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Authors: John Lescroart

Tags: #Mystery, #Suspense, #Thriller

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BOOK: The Ophelia Cut
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“Twelve arrests,” Hardy said.

“You don’t have to tell me. I’ve already gotten an earful from everybody from the sheriff to the mayor, including my beloved girlfriend. Why was the city moving on this? Why wasn’t there any warning? Wasn’t this a little bit of an overreaction to a nonissue? Was I really going to prosecute all these people? On the other hand, if I wasn’t, why not, since they all broke the law I’m sworn to uphold. Meanwhile, I am as in the dark as anyone except Mr. Goodman about the real reason he wants these warrants. All I know is that he does.”

“So what did Goodman do? To make all of this happen?”

“I’ve got a better one: why did I want this job?” Farrell took a chair across from where Hardy sat. “But Goodman? He’s having trouble getting his name in the papers. This is going to fix that, believe me. My guess is he knows somebody high up in Special Ops with the ABC and talked him into these busts. We’re going to find out soon enough.”

“What are you going to do?”

Farrell dredged up a weary smile. “You mean am I going to prosecute these people to the fullest extent of the law? Shit, no. But I had to go forward. That’s the beauty of all this. Goodman’s got me completely squeezed. If I decline to prosecute, citing the unnecessary cost in dollars and manpower to my already understaffed and underfunded office, then I’m soft on policing these violating premises that not only serve booze to kids but also deal in illegal narcotics and fence stolen property and are hotbeds of other vice and criminal activities. Since I am in fact underfunded and understaffed, I’d like to concentrate my efforts on people who are doing a lot worse things, and which, if I don’t, will affect my job approval rating down the line, I guarantee you. It’s a perfect end run.”

“Slick.”

“Fucked.”

“That, too,” Hardy said. “I picked up a client who’s more than a little freaked out about a felony conviction and going to jail. The guy’s a bartender, right? There’s somebody at the front door checking IDs. You tell me how a bartender is supposed to know how they got the stamp on their hand.”

“I hear you,” Farrell said. “And we know nothing is really going to happen. But I don’t see how I’m going to go up against the ABC and Goodman and blanket say I’m going to dismiss all of ’em. Best possible outcome, from your perspective, is bide your time and all the bullshit goes away.”

“Bide your time long enough, everything goes away, Wes.”

“True. Sorry I can’t be more help.”

G
LITSKY WAS READING
a book at his desk. At Hardy’s knock, he looked up, his expression blank almost to the point of nonrecognition. After a
slight hesitation, his lips went tight, his shoulders settled, he closed the book, and he leaned back in his chair. “What up, Diz?”

From the open doorway, Hardy said, “I was just downstairs and saw your wife, which reminded me that you were alive and kicking and maybe I should drop by and brighten up your day.”

Glitsky cocked his head at the windows high up in the wall to his left. Outside, the sky was gray. “It’s not working.”

Hardy came forward a few steps. “Sometimes it takes a minute for the full brightening power to take effect. What are you reading here in the middle of the afternoon, which I’m sure is against some regulation or other?”

Glitsky seemed surprised to find the book on his desk. “Steve Jobs. Totally allowed. What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. I just thought I’d say hi. You and I haven’t gotten much quality time in lately, maybe you’ve noticed?”

Glitsky sat back, then said, “Why don’t you shut the door.”

Hardy did, then pulled up a folding chair in front of Glitsky’s desk. “You’re still pissed off,” he said.

“More worried than anything.”

“Abe,” Hardy whispered, “it was six years ago.”

Glitsky sat back in his chair, hands clasped over his stomach. “That’s what worries me, Diz. The three of you there, thinking, ‘Hey, it’s been six years. We’re cool. Nobody cares anymore. Nobody remembers.’ Guess what?” He let out a breath. “Even you and me, right now. This is a topic that must never come up.”

“It didn’t. We never talked about it. The actual event.”

“I’m so glad to hear it.” Glitsky straightened up. His hands went to the sides of his head. “Diz. Please. Lord.”

