11
Hardy showed up by surprise with deli sandwiches and Diet Cokes in Farrell’s office, but they’d barely unpacked the lunch when Hardy took the call from Frannie. The partners were both sitting on the dilapidated couch, their food and napkins and bags of chips and cans of soda untouched on the low table in front of them.
Frannie told him that she’d just gotten off the phone with Treya and they had brought Zachary out of the induced coma and done something called a “pinch test” and that he’d reacted, which apparently was very good news. The swelling had gone down considerably and they were now talking about reinserting the dura mater and closing up the brain again within the next couple of days.
The doctors were starting to think, and had told Treya and Abe, that their son appeared to be out of immediate danger, on the mend, and that he might recover completely. Although with these types of injuries there would be a long watch-and-wait period to determine if there were going to be any ongoing problems with development, cognition, or motor skills. This still sounded quite serious to Hardy, and Frannie agreed with him that it was, but compared with what they’d been looking at for the past four days, it was the best possible news.
Hanging up, Hardy, with a great sense of relief, reached for his drink and sat back on the couch. “See?” He recounted the gist of the conversation, concluding with, “Things sometimes do turn around for the better.”
Farrell still wasn’t much in the mood to agree with him. In fact, his confidence and spirits had retreated so far that he’d worn a regular business suit to work today, and without a funny T-shirt under it. He’d gone out earlier in the morning and trimmed his thick gray-brown hair to a length that qualified as relatively normal. Now Wes hunched on the couch, holding his sandwich over the table in front of him, shredded lettuce spilling, condiments dripping. “Sometimes they do, and I’m glad as hell for Abe’s kid, and for him. But I haven’t even told you yet about Jeff Elliot’s call this morning.”
“What did our paper’s most esteemed columnist have to say?”
“He just wanted to give me a heads-up ’cause we’re friends. The Chronicle’s talking about running the weed story and including the whole list of us alleged dope-smoking fiends.”
Hardy was shaking his head. “Can’t happen. Won’t happen. Never in a million years.”
“Why not?”
“Because your name on a list on somebody’s computer doesn’t mean anything. You didn’t admit anything to Schiff when she called and asked you about it, did you?”
“I’m sure.” Farrell rolled his eyes. “What, I’m retarded?”
“That’s my point. You’re not. So you didn’t cop to it. So she’s got nothing she can prove. Besides, no way does this make ‘CityTalk.’ That doesn’t sound like Jeff.”
Farrell chewed and swallowed, chasing with Coke. “No. He was talking regular news. And you might be right about the libel problem, but the Chron’s got to be tempted. It’s a great story.”
“It’s a nonstory. They can’t run it.”
“Okay, good. But evidently there’s more than a few semipublic figures on the list, not including yours truly and Wyatt’s guy. And the public would like to know.”
“Like who?” Hardy asked.
“Jeff, God bless him, didn’t want to name names to me. But at least one judge, more than a couple of city department heads, several prominent educators, two supervisors, a few actors and like that, public personalities, and, oh yeah, some DAs…”
“You want to talk screwed,” Hardy said. “Just on the innuendo, those DAs are screwed. At least the ones that didn’t have the sense to get medical marijuana cards.”
“Yeah, heads are gonna roll for sure. If I still worked here, I’d swoop and scoop ’em up cheap and get ’em on our payroll.”
“You’re still working here, Wes. Don’t worry about that.”
“I’m not worried about getting fired, Diz.” He looked sideways down the couch. “Tell you the truth, I’m just embarrassed as all shit to have exposed the firm like this. You and Gina don’t deserve it, and it doesn’t exactly put on the best face for the associates, either, does it?”
Hardy waved that off. “Wes, it’s marijuana in San Francisco in the twenty-first century. It’s going to blow over in a week, maybe two. I appreciate your feelings but truly, nobody really cares.”
“They will if this murder turns out to be about a little benign weed.”
“It won’t come down like that. Whoever shot Dylan, he didn’t steal any of it.”
“How do you know that?”
“He was still wearing his backpack, which was full of it. How about that?”
“How about if he also happened to be pushing a shopping cart loaded with the stuff and the shooter ran off with that?”
That proposal stopped Hardy short for a second, but then he shook his head, banishing the unwelcome thought. “That didn’t happen, Wes. Look, worst case, if the Chronicle does the story, it’ll sell a few papers, but it’s a nonissue to everybody else.”
In fact, it wasn’t a nonissue to at least one San Francisco official-the newly minted special assistant United States attorney, Jerry Glass.
The previous U.S. attorney in San Francisco, construed by the attorney general’s office to be too liberal, had been one of the notorious Alberto Gonzalez fires. Upon taking office his replacement wanted to waste no time establishing his credentials as a hard-line prosecutor, aligned four-square against the permissive culture of the city that Herb Caen, the legendary columnist for the Chronicle, had christened Baghdad by the Bay. For some years after his graduation from law school, Jerry Glass had been an assistant district attorney in Orange County, following his boss the district attorney to Sacramento as a speechwriter during the first appointments of the Schwarzenegger era, eventually catching on as an assistant director of one of California’s dozens of bureaucracies, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.
Glass, thirty-five by now, was a well-built though slightly overweight, plain-looking specimen with an office worker’s pasty complexion. He shaved close and wore his light brown hair short, parted low on the right. He trimmed his sideburns up around the top of his ears. He was also aggressive and ambitious and had seen his ABC assignment-accurately-as a dead end. He’d had résumés out and was in a holding pattern when his ex-boss, now an assistant attorney general in Washington, D.C., tapped him for the San Francisco job, and he jumped at it. With this plum in his lap Jerry had no intention of following in the footsteps of his predecessor and, among other priorities, set to work immediately making efforts to shut down the city’s medical marijuana parlors, of which there were dozens. This was always a somewhat delicate endeavor, since the state of California, as well as the city and county of San Francisco, either sanctioned or at the very least turned a blind eye to these so-called compassionate use facilities.
But Jerry was there to enforce U.S., not local, law, and the use of marijuana was a federal crime. He got his name in the paper several times during his first year in office for busting some of the medical marijuana folks, but except for burnishing his conservative credentials-not exactly a plus in the San Francisco cultural environment-these actions did little, if anything, to raise his profile.
And suddenly, here in his office this cool Wednesday afternoon, all by herself, was Debra Schiff. He’d run into the very attractive homicide inspector a couple of times at the bar at Lou the Greek’s and he’d planned to meet her there some more if he could, but here she was now, telling him about this murder of a coffee-shop manager out in the godforsaken Haight-Ashbury.
To date, Glass had only been aware of rumors and what he’d read about this particular murder in the papers. Astoundingly, he thought, Schiff was telling him with a straight face that she and her partner, Bracco, hadn’t brought up the dope connection to the news media before because it simply didn’t occur to them that it might be of some special importance-since apparently no marijuana had been stolen, it couldn’t have been part of a motive in the case.