MD04 - Final Verdict Read online

  Work is also therapeutic for her. Her home life is a mess. More accurately, it’s non-existent. Two acrimonious divorces and a disastrous affair with her former boss at the DA’s office have left her decidedly ambivalent about attempting another meaningful relationship with a member of my gender. On the plus side, she recently reconciled with her college-aged son, who bore the brunt of her failed marriages.

  I give her a run-down on the events since I last saw her this afternoon, beginning with my visit to Sixth Street and ending with our chat with Nicole Ward earlier this evening. It doesn’t take much to fire up her engines and she takes in my explanation without interrupting. “Where do we start?” she asks.

  I tell her that the arraignment is Monday morning and that we need to ask for expedited discovery. “Among other things,” I say, “we need a copy of the tape from the security camera at Alcatraz Liquors, as well as the autopsy results and the police reports.”

  “I’m already working on it.”

  “You’re good.”

  “I know. What else?”

  I ask her what she’s found out about Tower Grayson.

  “I’ve done searches on the Net and Nexis. There was an article in the Chroniclea couple of months ago that was very interesting.”

  Roosevelt’s photographic memory is still perfect.

  “He was a low-level guy in the venture capital food chain,” she continues. “Paradigm raised twenty million from a small group of rich investors. It’s a lot of money to me, but it’s chump change to the real players. Your buddy, Brad Lucas, put together the documentation. Paradigm invested in a half dozen start-ups. A couple are still in business, but the rest have gone belly-up. That’s why they call it venture capital. They really should call it ‘adventure’ capital.”

  “Any hanky panky?”

  “Not as far as I can tell, but Grayson had some unhappy investors. Lawrence Chamberlain was quoted as saying that he had some issues that he planned to discuss with Grayson, but he didn’t elaborate. Venture capitalists value their privacy.”

  We’ll see if he’s a little more forthcoming after we send him a subpoena. “Do you have any idea why Grayson and Chamberlain were meeting with their lawyer last night?”

  “You’ll have to ask Chamberlain.” She winks and adds, “Do you know if he’s married?”

  “I’m not sure. Why do you ask?”

  “He looks like Robert Redford and has more money than God.” She plants her tongue in her cheek and says, “I can make myself available in the right circumstances.”

  Rosie and I have been encouraging Carolyn to keep her romantic involvements to a less formal level. She willingly admits that she’s better at dating than being married. “You don’t need a sugar daddy,” I say.

  “Where does it say that I always have to go out with slugs who have no money?”

  “You have more depth.”

  “Maybe I should try something superficial for awhile.”

  Perhaps. “Guys like Chamberlain don’t hang out with people from our neighborhood.”

  “They’d be better off if they did.”

  We discuss her current social situation for a few minutes, then I tell her that I’m going back to Sixth Street tomorrow to see if I can find any witnesses.

  “You’d better bring somebody who knows the lay of the land,” she says, “and you may want to carry some protection.”

  She had a permit to carry a handgun when she was a DA. It’s the price you pay for a perfect record prosecuting gang members. “I’m not going to carry a gun,” I tell her.

  “Your choice, but you’d better find somebody who can show you around. If you get in sideways with the wrong crowd, you’ll end up in a Dumpster, too.”

  “I’ve already called in reinforcements.”

  “Who?”

  “My brother.”

  # # #

  “You look like shit, Mick.” My brother, Pete, is standing in the doorway to my office as I’m listening to the Ferry Building clock chime ten times.

  I look out the window at the dark street and say, “That seems to be the consensus.”

  He’s five years younger than I am and is a more compact, muscular version of me, except his graying hair was once darker than mine and his face bears the scars of ten years as a patrolman and seven more as a PI. His departure from the SFPD was not a happy one. He and some of his former colleagues were given their walking papers after they broke up a gang fight with a little too much enthusiasm. Pete still thinks he got a raw deal, and I think he’s right.

  “I feel much worse than I look,” I tell him.

  He gives me the familiar half-grin and says in a raspy voice, “You couldn’t possibly look any worse.”

  That’s as close as he gets to humor. He’s wearing his standard office attire: a chocolate bomber jacket and a pair of tight-fitting black jeans. He spends a lot of time at the gym and has bulges in all the important places. He was married once for a short time, but things didn’t work out, and he’s lived by himself in the house where we grew up at Twenty-third and Kirkham since our mother died two years ago. For the last six months, he’s had an on-again, off-again relationship with a woman named Donna Andrews, who works in the accounting department of one of the big law firms downtown. He’s the first to admit that his unpredictable schedule makes long-term commitments difficult.

