The Ophelia Cut (34 page)

“He works at Burning Rome,” Hardy went on, “the ABC busts the place. He works here, they have a riot and break the damn window. And that’s a hard window. I’ve thrown people up against that window and it didn’t break.”

“Well, it did last night. But it wasn’t Tony,” Frannie said. “The Beck said it was the photographers.”

“Now you’re going to bat for him.”

“Just correcting the record.”

“Okay. But who’s the lawyer here?”

She took his hand. “You are. Seen enough?”

He stepped forward, knocked at the plywood a couple of times. It seemed to be holding. “If he’s trying to open at noon, he’ll be here soon
enough, and I don’t think I want to see him. I’ve had enough drama for one weekend.”

She started leading him back to their car. “I’m just afraid this is going to start another round.”

“Of what?”

“ ‘Of what,’ he asks. You’d think they’d just leave her alone.”

“Actually, no, I wouldn’t think so. Beautiful rape victim. Father on trial for killing her assailant. Now provoking a range war among the paparazzi. Who even knew there were paparazzi here? Or that many of them?”

“Well, there are going to be more now. And she hasn’t even testified yet. Imagine if they found out she was dating a protected witness? It would be a free-for-all. She’d have to go into hiding.”

“To say nothing of Tony, whose cover would be blown. That might not be such a bad thing. At least for Brittany, maybe for all concerned.” Hardy shook his head. “You know what I don’t understand?”

“Quantum physics?”

“Besides that. And don’t say string theory.”

“You don’t understand string theory?”

“Not so much. But what I really don’t understand is the frenzy. I mean, Brittany’s a pretty girl, okay, but a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of pretty?”

“That’s naked. In
Playboy
.”

“They think all normal pretty young women want to be in
Playboy
?”

“A lot of them do.”

“Am I a prude because I’m glad Brittany doesn’t?”

“You’re not a prude, period. It’s not about that, anyway. It’s about privacy. All that’s happened to her, did she ask for any of it? She’s going along with her life, and suddenly, everybody wants to take her picture, all her ex-boyfriends want to talk about how promiscuous she is, what a slut she was in college. Next thing you know, somebody’s going to turn up with a sex tape.”

“Please, God, no. For Susan’s sake, at least, not to mention Mose’s.”

A shrug. “Beck said she couldn’t rule it out.”

“Could Brittany have been that dumb?”

Frannie shot him an arch look. “Have you checked out Facebook lately?”

“Not exactly my thing. Is she on that?”

“Everybody’s on that, Diz. Everybody’s stalking everybody else. Hopefully, Brittany’s posts aren’t too extreme. Probably not, or they would have come out already, but there’s no sense of anybody’s private business. And not just there. Why wouldn’t you want to be naked in
Playboy
for money if you’re already naked on the Web for free?”

“How about if you just don’t want to be naked in public?”

Frannie smiled, stopped, and kissed his cheek. “You are such a sweet little Victorian,” she said.

A
FTER THE RIOT,
Susan and Brittany stayed at the bar to help clean up. They found the plywood—used many years before on the same front window, so a perfect fit—in the back storage area. When they finished, they went home to Susan’s together.

So this morning, Susan had let her daughter sleep in. Now, closing in on noon, Brittany sat at the kitchen table in running shorts and a Cal T-shirt. Susan had opened the windows to let in the warm breeze, and Brittany was finishing a cheese quesadilla. “The only thing,” Susan was saying, “is if your father didn’t, who did? I want to believe him. I don’t think he’d lie to me. But if he really thought I was going to leave him . . .”

“Did you say you were going to?”

“Not in so many words. Maybe I gave him that impression. If he could do that in cold blood, I thought I might leave. I didn’t know. But if he didn’t . . .”

“Yesterday you absolutely believed it.”

“I know. But sometimes you can want something so badly that you make yourself believe it. I’ve thought a little more about it since then. How reasonable is it that somebody else was there at almost exactly the same time for the same reason?”

Brittany swallowed, lifted her coffee mug. “The same-time part is a little hard to believe,” she said, “but not impossible. Exactly what time he died is a real window. But why for the same reason? There could have been any number of reasons.”

“You mean reasons not having to do with you?”

Brittany nodded.

Susan said, “Wouldn’t that be wonderful. But how?”

