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  Praise for

  INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE

  “Mike Daley and friends are back in this intriguing sequel to Siegel’s highly praised debut, Special Circumstances…The San Francisco setting and the courtroom scenes ring true. Readers will be anxiously awaiting this new Mike Daley novel.”

  —Library Journal

  “Another captivating legal thriller. The story line provides a wonderful tour of San Francisco inside a strong courtroom drama.”

  —The Midwest Book Review

  “Siegel, a practicing attorney in San Francisco, is a truly gifted writer…. He manages to make the usual assortment of legal-thriller characters (cops, lawyers, suspects) seem brand new, as though we’d never met any of them before…. I dare you: read this one. Do it now. You’ll thank me.”

  —Mystery Review

  “The story culminates in an outstanding courtroom scene. Daley narrates with a kind of genial irony, the pace never slows, and every description of the city is as brightly burnished as the San Francisco sky when the fog lifts.”

  —The Star-Ledger, Newark

  “Charm and strength. Mike Daley is an original and very appealing character in the overcrowded legal arena—a gentle soul who can fight hard when he has to, and a moral man who is repelled by the greed of many of his colleagues.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The trial procedure is fascinating…. From beginning to end, an effective page-turner with a realistic climax that holds true to the powerhouse milieu in which Daley and his colleagues have been operating.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  BOOKS BY SHELDON SIEGEL

  Special Circumstances

  Incriminating Evidence

  For my dad

  1

  “WE HAVE A SITUATION”

  “The attorney general is a law enforcement officer, not a social worker.”

  —PRENTICE MARSHALL GATES III, SAN FRANCISCO DISTRICT ATTORNEY AND CANDIDATE FOR CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GENERAL. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6.

  Being a partner in a small criminal defense firm isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Oh, it’s nice to see your name at the top of the letterhead, and there is a certain amount of ego gratification that goes along with having your own firm. Then again, you have to co-sign the line of credit and guarantee the lease. You also tend to get a lot of calls from collection agencies when cash flow is slow. In this business, founder’s privilege extends only so far.

  Unlike our well-heeled brethren in the high-rises that surround us, the attorneys in my firm, Fernandez and Daley, occupy cramped quarters around the corner from the Trans-bay bus terminal and next door to the Lucky Corner Number 2 Chinese restaurant. Our office is located on the second floor of a 1920s walk-up building at 553 Mission Street, on the only block of San Francisco’s South of Market area that has not yet been gentrified by the sprawl of downtown. Although we haven’t started remodeling yet, we recently took over the space from a now-defunct martial arts studio and moved upstairs from the basement. Our files sit in what used to be the men’s locker room. Our firm has grown by a whopping fifty percent in the last two years. We’re up to three lawyers.

  “Rosie, I’m back,” I sing out to my law partner and ex-wife as I stand in the doorway to her musty, sparsely furnished office at eight-thirty in the morning on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Somewhere behind four mountains of paper and three smiling pictures of our eight-year-old daughter, Grace, Rosita Fernandez is already working on her second Diet Coke and cradling the phone against her right ear. She gestures at me to come in and mouths the words “How was your trip?”

  I just got back from Cabo, where I was searching for the perfect vacation and, if the stars lined up right, the perfect woman. Well, my tan is good. When you’re forty-seven and divorced, your expectations tend to be pretty realistic.

  Rosie runs her hand through her thick, dark hair. She’s only forty-three, and the gray flecks annoy her. She holds a finger to her full lips and motions me to sit down. She gives me a conspiratorial wink and whispers the name Skipper as she points to the phone. “No, no,” she says to him. “He’ll be back this morning. I expect him any minute. I’ll have him call you as soon as he gets in.”

  I sit down and look at the beat-up bookcases filled with oatmeal-colored legal volumes with embossed gold lettering that says California Reporter. I glance out the open window at the tops of the Muni buses that pass below us on Mission Street. This is an improvement over our view before we moved upstairs. When we were in the basement, we got to look at the bottoms of the very same buses.

