone who needed to die and was walking around, letting Jennifer go through this hell, leaving Matt unavenged.

Hardy did believe in vengeance — in severe, purposeful vengeance.  It was what had drawn him into police work, then into the prosecution business in the first place.  But, and this way he knew he
was
becoming a lawyer, he now believed that before the vengeance he — personally — had to eliminate any reasonable doubt.

And this was what drove him now — not to sell his soul as a mouthpiece for some prosecution or defense posture, for some legal opinion, not to argue because he could prevail, but to uncover the truth of the matter, however it came out.

He put Matt's picture face down and went to the next one.

*     *     *     *     *

Freeman lived on the corner of Taylor and Pine, one steep block down from the peak of Nob Hill, a floor above one of the oldest and best French restaurants in the City.  Freeman kept his own personal wine cellar in the restaurant and averaged perhaps ten meals there every month.

His own apartment was modest in size and conveniences — two bedrooms, living room, kitchen with eating nook.  In spite of his income, the place resisted any not to modern technology.  Freeman still used a rotary wall-mounted telephone in the kitchen, and whenever he played his classical music, which was the only kind he listened to, it was on long-playing 33a rpm records that he'd bought with his then brand new stereo system in the early sixties.  The couches and chairs in the living room were comfortable, cracked old red leather; the coffee and end tables were of some dark wood with lion's claw feet.  The lamps all had shades, and most of them were three-way.