  “Were you working tonight?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “The usual?” Nine times out of ten, he’s on the tail of an unfaithful husband. If you want to keep an eye on somebody or you need to find someone, Pete’s your guy.

  He tugs at his mustache. “Something a little more exotic. I was trying to find out if a partner at Donna’s law firm is having an affair with his secretary.”

  Those of us who have worked at large law firms recognize that this is a disturbing, but hardly uncommon situation. “Is he?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did the guy’s wife hire you?”

  “Nah. She didn’t care. He gives her a mid-six figure allowance every year to play nice.”

  Not bad. “Did the firm hire you to see if they were going to get sued for sexual harassment?”

  “The firm has no official position on this matter. Nobody has complained and the managing partner has chosen to look the other way.”

  It’s a common response. We took a different approach when I was at Simpson and Gates. Our executive committee adopted an official edict that prohibited partners from having romantic relationships with staff members or other lawyers without first obtaining the written approval of our managing partner. Such non-fraternization policies, or, NFP’s, are fairly standard, although wags such as myself suggested that the letter “F” had a slightly more colloquial meaning. The idea is to fend off sexual harassment suits by having the participants sign a piece of paper stating that their relationship is consensual and that they won’t sue if things go south. It was, of course, difficult to police, and we used to joke that our managing partner carried a pager in case one of my former partners got the urge late at night. Law firms being law firms, our NFP was leaked to the Chronicle and became a topic of water cooler twittering all over the Bay Area. We haven’t found it necessary to adopt a similar policy at Fernandez, Daley and O’Malley.

  “If it wasn’t the wife or the law firm,” I say, “who hired you?”

  “The secretary’s significant other.”

  Of course. Invariably, the other player in these melodramas is the jilted lover. “So the secretary’s boyfriend hired you to see if his squeeze was cheating on him?”

  “Actually, it was the secretary’s girlfriend.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The secretary was a lesbian until she had the affair with her boss. She switched teams.”

  Uh-huh. “It happens,” I say. I can imagine the locker room talk at the firm. The partner is probably telling everyone he’s such a stud that he can cause women to change their sexual orientation. We discuss the ramifications of Pet
e’s latest case, then we turn to real business.

  “I understand you’ve decided to go another round with Leon Walker,” he says. He gives me the special look that he reserves just for me. “Are you a masochist or simply brain dead?”

  “Both.”

  “Didn’t you and Rosie get enough last time? He was guilty, Mick.”

  “His brother was guilty. Leon just drove the car.”

  “That made him an accomplice.” The corner of his mouth turns up slightly when he says, “You seem to have forgotten the Daley family motto.”

  “I wasn’t aware that we had one.”

  “We do. Never forgive and never forget.”

  Not bad. “It’s a good motto.”

  “I know. I just made it up.”

  Suddenly, everybody’s a comedian. I look at him and say, “I need your help, Pete.”

  “Walker’s dying.”

  “We can defend him until he does.”

  He turns serious. “Look, Mick,” he says, “he was guilty last time. It still bugs a lot of people–including me–that you got him off.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “The cops are going to do everything they can to nail him. Your little grandstand play pissed off a lot of people.”

  I try again. “I need your help. I have to look for witnesses on Sixth Street and I could get killed if I go down there by myself.”

  “Don’t go there, Mick.”

  “Sixth Street?”

  “Guilt.”

  I give him a quick smile and say, “It’s always worked in the past.”

  “Not anymore. Donna says I have to let go of some of this stuff. I did eighty years of guilt in the first twenty years of my life. I’m done.”

  Sounds like she’s a good influence. “And you’re going to take her advice over mine?”

  “She has better legs than you do, Mick.”

  *****

  Chapter 10

  Going the Distance

  “I will play fair and strive to win, but win or lose, I will always do my best.”

  — Little League Pledge.

  Notwithstanding the attractiveness of his girlfriend’s legs, I’m able to persuade my brother to help me by offering him tickets to the next Giants-Dodgers series, dinner at the restaurant of his choice and all of the carefully-negotiated two thousand dollar retainer that Leon promised us. He knows that the money will cover only a few days of his time and eventually he’ll be working pro bono with the rest of us. It won’t be the last time he does me a favor. I ask him to find out what he can out Grayson and Chamberlain, then I promise to meet him on Sixth Street tomorrow afternoon. He used to walk the beat down there and he still has some contacts. More importantly, he’s licensed to carry a gun.

  At the moment, I have a more pressing issue. My starting pitcher has broken curfew. I’m sitting on the corner of Grace’s bed and straining to keep a straight face as I give her my best imitation of a serious look. “Why are you still up?” I whisper. “You’re pitching tomorrow.”

