Dismas Hardy: Nothing But The Truth Part 1

NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH.

By John Lescroart.

Acknowledgements.

The research experience involved in this project has been singular. Although I interviewed close to twenty sources in the oil and ethanol industries, including lobbyists, engineers, lawyers, consultants, environmental toxicologists, and other professionals, not one individual consented to have his or her name mentioned in connection with this book. I thank these anonymous donors for their generosity and time.

Many other fine people were no less helpful, and I owe them a debt of grat.i.tude. These include, first and foremost, my friend and agent Barney Karpfinger; my pals Al Giannini and Don Matheson, who were continual stalwarts throughout a long, and I'm sure tedious, writing process; Peter Dietrich, MD, MPH; Davis (California) Fire Marshal Bill Greene; Mark Detzer, Ph.D. and his wife (my sister) Kathy.

A really terrific group of friends helps more than they know: Karen Kijewski and Tom lessen; d.i.c.k and Sheila Herman; Bill Wood; Dennis and Gayle Lynds; Max Byrd. I'm also grateful for the generosity of Nelson DeMille, T. Jefferson Parker, Jon and Faye Kellerman, Richard North Patterson, Debbie Macomber, and Dixie Reid.

Anita Boone is a wonderful a.s.sistant and great person. Nancy Borland's tireless enthusiasm keeps the spark alive. Jackie Cantor and Anne Williams are great friends as well as the best editors a writer could have.

Finally, JR and JS: you guys are, like, totally awesome.

To the Big Cactus and the little Gambas.

No mask like open truth to cover lies, As to go naked is the best disguise.

William Congreve.

PART ONE.

1.

At the tail end of a dog of a morning, Dismas Hardy was beginning to fear that he would also be spending the whole stiflingly dull afternoon in munic.i.p.al court on the second floor of the Hall of Justice in San Francisco.

He was waiting- interminably since nine a.m. - for his client to be admitted into the courtroom. This would not have been his first choice for how to celebrate his forty-eighth birthday.

Now again the clerk called out someone not his client - this time a young man who looked as though he'd been drinking since he'd turned twenty-one and possibly for two or three years before that. Maybe he was still drunk - certainly he looked wasted.

The judge was Peter Li, a former a.s.sistant district attorney with whom Hardy was reasonably friendly. The prosecuting attorney was Randy Huang, who sat at his table inside the bar rail as the defendant went shuffling past. The public defender was a ten-year veteran named Donna Wong.

Judge Li's long-time clerk, another Asian named Manny See, read the charge against the young man as he stood, swaying, eyes opening and closing, at the center podium. The judge addressed him. 'Mr Reynolds, you've been in custody now for two full days, trying to get to sober, and your attorney tells me you've gotten there. Is that true?'

'Yes, your honor,' Donna Wong declared quickly.

Judge Li nodded patiently, but spoke in a firm tone. 'I'd like to hear it from Mr Reynolds himself, counsellor. Sir?'

Reynolds looked up, swayed for a beat, let out a long breath, and shook his head.

'Mr Reynolds,' Judge Li raised his voice. 'Look at me, please. Do you know where you are?'

Donna Wong prodded him with her elbow. Reynolds looked down at her, up to the judge and his clerk, across to Huang sitting at the prosecution table. His expression took on a look of stunned surprise as he became aware of his surroundings, of the Asian faces everywhere he turned. 'I don't know.' A pause. 'China?'

But the courtroom humor, such as it was, mingled uneasily with tragedy and the sometimes cruel impersonality of the law. Twenty-five very long minutes after the drunken Mr Reynolds had been removed from the courtroom, another case had been called, another defendant - not Hardy's - brought in. He was beginning to think that his own client wouldn't get his hearing and that another entire day would have been wasted. This was not all that unusual an occurrence. Everyone b.i.t.c.hed about it, but no one seemed to be able to make things better.

