Nothing but the Truth (7 page)
The lieutenant was shaking his head. “I don’t know. I could talk to the desk, maybe get her in AdSeg.”
“What’s that?” Frannie asked. “I’m right here, guys. Don’t third-person me.”
“Administrative segregation,” Glitsky explained to her. “Basically it’s isolation, a nicer cell. Keep you away from the general population, which you want, trust me on this.”
“This can’t be happening,” Hardy said.
“Evidently,” Abe went on, looking at Frannie, “you broke the first rule of the courtroom—you don’t insult the judge.”
“She’s a pompous ass,” Frannie retorted. “She insulted me first.”
“She’s allowed to insult you. It’s in her job description. What did you say to her?”
“I told her I held
her
in contempt, that this whole thing was contemptible . . .”
her
in contempt, that this whole thing was contemptible . . .”
Hardy was shaking his head, believing it all now. When Frannie got her dander up, watch out.
“It got her four days,” Glitsky said.
“
Four days?
” Hardy gathered himself for a beat. “This isn’t about some secret?”
Four days?
” Hardy gathered himself for a beat. “This isn’t about some secret?”
“What secret? Not that I heard from Chomorro. It’s about Braun.” Glitsky changed to a hopeful tone. “Maybe she’ll talk to you tomorrow, Diz.”
“No maybe about it,” Hardy said. “I’ll tackle her in the hallway if I have to.”
Frannie reached across the table. “Dismas, you can’t let them keep me here. The kids need me. This is some horrible mistake. It just started with this stupid promise. That’s all they wanted.”
“So what is it? Tell me—I promise,
I
won’t tell anybody. You can hire me as your attorney and it’ll be privileged. Nobody will ever know and maybe we can use it as a chip. I’ll go wake up the judge at her house, explain the situation—”
I
won’t tell anybody. You can hire me as your attorney and it’ll be privileged. Nobody will ever know and maybe we can use it as a chip. I’ll go wake up the judge at her house, explain the situation—”
Glitsky butted in. “I wouldn’t do
that.
What secret?”
that.
What secret?”
Frannie ignored Abe. “They could just ask Ron.
You
, Dismas, could ask Ron. Go to his house and wake him up. Call him from here even. If he knew I was in jail, he’d tell them what they want to know. He wouldn’t let this happen to me.”
You
, Dismas, could ask Ron. Go to his house and wake him up. Call him from here even. If he knew I was in jail, he’d tell them what they want to know. He wouldn’t let this happen to me.”
“What is this secret?” Glitsky asked again.
Frannie finally raised her voice. “The secret isn’t the issue!” Then, more quietly, “The secret’s nothing.” Her eyes pleaded with her husband, trying to tell him something, but what it was remained shrouded in mystery.
Then she shifted her glance quickly to Abe. “I promisedRon. I gave him my word. It’s
his
secret. Dismas, maybe if you could call him or go to his apartment and tell him what’s going on . . . I’m sure he’ll tell you. Then you come back and get me out of here.”
his
secret. Dismas, maybe if you could call him or go to his apartment and tell him what’s going on . . . I’m sure he’ll tell you. Then you come back and get me out of here.”
5
Abe was sifting through an armful of files he’d brought in from one of the desks in the homicide detail. He found the file he wanted and pitched it across his desk to Hardy. “As you recall from your days as a prosecutor, the address is there on the top right. Broadway.”
Hardy glanced down, then looked up. “No phone number? A phone number would be nice.”
“A lot would be nice in that file, Diz. There’s next to nothing there.” He sighed. “My first inspector got himself killed about a week into the case. You might remember him, Carl Griffin?”
Hardy nodded. “Yeah. He got killed how?” He didn’t want to talk about any dead policemen, especially to his best friend the live one, but this might bear on Frannie and he had to know.
“Some witness meeting went bad, we think.”
Sergeant Inspector Carl Griffin didn’t know it, but when he got up from his desk in the homicide detail on the fourth floor of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice on Monday morning, October 5th, it was for the last time.
He was the lone inspector working the murder of Bree Beaumont, a thirty-six-year-old environmental and, recently, political consultant. He’d been on the case for six days. Griffin had been a homicide inspector for fourteen years and knew the hard truths by now—if you didn’t have a murderer in your sights within four days of the crime, it was likely you never would.
Carl was a plodder with a D in personality. Everybody in homicide, including his lieutenant, Abe Glitsky, considered him the dullest tack in the unit. Loyal and hardworking, true, but also slow, culturally ignorant, hygienically suspect.
Still, on occasion Carl did have his successes. He would often go a week, sometimes ten days, conducting interviews with witnesses and their acquaintances, gathering materials to be fingerprinted and other physical evidence, throwing everything into unlabeled freezer bags in the trunk of his city-issued car. When he was ready, he’d assemble all his junk into some semblance of coherence, and sometimes wind up with a convictable suspect.
Not that he often got assigned to cases that needed brains to solve. In San Francisco, nine out of ten homicides were open books. A woman kills a man who’s beating her. A jealous guy kills a wandering girlfriend. Dope deals go bad. Gang bangs. Drunken mistakes.
