“Well, it’s good you called at whatever time, ma’am,” Bracco said. “But we haven’t heard anybody else talking about more than one shot.” Bracco’s face reflected his frustration with San Francisco’s laissez faire reality. This wasn’t Hunters Point, exactly, in terms of gunshots per minute, but Bracco thought it wasn’t such a high crime area that a couple of gunshots would be a completely normal event. And yet, apparently, no one among the citizenry had seen fit to rally to report them. If it wasn’t napalm, he figured, nobody paid attention.
Mrs. Bradford looked from one inspector to the other, as though soliciting their forgiveness. “Nobody else called nine one one, then?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Oh, then I really should have, shouldn’t I?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that, Mrs. Bradford,” Schiff said. “The point is that you called now and we’re here. Inspector Bracco and I will check with dispatch and see if anybody called to report these shots or make a noise complaint on Saturday morning. Maybe they didn’t think it was an emergency, and then it wouldn’t have come to us through dispatch.”
Bracco leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Could you tell us a little more about these shots, ma’am? How far apart were they spaced, for example?”
Mrs. Bradford sat back and stared off into nothing for a second or two. “I’d say about a minute. A fairly long time, anyway. They weren’t right away, one after the other. I was awake, I remember, but still in bed, when I heard the first one, and I kind of lay there wondering what that was for a while, and if I’d really heard it. You know? The way you are when you’re half awake. And then I decided I’d really heard something and got up to see if I could see what it had been and I was just in the hallway there when the second one went off.”
“And what did you do then?” Schiff asked.
“Well.” Mrs. Bradford’s face grew animated at the recollection. “Well, then, I of course got to the window as fast as I could and looked down at the street here, and I could see the alley, too, but I didn’t know that’s where the shots must have come from. I couldn’t tell anything, really. Anyway, but then when I didn’t see anybody moving and hear anything else down below there, that’s when I decided it was probably nothing and not to call nine one one.”
“Mrs. Bradford,” Schiff asked, “did you happen to notice the exact time of these shots?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was ten minutes after six. The second one, I mean. The first one, just before that. Six oh eight or nine.” She pointed. “There’s the digital on the stove.”
“And how sure are you,” Bracco asked, “that it was the same kind of sound?”
“Oh, the same, definitely. If the second one was a shot, the first one was a shot, and vice versa. Loud, and sharp. Louder than TV.” Back to her recurring theme, she said, “I really should have called nine one one. Someone might have gotten here in time to catch the killer.”
“Really, Mrs. Bradford”-Schiff patted her hand on the table-“I wouldn’t lose one minute of sleep over that. You’ve done the right thing to call us now, and this is a very important bit of information that we didn’t have before.” She cast an eye on Bracco. “This may change our entire theory of the case, and it’s all because you’re a good citizen. We thank you very much.”
On the second flight down the stairs, out of earshot, Schiff started talking about it. “You believe her?”
“I think she heard something.”
“There was only one bullet missing from the murder weapon.”
“Maybe the murder weapon. Consistent with the murder weapon. And I kind of vaguely remember, Debra.”
“Vogler didn’t shoot somebody in that alley.”
“Nope.”
“And there was only one casing.”
“Yep.”
“Which means what?”
“It means the woman’s going on a hundred. She’s bored living alone. She heard some noises maybe the same morning Vogler was shot.”
They came out into the overcast and windy day and turned downhill toward Haight, where, even though they’d parked legally in an open metered space, Darrel had gone through his radio-over-the-rearview-mirror and business-card-on-the-dashboard routine. They were walking on the opposite side of the street from Bay Beans West, and as they came abreast of the place, Schiff hit Bracco on the arm. “Darrel,” she said, “wait up. Look at that.”
They both stopped.
“What?” Bracco asked.
“On the door.”
Bracco squinted to look, then stepped off the curb and started across the street. “What is that?”
When they came closer, the answer presented itself. Taped to the front door was an official yellow-colored single sheet of a government document with the heading “Posting of Real Property,” declaring that the establishment was subject to forfeiture to the federal government, as the proceeds of trafficking in controlled substances.
“Jerry Glass,” Schiff said. “I fucking love that guy.”
13
Dismas Hardy hadn’t thought to bring his trench coat to work with him this morning, and on general principles he’d be damned if he was going to take a cab from his office the dozen or fewer blocks to the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue. But now he was paying for his stubbornness, leaning into the teeth of a minigale as he walked, suitcoat buttoned up, hands in his pants pockets.
After the ten-thirty A.M. emergency cries for help, first from Maya and then minutes later from Joel Townshend, Hardy had immediately placed his own high-priority call to Jerry Glass, who did not seem inclined to discuss much about the forfeiture situation on the telephone-“It pretty much speaks for itself” was all the explanation he was ready to volunteer. But Hardy had an ace or two up his sleeve, as well, in the person of his former DA friend and mentor Art Drysdale, now one of the Grand Old Men of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and ten minutes after Hardy got off the phone with Art, Glass called him and told him he’d give him some face time if they could do it in Glass’s office in the next half hour.
Hence the hike.
But the exercise did serve a couple of small purposes. It gave Hardy time to think. And walking into the gusts and grit really pissed him off.
Now, as he walked down the perennially sterile hallway on the eleventh floor, Hardy found himself forcefully reminded of the last time he’d been down to this neighborhood on business. It had been directly across the street in the State Building. At that time, probably the best part of six years before, he’d essentially been accused of setting fire to his own home for the insurance. An arson inspector and a couple of detectives had three-teamed and threatened him with arrest until he’d called their bluff and simply walked out on them in the middle of the interview.
He wondered, not for the first time, if there was some kind of bland but powerful psychic karma in these two governmental edifices-one federal and one state-that attracted heartless, deceptive, self-righteous bureaucrats. For all of his dislike of the physical layout and general tone of the Hall of Justice at Seventh and Bryant-which is where he normally did his business-no one could argue that the place didn’t thrum with almost the very heartbeat of humanity in all of its flaws and grandeur. By contrast these fat faceless rectangles of glass and granite-the halls were silent-seemed the embodiment of the anonymous power of the state to harm and to meddle wherever it saw fit under the rubric of enforcing the rules.