What indeed? His assistant, Harvey Parsons, would be there to see she didn’t do anything outré to one of their Loved Ones.
Giselle Marc had hitched her chair closer to Kearny’s desk, and had been talking steadily. Since DKA’s life’s blood was finding people who had defaulted, defrauded, or embezzled from banks, bonding companies, lending institutions, or insurance conglomerates, and taking their unpaid-for chattels, she had a lot to go over with Kearny. An hour later she was down to a final folder. She opened it on the desk.
“Okay, the classics from UpScale Motors. We started out looking for seven of them after Ken scored that little 280Z. Larry got the Corvette roadster out of Wiley’s brother-in-law’s garage down in Pacifica the day after you left.”
“Any trouble?”
“Not with the repo, no.” She already was losing her enthusiasm at his return. “But, ah, Dan, something happened that might come back to bite us. A few hours after Larry took the Corvette, the brother-in-law and his very pregnant wife stormed in here with a bunch of Polaroids they said showed—”
She was interrupted by the arrival of three men through the back door. Two of them were cops who now and then shagged cars through police records for DKA. The other...
“You Kearny?” snapped the one she didn’t know.
He had strands of thin black hair combed sideways to cover a spreading bald spot and his small black mustache looked pinned to his sallow face like a tail pinned to a birthday party donkey.
Kearny said, “Tom. George. How are the families?”
The stranger yapped, “I’m the one you gotta worry about, wise-ass. Sergeant Willis Franks of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department. You’re under arrest for aggravated assault and wanton destruction of property. On your feet, buster.”
Tom and George winced. Kearny said, “Let’s see some tin.”
Franks pulled out his shield wallet and displayed his badge. Kearny nodded and stood up.
“Pacifica?” he asked Giselle as if the cops weren’t even there. She nodded. “Okay, get Hec Tranquillini on the horn and have him meet me at the San Mateo County Courthouse.” He looked at Franks. “The holding coop’s still in South City, isn’t it?”
Franks nodded, taking the cuffs off his belt.
“You don’t need those,” said Tom.
Franks got a mean cop look in his eye. “Assistant D.A. Scarbrough said to bring him in fast and bring him in hard. I don’t know what that means to you pussies up here, but in San Mateo that means the cuffs.”
“You ain’t in San Mateo,” George pointed out.
Kearny winked at Giselle, said, “Hec, pronto,” and went out with the San Mateo cop firmly holding his arm.
Sixteen
Hector Tranquillini was small and neat and nasty, like a scorpion in your shoe. Five-four in his artfully constructed high-heeled boots, an invariable 145 pounds before a session of handball at the YMCA on Golden Gate. Handball, not racket-ball. And no sissy soft inflated blue handballs: the little black hard rubber ones that made red swollen catchers’ mitts of your hands.
Hec was waiting in the interview room when Dan was brought in prior to his arraignment and bail hearing before the judge. Hec shooed out the guard while flicking his eyes around the room to indicate the D.A. might have it bugged. Illegal, of course, and it couldn’t be used in court; but bugs were a useful tool in scoping out the defense attorney’s strategy. Fat chance, fella.
“Another fine mess you’ve gotten me into,” Hec said with the joviality of a miniaturized Al Capone once the guard was gone. He slid the Accusation and Complaint across the table. Dan read, suddenly looked up to meet Hec’s twinkling eyes. His own hard blue eyes were bright with suppressed laughter.
But in deference to the possible bug, he said in a defeated voice, “Do you think you can get me out of here on bail? I... I don’t know if I could handle a night behind bars.”
“I can try. And I think I’d better demand a preliminary hearing as soon as possible so we’ll know how bad it is.”
Assistant D.A. Philip Scarbrough was just 30 years old and just six feet tall, straight, single, with the sort of clean-cut good looks that often came out of Stanford. And like so many other Stanford men, he was on the rise. Important People were beginning to notice him. He would work up to District Attorney of San Mateo County, springboard to state Attorney General — after that, who was to say how far his ambition might carry him?
He didn’t have the interview room bugged. He didn’t have to. When Ellen and Garth Winslett brought in their complaints against Daniel Kearny, he knew he had a winner. A crowd-pleaser. A vote-getter. The brutality of the assault, the brazen smashing of the garage door, the purloined Corvette, the business card, those damning Polaroids of the battered Ellen...
That’s why he’d told Sergeant Willis Franks to bring Kearny in fast and hard, show him who was in charge from the git-go. He first eyeballed Kearny in Judge Valenti’s modern but pleasant South San Francisco courtroom overlooking Mission Road, with San Bruno Mountain lurking in the background. Kearny was a tough-looking fifty-something, with a square jaw and slightly flattened nose and cold eyes. All bluff. He was scared. Had to be.
Looking at the reddened marks on Kearny’s wrists from the tightness of the cuffs clapped on as they’d crossed out of San Francisco County, Scarbrough thought maybe he shouldn’t have told Franks to be so enthusiastic. But slimeball repossessors were never popular with jury members driving financed cars.
“Mr. Scarbrough?”
Judge Anthony Valenti was a burly 60, with a wealth of his own grizzled hair and the huge hands of his Italian grandfather, a fisherman in the days when Monterey’s Cannery Row had been the sardine-packing capital of America. Rimless specs perched on his broad fleshy nose.
“Ready for the People, Your Honor.”
“Is the defendant in court and represented by counsel?”
“Yes, Your Honor.” Tranquillini’s voice suddenly bore the subtle Italian lilt of his ancestors from northern Italy’s Lombardy district. “Ettore Tranquillini for the defense.”
Ettore? Kearny suppressed a grin. Hector was Ettore only over a plate of Mama’s pasta — or in front of an Italian judge.
Scarbrough almost felt sorry for the defendant. This was Kearny’s attorney? A little pipsqueak with not much black curly hair, and so short. Surely not even marginally competent.
Hector was on his feet. “Your Honor, I would like to bring to the court’s attention the treatment my client has received. He is a respected San Francisco businessman, yet a San Mateo deputy sheriff dragged him from his office in handcuffs—”
“He assaulted a pregnant woman!” Scarbrough burst out.
Judge Valenti said mildly, “Surely not proven yet, Mr. Prosecutor. And I want to hear you on the subject of handcuffs.”
Scarbrough said defensively, “He’s a repossessor, he—”
“Your Honor!” Tranquillini was on his feet again. “Those handcuffs were ratcheted down brutally tight — look at Mr. Kearny’s wrists.” Dan held his arms aloft; the reddened, scraped skin showed up nicely against the muted courtroom colors. “All of this without even a courtesy call to my office so I could surrender my client in the usual manner.”
“Is this true, Mr. Prosecutor? Was no attempt made—”
“We... didn’t know who his counsel was, Your Honor.”
“And you didn’t ask?” The judge heaved a deep sigh. He said to Kearny, “How do you plead, sir?”