“So that night at Sam’s—”

Glitsky cut him off. “It shouldn’t be in anybody’s consciousness. It shouldn’t be the kind of thing that has any chance of coming up in casual conversation, because after all, six years have gone by, and this is ancient history. God forbid your brother-in-law falls off the wagon. I can hear him now, letting on to somebody across the bar—”

“Abe. Mose hasn’t had a drink in years.”

His voice in tight control, Glitsky said, “He’s an alcoholic, Diz. He
admits that himself. Every day at his meetings. You know how nervous it makes me feel to know that my future is a couple of ounces of Scotch away from being destroyed?”

Hardy crossed an ankle over a knee. “A little dramatic, Abe, don’t you think?”

“No. I don’t. It’s well within the realm of possibility.”

Hardy sighed. “I’ll talk to him, not that he needs reminding. Would that help?”

“Honestly, probably not. I’m not saying it would come out in everyday life if everything stays the same. But if something changes and he stresses out and starts drinking . . .”

“He’s not going there.”

“Famous last words.” Glitsky glared at his friend, arms crossed over his chest. “Actually, the last thing you should do is talk to Moses about it, put it in the front of his brainpan as something he has to deal with. We’ve just got to hope he doesn’t leak. For that matter, we have to hope that none of us leaks for the rest of our lives. Gina’s great, but she writes books. What if she wakes up one day and decides this would be a great plot? What if one of us gets religion and feels the need to confess publicly? It’s so easy in the movies—you blow away the bad guys, and they roll the credits and never think about it again. This situation isn’t like that. Not even close.”

“Well, while I don’t worry about Moses and you do, Frannie bought half a steer and wants me to cook it on Sunday, and we wondered if you guys wanted to come over and help us eat it. Moses won’t be there.”

Something like a smile appeared on Glitsky’s face. “You know how long it’s been since I’ve had a hunk of beef?”

“Probably too long.”

“That’s the right answer. What can we bring?”

Hardy gave him a grin. “Just your family and that sunny, carefree personality we know and love so well.”

5

L
IAM
G
OODMAN AND
his—at the time—paralegal Rick Jessup had worked with Jon Lo since 2008, before Goodman’s election to the Board of Supervisors, back when he was in private practice and Mr. Lo needed legal help handling the rezoning of ten properties that he owned downtown. Six of these multifamily apartment buildings had been residential units—rented almost exclusively to Korean tenants—for over forty years, ever since Lo’s grandfather built them in the 1960s. San Francisco’s aggressive rent control laws by themselves limited profits in the early years, to the degree that they would have been untenable as investments had it not been for the phenomenal rise in real estate prices. But the prices had kept rising, and it seemed that all was well.

In the late ’80s, Lo’s father had refinanced and taken over $3 million in cash out of the properties, which he’d then invested in four more buildings, filled with more recently emigrated Korean renters. These tenants represented an influx of capital, true, but some of his tenant families, especially from the earlier buildings, were in their third or even fourth generation. Many of these tenants were paying under a thousand dollars a month when individual
rooms
in private homes or condos right next door often commanded two to four thousand.

But the laws were unambiguous—as long as the tenant resided in the unit, the increase in rent was held at one percent per year.

In 2008, Jon Lo found himself in a cash-flow bind. The recession and bursting of the housing bubble had wiped out two thirds of the equity in all of his downtown properties. At the same time, several of his tenants—laid off or cut back or simply poorer—stopped paying even the insanely low rent. In theory, Lo could evict these families, but it took forever, was vastly expensive, and sometimes San Francisco judges refused to order
evictions. When Lo did get an eviction order, he had to convince the sheriff to enforce it, and that was a whole other cycle of obstacles. In the meantime, he was paying off his father’s refinancing, and the monthly rents weren’t covering his nut.

There had to be a better way.

Liam Goodman, his lawyer, had come up with the answer. Goodman had explained—though in truth, Jon Lo was more than passing familiar with the practice—that the apartment units should be converted from residential properties to massage parlors. The massage parlors would, in turn, be staffed by recent female immigrants from Korea who had been lured to the United States by promises of big money and clean, steady work as waitresses or models or hostesses; in fact, these young women often arrived owing thousands of dollars to the brokers who had arranged for their travel, documents, and relocation to America.