  On warm, sunny days like today, I’m glad we don’t work in a hermetically sealed building. On the other hand, by noon, the smell of bus fumes will make me wish we had an air conditioner. Our mismatched used furniture is standard stock for those of us who swim in the lower tide pools of the legal profession.

  Rosie and I used to work together at the San Francisco public defender’s office. Then we made a serious tactical error and decided to get married. We are very good at being lawyers, but we were very bad at being married. We split up almost seven years ago, shortly after Grace’s first birthday. Around the same time, I went to work for the tony Simpson and Gates law firm and Rosie went out on her own. Our professional lives were reunited about two years ago when I was fired by the Simpson firm because I didn’t bring in enough high-paying clients. I started subleasing space from Rosie. On my last night at Simpson and Gates, two attorneys were gunned down in the office. I ended up representing the lawyer who was charged with the murders. That’s when Rosie decided I was worthy of being her law partner.

  I point to myself and whisper, “Does Skipper want to talk to me?”

  She nods. She scribbles a note that says “Do you want to talk to him?”

  Prentice Marshall Gates III, known as Skipper, is the San Francisco district attorney. We used to be partners at Simpson and Gates. His father was Gates. He’s now running for California attorney general. His smiling mug appears on billboards all over town under the caption “Mr. Law and Order.” Two years ago, he won the DA’s race by spending three million dollars of his inheritance. I understand he’s prepared to ante up five million this time around.

  I whisper, “Tell him you just heard me come in and I’ll call him back in a few minutes.” I’m going to need a cup of coffee for this.

  Skipper is, well, a complicated guy. To my former partners at Simpson and Gates, he was a self-righteous, condescending ass. To defense attorneys like me, he’s an opportunistic egomaniac who spends most of his time padding his conviction statistics and preening for the media. To the citizens of the City and County of San Francisco, however, he’s a charismatic local hero who vigorously prosecutes drug dealers and pimps. He takes full credit for the fact that violent crime in San Francisco has dropped by a third during his tenure. Even though he’s a law-and-order Republican and a card-carrying member of the NRA, he has led the charge for greater regulation of handguns and sits on the board of directors of the Legal Community Against Violence, a local gun-control advocacy group. He’s an astute politician. It’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll win the AG race. The only question is whether he’ll be the next governor of California.

  Rosie cups her hand over the mouthpiece. “He says it’s urgent.” Her eyes gleam as the sunlight hits her face.

  With Skipper, everything is urgent. “If it’s that important,” I whisper, “it can wait.”

  She smiles and tells him I’ll call as soon as I can. Then her grin disappears as she listens intently. She puts the chief law enforcement officer of the City and County of San Francisco on hold. “You may want to talk to him,” she says.

  “And why would I want to talk to Mr. La
w and Order this fine morning?”

  The little crow’s-feet around her eyes crinkle. “It seems Mr. Law and Order just got himself arrested.”

  “I’ll take it in my office.”

  My new office isn’t much bigger than my old one downstairs. My window looks out on a large hole in the ground that will someday evolve into a high-rise office building across the alley. At least I don’t have to walk up a flight of stairs to the bathroom.

  I stop in our closet-sized kitchen on my way down the hall and pour coffee into a mug with Grace’s picture on it. I glance at the little mirror over the sink, which is filled with empty cups. My full head of light brown hair is fighting a losing battle against the onslaught of the gray. The bags under my eyes are a little smaller than they were a week ago. I walk into my office, where my desk is littered with mail. I log on to my computer and start scrolling through e-mail messages. Finally I pick up the phone, punch the blinking red button, and say in my most authoritative tone, “Michael Daley speaking.”

  “Skipper Gates,” says the familiar baritone. “I need your help ASAP. We have a situation.”