“How could any of those reasons come up when we were all thinking it was Daddy, no matter what? When he told you it wasn’t, well if that were true, it changed everything, didn’t it? Do you want to know what Tony thinks?”

Susan sat back. “Sure.”

“Well, you know the bogus charge he’s had hanging over his head forever that they finally dropped? Needless to say, he got familiar with how the whole thing came about, the sting and everything. His lawyers, including Uncle Diz, were all over it from the beginning, but there was nothing they could do.”

“You mean about the sting?”

“Right. The sting was legal, as far as it went.”

Susan’s brow furrowed. “We’re still talking about your father?”

“Wait. You’ll see. The point is that the sting was pretty much the brainchild of guess who? Liam Goodman. Who was . . .”

Susan leaned forward, all interest, elbows on the table. “Rick Jessup’s boss.”

“Correct. And you know why Mr. Goodman wanted the sting to happen? To take the heat off one of his donors, maybe his main donor, Jon Lo, who is in the Korean massage parlor business, also known as sex slavery. The city was cracking down on him until it got knocked sideways by the whole underage-drinking issue.”

“Okay, but I don’t see how—”

“I’m getting there. Really. Anyway”—she took a breath—“Tony was a policeman in New York before he came out here. With the Vice team, and one of the things he dealt with was human trafficking and sexual slavery.”

“We’re getting a long way from your father.”

“Not really. It turns out that when these people have an enemy they need to get rid of, they fly somebody in from China or Korea or wherever. They land in Montreal, drive across the border, catch a flight down to New York, rent a car, drive to the address they’ve been given, kill whoever it is they’ve been contracted for, drive back to the airport, and catch the next plane out of New York back to Asia, sometimes by way of Vancouver.”

“This happens a lot?”

“Whenever it needs to. Often enough that Tony knows about it.”

“Did they ever catch any of these people?”

“Never in the act. Once in a while, the feds will burn down a whole gang, like the Flying Dragons and the New York Ghost Shadows.”

“How do you know these names?”

“Tony. That’s how they found out the way it worked. And you know the really interesting thing about this, at least as far as Daddy is concerned?”

“What’s that?”

“These men who fly in from Asia? They can’t bring guns or knives on the airplanes, right? So they tend to use other things. Their hands. Rope.” She paused. “Blunt objects.”

“And so Tony’s theory is . . . ?”

“It’s not exactly a theory. He doesn’t know any details. Maybe none of it relates. But here in the city, we’ve got Jon Lo into sexual slavery, connected to Liam Goodman and Rick Jessup. Maybe Rick did something to get on Lo’s wrong side. We know what kind of person Rick was. Maybe the timing was just really unlucky for Daddy.”

Susan pushed herself back from the table. She crossed her arms over her chest, let out a breath. “Do you think there could be something to that?”

“I don’t know, Mom. But if Daddy didn’t kill him, somebody else did, and this is at least an alternative.”

“Have you mentioned it to Uncle Diz?”

Brittany let out a brittle laugh. “Mom, I barely finished telling you. And there isn’t much to tell him, is there? There’s no proof.”

“He doesn’t need proof,” Susan said. “The DA needs proof. All Uncle Diz needs, all your father needs, is doubt.”

I
T TOOK TWO
days for Hardy’s advice to sink in.

On Sunday, Glitsky looked in the mirror.

Now on this beautiful afternoon, clean-shaven, Glitsky sat on the landing that overlooked his small backyard while his wife buzzed his head. Hardy might have his own professional barber, but Treya worked just fine for Abe. Zach and Rachel and a couple of the neighbor kids had some kind of intrigue going around the play structure below. For the
briefest of moments, and for the first time in about three months, he considered that all was right with the world.

“So you’re going to do it?” she asked him.

“I’m leaning in that direction, but I wanted to clear it with you, see how Wes would take it.”

“Wes will not be thrilled, but in that flinty heart of yours, you already know that. You also know you don’t have to clear things with me.”

“Okay, get your opinion, then.”

“Should you testify for the defense?”

“That’s the question.”

“How much trouble could you get in?”

Glitsky’s lips went up a fraction of an inch. “More than being fired, you mean?”

“You weren’t fired. Lapeer was going to demote you, so you retired.”