To pay off this debt, their brokers—or owners in all but name—forced them to work in the massage parlors as sex slaves. They usually worked six days a week, entertaining as many as a dozen men every day, earning for their landlord fifty dollars per trick plus half of their tips (one to four hundred, depending on the services performed), with the remainder going for their freedom, a freedom that could and often did prove elusive.

Bad as it was for the girls, the business was terrific for Jon Lo, and it solved all of his monetary problems. In the city’s super-permissive atmosphere, sexual behavior flew under the radar. Officials tended not to care about these so-called victimless crimes. Beyond that, in 2004, jurisdiction for the massage parlors moved from the police department to the city’s Department of Public Health, whose mandate to check on general cleanliness in these places of business did not necessarily include reporting signs of suspected or probable prostitution to the police. A used condom might be a health violation, but it was nothing to call the Vice Squad about. Besides, sex in a massage parlor, unless police saw money change hands, went ignored.

In short, it was a good time to be the owner of several massage parlors in San Francisco, and Jon Lo, grateful to Liam Goodman for the legal and zoning assistance in turning his financial life around, had no problem with donating to Goodman’s campaign for city supervisor or with urging his fellow businessmen in the Tenderloin and in Chinatown to support that campaign as well.

T
HE PROXIMATE CAUSE
of the city’s sting this week against bar owners and underage drinking had been the third trickledown effect that had begun two months before with an unexpected federal sweep of the city’s massage parlors. The sweep resulted in the arrests of one hundred masseuses, most of them Korean. In response, the mightily embarrassed mayor, Leland Crawford—who was shocked,
shocked,
to discover that there was a lot of sex at these locations—called for the formation of a task force of health and police inspectors to step up their surveillance and enforcement of the city’s antiprostitution laws.

In the much publicized second event from only a month before, Crawford, accompanied by members of his new task force and a brace of reporters, had waited in the cut, or narrow unnamed alley, abutting the Golden Dream massage parlor, owned by Jon Lo and licensed by the Department of Public Health, while a plainclothes Asian policeman rang the doorbell. When the metal security door opened, the decoy officer duct-taped the lock so the mayor’s party could get in, just in time to discover a man in the middle of a sex act in the building’s lobby.

Not too surprisingly, this had caused a stir, and in its aftermath, Crawford had all but declared war on sex trafficking in the city. Unfortunately, all the immediate hue and cry came to naught when the inspectors who’d accompanied Crawford could cite the Golden Dream only for inadequate ventilation, for employees who were improperly attired, for using the business address as a living quarters, and for using a bed instead of a massage table. Since no one had seen money change hands and neither party had talked, the blatant sex act they’d all witnessed couldn’t be charged as prostitution.

A week later, an administrative law judge—Liam Goodman’s wife’s former law partner, Morrie Swindell—declined to revoke Mr. Lo’s permit to operate the massage parlor; and not one woman who worked at Golden Dream, rumored to have been threatened into silence by the owner, would testify against him. By this time, the federal case that had netted the original hundred arrests had foundered as well. The ten massage parlors were still in operation.

In spite of the zero sum change in prostitution in San Francisco,
sex trafficking had officially become one of the city’s hot liberal issues. Crawford had claimed it as his own; his concern over the victims of this international humanitarian crisis would translate to hundreds if not thousands of votes from women and Asians as he set his eyes on the state capitol. It was only a matter of time before his task force grew some teeth and started negatively impacting the businesses of Jon Lo and his colleagues.

Liam Goodman wasn’t afraid to be proactive. He knew that the average voter’s span of attention could be measured in seconds, if not less. He also knew that the city’s Vice Squad was strapped for both personnel and money, and if he could siphon off a few officers for other duties, the sex-traffic task force would take that much longer to reach a minimal level of competency. Further, if Crawford got elected to Sacramento next year, the mayor’s office yawned open for someone with sufficient profile and name recognition. Someone just like Goodman, if he could get his name in the news a little bit more often. And once Liam was elected mayor, the task force would be allowed to atrophy and then go away entirely.

He had been reading the paper last week when he came across a very sad article about a drunk teenager who’d run a red light and killed a young couple in town from Boise for their honeymoon.

BOOK: The Ophelia Cut
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