Hard Evidence (5 page)

7

The
Chronicle
building was at Fifth and Mission, about six blocks from the Hall of Justice. Hardy walked through the morning fog, which did a lot more than chill the air, and while Tony Bennett might not care, he was probably one of the very few who didn’t. Hardy gave away a few bucks in change to some homeless people who sat against the buildings on Third, wrapped in newspapers or old blankets, shivering. By the time he got to the
Chronicle
, his bones felt brittle and old.

Jeff Elliot anchored one of the newer desks in a cavernous room that smelled like an old school. His crutches were propped against the desk, all too visible. Propped as in prop, Hardy thought. He was turned to face a video terminal and was talking on the telephone when Hardy got to his desk.

‘All of this is off the record,’ he began.

Elliot turned, saw Hardy, held up a finger and continued talking into the mouthpiece.

Hardy continued right on. ‘When I got into work this morning, I wasn’t as mad as I was yesterday, but pretty close. Did I mention this is off the record?’

Elliot muttered something into the telephone, hung up and turned squarely to face Hardy. He didn’t look so young nor so friendly as he had at Hardy’s house two days earlier. His face, still boyish, looked sallow and wan, as though he hadn’t slept in a couple of days. The dishwater hair hung lank and long, over the ears. His tie was loosened at his throat, although his shirt was fresh.

‘Mr Hardy,’ he said, sticking out his hand over the desk.

Hardy ignored the hand. ‘Off the record. Everything I ever say to you again. Completely and absolutely off the record. Is that clear?’

Elliot, to his credit, didn’t bluff much, though he did try his sheepish grin. ‘My editor wouldn’t run the story without a source. You didn’t tell me not to use your name.’

Hardy held up a hand. ‘I don’t care about your politics. There’s enough where I work.’

Elliot shrugged. ‘I needed the —’

Hardy stopped him. ‘You could have accomplished the same thing being straight with me. I’m a pretty reasonable guy, but I am truly a bad enemy.’

Elliot was sitting farther back, eyes wide. ‘If that’s a threat,’ he said, then stopped.

To his surprise, Hardy noticed Elliot’s hands were shaking on the desk. The boy was scared. Something in Hardy wanted to go for the jugular, but he had liked Elliot at his house and the shaking hands made him lose the stomach for it.

He sat down, put his arms and elbows on the desk. ‘It’s no threat. It’s a tip, that’s all. Don’t make enemies you don’t need to. This is the big city. People play for keeps, even nice guys like me.’ Hardy flashed him a grin. ‘Now I’d like you to do me a favor.’

Elliot came slowly forward. ‘If I can. I guess I owe you one.’

‘That’s the right guess,’ Hardy said.

*     *     *     *     *

‘Owen Nash.’ Jeff Elliot’s voice was thick with excitement.

‘Where are you now?’ Hardy, at his desk, pushed away one of the case folders and swirled on his chair to look out the window. Gray on gray. He had asked Elliot to go to Missing Persons and check to see if either a large woman or a man — someone with a full-sized hand — had been reported missing.

‘I’m downstairs. The call just came in this morning.’

‘The timing’s right,’ Hardy said. Missing Persons would not get involved with a person’s disappearance until three days had passed.

‘Right. Well, this was called in by a guy, wait a sec, a guy named Ken Farris, phone number, you got a pencil?’

Hardy took the number. ‘Owen Nash, and this number. Anything else?’

‘They’ve got nine missing kids and three skipped or missing wives — all of them within the range of normal size. But Owen Nash is the only missing adult male this week. That’s not so common. It’s a real start.’

‘It’s a start, maybe, and that’s all it is, Jeff. And it’s a big, big maybe.’

‘Still,’ Elliot said. ‘But why couldn’t you just come down and ask around?’

Hardy sighed. Why get into it? ‘Politics,’ he said. ‘But it was a good idea. I wish it had been mine.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘You don’t do anything. I start a little follow-up and you wait until I call you, got it? And I might not.’

‘But if there’s a story?’

‘It’s yours. That’s the deal.’

*     *     *     *     *

Hardy hadn’t intended to mention anything to anybody, but Drysdale poked his head in through his door the minute he hung up. ‘Just making the rounds,’ he said. ‘You better today?’

‘They’ve got a missing adult male.’

Drysdale frowned, leaning on the door. ‘Who does?’

‘Missing Persons.’

‘Does this directly relate to one of the two dozen folders I see so prominently displayed on your desk?’

‘Not even indirectly.’ Hardy smiled.