The new defendant was Joshua Bonder, and from the Penal Code Section read out by the clerk, Hardy knew the charge was dealing amphetamines. But before things got started, Judge Li wanted to make sure that the three material witnesses in the case were in the building and ready to testify.

Hardy was half nodding off, half aware of the jockeying between Judge Li and the attorneys, when suddenly the back door by the judge's bench opened. At the sound of rattling chains - shades of the Middle Ages - Hardy looked up as a couple of armed bailiffs escorted three children into the courtroom.

The two boys and a girl seemed to range in age from about ten to fourteen. All of them rail-thin, poorly dressed, obviously terrified. But what sent an almost electric buzz through the courtroom was the fact that they were all shackled together in handcuffs and leg chains.

Joshua Bonder, whose own handcuffs had been removed for the hearing, screamed out, 'You sons of b.i.t.c.hes!' and nearly knocked over the defense table, jumping up, trying to get to the kids. 'What have you done to my children?'

Hardy had seen many murderers walk into the courtroom on their own, without any hardware. He thought he'd seen most of everything here, but this shocked him to his roots.

And he wasn't alone. Both of the courtroom bailiffs had leapt to restrain Mr Bonder, and now held him by the defense table. But Judge Li himself was up behind the bench, his normal calm demeanor thrown to the winds at this outrage.

'What the h.e.l.l is this?' he boomed at the guards. 'Uncuff those children at once!' His eyes raked the room, stopping at the prosecution table. 'Mr Vela' - the a.s.sistant DA who'd drawn Joshua Bonder - 'what is the meaning of this?'

Vela, too, was on his feet, stammering. 'Your honor, you yourself issued the body attachments for these children as witnesses. We were afraid they would flee. They wouldn't testify against their father - he's their only guardian. So we have been holding them in youth guidance.'

'For how long?'

Vela clearly wished the floor would open up and swallow him. 'Two weeks, your honor. You must remember...'

Li listened, then went back to shouting. 'I remember the case, but I didn't order them shackled, for G.o.d's sake!'

Vela the bureaucrat had an answer for that, too. 'That's the mandated procedure, your honor. When we transfer inmates from juvenile hall and we think there's a flight risk, we shackle them.'

Judge Li was almost stammering in his rage. 'But look at these people, Mr Vela. They're children, not even teenage-'

The father's attorney, a woman named Gina Roake, decided to put in her two cents worth. 'Your honor, am I to understand that these children have been at the YGC for two weeks?'

Vela mumbled something about how Ms Roake shouldn't get on her high horse; it was standard procedure. But Roake was by now truly exercised, her voice hoa.r.s.e with disgust. 'You locked up these innocent children in the company of serious juvenile offenders? Is that what you're telling me, Mr Vela?'

'They are not innocent-'

'No? What was their crime? Reluctance to testify against their father? That's all? And for this they're shackled?'

Vela tried again. 'The judge ordered-'

But Li wasn't having any part of that. Exploding, he pointed his whole hand at the prosecutor, now booming at the top of his voice. 'I ordered the least restrictive setting that would ensure the children's return to court. Least restrictive, Mr Vela. You know what that means?'

The smallest of the three kids had started crying, and the girl had moved over, putting her arm around him. As the bailiff moved in to separate them, Gina Roake cried out, 'Don't you dare touch them. Your honor?' A plea.

Which Li accepted. 'Let them alone.'

A moment of relative quiet ensued. Into it, Gina Roake inserted a heartfelt reproach. 'Your honor, this is the inevitable outcome when children are drawn into the criminal justice system. There has to be a better way. This is a travesty.'

At long last, it was Hardy's turn.

His client, a 32-year-old recent Dallas transplant named Jason Trent, made his living laying carpet and was now in custody charged with three counts of mayhem and inflicting grievous bodily injury pursuant to a fight in the 3Com Stadium parking lot after a Forty-Niner game.

