An aphorism of someone he’d once known sprang to his mind: The essence of fascism is to make laws forbidding everything and then enforce them selectively against your enemies.
It wasn’t that bad, of course. Hardy had several friends, including Art Drysdale, who worked in one or the other of these buildings. But he himself avoided them whenever he could, all but unconsciously. And getting to Glass’s outer office, he could neither ignore the bile that had risen in his gut nor the frisson of what felt like fear tickling at the base of his brain.
Glass evenly carried twenty extra pounds on a frame about the same size as Hardy’s. Today he wore a gray suit, white shirt buttoned tight at the neck, a light blue tie. With some effort he shook Hardy’s hand over his desk, then sat back down and indicated either of the two beige faux-leather chairs facing him.
Hardy generally thought it best to start out civilly. “I appreciate your taking the time to see me.”
Glass turned a hand up. “Art Drysdale’s a legend, Mr. Hardy. He recommends that I talk to you, that’s what I do. Although I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to help you.”
“Well, then we’re a bit in the same boat.”
“How’s that?”
“I think this forfeiture action you’re contemplating is going to turn out to be an embarrassment and a mistake. I don’t know how I’m going to help you avoid making it.”
Glass’s mouth tightened, the lips conveying a mild distaste. “I’m not just contemplating going forward with the forfeiture process, Mr. Hardy. I’ve got plenty of grounds and it’s a pretty cut-and-dried precedent. You deal in drugs, your profits and whatever you buy with your profits are subject to forfeiture.”
“Fair enough,” Hardy said. “But my client hasn’t been dealing in drugs. One of Maya Townshend’s employees evidently sold marijuana out of her coffee shop, but she didn’t know anything about it.”
“No?”
“No.”
“And you’re sure of that?”
“It’s not a question of whether I’m sure of it, which I am. It’s a question of whether you can prove it, which I don’t see how you can.”
“Well, that’s another matter and what I’ve already convened the grand jury about. As I’m sure you know, I can’t talk about what goes on in those proceedings at all. But as to whether your client knew this was going on-and let’s leave for a minute the question of whether she was profiting from the sale of this marijuana herself-it would be hard to imagine that she didn’t.”
“And why is that?”
“Because Bay Beans West has been the subject of no fewer than twenty-three nuisance calls from neighbors in the past five years. Almost all of them concerned flagrant marijuana use, much of it in front of children and adolescents. The nuisance complaints were, of course, conveyed not just to the manager of the business but to the owner of the establishment, who happens as well to own the building. Beyond that, and leaving out the stabbing that took place in the alley behind the place two years ago, to say nothing of the murder last week, would you care to guess how many citations for marijuana smoking have been issued in the past twenty-four months on the street directly in front of the coffee shop?”
“In front of isn’t in.”
Glass waved that objection away. “Forty-three. Forty-three tickets. The place is a well-known dope den, Mr. Hardy.”
“Be that as it may, sir, and I’m not denying it, the fact remains that my client didn’t know much about it. She rarely went there. She was a silent partner in running the place, that’s all.”
“She knew it well enough to have her civil lawyers come to the Zoning Commission when some neighbors tried to lift her business license three years ago. It went all the way to the Board of Supervisors, Mr. Hardy, and some say that if it weren’t for her brother, they would have shut her down then.”
This was completely unexpected and bad news to Hardy. Neither Maya nor Joel had mentioned anything about it to him. “Okay,” Hardy said, conceding the point, “but this is marijuana on Haight Street. You can get it in any doorway. You can’t seriously claim that BBW was the source or even a major contributor to all these tickets.”
Glass sniffed his displeasure. “Your client is the sister of one of our supervisors and the niece of the mayor. And mustn’t that be nice?” His lips turned up, but no one would have called it a smile. “Your client certainly knew the kind of place they were running, believe me. It’s a plain and simple narcotics operation, complete with the gun that’s the purported murder weapon for the latest problem there, huge amounts of cash-far more than you’d expect in a coffee shop-and substantial quantities of marijuana on the premises.”
Hardy took in this information in silence, masking his concern with a nonchalant posture-sitting back now, arms on the chair rests, his foot resting over its opposite knee. “Mr. Glass,” he said, “I’m not here to dispute whether or not the place was a source for marijuana. Obviously, it was. But it’s a long stretch-even if my client knew about it, or had a hunch about it, or anything like that-it’s a hell of a long stretch to prove that she profited from the dope at all. Do you know who Joel Townshend is? He doesn’t need dope money, believe me.”
“You mean on the theory, Mr. Hardy, that people who have a lot of money don’t want to have more?”
“He doesn’t need to take that kind of risk to get it. He wouldn’t take that risk. Neither would she.”
“Which came first, I wonder, the real estate or the drugs? Mr. Townshend may have a fortune, Mr. Hardy, but we intend to claim every dollar of it that came from the narcotics business. Then we’ll see how much he’s got left.”
“Why would they take the risk?” Hardy repeated.
Glass had a hand stretched out casually in front of him as he scratched at his desk blotter. “One could make the argument, I think you’ll agree, given the, shall we say, personal relationship between your client and the mayor’s office, that there was no risk here in this city in running any kind of illegal operation.” Now he came forward, his eyes narrowing, a hint of real anger ruddying up the pale flesh of his face. His voice, though, remained controlled. “She was paying the man ninety thousand dollars a year, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s right.”
“To manage a coffee shop.”
“Correct. Last time I checked, that wasn’t a crime.”
“No, but money laundering is. He gives her his dope money, she puts it in her or her husband’s account, and they pay him back out of that.”
“That wasn’t happening,” Hardy said flatly.
“I intend to show that it was. You get people worried about their assets, you’d be surprised what turns up.”
Hardy uncrossed his legs and came forward in his chair. “Mr. Glass, have you met these people? They didn’t do any of this.”
“No? Well, we’ll see. But what’s your point? That I’d like them if I met them socially? That it would matter to me? I’m sure they’re charming. People who deal in cons tend to be.”
“You’ve got this completely wrong,” Hardy said. “You don’t have any facts that implicate my client in any of this. And meanwhile, you’ve got her threatened with this forfeiture. It’s just a blunt instrument at this point.”
“Well.” Glass folded his heavy hands on the desk. “It’ll get us on the road to finding out what we need to know. And sometimes you just have to use the tools you got.”
“You can still do that?” Hardy asked from the office doorway.