Maya told Hardy she’d been busy with the kids’ school and on vacation and hadn’t been able to make it into the store to sign the business checks, but she’d also neglected to reimburse herself from the company account during the many visits when she’d had a chance to do so. She had no idea what the checks from Vogler to her represented. She had left it to Vogler to keep the books. In the current climate this explanation was widely discredited.
The victory for Glass and the accompanying widely perceived truth that the Townshends were in fact in the drug business had then in turn played a huge role in people’s perception of the Townshends, and public opinion shifted away from presumption of innocence. Suddenly, if you did business with Joel Townshend, or Harlen Fisk, or Kathy West-in fact, if you did business with the city-you were going to get cheated. That’s just the way “these people” did things.
Just this morning Hardy had read the Chronicle’s editorial and letters page, and it was fully one-third choked with vitriol-Supervisor Fisk and the mayor should quit or, failing that, they should be impeached. The drumbeat was picking up; even in Hardy’s office it was water-fountain talk.
And though none of this had anything to do with Maya’s guilt for the crimes of murder of which she was accused, Hardy knew that it was going to have a lot to do with Paul, aka Paulie, aka “The Big Ugly,” Stier-the assistant DA who’d pulled the case-and how he played the evidence. From an untutored perspective the entire courtroom drama could unfold as a large multi-tentacled conspiracy fueled by drugs and moral turpitude in high places.
Hardy glanced over at his opponent.
Despite his flamboyant nicknames Stier was in his mid-thirties, earnest, and, from Hardy’s dealings with him so far, possessed of little personality or sense of humor. The nicknames remained worrisome, though.
It was a truism in the courtroom that what you didn’t know would hurt you, and Hardy hadn’t been able to pick up much in the way of gossip or dirt on The Big Ugly, which probably meant he kept his personality-and his possible clever moves and dirty tricks-well hidden until he needed them, when they could inflict the most damage. Of course, it was also possible that the nicknames were sarcastic-that Stier was what he appeared to be, a hard-charging, fair-minded, good-looking working attorney. Certainly, he didn’t look dangerous now, leaning back over the bar rail chatting amicably with Jerry Glass. They were simply two clean-cut, hardworking, self-righteous, ambitious guys doing the people’s hard work-one for the country’s government, and one for the state’s.
Hardy felt a twist in his stomach.
There, also, in the front row, was Debra Schiff, who, Hardy knew, had started to see Glass socially, if not intimately. Leaning around further, Hardy briefly caught the eye of Darrel Bracco, who gave him a quick ambiguous look and then looked away-clearly all along Bracco had not been as gung-ho as Schiff about Maya’s guilt and the wisdom of her arrest, but in the maelstrom that had developed, his doubts, if any, had surely been laid to rest. Still, though, to Dismas the look somehow felt heartening.
Or maybe it was pity.
At a signal from the bailiff Hardy got up and walked through the door at the back of the courtroom leading to the corridor and the judge’s chambers. There, out of the sight of the jury, the bailiff took off Maya’s handcuffs, and Hardy entered with his client, followed by the bailiff, and they took their places at counsel’s table.
In what Hardy thought was a show of judicial nastiness if not downright personal affront to him, Braun had considered denying Maya the privilege of “dressing out,” or wearing normal street clothes when she appeared in the courtroom. For the duration of the trial, she opined, his client would sit next to Hardy at his table in her yellow jumpsuit.
Hardy, insane with rage, had had to file a fifteen-page brief before he could convince Braun that a variety of federal and state cases held squarely that his client had an absolute right to appear in front of the jury in civilian clothes. Dressed as a convict, she would present to the jury an image that was at odds with that of a citizen who was presumed innocent. She must be already guilty of something, went the not-so-subtle psychology of it. She wouldn’t be in jail, wearing that outfit, brought into the courtroom in handcuffs, if she hadn’t done anything at all, if she weren’t a danger to the community. Braun’s position was ridiculous and had been repudiated by courts for a good fifty years. Even so, she had conceded this absolutely undebatable point grudgingly and with bad grace.
The gallery noise behind them abated slightly. Maya gave Hardy a lost look and then scanned around behind her, nodding at her husband in the first row on “her” side of the gallery, or maybe it was that she was relieved not to see her children, who had been living with Fisk’s family all the while she’d been incarcerated.
The whole thing was awful, Hardy thought. Simply awful.
And what made it worse, all but intolerable from his perspective, was that in spite of the lack of evidence he’d finally come to lose almost all of his belief that she was not actually guilty of both murders.
Certainly, he knew, she had done something she was unwilling, under pain of life in prison, to reveal.
Also, while her family and her outside world appeared to be imploding around her, as the weeks had passed, she seemed to have grown more and more acquiescent, and less concerned with her defense, as though she deserved whatever happened to her. She still professed a desire to be found innocent, but mostly because she thought the children needed her. She didn’t want them to have to live with the fact that their mother was in jail, convicted of murder. For herself, though, it didn’t seem that critical an issue.
Hardy stood and pulled out her chair as all the parties rose while another bailiff brought in the jury from their room farther back along the same corridor Hardy and Maya had just used to enter the courtroom. When all the jurors were seated, she sat and Hardy pushed her forward until she was comfortably up at the table. As he’d coached her, she cast a look over to the newly empaneled jury and nodded a few times, making as much eye contact as seemed natural.
It was, from his perspective, a decent jury. Nine men and three women. Five whites, four African-Americans, three Asians. All between forty and seventy, and Hardy guessed from various nuances that seven or eight of them had at least tried marijuana. Nine of them held full-time jobs. Two of the men and one woman were retired and had been moderately successful in business. Hardy was surprised that Stier hadn’t peremptorily dismissed any of these, but maybe he hadn’t factored the antidevelopment prejudice adequately into his jury-selection strategy.
Although sometimes, Hardy knew, you just got lucky.
The way things had been going, though, Hardy didn’t think that was it in this case.
But before Hardy had a chance to sit again, behind them the gallery energy shifted, and both Hardy and Maya turned around to see what had caused it.
“Well, look at this,” Hardy said, a small grin toying with the sides of his mouth as Kathy West, the mayor of San Francisco herself, came walking down the center aisle toward them, accompanied by her nephew Harlen Fisk and a small procession of both of their staff members. Beyond them flowed a steady stream of reporters, courtroom groupies, and the simply curious, such that by the time Kathy and Harlen got up to the front row and began moving in beside Joel, the gallery was standing room only and the buzz in the room was constant and formidable.