Trent's story, and Hardy believed it, was that a trio of local boys had taken exception to his Dallas Cowboys attire and, after the 'Niners had been soundly thrashed, thought they would work out some of their frustrations by ganging up on the lone cowboy. This, in common with most of the other Niner decisions on the field during the game, turned out to be a bad idea for the home team.

Jason Trent had black belts in both karate and aikido and had also been a Golden Gloves champion in his teens back in Fort Worth. After being sprayed with beer and pushed from two directions at once, and all the while warning his a.s.sailants about his various defense skills, Jason had finally lost his temper. In a very short fight, he put all three boys on the ground. Then - his real mistake - he'd gone around with a few more rage-driven punches, in the process breaking two arms, one collarbone, and one nose.

'You should have stopped when they were down,' Hardy had told him.

To which Jason had shrugged. 'They started it.'

Even so, the story probably would have ended there had not one of the three 'victims' been the son of Richard Raintree, a San Francisco supervisor and political ally of District Attorney Sharron Pratt. Raintree contended that Jason Trent had overreacted to what amounted only to good-natured hazing and was himself drunk on beer. Sharron Pratt agreed - she'd ordered Jason arrested and charged. Now Hardy addressed Judge Li. 'Your honor,' he said, 'this is my client's first alleged offense. He has no criminal record, not even a parking ticket. He holds a steady job. He's married and has three young children. He shouldn't even be here in this courtroom. His alleged victims started this fight and he was forced to defend himself.'

Li allowed a crack in his stern visage, glancing over at the bandaged and splinted victims at the prosecution table. 'And did a good job of it, didn't he?'

Hardy kept at it. 'The point, your honor, is that Mr Trent was pushed to this extreme by three punks who were ganging up on him. For all he knew, they were planning to kill him.'

This woke up the prosecutor, Frank Fischer, who objected to the use of the word punk. 'And further, your honor, the victims were on the ground at the time of the attack. They posed no threat to Mr Trent at that time.'

'They are the reason anything happened at all, your honor.' The odds were that he was whistling in the wind, but Hardy felt he had to go ahead. This was San Francisco in the Nineties.

The ultimate responsibility for any action only rarely got all the way back to a prime mover - there were always too many victims in the path who could claim stress or that their rights had somehow been violated.

The law said that Jason Trent had gone beyond simple self-defense. Trent himself admitted that he'd been driven to loss of control. He wouldn't pretend he didn't do it. He'd hurt these slimeb.a.l.l.s on purpose because they'd hurt and threatened him first. Whose fault was that? he wanted to know.

So, law or no law, Hardy felt that for his client's sake he had to make the point. 'Mr Trent didn't do anything wrong here, your honor. The law recognizes self-defense as a perfect defense. These young men scared and outnumbered him. He felt he had no option but to immobilize them until he could get away.'

'Even after they were down on the ground?' Li asked. Hardy nodded. 'He wanted to make sure they wouldn't get up until he could remove himself from any further danger. He didn't use anything like deadly force, which he very well could have, your honor. He used appropriate force to stop a vicious and unprovoked attack.'

Hardy noted vibration at his belt, his silent beeper going off. He glanced down at it - a message from his office. Well, he was almost done here. Finally. The judge had heard his little speech, and now would set bail and a.s.sign a trial date, and then...

But Li, no doubt still simmering in his earlier fury with the DA's cavalier style, suddenly had a different idea. After he listened to Hardy's argument, he allowed a short silence to reign in his courtroom. Then he looked over at the prosecutor. 'Mr Fischer,' he said, 'do the People concede that Messrs Raintree et al. a.s.saulted the defendant here, Mr Trent, without provocation of any kind, other than his choice of clothing?'

Fischer was a nondescript functionary in his mid-thirties. By his reaction, this might have been the very first time that a judge had surprised him, or even spoken to him in the course of a proceeding. Now he stood up slowly, looked down at his notebook, and brought his eyes back up to the judge. 'Your honor, there was an exchange of words and insults. We have witnesses who...'

Li interrupted. 'Who hit who first?'