  Our daughter smiles at me through a mouthful of brace-covered teeth. Her hair is longer and her body is thinner than Rosie’s, but the resemblance is unmistakable. The business-like inflection in her voice is a dead-on imitation of her mother’s when she explains, “I was waiting for you to get home.”

  I point to my watch and say, “It’s eleven-thirty.”

  “I couldn’t fall asleep.”

  “Your game starts in nine and a half hours.”

  Her tone remains matter-of-fact when she says, “I’ll be ready.”

  Rosie and Grace live in a rented bungalow across the street from the Little League field in Larkspur, a bedroom community three suburbs north of the Golden Gate Bridge. I live a couple of blocks away in a small apartment behind the fire station. Our accommodations would be more elegant if we pooled our resources and lived under the same roof, but it didn’t work out when we tried it last time, and we’ve found that our two-block buffer zone has a positive impact on our relationship. It isn’t as if we’re going to buy a home in the Bay Area’s supercharged housing market and Rosie’s nine hundred square foot palace is well beyond our price range. Thankfully, her landlord is a retired teacher who bought the house forty years ago and is content to keep it as an investment while she spends her golden years in Tucson. She turned ninety last year and we’re hoping she’ll be around long enough for Grace to finish high school.

  “Why are you still conscious?” I ask.

  “I needed to ask you something.”

  “It couldn’t have waited until morning?”

  She shakes her head. She has Rosie’s dark eyes, thick hair and independent streak. At five-one, she’s almost as tall as her mom and towers over half the boys in her class. Her delicate features are identical to Rosie’s, but she also inherited a few Daley genes in her throwing arm from my older brother Tommy, who was a star quarterback at St. Ignatius and Cal before we lost him in Vietnam. She’s an overpowering pitcher and we’re hoping she’ll be the first woman to play in the majors.

  Grace is handling the transition from little girl to pre-teenager with more finesse than I expected. When the braces come off and her figure fills out, she’ll be stunning and I’ll be a basket case. She still calls me Daddy at home, but out in the real world, I’m now just Dad. We don’t listen to Radio Disney in the car anymore and she recently took down the photos of the teenage pop idols that covered the wall of her bedroom. She’s still more interested in baseball than boys, but there are subtle signs that this is starting to change. Our shortstop is a tall, good looking kid who has shown indications of interest, which Grace has grudgingly reciprocated. If he dares to ask her to go to a movie, he’ll be riding the bench for the rest of his life.

  She asks, “Can I throw a couple of curveballs in the game tomorrow if I get in a pinch?”

  “You stayed up two hours past your bedtime to ask me that?”

  “Yes.”

  I was a decent pitcher in high school and she knows I would stay up for hours talking about the grips for the four-seam fastball, the slider and the circle change-up. “You can throw a couple of curves tomorrow,” I tell her. “No more than two. It isn’t good for your arm.”

  “Thanks, Daddy.”

  “You’re welcome.” My parental and managerial instincts overrule my love for our national past time. “Now go to bed.”

  Her smile broadens. “I really didn’t stay up just to ask you about curveballs, Daddy.”

  I kind of figured that out. “Why are you up so late?”

  “I’m excited about the game.”

  Never underestimate the exuberance of an eleven year-old who is pitching in her first championship game. I’m not looking forward to the sullen teenage years. “So am I,” I say, “but you need to go to sleep. I’m your manager and I may need you to go the distance tomorrow. Do you think you can do it?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  I give her a kiss and I’m about to head for the door when she sits up and says, “I saw you on TV.”

  It isn’t the first time. Rosie and I have handled our share of high profile cases and we’ve stretched our fifteen minutes of fame into an hour or so. I ask, “Did I do okay?”

  “You did fine. You said Leon Walker was innocent. That’s what you always say when you’re on TV.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “But you say that even when they’re guilty.”

  Yes, I do. “You know it’s my job to defend people. The jury decides if they’re guilty.”

  “I know.” She folds her arms in a perfect imitation of Rosie. “Is he guilty?”

  It’s too late for this. The usual misdirection doesn’t work as well as it used to, but I give it a try. “It isn’t my job to make that decision.”

  Not good enough. “Come on, Dad,” she says. “Did he do it or not?”

  She isn’t taunting me. She really wants to know. “I’m not sure, honey.”

  “Then why did you say that he was i
nnocent on TV?”

  I continue the tap dance. “It’s my job to persuade people that he’s innocent.”

  “Even if you know he’s guilty?”

  It’s like arguing with Rosie. “The prosecutors will put on their case and I’ll put on our defense. Then the jury will decide. I don’t know if he’s guilty or not.”