Lowlifes purifying the gene pool.
In these cases, homicide inspectors collected the evidence that a jury would need to convict the completely obvious suspect and their job was done. Carl was useful here, connecting the dots.
Once in a while, since homicides came in over the transom and got assigned to whoever was on call, Griffin would draw a case that had to be worked. This hadn’t happened in over two years when the call came in about a politically connected white woman on Broadway, so Glitsky really had no choice. It wasn’t apparent at the outset that the case was high profile and if the lieutenant had suspected that it would go ballistic, he would have assigned other inspectors and Carl’s feelings be damned.
But as it was, Griffin got the Beaumont case, and he was in his sixth day, and he hadn’t made an arrest.
After receiving her doctorate from UC Berkeley in the early 80s, Bree had run that institution’s environmental toxicology lab for a couple of years before leaving academia to consult for the Western States Petroleum Association, and later to work for Caloco Oil.
Only a few months before her death, though, she’d abandoned the oil company and changed sides in the volatile wars over the multibillion-dollar gasoline additive industry. Going public with her opposition to what she had come to believe were cancer-causing additives in California gasoline, Bree had aligned herself with the state assemblyman from San Francisco, Damon Kerry, now running for governor.
The central plank of Kerry’s platform played on the public’s fears that these petroleum-based gasoline additives, particularly a substance called MTBE—methyl tertiary butyl ether—were seeping into California’s groundwater in alarming amounts. It was dangerous and had to be outlawed, but the government wouldn’t move on it.
When Bree, the oil industry’s very photogenic baby, had agreed to join his campaign, it had given Kerry a terrific boost. And now, after her death, radio talk shows hummed with theories that the oil companies had killed Bree Beaumont, either in revenge for her defection or to keep her from giving Kerry more and better ammunition to use against them.
With the election four weeks from tomorrow, Kerry trailed his opponent by half a dozen points. Bree’s death had become big news. And every time someone mentioned her name, Damon Kerry came up as well.
But Carl Griffin wasn’t troubled. He had a plate full of active homicides and knew the suspects in three of them. He was simply assembling the packages.
On Bree Beaumont, he was confident he was close to asking for a warrant. There was just one piece of information he had to verify and he’d have it tied up. And wouldn’t that just show Glitsky and the rest of them who thought he couldn’t do squat on this kind of case?
That’s why he never told anybody about his progress or lack of it. He wasn’t good with criticism. It rankled when other inspectors second-guessed him about what they’d do
differently, where they’d look, why they wouldn’t talk to the people Carl was talking to.
differently, where they’d look, why they wouldn’t talk to the people Carl was talking to.
Carl didn’t take this as good-natured ribbing, and maybe it wasn’t. He considered that he was an old-fashioned cop, a dog sniffing where his nose led, discarding anything that didn’t smell, following what did. His nose told him he was about a step away on Beaumont.
He stood in Glitsky’s doorway on his way out of the office. He wore his black Raiders windbreaker over an orange and blue Hawaiian shirt that he tucked into a shiny pair of ancient black slacks. The shirt billowed over his belt. He looked about halfway to term.
Griffin was telling his lieutenant that he was going to be seeing a snitch on a gang-related in the Western Addition first thing this morning. He was late for it now, which didn’t matter because the snitch would be late too. Then, depending on how things broke with the snitch, if he got time, he planned to try to find the knife in the Sanchez case—the crime scene investigators hadn’t been able to locate it in the house, but he’d bet it was somewhere on the block, so Griffin was going to poke around the shrubs and see what he came up with. His guess was she got out of the house and threw it somewhere and then came back before she dialed 911. Anyway, then—
Glitsky interrupted him. “How we doin’ on Beaumont?”
“Pretty good.”
Glitsky waited.
“Couple more days.”
“You writing it all up?”
Griffin lifted his windbreaker to show Glitsky the notebook tucked into his belt. He patted it. “Every word.”
There was no point in pushing. Griffin would tell him when he had something and he’d write it up when he got to it. Meanwhile, it sounded like he was moving steadily on at least two of his other cases. It would have to do for now.
But if Beaumont didn’t close in a couple of days, Glitsky knew he would have to pressure Carl to share his discoveries—he was starting to take heat about it.
“All right.” Griffin started to turn and for some reason, Glitsky said, “Watch your back, Carl.”
A nod. “Always.”
“Griffin wasn’t the brightest light in the detail,” Abe said. “You ever meet him?”
“Couple of times, yeah.”
“So you know. Anyhow, we figure he arranged some kind of sting, put the heat on one of his witnesses. Guy might have been on something, didn’t like the way it was going. Anyway, he didn’t respond well under pressure, felt he was getting double-crossed, shot Carl, something like that.” Glitsky made a face. “We may never know for sure.”
Hardy clucked in commiseration, then gestured down at the file he was holding. “So who’s got the case now?”
Glitsky nodded at the stack of folders he’d just gone through. “I got these off Tyler Coleman’s desk. That one doesn’t look much like it’s been worked.”
“Why not?”
Glitsky shrugged. “It’s their sixth active. Time they got it, the thing’s already over a week old. Priorities.”
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