  I haven’t heard the euphemism “We have a situation” since I left Simpson and Gates. We used to refer to this as Skipper speak. When somebody else screwed up, Skipper called it a fuck-up. When he screwed up, it was a situation.

  I try to keep the tone measured. “What is it, Skipper?”

  “I need to see you right away.”

  Nothing changes. I’m still glancing at my e-mails. We aren’t the best of pals. He led the charge to get me tossed out of the Simpson firm and we’ve had our share of run-ins over the last couple of years. It comes with the territory when you make your living as a defense attorney. San Francisco is a small town. Everybody involved in the criminal justice system knows everybody else. We have long memories and unlimited capacity for holding grudges. “Where are you?” I ask.

  “The Hall of Justice.”

  “Are you in your office?”

  “No. The holding area. They’re treating me like a prisoner.”

  “What happened?”

  Silence.

  “Skipper?”

  I hear him clear his throat. “We had a campaign rally at the Fairmont last night.” Skipper tends to refer to himself in the royal we. He’s one of the few people I know who can get away with it. “It ended late,” he continues, “so I decided to stay at the hotel. When I woke up this morning, there was a dead body in my room.”

  “How do you suppose it got there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “Just what I said. I don’t know. It wasn’t there when I went to sleep last night.”

  With Skipper, the imaginary line between reality and dreamland is often pretty fluid. He isn’t exactly lying. Well, not on purpose, anyway. He spends a substantial part of his waking hours in a parallel reality. This is a very useful skill if you’re a lawyer or a politician.

  I ask, “Do you know who it was?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Did you call security?”

  “Of course. They called the cops.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They arrested me.” He may as well have added the words “you idiot.”

  I stop to regroup. “Skipper,” I say, “why did you call me?”

  “We need somebody to deal with this right away. We have to start damage control. This isn’t going to help me in the polls.”

  I’ll say. A dead body is serious. “You know how the system works. You should hire somebody you trust. There are a lot of defense attorneys around town. I may not be the right guy for you.”

  I hear him exhale heavily. “You are the right guy. Notwithstanding our history, I called you for a reason. You’re a fighter. You have guts. You’ll tell me what you really think.” He pauses and then adds, “And unlike most of your contemporaries in the defense bar, you won’t try to cut a fast deal or turn this case into a self-serving infomercial.”

  I’ll be damned. A compliment from Skipper Gates. “All right,” I say. “You’re on.” I ask him a few more questions and agree to meet him at the Hall.

  I glance at my watch. Five to nine. Rosie walks in. “So, did you get lucky?” she asks.

  “Maybe. Looks like we may have a new case.”

  “No, dummy. Mexico. Did you get lucky in Mexico?”

  Rosie. Ever the pragmatist. First things first.

  “No,” I say. “I didn’t get lucky.” I’m probably the only guy at Club Med who didn’t get lucky. “I’m still all yours.”

  She’s pleased. “Well, then you did get lucky, didn’t you?” She glances at the notes I’ve scribbled. “What’s Skipper’s story?”

  I take a long drink of coffee. “Nothing out of the ordinary. A dead body wandered into his room in the middle of the night. The cops think he had something to do with it becoming dead.”

  She takes this news in stride. “Do they know who the victim is?”

  “No ID yet. The cops told him it may have been a prostitute.”

  “How did she die?”

  “They think it was suffocation.” I arch my eyebrows and add, “By the way, it wasn’t a she.”

  2

  THE ASSHOLE PREMIUM

  “The Hall of Justice isn’t a big tourist attraction.”

  —SAN FRANCISCO POLICE CHIEF. SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7.

  In San Francisco, the wheels of justice grind at a snail’s pace in the Hall of Justice, a monolithic six-story structure that rises above the 101 Freeway at the corner of Seventh and Bryant. The criminal courts, DA’s office, chief medical examiner and county jail jockey for position in this crowded testimonial to industrial-strength urban architecture. A modernistic new jail wing that opened in the early nineties adds little to the overall ambiance of the original gray building, which dates to the late fifties and looks as if it could withstand a nuclear attack. I park my eleven-year-old Corolla in the pay lot next to the McDonald’s and walk quickly through the throng of reporters who are already camped on the front steps of the Hall. The news is out.