“Semantics.”

“Not really. Not exactly. If you’d been fired, they wouldn’t be throwing you a retirement dinner next month.”

“Those things are pretty sarcastic.”

“Just because they say sarcastic things about you doesn’t mean the event is ironic. You don’t get roasted if they don’t want to honor you. And your service.”

“Nice of you to say so, but it’s pretty pro forma. You put in your thirty-plus years, they got to do something.”

Treya switched off the clippers. “I’m not going to argue about whether you are held in high esteem by the great majority of your colleagues. You got caught in some political cross fire between Lapeer and Goodman and didn’t feel you could fight back because of Moses and your connection to him. But that does not negate your whole career, and it doesn’t say one damn negative thing about your character, which is unimpeachable. Can you get that through your skull?”

Glitsky breathed in and out for a moment. “Are you mad at me?”

“Almost. I think if you have the chance, you ought to take the stand and say what really happened. They rushed to judgment. You didn’t go running to Diz. You didn’t alert Moses to anything. You never talked to either of them. Give them your phone records. You wanted to follow protocol, that’s all. The chief saw an opportunity to make some political hay,
and your inspectors probably could have built a better case if they’d taken a few more days. If they’re more interested in politics than in getting it straight, why should the jury believe them? All that’s true, right? It’s true and it helps Moses, which is also in your best interest, isn’t it?”

“Except I’ve built a life around not letting murderers get off.”

“He’s not a murderer until he’s proven guilty.”

“Not really, Trey. He’s a murderer right after he murders somebody.”

“Maybe he didn’t.”

“Please. That’s not in any real dispute.” He reached back and patted her hand, resting on his shoulder. “Even if it’s somehow in my best interest for him to get off, and I’m not denying that, it goes against the grain to testify against my people.”

“Vi Lapeer is not your people. She’s a politician.”

“And Brady? And Sher?”

“You’re not saying one bad word against them. And you know our little semantic difference about whether you were fired or you retired?”

“Vaguely. It rings a bell.”

“Just have Diz ask you about that, straight out. ‘Mr. Glitsky, did you in fact resign after this egregious display of obstructionism and political cronyism by the chief of police?’ And your answer, of course, is yes, which is the literal truth. You were not fired. You quit after a distinguished career. Who’d have the high ground then?”

After a minute, Glitsky nodded thoughtfully. “I’d prefer it, I think,” he said, “if he addressed me as ‘Lieutenant.’ ”

M
ONDAY MORNING, 9:18.
Twelve minutes until court convened.

Stier had given his okay, Hardy had sold it in a low-key way to his new friend the judge, and now Winston Paley, in a brown corduroy suit, a yellow shirt, and a purple and red tie a few inches too wide, sat in the front seat of the packed-to-the-rafters courtroom on Hardy’s side.

The doctor seemed to be in high spirits—and why not, Hardy thought, looking at a minimum of one and possibly two thirty-five-hundred-dollar days—and he was clearly taken with Gina Roake, who had come down from her gallery seat and perched on the bar rail, making small talk with him. This inadvertently, or maybe not, showed off her zaftig profile to best advantage.

Suddenly, Stier and his associate rose as a unit from their table and crossed over to the defense side, which broke up Roake and Paley’s rhythm enough for Stier to lean in to the expert witness and extend his hand. “Dr. Paley, Paul Stier for the prosecution. I just wanted to say hello and welcome you to San Francisco.”

Paley beamed, shook the prosecutor’s hand.

“And this,” Stier went on, stepping back, “is my associate, Lars Gunderson. He had occasion to study some of your testimony during a mock trial in law school at McGeorge and remembers it to this day. He’s a big fan. Says you’re one of his heroes.”

At this, Paley came up out of his chair and warmly greeted the young man, shaking his hand. “That’s extremely flattering. Thank you.” Then, to all, “It’s so gratifying when one’s work takes on a life of its own.”

“If you don’t mind”—Stier had his cell phone out, holding it up—“a quick picture, the two of you? Mr. Hardy, no objection?”

Hardy didn’t know what to make of the obsequious display, but there was nothing objectionable on the face of it—court wasn’t in session; Paley was a defense witness—and Stier had been nothing if not gracious in chambers this morning. “Sure. Go ahead.”