Drysdale let himself in the door and pulled it closed after him. ‘Diz, do yourself a favor, would you? Clear a few of these.’ He picked up part of the stack of files and dropped it on the middle of the desk. ‘Give me some numbers so I can point to your caseload and say, “This guy’s been a horse in the minors, let’s give him a shot at the big time.” ’

Hardy spun the jade paperweight, now doing its appointed task on his desk. ‘Okay, Art. Okay.’

‘Thank you.’ Drysdale started to go, but Hardy called him back. ‘Can you tell me anything about Elizabeth Pullios?’

‘I can tell you a lot about her. Why?’

‘She kind of gave me a pep talk yesterday, out of the blue.’

‘Maybe she thinks you’re cute.’

‘I got the feeling she doesn’t need to seek out men.’

Drysdale nodded, leaning against the doorpost. He had his hands in his pockets, one leg crossed over the other, relaxation incarnate. ‘No, she does not need to seek out men.’

‘So what’s her story? Why’s she such a red-hot?’

Checking the hallway behind him, Drysdale pulled the door shut and straddled one of the chairs facing Hardy’s desk, looking out the window at the gray behind him. He took a breath. ‘Her mother was raped and killed by a guy who’d been on parole three days. He’d been a model prisoner, in for rape. Served four years when they let him out for good behavior. I think it left her with an impression.’

Hardy whistled.

‘Well, I guess we’re all motivated by something, but some of the staff think Pullios takes it a little far.’ Drysdale stood up and stretched. ‘Anyway, the fact remains, I want to put somebody away, I’d go with her every time. Don’t get personal with her, though. She’s very one-track.’

Hardy held up his left hand, the one with Frannie’s ring. ‘I’m a newlywed, Art. I’m not in the market.’

‘I wouldn’t bet that’s a big issue with her.’

*     *     *     *     *

Hardy’s first move after his superior left was to pick up the telephone and dial the number Jeff Elliot had given him — Ken Farris, the man who had reported the missing person, Owen Nash. A sultry-voiced receptionist got crisp and efficient when Hardy said he was from the D.A.‘s office. He patched him through immediately.

‘This is Ken Farris. Who am I talking to?’

Hardy told him. There was a pause.

‘I don’t understand. You’re with the San Francisco district attorney’s office? Is Owen
in jail
?’

The telephone beeped.

‘If that’s your call waiting —’

Farris cut him off. ‘We record all our phone calls here. Is that a problem?’ He didn’t wait for a response. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but what’s the D.A. got to do with Owen being missing? Is he alive, please just tell me that?’

‘I don’t know that, Mr Farris.’ He heard a deep exhalation — relief or frustration, he couldn’t tell which, and didn’t want to wait to find out. ‘What I’m calling about, how I’m involved here, has to do with a hand that turned up in a shark’s belly.’

Hardy could almost hear Farris’s brain changing gears. ‘The one in the
Chronicle
? I read about that. What has
that
got to do with Owen?’

‘Maybe nothing. Mr Nash is a missing male, and the hand may be from an elderly male.’

‘What do you mean, might be? Did the paper have that? You think the hand might be
Owen’s
?’

‘I think it might be worth a look, that’s all. There might be some bit of skin with something you’d recognize, the shape of a fingernail, something. The fingerprints are gone, but…’

‘Don’t I remember something about a ring?’

Hardy nodded into the phone. ‘There was a jade ring on the little finger.’

The phone beeped again. All their calls? Hardy thought.

Farris was curt. ‘Then it wasn’t Owen. He wore a gold wedding band on his left hand, but no other jewelry. What hand was it?’

‘It’s a right hand.’

‘Well, it isn’t Owen then. That’s definite.’ Farris sighed again, letting out some more pressure. ‘Thank God.’

*     *     *     *     *

Derek Graham had been a maintenance man in sewers for thirteen years. He was a forty-year-old Caucasian male supervisor with a wife and three children. As a tenured city employee, he was immune to just about anything that might threaten his job, but the political reality was that a white management person who lost his job in San Francisco would find it filled immediately by a member of any one of the myriad minority groups San Francisco called its own. Already, Hardy knew, the sharks were circling, and a righteous drug-bust conviction could put Derek not only in jail but on the street.

For while it was still only a $100 misdemeanor to smoke marijuana in San Francisco, possession of anything over an ounce was interpreted as intent to sell and that was a felony.