  I glare into the nearest camera and invoke Skipper speak. “We have a situation. This misunderstanding will be resolved shortly and Mr. Gates will return to his duties at the DA’s office.” I push through the heavy doors, nod to the guard as I pass through the metal detector and walk up the stairs to the sixth floor of the new jail wing, known as County Jail Number 9.

  I present my state bar card and driver’s license to Sergeant Jeff Dito, a mustached, olive-skinned sheriff’s deputy who administers the intake center with a steady hand. He studies my bar card through deepset eyes. When I explain I’m here to see Skipper, he furrows his brow. “‘Mr. Law and Order’ is in booking,” he says. He punches some buttons on his computer keyboard and makes a phone call. “He’ll be up in a few minutes.”

  It’s early, but things are hopping. For historic bureaucratic reasons, the jail facility is run by the County Sheriff’s Department. Deputies walk through the hallway. I nod to a couple of my former colleagues from the PD’s office. I take a seat next to a man who is trying to persuade his parole officer that Jesus is talking to him. The parade of humanity resembles a flea market on a busy afternoon. Police, prosecutors, public defenders and criminals barter in the hallway. Instead of selling trinkets and other junk, the prosecutors sell trips to jail and probation terms. The defense attorneys do their clients’ bidding. If you sit here long enough, it almost sounds as if you’re listening in on a half dozen simultaneous time-share pitches for those condos in Mexico. When I was a PD, I used to make some of my best deals in the corridor just outside the old booking hub on the sixth floor of the Hall. That part of the facility is now used for hard-core prisoners. The new jail wing is a lot quieter.

  Whenever I’m in the Hall, I think of my dad, who was a San Francisco cop. He died a few weeks after Grace’s first birthday. He was beside himself when I decided to go to law schoo
l. He detested lawyers—even the prosecutors. He was appalled when I became a PD. He took it as a personal affront. Somehow, I still expect to see him walking down the corridor, chest out, cigarette in his hand.

  Five minutes later, Sergeant Dito nods and a deputy leads me to an airless room just behind the intake desk, where I find Skipper pacing like a caged lion. Even unshaven and in an orange jumpsuit, he’s impressively handsome, all trim six feet six of him. His charismatic public persona remains intact. Until now, I have never seen him dressed in anything other than a top-of-the-line Italian suit. He wags a menacing finger at me. “Somebody’s ass is going to fry for this,” he says.

  Hopefully, it won’t be yours.

  “I’m going to kick the chief’s butt all the way back to Northern Station for promoting McBride,” he snaps. Inspector Elaine McBride made the arrest. She’s only the second woman to make homicide inspector on the SFPD. She’s tough. Her stellar reputation is well deserved. Skipper sits down in a heavy wooden chair. “This is preposterous,” he says. “It’s a publicity stunt.”

  This sort of thing just isn’t supposed to happen to God-fearing Republicans. In many respects, getting arrested is society’s great equalizer. Even a well-connected, rich white guy like Skipper has been strip-searched, showered with disinfectant, given a medical interview and placed in a holding cell. There isn’t much dignity left after the process is completed. I place a pad of white paper in front of me on the table. Most lawyers have stopped using those ugly yellow pads because they can’t be recycled. I look directly into his eyes. “You’re the DA,” I say. “You know the drill. Tell me what happened.”

  He’s indignant. “Nothing happened,” he replies, emphasizing each syllable. He looks at the drab walls. On Friday, he was sitting in his opulent office on the third floor of the old Hall. Now he’s sharing space with murderers, child molesters and pimps. “We had a kickoff rally for my campaign in the grand ballroom at the Fairmont last night. Fifteen hundred people showed up. It was terrific.”