Fischer scratched at the table before him. 'Regardless of whatever instigated the fight that resulted in...'

Li's face remained placid but his voice hardened. 'Excuse me, Mr Fischer, I asked you a simple question. Would you like me to repeat it?'

'No, your honor. That isn't necessary.'

'Then would you do me the kindness to answer it?' Li repeated it anyway. 'Did Mr Raintree and the others start this fight?'

Fischer looked over at Hardy. Finally, he had to give it up. 'Yes, your honor.'

Hardy thought he saw a momentary glint in the judge's eye, and was suddenly certain he knew what the judge was going to do next. He wasn't supposed to do it, but Li obviously had had enough and didn't care. A couple more seconds of thought, then he tapped his gavel and stunned the courtroom with the words, 'Case dismissed.'

2.

Hardy had no time to savor the triumph. He thought he'd just quickly call his office, pick up his message, and then go have a celebratory birthday/freedom lunch with Jason Trent. Enjoy a rare midday Martini. Maybe two.

But the phone message ended all thought of that. It was the call all parents fear. His receptionist, Phyllis, told him that Theresa Wilson from Merryvale needed him to get in touch with her as soon as possible. Merryvale was where his children - Rebecca and Vincent - went to school, and Theresa Wilson was the princ.i.p.al there. It was one thirty, a Thursday afternoon in the middle of October.

'Are the kids all right?' He blurted it out. Hardy had lost a son, Michael, twenty-five years before and that wound still hadn't completely healed - it never would. Now any threat to his children blanked his mind and brought his stomach to his throat.

'They're fine.'

He closed his eyes and let out a breath of relief. 'But no one's come to pick them up.'

'Frannie hasn't called?' No, of course she hadn't. That's why Mrs Wilson was on the phone with him. He flicked a glance down at his watch. 'How late is she?'

He knew it sounded lame. He wasn't in charge of taking care of the kids - that was Frannie's job - so he wasn't certain what time school got out. Somewhere in the back of his mind he recalled that they had one early dismissal day every week. It must be Thursday.

'About an hour.'

An hour without even a call? Frannie liked to say that if a punctual person was a lonely one, then she was one of the loneliest people on earth. 'Have you heard from Erin? I mean Mrs Cochran? She's on the call list.' This was Rebecca's grandmother, who often picked up the kids at school when Frannie had other errands.

'That was my first call, Mr Hardy, to Erin. But I just got an answering machine. I thought I'd wait a few more minutes before calling you at work - maybe somebody got caught in traffic.' She hesitated. 'Your son's pretty upset. He wants to talk to you.'

Hardy heard his third grader, Vincent, trying to be brave, but his voice was cracking, frayed. He responded with a hearty confidence. 'It's OK, bud, I'll be down to pick you up in no time. Tell Rebecca it's all right, too. Everything's fine.'

'But where's Mom?'

'I don't know, Vin, but don't worry. I'm sure it's just a communication mix-up. That or she's running late from something.' He was selling himself as well as his son. Maybe Frannie had arranged for another parent to pick up the kids and that person had forgotten. 'She'll probably show up before I get there.'

Although he didn't really believe that. Frannie would have told the children if someone else other than Erin were going to pick them up. They had strict rules about not going home with anybody other than Mom, Dad or Grandma unless the arrangements had been approved in advance. 'You be a big guy,' he said. 'Everything's OK, I promise.'

Hardy made a quick call back to his reception desk and questioned Phyllis - was she sure Frannie hadn't left a message earlier? But Phyllis was an efficiency machine. If his wife had called, she told him icily, she would have told Hardy. As she always did.

He checked his watch again. It had been less than five minutes since he'd talked to Mrs Wilson.

Undoubtedly there was a simple explanation. Even in this day of ubiquitous communication, there were places that didn't have phones, or access to them. Frannie might be at one of them, stuck, trying to reach him.

He got the answering machine when he tried at his home. Where could she be? If she were not picking up the children, something was wrong.