Derek’s city-issued Chevrolet Caprice with its ‘Buy America’ bumper sticker had a burned-out brake light. This turned out to be bad luck for Derek. He had just finished half a joint so he could get home a little relaxed and not snap at his kids when a patrol car pulled him over, the officer had smelled that smell and, with his olfactory evidence as probable cause, had searched the Caprice and found roughly eight ounces of sensimilla in the trunk.

This led to a search of Derek’s house and the discovery of the hydroponic garden in the basement. Derek was in a lot of trouble, and he was very worried about it. ‘Look,’ he told Hardy, ‘I can’t lose my job.’ He was in Hardy’s office with his court-appointed attorney, a young woman named Gina Roake. Ms Roake hadn’t said a word since introducing Derek to Hardy five minutes earlier. Hardy had addressed his remarks to her at first, but Derek kept butting in, so Hardy went to the horse’s mouth.

‘Losing your job isn’t the half of it,’ he said.

Derek was six feet tall and weighed, Hardy figured, about one-eighty-five. He had a handsome, clean-shaven face topped by a businessman’s haircut. For this meeting, at which he wasn’t particularly welcome by either attorney, he’d chosen not to wear a tie. But in dress slacks and a pressed button-down checkered shirt, he looked more than presentable. He could have been applying for a job at a construction site.

‘It’s not like I’ve done anything criminal. Hell,’ he said to Hardy, ‘you work for the city, what do you make?’

‘Growing dope is criminal,’ Hardy answered, ‘and my salary is irrelevant.’

‘I could look it up, but say it’s forty-five.’ Derek continued without pause. Hardy made $52,000 a year in his new job, and he let his suspect go on. ‘You got kids?’

Hardy nodded.

‘Well, then, you know. You can’t make it on forty-five. Here I work for the city fifteen years —’

‘The file says thirteen.’

‘So split a hair. Thirteen. I work here thirteen years full-time and my wife and I are trying to raise three kids right, so she can stay home with ’em. Why have kids if you’re not going to raise them yourself, right? I got no record before this. I’m not whining, I’m just telling you the truth.‘

‘Raising your kids right includes marijuana horticulture?’ Hardy asked.

‘My oldest kid is seven. The grass is a second job, that’s all it is.’

There wasn’t any doubt of that. Hardy made his fifty-two, but he owned one quarter of the Little Shamrock and that brought in another grand or so a month, plus Frannie had a quarter-of-a-million-dollar insurance policy from her first husband’s death, which they were saving for the kids’ college. But at least if they really needed it, it was there. Hardy knew what Derek was saying — it
was
hard to make it on one salary in these times.

But Hardy, right now, was a prosecutor. He remembered Art Drysdale’s words,
Illegal is wrong
. He said, ‘You should have thought of that when you planted your garden.’ Not liking himself very much.

‘Who am I hurting? Tell me that. I’m no dealer. I got eight guys I off-load a key on.’

Hardy held up a hand. ‘Now we’re talking. Any of these people have names?’

Derek just shook his head. ‘Come on, man, these are normal people like me and you. How old are you, forty? Tell me you didn’t smoke a little weed in college.’

Hardy couldn’t tell him that. He didn’t know many people of his generation, including many on the police force, who hadn’t had a hit or two of marijuana at one time or another. To him it was a nonissue. But, here he was, playing at — no, being — the law.

Suddenly he turned and spoke directly to Ms Roake. ‘Could we have a conference, please?’ He looked pointedly at Derek. ‘There’s a reason the court appoints an attorney. The coffee shop’s down on one.’

When he’d gone, Hardy closed the file. ‘Ms Roake. Gina, may I call you Gina? What does he want?’

‘He doesn’t want to lose his job, I think.’

‘Is there an automatic administrative removal on conviction? There’s no question the plea is guilty, am I right?’

‘The question is the charge.’ Gina gave him a tight little smile. ‘Misdemeanor, I don’t think so, but if we’re talking felony, he’s fired.’ Gina seemed to be about twenty, although she must have been older. She bit her lower lip. ‘I really think he just wanted the money to help his family.’

Hardy fairly snapped at her. ‘People rob banks and kill people all the time to get money for their families.’ Gina stiffened visibly, and Hardy backed off. ‘Look, I don’t mean to jump all over you, but let’s not play his game. The guy was growing a good amount of dope, and that’s illegal. How about you think up some heavy misdemeanor that will satisfy me? I mean a good one. He pleads to that, pays a heavy fine, does some community service, I’ll try to sell that to my boss, and your man keeps his job.’