And now, in late February, here they were, with Braun presiding, about to begin exactly what he’d strategized and labored to avoid and yet called down upon himself. He had demanded a speedy trial, and now he was going to get it.
Even moving as quickly as he could, he couldn’t avoid the collateral damage that continued to wreak its havoc on the extended Fisk/ Townshend/West families-Harlen’s, Maya’s, and the mayor, Kathy West’s. It appeared that the U.S. attorney’s power to subpoena-particularly financial records-in capable hands like those of Jerry Glass could be a blunt weapon indeed.
By the time the preliminary hearing had begun, Glass had barely had time to look into the Bay Beans West bookkeeping, much less Joel Townshend’s wider business affairs, and how, if at all, they might relate to one another. But since the marijuana connection with Dylan Vogler was intimately connected with BBW, and this was needed by the State to establish a purported motive for Maya to have killed him, Glass and his conduit Debra Schiff had obviously been supplying the prosecution with whatever they could in terms of questionable financial dealings between the coffee shop and the Townshend household.
This hadn’t hurt anyone too badly during the preliminary hearing-although the money laundering possibility had apparently been part of the court’s decision that a jury should weigh the evidence and reach its own conclusions in Maya’s case-but over the past months, and especially in the past couple of weeks, Glass’s investigators and accountants had finally unearthed what appeared to be a treasure trove of sophisticated financial relationships and arrangements that now appeared to implicate Townshend, Harlen, Kathy West, and some other large players in at the very least questionable, if not to say unethical or illegal, conduct.
Potential kickbacks, preferential treatment, undocumented meetings about matters of public interest in violation of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance.
Very little, if any, of this had been proven yet, except that Glass had succeeded in crippling BBW, and the government was preliminarily close to attaching the entire building as the probable proceeds from a drug operation, although the place itself was still open day to day. Because Maya had a Fifth Amendment right not to answer any questions in the forfeiture proceeding while her criminal case was pending, any final decision was on hold for now, but the questions alone raised a spectre of criminality over Maya and everything she touched.
The BBW accounts were incredibly sloppy. As just one example, Maya had cut Vogler a check from her own personal checking account for $6,000 for emergency repairs from water damage in July and another personal check for a half month’s pay, $3,750, last March. There was no record he had ever given her back the money. There was at least $30,000 worth of checks from Vogler to Maya over the past two years with no explanation at all in their records. The only question seemed to be what precise illegality was being funded by the operation.
Maya told Hardy she’d been busy with the kids’ school and on vacation and hadn’t been able to make it into the store to sign the business checks, but she’d also neglected to reimburse herself from the company account during the many visits when she’d had a chance to do so. She had no idea what the checks from Vogler to her represented. She had left it to Vogler to keep the books. In the current climate this explanation was widely discredited.
The victory for Glass and the accompanying widely perceived truth that the Townshends were in fact in the drug business had then in turn played a huge role in people’s perception of the Townshends, and public opinion shifted away from presumption of innocence. Suddenly, if you did business with Joel Townshend, or Harlen Fisk, or Kathy West-in fact, if you did business with the city-you were going to get cheated. That’s just the way “these people” did things.
Just this morning Hardy had read the Chronicle’s editorial and letters page, and it was fully one-third choked with vitriol-Supervisor Fisk and the mayor should quit or, failing that, they should be impeached. The drumbeat was picking up; even in Hardy’s office it was water-fountain talk.
And though none of this had anything to do with Maya’s guilt for the crimes of murder of which she was accused, Hardy knew that it was going to have a lot to do with Paul, aka Paulie, aka “The Big Ugly,” Stier-the assistant DA who’d pulled the case-and how he played the evidence. From an untutored perspective the entire courtroom drama could unfold as a large multi-tentacled conspiracy fueled by drugs and moral turpitude in high places.
Hardy glanced over at his opponent.
Despite his flamboyant nicknames Stier was in his mid-thirties, earnest, and, from Hardy’s dealings with him so far, possessed of little personality or sense of humor. The nicknames remained worrisome, though.
It was a truism in the courtroom that what you didn’t know would hurt you, and Hardy hadn’t been able to pick up much in the way of gossip or dirt on The Big Ugly, which probably meant he kept his personality-and his possible clever moves and dirty tricks-well hidden until he needed them, when they could inflict the most damage. Of course, it was also possible that the nicknames were sarcastic-that Stier was what he appeared to be, a hard-charging, fair-minded, good-looking working attorney. Certainly, he didn’t look dangerous now, leaning back over the bar rail chatting amicably with Jerry Glass. They were simply two clean-cut, hardworking, self-righteous, ambitious guys doing the people’s hard work-one for the country’s government, and one for the state’s.
Hardy felt a twist in his stomach.
There, also, in the front row, was Debra Schiff, who, Hardy knew, had started to see Glass socially, if not intimately. Leaning around further, Hardy briefly caught the eye of Darrel Bracco, who gave him a quick ambiguous look and then looked away-clearly all along Bracco had not been as gung-ho as Schiff about Maya’s guilt and the wisdom of her arrest, but in the maelstrom that had developed, his doubts, if any, had surely been laid to rest. Still, though, to Dismas the look somehow felt heartening.
Or maybe it was pity.
At a signal from the bailiff Hardy got up and walked through the door at the back of the courtroom leading to the corridor and the judge’s chambers. There, out of the sight of the jury, the bailiff took off Maya’s handcuffs, and Hardy entered with his client, followed by the bailiff, and they took their places at counsel’s table.
In what Hardy thought was a show of judicial nastiness if not downright personal affront to him, Braun had considered denying Maya the privilege of “dressing out,” or wearing normal street clothes when she appeared in the courtroom. For the duration of the trial, she opined, his client would sit next to Hardy at his table in her yellow jumpsuit.
Hardy, insane with rage, had had to file a fifteen-page brief before he could convince Braun that a variety of federal and state cases held squarely that his client had an absolute right to appear in front of the jury in civilian clothes. Dressed as a convict, she would present to the jury an image that was at odds with that of a citizen who was presumed innocent. She must be already guilty of something, went the not-so-subtle psychology of it. She wouldn’t be in jail, wearing that outfit, brought into the courtroom in handcuffs, if she hadn’t done anything at all, if she weren’t a danger to the community. Braun’s position was ridiculous and had been repudiated by courts for a good fifty years. Even so, she had conceded this absolutely undebatable point grudgingly and with bad grace.
The gallery noise behind them abated slightly. Maya gave Hardy a lost look and then scanned around behind her, nodding at her husband in the first row on “her” side of the gallery, or maybe it was that she was relieved not to see her children, who had been living with Fisk’s family all the while she’d been incarcerated.